Janice Baldwin. She sat forward tensely, her gloved hands clasping the
railing. Larry tried to stare her into awareness across the vast room,
but her solemn wide eyes were riveted on Bemrose. With the brown fur of
her coat gathered around her shoulders, she blended into the oak of the
room, another fine ornament in the expanse of golden carving.
Suddenly Judge Lehman’s voice, questioning Arthur, acquired a new, hard
tone: “... how the question was not argued in the old case?” Larry had
missed the beginning, but it was obvious that Judge Lehman suspected
that the old case might have been dishonestly tried. In the days when
Cy’s father had received the award, Tammany was corrupt. Maybe the
O’Malleys’ lawyer had made a deal with the unscrupulous City lawyers to
forget the recapture clause.
“Why didn’t anyone argue the point?” Judge Lehman demanded. “From what
you’ve said so far, it evidently takes considerable arguing. If your
point is well taken, which of course is undecided----”
The tic started in Arthur’s lip. Larry knew that unless he could
explain why the point had not previously been argued the Court would
affirm without opinion, reasoning that a new trial might be a good
thing if the old one had been fixed.
“If the Court please, I cannot speak from personal knowledge,”
Bemrose’s voice flowed on unobstructed. “When this case was tried, I
was not a member of the bar. Our trial counsel and opposing counsel in
the old case are both dead. My client was a child, and his father, who
received the award, died ten years ago.” His clear, assured tone denied
the hopelessness of what he was saying.
“When this case was tried, the law consisted in what the lower court
had decided in the Upper New York Bay case,” he pointed out. “In
that case the recapture clause was declared null and void regardless
of the purpose of taking. The reasons are given on page thirty-four
of my brief. Both sides in this case apparently had agreed that the
recapture clause was worthless, and saw no point in arguing it. Have
I--” Arthur’s speech played the old trick, and a quiet rocked the room.
“Have I answered your Honor’s question?” he continued confidently.
“You have at least been logical.” Judge Lehman smiled.
He had saved his case. From the back row Cy wordlessly cheered. Old
Ambrose Dane shelfed his lower lip in approval, and whispered to Tom
Newton behind his hand.
“If I were standing--” Bemrose gestured expressively. “I must ask
your Honor to recognize the Respondent’s counsel.” The Judges stirred
amiably in their chairs.
Larry asked Bemrose to excuse him as the Assistant Corporation Counsel
set about to refute the appeal. Hurrying to the back of the room, he
slipped into an empty chair next to Janice.
The blue puffs showed under her eyes. She had been crying. Larry took
her hand in wordless comfort.
“It went fine,” he reassured her. “He got over the two big hurdles. I
think they’ll reverse.”
The tears started again, and her hand shook in his.
“He proved that he can do it,” Larry said.
She sobbed out loud, and the man next to her looked around.
“You saw him come in?”
She nodded dumbly.
“It looks worse than it is,” Larry said. “He gets around all right.
You’ll see. Wait for us outside.”
She motioned Larry to follow her out of the courtroom and in the
waiting room explained to him that she couldn’t stay until Arthur was
through. She was making the five o’clock train back to the city. She
had to get to Washington that night, and had a plane reservation from
New York at nine.
“But he’ll want to see you, Janice. When I tell him you were here----”
She held up the stiff, sharp hands.
“He’ll be so happy you were.”
Her smooth dark head fell forward over the thick arm of the chair, and
she pressed her eyes into the leather. Larry put his arm around her
shoulder. “I hate to see you go back alone.”
She bravely rearranged her features.
“He’ll be wondering what has happened to you,” Janice said. “You’d
better go back in there.”
“You’re sure you don’t want him to know?” Larry smoothed the dark
straight strands of hair along her cheek.
Janice shook her head. “I’ll be in New York next week. I’ll call you.”
Larry followed her through the marble rotunda to the door. She looked
small and lost among the massive columns.
“How did you know about today?” he asked.
“Tom Newton. I met him on the train coming up from Washington.” She
reached up and clung to Larry’s lapels. “I was a fool to make the trip.
I should have known when you told me not to come to New York----”
He kissed her. “He’ll feel fine if the Court decides for him. It’s
going to set him up. Today isn’t a bad day to hang around----”
Miserably she shook her head, and her eyes were soft and damp. Larry
figured she wasn’t crying for the wounded she may have left behind her
in China, but for her own private casualty here at home.
