Diary of a Yuppie Read online

  Only yesterday, for example, I encountered my fellow clerk, Glenn Deane, on the steps going down to the 77th Street subway stop. He was out of tokens and asked if I had an extra one. There was a long queue before the booth. I said I was sorry, that I had only one. In fact, I had four in my pocket when I left him to stand in that queue.

  Now what am I telling myself? That Glenn would have done the same thing? Not necessarily. His own form of meanness may not embrace subway tokens. But I am confident that it embraces many larger things. It so happens that I buy twenty tokens at a time, and that I like to see how long they will last me. It is a kind of game, or perhaps the vestige of some ancestral miserliness; I may enjoy the clink of “golden” tokens in my palm. Yet I would willingly lend Glenn a thousand bucks, which is considerably more than he would ever lend me. This goes to show, not that I am more generous than Glenn, but that meanness is not measured by the amount withheld. We are all mean about something, which means that we are all mean.

  Take another example. The other day, again in the subway with Glenn, I emitted a silent but smelly fart. I could see by Glenn’s puckered nostrils that he had noted it, and by a glance at a stout black woman standing before him and a shrug, I managed to shift the blame. Thousands of people do that kind of thing. It is not nice to do them, but it is better to face the fact that one does. I used to be ashamed of being scared in airplanes, and when I ceased to be ashamed, I ceased to be scared. As a matter of fact, I usually take care not to fart in the subway.

  Which all means that I believe I have occasional insights that some of my nearest and dearest lack. I certainly think that I know a good deal more about Mr. Blakelock than he knows about himself.

  To describe him. At sixty-nine Branders Blakelock is a tall, spare, ungainly man, bulging and tightening in the wrong places, with a high bald dome surrounded by a fringe of curly gray hair and a smooth bland face with small, shiny, twinkling blue eyes. His voice, which can be stentorian in court, is also capable of high, almost falsetto notes, and he has an exploding, cackling laugh which would be almost an insult were it not largely used to applaud his own sharp wit. He is brilliant, and he knows it and is not in the least ashamed to show that he knows it. At the Irving Association, his favorite club, named for the sage of Sunnyside and of which he has been president for some years, he loves to address the membership, either informally at the long table where he is famed for his barbed stories of New York worthies, past and present, or at the monthly dinner meetings, where he reads out the obituary list, ending in sweet, mournful tones with the famous couplet of William Cory’s:

  “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;

  They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.”

  For Blakelock is very much a man’s man. He is gallant with the ladies and pretends to be the slave of his dull, plain wife, but he really lives for his own sex, at the office pacing up and down his chamber and tearing apart the suggestions of his clerks, or at the Irving Club in the activities just described.

  Is he a great lawyer? A great trial lawyer, perhaps. He is an unblushing showoff, sometimes soft, sly and humble, sometimes a thunderbolt-hurling Jupiter, but more often the mildly amused, gently cynical gentleman whose scholarly achievements and urbane sophistication never cause him to lose the common touch. He is a bit on the old-fashioned side, with a twist of Arthur Train’s Mr. Tutt, the sharp old Yankee lawyer with the heart of gold, who beats the dirty shyster at his own game to save the widow whom the latter is trying to fleece. But the qualities that shine in the courtroom are less glowing in the conference chamber, where men are trying to get at the truth and not camouflage it And as no big firm can survive on litigation alone, Mr. Blakelock must spend more hours in his office than in court. And I don’t think he really likes it when he has to fool not so much other people as himself.

  For that is what men toting a bag of puritan principles must do when they practice law. Hoyt, Welles & Andrew, like many of the old-time corporate law firms, had at first disdained takeovers as dogfights to be left to less reputable practitioners, but when takeovers became the principal indoor sport of American finance they had no choice but to learn the game or lose their clients. And it did not take Blakelock long to become as sharp at the sport as anyone else. But this has vexed him.

