Powers of Attorney (24 page)

“Oh, for Pete's sake, Kip!” Reardon exclaimed impatiently. “Isn't it bad enough for you to have to work for these new tycoons without justifying them? All this easy money, these phony deductions, these blown-up expense accounts, these crazy corporate shells—all this slick financing to give the public a shoddy product—why must you defend it? What do you get out of it but a wretched salary, fully taxable, at that? Where are your deductions? You remind me of those ladies' maids in the French Revolution who followed their mistresses to the scaffold because they were too blind to see that the Jacobins were their real friends!”

“Is that what you plan for us, Tommy? The scaffold?”

“Well, if we could have
your
head, my friend, Uncle Sam would collect a lot more taxes!”

They laughed and parted, as usual, friends, but Reardon's comparison to the ladies' maids rankled deeply in Bayard's heart. For Inka Dahduh, the son of an Armenian rug peddler who now owned buildings in every part of the city, was to Bayard the incarnation of the destroying spirit that had laid low the poor old shabby, genteel past. Whole blocks of beautiful sober red-faced Federal houses had fallen before his bulldozers; churches and shrines had been sacrificed to make way for his thinly built, highly priced, spare grey cubes. And Inka himself looked like a conquering Tartar, a scimitar-swinging Tamburlaine, smiling at the discomfort of his victims. He was a tall, wide-shouldered, big-stomached, formidable man, with a blue complexion, a hawk nose, glittering black eyes and long thick oiled black hair, who spoke with a rumble and laughed in the sudden, explosive way of one whose temper, however massive, is always at the service of his shrewdness. He lived on top of one of his many buildings in a penthouse constructed of glass and bamboo, in the great bare reception halls of which, painted red and yellow and gold, hung his Pollocks and De Koonings and Klees, and through which sauntered the endlessly eclectic assembly of his guests.

Dahduh, on the other hand, regarded Bayard with the greatest admiration. It gave him especial pleasure to watch this cool young man, cool on the hottest day in the hottest conference, the only person not in shirtsleeves, work out the most tangled problems with the aid of a slide rule and a single sheet of paper in one corner of which his sharp pencil jotted the minimum of figures. “It's old New York,” Dahduh would announce triumphantly to the partners of his venture. “My little Kip here is a bit of ancient Yankee stock. He can even teach the old Armenian tricks!” Bayard at such moments felt like a captive Athenian scholar in the court of a Macedonian king.

But the most burdensome part of his duties for the builder were social. Dahduh had an old yacht on which he liked to take a motley group of helpless guests for weekend outings in Long Island Sound, and on the Sunday afternoon following the day of his lunch with Reardon, Bayard and his wife were included in one of these. Peggy Kip was a bright-eyed, tense little woman, with a habit of always pursing her lips, and although she did not share her husband's umbrage at the present obscurity of the Kips, being quite contented with the mild distinction in her little set conveyed by such heirlooms as the Duncan Phyfe horsehair sofa and the Eastman Johnson conversation piece, she had to the fullest the Kip sense that anybody, be he Pope or President, who was in any way “different” was “funny.” And Inka Dahduh was the funniest of all. She made no effort to mix with the other guests, but sat at the long table in the main saloon, turning the pages of the visitors' log with half-suppressed giggles.

“I suppose I'm being awful,” she whispered to Bayard with perfunctory remorse. “I suppose I should be more respectful.”

It was true, of course, that she was behaving badly and that the wife of any other clerk in Tower, Tilney & Webb would have been up on deck with the host uttering little squeals of admiration over the boat and its fixtures. But Bayard had never asked Peggy to be a good office wife; he would have scorned to do so. He did, however, observe, over the slowly widening gulf between her domestic preoccupations and his long downtown hours, that it never seemed to occur to her that she owed him more.

“If you find the visitors' log amusing, why shouldn't you express your amusement?” he asked.

“Doesn't it amuse
you?
”

“Ought it to?”

“It's so vulgar, Bayard! All those passée movie actresses with their florid messages. It's like an old copy of
Movie Mirror!”

“I sometimes think there's nothing so vulgar as poor gentility,” he said with a small sigh. “But let me look at it. This yacht is supposed to be used for business entertainment.”

