The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Guy, honey,” she exclaimed when she saw me, “you’re cute to come! Tell me about that handsome roommate of yours. He’s become quite a caller here. How do you make him talk? I declare I can’t get two words out of him.”

  “Rex is not a ladies’ man. I suppose he chats with Uncle Chauncey?”

  “With Chauncey? I don’t think Chauncey’s even met him.”

  This was good. Certainly, the less Rex saw of Uncle Chauncey, the better. “Maybe you scare him, Aunt Amy.”

  “Me? As if I could scare a fly!”

  “Perhaps it’s your pearls, then. They are ominously large.”

  I found Alix in the library and took her to a window embrasure. As the oldest of my generation I was rather a hero with my female cousins. I used to quiz them and advise them on all their little love affairs.

  “You’ve been holding out on me,” I said severely. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

  Alix cast down her eyes with a demureness that I was supposed to be stupid enough to take seriously. “I can’t imagine to what you are referring.”

  “You can’t imagine that, sharing an apartment with my best friend, I might have a suspicion when he’s smitten?”

  Alix’s oval, pale face became almost stern. What did he see in her? She twitched her shoulders, and her satin crackled. More than ever she was like a doll in an expensive dress. “I fear that Rex has been indiscreet.”

  “If you call infatuation indiscretion. The poor fellow’s in such a bad way that he almost beat the life out of me for abusing you.”

  “I wish he had!” she cried indignantly. “How were you abusing me?”

  “I was only telling him that old story about your trouble with the boy who took away the wet bathing suits at Bailey’s Beach.”

  “Guy Prime, you made that up!”

  “And then about the footman with the big calves whom Uncle Chauncey had to get rid of.”

  “Really, you’re too disgusting to be borne. I’m glad Rex beat you up.”

  “Look at the glint in those eyes! What a pity poor Rex didn’t pick a simple girl from his own home town. But seeing he’s stuck on a ‘sassiety’ type, I suppose I must plead his cause.”

  “Some pleader,” Alix retorted with a sniff. She was beginning to realize that she would not get anything out of me without betraying some interest, but she still tried. “Tell me about this unhappy swain,” she continued airily. “One knows so little about him. His father, I gather, is a minister?”

  “His putative father.”

  “His what?”

  “It’s all part o£ the mask. Rex is in reality the son of a very great man.”

  “He is!” Alix’s eyes were now really popping.

  “Yes, his real father is the Stuart pretender to the British crown. But don’t tell anyone. His life wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel if fat old King Edward were to catch him.”

  Alix’s little red puff of a mouth formed poutily into an oblong like her face. “Oh, Guy, you can never be serious.”

  “But I am serious. I was just trying to find out something, and I succeeded.”

  “What?”

  “That the only thing you have against Rex is his humble birth. If he were an eligible millionaire, you’d fly into his arms soon enough.”

  “I’m not flying into anyone’s arms, thank you very much,” Alix responded tartly. When I had no comment to make on this, she continued with a shrug of impatience: “Well, of course, one cares who people are. I have Pa to face. You have your pa. Be fair, Guy.”

  “Oh, my pa.” I dismissed him with my own shrug. “He married for love.”

  “You’re perfectly odious today! I won’t talk to you.”

  “Then I’ll talk to you,” I said, catching her by the arm. “Where do you think your branch of the family would be today if a young man called Thompson, born in much humbler circumstances than Rex, a tailor’s son, had not robbed his way to the top of the textile industry?”

  “How can you talk so vulgarly? Grandpa Thompson was a most distinguished man!”

  “He was when he died.” But people of recent fortune in that day lived so utterly in the present that the past did not exist for them, even as a thing to be ashamed of. “Tell me, Alix, do you ever stop to consider that when you marry, you’ll be marrying a way of life as well as a man?”

  “I hate to consider what sort of a way of life your wife will be marrying!”

