Part 16

“But why did he get you down here at eight o’clock?” Larry insisted. “You’re too sick a man----”

“He knows that,” Arthur pointed out. “He’s using my health as an excuse to get outside trial counsel.”

“Who?”

“Jorgennsen.”

Larry sat down thoughtfully. “Jorgennsen will do all right. He’s the only man----”

“I’m washed up.”

“Just because that pompous----?”

“Five years of preparation,” Bemrose said. “I put five years into that case.” He rocked angrily in his chair. “I’ll be damned if I tell Jorgennsen how to try it.”

“Why does he insist on Jorgennsen? You’ve lived with the case. If Jorgennsen were John Marshall, he couldn’t prepare it in six months. I’ll tell you, have someone talk to Shore. Can’t Tom Newton, or Harrison, or----”

“They’ve already retained him,” Bemrose reported. “He says I can’t manage the physical hurdles of the courtroom. He doesn’t see how I can stand on my feet, examine witnesses, manipulate the reference volumes, or turn the pages of the briefs. Oh, Shore hasn’t overlooked a detail,” he said harshly. “What do they expect me to do?” His hand jerked toward an inkwell cover lying on the desk. “Do they expect me to give up trial work because my legs aren’t steady?”

“You _can’t_ give it up.”

“I’d be throwing away three-quarters of my practice. I belong on my feet in court. The Judge drilled me in the idea that a lawyer should take his own cases to court. I might as well stop practicing.”

“You’re not going to stop, and you’re not going to give up trial work,” Larry insisted. “_Let_ him have Jorgennsen. He’ll come running to you on the next case.”

“He won’t have another like this in twenty years.” Bemrose shoved his crutches viciously across the room. “I’ll be damned if I’m the kind of lawyer who sits behind a desk and settles cases.”

“How about that appeal of Cy’s?” Larry asked. “He’ll go broke if the City makes him pay back what his family collected in the condemnation fifteen years ago. Cy hasn’t any reserves----”

“I never took a condemnation case, and I don’t want to start now,” Bemrose protested. “Not if all the O’Malleys in New York starve. It’s one kind of law I don’t want to practice.”

“But the case involves an interesting question of law.”

“What’s the question?” Arthur looked up.

“The City claims that one of the provisions in the original state grant to the O’Malleys was concealed from the court, a covenant saying that the City could recapture the property any time by repaying what the State had charged the O’Malleys for it. Peanuts, of course. The City ignored the covenant and handed Cy’s family healthy money for the land fifteen years ago. Now it wants to get back the difference.”

“Why didn’t the City think of that fifteen years ago when they condemned Cy’s property?” Arthur asked.

“The City says it was handled crookedly at that time. No one mentioned the trick covenant when the case was being tried.”

“And Cy’s supposed to go broke in order to correct the City’s mistake? That’s lovely.” He leaned back in his chair. “How far has the case gone?”

“Affirmed in the Appellate Division, one judge dissenting,” Larry reported.

“So he could take it to Albany?” Arthur swung around toward the window and looked out thoughtfully.

Suddenly Larry thought of the suicide dance on the ledge. “Cy couldn’t, but _you_ could,” he said. “He’s had a lousy deal from the City. You’d be helping out a pal----”

“I suppose the documents go way back.”

“You’d have a good time with the case,” Larry predicted. “You could dig around in the historical material. There are fascinating old maps of the waterways. It’s just the kind of case you like. Take it, Arthur.”

Bemrose pointed to his crutches. “What’s the use? I’d never be able to argue it in Albany. Cy would have to hire appeal counsel.”

“That’s tripe. You’ll argue it yourself if we have to take you up there in a wheelchair.” Larry rubbed his knees in anticipation. “We’ll show that stuffed penguin whether you’re finished.”

“Who’s going to pay to have briefs printed?”

“Cy. It’ll be easier for him to raise money for the briefs than to try and pay the City.”

“I wouldn’t have to charge him a fee,” Bemrose said. “The case must have cost him plenty already.”

Not charging fees again. The old pattern. But if Bemrose won this appeal in Albany, he’d come out all right. It would prove that he was still a good courtroom lawyer, in spite of Davis Shore. The boost to his morale would be tremendous.

