be impressed by anything like the Chicago award.
Some people in Westport—mostly on the outer concentric rings—said that Chester Hazen was nothing but a rapacious old Wall Street lawyer who had stolen millions in his heyday and now was trying to atone for his former depredations with a pretense of good works. Stanton didn’t know whether it was true or not, and didn’t care a great deal. It seemed to him that what Hazen was doing at present for the general welfare mattered more than what he might or might not have done forty years ago. Anyway, he was a cultivated and engaging old gentleman who looked as though he might have stepped out of The Pickwick Papers or just climbed down from the top of the Liverpool-London stage in one of those old prints. He had a merry face—bright pink cheeks and clear blue eyes with white tufted brows which sprouted like spring tulips. He was half a foot shorter than Stanton, and he had a massive, leonine head of white hair which gave him the appearance of a wigged English barrister. Stanton never saw him without thinking of the lawyer in Conrad’s Youth: “. . . fine crusted Tory, High Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honor. . . .” Hazen also happened to be a senior partner in a Wall Street law firm with clients like DuPont, Standard Oil and General Electric; Hazen himself had won a million-dollar patent suit for one client within the month. Even at his age he was a bit of an exquisite. He carried a cane, which he didn’t need, and he tapped Stanton’s suitcase and said, “Off to Chicago, eh?”
“Yes, Mr.—Sir Chester.” Stanton smiled.
“Ha! Sir Chester, well, that’s all right. Not going to congratulate you again, Stanton, about your honors, know all that. Think I told you last week how pleased—it’s great, great!”
“Thank you. I don’t know how great it’ll be after tomorrow night. I’m supposed to make a speech.”
“Speech! Nothing to it!” Hazen flicked his cane. “Listen—tell you a little trick. Something I learned a long time ago, when I tried cases in court. It’s a banquet, isn’t it? The speaker will introduce you?”
“Why, yes, I suppose so,” Stanton said. He was now quite perplexed. Why should Chester Hazen—?
“All right! After you’re introduced and stand up, don’t start talking right away. Wait a few seconds. Look them over. Look slowly—slowly, mind you—from left to right across the audience and then back and forth so you cover as many faces as you can. Then wait another second or two. That makes them wonder whether you’re stalling, or whether you’ve forgotten what you wanted to say, or whether—anyway, you have their attention, main thing. It works. It always works.”
“Is that the secret of your success?” Stanton said, smiling. “Hypnotizing juries by staring at them?”
“Never mind. Remember what I say when you stand up behind that table.”
“I will,” said Stanton. “And thanks for the tip. It certainly comes from one who knows.” He expected Hazen to withdraw at this point, but the old gentleman showed no disposition to leave.
“Don’t you usually go south about this time of year?” Stanton inquired. “You’re not going to sit out one of our Connecticut winters, are you?”
“No, no, I’m too old. The cold gets into my bones, and I stiffen up like a board. No, as a matter of fact, I’m leaving Sunday—be back once or twice a month, of course.”
“Mrs. Hazen going down with you, I suppose?”
“Mrs. Hazen? Oh, she’s been down all week. Left last Monday with her sister, to open the house.”
Stanton frowned in a puzzled way. “That’s funny,” he said.
“Eh? Funny? What’s funny about it?”
“Not her being down South, of course. It’s just that I thought I heard Betsy—Mrs. Wylie—say she had been talking to her on the phone this morning, about the Red Cross Drive. I must have misunderstood.”
Hazen’s head was tilted back. He seemed to be making a concentrated inspection of the thick black power lines strung between high black steel towers marching along the right of way. He half turned to Stanton and started to say something, then stopped. “What’s the news this morning?” he asked, glancing at Stanton’s paper.
“I haven’t looked at it yet.” Stanton unfolded his Times. The significant headline—the one over the two right-hand columns—read: GROMYKO AGAIN REJECTS U. S. ATOM PROPOSAL. SAYS BOMB MUST BE SHARED WITH ALL.
“Same thing,” he said. “The Russians are still saying ‘no.’ ” He paused and scanned the first paragraph of the story. “I wish that once in a while the peace news could be as good as the war news used to be. Remember the war headlines toward the end? Advance, enemy routed, successful invasion, new landings—victory? Now what have we got?”
“Hmph, see what you mean,” Hazen agreed. “Still, I had the idea you were more or less pro-Russian, Stanton? You don’t sound it.”
Stanton laughed. “A good many people seemed to get that idea. It started with a letter of mine that was published in the Westport Herald. I simply pointed out that thirty years after the American Revolution we were a pretty cantankerous and self-conscious nation ourselves, and that maybe the newness of the regime over there had a good deal to do with the way the Russians are behaving. I wrote the letter because I thought it might cut down some of the violent talk I’d been listening to around here, but of course it didn’t. People began talking about me as though I were in the pay of the Kremlin.
“No, I’m not pro-Russian,” he continued. “I’m not especially anti-Russian, either. I just have no patience with self-righteous dogmatists, whether they’re Russians, Republicans, Baptists or anything else. Here’s our train,” he added, as the blunt green nose of an electric locomotive came into sight down the track and rumbled across the drawbridge over the Saugatuck. Stanton had seen occasions when all traffic on the New Haven was blocked at this point so that a couple of kids in a sailboat could go through the bridge.
He was positive that Hazen would bid him adieu as they boarded the train, but instead the old lawyer said, “Mind if I sit with you?”
“Of course not,” Stanton said. “I’d be delighted.”
“I’m glad I ran into you,” Hazen said, after they were settled. “I nearly called you at your office yesterday.”
“So?” Stanton smiled. “I can guess what about—those plans for the youth center, isn’t that it? Actually, I drew them up in rough last week, but I haven’t submitted them yet because I’m waiting to hear what we can get in the way of materials. You know, we talked about glass brick for the façade? I’m afraid we’ll have a tough time getting any before late spring, and we want to have the center finished by then. Of course we could put up a temporary wall and replace it later on when the glass brick is available. How does that strike you?”
“Eh? Yes, yes, I’ll recommend it.” Hazen coughed in an embarrassed way and looked out the window. “I’d never worry about you doing the plans, Stanton, or anything else you said you’d do. Always know I can depend on you. Not like some of these other fellows we have on the committees, all promises and no performance.” He paused. “No, there was something else I thought I might want to discuss with you.”
“Well,” said Stanton. “Here I am. Shoot.”
Hazen shook his head. “This wouldn’t be quite the
