Chapter 9
Bemrose’s secretary was on her way to the washroom when Larry stopped her in the corridor. “Keeping you busy?” he asked.
Even for a woman who didn’t use makeup, she looked drawn and abnormally white. The fine lines under her eyes seemed to have reproduced by dividing, and heavy purple lined her lower lid. “I’m so glad you’re going in to see him, Mr. Frank,” she said. “He’s not himself lately.”
“You look done in yourself.”
“That’s what he says.” She nodded toward the office door. “He just gave me money to buy a new hat. He says I need it to pick me up.” She shook her head miserably. “It won’t keep me from worrying about him. I tell you, he’s not himself, Mr. Frank.”
Larry flipped his hat against her plain flannel skirt. “Buy yourself that bonnet and cheer up.”
“I didn’t want to take the money, Mr. Frank. I don’t need a hat.”
“Take it anyway,” Larry advised. “To make him feel better.”
Plaintively she said, “But, Mr. Frank, I haven’t worn a hat in three years.”
Larry had been avoiding Bemrose, not wanting to come to grips with him about the office-manager deal, but he couldn’t put off seeing him forever. He opened the reception room door tentatively. It was after five, and no one seemed to be around; so he went on through to Arthur’s room.
“Hello.” Arthur blinked up from some papers. “Thanks for coming over. I’m just finishing up.”
“Take your time.” Larry walked to the window. Three camouflaged cargo ships, about ten thousand tons each, steamed up the River. They were probably Lend-Lease. We must be sending a whale of a lot of stuff overseas. The poor devils over there certainly needed it—this past month the Heinies had stepped things up. If the newspapers were telling it straight, half of London slept underground, taking it unmelodramatically on the spine.
The ships seemed to be moving right along. They had passed Forty Wall and were headed for the Empire State building, doing a good seven or eight knots.
The brief Bemrose was reading crinkled as he turned the pages. Otherwise the room was quiet as Sunday at Salem Fields cemetery. Larry felt clammy cold, although it was exceptionally mild for after Labor Day. The sun was setting in geometric orange strips, and black smoke from the Jersey factories turned the sky into a modern, mechanized painting. The quiet was ominous. Larry realized the phone must be shut off and wondered why Bemrose hadn’t asked an operator to wait. He kept thinking about the job Arthur had offered him and wondered if pressure would be used on him to accept it. Larry examined his blue suit for lint, locating a few specks on the cuff. He wished Bemrose would say something and break the silence.
“With you in a second.” Bemrose made a margin note on the long sheet and took off his glasses. He walked over and stroked Larry’s back affectionately. “How are you doing, boy?
“I have to clean up the work on hand,” he apologized. “I don’t want to leave the clients high and dry.”
“Going somewhere?” Larry asked.
“To war.”
Bemrose’s left shoulder twitched, a new form of the lip tic. Larry watched the moving tweed of Arthur’s coat, so preoccupied with the jumping muscle that he didn’t realize what Bemrose had said.
But the sense of it finally came through to him. “So you’re saving me the trouble of turning down that job you offered me, huh?”
“That’s right! I won’t be needing you now.” Bemrose grinned.
Along with a sense of relief, Larry felt somewhat let down. He had been fighting round after round with himself and came out winner. Now Bemrose made the victory unimportant. While he had chewed over the offer of the summer, Arthur was three jumps ahead of him. Ahead of him by months. Maybe years. Larry admired the hell out of Bemrose’s sixth sense of what was going to be important, his way of smelling things out ahead and giving them priority. As far back as Larry could remember, Bemrose had done priority thinking, long before the word, priority, had come into general use. In anyone else he would call it vacillation perhaps, but in Bemrose it was something else. Flexibility, foresight.
“Did the Army finally take you?” Larry asked.