“The case has cost him plenty, and if he loses and has to pay the City, he’ll be in hock the rest of his life,” Larry said. “I wouldn’t mind if it happened to some fellows, but Cy--well, you know Cy.”

“Needs a nursery school,” Bemrose agreed. “I never expected to have the dubious privilege of representing him. I’ll bone up on abuse before we start. It’s the only way to get along with Cy. You have to insult him louder than he insults you.”

“He’s scared of you, Arthur. He’ll behave.”

“Cy scared?” Bemrose’s head jerked backward, and he laughed. It was the first time today that he had let go.

“You’ll have a helluva lot of fun working with him. Shall I give him a ring?” Larry moved toward the door.

“Not yet,” Bemrose decided. “Get hold of the briefs and let me study them. I want to find out about this concealed covenant.”

When Larry turned around he saw Miss Thompson at the door looking like a shock case.

She covered her face. “Did you see him, Mr. Bemrose?”

Larry shrugged at Bemrose and maneuvered Miss Thompson down the hall. “Come on, the Boss wants us to locate some papers for him,” he explained.

It wasn’t the day for Bemrose to hear about the fellow who had walked off the ledge.

_Chapter 20_

The headwaiter indicated a table at the far side of the room, across the floor from the orchestra, and Larry and Bess felt their way in the purplish light around the small, slick floor. The orchestra was playing _June Night_. Larry had made love to his first girl by it, and could hear it now flowing singsongy and nasal through her thinly etched nostrils.

They blinked their way through the murky room where cigarette smoke banked like fog, and Arthur half rose when he saw them, tabling his hands for support, while Bess rushed over to steady the fragile cane chair under him.

“Hello.” Arthur’s eyes challenged Bessie, and he motioned to the empty seats at the table.

A brocade evening bag lay on the table in front of an empty place. It must belong to Lucy.

Larry slid into the far chair and let Bess and Bemrose get comfortable. They seldom saw each other, and needed time to become acquainted. Larry knew that it wouldn’t take long. Bess would relate some irrelevant and trivial incident, and soon Bemrose would be swept along with her sure narrative skill.

Among the dancers Larry located Lucy’s gray-blonde head brushing the dark sleekness of Philip Kenyon’s. He was the Green network salesman whom Larry remembered from the first night at the Daughertys’ when he had called on Lucy about the lawsuit. Her arm relaxed on his collar, and Larry saw that they danced easily and well, her high, flat breasts conforming to his dark blue concavity. The music trickled to a close, and Kenyon must have said something which flushed her amber skin. As the band started, nostalgically sobbing _As Time Goes By_, she returned, smiling, to his arms.

Bemrose motioned Larry to move closer. “They make a nice couple. They used to go dancing before we were married,” he said.

“Are you trying to fix her up?”

“Sometimes I feel as if she were my daughter,” Bemrose confessed. “She must have missed going dancing after she married me. She was a little young to settle down. I realize it now.”

Lucy fluttered a hand at him from the floor, and he smiled back at her.

“You’re not in mothballs yet. For Chris’ sake----”

“I’m glad Kenyon is around. He’s a nice fellow to take her dancing. Especially now that I can’t.” Bemrose rearranged his legs.

“What are you going to do, hand her all the fun while you play papa?” Larry laughed. “Whose idea is this anyway? Lucy’s?”

But Bessie motioned him to be quiet. Lucy and Kenyon, knit in quiet conversation, were on their way to the table.

Lucy drew up a chair close to Arthur, freshened his highball with some soda, picked up his napkin from the floor, and solicitously asked whether he were tired. Her cool beauty reassured Larry. She never looked lovelier than in the sheer black dress she was wearing. It furnished solemn contrast to her light eyes and gave the gray-blonde hair a dreamlike quality.

Kenyon, chatting happily with Bessie, took on her tone as he pitched his amiability to hers. He was an adaptable man who reflected the personality of others and unconsciously imitated their speech and gestures. When a principal figure walked off the scene, Kenyon became neutral as a photographer’s background.

Lucy, noting Arthur’s hand shake on his highball glass, asked the waiter to give him a straw. While she was ordering drinks for the rest of them, Larry saw the carefully tailored sleeve of a man at the next table slip around the bosom of the girl who was with him. He reached greedily for her left breast, and when she tore his hand away, looked pained and helpless.

