The Scarlet Letters Page 11

  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?”

  “So Morris Applebaum and you, Harry,” Ambrose retorted with heavy sarcasm, “do not, after all, have your ears pricked for the clink of gold pieces. You are simply engaged in a gallant struggle for survival in a society rotted by a rabid socialism?”

  “All I’m saying, sir, is that the golden age of law practice, as I’ve heard you call it, like the golden age of opera, was at least as materialistic as our own. Because its seeming generosity and high ideals were based on the economic servitude of the majority.”

  “Out of which mire Morris Applebaum will lead us!” Ambrose cast a mocking eye around the table, as if to assess how many were with him. More than half? It was close. But enough for him to proceed as he had commenced. “Well, let me trust to the contrary. When the time comes for us to haul down our colors and hoist new ones, let me hope that they may not be his under which we shall march. Not under his sleazy divorce mill where cocktail waitresses wed to senile tycoons strip families of their inheritances! Or where ancient companies are looted and their faithful staffs fired by proxy pirates! Or where tax frauds are lauded for their ingenuity and embezzlers pardoned by bought politicians!”

  Harry threw up his hands and laughed. “Objection, your honor,” he cried. “I can only agree that such a practice would hardly benefit us. But who is offering it?”

  “You are, sir!” Ambrose thundered, and the table was shocked into a continued silence. But he saw fit to soften his expression as he glanced around the table. He was not so far gone as not to see when the issue was close. “Enough of this, anyway. I think we should now discuss the choice of a country club for our spring office outing. I’m told that Piping Rock is taken for the day we wanted…”

  But Harry was not about to lose what he saw was an advantageous moment to play his trump card. It was not a coincidence that he had sent the one Jewish partner out of town on a business trip to avoid the embarrassment of the discussion on which he was about to embark.

  “Country clubs are indeed relevant to the subject I wish to bring up, Mr. V,” he called loudly down the table. “For some of our earnest young associates have already expressed their hope to me that we will not patronize one guilty of racial and religious discrimination. These things are becoming very important today. And that is why I have the nerve to ask our senior partner if some of his objection to the Applebaum firm does not stem from the fact that a good half of their partners are Jewish?”

  Ambrose looked as if the question was beneath contempt, but he soon took in the fact that his partners were looking to him for an answer without in the least finding the query out of order.

  “My objection is not based on that, no sir,” he retorted icily.

  “But forgive me, Mr. V, if I point out that under your guidance and that of your distinguished uncle before you, the firm has become known in the law schools as not overfriendly to Jewish applicants. Is it entirely unfair that this has been attributed to us as a policy? In a city whose economic and cultural life is largely dominated by Jews we have exactly three. Two associates, who very likely will not be made partners, and one member of the firm, relegated to our smallest department, real estate. Surely this is not a coincidence.”

  “And you know damn well it’s not, Harry. What are you getting at? That I’m anti-Semitic? Nonsense! I have the greatest liking and respect for the considerable number of my Jewish friends. But when you’re putting together an institution of a certain type of manners and morals, it makes sense to go in for a certain quantity of homogeneity. The particular trademark of Vollard Kaye is an old Yankee tradition of integrity, courage and gentlemanly behavior. Indeed, you can’t mistake it. Now I’m not saying for a minute that Jews and Moslems and Chinamen and blacks are lackin
g in any of these virtues, but it so happens that they put them together in a different showcase.”

  “And that’s not the showcase you want?”

  “Well, let’s simply put it that it’s not my showcase. Is that anti-Semitism?”

  “You know, I rather think it is. Or at least that there are people who would call it that.”

  Ambrose had turned pink. “Hammersly, you have been a disruptive influence in the firm ever since Rod left us! But I’ll have you know I’m not going to sit idly by while you use your specious arguments to tear down the firm I’ve spent a lifetime putting together!”

  Harry saw that he had lost that round, but he had expected to lose it, and he had not lost much. He was fairly confident that the younger partners were in favor of his projects; the future was almost inevitably his. What he had to do now was work on the wavering members, individually. He did this over an extended period of time, at lunches for two, always premised initially on another topic to be discussed and then gradually converted to his opportunity to make disclosures about Ambrose.

