The Young Apollo and Other Stories (25 page)

I got a job, after much treading of unfamiliar streets, with a wily old shyster, a near genius with juries, who scandalously underpaid the three slave clerks who prepared his trumped-up damage claims, and who gave me just what I needed: a broad experience trying cases in the lower courts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was there that I learned the arts of a litigator and how to deal with a multitude of humans with backgrounds as different as possible from my own. It was also there that I learned that there need be no limit to what an able and determined man can make of himself.

Clara was a constant aid, a steady light in my toil. I can see now, only too well, that in my egotism and in the distraction of my long hours of work, I did not sufficiently note what the harsh New York winter was doing to her condition. I did once offer to send her back to her parents, who would have been glad to receive her, until the advent of warmer weather, but she adamantly refused to go. And then she became pregnant, which offered me a pleasanter excuse for her increasing frailty.

"Whatever happens," she told me once, "I want you always to remember that the happiness we have had was well worth it to me."

I attributed this to her old habit of taking the dark view of her ailment and maintained my resolute optimism. I had no real notion of the danger of her state until my little world blew into pieces with her death in childbirth.

Our son, Philip, survived. He has always, I suspect, harbored the secret suspicion that I resented him for causing his mother's death. He is wrong. I have always known that I caused it.

I never returned to my office, even to finish up my work there. Mother and Clara's parents came up from Virginia, and it was agreed between them that the baby should be taken to Mother's in Blue Hill; obviously I was in no state, emotionally or financially, to care for an infant. I could only acquiesce. Besides, the war with Spain had started, and I made the sudden decision to enlist. It was one solution, anyway, and I hardly cared whether or not it might prove a final one.

Life, however, never tires of playing tricks on us. Instead of death in Cuba, I found new life. My very recklessness seemed to insure my immunity. In the famous charge up San Juan Hill, I actually heard Colonel Roosevelt's sharp rebuke to a soldier crouching in the rear: "Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?" There was a man to follow! And I was a man, too. Indeed, I received a medal for being one.

On my way back to New York, where I had decided to resume the practice of law, I of course stopped for a visit to Blue Hill to see my son and mother. And my father as well. I no longer resented him. We were equals now. And he even seemed ready to acknowledge it.

He looked older and grayer; he was having the periodic heart attacks that were soon to end his life. Almost timidly—if one could associate such an adverb with him—he placed a hand on my shoulder.

"I'm proud of you, my boy."

If I had been capable of tears, that might have been the moment for them. "Oh, well, wars, you know," I replied instead with a shrug. "It's all in the cards. The cowering man on San Juan Hill I heard Colonel Roosevelt order to stand up, stood up and was shot down. If he'd stayed a coward he'd be alive."

Father did not smile. "He has nothing to do with you, Langdon. And I hope you've come home to stay. Your office is ready for you. Or rather, mine is. You'll be the senior now."

"Oh, Father, really!" I exclaimed in a sudden burst of something curiously like love for this sick old parent. But then I checked myself. I was a new man now. Could I say it? Yes, I could say it! I was even glad to. "But I'm afraid, Father, that I've decided to try my luck again in Yankeeland. Clara thought I should get away from home. From Blue Hill. Even from all of you. She married me, as the only way she could accomplish that, even at the cost of her life. I can't let her down after that, can I?"

Father shook his head sadly, and I saw Mother actually smile. "No, I guess you can't," he murmured.

"And when you're settled up there," Mother intervened, with a decisive cheerfulness, "we'll bring little Philip up to you."

I started building my career around the law firm that at first existed only in my resolute imagination, by the unlikely stratagem of returning to the wily old shyster whom I had so abruptly abandoned when Clara died. He was glad enough to have me back, for with age his forensic abilities had begun to tatter, and I propped up his failing practice until his sudden and dramatic demise in the midst of an impassioned oration to a jury. The publicity of this collapse helped to cover up some of the ineptitude of his final phase, and control of a too-long-cowered firm passed easily into my awaiting hands. I made a junior partner of the ablest of his clerks and discharged the rest. From this point on, I saw to it that every new member of the firm was a man on whose personal loyalty to me I could count.

