The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Very well, Jo,” I said softly. “You do just that.”

  “I’m sorry, Guy.”

  “I’m sorry, Jo. That you should feel compelled to push me around this way. But I shan’t put up with it. I have not organized and developed a great club to be treated in this fashion by one of its junior officers. We will both have our reports to make tomorrow. Good day, Jo.”

  As I sat, contemplating the telephone that I had replaced in its cradle, I considered what else I might have said or done. It was a bad hand to play, but it seemed to me that I had played it for all there was in it. What more could be expected of a man? And now, for the first time, I faced with unblinking eyes the possibility that I could go to jail.

  I am happy to record that my nerves steadied as my sense of the danger intensified. Leaving my office for a walk, I found that I could even take a curious interest in the totality of my disaster. With Georgia Phosphates down and only twenty-four hours before the Glenville board meeting, I was in a hopeless position to raise three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, unless I could get them from Rex Geer. It was out of the question now to go to Karl Vender. It was out of the question to go to anyone to whom I could not make a full confession. And how few would be those of my friends and acquaintances who would not be secretly delighted at the spectacle of my catastrophe! Oh, I did not kid myself. Nor did I blame them. Only in war, when disaster is the rule, do men lose their taste for it.

  I walked west toward the big black Gothic spire of Trinity that loomed at the end of the narrow corridor of Wall Street like a giant phallus, fitting symbol of the ruthless world of male competition. It was much more to me the house of my family than the house of God, for my grandfather had been Rector there before he had been Bishop and my ancestor, Lewis Prime, was buried in its graveyard under a chaste black stone. As I passed beneath the portal of the twelve apostles I slackened my pace and squared my shoulders, trying to look as if my visit was a usual occurrence. It is always risky for a financial man to be seen entering a church on a weekday.

  I sat as usual in a back pew near the marble bas-relief of my eagle-nosed grandfather. It had been the seat of my few market inspirations. I felt no impropriety in using a church for such purposes because Trinity seemed to me to stand for what the Primes stood for: the survival of a small, tough piece of Knickerbocker New York on an island overwhelmed with the old poor of the old world and the new rich of the new. Of course, Trinity was not itself very old, being the replacement of a twice-burned church and designed in the eighteen-forties by that same Up-john who had built my grandfather’s Newport villa, but it was still older than anything else in the street, and richer, too, for it owned blocks of the very downtown land on which the new money was being made. Yes, it was a kind of Prime.

  But Trinity and I were not in tune that morning. I felt that it might forgive me my crime but never the exposure. Old New York knew too much about the value of appearances. And would even my physical appearance pass? I remembered the image in the mirror over the Glenville bar: the ruddy face, the tweedy look, the vulgar health, the seeming loudness. What had any of that to do with the lean dark meanness of the early Primes? Had honesty fled with boniness, and virtue with the stiff collar? Would not my own father have distrusted a broker who went to work in a colored shirt? Was it any real argument that fashions changed?

  There remained the Almighty. His only begotten Son in the altar window, flanked by the four evangelists, was richly caparisoned in sapphire and scarlet. All the other windows in the austere church were as plain as Primes; only over the altar, only in the Redeemer was there color. Could that mean there was redemption for me? It is a curious fact that in all my visits to Trinity Church, only in this last one did I pause in all my giddy associations to consider my relations with God. It was no time to neglect potential allies.

  In my childhood Mother had been the one who had cared about matters spiritual while Father had concerned himself exclusively with the here and now. As she had always ailed and as Father had enjoyed robust health, I had grown up to think of God as a rather heedless being who neglected his devotees. If only Mother had depended on me, I would mutter to myself as I watched her bowed in prayer, / would not let her down I But Mother seemed aloof to terrestrial help. Her eyes sought only eternity.