* * * * *
During the remainder of the Corporation Counsel’s argument, Larry sat
in the back of the courtroom with Cy O’Malley. Cy’s baby face had lost
its roundness, and his blue eyes were mute, as the City’s small, blond
lawyer, whose irregular features looked as if they had been torn out
of paper, replied to Bemrose’s argument. The lawyer’s response lacked
conviction. The more he argued, the more cumbersome and unnecessary it
seemed to rouse the gray-bearded O’Malley judgment from its fifteen
year slumber. It appeared impractical to indulge the City in its
“second guess,” as Bemrose had called it, and reopen litigation that
long had been considered final. Apparently Arthur felt no threat in his
opponent’s argument. When the other lawyer finished, Arthur waived a
reply, although it was only ten minutes of six, and the Court did not
adjourn until six o’clock. Confident that the Judges had grasped his
point, he shrewdly decided to rest the case. Larry saw Cy’s relief when
it was over and they went up front to help Arthur collect his papers.
“Nice going,” Cy said. “I think you nailed them.”
Arthur greeted them looking rested and content. “Help me out of here,
will you, Larry?” He bent over to pick up his crutches which lay on the
carved stretcher of the table. “I’d like to see Tom Newton before he
gets away.”
Newton was waiting outside with John Elias, the Assistant Corporation
Counsel, and A. Atherton Clark and Ambrose Dane, both of whom were
prominent trial lawyers.
Clark, cold as the black and white tile of the entrance hall, held out
his hand. “Beautiful legal questions. A very satisfying case,” he said,
congratulating Bemrose.
Ambrose Dane, hearty and bearlike, hovered over him. “I kept thinking
of the Old Man. He would have enjoyed that argument. Too bad he
couldn’t have been up there on the bench.”
The Assistant Corporation Counsel knifed his way into the group. “You
did a fine job. I think I’m licked.”
Tom Newton, who fringed the gathering and was waiting for Bemrose, eyed
the young lawyer tolerantly. He came in and put his arm around Arthur’s
shoulder. “You didn’t forget how in the Army. That was--” He circled
his thumb and finger. “But on the nose.”
He motioned to an empty corner across the hall, and Arthur hobbled
after him.
A few minutes later Larry heard Arthur say, “Next week, Tom. Not later
than Wednesday. And thanks.”
A white-haired woman with a familiar smile embraced Arthur. Larry
hadn’t seen Mrs. Bemrose for twenty years, but there was no mistaking
the inclusive smile. He left them alone and when he returned, the other
lawyers had gone.
“I came early and heard the whole thing,” Mrs. Bemrose reported.
Larry responded to her ample, outgoing spirit. “It was a tough case. He
did a fine job.”
“You’ve been good to him. You’ve helped him--” She pressed Larry’s arm
by way of thanks.
“His father would like to see him. He didn’t want to come to Court.”
Her tired eyes lifted to the glass dome of the rotunda. “Come to
supper. You’ll only have to stay a little while.”
Larry wondered whether the day had been too much for Bemrose. The
trip up, the strain of the argument, the hand-shaking and standing
afterward, and now the family.
But Arthur’s voice was crisp and reassuring. “Tom has a swell job for
me in Washington. A war job. He wants me to come down and see him about
it next week.”
So that’s why Newton had hung around. To see whether Arthur could
handle whatever work he had lined up for him.
“How about letting us take _you_ out to dinner?” Larry asked Mrs.
Bemrose. “I haven’t been out with a good-looking girl for years.”
Laughing, she stood aside and let Arthur through the bronze doors. Her
big head swept back proudly.
“I hope they’ll take him in Washington,” she told Larry. “I hope
they’ll find some interesting war work for him.”
Larry noted that she seemed composed when Arthur fumbled for the
rung of his crutches. If she were crying inside, Larry never knew.
Apparently Mrs. Bemrose kept her tears where they didn’t show.
_Chapter 22_
Larry took Bemrose to Washington the next week to hear about the job
that Tom Newton had in mind for him. They entered one of the newest
and most dazzling of the government tombs, rode to the floor of Tom’s
office, and started down the endless corridor. Larry felt as if he were
walking into his own burial place, with the white hall a collapsible
telescope, and the exit of the corridor a side road into the hereafter.
It was a future world requiring neither ascent nor descent but
approached on the same level at which one had lived. Elations and
frustrations rotated unhappily in the tube of white stone, until they
seemed more important than when first they had been laughed or ached
over. Larry thought of how an acorn dropping on an awning sometimes
detonates like a bullet.
The rubber tips of Arthur’s crutches grabbed the stone floor. Obsessed
with memories of his first trip to the Capitol under Judge Haynes’
tutelage, Arthur kept quoting the Old Man. Either Bemrose was aging,
Larry decided, and reached into the past for gifts the present withheld
from him, or the Old Man’s restless spirit demanded a hearing.
