CURTIS AND PERKINS
50 State Street, Boston, MA  02109
Telephone:  (617) 227-3000
Fax:  (617) 227-2000
Dawn S. Peterson
Direct Dial: 617 227-3295


November 22, 2004


Cecilia D. Lawrence
118 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02116

Dear Cecilia:
     To repeat what I told you this morning, I am the lawyer for Mr. Millard's estate and I just found the enclosed among his papers. I had some initial doubts about reading it, but I'm glad I did. I called you as soon as I'd finished, and here is your copy.
     It seems that your godfather, Mr. Millard, as your father's executor, came across a journal your dad began writing soon after your mother's death in 1983. Mr. Millard then created what amounted to a joint memoir by grafting his own recollections, impressions and, I believe, distortions onto your father's narrative. Given the man he was, Mr. Millard wanted everyone to recognize his voice so he scored himself in italics.
     I worked with both your father and Mr. Millard. In the course of doing so I learned that the two of them went to boarding school together, attended different colleges and wound up in the class of 1963 at Harvard Law School. Both of them came to Curtis and Perkins after graduating and worked here until their deaths. As you might have guessed, they have very different reputations. The somewhat misleading legend at the base of the preceding page is an example of Mr. Millard's handiwork. I hope it will be removed in the near future.
     Your father never really knew what to make of Mr. Millard, but was happiest when he considered him his best friend. Mr. Millard was pleased to be seen in that role. Your godfather was more extroverted than your father, particularly in the company of young women. Mr. Millard loved describing how he spiked your father in an intramural baseball game over 50 years ago and, to his dying day, resented having gone to Brown (which he admitted was a "safety school" back then), thus becoming the first Millard male in several generations not to have become a member of his family's Harvard Club.
     On the other hand (as lawyers are fond of saying), your father said little about himself. This is unusual in a successful lawyer. He was a private person. So I was surprised to find that he was a secret diarist. I enjoyed your father's company, and was hoping to know him better. Then he died.
     Please forgive this rambling, badly formatted and, yes, unprofessional letter, but I believe I understand you well enough to speak candidly. Be assured that I've prepared this letter myself, and made only one copy (my own). It will not find its way to other people or into the firm archives. When you read the memoir you will see I have a minor, fifth act, walk-on role. I am touched by what your father wrote about me.  Except as mentioned below, I will not discuss this with anyone.
     Please get in touch when you've reviewed the memoir. I'm leaving it to you whether to make copies for others. In the meantime, I believe I must ask one of our partners, who has some familiarity with criminal law, whether we are obligated to give this document to the District Attorney.

Fondest Regards,
(s)  Dawn

Enclosure


CHAPTER ONE
ANDREW MILLARD

     My name is Andrew Millard, Andrew de Peyster Millard, as it happens. The accent falls on the second syllable of my surname. For those who get this wrong, I suggest using “Milord” as an aide-memoire. If that fails, I tell people that I am an iamb, and that "mallard" (the duck) is a trochee.
      Eliot Estabrook Lawrence, my friend and partner, law partner that is, died unexpectedly and, I have to say inexplicably, this June. He must have been as surprised as I was. Eliot always had matters, his and his clients', firmly under control. He was prepared but not "ready" for his leave taking. If Eliot was anything, he was organized. His estate plan which contained a rather unpleasant surprise for his young wife, Jeannette, was in perfect order, but, being, he liked to pretend, a modest sort, he had given no thought to a memorial service. Nevertheless, Eliot's minister, after years of usually good-natured arguing with him about the liturgy, had a clear idea of what Eliot would have wanted. The minister and I put it together. I am Eliot's executor. He would, I suppose, have been mine had I, as most people would have hoped and predicted, predeceased him.
     Since no one had been named, I took it upon myself to speak at Eliot's service. I’m a whiz at that sort of thing. Nobody challenged me even though there were a number of more plausible candidates. All of them, like Eliot, were pillars of something, often several things: their clubs, their communities, their churches, their non-profits, their schools. While pillarhood has thus far eluded me (it has always struck me as an unlikely means of self-enrichment), my frothy, irreverent remarks were well received. They produced warm laughter, gentle eye dabbing and many, apparently sincere, compliments. Several times I compared myself unfavorably to Eliot.  He would have been irked with my self-effacing self-promotion.
     It was pleasantly warm in Copley Square on June 14, 2003. After the service I stood outside Trinity Church basking in my triumph, radiating solicitude and attracting a great deal of new business. I deserved an Oscar. The audience, particularly Dawn and Cecilia, was in the palm of my hand. As I was immortalizing Eliot, I spotted, slumped in their pews, three elderly Bostonians who were likely, within a year or so, to decay into nine figure estates. After the service I booked conferences with two of them. Thank you Eliot. You provided me with a splendid marketing opportunity. At last, and deservedly so, I was the center of attention. And thank you, Mother. You taught me to look after myself.
     Bewfore I go further--a little background on me. I am now an only child. However, there was a period when I didn't enjoy that enviable status. During my first four years I was all that my parents had or desired. Their first sanctified coupling produced a healthy male heir. I was handsome, sturdy and destined to survive, succeed, and inherit their sadly depleted kingdom. How I've wished to be known as a "scion." Despite all of my sterling qualities, I was often warehoused with hired hands. I remember being hurt and upset when I was handed off to a changing cast of keepers as my parents set off to parts unknown from whence it was never clear they would return. I retaliated by pouring my milk and juice down air vents and flushing solids down the john. In fact, my "caregivers" were fun loving. Their coaching imbued me with an almost uncontrollable urge to kick pigeons. They were less successful in getting me on the path to salvation. Despite being marched by subversive nannies around, into and through every Catholic Church within toddling distance of our slightly tattered east-side apartment, I never developed a fondness for virgins or experienced a call to the cloth.
     I blame Hitler for my little brother. After 09/01/39 everyone knew child might yet trigger Mother's still dormant maternal instinct. For whatever reason, Father set to work and out popped engaging Edward, less than two months before the Japs interrupted Morning Prayer in Hawaii. Why wasn’t I enough? It's obvious from my baby pictures that I was adorable and precocious. Was Edward an insurance policy?  Was this another case of "an heir and a spare?"
     Sometime in 1942 Father answered the trumpet's call. He and several pals from his Harvard final club, needing a break from married life, raised their right hands in a New York recruiting office and 90 days later were commissioned second lieutenants in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Further training preceded his departure for London and a staff billet at SHAEF Headquarters. From nine to five Father analyzed aerial photos of German fortifications and during his evenings filled the voids left by absent English officers. Not that Mother stayed home playing Penelope. She was the 4 F's favorite.
     Meanwhile I had been stuck with Edward. By the summer of 1944 Mother had put me in charge of the little pest. Every day Mother, enjoying the mobility afforded by her privileged "B" gas sticker, drove us to the Atlantic Beach Club. She would deposit Edward and me by the pool and ascend to the "poopdeck," an open-air watering hole overlooking the ocean that was off limits to children. She left me with two sandwiches and, if anyone was within sight, a kiss. The sandwiches, made days earlier and then stored in the icebox, were always soggy and inedible. My memories of Mother are confirmed by the old photo albums I inherited. There she is in her sundresses, sandals, floppy hats and radiant smiles. I adored her, and if she hadn't been my mom would have gone "hubba-hubba" like her adolescent admirers. All I can say to Herr. Freud is, "duh."
     Why didn't Mother find time for me? She wasn't chained to a lathe. It's not as though she was Rosie, the Riveter. I was her most ardent fan and we could have had such fun together. How could she not have wanted to be with me? I was her besotted slave. She meant more to me than Jolting Joe. How could she not have preferred me to others? All others? Radar was new in those days, but neither Edward nor I were on her screen. We had enough money and plenty of gasoline. I never learned how Mother managed the latter. We experienced little scarcity. The only commodity that seemed to be rationed was affection.
