Powers of Attorney (29 page)

Miss Shepard decided immediately that so open a mutiny called for the sternest measures. “The Durands and the Wileys,” she said gravely, “have been in Anchor Harbor since the end of the eighteenth century. I suggest we consider their qualifications in the light of how long some of our more recent members have been here.”

But Emmaline positively snatched at the gauntlet so thrown. “I never heard that membership went according to length of squatting,” she exclaimed with a hard little laugh. “Why not take in the seals and the moose and have done with it? It seems to me that the clear duty of this board is to preserve a club that will continue to attract new and desirable families to Anchor Harbor. And you won't do that by filling it with a parcel of druggists and haberdashers!”

“At least,” Miss Shepard retorted, “we know where
their
money comes from.”

Emmaline flushed deeply and lost control of her temper. “You needn't take that tone, Johanna!” she cried shrilly. “Everyone knows that the Shepards only came here because they couldn't make the grade in Newport!”

Miss Shepard stared down at the green cloth on the table of the committee room without deigning to reply. She was not surprised when her candidates were blackballed. She was not even surprised, a few days later, when she had resigned from the board, to receive a purely formal letter of thanks for the two decades of her service on it. Mrs. Tyng had won, and words, of course, would never again be exchanged between them. The umbrella table on the other side of the brick steps leading down to the lawn would henceforth be occupied by a rival group.

Yet it was not one of her satisfactory rows. Anchor Harbor was too small a place for a serious feud, particularly if one's enemy lived next door. Emmaline had taken to having music at her evening parties, and it was terrible for Miss Shepard to be kept awake by the sounds of a frivolity in which she was no longer included. Worse still was the modern pavilion for suppers and dancing which her neighbor proceeded to erect, at obviously great cost, on the rocks overlooking the sea directly abutting Miss Shepard's border. It was not simply that the pavilion obstructed Miss Shepard's own view that angered the latter; it was that it blocked the shore path, so the sailors and their girls, who had formerly done their necking at the end, just beyond Emmaline's house, now did it on the rocks in plain sight of Miss Shepard's porch. When she wrote to the Mayor's office to protest Mrs. Tyng's arbitrary action in closing off a public easement, she received the mysterious answer that the Village Board of Anchor Harbor had by “mesne conveyance” transferred the “public easement over the lands of Emmaline Tyng” to Emmaline Tyng herself. After that there was nothing for Miss Shepard to do but close her windows to the making of music and her shades to the making of love and await with a vibrant indignation the annual August visit of Waldron P. Webb.

 

Miss Shepard's relationship with her lawyers had been the most satisfactory of her life. She knew that they flattered her, but it was nice that there were still people who cared enough to do that. In fact, the partners and associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb, alone of the reading public, seemed to take literally the legend of the “formidable dowager” evoked by Messrs. Amory and Knickerbocker. In their Wall Street offices she could play to sympathetic countenances her favorite and inconsistent roles: the shrewd old girl whose flare for business was worth a library of book-learning and the art-loving, beauty-loving, “fay” creature who had no comprehension of the deeds and mortgages and leases that made up her little brownstone empire. She suspected that if admiring Johanna Shepard was a lawyers' game, it was a game, nonetheless, that they enjoyed playing, from the receptionist, with her emphatic “And how are
you,
Miss Shepard?” to Mr. Webb's secretary who came beaming to the reception hall to greet her, to the nice young law clerks who smiled so feelingly and seemed to have so much time to give her. There was none of the casualness to be found now in the oldest banks and even in the oldest Fifth Avenue stores; a Shepard there was a gold coin that still rang with its full value.

With Waldron Webb, who had triumphed over the unspeakable woman who had sued her father's estate, alleging the most terrible things, she had developed something like a friendship. He was actually less congenial than Mr. Madison of the Tax Department or Mr. Buck in real estate, but Miss Shepard was so anxious to keep him close to her, in case that filthy hand from the cesspool world should ever strike again, that she invited him and his wife for a long weekend every summer in Anchor Harbor. Actually, she rather enjoyed the importance of this “visit of counsel,” with its implications to the community that her affairs in the distant simmering city were too important to go even three months without a conference. She would give a small dinner for the Webbs on their last night, and she had contrived to make invitations to this party seem like tokens of her especial favor. “Mr. Webb is tired and hates parties,” she would murmur at the umbrella table, “but I think if we had just a congenial few, we might get him going on one of his cases.”

