Powers of Attorney by Louis Auchincloss Page B

wrinkle.”
    His words were a bleak reminder of the desolating disloyalty of people like Mrs. Tower. It was all very well to warm oneself in the sunshine of their benignant smiles on those rare visits downtown to sign a will, to cut a coupon, to make a tax-free gift, or to be lulled by their smooth, firm, complimentary voices on the telephone—“Dear Mrs. A, would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to address my Christmas cards this year?”—but one always knew, in a drafty little corner of one’s heart, that one did not really exist for them, that at dinner tables covered with thin-stemmed wineglasses and silver candelabra they would betray one to the Tilneys of this world, for a snicker, let alone a laugh.
    â€œI think, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Tower, that you make a mistake to let Mr. Tilney take over the running of your department. Of course, I understand that as senior partner he has a general responsibility for the firm. But surely that doesn’t include all the details. Surely, it behooves you to stand up for your own!”
    â€œI do my best, Mrs. A,” he replied with an ashy little smile. “But Tilney’s always shouting about people not pulling their weight.”
    â€œThe Surrogate used to say,” Mrs. Abercrombie retorted in the high, cheerful, rippling tone, like the crest of a fast moving breaker, that she used in invoking her late employer’s title, “that one couldn’t evaluate an estate practice over one year, or even two or three. But he maintained that if one took a sufficiently long view, one would find it was estates that paid the rent!”
    â€œWell, until you can convince Mr. Tilney of that, I am afraid we must do as he says.”
    Mrs. Abercrombie stood motionless for a heavy moment; then, without a word, she slowly turned to depart. But she did not fool herself. The dignity of her exit hardly covered her sweeping defeat in the matter of the tax returns. For years now, in fact, even since before the beloved Surrogate’s death, she had viewed with an increasingly critical eye what Clitus Tilney was doing to the firm. As a young woman she had come into an office that still had some of the aroma of the days of the great individualist lawyers, those driving, nervous men who had cleaned out of the practice of law the windy court oratory of a Websterian age and substituted the machinelike chatter of corporate meetings, dry, snappish authoritarian men who, for all that, had had distinction as well as arrogance, manners as well as testiness, who had believed in being gentlemen as well as lawyers, who had collected paintings, built great houses, loved old wines. They might have driven their staffs unmercifully, but their offices had had charm: safes that did not open, or to which everyone had the combination, receptionists who were burly, storytelling, retired cops who shouted at clients, and tea served to everybody at five in big, dark comfortable libraries. There were no silvery bells to summon people to the telephone, no honey-toned switchboard operators, no “office organization” pamphlets, no memoranda from headquarters on little points of procedure, no office parties or “outings” to improve morale. And now? Well, now they might as well move to Madison Avenue and have done with it!
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    Mrs. Abercrombie lunched that day with Mrs. Grimshawe, head of stenographic. Her relations with the staff were governed by three simple rules. To the new girls and office boys she merely nodded, if she happened to pass them in the corridor. With those who had been employed five years or more she occasionally chatted, seated in her corner armchair in the recreation room. With a few intimates, of high position and long tenure of employment, she lunched and permitted the use of Christian names. Of the latter group Lois Grimshawe was certainly closest to her, yet Mrs. Abercrombie had always ruefully to acknowledge that