“Why do you always have to drink too much?” she asked peevishly.

“Don’t sound like your mother,” he complained. “Unpleasant bitch!”

His daughter shoved her napkin toward him as if pushing away something loathsome. She was kodachrome pretty, with red hair.

He grabbed her arm, clearing a set of heavy silver bracelets. “You’re grown up now. You might as well know that men--” He clawed her breast, clutching the gold cloth of her dress. “They’ll want to sleep with you, Baby.”

Frantically she called to the waiter. “He’ll pay the check. I have to catch a train back to school.” She took time to daub her nose while he fumbled in a confusion of bills and silver.

Larry used the whiskey in front of him to purify his palate. He saw Arthur’s glance follow Lucy’s dark dress as it threaded the tables. She was going out to phone Marge Daugherty, who had been sick again. Bessie left to dance with Phil Kenyon, and Bemrose and Larry were alone.

He stirred uneasily and addressed Bemrose, “I don’t know whether this is the time to bring it up----”

Arthur encouraged him to go on.

“You and Lucy seem to be making a go of it, and I don’t want to do anything to upset it,” Larry continued.

Silently Arthur waited for him to finish, refusing to help. His hand shook as he reached for an ash tray.

“I don’t want to interfere, you understand, not if things are going better with you and Lucy----”

Arthur shrugged. “That depends on what you mean by better.”

“I can’t stall Janice any longer,” Larry complained. “She’s been after me for weeks. She phones, she wires, she writes--” Larry’s palms felt warm. “I don’t want her to bother you, fellow, not if you’re all set with Lucy.”

“We go to bed together. In spite of these.” He kicked his crutches. “I’m not precisely an acrobat, but-- So far she hasn’t complained.”

Bemrose’s shoulder twitched, and his lip began to jerk. He covered his face. After three or four minutes he said bitterly, “What does Janice want of me?”

“Forget it, Arthur. I’ll tell her you’re in no condition----”

“What good does she think I would do her? I suppose she’d like to wheel me around Central Park on Sunday mornings.”

“She’d like to come up and see you some weekend, that’s all. She doesn’t expect you to take her to night clubs.”

“What did you write her?” Arthur asked sharply. “Did you tell her the truth, that Lucy bathes and dresses me every morning and undresses me at night, that she waits on me hand and foot?”

“I spared her the part about Lucy undressing you. No use torturing the girl. No, I wrote her you had changed.”

“I’ll say so. She ought to see me try to walk from here to the door. She’d get a shock all right.”

“I didn’t mean your sickness. I meant really changed inside, the way she’d like. No devil driving you. Not pushing to be Number One. Easy and nice. I figured the way you are now-- Well, she ought to know about it.”

Arthur shook his head. “What kind of deal would it be for her? Figure it out for yourself. She’s waited a long time. She deserves a decent break from some guy. I had something good to offer her once, but I was too dumb and self-absorbed to see it. What can I give her now except a brokendown nervous system?” He felt uncertainly for his coat pocket, and Larry knew the speech had been hard for him.

“I figured Janice hasn’t found the going easy lately, and it might cheer her up to come to New York.”

“Anything wrong?”

“Yes, her brother’s been sick.”

“I’m sorry. She’s crazy about her brother.”

“Her letters sound as if she’s broken up. I thought if she came up some weekend and got her mind on something else----”

“Not just now, Larry. Neither of us could take it. Wait a little while. What I’ve got with Lucy is working pretty well right now. She’s given up the idea of any high romance with me, and as long as I treat her considerately, she’s willing to put up with my needs. That’s quite a good deal. I’m not easy to live with these days.”

“Is it enough? Do you want to settle for it?” Larry asked.

“I know it’s not the big thing, but when you have the big thing at home, you’re exposed. I’ve been ducking that kind of exposure most of my life. I don’t want to go around with my thalamus aching. I’d rather save the emotional turmoil for trial work. I’d rather pour it out in a courtroom where it has more of a chance of repaying me.”

Lucy was back, and Larry rose to pull out her chair. “I’ll write Washington on that matter,” he promised Arthur. “They’ll be disappointed not to see you over the weekend, but I’ll try to present your views.”