Of course it was my rapidly growing fame as a litigator that drew them to the firm. When I agreed to represent a client, I was concerned, perfectly properly, with only two factors: was his case either winnable or capable of a good settlement, and could he pay my high fee? It was said of me, I know, that I could have got Judas off with a suspended sentence, but I took it as a compliment. I have always been aware that true justice was not invariably promoted by my victories in court, but let those who wail about this devise a better system. If I was never much concerned with what some sentimentalists call the "spirit" of the law, it is also true that I never broke one. A trial to me is a game to be played, and why play a game in any way but to win?

It may have been true, in the early years of my practice, that my indifference to the heavy cost to defendants of what my critics called the grossly inflated damage awards that I obtained from juries sprang from my feeling that such defendants, after all, were northerners who had ravaged my homeland. Yes, that is possible, but it certainly didn't last, and later I achieved some significant victories over corporations in the South. I do not think today, despite my stand on desegregation, that I can be rightfully accused of any regional bias. And one thing I have assuredly observed is that fame, even fame as a tricky lawyer, brings not only a half-reluctant popularity but actual esteem.

In building my firm from a handful of lawyers to its present size of fifteen partners and thirty associates, I have not followed the procedure of many of the major downtown firms in selecting partners, sometimes exclusively, from the ranks of clerks hired directly out of law school, with the hope of creating a homogeneous organization of dedicated members. No, I have never hesitated to grab a promising outsider and take him in as a partner even ahead of those who have toiled longer in the vineyard. Anyone who objects can go elsewhere. Nor have I ever stooped to the fashionable anti-Semitism or anti-Irishness of some Wall Streeters. I have not only brought in many Jewish lawyers, I have even used the language of flagrant racism to make them acceptable to prejudiced clients: "What you need, you see, is just what you don't like: a rough, tough kike of a lawyer who won't look under every bed for a scruple." Nor have I succumbed to the craven preference of so many firms for the elegantly trained products of Harvard and Yale law schools; I have always regarded my firm as the real law academy from which my clerks must graduate. Not that I spurn Harvard, but Fordham does me just as well, sometimes better. I would have taken Negroes, but their time had not yet come, and I have never been a pioneer.

Which brings me to how I have been able to maintain absolute and still undisputed control of my firm. Needless to say, it has not been an unconscious process. Let us suppose that I had been retained by the president of a large company to represent it in a particular litigation in whose field my trial talents happened to outweigh those of its general counsel. I would alert my partners to the need of cultivating the corporate officers of the new client and somehow conveying to them the knowledge that we had skill in corporate affairs as well as jury trials. In the flush of my subsequent court victory there was sometimes the occasion for a grateful company president to move all his business to my firm. But in assigning a junior partner to this new account—for I couldn't do all the work—I never, as did so many managers, allowed him to take over the client. Busy as I was, I was always kept abreast of the client's problems, and attended the more important conferences, and occasionally lunched or dined with its chief officers. This was usually enough to maintain the illusion in the client that I was always primarily in charge of its matters. Sometimes it didn't work, and there were occasions when I had to expel a too greedy partner from the firm. But I usually made a great point of being all genial smiles, acting as a kindly uncle to the younger men who came into the firm, asking them to my country house for a weekend and even loaning them money for their struggling families. I think they even took a certain pride in my reputation downtown as a benevolent despot. It is something to be well known, even at that price.

I knew the story that was circulated about me. It was said—and widely believed—that a daring partner had once come to me to suggest a more even split of the net profits among the members of the firm. "Good, good," I am supposed to have blandly replied. "Divvy them up in any way that seems fair and square to you. So long as I get my fifty percent, I don't care what you do with the balance." Well, of course no such discussion ever took place, nor do I take anything like such a lion's share of our earnings. But there is some truth in the fable.

