The Scarlet Letters Read online

  SOMEWHAT TO HIS SURPRISE Hetty went along with her parents’ desire for a large wedding reception in their big shingle beach house in Nahant. Some three hundred of Boston’s best gathered in the big tent erected on the lawn; it was a dressy and festive occasion. Ambrose’s parents were delighted with the whole affair; they certainly thought that their younger son had done a great deal better than anyone could have expected from his youth. And Ambrose finally decided that they were right.

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  WHEN A YOUNG MAN is furnished with the right job to fit his talents and ambition and the right wife for his social and domestic needs, his advance in the world, barring the absence of Lady Luck, should be smooth and steady, and such was the case with Ambrose. Even America’s entry into the war in 1917 favored him, for as an army first lieutenant he was not sent to the trenches, as he had requested, but assigned instead to the war secretary’s office in Washington, where his business experience enabled him to serve importantly in the field of arms production and brought him in close touch with several magnates who were later to join the swelling ranks of his clients.

  Even the Grim Reaper proved his ally. The year 1923 marked the death of Uncle Charley, followed quickly by that of two other senior partners, and in the sudden void of the firm leadership Ambrose, still in his thirties, found himself catapulted into its head management. Nothing could stop him now. He was able at last to implement all his plans for the organization of a “perfect” law firm, and in the due course of time the newly named Vollard, Kaye & Duer came to be deemed by many the first in Wall Street for its expertise, its industry, its interior discipline and high esprit de corps. And Ambrose’s fame, as he moved comfortably into his fifth decade, not only as the wisest and shrewdest of counselors but as a witty and hearty companion, made him everywhere in demand as a speaker, a toastmaster, a cornerstone layer, and an adviser to political sachems in trying times. It was widely thought that he should enter public life, and some tempting offers were made to him, even by the New Deal administration in Washington, but at the last moment he always found himself too engrossed in guiding his beloved firm to be able to tear himself away.

  On the domestic side his life was not quite so easy. Three daughters were born to him and Hetty, but no son, and after the difficult delivery of the third it was thought medically inadvisable for Hetty to undergo another pregnancy. Lavinia, or “Vinnie,” a bold beauty, soon became her father’s particular pride and joy, easily outdistancing her less interesting younger siblings, though they were amiable enough and pretty enough, but lacking in her fire. Oh yes, he cared for them all, if he favored Vinnie, but he yearned for a boy, a youth, an heir whom he could rear to be a hero—he allowed his private ruminations to be wildly romantic—avoiding all the errors into which his own parents had fallen. At times the very sharpness of his regret surprised him. Why should a priest of the life of reason make such a distinction between an unborn son and a very present daughter?

  It was certainly something of which Hetty was very much aware. She turned her attention to making up to her younger daughters for their father’s obvious favoritism, but try as she could, she couldn’t quite help adding this parental fault to the largely hidden grudge that she held against him for so sorely missing a son. She herself would have willingly risked her life to provide him with one, but he would not hear of it and even discontinued sexual relations with her in fear of slipping up. Of course, she couldn’t help but suspect that this was less of a sacrifice for him than for her, a suspicion more than confirmed when his abstinence survived her menopause. The years had not made her more attractive, and her new stoutness and thinning hair had destroyed much of what little sex appeal she had had for him.

  Certainly, however, she did her job as the senior partner’s wife very well. Nobody disputed that. In town, in their commodious brownstone with a butler and four maids, and in Glenville, in their handsome white colonial revival house, she was appreciated as a clever if sometimes sharp-tongued, efficient, busy little hostess, especially by the shy young wives of newly made partners whom she clucked over like a kindly mother hen. But there was a vein of repressed sadness, a touch of muffled grimness behind her rather bustling activity, even lurking in the jangle of her laughter. Hetty knew that the gamble she had taken in wedding a great man who cared less for her than for his own greatness would have paid off in full only if she had given him the family he wanted. She was fair enough to recognize that the gamble had been her option and that she had no one to blame but herself. But she wouldn’t have been human if she didn’t sometimes take it out on him.

