SOMEBODY HAD SAID of the renowned constitutional lawyer George Haven that he was the rare case of a great man without the facial features of such, which at once invited the query as to whether he really was one. His long oval countenance was bland, smooth, seemingly incapable of registering any strong emotion. His brow was high and fine; his hair long and thick and quite as silvery as his voice; his eyes small and pink-gray, usually expressing an amused resignation at the follies of the world, qualified by a mild irritation at their inevitability. His tall, trim figure, which Thaddeus Sturges always tended to picture as garbed in a morning coat and striped pants, suggested a constant readiness to appear before some high tribunal, but a lightly loosened tie, an occasional shirt button undone, like the ever relit pipe before his attentively focused eyes, struck a note of indefinite ease under an easily doffed formality, a need to get down to basics, a hint that behind closed doors, or in a pool room, or even out in a village square with pigeons before some columned courthouse, occurred the basic male confidences that were the necessary complement to the clarion oratory. Was George Haven the type of grand old lawyer of the grand old South, or was he playing the part—or was playing the part not precisely what those grand old lawyers did?
Thaddeus knew that these questions were sometimes asked by the more sarcastic clerks of Haven, Tillinghast & Dorr, of 70 Wall Street, but he attributed them to the envy that greatness engenders in small minds. There had been no wavering in his own total dedication to the senior partner ever since his first interview with the latter in 1936.
He had had the good fortune, immediately upon coming to work, to be assigned to the great man's litigating team, and Mr. Haven had asked him to get a certain document from the office safe. When he had returned empty-handed after a frantic search, his new boss had simply inquired if he had looked under the safe.
"I see you're new here, Mr. Sturges. Or may I call you Thaddeus? But doesn't that sound too biblical? How about Thad? All right? Well then, Thad, you always have to look on the floor because there's a hole in the back of that safe that some of the papers slip through."
And Thad (for Thad he was to be thenceforth, though he had hitherto been known as Ted) knew at once that this was both the firm and the man for whom he wanted to work.
His background had been a confusing one. His father had been a Boston Sturges, but of an impecunious branch, who had compounded this disadvantage by marrying a dressmaker, and an Irish Catholic, to boot. Thaddeus senior had died young and alcoholic, leaving his only child to be reared by a proud and intrepid mother, who had put him through private school and Harvard College on the earnings of her small but reputable shop. Thad had acknowledged his obligation by his adoration of her and by his passionate embracement of the faith that had sustained her in her lonely and industrious existence. She had hoped he would become a priest, even after he had grown into a rangy, sandy-haired six-footer and played on the Harvard football team. And he had even considered obliging her until his shame over an adulterous affair with one of her clients had convinced him (and her) that he was unfit for holy orders. Thereafter he had thrown all his energies into his courses at Harvard Law and obtained an editorship of the Review which had brought him an offer from the Haven firm. He had wanted to turn it down and stay in Boston to be a comfort to his mother, but she had insisted that New York provided the greater opportunity. And thus it was that he had come down to Manhattan, a very serious and literal young man, with a shame of lust doubly inherited from puritans and Irish, whose quizzical and guarded gaze seemed to express the hope, but by no means the expectation, that the world was going to be as straight with him as he certainly intended to be with it. And in George Haven he found the father figure he had always missed.
In a year's time he had succeeded in making himself useful to his leader. In three he had made himself indispensable. Mr. Haven, a former governor of Alabama who had long abandoned his native South for the more lucrative practice of Wall Street and who was nationally known as a legal champion of the conservative cause, was then engaged in his long battle to invalidate what he considered the socialist statutes of the New Deal. Thad threw himself into the fray with all the fervor of a crusader. He had not previously been much involved in economic philosophy, but he now unhesitatingly adopted his leader's credo that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had been designed to guarantee to corporations the continuation of free enterprise and that freedom of contract was the root of democracy.
The war only cemented the friendship and alliance between the older and younger man. Thad, though strong and seemingly fit, had the humiliation of being barred from combat by a discovered heart murmur which his own physician had deemed innocuous. He had then wanted to serve the government in a civilian capacity, but Mr. Haven had persuaded him that his duty lay elsewhere.
"I'm all for your fighting, my boy, but if you can't fight Huns and Japs and Wops you'd better stay home with me and fight the Hudson River squire. We've seen what he did in peacetime. Think what he may do with war powers!"
By 1946, now a full partner in the firm, Thad had become indissolubly associated with Haven in the minds of the downtown bar. The two men were said to complement each other. Thad could be as sober and quiet as his leader was volatile. He could be the person to whom the client might turn when the old man was going too far, to suggest a compromise when Haven wanted to fight to the death. And he knew when discreetly to tug his senior's coattail when an oral argument had gone on long enough.
This latter ability was important, as the oral argument brought out Mr. Haven's particular genius. His capacity to simplify and dramatize the most complicated and dryest facts made him a popular litigant even with liberal judges.
