The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Prime?”

  “Nothing, George, nothing at all. Only I think I’ll go back to the bar. Sometimes, when I look at you and think that here’s the man who’s actually going to take away my Evadne, I have a kind of shock. But don’t worry. I’ll come around. God bless you, my boy.”

  I talked with the men at the bar, but I could talk to them and think of the other thing. I could talk to them and speculate that I might at last be losing my mind. Three hundred and fifty thousand! My stock of Georgia Phosphates, the principal security for my loan, had been dropping badly all winter, and I had been tossing everything I could lay my hands on, including some of the America City bonds, on the pile at de Grasse to prevent a sale, but I had not dreamed that it had reached even a fraction of such a total. If what George said were true—and could one doubt it?—more than half the Club’s bonds were hypothecated for my loan.

  “Coming to lunch, Guy? It’s nearly two.”

  “No, go ahead, fellows. I’ll join you later.”

  I would go to Karl Vender in the morning. He would give me the money quickly enough. But I would have to watch myself in the future. I was alone now in the bar, for Pierre had gone to the pantry, and I surveyed the desolate pink face that loomed over the sport coat in the mirror facing me. Was that Guy Prime? That scared rabbit? That fat phony? Slowly, carefully, almost solemnly, I raised my empty glass until it was high above my head and then hurled it with all my force at that fatuously staring image. The shocking smash brought instant ease to my troubled soul as it brought Pierre, unblinking, back to the bar.

  “There’s been an accident, Pierre,” I said impassively. “I seem to have broken my glass.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I fix you another drink, Mr. Prime?”

  “No, that will be quite enough. I’m going in to lunch now.”

  If the rest of the world would only be as sensible as Pierre, I reflected, I might still come out all right. But Pierre was part of the club I had created. I had not created the world that I faced each Monday.

  3.

  WHAT WAS the background? Well, what is a family? Is it anything more, as I have already suggested, than the predominance of male issue over female? We speak of families “dying out,” simply because the direct male line from father to son has been snapped. The hundreds of descendants of Lewis Prime, who came from Liverpool to New York in 1740 to establish an auction business, include some of the most distinguished merchants and lawyers of Manhattan’s history, but few of them were Primes. All of our renown, such as it is, rests on the simple fact that my grandfather, the Reverend Chauncey Prime, Rector of Trinity Church and later Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, had seven sons who made almost as many famous matches. Puck’s Weekly in 1881 ran a cartoon that showed railroad and steel magnates desperately piling up their bags of gold before a group of tall, indolent, blond young men in sports clothes, with tennis rackets under their arms, who barely condescend to glance at the bait thrust under their languid eyes. It was entitled: “What Your Money Will Buy, or The Quest of the Primes.” A decade later, in the ‘nineties, the same bait was sent over the Atlantic in search of coronets, but by that time my uncles were all comfortably settled.

  How did they do it? What did they have? Certainly not brains, nor business acumen, nor imagination, nor wit, nor even great looks. They were tall, slim and very straight, and had long, rather wooden, oblong faces that bore age well. Their resemblance to each other, which was of great assistance to the younger ones, was almost comic, for the father of an heiress, seeing that his neighbor in Newport had done well with one Prime, was pleased to find another available. The new rich always copy each other, and once the Prime fashion had started my uncles had only to bow to it. They had only, in short, to believe in themselves and in the world that constituted their immediate environment.

  That may have been the answer, that they never questioned anything. They were too serene ever to suffer from the acidulous suspicion that is the bane of the conservative; they smiled with a sniff at the future, just as they smiled with a shrug at the mention of a name that they did not know socially. They did everything one had to do well but not too well; excessive expertise in the saddle, at the card table, even on the golf course, might have seemed “showy.” Only in clothes did they really let themselves go, as if from some deep consciousness that their true function was to decorate the stage of society and persuade the observer that it was real. When I think of them now, I think of grays and whites and blacks, of striped trousers never wrinkled, of maroon gleaming shoe leather, of pearl studs and gray spats and gloves, of canes and tall gray hats, of gray against emerald garden parties, of gray against the glittering blue of a Newport sea and under a bright sun. My uncles at least made measured sense out of a life that was notoriously a source of discontent to the many who lead it.

