Diary of a Yuppie (4 page)

The Jock Nortons, Alice's parents, lived down the road from us in the village of Keswick in Westchester County. Alice and I were classmates in high school and later at Columbia, where we became engaged in our senior year. We were "childhood sweethearts," which Jock Norton always maintained was the American nightmare, only half laughing when he said it. He was a free-lance writer who always believed—according to Alice, for he was too much of a gentleman to say it—that, had he not saddled himself with a wife and child and an expensive house in the suburbs, he might have been a first-class novelist. What he never realized was that his genius was precisely for the kinds of pieces that he did write: brilliant short stories, witty satirical poetry, devastating movie reviews, which brought him a modest but regular income. He was better off, I am sure, lamenting a career as a major writer of fiction than facing its failure. Isabel, his wife, was saved from the boredom of suburbia by her constant anxiety as to whether her husband's regular drinking and irregular adulteries would get out of control. They never did. Jock Norton always knew what he was doing. He was a bit of a ham who was ashamed but not ashamed enough of being one. He even had the decency to be a bit ashamed of his success in playing the role of adored father to a too genuinely adoring daughter.

Fatuity, on the other hand, was the keynote of my father's life. Jason Service was and still is, at seventy, an associate in the great Wall Street firm of Burr & Doyle. When he started practicing law in the late 1930s that firm had perhaps fifty lawyers; now it has three hundred. Dad's tall, ambling figure, his high, shiny dome, big nose and bleary gray eyes are almost a trademark of the organization. Everyone knows him; everyone respects him; everyone pities him. Why did he not move on when he failed to make partner thirty or more years ago? Because he had a specialty in patents and a safe little niche, and he always claimed that he was not interested in the "rat race for partnership," that there was adequate dignity and satisfaction in a job well done. He loves, or purports to love, his little nook in the law and insists that it is a relief not to be bothered with administrative problems or what he likes jocularly to call "ambulance chasing," by which term he simply means acquisition of the roster of clients necessary to support any law practice. He has always made a decent salary, and our small Queen Anne house and acre of land in Keswick are situated on a pleasant rural road. He could afford to send me away to Haverstock Academy for my last year of high school, so I was able to enter Columbia with some air of being a "preppie." And poor Mother, spare, thin, angular, apprehensive, has always been so fiercely defensive of him that I believe she has almost dreaded that my own incipient success might tear the blinders from his eyes as to what his own career has not been. She needn't worry. Deep down he knows. People always know.

My reaction to Father's position in Burr & Doyle was one of violent humiliation, all the worse in that I recognized that the truly shameful thing was my feeling so. Father and Mother were very well thought of in Keswick; their friends and neighbors would have been shocked by my attitude. But my trouble had begun at the age of twelve when I had the bad luck to see my father through the eyes of the snotty son of a senior partner. Mr. Doyle and Father were exact contemporaries and had started in the then firm of Burr & Hutchinson right after law school, even sharing an office. The rise of one to senior partnership while the other remained a salaried associate naturally put a strain on the friendship, but Mr. Doyle was not a man to let it too glaringly show, and he always affected a rather demonstrative heartiness towards Father when they met. Once, when we were asked to a firm outing at Mr. Doyle's estate in Roslyn, Long Island, his son Tom was delegated to take the lawyers' children on a ramble in the woods. Walking in the lead with me he asked me my name. "Oh, yes," he commented when he heard it, "you're 'Old Jake's' son. My dad says yours is one of his top clerks. 'They don't make 'em like Old Jake anymore,' he always says. 'They broke the mold after they made him.'"

Oh, the compliments of children! That one broke my life in two. I thought of Father from then on as a kind of Uncle Tom, and I should not have been surprised to hear that the usually benevolent Mr. Doyle, chancing to find his faithful servitor in some breach of duty, had brought the lash down on his stooped shoulders. To my parents' dismay I refused ever again to go to a firm outing, becoming almost hysterical when pressed. And when I graduated from law school I hurt my father deeply by declining even to be interviewed for a job in Burr & Doyle, although Mr. Doyle, impressed by my grades and
Law Review
editorship, had been genuinely anxious to offer me one. But I knew that David Burr, Jr., had just been taken in as a partner, and I would rather have died than give people the chance to quip: "Burr & Doyle is the only firm in town with a father and son among the partners and a father and son among the clerks!"

