Diary of a Yuppie Read Online Free PDF

pleasant rural road. He could afford to send me away to Haverstock Academy for my last year of high school, so I was able to enter Columbia with some air of being a "preppie." And poor Mother, spare, thin, angular, apprehensive, has always been so fiercely defensive of him that I believe she has almost dreaded that my own incipient success might tear the blinders from his eyes as to what his own career has not been. She needn't worry. Deep down he knows. People always know.
    My reaction to Father's position in Burr & Doyle was one of violent humiliation, all the worse in that I recognized that the truly shameful thing was my feeling so. Father and Mother were very well thought of in Keswick; their friends and neighbors would have been shocked by my attitude. But my trouble had begun at the age of twelve when I had the bad luck to see my father through the eyes of the snotty son of a senior partner. Mr. Doyle and Father were exact contemporaries and had started in the then firm of Burr & Hutchinson right after law school, even sharing an office. The rise of one to senior partnership while the other remained a salaried associate naturally put a strain on the friendship, but Mr. Doyle was not a man to let it too glaringly show, and he always affected a rather demonstrative heartiness towards Father when they met. Once, when we were asked to a firm outing at Mr. Doyle's estate in Roslyn, Long Island, his son Tom was delegated to take the lawyers' children on a ramble in the woods. Walking in the lead with me he asked me my name. "Oh, yes," he commented when he heard it, "you're 'Old Jake's' son. My dad says yours is one of his top clerks. 'They don't make 'em like Old Jake anymore,' he always says. 'They broke the mold after they made him.'"
    Oh, the compliments of children! That one broke my life in two. I thought of Father from then on as a kind of Uncle Tom, and I should not have been surprised to hear that the usually benevolent Mr. Doyle, chancing to find his faithful servitor in some breach of duty, had brought the lash down on his stooped shoulders. To my parents' dismay I refused ever again to go to a firm outing, becoming almost hysterical when pressed. And when I graduated from law school I hurt my father deeply by declining even to be interviewed for a job in Burr & Doyle, although Mr. Doyle, impressed by my grades and
Law Review
editorship, had been genuinely anxious to offer me one. But I knew that David Burr, Jr., had just been taken in as a partner, and I would rather have died than give people the chance to quip: "Burr & Doyle is the only firm in town with a father and son among the partners and a father and son among the clerks!"
    Now who would have said a thing like that? Very likely nobody. But the fact that I knew that my soul was the only one on fire did not make the suffering less acute. Indeed, the only thing that would have made it more acute would have been precisely if others
did
suspect it. Alice, for example. She might have left me had she known that I was ashamed of my father, whom she adored. But then Alice's mind is as different from mine as day from night. She may hardly realize that Dad is
not
a partner!

5
    A TLANTIC R YLANDS has lost its bid to take over Shaughnessy Products, and even though it has made millions out of its defeat because of the boosting of Shaughnessy shares it had to acquire, the feeling among its officers is bitter. It is an instance of money not being everything; victory can be more coveted than profit. One vice president went so far as to imply to me that Blakelock's friendship for Albert Lamb had signally reduced his aggressiveness. What would this officer have said had he known of the unused opportunity of Lamb's brother!
    "Frankly, Bob," he told me, "there were some of us—and I don't mind including the chairman of our board—who wish you'd been in charge."
    "Oh, come now. Branders Blakelock is one of the undisputed leaders of the New York bar. He's taught me