The Scarlet Letters (13 page)

And he was right. Harry read the future very differently from the way his wife's father read it. He saw size as the name of the future game, and the greatest prizes going to the biggest firms. He understood perfectly that Vollard Kaye was considered a jewel case among the firms representing major corporations and that its list of clients was the envy of downtown, but he also saw that by expanding its business into the areas of celebrity divorces, family feuds in Gotham, stockholders' strike suits, deadly proxy battles, medical malpractice and other fields of legal combat openly sniffed at by the ethically snobbish Ambrose, he could double the size of the firm and more than double its net profits. He was already having quiet lunches with Morris Applebaum, of Applebaum, Levy & Knox, who enjoyed a brilliant practice in all the areas shunned by Vollard Kaye, but who lacked a strong corporate department. A merger with them, in Harry's eyes, would be a merger made in heaven, though it was only too clear that in Ambrose's far from silent view, it would be made in the other place.

For such a union would involve the taking in of some twenty-five new partners and placing them above Vollard Kaye associates who had been led to believe that they had no rivals in ascending the firm ladder other than those hired originally out of law school like themselves. The joined firms would constitute a unit markedly different from the present Vollard Kaye, for Ambrose's particular variety of esprit de corps would be bound to be lost in sheer numbers and with partners not trained in his philosophy. Harry recognized that Vollard, Applebaum & Hammersly (for his imagination had already placed his name in the new firm) would have lost the unique reputation its predecessor now enjoyed in the legal world, but he was sure that this loss would be compensated, at least in the eyes of the younger partners, by a "gross" that would put it among the first firms in the nation!

Nor did he have any serious qualms about working in a kind of underground against his father-in-law's principles. He saw the future as ineluctable and Ambrose's idealistic concept of a law firm as a quaint relic of a picturesque but disappearing past. To oppose the big black curling breakers of the coming sea was as futile and even ludicrous as leading knights of the round table into the surging foam. Their very armor would pull them down. Sad, but was it Harry's fault if Ambrose chose the role of Don Quixote? While he Harry, the supreme surfer, would slide to glory on the crest of the beetling wave?

And he had more now than just himself to think about. He had his son, or "stepson" as the world was asked to believe, young Ambrose Jessup, a fine, healthy little lad, almost comically resembling him, who had the sense already to show a marked preference for his jovial, gift-bearing, fun-sharing "stepfather" over his more remote and often preoccupied mother. Young Ambrose might ultimately rise to take the place of his maternal grandfather and namesake in the family firm (a firm to which his "stepfather" would have ultimately made the greater contribution), but if the boy chose another career, well, Harry would see that he had the best start in that!

One thing that seemed to bode well for Harry's projected merger was a marked decline in old Ambrose's mental and physical health. He had always been subject to periodic spells of depression, but ever since Rod Jessup had quit the firm, they had become more frequent and more prolonged. The staff had gradually fallen into the habit of referring all administrative questions to Harry. Vacuums are soon filled. And one of such questions was that of moving the firm from its old quarters, which it had long occupied in a superannuated building on Wall Street, to a new gleaming glass cube with a breathtaking view of the harbor. There was also plenty of available space in the structure to accommodate the Applebaum firm should the merger ever be effected.

Ambrose, reluctantly accompanying his son-in-law on an inspection tour of the proposed site, grumbled a bit as they traversed the empty white corridors and empty white chambers. "It's all very swell, of course, Harry. A bit too swell, if you ask me, which I'm not entirely sure you're planning to. I can never forget how, in my uncle's old offices, he used to remind people, if they couldn't find a document in the safe, to look underneath it, for there was a hole in its bottom. That was the kind of relaxed, genteel atmosphere I cherished! Can't imagine it happening here."

Harry smiled in a show of sympathy. He had heard the story many times before. They were nearing the end of their visit, and he now guided his senior's footsteps to a vast corner office whose four large windows framed the dramatic panorama of Governor's Island and the Statue of Liberty.