“Are you two talking business?” Lucy asked absentmindedly.

Phil Kenyon was back, leaning over her. “Save the next dance for me, Sug.”

The band played a rhumba, and they left the table, while Arthur devoted himself to Bessie with diplomatic smoothness. He made Bess feel as if his entire friendship with Larry depended on her, and from now on it was going to be the three of them, not the two of them any longer. Under Bemrose’s suave handling, her old antagonisms melted and her dark lips played delightedly over the flawless teeth. The curls on her forehead bobbed in quick, excited shakes as she agreed with Arthur about Larry quitting Tammany and hooking up with the A.L.P. Things were fine and easy between Bess and Arthur. She sipped at his charm, lingering over its bouquet, and rewarded him with an animation she usually kept from strangers.

Together they eulogized Elizabeth Brett and her good, female earthiness. Even when he and Liz fought the hardest, he enjoyed her, Bemrose maintained. He liked women with conviction and taste. His manner left no doubt that he bracketed Bessie with this chosen group.

Flushed with the subtle flattery Bemrose had lavished on her, Bess asked Larry to dance, although she knew he didn’t care much about it. On the floor she complimented the one-step he had learned twenty years ago, and pressed her soft warmth against him, circling his neck. Spelled by Bemrose she seemed to mesmerize herself into thinking of Larry as a romantic figure.

“They’re happy.” She sighed. “I think he’s charming to her. And she’s nice. Before he asks for anything, she hands it to him. It’s wonderful how she understands.”

A pocket of traffic pinned them to their spot on the floor, and Larry overheard a man say, “Just like old times, isn’t it, Sug? I used to get mighty lonesome.”

The voice continued, “I always liked you best in black, Sug.”

Larry wondered about Lucy. He wondered how long she’d be content to cushion Arthur’s disability, nursing him with every gentle comfort she had, sacrificing her own desires to make him feel more secure. It was hard to penetrate Lucy’s fortress of reserve. Larry wasn’t at all sure how strong her desires were. Kenyon’s might be a different matter, but whether or not Lucy complied with them----

“I think it’s sweet the way he invites a friend along to dance with her,” Bessie said. “I think it’s nice that he wants her to have a good time. Some men would be sensitive--” She nudged him. “Look at that hair-do, Larry. The pink feathers!”

But Larry was indifferent to the fashion this season of killing and stuffing love birds for decorative use in the hair. He was conscious of Bemrose alone at the edge of the dance floor, his shoulder twitching and his lip moving in sudden jerks. At this moment Arthur strained to find Lucy among the dancers as he twisted and knotted the napkin she had picked up from the floor for him during the last intermission. Every nerve worked overtime while he waited, tensely, for her to come back and sit next to him.

Larry wondered how much guts it had taken for Bemrose to turn down the chance of seeing Janice. He was glad to have given him the chance. No matter how much conflict the decision cost, it must have been flattering to feel wanted, even for a little while, strongly and passionately desired by a woman. It must be good to know that Janice was still around waiting for word from him.

“Fun to go dancing, isn’t it, Larry?” Bess’s plump fingers wooed the back of his neck. “I’m glad you’re my husband, Larry.”

He felt the roll of flesh above her waist as he drew her closely toward him. “A little too much of you here maybe,” he said, pinching her, “but as wives go, not bad. Not at all bad.”

_Chapter 21_

It was December 7, the day that Cy O’Malley’s case was to be argued in the Court of Appeals. Larry walked from his hotel, which was located across from the Capitol, to the Court of Appeals Hall on Eagle Street. Glancing across at the Capitol building, he wondered how many times Bemrose, as a kid, must have looked up those steep stone steps and thought of walking in someday to see the Governor or the Legislature on official business. Larry detoured into the park and stopped before a stern bronze statue of Philip Schuyler. The formidable likeness might have frightened a small boy who was standing in the snow all day Saturdays to drum up shoeshines.

The Courthouse itself was a hundred years old, according to the cornerstone dated 1842, and was fronted by six weathered Greek columns.

