Free Powers of Attorney by Louis Auchincloss

know unless—well, unless he won. And his heart bounded as he thought of the paneled office that Tilney would have to assign to the director of the Hubert Foundation.
    A new office was only the first of many imaginative flights in which he riotously indulged. He saw himself dispensing grants to universities and hospitals, called on, solicited, profusely thanked. He calculated and recalculated his executor’s commissions on increasingly optimistic estimates of the Colonel’s estate. In fact, his concept of the old man’s wealth and his own control of it, the apotheosis of Rutherford Tower to the position of benefactor of the city,
the
Tower at long last of Tower, Tilney & Webb, began, in the ensuing months, to edge out the more real prospect of disappointment. The fantasy had become too important not to be deliberately indulged in. When he turned at breakfast to the obituary page, he would close his eyes and actually pray that he would not find the name there, so that he would have another day in which to dream.
    When the Colonel did die, it was Phyllis, of course, who spotted it. “I see that old Colonel Bill is dead,” she said at breakfast one morning, without looking up from her newspaper. “Eighty-seven. Didn’t you say he’d been in to see you?”
    For a moment, Rutherford sat utterly still. “Where did he die?” he asked.
    â€œIn some lawyer’s office in Miami. So convenient, I should imagine. They probably had all his papers ready. Why, Rutherford, where are you going?”
    He didn’t trust himself to wait, and hurried out. In the street, he bought copies of all the newspapers and went to a Central Park bench to read them. There was little more in any of the obituaries than the headlines: “Former Army Officer Stricken” or “Husband of Mrs. J. L. Tyson Succumbs.” He could find nothing else about the Miami lawyer. After all, he reasoned desperately as he got up and walked through the Mall, wasn’t it only natural for the Colonel to have Florida counsel? Didn’t he spend part of the year there? But, for all his arguments, it was almost lunchtime before he gathered courage to call his office. His secretary, however, had to report only that Aunt Mildred Tower had called twice and wanted him to call back.
    â€œTell her I’m tied up,” he said irritably. “Tell her I’ve gone to the partners’ lunch.”
    For, indeed, it was Monday, the day of their weekly lunch. When he got to the private room of the Down Town where they met, he found some twenty of them at the table, listening to Clitus Tilney. Rutherford assumed, as he slipped into a chair at the lower end of the table, that the senior partner was telling one of his usual stories to illustrate the greatness of Clitus and the confounding of his rivals. But this story, as he listened to it with a growing void in his stomach, appeared to be something else.
    â€œNo, it’s true, I’m not exaggerating,” Tilney was saying, with a rumbling laugh. “There are twenty-five wills that they know of already, and they’re not all in by a long shot. Sam Kennecott, at Standard Trust, told me it was a mania with the old boy. And the killing thing is, they’re all the same. Except for one that has forty-five pages of specific bequests, they all set up some crazy foundation under the control of—guess who—the little shyster who drew the will! Sam says you’ve never seen such an accumulation of greed in your life! In my opinion, they ought to be disbarred, the lot of them, for taking advantage of the poor old dodo. Except the joke’s on them—that’s the beauty of it!”
    Rutherford did not have to ask one of his neighbors the name of the deceased, but, feeling dazed, he did. The neighbor told him.
    â€œDid any of the big firms get hooked?” someone asked.
    â€œGood Lord, we have
some
ethics, I hope!” Tilney answered.