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By Proxy
by
Three times, only his grandmother’s influence kept him from being expelled from the exclusive prep school she had enrolled him in, and his final grades were nothing to mention in polite society, much less boast about.
In her own way, the old lady was trying to do her best for him, but she had found it difficult to understand her own son, and his deviations from the Porter norm had been slight in comparison with those of his son. When the time came for Malcom to enter college, Grandmother Porter was at a total loss as to what to do. With his record, it was unlikely that any law school would take him unless he showed tremendous improvement in his pre-law courses. And unless that improvement was a general one, not only as far as his studies were concerned, but in his handling of his personal life, it would be commercial suicide to put him in any position of trust with Porter & Sons. It wasn’t that he was dishonest; he simply couldn’t be trusted to do anything properly. He had a tendency to follow his own whims and ignore everybody else.
The idea of his entering the clergy was never even considered.
It came almost as a relief to the old woman when Malcom announced that he was going to study physics, as his father had done.
The relief didn’t last long. By the time Malcom was in his sophomore year, he was apparently convinced that his instructors were dunderheads to the last man. That, Elshawe thought, was probably not unusual among college students, but Malcom Porter made the mistake of telling them about it.
One of the professors with whom Elshawe had talked had said: “He acted as though he owned the college. That, I think, was what was his trouble in his studies; he wasn’t really stupid, and he wasn’t as lazy as some said, but he didn’t want to be bothered with anything that he didn’t enjoy. The experiments he liked, for instance, were the showy, spectacular ones. He built himself a Tesla coil, and a table with hidden AC electromagnets in it that would make a metal plate float in the air. But when it came to nucleonics, he was bored. Anything less than a thermonuclear bomb wasn’t any fun.”
The trouble was that he called his instructors stupid and dull for being interested in “commonplace stuff,” and it infuriated him to be forced to study such “junk.”
As a result, he managed to get himself booted out of college toward the end of his junior year. And that was the end of his formal education.
Six months after that, his grandmother died. Although she had married into the Porter family, she was fiercely proud of the name; she had been born a Van Courtland, so she knew what family pride was. And the realization that Malcom was the last of the Porters–and a failure–was more than she could bear. The coronary attack she suffered should have been cured in a week, but the best medico-surgical techniques on Earth can’t help a woman who doesn’t want to live.
Her will showed exactly what she thought of Malcom Porter. The Porter holdings were placed in trust. Malcom was to have the earnings, but he had no voice whatever in control of the principal until he was fifty years of age.
* * * * *
Instead of being angry, Malcom was perfectly happy. He had an income that exceeded a million dollars before taxes, and didn’t need to worry about the dull details of making money. He formed a small corporation of his own, Porter Research Associates, and financed it with his own money. It ran deep in the red, but Porter didn’t mind; Porter Research Associates was a hobby, not a business, and running at a deficit saved him plenty in taxes.