     Mother was magnetic. She would enter a room and moments later the other women would find themselves alone with each other. In that way, Francesca reminds me of Mother. However, I learned one day that not everyone saw Mother as I did. I was hauling Edward along the boardwalk to our bathhouse when I was approached by Faith Coleman. Faith was a grade ahead of me and her pedestal was only slightly lower than Mother's. I worshipped her ardently, silently, but from afar. (An aside:  Let me admit, sotto voce, that I was once inhibited.) What a fabulous development. I was beyond excited. Maybe I could ditch Edward and splash around in the surf with Faith. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Faith drew nigh. I was tingling. She whispered, "Your mother is breaking up my parent's marriage." Then she walked away. Some sentences stay with you forever. Faith never spoke to me again. I knew she'd said something awful.  Whatever it was, it had to be untrue. I wanted to remonstrate. I wanted to defend Mother, but I didn't understand what Faith had meant.
     In the meantime, Edward had become a millstone. One August afternoon (the 16th, as though I could forget) when I was on Edward duty, everyone at the beach club heard an unhealthy sound in the sky. A coughing engine. Looking up we saw a P-47 low over the water. It was never going to make it home to Mitchell Field. Smoke and flames squirmed back along its fuselage towards the cockpit. The pilot brought it down just beyond the surf line. The big fighter took one heavy bounce and came to rest, sending sheets of spray in all directions. The lifeguards had already launched their boat. It was a perfect wheels-up ditching, something I had seen only in newsreels. The pilot had his canopy back, was out of his cockpit and onto a wing before his aircraft nosed over and sank. He was only in the water for a moment.  Edward seemed fine so I joined all the other kids in a rush to the shore. We got there as the pilot vaulted out of the lifeboat and splashed towards us. He was God made man. A visitor from another world. The sort of being I yearned to become. This was beyond awesome. Our pilot turned out to be a friendly and relieved god. He gave away his survival kit, but wouldn't let me have his Mae West or his cool ID bracelet. Nor would he allow any of us to hold his pistol or survival knife. I couldn't understand why Mother hadn't come down from the poopdeck for this apocalyptic event.
     Then I noticed that all hell had broken loose at the swimming pool. People were yelling and running around. I knew at once that what couldn't happen, had happened. I returned to my post, and there was Ed, a miniature version of the shapes we saw in wartime photos of faraway invasion beaches. Someone was pumping up and down on his back while screaming for help that never arrived. None of this mattered to Edward who was being his usual stubborn self. He refused to move or breathe. Somehow Edward must have gotten out of his life preserver. It would have been my fault if he hadn't been wearing it since Mother had tasked me with his safety. I was told that Edward was never to run on the pool deck, remove his life preserver, or go anywhere near the deep end. He must have figured out how to undo the snaps.
     That's not how Mother saw it. I could seldom predict Mother's moods when she came down from the poopdeck. Sometimes she was angry, perhaps realizing the war wouldn't last forever. Often she was sloppy, telling me I was her "little man" and making slurred promises about presents and trips together that I finally realized she'd never keep. There was only one constant. I had to stay on my toes if we were to make it home intact. This time Mother screamed "Damn You," and walloped me in the puss. In front of everyone. She really put a lot into it. Maybe she sensed disapproval among the onlookers, because she did it only once. But that was enough. An effective slap is all in the wrists, and, thinking back on it, Mother's must have been as well developed as Joe D's.
     It was so unfair. None of my friends had to be nursemaids. None of them had younger siblings clinging to them like leeches. Why me? It's a sink or swim world, and Edward had elected to sink. It wasn't my fault. I was only a child and I hadn't done anything. The sin of omission is no sin at all, at least in the eyes of the law. If anyone was to blame, it was the chief mechanic of the P-47.
     How did Mother get this way? She was nothing like her own mother. Was that my fault?  Was I annoying? Dull? Unlovable? I knew I wasn't ugly. I was used to being made much of. Would my affectionate grandmothers have treated me as Mother did if they'd seen more of me? Wasn't I all that Mother had left? Wasn't I the person who'd helped draw the stocking seams on the back of her legs? Wasn't I the one she used as a prop when she wanted to impress men with her warmth? Whatever. There was no way anyone was going to do that to me again. I had learned the benefits of preemption.
     After Edward was crated and shipped off to Woodlawn, my family's fashionable boneyard, I was relieved to have retaken the spotlight from my scene-stealing sibling. Edward had usurped my place in the cuteness polls, but now I was back on top. Adults fussed over me for years, and I was always able to ignore the unkind taunts of my contemporaries. For years I told nobody about my bad dreams. They were frequent and varied. Sometimes Edward and Mother would reverse roles. She'd drown and he, grown to the size of the pilot, would beat me to a pulp. Sometimes it was Edward striding ashore from his sunken plane. At other times it was me ditching way offshore with no Mae West or life raft. And always there were sharks and currents sweeping me eastward.
     In my early teens a teacher said that I should "TALK" to someone. It was silly, but visiting the bearded dude in Boston was an escape from the stalag-like atmosphere of my (and Eliot's) boarding school. It was also a chance to take in a movie and have a few smokes. I allowed the kindly old duffer to persuade me that I was blameless and Mother's reaction had been wrong. His job was to make me feel good about myself, and he succeeded. However, he didn't get it quite right when he more or less promised that my bad dreams would go away. How anyone could make a living flogging those bromides is beyond me.
     Dr. Prescott did teach me a few useful, if unintended lessons. Like most boys, I learned to engage in constant surveillance and risk assessment. There were always bigger and/or older guys who might suddenly take it into their heads to smack the living snot out of me. Situational awareness was essential to survival. It should have been obvious earlier, but Edward's sinking brought home the fact that I must add Mother to my watch list. Defuse her or avoid her. If you didn't protect your ass nobody else would. I wonder if that's why I look for the armor gallery whenever I visit a museum. When I was born, a soldier's sole protection was a silly metal hat that looked like an inverted soup bowl. Like me they were vulnerable. Now our troops are encased in ceramic plate and helmets, which, if they had visors, would resemble those worn in medieval jousts. Makes sense to me.
     So many people, particularly memoirists and those who are confessionally inclined, like to attribute their failures as adults to childhood episodes. They are wimps and copouts. Edward's making like the Titanic would have scarred a lesser man, someone without my resilience and fortitude. Someone like Eliot.  Someone who kept it all inside. I have carried on and prevailed. In fact, the incident at the pool may have motivated me. I detest gormless expressions like "It's all good."  Sometimes, however, they have a certain applicability. At an early age I sensed in Edward an insufferable intent to surpass and supplant me that would have poisoned our relationship in later years. As it is, Edward is history, and I am not a believer in Toynbee. Was I wounded by this? No. Scratched maybe, but it's long since healed. I'm in a good place and it's all good in my good place.
     My early teens also brought me into contact with Eliot and that worked for both of us. He had been blessed by the gods. Oddly enough Eliot had no enemies, and people didn't mistake his habitual friendliness for weakness. All but the rancorous were attracted to him, and I realized even then that being well regarded by Eliot would be helpful to me. Like my grandmothers, Eliot seemed to put others first or at least be aware of them. And, vis à vis Eliot, I was an "other." However, it would be wrong to suppose I brought nothing to the table. Being an only child, Eliot needed me or someone like me as much as I needed him. Not  that I could ever let down my guard since it was logical to  assume that Eliot, once I began  to surpass him, wouldn't hesitate to act in his own self-interest.