  Oh, they were bargains, all right, cheap for the relatively little they cost. They were faithful husbands, unlike the peers who followed them, and conscientious stewards of the money they had married. Like figures in Saint-Simon, they had implicit confidence in the validity of the social game as it was played from day to day. They grasped it by instinct, which was the only way to grasp a game without logic or even a set of rules, sensing intuitively which parvenu would make the grade and which divorcée would be forgiven, covering up the inconsistencies, like good priests of Mammon, with a mellifluous roll of generalities in which they at times almost believed. It is not surprising that their descendants should have totally lacked their style, for the later Primes inherited caution and thick skins with the maternal wealth, and concentrated more on the keeping of dollars than the making of friends. Indeed, by the time I grew up, the money of Fisks and Goulds and Villards had become so associated with my relatives that people began to believe there must have been a great Prime fortune. It was this legend, perpetuated in the social columns of a thousand evening journals, that created the particular problem of my youth.

  For my father, Percy Prime, had married for love. He was the brightest and the most attractive of the brothers and had been expected to make the greatest match. There was even, uniquely among Primes, something of the artist in his make-up, for he saw the world of parties as something that could be made as beautiful as one aspired. To him the organization of a cotillion or picnic, the seating of a dinner table, the selection of wines and music, were matters quite as important as the making or merger of corporations. There could be no point to the latter without the former, he always insisted, as there could be no point to splendid moneymaking without splendid expenditure. What saved him, as it saved his brothers, from the ridicule of his male contemporaries, was that in the role of social arbiter and adviser to hostesses, a role usually associated with the effeminate, or at least the epicene, he was uncompromisingly strict and masculine. Father was just as happy among the gentlemen after dinner as with the ladies at lunch. I see him now, with his chair pushed back, his long legs carefully crossed, leaning forward to place his brandy glass on the edge of the table and turning, with the easy deference of a trusted staff officer, to ask the richest man present his opinion of the last government intrusion upon industry. He knew little of such matters, but he knew how to ask a good question.

  It may have been precisely Father’s trouble that he had too much imagination. It may have been why, in the short run as well as the long, his brothers did so much better. Bellevue Avenue and Fifth must have been at times the least bit nervous at what their images might be in Percy Prime’s bright, blank, serenely gazing, sky-blue eyes. Society people, at least in that day, like to glaze their materialism under the icing of religiosity and the spun sugar of a late Victorian sentimentality. But Father refused to apologize for his own materialism; he reveled in it, boldly baring the very facts the others sought to hide. He conceded with a blatant cheerfulness the sisterhood of the Colonel’s lady and Rosie O’Grady and deduced without a qualm that only a bank account separated the New York top from the New York bottom. What
then, he would conclude, was more glorious, more worshipful than money? New York worshiped money, to be sure, but not in public or on Sunday, and Father caused uneasiness with his vigorous genuflections to the golden calf.

  Why then did this paragon of the age of elegance, who could have dipped his beaker in those fulvescent waters on whose surface his words were always skipping, bear it instead to the stagnant shallow pools of old New York? My maternal grandfather, Jonas Fearing, had been accounted a merchant of substance; he had a Swiss chalet at Bailey’s Beach and a chaste red brick town house on Washington Square; he was a charter member of the Century Association and a friend of William Cullen Bryant. But what was all this in the dawn of Standard Oil? What was so fascinating about my mother, of faded prettiness and gentle ways, dowdy of dress, utterly unaware that it was not still a world of Fearings, already thirty-six years old and distinguished solely for having once won the ladies’ archery contest at Mrs. Julia Ward Howe’s?