  I have a photograph of us, taken when I was fifteen, which has always graced my bureau, even in jail, even in Panama. Mother is seated stiffly in a high-backed chair, her waved white hair and diamond choker recalling the style of photographs of royal persons, but her thin cheeks and rather haggard intensity bespeaking a world of worries. And I, round and uncoordinated, with blond straight hair parted in the middle, seem to have strength to spare, life to throw away, as I lean awkwardly over the chair, one arm about her seemingly quivering shoulders, as if by hugging her I could give her some needed transfusion of vital energy. Yet she, erect, uncompromising, willful in the agony of her love for me—agony because she knows that she will die and leave me and that big as I am, strong as I am, I cannot do without her—seems with desperate gaze fixed on the camera to deny my help, not only because she is doomed and beyond it, but because she knows that I will need every scrap of strength that I can offer her for myself.

  Father never objected to Mother’s religiosity until it threatened to affect his plans for me. Then he acted quickly and decisively.

  One Christmas vacation, down from St. Andrew’s, I got drunk at a debutante ball with two of my cousins. They were sober enough to see me home and up the three narrow flights of stairs in the family brownstone without awakening anybody, but they could not help what happened afterwards. I was sick to my stomach, abominably sick, and Mother, whose room was directly under mine, appeared in my doorway as white and terrible as an angel on Judgment Day.

  “Go down on your knees!” she cried in a hoarse, unfamiliar tone. “Go down on your knees in your vomit and pray God to forgive you for this night’s wickedness!”

  And down I went on my knees, and she too, in my vomit, by the side of the bed, while she prayed aloud.

  “Dear God, may this disgusting performance convince this sinning child of the error of his ways. Lead him from the gutters of Mammon to the clean avenues of Thy presence. Teach him the dangers of the frivolous pursuits of society and make him see the stinking cesspools that lurk below its lacey covering.”

  Yes, people in 1903 could still talk that way. But one person who never had any use for it was Father, and by my third piece of bad luck in one night, he too was aroused by the events on my floor. When he appeared in the doorway, in his red and black silk dressing gown, he might have been playing Mephistopheles to Mother’s Marguerite.

  “For heaven’s sake, Eunice, what are you doing out of bed at this hour? Do you want to catch your death?”

  She turned to him, still on her knees. “Can’t you smell it?”

  Father raised a handkerchief to his nostrils. “I can detect the aftermath of an evening where boys seem to have been rather too boyish. But surely you don’t expect God to clean it up, do you? That’s a lot to expect, no matter how hard you both pray. May I suggest that we move Guy to the guest room and close the door here until our faithful Agatha can get to this mess in the morning? Unless, of course, you want to rouse her now?”

  “Percy, have you no concern for our boy’s soul!”

  “Really, my dear, at three in the morning? There’s a time for everything. Let us all get to bed.”

  Mother was on her feet now, almost distracted with her concern. “Percy, this may be our last chance to save him! Don’t you see what’s happening?”

  And then, suddenly, the operetta was over. Suddenly a very different sort of drama began to unfold. For the first time in my life I saw Father drop the air of faintly mocking gallantry with which he habitually treated Mother.

  “I’m afraid I do see, Eunice,” he said in a chilly tone. “I’m afraid I see that you’re trying to turn the boy into a mollycoddle. He’s got to learn to live in this world befo
re he learns to live in the next. You, my dear, have always avoided that, but you are not a man. It is my job to see that Guy understands the things a gentleman must understand. Religion is only one of these. Drinking is another.”

  “Percy!”

  “I realize that shocks you, my dear, but you’ve brought it on yourself. You know that I brook no interference with my plans for Guy. Not even from you. I am quite determined that he, at least, shall enjoy the experience of living.”

  “You call what happened tonight living?”

  Mother was leaning forward now, one hand over her mouth, as though she, too, were going to be sick, her other hand and arm jerking sharply up and down in a gesture that seemed desperately to protest any answer that he might make. My agony at hers tore at my stomach like a saw. She seemed to be having a kind of a seizure, but when I ran to her she thrust me roughly off.

  “Father!” I shouted. “Don’t you see you’re killing her?”