"And for what monarch will this be the throne room?" Ambrose growled.

"Need you ask, sir?"

The older man was touched, in spite of himself. Even he could be dazzled. He gave Harry a little cuff on the shoulder.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!"

Vinnie had watched the rising tension between her father and husband with apprehension. She had not lost her high post in the paternal affections, but she was no longer the intimate confidante she had once been. Ambrose seemed to be retiring farther and further into himself. And it was she who needed him now, as he had once needed her. Being Harry's wife, she found, was a very different thing from being his mistress.

Was it marriage that had changed Harry? Or paternity? Or simply the elimination of Rod between himself and his goal in the firm? In any case, he was a much more serious person. Harry had still his old biting and sarcastic humor, but it was tempered now with a new habit of mild frowns, and his old shrill laugh had been muted to a rather smug chuckle. He had become somehow more focused, but on what she was not sure, except that it was certainly not his wife.

They had at last one of those discussions that suddenly erupt into irate recognitions of differences that each has known were long smoldering in the other.

"I wish you'd go a little easier on Dad," she had begun and then faltered, for he had looked immediately and sharply up. "I mean about this new office and all. You know how he hates changes. But time will maybe do a lot, if you'll just be patient."

"Time is something we don't have an infinite amount of, my dear. Its very name implies it. And markets have to be taken advantage of. Real estate markets, especially."

"But you don't want to hurt him, do you?"

"I don't
want
to, of course not. But men who stand pat before the juggernaut of the future must expect to be pushed aside."

"My father, Harry, is not a man to be pushed aside."

"Then let him stand gracefully out of the way."

This angered her. "You seem to have this fixed idea that the future belongs to you. I don't see any reason for such pessimism. Why shouldn't it belong equally well to Daddy? He's certainly done more than you have to make the present what it is."

"You will oblige me, Lavinia, by not talking about things you know nothing about."

"Why should I give a damn about obliging you?" Vinnie's voice was rising. "And I
do
know what I'm talking about! I'm talking about human decency and plain ordinary gratitude!"

"How does gratitude come into it?"

"How can you ask? Anyway, I'll tell you! Gratitude for all my father has done for you. He has simply made you, and you know it. Yes, he and I, too. Where the hell do you think Harry Hammersly would be without the two of us?"

"Just about where he is today," Harry responded coolly. "You don't understand these things. You never have, and I daresay you never will. You were raised to worship your father as a god. Well, he's still a mortal. He's been a clever lawyer who's constructed a highly competent firm—for its day. But that day is passing. He knows it, but he won't face it. That's why he's fortunate to have me to do it for him. In another firm he might, like Akele in
The Jungle Book,
have to fight a successor wolf to the death. With me, instead of a torn throat, he can look forward to a dignified and respected retirement."

Vinnie gazed at him, almost now in fear. "All I was suggesting was that you might go a bit slower with him," she muttered.

"I shall proceed at my own speed," was his inexorable reply. "The pace will be dictated by events and certainly not by any undue sentimentality. And while we're on the subject of your father there is something that I want
you
to take up with him. Something that I've given a lot of thought to. And it's something of which you may be a better proponent than I."

"And that is?"

"Young Ambrose is now five and has not been baptized. I want it done, and I want his name changed to Ambrose Hammersly."

"Oh no! What will people say?"

"I don't give a hoot in hell what people say. No doubt, some of them have said it already. I want my child to bear my name. I more than want it. I insist on it!"

"But Daddy has always assumed he's Rod's child! What difference does a name make? A stepson is just as good as a son, particularly when Rod never even sees the child. For heaven's sake, Harry, leave well enough alone!"

"What's the big deal? Why all the fuss?"

"Because if Daddy ever suspects that it wasn't his dear Rod that caused the big stink but actually his darling daughter, he'll have a fit!"

"But you wouldn't have to tell him the truth."

"He can put two and two together. No, I can't do it. I can't be the one to tell him he threw his adored protégé out of the firm for something he hadn't done."