     There were a number of ironies surrounding Eliot’s premature departure.  Considering his wholesome habits, his annoying good health (except for  those  allergies and  asthma problems), his trim physique, his positive disposition, his tennis-playing trophy wife, his doting children and his numerous achievements, anyone believing in an ordered universe overseen by a beneficent deity would have made me a prohibitive long shot in the survival sweepstakes. My dramatic last furlong victory (Eliot died the month after Funny Cide’s win in the 2003 Kentucky Derby, an event that always reminds me of Edith, the first of my four marital mistakes) intensifies my pleasure in having outlived him. It has been suggested that for someone my age (66), the most exciting sensation is the sneeze. I would submit, however, that for unadulterated (and I use this word with some hesitation) pleasure, nothing approaches that derived from solemnly reading the twenty-third psalm at the memorial service of a fallen rival, a rival who until recently had always bested you.
     Women who are in a position (any one of several) to know tell me that I am a wonder, in an absolute not an age-adjusted sense. Years ago I named my ardent organ, which still discharges regularly and puissantly (with, I admit, a little pharmaceutical assistance), “Old Faithless.” I refer to the rest of my package as Balzac. I am considering donating these anatomical wonders to an organ bank or maybe the Smithsonian. But why shouldn't I have the last word? I choose to regard my survival as only partial recompense for decades of slights and wrongs. I have now assumed the role of my law firm's sour yet lovable curmudgeon. It's almost expected. Aren't elderly trustees supposed to spend their remaining years excoriating change and harrumphing about declining standards?
     Eliot's success was so undeserved. He fell into it. A legacy at Harvard. His family's name on one of Harvard's innumerable libraries. A library the clubbable Eliot probably never entered. He was coddled by a host of mentors, counselors and cheer leaders beginning in boarding school and carrying on well into his fifties at Curtis and Perkins. When his seniors died off, a group of eager young lawyers, jostling among themselves for precedence and the first crack at Eliot’s (I admit it) solid (albeit declining) practice, kept him out of trouble, guffawed at what passed for jokes, and struggled to give him the impression he hadn’t lost a step.
     Eliot once told me he was fortunate to have unremarkable and, therefore, unthreatening looks. He was above average height, topping out at a hair under six feet.  Anyone but Eliot would have said he was a six-footer. I would have. Eliot couldn’t, but I knew he was hoping because he measured himself constantly until he was almost 30. Eliot got most of his growth early (mine came later but for years I had to look up to him). This discouraged bullying, and when combined with his determination (some would call it stubbornness), decent grades and above-average athleticism, made him a minor deity in boarding school. A gritty lineman, he was elected football captain because of his pluck and personality and despite the absence of a mean streak that would have increased his effectiveness if not his popularity. He was husky and would have been fat had he not been so disciplined. Eliot’s hair, which he kept short all his life, was, he and I would agree, a nondescript brown, his eyes a pleasing (I've been told) blue. Expressive but not riveting like mine. Eliot could never conceal his feelings. His open face could be read by an infant. Eliot had a smile that, strangely enough, was enhanced not diminished by his irregularly spaced teeth. But then who can dislike a jack-o-lantern?
     Eliot’s features were regular, common, in fact. The passing generations had eroded the angularities and anomalies seen in the paintings of his patrician ancestors. That’s the sort of thing that can happen when a family stops inbreeding. Eliot was matter-of-fact about his appearance but said he wished that once in his life a girl would look at him rather than his companions. I never had the heart to tell Eliot how accustomed I became to being “checked out.” There is another area in which I always surpassed Eliot. I shall be delicate, but it is obvious to anyone who has observed Eliot and me in a locker room. As naughty Martial put it, “Audieris in quo, Flacce, balneo plausum, Maronis illic esse mentulam scito.” (When you hear applause in a bath, Flaccus, you may be sure that Maro’s cock is there.) In Cold War terminology, there was a missile gap.
     Then there was Eliot's almost Midwestern vitality. Many of us had it in abundance at one time. Eliot managed to retain his. I find that aggravating. I have other weapons. My poise and urbanity, when coupled with my indicia of wealth and influence have more than compensated for the absence of boyish excess. I recall one of my former wives (I don’t remember which one of the harpies) saying she liked me best when I was sick. I didn’t care for the remark at the time, but I knew where she was coming from. Unfocused energy and puppyish enthusiasm get tiresome.
     Unlike Eliot I've had to scratch and scrape. Not that I'm slow witted or from the wrong side of the tracks. Far from it. My pedigree opens doors everywhere, but I've made it on my own with no encouragement or support. All of my wives have been major disappointments. They brought little to table, tangible or intangible. Admittedly my career received some help from a number of timely deaths and departures, but basically it's been my doing. Despite having out-earned Eliot, despite having supplanted him on my firm’s management committee, it enrages me to admit that until recently, I was not so much undervalued as unnoticed. Millard the obscure.
     Eliot was as lucky in love as he was in everything else. Clare, his desirable first wife, praised Eliot’s looks, character, and intellect. Even less plausibly, she raved about his wit and, though I still can’t believe it, his metronomic dancing.  Clare did this publicly and, as Eliot once confided, privately. She may even have convinced him he was well endowed. If only she'd known.
     I always desired Clare. She should have been with me. She'd have had so much more to praise. Virtuous as well as voluptuous, she never responded to my subtle overtures. Instead she treated me as a naughty if ultimately harmless child, someone to be tolerated but never encouraged. Even more annoying, she never betrayed by a wink or a raised eyebrow that her apotheosis of Eliot was anything but sincere. Her performances were so convincing and so consistent that in time I began to wonder whether they might be genuine. Did Eliot buy this? You bet. Would he have failed without Clare's uncritical adulation? Probably not. Eliot would have muddled along. He was a plugger, I'll give him that. However, supported and propelled by his cheerleader/muse, Eliot took flight. It was a lumbering take off requiring a lot of runway but in the end Eliot was airborne.
     Now change is in the air. My star is ascending. Having started my legal career in reduced circumstances, I have become a man of independent means. I and the planet that once eclipsed me are no longer in synchronous orbits. Sometimes mere survival is enough to enhance one's status. The young so wish to respect if not adore their elders. It's rather touching. Foolishly, they believe this will earn them similar treatment.
     For those of us who still have our wits about us, age brings certain opportunities. Only our contemporaries really know us, and if most of them are dead or gaga, we are free to dissemble, to recreate ourselves. It’s a cinch. Any of us can, if he possesses an iota of cunning, produce the occasional twinkle and generate an aura that passes for warmth. Believe it or not, bankruptcy lawyers have been known to rehabilitate themselves. Millard the ignored, Millard the unappreciated is gone; long live Millard the beloved.
     Being venerated comes easily. An avuncular look and a self-deprecating manner are enough to excuse decades of unpartnerly conduct. Dimly remembered episodes of selfishness, malpractice, client grabbing, betrayal and sharp practice take on a warm rosy patina, evoking chuckles rather than outrage. Attention to detail is most important, however. The challenge is to be taken for a slightly befuddled professor, not a derelict. A few food stains on the signature tattersall vest will always be tolerated, but it is imperative to maintain minimum standards of personal hygiene and appearance. Instruct your barber to institute a rigorous defoliation program; check your fly regularly but not so often you’re arrested. Remember to chew with your mouth closed, use your napkin frequently and, by all means, floss, floss, floss.
     To return to Eliot. His ascendancy began seven months after we met in Grand Central Station before our second form year (eighth grade, if you have to ask) at what might still be considered a prestigious, if no longer elite, New England boarding school. That spring he unfairly beat me out for shortstop on our club team (he may have regretted doing so since I really nailed him a few days later sliding into second; my handiwork required seven or eight stitches). This established a pattern that persisted until shortly before his blessed departure.
     I’ve sometimes wondered what Eliot thought of me. It wasn’t easy to get beneath his bluff, cheery, can-do mask. Or maybe, it wasn’t a mask. Perhaps that’s all there was. But Clare didn’t think so. Eliot was insufferably agreeable although I recall him saying that I had a knack of making the one remark you least wanted to hear to the person you least wanted to hear it. I should have taken umbrage, but who could when he was grinning in that way of his. Me, that's who. I bet Eliot thought he was helping me with Edward-induced guilt and grief. That he was taking over for Edward in some fashion. So self-satisfied of him.