  Mother swayed to the doorway and down the stairs, clutching the banister as she went. I hurried after her, with little groans of commiseration, but she would not turn, and when she reached her door she shut me firmly out. I even heard the key turn in the lock. I think I would have pounded on it in hysteria all night had Father not followed me and turned me around to shake me by the shoulders.

  “I’ll tell you something important, my boy. Women are a good deal tougher than they look. Watch how mercilessly they treat each other. If I hadn’t learned that, your mother would have long ago turned me into a lapdog.”

  The next day he was as charming and courteous to Mother as if nothing had happened, but there was no question in anyone’s mind as to who had won the bout of the night before. Mother continued to fight for God in dozens of little ways, reminding me to go to church, putting a Bible on the table by my bed and warning me never to place another book on top of it, applying Scripture to all kinds of small humdrum problems, but she never again came to my room at night to urge me to pray for forgiveness. God, her God, had been put in His place.

  What could a man do but stand on his own two mortal feet? What could a man not do but not drivel and fawn and weep? I rose now and left Trinity for what turned out to be the last time. Neither Christ nor His evangelists, nor Peter with his keys, nor the good bishop behind me with his fine aquiline nose, had any message that I could carry to my creditors.

  Returning to my office I dialed Rex’s number myself. The de Grasse operator told me that he was in a partners’ meeting, but I insisted that she tell his secretary to get him out. When he finally came on the wire, he sounded very cross. “What is it, Guy? Can’t it wait till tonight?”

  I had quite forgotten that he and his son George were dining at Meadowview. It was to be a family party for a discussion of wedding plans with George and Evadne.

  “I’ve got to have three hundred and fifty thousand dollars by tomorrow morning,” I said flatly. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “God, man, what’s up?”

  “I’d rather not tell you over the phone.”

  “Can you give me an idea?”

  “Well…” It was before the days of universal wire tapping, and I knew that our old switchboard girl did not listen in. “I’ve got to get hold of the America City bonds in my security account at your shop.”

  “All of them? Why?”

  I moistened my lips and then threw it at him. “Because it so happens that they’re the property of the Glenville Club.”

  “You mean the Club allowed you to pledge them?”

  “I mean no such thing. The Club doesn’t know.”

  “Jesus, man I” Rex’s tone was high and piercing, as it always became, soaring from its usual low gravity, in moments of crisis. It had an immediately calming effect on me.

  “You see my problem.”

  “But, Guy, how could you?”

  “What’s the use of that, Rex? You’re my last chance. It’s you or ruin.”

  “I’ll have to think about this. Good God, it’s not easy, you know! I’ll talk about it tonight.”

  “But, Rex, I have to have those bonds in the morning. If I’m to have them at all.”

  “You will. If you have them at all.”

  “I knew I could count on you, old man. Friendship is thicker than blood.”

  “I haven’t promised anything.”

  “Of course not. You never do.”

  No sooner had I put down the receiver than I picked it up again to ask my secretary to call Jo Beal. She got him before I had even had time to gauge my reaction to Rex’s reaction.

  “Jo, I’ve been thinking about those bonds,” I started off. “I guess it was silly of me to let you get my back up. After all, you were only doing your job. The board meeting tomorrow is at five, isn’t it? Suppose you round up that auditor and bring him here at noon? I’m going to the vault at eleven, and I can pick up the bonds then.”

  Jo simply collapsed. It was surely the worst diplomacy in a man of his supposed business acumen to reveal so baldly what his suspicions had been. “Oh, Guy, that would be just swell! Of course, I’ll bring him. But if it’s really inconvenient for you, I’m sure we can arrange it for another time. Dellwood can wait. Hell, they’re only too glad to merge with us, anyway.”

  “No, as you said, there’s no point making an issue of something that’s going to take fifteen minutes. Tomorrow at noon, then. And bring an armed guard so you can take the bonds back with you. I had thought they were as well off in the president’s vault as in the treasurer’s, but after all, I am a broker. Let’s do everything according to Hoyle.”

  I hung up and stared at “Storm in the Catskills” and wondered sadly what was left of Guy Prime now that he, like his daughter, was to be delivered to the Geers.