“Whenever we walked through the Capitol, he’d never let me stop to read
the inscriptions on the statues. I think he envied them,” Arthur said.
“Do you know the one of Marshall on the west terrace of the Capitol?
I used to feel like taking off my hat when I saw it, but he’d rush me
past. I don’t know why he should have felt that way about Marshall.”
“Competition, maybe.”
“We used to drop into the old Supreme Court. When it was still in the
Capitol,” Arthur added. “I think he hated those staring marble busts of
the Justices. He never had much use for tradition, you know. He said
the past was something we couldn’t help. His theory was that you didn’t
have to like the past. You only had to put up with it.
“Now he’s the past.” Bemrose sighed. “I can never get it through my
thick head. Some mornings when I walk into the office, or when I’m on
a trip to Washington like this, I expect to see him coming at me, his
black robes billowing around that skinny frame of his.”
“As long as his ideas are still good, he’s really not the past,” Larry
said.
“They weren’t always good. That’s the trouble. He was often stinking
anti-social.” The rubber thumped the stone dully as Arthur beat out his
re-evaluation of Haynes. “He smothered his reactionary views in charm,
and people forgot to take offense.”
“What do you mean by ‘anti-social’? Whose society was he against?”
Larry asked, grateful to have a human voice penetrate the mausoleum
quiet of the hall and break the mournful rhythm of this walk.
“He’d take me to Rock Creek Park, and we’d race his game leg up and
down the hills--they have real inclines over there. But it wasn’t the
exercise he wanted. Mostly he’d want to talk.” Arthur bore down on his
crutches as he reconstructed the Judge’s thinking while Larry watched
to make sure that his crutches didn’t skid.
“He’d say that whenever labor got control, it began to fuss and rail
against conditions. The more gadgets the working man bought and the
more bathrooms he had, the more he complained about conditions. The
Judge’s theory was that people had a better time without modern
comforts, that when they lived poorer, worked harder, and didn’t have
the benefits of education, they had more fun than with their high
wages, their ideology, and their unions. He claimed that the soldiers
who were with him at San Juan Hill laughed more and had a better time
living in mud than the well-fed working man at home. He said when you
shortened hours and gave people time and energy to complain, they would
start being miserable, like the French peasants before the revolution.
He called union leaders big business men who had forgotten what most
business men knew--that the way to make a living was to work hard. As
much as he liked the adventure and excitement of a military war, that’s
as much as he hated class war.”
A Senator that Arthur knew stopped to say hello.
“Another labor-baiter,” he said when the Senator had gone.
“You wouldn’t call the Old Man----?”
“He wasn’t intentionally vicious,” Bemrose admitted. “His trouble was
that he believed the best in people. Capital offered no threat to
labor, and labor would smarten up in time and see class war didn’t get
anywhere. No one, according to the Old Man, ever plotted against anyone
else. Naïve, wasn’t it? I suppose he was wrapped in court wool for
too many years. Street fights and brawls were just newspaper stories
to him. He didn’t think they happened. Besides, he always thought more
education would iron out the unreasonableness.”
Larry paced his step to Arthur’s measured gait.
“The Old Man himself, for all his learning, could never control his
temper,” Arthur said. “On Sunday we’d go out to Arlington and read the
names on the graves, and he’d growl at every fourth or fifth name. He
was an eloquent hater. He could hate the dead as hard as he hated the
living.” Arthur paused.
“Harder,” he continued. “I’m glad they let him go to Arlington. He
always wanted to. I think he liked the idea of spending the rest of
time across the bridge from Lincoln. You’ve seen that seated figure of
Lincoln--the memorial by French.”
Larry nodded.
“The Old Man used to stand in front of it for hours, looking into
Lincoln’s wise face. It was one statue he didn’t sneer at-- I think
he felt Lincoln knew something human, something about the way people
operate, that he had never got hold of.”
“How about taking the Old Man some flowers if we finish with Newton
early?” Larry suggested.
“We’ll take him geraniums. He always said they smelled badly and looked
awful, and that’s why he liked them. Honest. No frills about geraniums
and no perfume worth mentioning.”
“You’re sure Newton’s office is down the hall?” Larry asked. “I bet
we’ve passed fifty doors already.”
Arthur indicated some doors about a quarter of a mile further
on. “Five minutes away. When Zantzinger, the architect, submitted
blueprints for this tomb, he should have included roller skates.”
“Did the Old Man ever say what he wanted for you? What he really hoped?