     For the eight years after school, Eliot and I saw very little of each other. He, of course, sailed into Harvard and I slunk off to Brown (my rigid headmaster didn’t favor me with the sort of hyperbolic paeans he cranked out for the pious numbskulls and he got completely bent out of shape about the sign ("Arbeit Macht Frei") I hung over our school's forbidding main entrance). I remember seeing Eliot at a party where he said his freshman football coach warned the team it should expect a helluva scrap from Brown because so many of its players were Harvard rejects. My four years in Providence flew by. I took the same courses as my cousin Bruce, and resubmitted the papers he so thoughtfully handed down to me. This enabled me to spend a great deal of time in Boston and New York.
     As I write this, I am settling Eliot's estate. Eliot, the loyal friend, kept me on as executor. Having always been a snoop and a gossip and perhaps being somewhat obsessed with Eliot himself, I enjoy inventorying his property – real, personal and mixed, as we say in the trade. What fun to rummage through his correspondence, his academic transcripts and even his old report cards, not all of which are as glowing as his children probably assume.
     As for Eliot’s personal property – quite unexceptional -- faded china with barely legible crests, a number of well-bound but otherwise pedestrian books (Gibbon, Scott, Thackerey, Buchan, Kipling, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau,  and other New England worthies, none of them first editions), undistinguished furniture and silver (many porringers, pocket watches, family seals, lockets and the like) and finally his treasured genealogical records which revealed that Eliot’s oft-mentioned Mayflower ancestor was, in fact, a servant. There are also several family portraits that, to the untrained eye, could be taken for Copleys. Finally his ghastly collection of family samplers, faded and poorly framed, evoking cheerless images of chastity and chilblains. All in all, modest survivors of a more affluent past.
     A month ago, I hit the jackpot. What should I discover but Eliot's personal journals. In 1983 my despondent friend began a secret diary. There were hundreds of handwritten pages, all of them bound to be tedious and obvious. Would they illuminate the inner Eliot? Was there such a thing? Eliot had, I was sure, nothing to confess and lacked the imagination to invent or embellish. Nothing about Eliot was interesting except his sex life with Clare and he'd omit that. Didn't his journals have to be about me? Mostly about me? But how could Eliot be expected to capture my depth and complexity? How could he get me right? His journals would require meticulous scrutiny and undoubtedly call for my editorial intervention.
     Neither young Eliot nor Cecilia knew about these Back Bay scrolls, and I haven’t enlightened them, at least not for the moment. They are still deep in grief. There’s plenty of time for me to decide whether my friend’s journals are bound for the shredder or the shrine, the dumpster or the depository.
     By the time I unearthed Eliot’s journals, Eliot Jr.  and his darling sister, my goddaughter, were worn out from sorting and distributing their father's possessions. The task of dealing with his journals would have been too daunting. What would they do with them? To whom should they turn? Certainly not to Jeannette, their stepmother, who had spent her time as Mrs. Lawrence unsuccessfully urging Eliot to disinherit them. I was the obvious choice.
     It’s difficult to mention Eliot’s children without being reminded of the fruit of my loins. Arthur and Stanley worry that they will not survive the obligatory life estate my next and presumably youthful spouse will almost certainly extract from me as a condition of our union. They natter on about the nuisance of tidying up after my death. They would be pleased if I disposed of my property (to them) now, dropped my club memberships, stopped traveling, ceased all exercise, increased my intake of artery-clogging fats and eliminated all  health care expenses other than infrequent bulk purchases of generic drugs. Their hearts would sing if I moved to a rent controlled basement apartment, purchased a casket and slept in it until what they will probably refer to as my passing. Do all children insist that their youthful, vigorous daddies execute a "Do Not Resuscitate?" Arthur and Stanley, I love you as I know you love me. My heart aches. I reach out to you constantly, but you hold me at arms length, you screen my calls. Why? Why?
     Now back to Eliot. It's true. Thus far I have found little of interest or merit in his journals. Eliot's insights, such as they were, related to business matters and, as he'd been told as an associate, his writing, or drafting as we lawyers like to dignify it, was mediocre. Therefore, I have undertaken a wholesale revision, getting away from his diary format and substituting a smoothly flowing story line. By adding myself, my clear voice and my aperçus to Eliot's plodding recitation, I have tried to present a realistic picture of me  as the leader of a nineteenth century gentleman's club as it slouched reluctantly towards a new and as yet undefined identity. Lest I be accused of distortions, I have preserved Eliot’s original journals. However, I am confident that I have captured their essence and produced a fair and balanced presentation.
     Wholly apart from several specific revelations, it would be unwise to show my work to Eliot’s children. They would be puzzled and suspicious if I suggested that this manuscript might be of interest to the general reader. What, they would wonder, could intrigue outsiders that would not be awkward for the family? The public couldn't be interested in the musings of two middle-aged WASP males. Besides, “Dad” was a private person. In accordance with our tribal mores, he had appeared in the newspapers only three times: at birth, when he married Clare and when he died. His marriage to Jeannette had gone unreported even though it followed a death rather than a divorce. Perhaps Eliot did not wish to draw attention to the age difference (19 years) between Jeannette and himself.
     Should they ever see my manuscript, Eliot and Cecilia will discover that their daddy was neither Louis Auchincloss nor Charles Manson. Even his fantasy life was pedestrian. As a boy he had a crush on Doris Day. Yawn. During his days at Curtis and Perkins, he lived and died for the hapless Red Sox and, to balance the frustration of doing so, was an avid supporter of Harvard hockey and crew. In his later years, Eliot subscribed to" The Harvard Health Letter" and became absorbed by his polyps. His life was a series of repetitive cycles built around reunions, doctors' appointments and his next colonoscopy. Ok, I admit it. I wish Eliot could be summoned back occasionally for me to tease and torment. By checking out when he did, at least Eliot missed Pedro’s collapse, Posada’s bloop double and Boone’s walk-off home run in the final game of the 2003 American League Championship Series. If he’d survived that, surely he would have been undone when the Yankees snagged A-Rod just four months later. You see, like most winners, I am a Yankees fan.
     Now I must pause for a moment to confess I am enormously pleased with what I have wrought and, yes, it settles some scores and airs some unclean Lawrence laundry. However, as I review my creation, I realize that I must sometime compose the authorized version of the Eliot Lawrence Journals if I want my work to see the light of day. This magisterial draft must stay out of sight until flights of angels sing me to my rest. It would be wrong for readers to get the wrong impression. It is possible some might think Andrew Millard devious, envious and lecherous, not to mention greedy, grasping and solipsistic. My next edition will be warm and fuzzy. Maybe I'll send it to that woman, Opera Winfield.
     I am savoring this first folio in private, and am charmed by my contributions. They appear in italic type. My terse clarity, which in a work of fiction might suggest a certain disengagement, is, I believe, perfect for a work of this nature. And, I am no less pleased with Eliot’s offerings that I have edited and abridged without, I hope, enlivening their distinctive monotone. Preserving his vapidity, while challenging, has, I believe, been achieved.  When it made sense to do so, I have taken minor creative liberties. I’ve never been one of those full disclosure nuts. As one of my litigation partners liked to put it, “If honesty is the best policy, what’s second best?” As for transparency -- only in women's clothing.
     I continue to struggle with the question of what to name my work. I have toyed with but rejected “The Second Best Policy.” Eliot left some typically heavy-handed hints. His journals contain frequent references to the phrase "the balanced scales." So bland. So vapid. So Eliot.
     Poor Eliot never understood what Curtis and Perkins had become. He would have loved it if his friends there had marched into his funeral together, as the Cravath partners do (did?) for their own. It's not that kind of place anymore. Thank heavens. It has finally become an environment in which I am ideally suited to flourish. Eliot still had the hopelessly outdated mindset of the firm’s long-dead leaders.