“Nobody will promise me anything. I don’t know what they need to get going. The facts were in when the Nazis marched into Poland. If a business man sat around waiting for facts and more facts—” Bemrose threw up his hands. “The facts are in, and they sit around, tied hand and foot. 1941, the year of the great sitting paralysis—that’s how they’re going to write about it someday.” He turned on Larry angrily. “Well, let the rest sit around paralyzed. Let the rest of them enjoy warming their fannies. I’m going to get in. The only question is how.”
“Have you put out any feelers?” Larry asked.
Bemrose nodded absentmindedly. “Listen to this.” He shuffled in his middle desk drawer and pulled out a folded notepaper. “Judge Haynes wrote it in 1918,” he said. “We were one helluva time getting into that war, too, and this was an answer to a letter he received from Didier saying the French liked Wilson’s new policy.” Bemrose squinted at the faded writing, tracing the lines until his finger reached the middle of the yellowed paper. “‘Every night I thank God that we are in it with you. I pray we have not come in too late. We must prepare for setbacks because we waited long. I sorrow to think of the days, the months, and the years we allowed to slip by.’”
He read the words solemnly. His deep, full tone crowded the spacious room.
“It could have been written today,” Larry admitted.
“Whenever I have a question, that’s what I do—look back to the Old Man. Nine times out of ten he had already answered it.”
It was curious, his saying that, when Larry had just been thinking about Bemrose looking forward, not backward. He supposed ideas had to come from something, go through a process of change to fit the times, take on the color of a fresh personality, and come out pointing toward something different. Bemrose’s came from Judge Haynes but pointed toward a philosophy of his own. He had a sense of history along with a view of the future.
“I wonder how he’d think I should get in,” Bemrose said wistfully, slipping the Judge’s letter into a corner of his blotter pad.
“What about asking your friend, Tom Newton?” Larry inquired.
“I haven’t seen any of that Washington crowd for months.” Bemrose frowned. “I’ve written Tom twice to get in touch with me when he’s in New York. We wanted to have him up to the house. I can’t figure out why I haven’t heard from him.”
The phone rang, and Bemrose grabbed the receiver as if it were a lifeline. “Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “We’ll make it another time.” His voice sounded tired.
“Professor Storey,” he explained. “They were coming to dinner Friday night, but he’s going out of town.”
Larry watched his shoulder twitch. It was too bad, Bemrose and Lucy in the Brett-decorated house not quite able to organize a dinner party. Larry remembered what Steve Holmes said about Bemrose not making the client-friends happy. Maybe Liz Brett’s stories had made the rounds, and the others were uneasy. A man taking it out on his wife, his wife of three months, was no fun to be around.
“When I get into the War, we’ll close the house,” Bemrose said.
“But you just finished remodeling.”
“Hell, if they came to dinner, she would be scared. She’s never been around anyone much except that Aunt and Uncle.”
Larry pulled a shabby piece of yellow copy paper out of his side coat pocket, and shoved it toward Bemrose. The note was from Janice.
While Arthur read, the shoulder quieted down. The large ears stood out when he reached the last paragraph where Janice had casually sent him regards. It was as though he were straining to catch the tone of her voice.
“You could cable her,” Larry suggested. “She knows people in London. There may be something over there with Lend-Lease——”
“I’d rather try for the Army,” Bemrose said. “The Army will be in it longer.” He handed back the letter. “Good to hear from her.”
His face was lonesome between the oversized ears, and his ample frame looked lost in the outsized tweed coat. The sound of him was humble, too. Larry had never seen a man take to marriage harder. He wanted to say, “Look, it’s a business deal. If it’s grinding you up, why not get out of it? Don’t tear yourself to pieces.” But he kept still.
“I’d like you to hear a part of this brief.” Bemrose pulled some papers from under a jade paperweight. “I won’t try to read the whole thing to you, just parts of it. Lucy’s picking me up in twenty minutes.”