  Perhaps it was her very unawareness of the times. Perhaps it was Father’s nostalgia, born of the bitterness that must have lurked beneath his flamboyant philosophy, for that simpler society which Eunice Fearing represented to him, the New York of quiet afternoon calls in brownstone streets, of a mild rubbing of elbows with landscape painters and even Shakespearean actors, of long midday meals with Madeira to which the men came home, of insularity and integrity, of small minds and high principles. I have always treasured my Grandfather Fearing’s scrapbooks and still spend an occasional evening, with a pleasure that Carmela can never fathom, turning the pages of old hotel menus and calling cards, of photographs of gabled houses and crowded porches, of huge engraved wedding announcements and diminutive Times obituaries. Mrs. Wharton knew what she was doing when she called this era the “age of innocence.” It may have been its evocation that Father in a sentimental moment, surfeited with Mammon, considered his salvation. He should have reflected that sentiment is short and salvation long.

  They were married, at any rate, Percy Prime and Eunice Fearing, the exquisite forty-year-old bachelor and the stately, demure virgin, and all Newport went to the wedding in the summer and gathered afterwards on the lawn around the chalet and drank the couple’s health by a shimmering sea. It was a question of their starting at the top, for thereafter everything seemed to slide, inevitably if almost imperceptibly, down the long gentle velvet incline of a life in which there was never quite enough to do but just enough to keep one from doing more.

  From my beginning, all Father’s hopes centered in me. My sister Bertha, Mother herself, being women, could not help. He made it clear that everything he had was mine: all of his little money and his greater ambition and all of his peculiar brand of love—peculiar in that I shared it with no one else. He never hurried me, never pushed me, rarely complained that I made no higher grades or grander friends. I could take all the time in the world and have all the fun in the world, but when I was ready, he wanted to know. That was all.

  And when I was ready, he set me up; he established me in the firm which thereafter bore my name. He bought my seat on the Exchange and put up the capital. He did it by using all the money, in a single magnificent gesture, that he had not borrowed from his rich brothers in all the long hard years of his married life. Never once, even when mother was at her most ailing, did he take a single penny for her doctors or for her pleasures. On the contrary, he poured out sums that he could ill afford in presents for his wealthy sisters-in-law and nephews and nieces, on birthdays and on Christmases, and nearly bankrupted himself paying tips to their servants and buying outfits for their sporty weekends. It was bitter tea, keeping up with his rich relations, but he did it all with a view in mind of the day when he would be able to go to his brothers and say: “Never have I dunned you before. What will you do now for my only son?” And when that day came, the money was forthcoming as readily and as willingly as he had foreseen. My uncles were not imaginative, but even they could appreciate so perfect a father’s love.

  In all the wreckage of my career there remains one thing for which I continue to be grateful to the dark deities who presided over my collapse: that Father never lived to see it. He died, at ninety, in his room at the Glenville Club, which I always reserved for his spring visit, after attending a great dinner that I had given in honor of the visiting King of Siam. He had seen me reach a social altitude never attained by his brothers, and he expired with his own particular Nunc Dimittis on his lips. It is perhaps of some significance that the only person I never let down was the only person whose faith in me was complete.

  4.

  I WAS ALWAYS very proud of my office, which was unique for Wall Street. Prime King Dawson & King occupied the top floor of No. 65, but the banal, if splendid, view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty I had abandoned to my partners and employees. For myself I had kept the noble chamber in the center of the floor, forty feet by twenty, possessed of no window but entirely covered by a great skylight. On the walls, painted a glistening white, I had hung my Grandfather Fearing’s collection of Hudson River canvases: “Source of the Amazon” by Church, “Storm in the Catskills” by Cole, “Indian Bivouac” by Durand. The effect of these, with their rolling mountains, broad prairies and tumbling rivers, was to make one feel as if one were rushing across the American continent in a low-flying, open plane.

