Powers of Attorney by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

correspondence?”
    â€œHe asked me to help him on a personal matter.”
    â€œDo the partners do that?”
    â€œWhy not? We’re the hired help, that’s all.”
    â€œWhat kind of a personal matter?”
    â€œOh, just an income tax deduction.”
    â€œWhy didn’t he go to the tax department?”
    There were a dozen ways that he could have foiled her, but he was angered at the obvious distrust in her tone. “All right, I went into his files to find out about the merger. What’s wrong with that?”
    â€œJake Platt! You old snoop!”
    Her tone was sharper than her words, and there was a gleam of old suspicions in her frankly staring dark eyes, a note of “So you
are
that sort, after all.”
    â€œMay I remind you that I have a career to look after?” he asked irritably. “May I remind you that I have a wife and child who depend on it?”
    â€œOh, don’t put it off on Jock and me. If you’re going to snoop, snoop for yourself.”
    â€œHonestly, Leila, it’s high time you came out of dreamland. You can’t expect the partners in Tower, Tilney to come to
me
and tell me they’re on the skids. Chances are they don’t know it themselves.”
    â€œThen you ought to tell them!”
    â€œAre you quite mad?”
    â€œWhy is that mad? Why shouldn’t you go to Mr. Tilney, who’s done so much for you, and tell him frankly about your fears for the firm? Maybe you and he could work out some system to save it.”
    Jake covered his face with his hands and uttered a low groan. “Because that isn’t the way life is,” he was murmuring, but he stopped. What was the use? “Anyway, it’s too late. You can’t arrest that kind of rot once it’s started.”
    â€œAll you can do is leave the sinking ship, is that it?”
    Their eyes met in a stare that was suddenly grim.
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œDoes your decision to be a rat mean that I must be a rat’s wife?”
    Jake knew that the satisfactions which they derived from this kind of argument were not worth the damage it did to their relationship. He closed his lips very tightly and nodded his head slowly as he counted to ten. “You must do as you see fit, my dear. I’m only trying to be a good husband and father.”
    The following night he did not come home but worked until dawn at the office, arranging his matters and calculating the time that it would take him to complete each. It was the only way he knew of reorienting his thoughts and emotions after the tumultuous invasion of the irrational as represented by his wife. It seemed a pity that a man could not find even in his home life a chance to relax from the ceaseless hypocrisy which the whole world demanded, but so it was. Remorselessly, other humans, males and particularly females, required that he should toe every minute, every second even, the line of fatuity that was to them more than an imagined line, that was to them, presumably, a saving granite wall that hemmed out a thrusting jungle of horror. If one had the ill chance to be born a freak or a Mowgli, and to understand the jungle, one had to spend a lifetime persuading one’s fellow monkeys (for what else were they?), despite their screams and chattering, their flung coconuts and scampering up and down the trees, that they weren’t in the wilderness at all, that they were confined instead in a nice, neat, cozy zoo where their cages would be cleaned in the morning and where they would be fed at noon. But it made life a weary business for the freak.
    At half past eight Barry Schlide burst into his room with a red beaming face full of news. “Say, Jake, what do you
know?
I’ve got the hot dope on the Standard-Commerce merger!” He paused as he took in Jake’s unshaven and haggard appearance and whistled. “Hey, haven’t you been home?” When Jake simply shrugged impatiently