  “No, be serious, please. Who do you think had more fun: your grandparents in their clamber to the top of the pile, or your parents in their dull existence at the summit? Which would you want for a husband: a man who would take you with him to the places where the exciting things of our century are happening, or a pink-faced boob out of a Turkish bath at the Racquet Club?”

  “A pink-faced boob out of a Turkish bath at the Racquet Club!” Here she stretched her arms mockingly towards me. “Marry me, Guy!”

  It was this gesture that gave her away, that made me suspect that she might, after all, care a little bit for Rex. Love him? Could she? I was not sure. But I knew that this bolder humor, this stretching out of her arms, was not characteristic of the old Alix. Someone had given her a confidence that she had quite lacked before, and I began to wonder if Rex might not, after all, make something of her. It was not promising material, to be sure, but in the hands of a man who cared—well, who knew?

  I examined Rex about it that night and elicited the fact that he and Alix had already met twice alone for walks in Central Park. This, in a girl so cautious and so protected, was evidence of a considerable involvement. Rex also admitted that he had proposed to her and that she had accepted his commitment without in the least committing herself. I could not help laughing.

  “She’s as sly as her father,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’ve spoken to him?”

  “Spoken to him! He’s hardly aware that I exist. How could I speak to him when I’m not in a position to support a wife? Not a wife like Alix, anyway.”

  “Oh, I suppose Alix has her own money.”

  “I wouldn’t touch a penny of it!” Rex exclaimed excitedly. “All I want her to do is to wait until I’ve got on my feet. I’ll get there. You’ll see!”

  “My dear fellow, I have no doubt I’ll see it. My only question is how long Alix will be allowed to wait. Particularly if Uncle Chauncey finds some duke for her.”

  “Her mother’s on my side.”

  “Aunt Amy’s a cipher. As an ally, she’s more of a liability than an asset. I’ll have to sleep on this.”

  But instead of doing that, I lay awake much of the night. Why, really, should it not be a match? Alix was a goose, but so long as Rex did not mind, why should I? He had more than enough brains for two. And if I had had faith in the power of a poor Rex to move mountains, what ranges might not a rich one move?

  Their only hope, I concluded, was in elopement. It would be pointless even to ask Uncle Chauncey. The American rich of his generation were too unsophisticated in their worldliness. A French or English father might have scented Rex’s future; Uncle Chauncey would have seen no further than his present bank balance. But what would Uncle Chauncey be able to do with a fait accompli? The fortune, after all, was Aunt Amy’s, and would go in time through trusts to her daughters.

  Summer was upon us; my parents had already left for Bar Harbor. Aunt Amy was to pay them a visit early in July, taking her three daughters, while Uncle Chauncey was to go cruising with his bachelor brother-in-law, Commodore Thompson, on the latter’s steam yacht, “The Wandering Albatross.” In the morning I suggested to Rex that we take our vacations simultaneously and go to my family’s in Bar Harbor during Aunt Amy’s visit. The poor fellow was pathetically grateful. There was no talk now of any lacking of the right clothes or any deficiency in the social graces. Alix’s prospective visit to Mt. Desert Island had endowed the despised summer colony with the aura of a shrine. Of course, I did not tell him my scheme. I hoped that events in Bar Harbor might take care of themselve
s.

  8.

  WE WERE tightly packed in the little shingle villa halfway up Mr. de Grasse’s hill, but Aunt Amy’s enthusiasm made it a cheery houseparty. It was touching to see how eagerly she shed the grandeur in which Uncle Chauncey kept her so sternly invested. She had her bed pulled out on the sleeping porch and put her younger daughters in her room; Alix shared a room with my sister Bertha; Rex doubled up with me. Father was perfectly content so long as none of our arrangements interfered with his own room and dressing room. The era of “children first” had not yet arrived.

  The natural foursome, as I had planned it, was Rex and Alix, on one side, and my sister Bertha and myself on the other. Four young people for tennis, for walks, for swimming parties, what could have been more natural or more innocuous? It was no fun for me, for Bertha, at a stout, solid nineteen, had still much of the explosive self-pity that had marred her maturing years, and it was hard on my male vanity to be seen constantly in the company of such a wallflower, but I was resolved that for two weeks at least I could bear it.