  “You know, of course, there’s not a man in the world for whom I have a greater affection or respect. But that can’t be allowed to blind even a son-in-law. It’s only kind to Ambrose—only fair to him, really—to protect him from the consequences of hanging on to an attitude that was common enough to his generation, but that sticks in the craw of our contemporaries. I’m talking, of course, of his virulent anti-Semitism, which is obviously the core of his objection to Morris Applebaum’s firm. And that kind of thing, believe me, isn’t going to do us a bit of good in a world where racial and religious intolerance has become the blackest of all crimes. Perhaps, indeed, the only one that people take really seriously anymore!”

  Was this fair to Ambrose? Harry was a bit taken aback at how successful some of these little chats had been. He knew through an indignant Vinnie that her father had been much upset by that talk at the lunch club and that he had even gone so far as to consult one of his old Jewish friends to ask if his attitude was really as bad as Harry had tried to make out. After which he had discussed with one of his older partners the possibility of dropping any kind of hiring quotas. But wasn’t the very fact that he still regarded it as a matter to be discussed evidence of the continuance of an attitude of extreme prejudice?

  Of course it was! And he was being fair to Ambrose! Harry had to remind himself that those who feared the heat should stay clear of kitchens. Empire builders couldn’t be overdelicate about the rights of aborigines. And at this point he was in the home stretch of the question of merger. If he wavered now, the whole issue would be lost. Morris Applebaum, impatient, was already hinting at merger talks with another corporate law firm.

  The crisis broke on the afternoon of young Ambrose’s baptism, which was to take place on the terrace of the Vollards’ house in Glenville on a beautiful clear spring day where one could see all the way across Long Island Sound to the Connecticut shore. Before Vinnie and the minister had arrived with the boy and her daughters, Harry, who had made a point of being early, sought a private interview with his father-in-law in the library.

  Ambrose listened in a surprised silence as his son-in-law for the first time explained his desire to change the boy’s last name. Only when Harry spoke of Rod’s lack of interest in the child did he interrupt.

  “I have always intended, when the boy was a little older, to speak to Rod about that. Of course, I haven’t seen Rod recently, but I’m told he’s leading a perfectly respectable life, and he’s certainly shown no neglect of either of his daughters. Rod may have changed, Harry. He may have come to regret what he has done to us. And if that is the case, he may wish in time to become acquainted with his son. We don’t know what it was that made him turn from the child. I have a funny sort of idea that he may have associated the baby with his own sin. That he may be mortally ashamed of having been an adulterer when the child was conceived.”

  Harry was jarred. Could the old man really believe that? “But whether or not that is the case, sir, the fact remains that your grandson is left in my care and that I am the one charged with his rearing. It is really only just that he should bear my name.”

  “Even if it makes people talk? For they will, you know.”

  “I don’t see why they should. Lots of children today take their stepfather’s name.”

  “But not under these exact circumstances.”

  “Circumstances are never exactly the same.”

  Ambrose turned to face his son-in-law squarely at this. “Are you asking my permission?”

  “No sir. The decision is mine and your daughter’s.”

  “And Vinnie is for it?”

  Harry hesitated. “She is not against it.”

  “Then I have no more to say.”

  Harry was about to protest, but Ambrose vouchsafed no further word and took his way out of the house by a French window to the terrace where Vinnie and the minister had just arrived, and the few friends invited had already gathered.

  After the brief ceremony champagne was served. Little Ambrose, grasping with one hand the string of a large red balloon, grinned at the company while holding tight with his other to his stepfather’s. Nobody had expressed the least surprise at the announced change of name. Indeed, it had probably been expected.

  Ambrose stood apart from the group, glass in hand, looking deeply preoccupied. This also surprised nobody, for his recent moodiness was well known to the small community. But Harry noted uneasily how his glance wandered occasionally from his grandson’s features to those of his son-in-law. Was he at long last noting something? Well, why not, for God’s sake?