  THE SUMMER OF 1953 wrought havoc both inside and outside the firm of Vollard Kaye. Ambrose had never faced a personal emotional crisis as bewildering and upsetting as that caused him by his son-in-law’s adultery. He could not seem to find, in the well-stocked armory of his selected resources, the tool to deal with it. He had always inwardly lauded himself on a precise understanding of what he liked to think of as his own highly individual and complex double personality. He had formulated a diagnosis of himself as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde—eliminating, of course, the darkest evil of the latter—and he had practiced the inner therapy (harmless, as he had then believed) of dramatizing himself as two brilliant but near opposite types. One, of course, was the prominent public figure—large, bony, broad-shouldered, grizzled, high-browed and expensively tweeded, with hard gray eyes that, however, could twinkle as well as rebuke, a legal scholar and philosopher as well as a deft administrator, a lofty idealist who was yet capable of diplomatic compromise. The other was a man of concealed depressions, the victim of black moods in which he believed in nobody and nothing and would try to console himself behind the locked doors of his study at home with a bottle of whiskey. But there was also a horrid little spy in his psyche that whispered to him that his melancholia was the finishing touch that the first Ambrose Vollard needed for a properly dramatic portrait.

  And now, due no doubt to the high pitch of his resentment of the man who had betrayed his favorite daughter—and her father, too, oh yes her father as well—a fourth Ambrose seemed to be emerging, a grotesque caricature of the whispering spy, a shrill hyena accusing the two other Vollards of playing God and Satan in their own Paradise Lost. Was he having a true nervous breakdown at last?

  He recalled with searing clarity the image of the twenty-three-year-old Rodman Jessup who had first applied for a job in Vollard Kaye in the fall of 1939. Under the high-standing wavy blond hair was a beautiful boyish face, the face of a fine clean youth, a kind of all-American cartoon. Yet the eyes had a mature and rather fixed stare, and one felt that the muscular, well-shaped body under the white spotless summer suit would respond instantly to anything those eyes saw as needing correction.

  Ambrose had been half apologetic about the exiguous salary then customarily offered to law school graduates.

  “Oh, that’s quite all right, sir,” was the prompt response. “I’m looking for opportunity more than remuneration. I’ve had to work my way through college and law school, and I’m used to making do with small means. And if I may say so, sir, it was hearing you address my graduating class at Yale three years ago that made me apply first to your firm. I’ve never forgotten the way you pictured the high role that lawyers can play in our business system.”

  Ambrose looked at him carefully for a moment. Was this flattery? “My daughter Lavinia is a friend of yours, I believe. She told me that you were going to apply here.”

  “I am honored if she describes me as a friend, sir. But I hadn’t intended to mention her name to you. The only endorser I bring is myself.”

  “Plus a very good record at Columbia Law. Not to mention your editorship in the Journal. I was an editor myself.”

  “As all our board well knew, sir.”

  “How did you happen to pick Columbia over, say, Harvard?”

  “I was able to get a partial scholarship there. And by living with my mother here in town I could save board.”

  Of course, Rodman
was immediately hired—he was clearly something of a catch. But what clinched the matter was something that Ambrose already knew and that the applicant did not know: that Vinnie had already confided in her father that she had every intention of bringing the young Jessup to the point of proposing to her.

  Ambrose had succumbed to the somewhat perverse temptation to submit this self-assured intruder into his family midst to the toughest office test, so he assigned the new recruit to the job of acting as his principal assistant in the most complicated of corporate reorganizations. Rod had been extraordinary. He toiled away, night and day, even sleeping on a couch in the law library, until he mastered every detail of the massive transaction with a clarity of mind and an organizing capability that had astonished and delighted his new boss. When the job was finished Ambrose took him out to a Lucullan dinner at the most expensive French restaurant in town, where, he was pleased to note, his guest partook freely of three famous wines without slurring a syllable.