Arthur had told him about the case once, and Larry knew that it involved an appeal from an order of the N. Y. Supreme Court, Special Term. The order granted Bemrose’s client, a Times Square hotel, permission to join an insurance company as party defendant in the suit brought by a guest who had lost valuable papers which were stored in the hotel vault. The insurance company claimed that the jury would be prejudiced in the plaintiff’s favor if it knew the hotel were insured. Juries notoriously brought in thumping verdicts against insurance companies. The companies were fighting the court order desperately, Bemrose explained. If a precedent of impleading them as third parties were established, it might result in huge future losses.
Larry could see the point. There was a settled rule in negligence cases that insurance companies could not be brought into court. It practically amounted to an invitation for heavy damages. The companies in this case had ganged up against Arthur’s client, and he was sweating over his reply brief. He had struggled with the case since spring and won his motion in Special Term on a section of the Civil Practice Act which he unearthed, a section no one else had used for years. While Larry didn’t grasp all the subtleties of Arthur’s argument, there was really no need to. In his practice, he’d never come up against a pack of insurance company lawyers. Anyway, he understood enough to know that Bemrose had turned in a job.
Bemrose paced around Larry’s chair. “Now the so-and-sos have some unofficially reported English cases. They’re going to claim that if the Judge at Special Term had seen these cases, he’d never have granted the motion. Take a look.” He picked up the appellant’s brief from his desk and handed it to Larry. “The English citations start on page ten.”
Larry concentrated on the text, and saw the cases were fairly damaging. “I wouldn’t worry. The Appellate Division won’t reverse it,” he said reassuringly.
“You can never tell with that court. That last English case worries me. It says the real issue should be decided on the merits without supervening and prejudicial circumstances being interposed. The Judge couldn’t say it any plainer. It’s right there.” He pointed to the brief from across the room. “A third party procedure which brings the insurance company before the Court is objectionable.”
Larry turned back to page ten and saw that Bemrose was quoting verbatim. In a few minutes he’d be tossing volume, section, and page numbers at him, not only of this case but all the others. Larry had heard of people who memorized railroad timetables. Arthur probably could if he ever had to. If it meant winning a case. His mind was superspeed film which recorded case references infallibly. The boys at law school used to say, “Don’t bother to look it up. Ask Arthur.”
“When the Army finds out about your fantastic memory, you won’t have to worry whether the Idlewild Hotel Corporation impleads an insurance company,” Larry said. “They’ll stick you in a uniform before you can go out and buy mothballs for your other clothes.”
“The insurance company walked out of the case,” Bemrose complained. “We gave them plenty of chance to defend the action, and they wouldn’t touch it. Said they weren’t liable. Now what do they do?” He motioned helplessly. “Raise a howl because we have this order to implead them. Figure it out, Larry. If we have to pay the judgment, then turn around and sue the insurance company before we can collect a red cent——”
Larry glanced at the door.
It was Lucy. Bemrose motioned her to a chair without getting up to greet her. She smiled at Larry and sat down rather stiffly. Larry thought she looked tired, but he couldn’t tell whether it was fatigue, or the weary gray hat and mannish wool overcoat. Some women looked trim in man-tailored clothes, but not Lucy. They didn’t go with her particular beauty which needed fluffs and bows. Arthur may have insisted on the outfit, the way he handed her stripes for the bedroom, Larry guessed. Whatever had done it, she looked years older than Bemrose’s client of a few months ago.
Larry smiled at her. “Arthur tells me you’ve done a nice job of fixing over your place.”
She looked quizzically at Bemrose, her head tilted slightly. “We want you to——”
Larry waved away her apology. He turned toward Arthur. “I’ll go on down with you.”
But Bemrose picked up his brief, pretending not to hear. “Tell me what you think of this as a clincher under Point One. It’s from Traylos versus Commercial Union of America, page three hundred fifty-nine.” He read distinctly, giving each syllable its full measure. “‘The purpose of this provision of the Civil Practice Act was to avoid circuity or multiplicity of actions—’ That’s exactly our situation. Just what section one hundred ninety-three is supposed to cover. For the life of me I don’t see how they can claim—” His voice droned on.
Lucy shifted uneasily in her chair.