Webb himself was a trying visitor, almost impossible to entertain. He was one of those lawyers who were frankly bored by everything but the practice of law. He was a big, stout choleric man, with a loud gravelly voice that was made for the crossexamination of hostile witnesses and not for gossip under the umbrellas. He indulged in no known sport, would not even swim, and expressed his contempt for the country in the uncompromising black of his baggy linen suit and the damp cigar that was always clenched between his yellow molars. He wandered about the house, pulling books out of the bookcases which he would then abandon with a snort, and asking for whiskey at unlikely hours. Mrs. Webb, the kind of forlorn creature that loud, oratorical men are apt to marry, contemplated him with nervous eyes, hoping, perhaps, that he would wait until they were alone before abusing her.

He brightened, however, on the visit when she told him of her troubles with Mrs. Tyng, his nostrils whiffing immediately the gamy scent of a law suit.

“I shouldn't dispute the Village of Anchor Harbor's right to release its easement to
all
the landowners on the Shore Path,” he said, after clearing his throat emphatically, as if to discharge all idle summer accumulations. “But I certainly question its right to release it to
one.
That smacks of discrimination.”

“How do you suppose she obtained it?”

“How?” Webb glared at her as if naïveté were a kind of impertinence. “Why, how else but in the time-honored fashion of crossing the palms of the Village fathers?”

“Oh, but we're in New England, Mr. Webb. Things are different here.”

Webb's snort was positively joyous. He was the kind of litigator whose fixed belief in the corruption of man gave a buoyancy, almost a gaiety to the moments when he could demonstrate it. He was never satisfied, reading the newspaper, at finding only a single crime. A rapist had to have been led on, a murderer blackmailed, an embezzling politician the cover for a higher-up.

“Here in New England, as elsewhere, apes will be apes,” he said with a chuckle. “But, of course, it will be uphill work to sue a Maine village in a Maine court. Let me explore first to see if there isn't an easier way.”

“How?”

“Let me prowl around, Miss Shepard. Let an old wolfhound prowl around. I may drop in at the Register's office and have a glimpse at your title papers. I was trained by a great trial lawyer, John Carter Stokes. He used to tell me: ‘Waldron, remember one thing. Always start at the beginning. If your enemy has a gun, find out if he's got a license.”

Webb spent a large part of the next two days in the village, and at mealtimes he seemed preoccupied but content. He said very little and occasionally whistled under his breath. The third day he spent strolling about the place, consulting a crumpled paper that appeared to be a map. Miss Shepard, watching him from the veranda, where she sat with his wife, felt an odd combination of comfort and apprehension. There he was, her legal protector, so large and alien, a strange blob against the radiant blues and greens of the coast line, yet curiously dominating it, as if, an ambassador to a world of sea and pines from the greater world of asphalt and brownstone, he might suddenly assume vice-regal powers and say: “Waves, you are only waves, and trees, you are only trees, and I bring the word that relates you to men.” He seemed to hurl an articulate challenge into the astonished face of eternity, shouting that the rights and prerogatives of Miss Johanna Shepard were more than the transiently enforceable squatter's claim of a withered old maid to a bit of top soil on the Atlantic Coast, that they were, on the contrary, fixed and eternal and had their place—their important place—with the mountains and the forests and the tossing sea.

When he fixed his attention on Mrs. Tyng's property, on the other hand, when he raised his arm and squinted down it towards her new pavilion, as if he were aiming a rifle, he seemed the very figure of Nemesis, a dark devil from a sulphurous underworld who would destroy the enemies of Johanna Shepard but only at a terrible price to her. It was in this latter guise that he appeared at cocktails one night on the veranda, puffing at that damp cigar and obviously bursting with news that he nonetheless was determined to repress and discipline into more dramatic form.