Was it the Supreme Court?” Larry asked.
“It might have been,” Arthur admitted. “He might have had it in mind.
That is, before they moved it east of the Capitol and gave it the
biggest columns and the biggest pediment and entablature of any tomb in
Washington. He hated the biggest of anything. He had misgivings about
the new Court and said they would get the swelled head once they’d
moved over there. I’d see him stand in front of the new building, a
Pigmy alongside those marble slabs, and wither the columns with his
superiority. You could see them shrivel. Then he’d turn around and
threaten me. ‘Wait ’til they send you up here someday!’ That’s how he
put it.”
“Send you up, huh. Like Sing Sing.”
“He probably had naïve ideas of what I had to do in order to be ‘sent
up.’ Write a few brilliant briefs and execute a couple of first-class
jobs in Washington. That’s all there would be to it. I’d be noticed and
they would invite me to sit on the Court.”
“Well, here’s your chance. Newton’s noticed you. What do you think he
has lined up?”
A black cat ran in front of them, and Arthur twisted his left shoulder
to look down the corridor, watching it slide along the floor. “Murder
cases,” he said.
“You said it was a war job, didn’t you?” Larry asked. “I suppose that
would have suited the Old Man down to the ground.”
“Sure. He’d say I was committed to fighting this War, and I ought to go
on with it. Even if they hand me a tough assignment which doesn’t seem
to be hooked up directly with the fighting. He’d say that if I believed
in the War, I ought to work with everything I’ve got no matter where I
come out, and if----”
It was the first time during the funereal walk that Bemrose’s speech
stumbled.
“You’re tired.” Larry steadied his elbow.
“If brains are all I have left, I ought to fight with them,” Arthur
concluded his thought.
Larry had a sudden flash of insight. The march down the long corridor
showed Arthur’s incapacity to make war like other men. It confirmed his
fears about others doing his physical fighting for him. His decision to
consider Newton’s desk job was recognition that he considered himself
through physically. He must feel that the quickness was drained from
him. While he might believe hard in the War, he couldn’t physically
execute his beliefs. The alternative was to accept Tom’s job and fight
at a desk. Larry figured that was the way Bemrose reasoned about it.
“Lucy’s the one I have to worry about,” he continued. “This trouble of
mine is costing real money. She’s never complained about the cost or
the bother, but I haven’t any right to ask her to live on a dollar a
year.”
“After all, she won’t have to, will she?” Larry pointed out.
* * * * *
Arthur braced himself for the final sprint down the hall and swung
along silently. This last wordless stretch seemed longer than the
initial mileage. Larry had a sense of proceeding to a waiting doom
at the end of the cryptlike corridor. Then, as swiftly as the brush
of a cat’s tail, the mood of bleak fate altered. A figure stepped
from Newton’s door into the hall and turned sharply toward them. She
stopped, cried out, and reached to steady Bemrose.
Larry saw the tightly wrapped face and dark searching eyes and knew
that this was the inevitable and recurring pattern in Bemrose’s life--a
long face with high cheekbones and oversized eyes, an economy of
smooth, dark skin distributed over a large-boned frame. This was the
leitmotif relentlessly performed and encored.
“Tom told me he was expecting you.” Janice kept her hand on the sleeve
of his overcoat.
Arthur rejoined the living with his smile and swung around accusingly.
“Did you write Janice?” he asked Larry.
With exaggerated fervor, Larry protested. “Of course not. I thought
this trip was going to be business.”
“Tom won’t give you more than an hour. It’s a madhouse in there.” She
indicated the door. “I’ll pick you up and drive you to the house for
lunch. I have a place in Georgetown, and a new painting by Julio de
Diego someone lent me for the drawing room. You’ll have to see the
painting. Is it all right if I come back at one?” She glanced nervously
at her watch.
Larry offered to check with Newton’s secretary and find out. He
found five secretaries in a reception room large enough for a Legion
convention and promptly located the one who knew about Bemrose’s
appointment.
A resigned and weary line waiting to see the Attorney-General eyed
Larry hostilely as he hurried past the pale blue walls, indirect
lighting, and chromium to the outer hall.
“Newton will see him in five minutes,” Larry touched her cheek. “You
don’t mind if I look at your house another time, do you, Jan? I have
some personal business to take care of.”
She grabbed his hand. “How personal?”
“No, honestly. I’ve been promising a client for a month that I’d see a
man in the O.P.A. about the ceiling price on bone buttons.”
“You’ll drive him back to the hotel in time, won’t you, Jan?” He guided
Arthur to Newton’s door. “We’re planning to catch the five o’clock
home.”