  Nothing more happened until Harry and Vinnie were leaving with their family. Ambrose took his son-in-law suddenly by the cuff and pulled him away out of earshot of the others.

  “All right, you can have your fucking merger!” he snarled, and, turning abruptly on his heel, went into the house.

  If, on a visit to the cathedral at Chartres, the Virgin had leaned down from her window over the altar to spit that word at him, Harry could not have been more shocked.

  10

  THE FIVE YEARS that brought glory to Harry also brought fame and fortune to Rodman Jessup. He had hardly settled himself in a new apartment, and adjusted himself to the life of a divorced parent who took his daughters to the movies or the zoo on Saturday afternoons, when he was invited to lunch by an old law school classmate, Newbold Armstrong, in a newly formed club atop a skyscraper in midtown, whither much of the Wall and Broad Street legal and financial community were already beginning to move. Armstrong, the handsome, clean-cut scion of an old New York clan, was a partner in a new and aggressive law firm that was making a rather notorious name for itself in the burgeoning field of the proxy fights attending the formation of corporate conglomerates. After one cocktail and a brief and perfunctory inquiry into his old friend’s health and family, Armstrong came right to the point. Would Rod consider a partnership in his firm?

  Rod restrained the initial impulse to wrinkle his nose. “I’m not a great fan of proxy fights. Some of them strike me as verging on dirty pool. I’m sorry to say that, Newbold, but you and I may as well be frank with each other. At Vollard Kaye we used to turn down those retainers.”

  “Vollard Kaye is beginning to show its age, my friend. And you’ll soon enough see the truth of that. Survival these days consists in keeping up with the times. Luckily for me the Armstrongs always made a point of that. One of my grandfathers acted as broker for ‘Uncle’ Dan Drew, the greatest rascal on Wall Street. And a great-aunt of mine married a son of Jay Gould, whom no respectable family would let into their house by the front door. And look at us now! We’re doing just fine, thank you. I had rather hoped, Rod, that the way you’d been treated by your old firm and family-in-law, for doing what three quarters of the men I know have done at one point or another in their lives, would have opened your eyes. Of course, I have to admit that you weren’t very tactful in the way you went about it. But that
was probably because you’d always been such a Christer. You hadn’t learned that it’s not what you do that counts. It’s how you do it.”

  Rod fixed a long silent stare on his luncheon host. “You know, Newbold, there may be something in what you say.”

  “There’s a hell of a lot in what I say.”

  “Won’t it create bitterness among the associates in your firm if you take in a partner from outside ahead of them?”

  “Oh, I daresay they won’t like it. But they’re used to it. Everyone ‘buys’ partners from the outside these days. The only man who’ll really mind is the partner we’ll be dumping if we get hold of you.”

  “Why him? What’s he done?”

  “It’s what he’s not done. His billings don’t add up, Rod. The days are gone when a firm will keep on some old geezer who’s ceased to produce. We’re not a retirement home, after all. I’ll bet that Vollard Kaye has some old farts on its payroll who’ve been eating free off it for years.”

  Rod nodded grimly. “Probably. And of course the same thing would happen to me in your firm if I didn’t pan out.”

  “And to me, too!” Newbold cheerfully agreed. “But I’m betting on us. Who wants special treatment? Come to us, Rod, and I’ll count on you to become our star man in a proxy holocaust.”

  “What makes you think I’d be so good at it?”

  His friend still chose to make a joke of it. His laugh was loud and free. “Because I can see that after the way you’ve been treated you’re just about ready to take off the mask. You’re not Little Red Riding Hood’s granny anymore, buddy. You’re the big bad wolf himself!”

  Rod took the job, and in two years’ time he had gained the reputation of being one of the toughest proxy battlers in the city.

  ON SATURDAYS, when Rod called at the Hammerslys’ commodious Park Avenue apartment to pick up his daughters, Harry and Vinnie had the tact always to be out, or at least invisible in their private quarters. But one day, when he was ushered into the living room, he found Vinnie sitting there alone, rather tensely smiling and considerably stouter than when he had last seen her. She rose and stepped forward to greet him with an extended hand.