  He has always, for example, been uneasy about the jargon of this type of corporate conflict. He either carefully avoids use of such terms as “bear hug,” “shark repellent,” and “blitzkrieg,” or else articulates them with a sardonic and venomous precision. He detests my casual use of them. Here is a conversation we had at the beginning of the Atlantic-Shaughnessy affair, when I happened to use the term “golden parachute.”

  “Does it never strike you, Bob, that these labels may be the true moral indicia of what we are doing? Historians have always professed to find illumination in the vernacular.”

  “I don’t find it necessary to decide.”

  “You just go ahead and do what you think you have to do?”

  “Like you, sir.”

  “Oh yes, oh yes.” The glinting eyes darken, and lumps of mucus change place rumblingly in the throat. “A job’s a job. If you take it on, you do it. No one knows that better than I. But I suppose I’m cursed by an inner mentor that sits above the turmoil of my spirits and points out with glee: ‘You’re a shyster, Branders Blakelock. Or if you say you’re not, will you kindly explain the difference?’ There’s no such devil in your heart, Robert?”

  “If there were, I’d send him packing. Isn’t that what you pay me for?”

  “It’s what we’re making you a partner for—on New Year’s Day next. But I’m probing you, my friend. Do you mind? I’m trying to discover if you can really be so happily free of the cancer of an inner judge. Have you no doubts? Even when you see the tail of the predator consuming its prey already clamped in the jaws of a larger predator? Does it not remind you of those chain-of-life charts where you see the otter eating the fish that has swallowed the frog that has gobbled the fly? Ugh!”

  “Well, it’s life, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps you even like it.” He has left the lectern now and taken a step closer to my chair as if to examine a curious object. I sigh with no attempt to conceal it. “Perhaps you conceive it to be a man’s role. Macho, isn’t that the term? With all that curly blond hair and those blue, blue eyes! Young America in a Will Rogers film. And yet isn’t there something lean and hungry behind that mask? I know because I’ve made use of it, God help me! Maybe it’s your generation. God is dead, and the frontier is gone, and there are no wars to fight, but a man must still use his fangs and claws. After all, there has to be some fun in life!”

  “Look, Mr. Blakelock.” I have always found it awkward to use his Christian name, though he has repeatedly asked me to. “I’m not responsible for the low price of common stocks. It’s not my fault that there are companies that take advantage of the market to buy up other companies. I thought you believed in a free economy.”

  “I do. I do.”

  “Well, we’re adjusting to it, that’s all. And helping our clients to do so. Why make such heavy weather of it?”

  “Because it seems such a travesty of the American dream!” Now he is pacing the chamber again, the great professor on the dais, peering from a murky past to a misty future. “The old robber barons at least covered our land with rails and factories. But their successors simply devour one another. We may all end up in the distended bellies of a few somnolent titans that will sit facing each other across the desert of our poverty like giant Buddhas, too gorged to do more than gaze with blurred eyes at their own navels.”

  “You forget the antitrust laws.”

  “They seem very resilient these days. Everything favors amalgamation. Even the computer, which is nothing but an instrument for reassessing what we already have. New ways of looking at the old. Our future has dwindled to a change of labels.”

  “Which reminds me that I must be getting on with
changing the label of Shaughnessy Products.”

  “Right you are, my boy! Shut the old windbag up! You know that for all his prattle he’s in this bloody business right up to his prating mouth!”

  The raid on Shaughnessy was peculiarly obnoxious to Blakelock because Albert Lamb, the target’s president, had been a member of his Saturday golf foursome at the Antlers Club in Rye. Because of the ironclad secrecy in which preparations for a takeover had to be shrouded, it had been impossible for Blakelock to give the faintest warning to his friend. Indeed, it had behooved him not to betray the danger by the least change in his normal attitude and behavior. Even a failure to appear at the first tee on any Saturday morning at nine might have been taken as a sign of embarrassment, and Lamb might have speculated: embarrassment over what?