  As they sat over their cognac after their meal, Ambrose embarked on a more personal note. “Well, my boy, now you’ve had a glimpse of what a corporate law practice is all about, I daresay it strikes a young idealist like yourself as something a bit dustier than you’d expected. Even a bit grubbier. Isn’t that so? You know the poem of the young Apollo, tiptoe on the verge of strife? How does it go? ‘Magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life’? Well, I suppose the ‘magnificently’ is something.”

  “But what are the details, sir, if the whole is good?”

  “You find a corporate reorganization good? You interest me.”

  “Isn’t it part of the social machinery that got us out of the great Depression? How can that not be good?”

  “Well, I guess you might argue that in the matter we’ve just finished. But I’m afraid, my friend, you’ll find that some reorganizations have no purpose loftier than to establish the control of one set of pirates over another.”

  Ambrose, facing the cool responding stare of those blue-gray eyes, felt almost ashamed of himself. What was he up to now, old ham that he was, but trying to impress this young man with the broad reach of a mind that could dive into the bottom as well as rise to the top of a modern law practice?

  “But those things are going to be done anyway, sir” was Rod’s sturdy reply. “As I see it, our job is to make sure they are done efficiently and lawfully. In a democracy, and in a free market, or as free as practicable, we have to allow businessmen to some extent to work things out their own way. But as lawyers we can see that they work it out strictly within the law. It doesn’t matter so much what they do, as long as it’s in the public eye. Then, if laws have to be changed, the voters will know what to change.”

  Ambrose nodded musingly. “Which means that a lawyer doesn’t really need a conscience at all?”

  “Or the highest and most sensitive kind. Like your own, sir.”

  This had all been very gratifying, and the young man was evidently sincere, if almost too much so. It had not taken more than a few months before it was recognized by all twenty partners and sixty clerks that young Jessup had been enlisted among the small group of selected associates who worked almost exclusively for the senior partner. Within a year Rod had become Ambrose’s son-in-law, and in another five he was made the youngest member of the firm. A tour of naval duty in the Pacific in World War II only added to his luster, and he and Vinnie, neighbors of her parents in town and tenants of a cottage abutting the latters’ estate in Glenville, became as essential to Ambrose’s family as they were to his law practice. Even Vinnie’s younger sisters adored their handsome and intriguingly serious brother-in-law and sought his approval of their boyfriends.

  There were times when Ambrose liked to think of himself as an aging Hadrian leaning on the sturdy shoulders of a stalwart Antinoüs, on whose total fidelity he could confidently rely to help him bear the burdens of empire. But there were also moments when he was subject to the uncomfortable suspicion that his protégé was gaining control of his inner being and becoming as much a guide as a support. If there was the hint of a fanatic in Rod, there might also be the hint of a fanatic’s strength.

  When a vacancy on the Court of Appeals in Albany prompted gossip that the governor might appoint Ambrose to the seat, he discussed the pros and cons of his accepting it with Rod over lunch at the Downtown Association.

  His son-in-law did not conceal his concern. “But what would happen to the firm?” he protested.

  “Nothing. It would get along just fine. Nobody’s indispensable. And there’s a side of me that would like to philosophize about law for a bit. As judges can.”

  “How many judges do?”

  “Well, call me Holmes, then!” Ambrose exclaimed with irritation. “Call me Cardozo! Can’t there be anything in my life but the firm? Must I go to my grave having done nothing but represent more or less flawed characters? I want a moment of truth. Shining truth!”

  Rod’s retort was almost fierce. “But that’s precisely what you have! You’ve forged this great law firm into your tool. Or rather into your shining sword! You say you’re not indispensable to it, but I claim you are. There’s not another firm in town with our unity, our spirit, and you are what holds the whole thing together. Every one of your partners feels the firm not only as his place of business, but as his club, his school, perhaps even his church!”