Larry remembered the first time he came up to hear an argument when he was just out of law school and the Court had seemed remote and sacred. He always meant to have a look around the historic building. This morning ought to be a good time. He would have to wait anyway until the clerk asked the Chief Judge if Arthur might deliver his argument seated.

A girl at the information desk inside the bronze entrance doors told Larry the clerk wouldn’t be available for fifteen or twenty minutes. Larry walked into the rotunda with its gold Star of David in the floor, and looked up past overhanging balconies to the white frosted dome. Shut into the circular space by eight massive columns, he had a moment’s claustrophobia. The sensation eased as he emerged into the high arched ceilings of the entrance hall. Near the telephone booth, a painting of David Dudley Field, his hand thrust into a Prince Albert coat, was flanked by Florentine chairs embossed with the New York State shield.

Larry wandered into the library and glanced at a copy of the _Law Journal_ on a table neatly blottered in green. He took down a volume of _Hopkins Chancery Reports_ in the tan binding with red title panel, and leafed through it aimlessly.

From a corner of the room glared a marble bust of Ambrose Spencer, former Mayor of Albany. Larry wondered if Spencer were responsible for cobblestoning the steep inclines of Albany, a city that had ice on the streets five months a year. The ground now was lightly covered with snow, and green patches of grass showed restfully through the white cover. Larry had realized on the trip up, riding along the Hudson, how building-weary his eyes must have become the past months, and how much he needed this chance away from New York to look at water, sky and earth.

He stepped across to the lawyers’ waiting-room with its oversized leather chairs and picked up a copy of the daily calendar. The O’Malley case was second on the list. That ought to give Bemrose plenty of chance to finish his argument this afternoon. A timetable lay beside the calendar. If they were out by six o’clock, and Arthur decided not to stay over with his family, they could have dinner, catch an evening train, and be back in New York tonight.

Larry walked through the hall to Room 119, and reverently opened the door. He seldom walked into the courtroom without feeling as if he were blaspheming. Oil portraits of former judges circled the room in two rows, the full-length figures above and head-and-shoulder portraits below, framed by carved golden oak panels.

Larry remembered sitting as a spectator behind a rail in the back of the high-ceilinged room, intimidated by the giant fireplace of yellow marble, sunk in the left wall, with its giant claw-footed andirons of bronze. Intricate baskets of carved golden oak above the fireplace symbolized another generation’s concept of rich decoration. The sheer, stupendous hand labor involved in carving every oak wall panel, fashioning a rosette in the arm of every oak chair, decorating the legs and stretchers of the seven counsel tables, whittling gargoyles and cathedral doors of golden oak into each panel of the semi-circular bench at which the judges sat, and hewing from raw wood the elaborate fifteen foot cabinet of the grandfather’s clock which told the day of the week and month as well as the time, this human effort of fashioning, designing, perfecting, molding, and veneering the walls, ceilings, and furnishings of a space fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long overwhelmed Larry. In the chill December light that speared through three towering windows on the right, the artifice of the woodcarvers whose strong fingers must have grown knotted and stained in this work seemed an obsolete craft. It had little affinity with the contemporary feeling about wood, the desire to bring out and emphasize the simple, natural beauty of the grain. This older art treated wood like filigree, working it into forms that might more delicately have been executed in platinum, and hiding its character under shiny layers of varnish. A modern designer like Elizabeth Brett would call it unfunctional, Larry knew. As if to prove the truth of this modern view, he saw that the fireplace had never been used, the clock had stopped, and the weighty bronze crowns, suspended by chains from the ceiling, obstructed the light from the electric globes they decorated.

Observing the same lack of forthrightness in some of the portraits, Larry studied a full figure of Judge Haynes. The artist had made him pink-and-white pretty with an unlined face. Larry found in it little resemblance to the austerely lived-in countenance he remembered. The stocks, the whiskers, and the colored flowing robes of some of the older judges mellowed their portraits, as did the tarnished nameplates below, but the empty emotion of the more recent paintings showed as raw as their color in the winter morning light.

There was a commercial calendar next to the silent clock, a chromium-trimmed lamp on the desk of the case clerk, and a functional water cooler near the window, showing that the room couldn’t get along without the modern. Ample radiator boxes at the windows, working wall thermometers and metal ventilators also indicated that no expense had been spared to circulate fresh air among members of the Court.