  Yet it was Bertha who upset my plans. She proved not to be content to linger behind with me on a tour of Jordan’s Pond while Alix and Rex sauntered ahead. She was as bored with my company as I with hers and had none of my motives for concealing it. On the contrary, she had developed a violent crush on Rex and was always trying to edge her way between him and Alix. And to make matters worse, whether it was from maidenly timidity, lack of imagination or simply innate good manners, Alix appeared to tolerate her intrusions.

  Alix was indeed an enigma. She accepted our house and household, not with the disarming enthusiasm of her mother, but more daintily, as if she were being very gracious on some annual organization outing, some special anniversary picnic, where the servants, once a year, sat down with the princess. I wondered if she did not enjoy her visit to the Percy Primes in some of the same way that she seemed to enjoy her flirtation with Rex, as things that were pleasant, titillating, perhaps even exciting, but not, in the last analysis, quite real, things that belonged to summer and to a sea resort and to brightly colored umbrellas on a beach, things that one had, by implication, to put away in the crisp days of early autumn when one took up city things, social things, real things. Where did reality go in summer? Ah, that was just it, reality was off cruising up the Maine coast aboard “The Wandering Albatross.” Rex would not have had even the little that he did have if Uncle Chauncey had been there.

  He did not think, certainly, that he was getting much, and he became progressively gloomier as the visit wore on.

  “I sometimes think Alix cares more for her clothes than she does for me,” he grumbled one night after we had gone to bed. “Do you realize we’ve been here nine days, and she hasn’t worn the same dress twice?”

  “You must really be in love,” I muttered. “I never knew you to notice a dress before.”

  “Is it possible, do you think,” he persisted, “to break through the barrier girls like her put up? It’s like a wall of pink and yellow ice cream, with spun sugar for barbed wire, on top. But don’t let that fool you! It’s as impenetrable as steel.”

  “Love seems to have given the banker’s language a colorful turn.”

  “But you know what I mean, Guy,” the anxious voice came to me through the darkness. “After all, you’re a Prime. You know the society attitude that identifies the unfamiliar with the comic. All I have to do to make Alix smile is to mention East Putnam or the public school that I went to there or the fact that my father’s a Congregationalist minister. She doesn’t mean in the least to be unkind. But middle-class things are supposed to be funny, like hay fever or hives.”

  “And lower-class things?”

  “Oh, they’re different. They’re sad—when they’re not dangerous. We shake our heads over the poor.” He snorted in derision. “Of course, it’s simply childishness at bottom. I remember the first time I discovered that every boy’s father wasn’t a minister. It struck me as very funny. But I’ve grown up since. Alix still feels that to mention any denomination but Episcopalianism is to say something, well if not exactly crude, certainly embarrassing.”

  “Ah, my poor fellow, I can see you’ve learned the ways of society! And to think what a simple unspoiled creature you were a year ago! Maybe you should give her up.”

  “Give her up? How can I give her up? Or give up the part of me that’s bound to her? He sprang out of bed and paced angrily about the room. “It’s easy enough for you to say that. You’re not in love with Alix, and, besides, it’s incredible to you that I should be. Oh yes, I know how that is. I never really believe in my sisters’ beaux. And then you don’t appreciate Alix. You don’t recognize her enormous potentialities…”

  “But, Rex, you know I’ve changed my mind about all that!”

  “You say you have, perhaps you think you have, but have you really? I’ll never forget what you said about her before you knew how I felt!”

  The unfairness of this got me, too, out of bed. “You might at least have the decency to admit that I’ve been on your side in this thing!” I exclaimed angrily. “I’ve come up here on my vacation when I could have gone salmon fishing. I’ve spent all my days in the company of my dear sister which could hardly be deemed anything but a sacrifice. I’ve left you and Alix together; I’ve kept my father’s attention distracted; I’ve played court jester to the whole damn family houseparty. And all for what? To be told that I lack sympathy. All right, Romeo, from now on you can paddle your own canoe! I’m going back to New York.”