“My old sage was right, Miss Shepard,” he began with a pleased sigh, after a long sip of whiskey. “Mrs. Tyng's gun is not hers. Or at least not all of it. But who cares how much? Who can shoot with part of a gun?”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Simply that the barrel of her gun is yours.”

Miss Shepard was always frightened when her heart began to beat too hard, and she exclaimed almost querulously: “Please, Mr. Webb, don't talk to me in riddles.”

“Very well then. That beautiful new pavilion of your neighbor's. That very expensive summerhouse. It stands half on your land. I suspected it the other day, but I didn't believe it until I'd paced it out. Of course a survey will have to prove it, but there's no doubt at all of the fact.”

Miss Shepard still gaped. “But how can that be?”

“You mean how could anyone be such a fool as to erect a structure like that without first making a new survey? But that is typical of such a woman as Mrs. Tyng. Habitually living beyond her means, she will always save in the wrong places. And will lose a pavilion to pick up a hundred bucks.”

“Beyond her means? What makes you say that?”

“I had a little talk with the president of the local bank. Mrs. Tyng is well known as bad pay among the tradespeople. If she loses her pavilion I doubt that she can build another. And the beauty of it all is that she's been hoist by her own petard. Her only possible defense to an action in trespass would be entrapment: that you had knowingly watched the construction of the pavilion and bided your time. But by closing the shore path (which I find she accomplished by the simple expedient of giving a garden party for the Mayor's wife) she shut off your view of what was going on. It's too perfect!”

“You mean, I can simply tell her ... to remove her pavilion?”

“Or remove it yourself. At least, the trespassing half. There is absolutely not a thing she can do about it.”

 

The Webbs extended their visit until a survey had been duly made, and when they left Miss Shepard was in possession of a map that showed, with a terrifying precision, how the purple line of the Shepard-Tyng boundary neatly bisected the poor little oval that represented the expensive pavilion. Miss Shepard carried the survey about in her pocket and kept pulling it out and furtively examining it. Each time she had to reassure herself that this dizzy vision of inconceivable power was not the illusion of a premature senility. No, each time, there was that line slicing through the offending pleasure dome with the laminating edge of an executioner's sword. It was justice, the strong, dazzling justice that falls with the final curtain of a well-made melodrama.

Webb had pleaded with her to allow him to call upon Mrs. Tyng, survey in hand, and to present her with his demands, but she had insisted on time to think it over, and he had departed sulkily for the city, deprived of his well-earned scene. She sympathized with his disappointment, but she wanted to savor her triumph. She had reached an age where she knew that there was no greater joy than anticipation. At her umbrella table at the club, when she heard Emmaline Tyng's high, shrill laugh, the particularly high one that was designed to create at Miss Shepard's table the uneasy sense that its occupants were targets of the Tyng wit, she would smile grimly and reach a finger into her handbag to touch the folded paper that she always kept there. Similarly, at night, when the offensive strains of dance music were wafted across the lawn from the doomed pavilion to Miss Shepard's window, she had only to reach a hand to the table by her bed and sink into gentle slumber at the reassuring touch of the survey. She felt younger and gayer than she had for many a summer, and it was not long before her mood began to be felt at the Tyng table where it caused suspicious glances. What in the name of Hamlin Hill was the old girl up to?

She could not, however, live indefinitely on anticipation. Labor Day was approaching, and soon the summer swallows would be gone. Miss Shepard rose one afternoon from the wicker chair on her veranda, reached for her stick and strode slowly across her lawn. As she paused in the little path through the copse that separated her property from Mrs. Tyng's, she opened her bag to take one last quick look at the survey. It was safely there. Erect again, she proceeded up her enemy's lawn and around the house to the big porte-cochere. But as she passed under it and placed her foot on the first of the big stone steps, her heart began beating so rapidly that she stopped in terror. Was she going to die and miss her famous scene? Breathing hard, she sat down on the top of the steps and rested her chin in her hands.