Now who would have said a thing like that? Very likely nobody. But the fact that I knew that my soul was the only one on fire did not make the suffering less acute. Indeed, the only thing that would have made it more acute would have been precisely if others
did
suspect it. Alice, for example. She might have left me had she known that I was ashamed of my father, whom she adored. But then Alice's mind is as different from mine as day from night. She may hardly realize that Dad is
not
a partner!

A
TLANTIC
R
YLANDS
has lost its bid to take over Shaughnessy Products, and even though it has made millions out of its defeat because of the boosting of Shaughnessy shares it had to acquire, the feeling among its officers is bitter. It is an instance of money not being everything; victory can be more coveted than profit. One vice president went so far as to imply to me that Blakelock's friendship for Albert Lamb had signally reduced his aggressiveness. What would this officer have said had he known of the unused opportunity of Lamb's brother!

"Frankly, Bob," he told me, "there were some of us—and I don't mind including the chairman of our board—who wish you'd been in charge."

"Oh, come now. Branders Blakelock is one of the undisputed leaders of the New York bar. He's taught me everything I know, and I'm still learning."

It was loyal of me to say this, but loyalty is a quality that is highly regarded in corporate circles. A young man who turns on one boss may turn on another.

"He may be a leader of the old bar, but this is a new one. I don't really believe that men of his generation have what it takes for this kind of work. They're too bogged down in old ideas of politesse. Like that French officer in the history books who invited the enemy to fire first."

"I guess you have to have been born after World War II to be a real skunk."

My friend grunted appreciatively. "And I guess you need one to fight one."

I have been giving the most serious consideration to the question of whether or not Hoyt, Welles & Andrew is the right firm for me. I've been compiling statistics, breaking the partners down according to age, social background, religion, inherited wealth, law school, competence and legal specialty. I am troubled particularly by their ages. Nineteen out of thirty-six are over fifty and six are over sixty-five, which means that the next echelon will already be old by the time they take over management and will tend to lack the vitality and keenness needed to fight cases of increasing toughness and complexity. As a junior partner I could not reasonably expect to have a determinative share in executive decisions for at least a decade, by which time the firm might be down the drain. For we have seen grand old firms fall apart; it is a known thing.

And how do I feel as I write this? As I face the fact that I may have spent eight years of exhausting work in the wrong law firm? I think what I feel is actually a kind of excitement! What is it but a great challenge, and one that I already begin to make out a way of meeting? At least it is more interesting than much of what is contained in my daily grind. And suppose I lose? But I shall not lose.

The key to my solution is going to be Glenn Deane. Glenn is thirty-five and still an associate, though he has not yet been passed over, for he started late as a lawyer in the firm, having first been employed as an accountant who studied law at night. He is brilliantly able, but his partnership is not fully assured, as he is not considered "attractive" by some members of the firm. And indeed, he is
not
attractive. He is big, but on the stout side, and he is very plain, with a cauliflower nose, pushed a bit to the left, pockmarked cheeks, an oval chin and clever, mocking, small greenish-brown eyes under a high brow and balding dome. But he makes a bold and abrasive use of his unattractiveness, converting it into a kind of rough sex appeal. He knows when to wheedle and cajole and when to be brutal, even a bully. He is quite untrustworthy and capable of maudlin self-pity, but he can also be devilishly funny, and at weekend gatherings at his house in Chappaqua he is the life of the party, except to the occasional guest whom he tears to bits, egged on and applauded by his heavy, devoted wife, to whom he is periodically unfaithful. Glenn has worked with me in takeovers, and he is resourceful, imaginative and perfectly ready to use any weapon that he finds to hand. With someone of my "polish" to make up for his lack of it there is almost nowhere that he might not go. So we shall see.