"What do you mean, hadn't done? Do you think he and Lila Fisk were playing tiddlywinks?"

"Hadn't done what Daddy couldn't forgive: being unfaithful to
me.
Lila Fisk was nothing, and you know it."

"Very well. If you won't go to your father, I will."

"But you won't tell him?"

"About us? I shall simply tell him that I cannot undertake the raising of his grandson unless the boy bears my name."

Vinnie knew she was licked.

Harry decided to challenge his father-in-law about the Applebaum merger at Ambrose's seemingly strongest post. This was at the biweekly partners' lunch, held in a private dining room at the Downtown Association, which old Ambrose regarded as the forum where he could still most effectively exercise his supposed leadership of the firm. There, entrenched behind the double crystalline martini that a waiter brought him immediately upon his appearance, dressed and seated as inconspicuously as any at the table, he gave the affable appearance of being just another member of the group he dominated. He would laugh heartily at the most banal joke of the least amusing partner, and give his total attention to the idlest administrative suggestion of the youngest and most earnest. At least in the past he had known just how to dispose lightly of a silly or divisive topic without offending its proponent, and how to rally the table into an amicable union when he was backed by only a few. He knew his partners were too smart not to know when they were being handled, but he also knew that they were flattered by the fact that it took a great artist to handle them.

Harry, on the day of his planned coup d'état, had taken advantage of the senior partner's belated appearance at the lunch table to tell an amusing but mildly uncomplimentary anecdote about him.

"You know, gentlemen, that I represent you at a monthly meeting of the administrative officers of the major downtown law firms where we discuss common problems of management. I was asked at the last one how we handled aging partners who were reluctant to see their percentages of profit cut. 'Oh,' I told them, 'Ambrose handles all that. And to the queen's taste. He takes the old boy out for lunch and tells him in the friendliest fashion, Look, Tom or Bill or whatever his name is, the time has come for us old farts to move over.' The old geezer is willing enough to go along with the boss, but when the smoke clears, he finds that only one old fart has moved over."

The general laughter that ensued subsided as Ambrose entered the chamber and took his seat.

"I paused in the doorway before coming in," he observed to all, with a wry smile. "I did not wish to interrupt Harry's story. I know it's often told about me, and, of course, there's not a word of truth in it. That's fame, I suppose. But to be serious for a moment, I might point out that our Harry's concern these days seems to be more with increases than cuts in partners' percentages. Some of you may have learned through the grapevine, as I have, that he's been flirting with Morris Applebaum. Tell us, Harry, what we should have to pay Morris and his partners if we took them in, as you seem to favor."

Harry wondered for a few seconds who might have betrayed him. Vinnie? He glanced around the table. But
any
of them might have! Didn't he know the world? And wasn't he ready for it? "Probably more than any of us are now making, sir," he replied boldly. "The merger would more than double our gross. Every one of us would be making substantially more money."

"And money is all we care about?"

Harry would have liked to have retorted that not all of the partners were wed to Boston heiresses, but he knew better. "I don't say that, sir, but we should always be on the lookout for new sources of income." He addressed himself now to the table. "Even the most profitable law practice is at risk these days. None of the firms have big capital, and a couple of bad years can break them. A single change in the tax law could wipe out a whole field of clients: say, the repeal of the exemption of municipal bonds. We hear a lot of chatter these days about how the world is growing too materialistic. It's not the case! It's the inflation of everything, particularly wages, that drives us to make more and more money. What choice do we have? Take the opera, for example. In Ambrose's youth, the so-called golden age, you could hire a man for a buck a night to carry a pike in the grand march of
Aïda.
Now you probably have to pay for his health insurance! We wanted a world where every man could earn a living wage. Well, we've got it! And one way or another we've got to pay for it. With associates' salaries going up and up, to say nothing of rent and malpractice insurance, we have to keep a constant eye on our books to see how we're doing. The question used to be: Did we have a good year? Already we're talking about: Did we have a good month? We may get to the point where we ask: Did we have a good day?"