  Ambrose at this chose to conclude the discussion, and anyway, as it turned out, the governor did not appoint him. But if he had, would Ambrose have turned it down? And would he have been doing it under the sway of Rod’s so flattering estimate of his value to the firm? Wasn’t it really time for him to quit? Was it really good for any partnership to be so dominated by a single member? Oh yes, he tried to kid himself that Vollard Kaye was as democratic as a Greek city-state, but didn’t he know that he was in fact a despot, however benevolent? And didn’t he like it? Too much? And wasn’t his present nervousness possible evidence of a hidden fear that Rod Jessup was grooming himself for the successorship but thought the time was not yet quite ripe?

  And then, only a few months before the dreadful event of the flaunted adultery, came the first serious row in Ambrose’s halcyon relationship with his son-in-law.

  One of the partners, exultantly, had just brought in an important new client, a large Canadian distilling corporation, and Ambrose, immediately before his row with Rod, had been in conference with some half dozen of the company’s chief officers. He had been pleased with their reception and interested in some of the problems they faced with Uncle Sam, to one of which he had already flared a possible solution, and, finding Rod in his office when he returned from the conference chamber, he started at once to explain it. But his son-in-law held up an interrupting hand.

  “I’m sorry to say it, sir, but I don’t think you can represent them.”

  “You mean we have a conflict? What a shame.”

  “Not a conflict, no. Though you could use our representing Deacon Brewers, a potential litigant with them, as an excuse for declining their retainer.”

  Ambrose stared. “And why should I want to do that?”

  “Because they’re crooks. Or at least used to be.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose they could be criminally indicted today for what they did thirty years ago. And it hasn’t been necessary for them to commit mayhem or murder since Prohibition was repealed.”

  “You mean they were involved in bootlegging back in the twenties and thirties? Good heavens, man, who wasn’t? What do you think we’re running here on Wall Street? A reformatory?”

  “I’m not talking about just bootlegging. I’m talking about gang warfare and brutal murder.” Rod had declined to sit down when Ambrose did; he loomed threateningly over the latter’s desk and even struck its surface with his fist. “It so happens that I wrote my senior thesis at Yale on just that. I got absorbed in the subject and did a lot of personal research, including reading the record of several court cases. It may
interest you to know that your new client was up to its ears in all kinds of suspected dirty work and was even—though I admit it was never proved—widely believed to have instigated the slaughter of two rivals to its gang right here in Manhattan. One of the men was even supposed to have been burned alive.”

  Ambrose shuddered. Execution at the stake had been one of his recurrent nightmares. He remembered how in his college days he had bitterly ejected Sir Thomas More from his mental catalogue of historical heroes when he read that the so-called saint had ordered the burning of Anabaptists. Then he shook himself. “But all that’s ancient history, Rod. Even if there were officers of the company mixed up in such doings, they must be long dead or retired. There’s no point holding the past against perfectly innocent men today.”

  “But they’re not all dead or retired! The president of the company whom you’ve just been conferring with, Stanley Foot, was directly involved as a young man in their cross-boundary operations. I even devoted a section of my thesis to him. There was an effort by our feds to indict him, but the smokescreen sent up by shysters reduced it to nothing. Oh, of course, he’s the image of respectability now. He’s even got a flock of honorary degrees!”

  Ambrose uncomfortably recalled the stout, hearty features of the loud-mouthed, grinning and genial Mr. Foot, the essence of an assured, lower-middle-class cockney Britisher.

  Rod continued. “I got so wrapped up in my thesis that I even thought of taking a year off before law school to develop it into a book. But Mother said we couldn’t really afford it. In my opinion American morals have never fully recovered from the blow that era of lawlessness dealt them. I’m sure you will agree now, sir, that a lawyer of your standing at the bar cannot possibly represent such a man as Stanley Foot.”