  In a moment he had bounded to my side and gripped both my shoulders. “Please, Guy, forgive me. Make allowances for my insanity. You’ve been a brick. I know it’s not your fault that the more you do, the worse things get. It’s mine! No, honest to God, I’m not being sarcastic, I mean that!”

  I stared into the darkness, but could make out no expression in the thicker gloom that was Rex’s head. Then I decided that I wanted no further speculations that night. I was tired, upset, perhaps a tiny bit scared. “Go to bed,” I said gruffly. “Maybe things will be better tomorrow.”

  “They could hardly be worse,” was his only rejoinder.

  I reviewed my conduct painstakingly as I lay in bed. Had I in any way, consciously or unconsciously, betrayed Rex’s cause? I had certainly changed my habitual demeanor to Alix. Instead of treating her with the semi-contemptuous familiarity of an older male cousin, rubbing the nose of her pride in the dirt of my insinuations, mocking her, exposing her foibles, I had behaved to her with the seriousness due to my best friend’s Egeria. I had asked her advice about my parents, my money troubles, my career, even my girls. Alix’s advice on all these matters was, needless to say, quite worthless, and like most worthless things it had come in abundance. She had obviously been flattered to be asked. Had I in any way distracted her attention from Rex?

  I was determined to find out the answer, and the very next morning, before breakfast, while Rex was off on a solitary early walk, I asked Alix to come out and talk with me on the veranda. It was one of those rare brilliant Maine July days, and Alix, in blue, looked for the first time almost like a woman. “I want to tell you something. If you’re playing with Rex, I don’t know how much more he can take.”

  “Playing with him!” A faint pink of indignation appeared even under Alix’s high pallor. “If a game is being played up here, why am I the person accused of playing it?”

  “I suggest that you have given my poor friend, who’s head over heels in love with you, reason to believe that you reciprocate his feeling. If you don’t, you are most certainly playing with him.”

  “I’ve given him reason! I like that, Guy Prime. Who brought him up here? Who’s always leaving us alone together?”

  “But you were seeing him alone in New York, Alix!”

  “Why should I not see him alone in New York? What business is it of yours whom I see or don’t see in New York?”

  I was certainly taken aback by this. “But if you were glad to see him in
New York, why shouldn’t you be glad to see him in Maine?”

  “That’s my affair! The point is, you have no business making plans for me. Or for Rex!”

  This was very spirited for Alix, and I looked with sudden mistrust into those popping blue eyes. “You mean you have no idea of marrying him? That you never had?”

  “I mean that I have no intention of telling you my marital plans!” she cried with a petulant little stamp of her foot. “When I have any, I shall tell them to my father. Can you give me any better advice, dear cousin?”

  “Yes,” I retorted, surly now. “I suggest that we go and have breakfast.”

  As I started away, I heard my name called in a sharp, tense voice, and I turned back in surprise, to find her apparently overcome with embarrassment.

  “Yes, Alix?”

  “Stop playing John Alden!”

  Saying which she giggled, shrilly and foolishly, and hurried past me into the dining room, where Father was already seated.

  Holy stars! What could she have meant but that I should plead for myself? I will never know, for I never asked her. All my wits had to be summoned for the emergency of soldering up this rapidly deteriorating situation. My grandsons may be surprised that it never occurred to me to be flattered by the possibility of such a passion in my heiress cousin. Yet it never did, not for an instant. I was too absorbed in helping poor Rex, and, besides, the idea of love between Alix and myself seemed incestuous. We had been raised together, more like siblings than cousins. Furthermore, Alix had no attractions for me, even objectively viewed. I was still a romantic, for all my gift of common sense, and I had the greatest dreams of what my wife should be: beautiful, brilliant, sultry, voluptuous. When I was looking for Cleopatra, could I stoop to the consanguineous fondlings of Victorian fiction?