“No one has to drive me to the hotel. I’ll get a cab,” Arthur
protested, but Janice reassured Larry with a nod that she would take
care of him.
* * * * *
They missed the five and the six o’clock back to New York, and Larry,
tired of waiting for Bemrose, changed their parlor car seats to a
drawing room on the sleeper. After a late dinner which consisted mainly
of succulent chincoteagues on the half shell, one of the reasons for
coming to Washington, Larry always figured, they went up to their hotel
room. Larry unpacked his toilet kit in the next room while Bemrose told
him about the interview with Newton.
“It’s cloak and dagger stuff,” he explained. “Work with the F.B.I.
drawing up indictments against Nazi sympathizers in this country. The
F.B.I. has the evidence, and my job would be to make it legal under
section nine, title eighteen, of the federal code.”
“Have you grounds for indicting the bastards?” Larry asked. “They’re
slick operators, particularly that Yorkville jerk--you know the one I
mean. They probably are smart enough to sweep up good and clean when
they finish a job.” Larry threw away a torn tube of shaving cream. The
wartime metal was like tissue paper and had split the second time he
used the tube.
“They’ve tried to stir up insubordination and mutiny in the Army and
Navy,” Arthur said. “Distributed printed matter advising disloyalty and
refusal of duty.”
“What can they get?” Larry asked. “What’s the maximum?”
“Ten years’ imprisonment, or a ten thousand dollar fine, or both.”
Larry whistled. “And Tom thinks the F.B.I. has the goods that will nail
them?”
Arthur nodded. “Tom has to make it stick. That’s not so easy.”
“Every time I hear those birds talk about how Roosevelt asked the Japs
to attack Pearl Harbor--” Larry spit into the wash basin. “The bastards
should be locked up. Remember Jan and that fellow Richter, the art
dealer?”
“You understand it’s graveyard, Tom’s proposition,” Arthur reminded him.
“What kind of money did he talk? You told him a dollar-a-year was
out----”
“He recognizes my medical expenses are heavy, and thinks he can stretch
the job to pay eight or nine thousand. I can manage on that. Not in
style, but we can live. I still have to talk to Lucy and see how she
feels about pulling up stakes in New York.”
“I hope you can get rid of the slimy bastards. That would be an
accomplishment, all right,” Larry said enviously. “If you decide to
come down here and close the office, I may try for a commission.” He
walked in from the bathroom, and threw his toilet kit on the bed. It
bounced on the damask bed cover.
“See how things shape up with me first,” Arthur suggested. “There may
be a job down here for you. Or this thing of Tom’s might only last a
few months. Maybe I’ll even decide to keep the office going.”
Larry frowned and sat down hard on the edge of the bed.
“There I go again, telling you what to do while I go out and cut myself
a slice of war. I guess I’ll never learn,” Arthur apologized. His voice
was high and strained. “You do what you want.”
“It’s okay.” Larry went back to the bathroom for a shoe cloth.
“Next time kick me around the block.”
Larry bent over the tub and wiped his shoes. “What does Jan think about
your moving down?”
“Come again.”
“What does Jan think?” Larry repeated.
There was silence from the other room.
Larry waited for Bemrose to answer, and when he didn’t hear anything,
he went into the bedroom, circled the bed and picked up the phone.
“You’re packed, aren’t you?” Larry asked him. “I’ll find out from the
bell captain what time the train is made up. Let’s get to the station
early and grab some sleep before we pull out.”
_Chapter 23_
The next afternoon in New York Larry bumped into Davis Shore leaving
Arthur’s office. Shore jerked his recognition and moved on.
“Someone tell him a clean story? He looks downhearted,” Larry observed.
“He wanted me to take a case for him. I referred him to Harrison,”
Arthur said.
“That must have felt lovely.”
“I thought it would, but it didn’t,” Arthur went on signing his mail.
“Wasn’t he in once before this week?”
“Yes. He’s been after me to try this new case ever since Albany. He
must have heard about my argument up there.”
“And it didn’t feel good to turn him down?” Larry asked. “If I were
you, I think I would have stuck in the knife and twisted it.”
“You wouldn’t pull a leg off a dead spider. There’s no fun in that,”
Arthur said.
“What kind of cattle boat did his ancestors come over on anyway? He
must have something to cover up, or he wouldn’t be such a snob.”
“He’s a helluva good reason for accepting the job in Washington,”
Arthur agreed. “I wonder if Tom really has anything on that Nazi crowd.
If he has and we can prove----”