The Scarlet Letters (3 page)

Of course he had thought of this. But now she helped it to take root. "Will Papa stake me to it?" he wondered.

"Leave that to me!"

In fact she had already crossed that bridge, by persuading her parents that the study of law was really the study of law and order and might have a mollifying effect on their wide-eyed son.

Which it did. Or rather which Professor Gideon Gregg did. He was a small dry neat bald sexagenarian, with a voice so low that he lectured through an amplifier, who had devoted his life to the study and teaching of contract law, with rare but well-paid appearances in court as an expert witness to edify the bench. He was supposed to have thus answered a judge's question as to who was the foremost authority in his field: "I believe, your honor, that Mr. Williston at Harvard is generally deemed the second." Unlike many law professors he disdained the barking approach; he was invariably kind and courteous to his students, and was notorious, when questioning one of them in class, for offering broad hints as to the correct answer. He wanted to believe that every man or woman seated before him was a natural lawyer, but he nonetheless had a keen eye for a real talent, and when he found a paper of Ambrose's on unilateral contracts unusually perspicacious, he called him into his office and offered him on the spot a job assisting him in revising an edition of his famous casebook. It was, of course, quite a load to take on in addition to Ambrose's class work, but as the stipend was generous, thanks to Gregg's soft heart, and as the Vollard allowance, from a still doubting father, was still on the stingy side, he jumped at the chance.

The close relationship that ensued between master and apprentice gave Ambrose his first real purpose and incentive in life. He came to see his wonderful little mentor as an inspired artist who could use words as his tools to clamp the golden wires of civility around the dark chaos of life. Offer and acceptance, good faith and bad, the meeting or non-meeting of minds, consideration and specific performance, breach and damages—the areas of contractual obligation opened up to him like a massive clearing in a dense dark threatening jungle, and the beauty of Gideon Gregg's prose in the essay portions of his casebook, the tight flashing mesh of his Anglo-Saxon short words and his Latinized long ones, seamlessly concise and pregnant with meaning, provided Ambrose with a kind of creed, or art, or even faith that might be almost enough to live on.

By the middle of his second year at law school Ambrose had completed his work on the casebook, which was just as well, as he had accepted, at the professor's strong urging, an editorship on the Law Journal that would henceforth preempt his every spare moment.

"Whatever else happens to me in life, sir," he told his mentor, "I know now that I will always be a lawyer."

Gregg stared at him in astonishment. "Great Scott, my boy, was there ever a doubt in your mind about that? What the devil else did you come to law school for?"

"Oh, I heard it was a good preparation for almost everything."

"It's a good preparation for the practice of law, that's what it is. And if ever I saw a born attorney, it's you, my boy. If you do anything else, you're a fool, and if you're that it's time I retired. For if I'm wrong on that, I'm wrong on everything."

"But is it necessary to practice, sir? Couldn't I be a teacher like you and the writer of treatises?"

Gregg was silent for a moment, and his face expressed the seriousness of his thought. "You could, yes. But I think your particular forte will be for an active practice. I see you as a fighter, my boy. Nor do I for a minute minimize that. The judge, the law professor, the treatise writer and the practicing lawyer are all equally indispensable to our sacred profession. The law comes out of our words: words penned for books and treatises in sober reflection, words used less temperately in briefs and oral argument, words chosen wisely in opinions or dramatically in classrooms, it's all the same game!"

Ambrose had another talk with the professor about his future a year later, in the spring before his graduation.

"Am I not correct, Ambrose, in supposing that Charles de Peyster is a relative of yours?"

"He's my uncle, sir. My mother's brother."

"May I suggest, then, that you apply to his firm for a position? It's one of the first, perhaps the best, of the great corporation law firms of our city. I have had the occasion to testify for them in a number of cases. They do fine work."

"But I'm afraid, sir, I've been rather remiss in my family duties. I have seen my uncle only at Christmas or birthday gatherings. And I'm afraid he may have formed an unfavorable opinion of me when I dropped out of Chelton."