     What then should be the title of this Millard – Lawrence saga? Law firms are not for the sensitive, the sickly, or the saintly. You'll not see a bumper sticker on any partner's Beemer scolding you to "Give Peace a Chance" or to "Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty." Law firms are and must be about focus, intensity and single-mindedness. We must be hard. We must be resolute. We must be tough-minded. Our clients wouldn’t have it otherwise. This being so, while I considered “Eliot Lawrence: A Life?”, I have selected “Semper Fee.” I am saving the title “Rarely Fi” for my as yet unwritten autobiography.
     So let’s get after it. Lock and load. Drop the ramp. Hit the beach. The game’s afoot.



CHAPTER TWO
ELIOT LAWRENCE

      It’s wonderful to be excited again. I’ve been thinking about this journal-writing project for months, and it’s time to fish or cut bait. How will twenty years ago look to me now and what will the present look like twenty years hence? I must reenter the past and recapture it. Clare mustn’t vanish into the lengthening shadows. People and events I considered unforgettable are beginning to blur. This is bound to get worse, and that frightens me. It will be challenging to work forward twenty years from 1963 and more difficult yet to remember my childhood. But it won’t get any easier if I procrastinate. I’m planning to do a little every day until I get back to the present (1983). Here I go.
     On Tuesday, September 3, 1963, Rico, the most outgoing of the uniformed operators of 23 State Street’s classic open cage elevators, took me to the ninth floor. Rico, for many years a reliable source of unreliable inside information, who delighted in tormenting penniless associates with fables of his stock market triumphs, let me off in the reception area of Curtis and Perkins. There before me was the threadbare green carpet, the battered furniture, and the tranquil Miss Landry. I could see myself swimming into focus. She didn’t remember me from my interviews, but smiled gently nevertheless. She took my name, flapped vaguely at a sofa that was as uncomfortable as it looked and slipped back into her reverie. As best I could tell, she notified nobody of my arrival. It being 8:30 a.m. on the day after Labor Day, there may have been nobody around to notify.
     My surroundings were spartan. I found this comforting. To me it suggested that the firm’s (now, my firm’s) focus was on substance not appearance. Iron men in wooden ships. There were no newspapers or magazines to be seen anywhere. Only a few copies of the ABA Journal. I carried my trusty briefcase. It contained my law dictionary and what I thought would be my most useful treatises and casebooks. Not my diplomas. Nobody at Curtis and Perkins advertised that they’d gone to the colleges and law schools that had been attended by the men in their families for generations. In those days Curtis and Perkins clients made certain assumptions about the personal and academic backgrounds of their attorneys. My briefcase, purchased at the Coop when I entered Harvard Law School, would serve me faithfully for several more years until its bottom fell out while I was carrying a set of closing documents through the lobby of The Chase Manhattan Bank. I hated to part with it, but it was beyond repair. I checked with a cobbler. In fact, a number of my colleagues suggested that I reequip myself. By then, up and comers who took themselves seriously and expected others to do likewise carried attaché cases while those who were going nowhere trudged about with satchels like mine or indestructible document bags. My thought was: beware of attorneys carrying attaché cases.
     The ABA Journal didn’t interest me. I couldn’t bring myself to read anything. First impressions are indelible, and I very much wanted to get off to a good start. There were only three new associates that fall (back then Curtis and Perkins associates were “juniors” and offices were “rooms”), and history suggested that probably one, two at the most, would make partner. One was my schoolmate, Andrew Millard for whom everything had always come easily. He was charming in an evasive way, and early in life he developed a knack of getting others, especially females, to do things for him. I befriended him in boarding school in part because I learned he lost his brother in a childhood accident he should have prevented. Since his parents never visited our school, I made a point of inviting him home with me on weekends. For years I considered him my best friend.
     So there I was, age 26, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in a new, navy blue Rogers Peet suit and shiny black wing tips (my father had suggested these) enjoying a late summer breeze from several open windows. Scents and sounds from the harbor and the streets were welcome stimulants in the sleepy atmosphere of the reception area.  Window units, not to mention central air conditioning, were still several years in the future.
     I had just cast my lot with a highly-regarded white shoe Boston law firm organized in 1895. When I joined Curtis and Perkins there were 25 partners and a slightly smaller number of associates, a ratio that consultants would tell us was bound to result in mediocre financial performance. This observation was correct then and now. It was many years before established law firms, at least Boston law firms, began focusing on leverage. Virtually all of the partners were Harvard Law School graduates. You made partner in seven years or you were gone. Up or out.
     None of the associates had the remotest idea what the firm as a whole or individual partners earned. This was a smart policy. It fostered the misapprehension that all of the partners were important and should be taken seriously. Along these lines, I recall one senior partner complaining to me some years later that he should have earned at least $50,000 because he had collected that amount in fees. I was unimpressed by this analysis. Being a business lawyer, he presumably had some idea of the difference between gross and net. Also, $50,000 in collections for someone who should have been at the top of his game struck me as modest even in the early 1970s.
     However, the partners seemed prosperous so the more self-assured associates assumed that they would become so. Even the office directory reinforced this impression by listing the addresses and the names of the partners’ summer houses, most of which were “cottages” by the ocean on the north shore. Their names evoked visions of fresh air, sunshine, rattling halyards, and happy cries of "fore" and "let."  One of my more iconoclastic and impecunious contemporaries threatened to call his imaginary summer retreat, “La Meme F***ing Place.”
     From our humble vantagepoints, we regarded the partners as nothing less than demi-gods. They had, we all thought, distinguished themselves in a rigorous boot camp, received their commissions and at all times thereafter carried out important missions at uniformly high levels of competence. Only gradually did the scales fall from our eyes.  Some partners we learned were more equal than others. Then came the realization that partners could be deaccessioned with, or sometimes without (in my opinion), cause. We saw many derailed between commissioning and retirement.  Booze was a familiar culprit. Drugs were lurking just offstage, but, funnily enough, we haven’t lost anyone to narcotics as far as I know. There were other temptations and pitfalls. A sense of futility or a fat inheritance could each, in its own way, sap your energy. In later years, there were instances of management breaking a person’s spirit. The death or retirement of one of the firm’s stars often led to the purging of those of his followers who had not managed to grab a significant chunk of his practice or find a new protector.
     Time passed. My classmate Andrew Millard (accent on the last syllable) showed up at 9:30 a.m. He greeted me in his cocky, cynical fashion. He reminisced about school, and airily suggested that life as we knew it was over. I didn’t get that. We were lucky to be here. Richard Stevens, the third new associate had arrived a few minutes earlier. My promptness had gone unobserved. But I had no cause for complaint. I was about to start a career at a prestigious Boston law firm. I had to support Clare and myself on $7,000 a year, but I knew if I could get to $25,000 I would be able to do this, educate my children and consider myself a success. Some day I might even reach levels where my income always exceeded my age times 1,000. I am optimistic by nature.
     Mr. Barber, the office manager, arrived well after 10:00 a.m. He looked like many of the partners. Blotchy complexion. Wrinkled seersucker suit. Stained straw boater.  Brooks Brothers button down. Madras tie with a discolored knot. Unshined brown shoes. Looking neither left nor right, and not acknowledging our presence, he fled to his office and firmly closed the door. He had, we learned, managed to lose what he and his friends thought was a sinecure in the personnel department of Devonshire Trust Company. That took some doing. We were still in an era when a Harvard diploma, even diplomas of under-performing liberal arts majors for whom Cs were achievements, usually guaranteed a lifetime position and at least a Vice Presidency at quiet places like Devonshire. After his dismissal, one of his Harvard club mates (I was in the same club) found him a home at Curtis and Perkins. Mr. Barber’s role was to serve as friend and companion to the lawyers who hired him. He was like the plugs that soothed the temperamental thoroughbreds on their way to the starting gate.
