East Side Story Page 10

  Look. Your brothers are all occupied with their lives and families as they should be. In Italy you would have help—servants are cheap and plentiful there—as well as nurses and perhaps your mother to care for you. But you would need a man to cope with the household, the currency, the shopping, the taking you on drives, the checking on doctors, and all the myriad little odd jobs living abroad entails. I speak some Italian—enough to get along, anyway, and I could easily become more fluent—and I have a sufficient private income to support myself. It would be my pride and joy to take an indefinite leave of absence from my firm and go to Italy as your majordomo or courier, or whatever it pleased you to call it. And I could stay there for a year or two years, or as long as it took you to get well. Nor would you have to worry about the propriety of it; I would of course not occupy your villa or even visit it except to perform my duties.

  What are we waiting for? Let’s go!

  What follows is Estelle’s last letter.

  I did not write you, dearest Bron, of Dr. Bretton’s brief optimism because the day after he had expressed it I had a severe hemorrhage that almost carried me off, and after a consultation with my regular attendant, dear old Dr. Wren, he regretfully changed his opinion. It seems I am past even Neapolitan miracles. But oh, dear man, what a joy and a lift it gave me to know that you were willing to jump off the ladder to the legal fame which I know is your destiny to devote to my welfare a great span of your working time that might well be fatal to your career. You may remember how you and I once talked of the great J. P. Morgan (whom, with his partners, the Carnochans worship as the twelve apostles), who abandoned his career as a young man to take his ailing first bride to Egypt for her recovery. Of course, she died before it was too late for him to resume it, but he didn’t know that at the time, and you and I agreed that he showed a love of which no other contemporary American tycoon would have been capable. Can you imagine Gould or Rockefeller doing any such thing? And now I can boast that I have inspired an equal devotion! It makes me on the one hand bitterly regret the fate that keeps us from sharing a golden partnership, but on the other, it gives me a glorious consolation to think that I have not lived without a great happiness.

  Bless you, my beloved. I can die in peace. Well, anyway, in a kind of peace. I think I can make do with it. And I owe it all to you.

  BRONSON SURVIVED ESTELLE for half a century. He became the senior partner of a major Boston law firm, a renowned lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and the author of a classic textbook on the law of contracts. A wise and grave gentleman of the old school, he was respected and esteemed by all who knew him, though many found him too formal of manner and difficult to approach. His marriage of forty years to an amiable and noble-minded woman, a Cabot, seemed serenely smooth, and it was blessed with three fine children. He was reputed never to have mentioned his first love, but everyone knew his story.

  6. GORDON 2

  GORDON CARNOCHAN did not remain long separated from his cousin David in the practice of law. After only a few years in the Perry, Whitehead firm, interrupted by a brief service in 1918 in officers’ training camp brought to a sudden close by the Armistice, he was faced with the dazzling offer of a partnership in David’s firm, which was in the process of being reorganized, largely by David himself, due to the near-simultaneous deaths of its two senior partners in 1920. David had prevailed on Adam Carter, one of the leading legal lights and statesmen of the era—and whose daughter Janetta David had wed—to take over the administration of the distinguished but now leaderless Brown & Livermore, and David himself, of course, was to be a junior partner in the new firm. He had also been authorized by Mr. Carter to offer an equal position to his cousin Gordon, who had a fine record in his own firm but who had not yet been promoted to partnership there.

  “We’ll be at least two of the old musketeers!” David exclaimed, with something of his old Yale enthusiasm. “And when old father Carter goes to his well-deserved reward, we two, if we play our cards right, should be able to rule the roost.”

  It was certainly a tempting offer. Carter had a fine reputation, and the new firm had every look of future success. The partners in Gordon’s old firm might have applauded his work, but they had been stingy and slow in promoting their juniors. Agatha had her doubts about the project, but she was happily engaged now with two children and a job she loved, teaching at a private girls’ school, and she thought Gordon had shown sufficient independence of his family to be free of domination from any of them. So the offer was accepted.

  At a later period in his life Gordon looked back on the years 1920 to 1933 as the golden ones. The children were growing up healthy and happy; Agatha was content with her job, and he was finding keen satisfaction running the lucrative bond department of the firm, which had made him quite as much a voice in its management as David with his corporations. The cousins had worked together harmoniously, and it was beginning to look as if David’s prediction would come true. There was talk among the partners now of renaming the firm and including both the Carnochans in the new tide. He and David were not only musketeers; they were almost rivals!

  But in 1933 his life seemed to darken. It was not so much the Great Depression, which had seized the nation, and which his firm had survived, though it formed an appropriate background. It was more a kind of disillusionment and apathy. It started with an incident that David at least would have regarded as trivial.

  Gordon had adopted a private hobby of preparing a history of the firm, and one morning he uncovered a document in Mr. Carter’s private files, which had been freely turned over to him, that deeply upset him. He told Agatha of it that night; he said it might have changed his whole attitude toward the firm. She was surprised.

  “As bad as all that?” she queried. “I suppose you can give up the history. How many people know you’re writing it, anyway?”