"Pish tush, that water's long under the bridge. You'll find he'll take a very different view of you when he hears
my
recommendation. And that he is certainly going to have!"

U
NCLE CHARLEY HAD MANY
of the de Peyster characteristics: he was grave of demeanor, deeply conservative in his attitudes—domestic, political and economic—darkly and faultlessly dressed, dignified in bearing, measured of speech. But he differed drastically from his sister Fanny in that he cut a figure of considerable importance in the social and business worlds and cared about cutting such a figure. For all his disdain of an increasingly multiracial and multicultural New York and what he considered its vulgar innovations, for all his reluctance to associate with Irish Catholics or Jews, he studied the changes in his world with care and caution and learned precisely what compromises were required for a successful navigator of such turbulent water and just when hoisting the de Peyster flag could be a signal of triumph and when dipping it could be a judicious surrender. His mind and legal abilities, though keen enough, were not of the high caliber to have brought him by themselves to eminence at the bar, but when added to his impressive appearance, his high social connections and his smooth assurance of attracting major clients, the combination carried him to the senior partnership in Dallas, Kaye & de Peyster that he had never doubted would one day be his. Majestic but gracious, he inspired in the roughest of rough diamonds among the firm's large and variegated clientele something like the awe which a Spanish conquistador might have instilled in a native Aztec or Inca.

He understood at once the value of Professor Gregg's recommendation of his nephew; it confirmed an unspoken suspicion on his part that his sister was too self-centered to have any true comprehension of an even mildly rebellious child. He had heard her complaints about Ambrose's "atheism" with the same cool but neutral silence of a Medici cardinal hearing of the indictment of a Galileo. He would only interfere when it paid him to interfere, and this happened when he hired Ambrose on his own account, the other available openings in his firm having been filled by graduates of Harvard Law School, the institution then almost exclusively favored by his partners. Years later this decision, like most that Charles de Peyster made, redounded to his own benefit, for when he aged and began to fail, it was his rising relative who went to bat for him and saved his unduly swollen percentage of profits earned by younger men from being reduced by a hungry partnership.

At first under his uncle's guidance but rapidly on his own merits Ambrose's rise in the firm was steady and seemingly ineluctable. He not only loved his work, he devoured it, putting in hours that surprised even the most industrious of an already industrious organization. He attacked the thorniest of great corporation problems with a kind of fierce delight, and in his admiration of power and his excitement at implementing it he lost almost every tinge of his youthful economic liberalism. He turned his reforming energy instead to studying the composition and administration of the firm that was to be the tool of his creative thinking and made plans in his head for its better development if he should ever find himself in charge. He would concentrate, for example, on improving its esprit de corps. No lawyer would ever be hired either as a partner or clerk collaterally: every ultimate member of the firm would start as an associate right out of law school, secure in the knowledge that his only rivals for partnership would be the men starting with him. Any associate passed over for partnership, a majority of which if the firm was to be kept a manageable size, would be assured of an equally well or even better paid job in a client or sister firm. Profits would be divided evenly among the partners, with certain gradations upwards with age and downwards with old age. The energy and unity of the firm as a team would not be dissipated by foreign branches; there would be one office and one alone. Oh, he had it all worked out!

As he rose in the firm Ambrose was careful to cultivate close friendships with his fellow clerks, particularly those in whom he saw the most brilliant legal future. He discarded the somewhat shaggy appearance he had adopted in academe, and took care now to be well groomed, with his thick, prematurely graying hair properly clipped and combed, his square chin held up but not arrogantly, his large lanky figure no longer slouching but straight. People meeting Ambrose knew that they were in contact with a man who knew what he was doing and what he could do for them.

His family now came round to something like an appreciation. His father gave him money that he no longer needed, and his mother allowed him to kiss her without placing a hand on his shoulder.