  How well I could imagine that last Saturday morning before the raid! The low, rolling, wooded, autumnal hills, yellow and brown and hectic red, the azure sky with here and there the puff of a cloud, the sweeping yellow-green course, and the four old boys in their tweeds, chattering comfortably (except for Mr. B) as they ambled along, on all the topics so dear to them, happy and secure in their male solidarity, free of the sharp words and possessive affections of the other sex.

  Perhaps they were discussing the war in Afghanistan that has just started. All would have expressed outrage at the Russians, Mr. B with particular violence.

  “The devil about the hydrogen bomb is that we can’t afford to do the right thing. It’s too dangerous. But at times I feel that if we don’t take some chances, we’re going to lose our souls as surely as the Soviets have.”

  “What do you suggest, Branders?” This perhaps would be from Lamb, gray-haired, square of chin and shoulder, an executive from a cover of Fortune. “Would you send in troops through Pakistan and call them volunteers?”

  “Damn it, Al, I think I might!”

  “But the Reds would send in ten men for every one of ours. It would be Vietnam all over again against a foe many times as strong. You have nothing to fight with, Branders!”

  “It is recorded in the Scriptures that Samson smote the enemy with the jawbone of an ass.” I can just hear Blakelock’s high, snooty laugh. “So if you, my dear Albert, will oblige us by shipping your lower maxillary to the Department of Defense…!”

  But now Blakelock would be going too far. He would not be so acerbic if something were not eating at his heart. He knows that in a day or so an attack will be launched against Shaughnessy Products that will in all probability result in the ouster of his golf companion from a position it has taken him a lifetime’s labor to achieve. What will Lamb think of him, knowing that on that lovely morning in the country, smacking the golf balls and talking of heroic stands in Asia, his supposed friend was actively plotting the raid that has destroyed him? And indeed Albert Lamb was furious and has since retired from the foursome. But Blakelock does not so much care what Lamb thinks of him; he is too big a man for that. What he really minds is what he must think of himself. That he, Branders Blakelock, a god of the Irving, a man of good will, a holder-up of the beacon light of good fellowship and humanitarianism, should find himself in a position that in the good old rosy past might have been described as more suitable to a legless, slithering reptile!

  Yes, I feel sorry for him. I really do. But what I cannot get away from is that he is basically doing it to himself. He wants to be a leader of today’s bar and at the same time reconcile his actions with a code of ethics for a désœuvré society of nineteenth-century aristocrats. And obviously it’s not going to work.

  3

  ALICE’S REACTION was very different from Mr. Blakelock’s. Whereas he was concerned with my ethics, she was concerned with my relationship with him.

  “Why do you have to be more Catholic than the pope?” she demanded. “If he doesn’t like it, why not drop it?”

  “Because I want this takeover to take.”

  “Isn’t that his affair? You’re not a partner yet.”

  “No, but do I even want to be a partner of a firm that hasn’t the guts to do the job?”

  “Guts? It’s the first time I’ve heard you accuse Mr. Blakelock of not having guts.”

  “Call it fastidiousness then. His nostrils are too tender. One nasty smell, and he gags.”

  “One nasty smell! Ransacking garbage pails?”

  “Of course, you would jump on that aspect of it. If you concede that information has to be gathered, you must go where it is.”

  “I guess I don’t concede it has to be gathered.”

  “Why should you? You’re not a lawyer. But leave the practice to those that are.”

  “I do! To Mr. Blakelock! I’m perfectly happy so long as you follow his lead. But now it seems you no longer do.”

  What man who calls himself that would not have been angered? To have it spat in my eye that my boss was not only my boss but my preceptor, and a badly needed one at that! As I looked at Alice, so tall and fine and proud and dark, it struck me that she and Blakelock were acting as if they had formed a secret alliance to keep an unruly boy under control.

  “Maybe we’d better have supper,” I equivocated. “Is it ready?”