     We must have waited at least twenty minutes. The receptionist brought Mr. Barber a cup of coffee. We could smell cigarette smoke (none of us had dared light up), but no motion could be observed behind his frosted glass door. At last he emerged. A man on a mission. Without acknowledging our presence, he walked through the reception area carrying “The Boston Herald” and made straight for the john.
     Minutes passed. We heard a chain being yanked followed immediately by the roar of cascading water. The Curtis and Perkins loos had to be seen to be believed. The overhead thunder box, the chain with a wooden pull, the copper piping and the sculpted, close-grained seat of easement. The marble walls that amplified sound.  Mr. Barber reappeared. He looked content. At around 11:00 a.m. he reemerged from his office, ready to tackle the challenges of late summer. Rumpled, frayed, florid and in need of a haircut, he surveyed his three new recruits and asked which one of us had arrived first. I raised my hand and, to my great delight, drew the last single office.  Millard and Stevens had to double up. A day or so later Millard in his unctuous way suggested that it was only fair to draw straws for my office. I agreed, but only if Stevens was included. We did so, and I won. Although he tried to conceal it, I could tell Millard was annoyed by both my sportsmanship and my luck.

  _______________________________________________

     Let me apologize for Eliot's predictable beginning, while assuring the reader I have pared down his anodyne story of the hard-pressed associate, the demanding elders and the seductive secretaries. Unlike most works of this genre, there is no agonizing over the bar exam. We were Harvard graduates after all.
     Eliot is as insufferable in his writing as he often was in person. I take the strongest exception to his suggestion that I exploit others, don’t play fair and am less than candid. Readers are free to draw their own conclusions. If I weren’t honorable I would have stricken the preceding paragraph and other defamatory passages. Their survival is an obvious testimonial to my character. Furthermore, I strongly resent that self-satisfied twaddle about showing kindness to the sad schoolboy from the broken home. I was not sad, and whose home isn't broken in one way or another? And then there was the first day drama. Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you isn’t going to make it. It was obvious from the start who was to be the one. Stevens. His academic credentials were adequate. His briefcase was Samsonite. He might as well have been wearing a short-sleeved shirt with pit stains and a pocket protector. No sweat. It was in the bag. Curtis and Perkins was still operating on the assumption that it could live by well-bred alone.
     Eliot had it made despite carrying what amounted to a sample case. It would have done credit to Willie Loman, but somehow contributed to his intolerable, clean-cut image. As Eliot often put it in his complacent fashion, “I feel no need to define myself by consumer products.” The older partners were going to love him. He was the dutiful, conscientious, plodding son and heir so few of them had managed to sire. And he wasn’t going to play Oedipus to their Laius. As for me, I had no doubts at all. I had the smarts, the moves, impeccable ancestors and enviable connections. If only my family hadn’t lost so much in the Depression. While I could never derail Eliot, Stevens was out of the running, and I was pretty sure I could scuttle any unexpected competition from laterals.
     So there we sat. While Eliot was probably thinking his usual selfless, elevated thoughts, perhaps reflecting on Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech of the previous week and Stevens was no doubt glorying in his shiny accessory, I was delighting in the scandal that had engulfed dashing John Profumo, England’s Minister of War. He had been caught in a dalliance with Christine Keeler, a scrumptious call girl who also fancied KGB agents. So interesting, in Albion it’s the Tories who entertain us with those delicious sex scandals, particularly ones involving disguises, animals, spanking and hyphenated names. Here the Republicans are prigs while Democrats in high places go at it like mink – in my view one of the few positive things that can be said about them. The Profumo mess encouraged me. It suggested that fun could be had in the most hidebound institutions.
     We sat some more. Were the three of us musketeers or stooges? As Eliot so perceptively observed, the Curtis and Perkins offices were Spartan. He failed to say they were Bronze Age Spartan. To Eliot this denoted virtue whereas I was queasy about the financial implications of our décor. I was not encouraged when I learned you had to turn in the stub before you could draw a new pencil from supply. Our receptionist, the comatose Miss Landry, had a face with the indented cross-hatching of a lifetime smoker. She reminded me of a manatee. I could visualize her in a tropical waterworld drifting upward, raising her whiskered muzzle above the surface and gently inhaling a mouthful of carrots and lettuce leaves. After seating me, she slid downward in a trail of bubbles. What would Curtis and Perkins’s less somnolent clients, if any, make of Miss Landry and the firm as a whole?
     While Eliot was having his Saul on the road to Damascus moment and Stevens was slipping further out of contention with each passing minute, I was looking for a sharp instrument, if there was anything sharp at Curtis and Perkins, with which to slash my wrists. I tried consoling myself with the thought that 1963 wasn’t the year to make big bucks. The marginal tax rate was 91%.
     Law school had kept me from the workplace for three barely tolerable years, but now my sentence, perhaps a life sentence, was beginning. The day of reckoning had arrived. The Iron Curtain was rattling down and I was trapped on the wrong side. What boy had ever grown up hoping to be a lawyer? I had met a few in law school and wanted nothing to do with them. For me, as I suspect for most guys, it was always sex and sports. My advice has always been, “Listen, to your bawdy.”
     Believe me, I had thought this through. It was dire financial pressure that drove me to law school. For years I had observed my elderly relatives, seeking signs and portents that their deaths might defer or, better yet, obviate my entry into the labor market or, once there, hasten my retirement. Their lack of productivity combined with confiscatory death taxes have quashed my hopes. Both sets of grandparents died, and it was evident they had been as profligate as I have always hoped to be. The trusts from which they received their sustenance allowed them to spend principal and they had done so with energy not seen in my family for generations. Their spineless trustees did nothing to rein them in. Other than some unmatched cuff links and impeccable manners, I have received little from my family besides the personal effects of one great uncle. I still haven’t figured out how to monetize his collection of split bamboo fly rods.
     My parents have been equally unhelpful. What can I say about Mother? She was consistent to the end. As I recall, her last words to me were "Screw You," and they seemed to be coming from a cave on the far bank of the Styx. It sounded as though Mother was not enjoying herself. Had she just spotted Edward?
     Much to her surprise, Mother failed to land a trophy husband (she caught and consumed two undersized ones) after her tempestuous leave taking from my father. As a consequence there was little for me, her "lamb chop" when she pegged out.
     Ignoring for a moment those instances where she overindulged and yelled at me for murdering her baby, I think fondly (well, semi-fondly) of Mother. She insisted we were best pals. So be it. I even got over it when she bestowed "lamb chop" on her third and final husband and reduced me to some lesser cut. What can you do? You pattern yourself on the first living thing you see in your hospital room, burrow or nest.
     My father was a plodder. He maxed out as a Senior V.P. at Devonshire Trust (no, Boston isn't a one bank town, but certain institutions attract certain types). For the last several years, he's been loving his dementia, the dementia that's draining the last of the Millard resources. What's not to like. Every television program's a hoot, and it's a kick to sit naked in an empty bath tub, defecate at will and sing "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard."
     It could have been so different for me. If only Edith had been as advertised, or, to use a now familiar cliché, if only I’d drilled down a little deeper before drilling her. I was young and had assumed that, except for the nouveau poor Millards, being in the studbook meant “money” and lots of it. How silly. How trusting. Had I done even the most rudimentary due diligence, I wouldn’t have been sitting in this dismal reception area with Eliot. Why had our parents invested so much in teaching us golf, tennis, sailing, skiing, bridge, backgammon and forks while leaving us untutored and vulnerable in this most important and challenging game? Had I read Emma, I might have learned something from Mr. Knightley’s observation about Frank Churchill: “He is a most fortunate man!” returned Mr. Knightley with energy. “So early in life - at three and twenty – a period when, if a man chooses a wife, he generally chooses ill.”