Bertha was delighted with him, but not surprised; she was only disappointed that his work prevented him from having a social life as animated as his legal one. Stuffy actually brought him some slight and undesirable business, and Rosebud, who despite a rich husband had only a small property of her own, named him an executor of her will.

There were still periods when his old black moods would descend upon him, days, though infrequent, when he would without excuse fail to appear at the office and drink inordinately in his small apartment, and growl at his new image in the mirror and confound himself for succumbing to the false standards of the old world of the de Peysters and falser ones of the new world of the Goulds and Fisks. Yet he was still beginning to wonder if, given the powers of a president with a majority behind him in both houses of Congress, he would do more than add a few teeth to the Sherman Act and lower the tariffs. The world, as Justice Holmes had said, wouldn't be much better off if the riches of the rich were scattered among the innumerable poor. It would be Ambrose's function, if he had any at all, to grease the wheels of such financial machinery as kept things going. But his law firm, if it ever should be his, would at least be a beacon of honesty! Uncle Charley was all very well, but he had his moments of compromise with men who emitted a faint scent of brimstone. Ambrose would have to wait. But he could wait! Then he would put the bottle down, take a shower and go back to work.

There was little time for love in his busy life, but there was some. When his uncle, foreseeing the day when his nephew might become a partner and desiring him to have experience in all the firm's departments, transferred him for a season into the field of trusts and estates, Ambrose found himself spending more time than was actually required drawing a will and trusts for the pretty and flirtatious young bride of an aging financier. Uncle Charley, who had a sharp nose for the ultra-proper, scented trouble early, and, anxious not to have the financier upset, summoned his nephew for a little "chat." To forestall resentment he cloaked his caution in terms of general advice.

"You never knew my partner, Oscar Tully, did you, Ambrose? He retired before you joined us. He was not quite a man of our background—he had had to make his own way in life—but he was a first-class lawyer, and he had a wise and pithy way of expressing basic truths. 'Give a lady client everything you have above the waist, nothing from below.'"

Ambrose was amused by his own shock at so unexpected a crudity. "You mean never have an affair with a client, sir? Do you imply that I'm in danger of one?"

"No, no, dear boy, I'm merely stating a principle. Though of course you're a handsome enough young fellow. And unattached, too. There are uncles who might say, If the shoe fits, wear it."

"It seems to me you just have."

"Well, there's no harm done, in any case. But that isn't the real matter I have to discuss with you today. I want you to go to Boston and do a little job for me. I say a little job, though it may take three or four weeks. You've heard of the Reverend Philemon Shattuckup there?"

"The great preacher? Yes, of course."

"He's not only a great preacher and an old Harvard classmate of mine, but, like many Massachusetts divines, he's a gentleman of considerable wealth. There's a rather messy and nasty accounting proceeding going on there involving the estate of a bachelor brother of his, a mistress claiming this and that, and so forth. He doesn't want to get too much involved in it, though of course he and his sisters have to put in appearances, but he wants a smart lawyer to keep an eye on what's going on and check on the family counsel, in whom he has limited confidence. That's where you come in. I know you haven't been admitted up there, but you can attend the hearings as his private watchdog and tell him if you think it's advisable to send in additional troops."

"But won't the family counsel object?"

"They needn't even know about it. And if they do find out, so what? Nobody's going to pick a row with Dr. Shattuck. You'll be staying with him and his family. It's a mansion on Commonwealth Avenue, and I've no doubt you'll find yourself very comfortable. Besides, there are five unmarried daughters, all reasonably attractive."

"Do you suggest I might have my pick of them?"

"I shouldn't be surprised. A strapping New York attorney could be a rather tempting morsel to a closely guarded Boston debutante. Of course, there are a couple of brothers, and a seven-way division can wreak havoc on a family fortune, but plenty of those saving Bostonians are even richer than generally supposed."

"Do I strike you as so mercenary, sir?"

"You don't strike me as anything, silly boy. Can't you see I'm talking in generalities?"