  5.

  FATHER ALWAYS felt that my best friend, Rex Geer, and my wife, Angelica, were the two great mistakes of my life. Certainly, my relationship with each was entered into over his open protest. I think I can see now that they represented, not so much my conscious desire to defy him—for Father was rarely so arbitrary as to put himself in a position where defiance was a feasible act—as my desire to impress him. I wanted to show him that I could acquire something on my own, that I could pick out of the corners of a world into which his elegance did not shine some golden nuggets of whose very existence he was ignorant, yet whose value, thrust under his nose, he could hardly deny. Of course, I should have known that Father was a past master at denying values.

  If Angelica’s family were to stand for the corner, unvisited by my parents, of cultivated and cosmopolitan living, Rex’s were to fill up the corner, unvisited at least by Father, of evangelical religion. The Reverend Jude Geer was a fine, big, spare, clean man of God, the Congregationalist minister of a small Vermont parish, and his wife, as large and spare as he, had borne him eight splendid children of whom my friend was the senior. In middle age Rex was to publish privately for his friends and relatives a memoir entitled “My Boyhood in a New England Rectory,” which I privately subtitled “From Lux to Lucre.” But in sober fact the Geers were almost too good to be true.

  We did not become friends until junior year at Harvard. Our lives were too different. I existed luxuriously on the liberal allowance that Father, for all his scrapings, managed to put aside for me. I took courses in English and history of art and submitted gaudy poetry to the A dvocate; I entertained liberally at restaurants and fancied myself a terrific dandy. But, for all my social efforts, I had few real friends. Oh, true, I had dozens and dozens of the friendliest acquaintances; I was probably welcome in more rooms than any other man in the class. Why not, with high spirits and a bubbling laugh that could pass for wit? Nor was I the Philistine that many people later supposed; I could quote copiously from Matthew Arnold, Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde, and I considered “The City of Dreadful Night” the most powerful and terrifying poem ever written. I could talk until dawn about life and sex and go freshly to class without having slept an hour. I knew all my professors
and called at their houses. Was I simply too bright-eyed, too anxious to please, too much the young aristocrat, the Pendennis, the Clive Newcome, to be quite believable?

  Today I would have been considered ripe for a serious love affair, but in 1906 this was not so usual a solution. I had held hands and necked with the less discreet debutantes of the period and had imagined myself the summer before (to Father’s disgust) passionately in love with one of my poor Fearing cousins, and I had passed, with bursting pride, the customary tests of manhood in Boston cat houses. But to fill the great gap in my young and surging heart I needed a friend, a particular friend, a Pythias, a Jonathan, who would direct me as well as understand me, who would help me prove to myself that I was a man as well as a Prime. And just such a friend did I think I had found in Rex Geer.

  This is not all hindsight. I knew what I needed at the time, young as I was, and when I saw Rex I seemed to recognize at once my solution. He was already one of the prominent men of ‘07: a powerful debater, a first-rate boxer, and, academically, first in the class. Only a reputation for extreme sobriety and toiling industry (he was, of course, a scholarship boy) dimmed his popularity. Rex, like his family, was, if anything, a bit too worthy.

  Yet I liked his worthiness. I had plenty of qualms about my own frivolous existence—Mother’s shafts had not all been thrown away. I was attracted to a man who was as ascetic as even her standards could require. And Rex was a fine fellow to look at, too. He was handsome, not with the bursting blondness of my brief moment in the sun, but with a taut, tight cleanness that has lasted through the years. His later became the face that magazines like Fortune always wanted to illustrate articles on Wall Street. It hardened; it was hardening even at college, but it was the rigidity of justness and clear thinking and exact application. Rex had short, stiff, wavy, inky hair that he never lost, and wide-apart, brooding, gray-green eyes that rarely committed themselves. His brow was high and fine, his nose Roman, his complexion pale and clear. When he became angry, his features settled slowly into a formidable, craggy expression. But in college his high cheekbones and pallor still gave him at moments an almost romantic air.