He and his wife, Lynne, have asked us to spend Saturday night at their house in Chappaqua. They are giving a cocktail party and have suggested that we may not want to drive back to the city before Sunday morning. Norma has agreed to stay with the girls, and Alice has reluctantly consented. Reluctantly, because, understandably, she dislikes the Deanes. But she is always a good office wife.

Alice has been on a be-nice-to-hubby kick ever since the collapse of the Atlantic bid. I think that even she has been able to take in the gravity of one of these affairs when the client is dissatisfied, and she is troubled that she may have gone too far in criticizing my "aggressive" tactics. And of course she did go too far. She was pulling me down while I was trying to earn the money that she likes to spend. But I can overlook this because I love Alice and consider her a wife of great character and charm. She is an asset in my life, in my career, in my bed. And I suppose in my soul, if I have one. But I must also record that I gain an advantage over Alice if I abstain from open recrimination and allow her sense of guilt to work for me. And an advantage is something one can always use over a spouse. The occasions do present themselves.

The weekend of the Deanes' party is over.

Their home in Chappaqua is an old white farmhouse reduced to a half-acre of land by the encroaching suburb and containing enough bedrooms for five little Deanes. Lynne Deane is a noisy, stout blonde, efficient, direct, unimaginative and easily hurt, frequently reduced to despair by the cleverer but malign spouse whom she resentfully worships. Unlike Alice, who stands aloof from office gossip, Lynne knows everything about everyone in the firm, and she loves or loathes them in exact proportion to their being aids or obstacles to her husband. Needless to say, she is a veritable cesspool of gossip, and Glenn occasionally flies out at her savagely for going too far. "Do you want to ruin me, woman?" he will bark at her, and she will shriek back at him and then storm out of the room in a torrent of tears.

Their cocktail party, which lasted for four hours, was made up half from the office and half from the neighborhood. The office people talked exclusively with one another, and the neighbors did the same; we formed two distinct groups, both perfectly content. Alice, following her old-fashioned notion that a guest should "help out" her hostess by cultivating strangers, did her best to talk to the neighbors, one after the other, who would each regard her with a faint suspicion and then resume their gossip with one another. At length she gave it up and joined me, like the other office wives who, whether from timidity, boredom or lack of social initiative, tended to remain glued to their husbands for the whole evening.

I make a habit of currying easy favor with Alice by agreeing with her that these parties are tedious and insisting that I attend them only in the interests of good office feeling. Yet the fact is that I enjoy them very much. I like to drink, and I have a strong head; I relish the mild humming in my temples aroused by seven or eight gins. It never interferes with my concentration on the revelations of my usually inhibited fellow associates, both male and female, as they open up under the influence of alcohol. This sounds as if I were spying on them, but it is more than that. A law firm becomes the bulk of one's life if one gives oneself to it—and one must do that to get on—and it is only sensible to want to know all one can about one's own life. We always start by talking shop at these parties, but after a few drinks we get on to personalities, and that is when I learn things. And why not learn things? What kind of a sot would want to spend his life in a pit before a lighted stage and never go behind the scenes?

Glenn at last took Alice away from me into another room. He had drunk a lot; he may have tried to pinch her, I don't know. He has rather a thing about her, but Alice can take care of herself, and she never bothers me with these things. But when the guests had at last departed, and the Deanes and Services sat down to hamburgers and red wine, Lynne gave my poor wife some undeserved dirty looks.

Our topic of discussion was Paul Merton, one of the tax partners, a handsome, youthful-looking man still on the sunny side of fifty, who was thought to have jeopardized a career launched twenty years back with his marriage to a senior partner's daughter, by his leaving her now for a young female associate. His unfortunate wife was an object of pity among the partners and scorn among the clerks. The topic was of inexhaustible interest to the entire office family—with the exception of Alice.

"It shows there
is
something stronger than ambition, after all," Glenn observed. "As a young man Merton would swallow any shit to get ahead. But in the end Eleanor's huge ass and stringy tits proved too much for him. He had to find something gamier."