  The first of my callers, on that spring Monday morning of 1936, after the Sunday revelations at the Glenville Club, was my junior partner, Bert King. He brought the sorry news of another terrible slide in Georgia Phosphates. His long handsome face, still boyish at forty, had become pinched and dry with eight years of anxiety.

  “You make me wonder if the ancients didn’t have a point,” I complained. “They used to put the bearers of evil tidings to death. If I’d tossed you out the window years ago, do you think my luck might have turned?”

  “I’ll save you the trouble, Guy. I’m ready to jump now.”

  I tried to picture how he would look if he knew what I knew. Decidedly these younger men, depression weary, lacked the bounce of my generation.

  “Buck up,” I told him. “It can only get worse.”

  My grandsons will learn from their elders and betters that foolish investors always blame their failure on bad luck. But I wonder if even the wisest watcher of the market could have foreseen the hurricane that wrecked my Caribbean resort island, the patent suit that delayed the production of my Vita-Glass houses, the title flaw that paralyzed my phosphate mines, the federal investigation that slandered my tranquilizer pills. If only one of these projects had been realized in 1936, my troubles would have been over. All were realized ultimately—that is the killing part. If I owned today the stock in those four companies that I owned twenty-three years ago, I would be richer than any partner in de Grasse.

  When Bert left, my secretary rang to say that she had Jo Beal, treasurer of the Glenville Club, waiting on the line to talk. Jo was one of those serious-minded insurance executives in whom the need to please is at constant war with their natural sense of the bleakness of things.

  “Sorry to bother you, Guy,” he started straight off, “but Elkins said you wouldn’t discuss the America City bonds with him at the club yesterday. I know he had no business bothering you on Sunday, but we are a bit pressed with the board meeting tomorrow. Do you think I could possibly make an appointment for the auditor to see those bonds this afternoon?”

  “I won’t be in this afternoon, Jo.”

  “Couldn’t someone in your office take care of it?”

  “Handling securities? Certainly not. I always like to take care of those things myself.” My tone was mild, but my fingers were gingerly tapping my rapidly dampening brow. Was it possible that my margin of operation had dropped to a single day?

  “What about this morning, then? Suppose I bring him over now?”

  “I’m afraid I have appointments all morning.”

  “But, Guy, that makes it a bit tough on me, if you don’t mind my saying so. I put it on the agenda
of tomorrow’s meeting that we would ratify this merger with Dellwood Beach. If it has to go over to the fall meeting, the whole deal may fall through.”

  “Well, I don’t see how we can do it, Jo. What about next week? I’ll be freer then. If Dellwood doesn’t like it, to hell with Dellwood. We can find plenty of other beach clubs to merge with.”

  “Now, Guy, what kind of talk is that?” There was a sudden sharp whine in Beal’s tone, and I sensed the immediate diminution of his old-time awe of me. How fast we fall when we fall! Like comets, as a thousand poets have said. “You’re not going to make us lose Dellwood because you can’t find two minutes for an auditor, are you? Besides, it’s not Dellwood’s auditor who’s requesting the check. It’s ours.”

  “I still don’t see why next week isn’t just as good. We could call a special meeting of the board if we have to.”

  “Look, Guy, those bonds are there, aren’t they?”

  I had to catch my breath at this. What could have happened to make Beal so bold? Were there other losses besides Georgia Phosphates of which I was ignorant? Had word got about that I had pledged the bonds? Or was there some bit of bad news in the air, perhaps unjustly attributed to me, of which no one would speak? That is the hell of the market: everything affects it, most of all untruths. “Of course, they’re here. But they’re down in the vault, and it’s not convenient to dig them out. Not today, anyway.”

  “Well, I don’t see it, I’m sorry. You won’t let the auditor check them and…”

  “I didn’t say that, Jo.”

  “That’s what it seems to boil down to. I’m going to report to the club board tomorrow that you’ve had those bonds for six months and can’t find two minutes to exhibit them!”