  “Oh, plenty. But nobody gives a damn about it, anyway.”

  “And to tell the truth, neither would they give much of a damn about this memo that’s got you so upset.”

  What he had shown Agatha was an appalling memorandum exposing the curious dichotomy between the public and private morals of the great Adam Carter, the revered deity of the firm. Agatha, however, in her usual practical way, had taken the matter less dramatically. She suggested it was not so unusual.

  “Well, that’s just it!” he exclaimed. “That’s what really gets me. It’s their world. Has it always been their world? It’s what has haunted me, isn’t it? That I’m a braying ass in an ass’s paradise?”

  “But that memo is an old one, my poor dear. You know that things were different then. That lots of matters were tolerated then that are frowned on today.”

  “They weren’t as different as all that. If they had been, people wouldn’t have taken such pains to hide them. Do you think for a minute that if I offered to print that memo in my history, the whole firm wouldn’t shriek no?”

  “No, I daresay they would. But don’t they hope your history will be a kind of advertisement of their legal expertise? If you’re boosting Lifebuoy soap, you won’t concede that it ever sinks.”

  “But that’s just what’s wrong, Aggie. You’ve put your finger on it. They don’t want a history. They want a panegyric. And you know how much I admired Adam Carter.”

  “Oh, dear heart, you don’t have to tell me that.”

  “I’m sorry. Perhaps I overdid it. Perhaps I’ve always overdone this habit of seeing the best in people.”

  “It’s an attractive quality. I’ve always admired it in you.”

  “But it can be a weakness, too. It might come from the fear of facing evil.”

  The author of the memorandum was none other than his cousin and partner, David, Adam Carter’s son-in-law. When each of the firm members had been asked to write a tribute to Adam Carter to be included in a privately printed volume to be presented to him on his eightieth birthday, David, like a snickering evil godmother, had dropped on his father-in-law’s desk this memorandum entitled
“The Two Adam Carters.” There had been no serious idea of its being incorporated in the tributary volume, but Carter, who had the rare quality of being able to enjoy a satire on himself, provided it was clever enough, had kept the paper among his private ones, which was where Gordon had come across it.

  It described first Carter, the good citizen and conscientious public servant, a gentleman of the old school, upright in all his standards, a model of strict and punctilious behavior, tireless in his performance of duty in the high federal offices he from time to time undertook: as solicitor general and Secretary of the Interior of the United States and as ambassador to France. And then the author turned, as from a kind of Dr. Jekyll to a species of Mr. Hyde, to Carter the lawyer, who seemed to obliterate himself and his scruples in the interests of his great corporate clients, coldly justifying their every grab act and attempted monopoly in and out of the courts, seeming to see nothing in the least deleterious in an economy subject to the manipulations of Wall Street and the barons of rail, oil, and steel.

  The particular genius of Adam Carter, according to the memorandum, was in his deft use of the holding company. Where there was to be any activity of doubtful legality, such as freight rebates to obliging customers, sweetheart deals to eliminate competition, or cash payments to compliant legislators, it would be done by a corporate entity far enough down the chain of ownership to leave Carter’s client free of any legal responsibility. Indeed, Carter would not even represent the victim if it got into trouble. One of the greatest tycoons in the gilded list of those represented by the firm, a man notorious for his ruthlessness in building an empire of rails, was able to boast truthfully that he had never broken a single law.

  And Gordon had to admit ruefully to himself that he could imagine his late idol chuckling over this supposed tribute to himself. For Carter the man was quite capable of laughing at Carter the lawyer. Life to him might have been a game where skill was everything.

  “Isn’t evil a rather strong term to describe what you saw in that memo?” Agatha asked at last.

  Gordon had no immediate answer to this; the question seemed to justify the very existence of a dark creed that was forever hidden in the unparted folds of the past. But he turned away now from his loving wife as if she belonged, always and irreducibly, to an irrelevant present. He was plunged in the harsher reality of all that had gone before.

  Nineteen thirty-three was to bring even worse news. Gordon’s father, Wallace, who had aged badly, had been playing the bull stock market recklessly, even by the standards of the boom era, and with the crash on Wall Street he lost three quarters of his capital. As this was followed by no noticeable economies on his or Julie’s part, the results threatened to be dire indeed, and Gordon’s sisters complained bitterly that, as his father’s counsel, he should have exercised greater control in restraining him. At the same time, his firm was faced with the possibility of a liability for a bond issue the state constitutional validity of which, supported by Gordon’s opinion, had been challenged in court. The remnants of Wallace’s fortune were ultimately saved, and he and his wife at last placed on a feasible budget, and the challenge to the bond issue was defeated in court, but the double crisis in Gordon’s professional and private life had triggered off a black depression, and in 1934 he was obliged to seek a leave of absence from the firm.

  His depression, like the national one, hit its lowest point in that dark winter, when Gordon, still unable to work, had been persuaded by the practical Agatha to cut their expenses by spending the year entirely in Maine. It was at this time that Gordon learned of a reorganization of the firm in which David had been raised to the rank of a “named” partner in the new title, Carter, Brown & Carnochan, and his own percentage of the profits severely cut. He had not been notified of this before the decision was made, according to a letter from David, as his leave of absence had suspended his vote in office decisions.