“Where’s the fire?” Bemrose turned toward her sharply.
“Maybe I’d better phone Marge and tell her we’ll be late.” She went to the door. “I can dial the number out here,” she said.
“Sit down.” Bemrose swung sharply toward Larry.
The gray eyes clouded, but she sat down. She wet a finger and rubbed a scratch in the mounting of her black calf handbag.
“What do you make of this nonsense?” Bemrose slapped a page of the brief. “They maintain that the jury will misconstrue the issue. Instead of concentrating on the plaintiff’s claim, the jury will try to decide whether we’re liable or the Company. You’d think juries never had to decide more than one issue. Why in the simplest actions——”
Larry half listened, while he glanced at Lucy. The stiff thread of tension held her erect. Larry felt his own neck warming with embarrassment for Bemrose.
“Have you told Lucy about the case?” he asked. “It’s a question of whether this insurance company that wrote the policies for Arthur’s client can——”
“Is it the case about the hotel?” She let her eyes thank Larry.
“Yes, it’s about the hotel,” Bemrose answered. “It’s the matter that I’ve been working on nights.”
“The decision will raise hell with insurance companies from now on if the Judge’s order sticks in this case,” Larry explained to her. “They’ll be in for a flock of nasty judgments. He’s really creating new law, your old man.” Larry nodded toward Bemrose.
“Arthur, you didn’t tell me that.” Her voice climbed happily, ready to be proud of him.
“Don’t pay any attention to what Larry says,” Bemrose broke in.
“You’ll have more fun paying attention to what I say than what he says. Let me buy you both a drink,” Larry offered. “This stuff is way over our heads, isn’t it, Lucy?” He walked over and boosted her elbow.
“I have to phone Marge. Arthur promised we would get there early. She’s planning dinner for six-thirty.”
“What are they running, a radio station?” Bemrose asked. “We don’t always have to show up on time. I’ve told you we don’t. People ought to eat when they’re hungry——”
“It will only take a minute to give her a ring,” Lucy said, stretching her arm across his desk.
He pulled the instrument toward him, out of her reach. “We’ll go with Larry and have a drink.”
They found seats down the street at a bar. Bemrose ordered a Martini, rocking in an unsteady chair manufactured to look roughhewn. The place with its stone floor, dim lights, and fake log cabin furniture had the dreariness of an unaired cellar. It must have been the gloom that fortified Bemrose, his troubles crawling into this smelly hole, its dinginess hiding them. He had three Martinis while Larry finished two and Lucy sipped a lukewarm Coca-Cola. The gin made him noisy. Three lawyers Larry recognized from the County Lawyers’ smiled from the next table, and while Bemrose loudly rehashed the details of the appeals’ brief, Larry saw them stop talking. One of them might work for the insurance company— Larry brushed Arthur’s foot, and he subsided.
He threw back his head and aimed the Martini olive down his throat. “Do you think I should write London?” Arthur asked. “I was going down to Bolling Field tomorrow, but if you think I’d do better writing that party——” When he gets loud, nasal, and starts drinking, he’s thinking of Janice. When he’s evil to Lucy, he’s taking it out on her because of Jan. When he shouts down Little Shots, he’s trying to build up his ego in order to square accounts with Janice. He wants her to know what she gave up and regret it, Larry decided.
Maybe he shouldn’t have shown Arthur the letter from Jan. But it was hard to know the best thing to do. Bemrose had read it and handed it back without any special reaction. He seemed calm enough then. It took three Martinis and Lucy——
She shoved aside her half-filled glass and sneaked a look at her lap where a lavish new diamond watch, undoubtedly a present from Bemrose, shone on her wrist. It was all right for him to give it to her, but apparently not all right for her to look at it.
“I’ll have to run along.” Larry waved for the check. “I promised the boys to stop in at the clubhouse on my way uptown, and Bess expects me home tonight for dinner.”
He patted the top of Lucy’s hand. “Bess is like your Aunt,” he explained. “She likes to sit down and eat right on time.”