     Edith, the apparently highly sexed, high net worth Kentucky filly. It was a snare and a delusion. In reality, she may have been Bennington College’s only virgin, and how was I to know her family was being kept afloat by a towering stack of daddy’s high interest rate demand notes. Edith’s vault, while empty of bullion was, I soon discovered, as well defended as Fort Knox. I met her at a party in Newport. That seemed promising. During our first dance as I was in the “getting to know you” phase, she told me that she was interested in a Harvard senior, who, she implied, was mad for her.
     Flicking on my brights, I casually asked her for the name of my “rival.” It was Eliot. Suddenly I was on her like a heat seeking missile. Had competitive juices been more than a figure of speech, I would have needed to towel off. Edith had a yummy, slightly squishy Rubenesque allure. There seemed little doubt that she was in season, but most importantly she was, temporarily at least, Eliot’s and, therefore, fair game.
     I asked the band to play My Old Kentucky Home. How masterful. We chatted. We waltzed. We trotted like foxes. We smoked. We drank. We flirted. I smiled, smiled constantly in my most engaging manner. She invited me to go with her to the Derby. Her daddy’s plane could pick us up. I could stay at her house in Louisville. It would be a really fun weekend. It was all on her. After a few pro-forma protests and a wholly insincere offer to pay my own way, I allowed myself to be persuaded. What about a house present? Thinking about it now, it would have been amusing (but unnecessary) to bring some K-Y jelly to KY. My ladies are always "au jus," when I come knocking.
     It was time for a drive along Bellevue Avenue. We parked. The moment seemed propitious. The moon was in the seventh house. Jupiter was aligned with Mars. Why not a sneak preview of my bliss in the blue grass? My mission: submission, admission and emission. I made my move. Away all boarders. I was the conflation of Drake, Raleigh, Aubrey, Hornblower and other sea dogs, real and imagined. She was wearing more layers than anartichoke, but I burrowed like a Jack Russell. Her girdle would have thwarted Fluellen and Harry’s other Welshmen as they struggled to undermine the walls of Harfleur. Despite her body armor, my relentless index finger continued its inexorable advance. Always probing. Always advancing. Plunging ever deeper into terra incognita. Oh brave extremity.
     My foraging finger fought its way to the lip of the crater and began to descend like a blind mole rat. Searching. Seeking. By now it was bent and twisted from the pressure exerted by Edith’s armor plate. Far too many pounds per square inch. Like a submarine that had exceeded its depth limitation. And what about Edith? Why wasn’t she warming up Old Faithless instead of trying to repel boarders?
     Suddenly I howled. Not in bliss but in agony. I had dislocated my finger. Then Edith screamed. Bravo, Millard. Millard the climaxologist, the bringer of the little death. But no. Edith’s cry was neither the ecstatic affirmation of my sublime lovemaking nor the explosion of blessed release. It was simply the pain experienced when a sharp, jagged, dirty fingernail (with an edge like a serrated bread knife) is driven into a sensitive area at the confluence of a myriad of nerve endings. What I mistook for the supreme compliment was more like the cry of a harpooned whale. It was unnerving. I jumped, expecting to be set upon by a horde of enraged Greenpeace activists.
     We retreated to our respective corners. Our cut men did what they could for us. When the bell rang, I bounced eagerly to the center of the ring. I was ready to mix it up. Like a tray table at takeoff, I was in the fully upright and locked position. Edith was covering up. Unlike the Maginot Line, her flanks could not be outflanked. I was overmatched. Edith possessed that bred in the bone southern knack of bringing you to a gasping, panting boil and then unilaterally declaring a ceasefire. My assault was beaten off. Alas, I was not. I hadn’t even won her hand. Self-help seemed unseemly. Soon that all too familiar ache had seized my nether regions. In a few years this common and agonizing affliction, this crippling scourge known as “blue balls” (but not confined to liberals) would become nothing more than a memory as we moved into the all-too-brief golden age of universal promiscuity sandwiched between the frigid fifties and the plague years that followed.
     Nevertheless, I was undeterred and determined to go where Eliot, for whatever reasons, had failed to tread. I knew what needed to be said. Edith had gasped out something about love. I acknowledged her transmission, rogered her last, tossed her my troth and continued to march. The drawbridge fell, the portcullis rose, the girdle no longer girdled, the forlorn hope stood down from its suicidal mission and fortune, I thought, crowned my sword. The citadel threw open its gates. Arrrrrh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! E! E! E! E! E! E! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! AAAAAAAAH! Yeaaaah. My siege engine discharged its awful load. Edith was mine. It was also clear that she had been someone else's. Eliot, for once a loser but always the good sport, agreed to be my best man. Why, I wondered, was he smirking through the entire ceremony?
     Within a year of our wedding, Edith’s mother died of kidney failure, and her father, shut down by his bank, went into Chapter 7. Depression and the drugs she used to combat it erased Edith’s already diminishing sex drive. Her figure ballooned, going in just a few months from a robust 8 to a haus frau 16. She began consoling herself with the ample remains of her parent’s wine cellar as supplemented by her own dwindling assets. In no time at all, the Edith I had wed vanished into the body of a boozer. She had a cask for a torso and sticks for arms and legs. Given the brevity of our marriage and the absence of children, our parting was quick and relatively inexpensive. My great uncle, he of the split bamboo fly rods, would have understood.  Merely a case of catch and release. My Edith episode was just another well-laid scheme which as Burns would say, “gang aft a-gley.”
     Deprived of my place in the Kentucky squirearchy, I took the law boards, scored brilliantly (besting Eliot here as I would on other fields) and followed the lead of other directionless contemporaries. There, after my wasted year and Eliot’s worthy year, we reunited at Harvard Law School. Eliot and Clare, about whom – more later, chose to live in an apartment adjacent to the law school so he'd be close to his study group. Ugh. I found more agreeable lodgings in a carriage house off Brattle Street.
     Worm-wood and gall. As we sat together in the Curtis and Perkins reception area watching dust motes floating in the sunny, slow-moving air, I remember thinking that having won Edith I had at last closed the gap on Eliot. And in doing so secured a comfortable future. But no. During my year with Edith, the worthy Eliot had served six months in the Marines, and done good deeds on a Pima Indian reservation (where he met, courted and won the heart of a fellow do-gooder, the incorruptible Clare). Eliot, the Red Sox fan, would have hated the analogy, but he was too much like my Yankees – calm, assured and regal, unaware of me clawing, scratching and always trying to play catch-up.
     So there I waited, as though seated in a tumbrel on its way to the Place de la Concorde. I had counted on Edith to provide me with a sedentary life of sensuality and sloth. I had lived up to my end of the bargain. I had been an eminently presentable husband. She had failed me most grievously. Now I had to make my time at Curtis and Perkins as easeful, brief and lucrative as possible. I needed to put myself in charm’s way, in a position where I would meet a cross section of women, each of whom was financially secure and needed an Andrew de Peyster Millard to complete herself. How best to realize these goals at Curtis and Perkins?
     Could litigation be my path to riches? If you fail, the chances are good you can angle a judicial appointment. Do the fat ones go to food courts, I wonder. After all, better to have billed and lost than never to have billed at all. I could have been a star in litigation. Even now, I thrill to the idea of throttling my foes, tearing off their armor and mutilating their bodies, but not at the cost of my evenings, weekends and vacations. Real estate was and remains sickening. Bankruptcy? The practitioners and clients there are almost as bad as those in real estate, not that I have any trouble with being a jackal. Labor law? The province of the loud and uncouth. Divorce? Interesting. No standards. Amorality rules. Wealthy, needy, distraught women. On balance, too messy.
     Business law? Yes, business law. I've got what it takes. While erratic off the tee, my short game is fantastic. I'd need to get there before Eliot. He'd be a shoo-in with those codgers. Even a place as unorganized as Curtis and Perkins probably wouldn't allow two-thirds of its freshman class to opt for the same major.