  A return to New York was imperative, and two days later Gordon was back in his office, waiting for the call from Mr. Carter, with whom he had requested a fifteen-minute interview. It was promptly granted.

  The great man was all sympathy. The high balding head, the long tapering nose, the pointed chin and small steely eyes of this slight but formidable statesman, the stillness of his fixed attention, all combined to receive his visitor as if the latter were the embassy of some great power. He treated all alike, confident in his ability to grant or deny whatever petition might be made of him, and to end, one way or another, any potential dispute.

  “I’m glad that you’ve come to talk to me, Gordon,” he began, seizing in his usual courtroom fashion the genial offensive. “Of course, it’s about the knock in your percentage. Let me assure you at once that it has nothing to do with the quality of your work, which is, and has always been, first class. You may not know it, my friend, but you and I have something in common. We are both artists. And that is something that is not always true of our fellow lawyers, even the best of them. It may not even be necessary for a successful practice of our profession. Indeed, some might say one was better off without it. It’s an inner thing, a state of mind, really. The idea that you’re creating something beautiful. Even if its beauty appears only to yourself. If I make a point in a brief or an oral argument, say, one that disposes of an opponent’s contention, and does it sharply, conclusively, concisely, in just the right words, neither too many nor too few, I feel a delight in my heart that is like no other joy on earth. And I include the joys of sex and power and health and wealth. Oh, yes, I do! The artist knows an ecstasy in creation that no other man is given. And I believe you know that, Gordon.”

  Gordon did not know it. But the wonderful thing about Carter, he reflected, was that he was absolutely sincere in every pose that he adopted. While he adopted it. It was what made him a great trial lawyer.

  “It may be easier,” Gordon replied with a wry smile, “to see the artist in the great orator spellbinding an awed jury than in the drafter of a municipal bond indenture.”

  “Not at all. The whole thing is in the inner man. I see you planning the different tributaries into which the tolls of the great utilities must flow like the explorer of an unknown river, mapping out the uses to which the mighty flood must be put, so that all may be repaid or profit. Is that not to you a thing of beauty?”

  “Anyway, I’m proud to share anything with you, sir.” Gordon did not choose to employ, at so lofty a moment, the use of Carter’s first name, and the latter’s small smile seemed to recognize the distinction.

  “Which brings me to the other point. Which less exalted folk might call the central point. The real central point to you and me, Gordon, will always be our work. Compensation is a different matter. My law work I’d do for a mere cost-of-living allowance. What the firm pays me over and above that I regard as my charge for the more pedestrian matter of administration. Indeed, left to myself, I might favor an even split among the partners. Still, we must consider pedestrian matters. We live in different times, my friend. Gentlemen like you and I can’t expect to rule the roost. We have in our expanding partnership today new members who seek to match a man’s compensation strictly with the revenue he brings in. Indeed, they will not admit any other criteria. And if that revenue is reduced, even by circumstances beyond the power of an individual partner to control, say by illness or family emergency, a corresponding docking of pay must ensue. I don’t like it, Gordon, any more than you do. But facts are facts. But do not think that you were without advocates in our reorganization talks. There was one partner, Jack Lawrence, who took your part very strongly. He thought it was you and not your cousin who should be the Carnochan in the new firm name.”

  Gordon knew that he was beaten the moment the blame for his demotion in the firm was laid on the absence caused by his illness. He would not and could not discuss his depression with the senior partner; it was a subject too alien to the latter’s iron mental health. He had wanted to discuss frankly the role that his cousin might have played in the matter, bu
t now that he had learned that David had had to face the possibility, however remote, of actually being outranked in the firm by his humble self, he had all the confirmation needed of what he had already suspected. David in such a situation would have used every weapon he could get hold of. He wouldn’t have been David otherwise. And when had David not been an integral part of his life?

  He was touched, however, deeply touched, that the great Carter should have so confided in him, and even equated Gordon’s attitude toward his practice with his own, but he was still not unaware that he was in the presence of a man who would never have tolerated the even split among partners of the firm’s net that he professed to prefer and who, despite his claim of adapting himself to the greedy demands of younger firm members, would never, even in his seventies, surrender a penny of his lion’s share of the profits. But Carter was a great man, and who was Gordon to compare himself with such? What had Carter been but his substitute god?

  In his subsequent lunch with David, however, he felt himself on more equal ground. The framed, bearded worthies of deceased presidents of the Downtown Association looked gravely down at the table where they sipped a preparatory cocktail.

  “I have heard a surprising thing, David. I have heard that my mental state has been the subject of executive discussion and that you seem not to have taken my side.”

  David, who had just raised his napkin to wipe his thin lips, threw it down on the table in a brave show of pique. “I really wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to hold our meetings in the presence of the entire firm. Or at least record them and circulate them to the partners. This way there are constant leaks and exaggerations, and the whole thing gets out of control.”