What really keeps me in power is that the firm as a whole recognizes that it owes its health and prosperity basically to my efforts and reputation. Otherwise the authority that I exercise would not be tolerated. Now we are approaching the time when my grip is bound to be loosened. But the legend of old Langdon Rives, mellowing with age and still a formidable figure at the bar, has swollen to the point where even my most envious juniors are more anxious to use it and promote it than to blow it away. If you become a landmark, you become a permanent part of the landscape. It might take an earthquake to tumble you.

I should turn now from the firm to my domestic life. Yes, I married again, but I'm coming to that. First was the business of raising my son, Philip, who shared with me the increasingly grander residences that I acquired as my income waxed: the Beaux Arts mansion that reared its overornamented but only forty-foot-wide facade on East Seventieth Street and the inevitable red-brick Georgian manor house in Westbury, Long Island. I have never been one to hide my light under a bushel. Philip had everything a lad could desire: a swimming pool, a tennis court, a horse to ride, membership in any club he cared to join, and a father willing to entertain house parties of his friends. And no, he did not turn out to be a disappointment to me, as you might have expected from the above.

Indeed, he proved in many ways the ideal son and heir. At least he would have been to any parent with less unreasonable requirements. He was very handsome, favoring his mother, with thick black hair and large, dark, brooding eyes, pale skin, a trim muscular figure, a bit on the slight side, and a charming courtesy of manner, more like that of a French or Italian youth of good birth than an American. To watch him enter a room and join a group was to watch an act of gracefulness. An able student, a competent athlete, at ease with both his own generation and mine, he fitted smoothly into the routine of my busy life. Why wasn't he perfect? Maybe that was just the trouble. He was.

The fault, of course, was mine. It seems it always is. I wanted more than he had to give. I wanted his love. I wasn't loved by my partners, and I had given too much of myself to the law to have more than casual friends. My parents were long dead, and Clara's family had never forgiven me for taking her north. What my second marriage gave me I shall come to, but it wasn't love. For that I turned to Philip.

Mind you, I could never fault him. He treated me with every show of respect and friendliness. He showed an intelligent interest in my cases; he was a pleasant companion on our vacation trips; when his pals came to visit, he always included me in their jokes and discussions. Away at boarding school and later at Yale, he wrote me newsy and informative letters.

What was wrong was that for all his charm and goodness, for all his wonderfully controlled patience and temper, the boy could not find it in his heart to give me what he was too sensitive not to feel that I craved. He would have simulated love if he could have, but he was far too honest to do so. He would have cut his tongue out rather than admit that he was ashamed of me. But that was it. To him I was a shyster.

This had to come out when he went to law school. Indeed, I was surprised that he chose law at all, though now I rather wryly see it as not unlike Benjamin Cardozo's joining the bar as a chance to redeem the family name from his father's corrupt use of his judgeship. Did Philip choose a legal career to atone for mine? Crazy as it sounds, I'm afraid so.

He became an editor of the
Yale Law Journal,
but he never submitted the "notes" or "decisions" that he contributed to that distinguished periodical in draft to me. When I read them, I saw why. They were entirely concerned with the role of law in the development of a more egalitarian society, with the problems of remedial legislation, with misconducted trials and hoodwinked juries, and his principal piece dealt with the danger of excessive jury damage awards.

It was not, therefore, any surprise to me when, on his graduation, Philip instructed me that he was declining the job that I offered him in my firm and was joining Legal Aid instead. The time had come at last for some plain speaking between us, and despite my natural irritation, I felt a small throb of pride that Philip was so evidently up to it.

"I might as well put it to you frankly, Dad."

"What better way?"

"Well, in my possibly too prim opinion, your firm doesn't make any significant contribution to society as a whole."

"You mean that my devising of a perfect legal tool is no use to society? What did society want but a system of justice where every wrong could be righted? My firm is finely constructed to achieve just that purpose. If I were a Praxiteles, it would be deemed my masterpiece!"