“Is that what you call business?” Peggy demanded with a snort, pointing to where Inka was standing on the fantail, the arm of a blonde tucked under his. “If I amused Mr. Dahduh, would you let him deduct me?”

Bayard's gaze followed her impertinent finger and rested for a long moment on his host. Then he turned with a new interest to the log. In fact, in the ensuing half hour he examined every one of its pages. Although he was not familiar with the names of stage and screen, the exclamatory messages beside the signatures, the poems and limericks in the margin, the caricatures drawn all over, the dirty pictures, made it entirely clear that he was not dealing with an assemblage of brokers or contractors. As he was closing the book he felt a friendly grip on his shoulder, and the rumbly voice from above his head demanded:

“Quite a varied group of friends, isn't it, Bayard?”

“That's what I was trying to determine. Is it?”

Inka, however, seemed unconscious of any special meaning in his lawyer's tone. “You should mingle with the others, you and your pretty wife,” he continued. “You should meet my guests and not just read about them. They may not be in the Social Register, but they can teach you a thing or three. That's why I keep this yacht. It's like a desert island, on which we're stranded. We're cut off from our roots and all the little props that we depend on. For one afternoon we have to be on our own. We have to rely on our wits and our tongues. We have to amuse. Yes, my dear Bayard, you can learn a lot from a day at sea. It's an experiment with democracy!”

As their host moved off, waving his big cigar in the air, Bayard followed his broad retreating back with narrowed eyes. Peggy, who never seemed to listen to a thing he said, had a way of noticing his smallest change of expression. “Now, Bayard, you're not going to get in one of your moods, are you? What do we care what he uses his silly yacht for?”

“I happen to care very much.”

“Oh, dear,” she said apprehensively. “Why couldn't I keep my mouth shut? What are you going to do now?”

“Do?” Bayard's tone was detached again. “I'm going to do what our host suggests. I'm going to take a little stroll on deck and meet my fellow passengers. I'm going to rely on my wits and my tongue. I'm going to find out exactly what each and every one of them does for a living! And
why
they're here.”

 

Lying awake early the next Monday morning and gazing from the faded shepherdesses of their bedroom wallpaper to the flaking paint of the ceiling, Bayard prepared in his mind, with a grim, tense satisfaction, the things that he would do when he got to the office. He would take the Dahduh income tax returns to Mr. Madison and lay them on his desk with a slight, respectful bow. “If
you
wish to sign these, here they are, sir. I'm afraid I can no longer be responsible for defrauding the Collector.” He smiled a thin smile as he imagined the habitual look of preoccupation on the long grey face of the senior tax partner as it would dissolve into astonishment. “What's that? What?” And then anger. Anger and recrimination. Bayard rose quietly so as not to disturb Peggy and went to the window with a suddenly quickening heartbeat to stare down at the back yard of the apartment house with its garbage pails and two bare trees. Would it cost him his partnership? Did he care?

At breakfast with the children he gave a lecture on the use of “Good morning” instead of “Hi.” In the subway he read the market news and a tax periodical. And all the while his curious exhilaration persisted. He remembered the French duchess in the revolution that his friend Reardon loved to cite, who, on the verge of denying her correspondence with the enemy, suddenly shrugged and said: “No, no, life isn't worth a lie.” That was it. No boasting of moral superiority, no vulgar dramatic oratory, no affectation of heroism—simply a shrug and a life tossed away. If one was a Kip, there was, after all, a gesture still to be made, a gesture that for all its quietness was a repudiation of rottenness, a repudiation, indeed, of the whole wretched age in which he had to live. Had not the first Bayard Kip been ruined for resisting the Astors? Had not his own great-grandfather lost a fortune by disdaining the bribes of Jim Fisk? They had consciences as simple as the brownstone behind which they had lived, consciences that stemmed from the quaint old days of eighteenth century finance, consciences that antedated the venality of steam and oil. Bayard was grateful to the son of an Armenian rug peddler for providing him with the opportunity to show that the Kips still stood apart.

Mr. Madison did not disappoint him. His bewilderment and irritation were all that Bayard had hoped.

“But why do
you
have to be the judge of what's a business deduction?” he demanded fretfully. “Why do you have to go snooping into what he uses the yacht for? The client
tells
you it's for business. All right, put it in the return that way.”

“I have. But I won't sign it.”