"It's really more than half the battle," he would insist to Thad. "Our briefs are writ on water. They moulder on the back shelves of bar association libraries. All a lawyer really has is that golden moment when the right sentence or even the right phrase wings its way from him to an attentive court, and he senses that it may bring him victory. Did Shakespeare care about printing his plays? Not at all! The passage of his words from actor to pit was all the glory he needed."
Words indeed had become the obsession of George Haven's old age. His constant complaint of the young lawyers of the office was that they couldn't write. "And if they can't do that, how the devil can they think?" he would demand. "Can you have a thought you can't express?" He abandoned his church in Smithport where he spent his summers and weekends when its minister adopted the revised version of the King James Bible. And so it seemed in keeping to Thad, on a winter morning late in 1946, when Haven spoke of a new recruit to their litigating team as "at least someone who can speak the language."
"I didn't know we had a new associate."
"We didn't until this morning. And she's not a new associate. She's been with us for almost three years. She's a transfer from Estates and Trusts. It's Mrs. Hill."
"Natica Hill? Why does she want to be a litigator?"
"She doesn't. Or at least she hasn't asked to be. I am the one who wants her. What do you know about her work?"
"Nothing. I hardly know her. I sat next to her at the firm dinner last October. She seems bright enough. And she's certainly attractive."
"Watch out for her, Thad. She's a femme fatale."
"Well I certainly wouldn't have guessed that. She struck me more as quiet and businesslike."
"Still waters, you know."
Thad perceived that the old man was enjoying himself. There was something he wanted to tell, but he was going to take his own time about it.
"Have you moved her to Litigation to see if I can resist temptation?"
"No. You seem all too resistant to the fair sex. It's high time you thought of getting married, my boy. Thirty-five is half your biblical span."
"But I'm not, I take it, to marry Mrs. Hill."
"Heaven forbid!" Haven raised his hands in dismay. "I guess it's time I explained the mystery. We had an important death over the weekend. Angus Hill."
"Really! I hadn't heard."
"It'll be in the evening papers. I would have called you, but I knew you'd gone to Boston to visit your ma."
"You're an executor, aren't you?"
"I am that. Together with his widow and his nephew Tyler Bennett. It's a very large estate, of course. Bennett came to the house last night to talk about the will. There's one little thing that may give us a bit of trouble. Natica Hill, as you no doubt know, was Angus's daughter-in-law. She was married to the only son, who shot himself six years ago. Because of the way the son's trust was set up, she got nothing from his estate. And now Angus has left her nothing."
"Why was he so hard on the poor girl?"
"She may indeed be poor, but it's for no lack of trying to be rich. She was married to a minister who taught at Averhill School. When young Stephen Hill joined the faculty there she set out to snare him. She got him into bed, claimed she was pregnant and bamboozled him into marrying her after she shed her impecunious clerical spouse. Then she had a convenient miscarriage in Paris, if indeed she was ever pregnant. Angus told me she was quite capable of bribing a Frog doctor to go along with her story. When poor Stephen cottoned on at last to the sort of creature he was hitched to, he blew his brains out. Not that he ever amounted to much. Angus said he was even a fairy."
"Then how did she ever seduce him?"
"Oh, I suppose she flattered him into thinking he was a real man, that he had given her the thrill of her life. And then, when she had him snagged, she probably sneered at his sorry performance."
"I must say, sir, she didn't strike me as that type at all."
"Of course not. They never do."
"And what is she doing working for a firm that represents her husband's family?"
"Good question. Nobody but I, and you now, knows the full extent of Angus Hill's suspicions of her. And his wife did not share his attitude at all. She even put the girl through law school. It was at her behest that I hired Natica."
"I see. But what are you and Bennett really afraid of? A daughter-in-law isn't an heir or next of kin. She has no standing in court to contest the will."
"Unless she were mentioned in it. And she is mentioned in it. Angus states that he is leaving her nothing because she has been 'otherwise provided for.' Our man who drew the will assumed that this had been done. But it hadn't. Unless you count Angelica Hill's paying for her law school, which is pretty thin."
"Even so, it doesn't sound like much of a case for Natica. I wouldn't care to take it."
"No, but some shyster might, and that's just the point. He'd use it to get his dirty toe in the door and then have a fine old time digging into all the complicated Hill trusts and family corporations. We'd probably end by making some sort of settlement just to get rid of him. Now I don't say that Natica is going to do that. But just in case she has any inclination I've taken her out of Estates and Trusts, at least while Angus's estate is in administration. I don't want her poking her nose into inventories and appraisals."
"Do you think I'm a complete dodo? No, when I talked to her earlier this morning, I told her frankly that I knew of divisions of opinion about her in the Hill family, that I took no side and had no opinion of her myself, except that Tom Hilliard in Estates considers her a first class lawyer. I then suggested it might be easier on all if she were to be out of the department while members of the family were going there on estate business."
"And did she buy that?"
"She was too smart not to pretend to, anyway. And I sweetened it a bit by telling her I'd heard about the fine writing style of her memoranda of law and that I'd like her help on one of my briefs. And I capped it all off by telling her she'd be working for the great Mr. Sturges!"
"That must have really done it."
"Anyway, she allowed as she'd be happy to make the switch. So there you are, Thad. She's all yours!"