     I needed a mentor and who better than Mr. Clark, our fading but once effulgent star, a man whose wishes were still commands on the three floors occupied by the firm he had once dominated. How to showcase my ability, my character and my commitment. Wholly apart from Eliot I had to move quickly because, based on my observations, it wasn't clear Mr. Clark would make it to Christmas. I studied his habits, and I can report he was a creature of habit. Regularity was his watchword. I learned the times of his arrivals, his departures and his trips to the hospitalities. I hung about on the ninth floor, our Olympus, watching, observing and taking mental notes. I made it my business to cross Mr. Clark's path at least once a day Monday through Friday and twice on Saturday mornings when I was my most aggressively cheerful.
     At every encounter I barked out a crisp yet deferential, "Good morning, Mr. Clark," throwing in a snappy "Sir" in order to differentiate myself from the other sycophants. To hammer home my message and acknowledge my humble station, I added, "Andrew Millard, Sir." It took me at least a dozen such ambushes before I received any form of acknowledgment and another few weeks after that before my jaunty salutation produced anything like approving recognition.
     I sprang my trap of 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 14, 1963. I know because I recorded it in my lawyer's diary. Mr. Clark never got to his office later than 10:05 a.m. (frighteningly early for someone his age). At that hour he was usually Rico's only passenger and vulnerable to assault. I was lurking in the ground floor lobby, "studying" the building directory when Mr. Clark negotiated the revolving door and tottered toward Rico's outstretched hand. I scuttled into the cab before Rico returned with his burden. Neither of them noticed me.
     Rico positioned our senior partner behind him against the back wall. He wrapped several of Mr. Clark's unsupple fingers around the safety rail, assumed his position on the quarter deck and checked the preparedness of his passengers. Next Rico squared away his visored cap, faced front, levered shut the outer door, closed the grating, took the joy stick in one gray-gloved hand and with an authoritative semi-circular motion sent his battle star into the billable empyrean.
     I had little time to act. Rico was rushing Mr. Clark to nine before off-loading me in steerage.
     "Good morning, Mr. Clark, Sir. Andrew Millard."
     Mr. Clark half turned in my direction. His hand dropped from the safety rail. It took him two floors to bring me into focus.
     "Good morning, Mr. Millard. I'm not certain we've been introduced. Ezra Clark."
     "Yes, Sir. I know who you are."
     "You're new here, aren't you?"
     "Yes, sir, I am."
     "What do they have you doing, Mr. Millard?"
     "A little of everything, Sir. A great deal of memo writing. Many (sigh) trips to the Social Law Library."
     A promising but unintelligible sound from Mr. Clark.
     "Do you have any idea yet as to what you might like to do?"
     "Yes, Sir. I sure do, Sir."
     We had reached nine. Rico had the elevator perfectly aligned with the floor. Mr. Clark shuffled forward and debarked. I considered but rejected the idea of offering him my arm. That kiss-ass Rico might get away with it, but not me. Not on his own turf where, for as many months as he had left, he was king. I followed Mr. Clark from the elevator. The nearly bald Miss Landry inclined her ample upper body in a gesture of submission and respect.
     I took a chance. I didn't really know what the fuck it meant but I blurted out, "Transactional work, Sir."
     "Really?"
     A good guess, my man.
     "Yes, Sir. Absolutely."
     “In that case, come see me tomorrow.”
     “Yes, Sir. I’ll be there.” With bells on, I thought.
     I sensed that my audience was over. Not wishing to press my luck or be seen as descending to utterly grotesque levels of self-abasement, I bowed and shuffled backwards toward the elevator. What must Rico have thought? He was uncharacteristically poker faced. He'd seen it all before.
     At 10:15 a.m. the next morning I was in Mr. Clark's office looking into his watery eyes and thinking, Beware of what you wish for.
     With a face resembling a scrotum after a cold shower, Mr. Clark appeared to have been recently exhumed from the Valley of the Kings. His doleful canine expression suggested he might have been distantly related to Anubis. He had a faraway, centuries faraway, look about him. Had his brains been removed through his nostrils or was this the unavoidable consequence of over forty years in a law firm? What happened to Mr. Clark at night? Was he injected with fresh embalming fluid, wrapped in linen and laid to rest in a sarcophagus with good lumbar support?
     There was something else, a not inconsequential something else if we were to work together and I was to share his space. Mr. Clark reeked. "Smelled" doesn't begin to do him justice. When you got within range your head was snapped back by a sharp, penetrating odor. Just what happens when a stone hits your windshield. How to describe it? Putrefaction comes closest. Was it contagious? I wouldn't be getting much if any of that rubbed off on me. Where was Mrs. Clark when hubby toddled off to work?
     What could have been the source of this aroma, this effluvium? Rotting organs? Unwashed clothes? An unclean body? A long-unpurged build-up of toxins? Decaying unbrushed teeth? That must have been it. However, it was impossible to identify the offending teeth as all of them appeared to have been fused together by a grayish green or greenish gray substance that over time had hardened into an impenetrable coating.
     And what was I expected to do if Mr. Clark collapsed in my presence? Remember, this was before defibrillators. Were Curtis and Perkins juniors expected to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Would I have to clamp my lips over his and inhale the vapors of the crypt? Would I be obliged to deliver him to Charon? Be positive, Andrew. You've aced out your buddy, Eliot. "Think not what your law firm can do for you, but ..."
     Now what?
     Silence.
     "Mr. Millard, would you like to ..."
     Puff.
     "Work on a ..."
     Pause. Smoke leaked from Mr. Clark's mouth and nose.
     "Deal?"
     Crossing my fingers as I leaned forward and looked my most trustworthy, I replied, "Yes, Sir, Mr. Clark. Absolutely."
     Mr. Clark studied his cigarette as he considered my response.
     Was I losing it? I am unused to maintaining an alert and respectful demeanor. "Revolted" would have best described me at that moment. Meanwhile I was reaching for a word from my only college science course (geology). "Fumarole."  Yes, Mr. Clark was a fumarole, a crack in the earth emitting gas and vapor.
     A dry hack followed by another, more liquid, cough. I slid backwards in my chair.
     "We are going to represent the underwriters ..."
     I liked that “we.” Clearly he meant the two of us. He must have been thrilled with my answers. I'd obviously snowed the old coot. Also, I was relieved. I thought he was going to say “undertakers.”
     "Of First Mortgage Bonds ..."
     A rodent-like nibble at one of his cookies.
     "Of a Massachusetts electric utility." Pause. "An investor-owned electric utility."
     Mr. Clark withdrew a handkerchief from his cuff and attended to the crumbs. I could tell the old prick was wondering if I'd grasped the significance of the utility's being investor owned. I hadn't and what's more I didn't give a rat's ass. But I had to maintain an appearance of enthusiasm so I nodded with the resolution of a B-17 pilot who has just drawn another daylight mission over the Ruhr.
     Mr. Clark cleared his throat. Months perhaps years of compacted phlegm heaved upward, reached its apogee and slid back into the abyss.
     "Have you ever ..."
     He waved at an ash that had landed on the broad lapel of a double-breasted suit that was probably out of fashion in the Coolidge administration. If he hadn't been so out of it he would have felt diminished by my sense of style. That would have been a problem.
     "Worked on a ..."
     What, for Chrissake, what? I'd hardly worked on anything. Sweet Jesus, I'd just gotten here. O.K. O.K. Take a breath. Slow your pulse. Tamp it down. Erase the sneer.
     "Public offering?"
     "No Sir, Mr. Clark."
     My sharp ears picked up the soft sibilance of escaping gas. Since it wasn't me, there was no doubt of its source. Mr. Clark had become a noisome bouquet of smells. I studied his furnishing. I thought of other things. I bit my lip. Giggling would be fatal.
     Once I'd composed myself, I turned to face Mr. Clark.
     "That will be all, Mr. Millard."
     For now, I assumed.
     As I left his office I noticed that Mr. Clark was rearranging his privates.
     Next morning I spied Eliot sprinting for the stairs. "Where's the fire, big guy," I drawled.
     "Mr. Clark wants to see me," said Eliot.