“But Dahduh will blow up—” Madison stopped when he saw Bayard's shrug. “Look, Bayard, I'm not asking you to do anything dishonest. I simply want you to recognize that if we do make you a partner, it will be largely to work on Dahduh's matters. He
depends
on you!”

“I know he does,” Bayard said grimly. “He depends on my signature. If he's ever prosecuted, he can always make the defense that his lawyer signed the return.”

“But damn it all, you can't
know
all the uses he puts that yacht to!”

“That's just it. I can.”

“Well,
I
can't!” Madison exclaimed angrily, picking up the return. “And
I
can sign it.”

“As you wish,” Bayard said quietly and withdrew.

He did not see Madison again that day, but the real scene occurred that evening when he told Peggy.

“I think it's the meanest thing I ever heard!” she wailed. “You're going to blast your career at the office because I sneered at Mr. Dahduh.”

“You were right to sneer at him.”

“But I never thought you'd
do
anything about it. All I meant was that I didn't want to see him
socially.”

“You think it's all right to make your living off a man like that provided you don't see him socially?”

“Well,
naturally.
Hasn't that always been the rule?”

“It has never been mine,” Bayard said sternly. “Nor has it ever been that of my family. It may interest you to know that my great-grandfather Kip lost a...”

“It may
not
interest me to know it!” she exclaimed fiercely. “It may interest me to know that you care more about your silly family pride than you do about your wife and children! I believe you're actually
happy
about this thing. I bet you did it to spite me!”

Bayard, however, was little touched by her hysteria. After all, the children were not going to starve. Only promotion was at stake, and it was clear that Peggy, a creature of her age, was not willing to sacrifice the smallest part of it for integrity, that she expected him to succumb to the modern sentimentality of basing moral decisions on the material needs of his family. But things were right or things were wrong, and life was only worth living if one acted with some consistency in the face of this simple premise. Peggy's charge that he was motivated by a desire to hurt her was quite irrelevant. Motives mattered only if one asked for credit, and he was asking for none.

It was an anticlimax, therefore, the next day, when he was summoned to Madison's office, to be ushered into the big smiling presence of Inka himself.

“Bayard, my boy,” he said, putting a thick arm over the younger man's slim shoulders, “I want you to come straight to Daddy Dahduh when you have doubts about his virtue. Don't leave the job to poor old Madison here. When I walked into his office this morning I caught him in the act of signing my returns. 'Hey, there,' I said, ‘isn't that Bayard's job?' Well, he started to explain, and you should have heard him stammer! The great Morris Madison, the glibbest advocate before the Tax Court! But I gradually made out that you think your friend Inka's a fraud and a phony. All right, so he's a fraud and a phony! But don't you think you owed it to me to come and tell me so yourself?”

“It wasn't my place as an associate,” Bayard explained in his gravest manner, “to make that kind of communication to a client of Mr. Madison's.”

“Oh, I
see,”
Inka said, nodding emphatically. “Well, then, let us hope that you may not be an associate forever. But to the question of my poor old yacht. Of course we'll knock the deduction out of the return. I would have done so myself had I only thought of it. She was originally used for business, but in the past months—you're quite right—she's been more of a personal plaything. As a matter of fact, I wonder if the time hasn't come to get rid of her. Do you know any yacht brokers, Bayard, my friend?”

They were both grinning at him, Madison and Inka, but Bayard did not grin back. He was disturbed to recognize the sudden little weight in his heart as disappointment, and he remembered what Peggy had said.

 

Promotion, when it came, came as it so often does, fast. In two months' time Bayard was a junior partner with an office overlooking the East River, a full-time secretary and his lunch club dues paid. Peggy was able to redecorate the apartment and have the family pictures cleaned and the silver lacquered. For the little family party at which they celebrated this advancement a butler was hired, and Bayard, sipping his sherry under the now gleaming Rembrandt Peale of General Kip and glimpsing through the freshly painted, open doors of the dining room the glitter of the old candelabra, began to feel that the Kips were coming back to life. It was a bit startling to have life turn out to be as simple as his own principles, to have the ashes of martyrdom so promptly converted into the downy pillows of success, but mightn't it be the ultimate justification of his lifelong adherence to the creed that a family, with faith and tenacity,
could
stay on top?