  “It can be ready in ten minutes. I want to go on with this first. You’ve changed, Bob.”

  “I haven’t changed in wanting my supper.”

  “I tell you it’s coming.”

  Alice was the perfect wife. She took pride in being ready for me whenever I came home. Our two girls had had their supper and were doing homework in their room. Audrey, who was eleven, sometimes supped with us, but not tonight. Alice would have left her office at five and come home to take over from Norma, our black cook-cleaning woman, who left at six, having prepared the meal, which only had to be warmed up. At seven, when I arrived, on nights that I wasn’t working late, she was clad in a long dressing gown tightly belted, which admirably set off her tall, full figure. Alice was a dark beauty with pale skin and eyes that looked as if they would have betrayed laughter had she not been so determined to be serious.

  Our living room owed more to her gravity than to her taste. I think Alice thought that interior decoration was trivial. There was too much blue on the sofas and chairs, and she had a cabinet of ornaments given her by a mother of middle-class tastes that contained statuettes of animals and birds. The walls had two Piranesi prints that had belonged to her grandparents. It was surprising that a woman of so much character could have produced a chamber with so little. But Alice was literary; her domain was words.

  “You think you’re always the same, Bob. But you’re changing, little by little, all the time.”

  “In what way?”

  “Shall I put it bluntly?”

  “When do you not?”

  “Well, then you’re getting hard-boiled. Or perhaps I should put it that you’re trying to get hard-boiled. As if you thought there was something desirable about being cool and clear and above it all and looking down on poor scrapping mortals.”

  “And there isn’t?” But for all my jaunty tone, I was cruelly hurt. Who wants to be thought hard-boiled?

  “No! Sometimes I wonder what happened to the blue-eyed, laughing boy who sat next to me at Columbia and collected the famous lines of English poetry that had clumsy mates.”

  “‘My heart is like a singing bird,’” I promptly quoted.

  “‘Whose nest is in a watered shoot,’” she came right back at me.

  “‘Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime.’”

  “‘A rose-red city half as old as time!’”

  “I could go on.”

  “Could you, Bob? When I see you day after day, night after night, so wrapped up in one of these ghastly corporate raids, I can’t help but wonder.”

  “That’s my job. The only difference between now and eight years ago is that now I’m making some of the decisions. When I was a junior clerk I had no responsibility. I might as well have been running the elevator. But I always knew the time was coming when I’d have my share. Wh
at else was I slaving for?”

  “Was that really it? You mean you always imagined that one day you’d be doing this kind of work? And loving it?”

  “Well, of course, I couldn’t know I’d become a specialist in takeovers. But it was always going to be some aspect of corporate law. That’s what being an attorney is all about.”

  “Even the dirty tricks?”

  “Even what you call the dirty tricks. The trouble with you and Blakelock is that neither of you has the remotest understanding of the moral climate in which we live today. It’s all a game, but a game with very strict rules. You have to stay meticulously within the law; the least misstep, if caught, involves an instant penalty. But there is no particular moral opprobrium in incurring a penalty, any more than there is being offside in football. A man who is found to have bought or sold stock on inside information, or misrepresented his assets in a loan application, or put his girl friend on the company payroll, is not ‘looked down on,’ except by sentimentalists. He’s simply been caught, that’s all. Even the public understands that. Watergate showed it. You break the rules, pay the penalty and go back to the game. Albert Lamb would do to any officer in Atlantic exactly what I propose doing to him. If not, he should be benched.”

  “So you think Mr. Blakelock should be benched.”

  “I’m certainly beginning to wonder about it.”

  Alice was fair enough to give to what I had said some moments of thought. But then she came, in her woman’s fashion, back to the personal aspect. “I guess what I really mind is your enthusiasm about it. If you thought of it just as a job, that would be one thing. After all, it’s not your fault that American businessmen are such sharks. But the glee with which you ferret around in ash cans! Why do you have to want to do so much more than Mr. Blakelock wants?”