The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  But Rex, alas, poor Rex! How was I to detach him from his beloved without destroying our friendship? It was lucky for me, and I hope for him, that the same hour which brought the realization of my problem brought also its solution. Father, who had been silent and pensive all during breakfast, asked me now to go with him to his study.

  “Close the door, Guy. I have something disagreeable to discuss with you. It concerns your friend Geer. Has anything been going on between him and Alix?”

  “Going on, sir?”

  “Well, I’ve noticed, of course, the usual dalliance that one expects of young persons on a houseparty. But this morning, as I was coming downstairs, I saw them below me in the hallway. She jumped away from him suddenly, as if they had been kissing or as if he had been trying to kiss her. I couldn’t be sure which.”

  “Is that so terribly shocking?”

  “It depends on the circumstances. When the young man is Mr. Nobody and the girl is not only my niece but a considerable heiress, I think it is. At least when it happens under my roof.”

  “You think, then, that Rex has no right to look at her?”

  “To look at her? You talk like a green kid. To look at her money, you mean.”

  “You’re insulting him!”

  Father slapped the surface of his desk hard. “You will mind your tone with me, sir!”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Take care that you are and listen to me. I want you to weigh what I have to say and…”

  “But, Father…”

  “Shut your mouth, sir! When I tell you to listen, listen. Your friend Geer has taken advantage of your affections and your confidence to obtain a place in society of which he could not otherwise have dreamed. For that, as I have told you before, I do not blame him. But the trouble with Mr. Reginald Geer is that he is greedy. It’s not enough that through your family he has had the entrée into some of our best houses and a splendid opening in a great banking firm. Oh, no. He must fly higher still. He must have a fortune to boot!”

  Father paused here to observe the effect of his oratory. When I thought he was prepared to receive a comment, I suggested as mildly as I could that Uncle Chauncey had found his own fortune at the altar. He brushed this aside.

  “The cases are not at all comparable. Your Uncle Chauncey offered your aunt a position in society which would never have been hers without him. Geer offers Alix nothing.”

  “Except a brilliant future.”

  “A brilliant future that he will buy with her money. I must say, Guy, your naïveté astounds me. Can you honestly stand there and tell me that a man with the accomplishments you claim for your friend would have fallen in love with a goose like Alix if she’d had no money?”

  I confess I was silent for a moment.

  “You see then I” Father exclaimed triumphantly.

  “No, sir, I don’t,” I protested. “I know it must seem odd to you, but Rex isn’t used to girls. He’s led too restricted a life. That’s why Alix could suddenly strike him as a goddess.”

  “What do you know about his private life? Men don’t always tell each other about such things. But that is beside the point. Am I to take it from you that a proposal has actually been made?”

  “Why don’t you ask Aunt Amy?”

  “Because you and I know all about Aunt Amy. And because I’m asking you.”

  I hesitated again, realizing at last that so simple a way out of my troubles might never again present itself. “Very well, then, a proposal has been made.”

  “Good God! And accepted?”

  “I believe not yet. But Rex has reason to hope that it may be.”

  “We’ll see about that. ‘The Wandering Albatross’ is in Dark Harbor today. If I telegraph now, your uncle can be in Mt. Desert tomorrow. How can I face him? But that must be. In the meantime you will give me your word of honor not to mention this to Geer. I want no attempted elopements from my house tonight!”

  “If you will forgive me, sir, I think the duty of friendship obliges me to say something to Rex.”

  Father rose menacingly to his feet. “Do so, then, and tell him at the same time that he is to leave this house immediately. Tell him furthermore that I shall denounce him to Marcellus de Grasse for the unprincipled adventurer that I take him to be!”

  What could I do but hold my tongue and pass a wretched day and a more wretched night? Early the next morning Commodore Thompson’s great white steam yacht slipped into Bar Harbor, as ominously beautiful as an imperial cruiser in a half-savage Pacific port. As Rex and I watched her from our balcony we both knew, without exchanging a word, that it was the end of romance.

  Uncle Chauncey was too magnificent to set foot ashore. He simply sent for Alix, with her bags and baggage, and she went. Oh, yes, she went. She went without a word to Rex or to her mother or even to me. She went, perhaps in tears, but she went. As I have said, she was a Prime, and the Primes, however individualistic at heart, recognized authority. They could and would on occasion fight, but they always knew when the game was up. Rex could not believe it. When, later that morning, a sailor from “The Wandering Albatross” delivered to him a little pink scented note of adieu, I thought he would go mad.

  “I’m going after her if I have to swim!”

  “There’s no use, Rex, they won’t allow you on board. I know my uncle.”

  “Do you? I suppose you do. You’re all together, aren’t you? Against me and against that poor girl. Did you send for him?”

  “Rex! May God forgive you!”

  He shook his head fiercely, his attitude more one of desperation than remorse. “I wouldn’t trust my own mother today.”

  He hired a rowboat in the village and went out to the yacht where, as I had predicted, he was not received on board. Then, until “The Wandering Albatross” got under way, he rowed desperately around and around her, shouting appeals to Alix and imprecations against her father. It was a shocking scene and caused a terrible scandal in the summer community. Needless to say, my father never forgave it. The big white boat sailed off, and my poor friend was told at once to pack his bags.

  Rex went back to New York and to a rented room. He refused to occupy, for even one night, his old quarters on Prime territory. Later, however, he unburdened his heart to me in a touching and apologetic letter. I have always kept it, for never again did Rex express himself (at least to me) with so little rein. He told me that it was all over with Alix, that he would never try to see her again. He said that he would always love her and that she would be the inspiration of his life, but that it had been perfectly plain to him, seeing the calm fashion in which she had obeyed her father, that he could have meant very little to her. He said that it behooved him now to be a man and learn to live without her. He quoted from Browning’s “The Last Ride Together.” That was the way we were in those days. But it did not mean that he did not suffer.

  When we met again in de Grasse, Rex was a different man, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he had simply reverted to the Rex of our pre-friendship days. He was very grim and serious again and thought of nothing but his work and his future. He was perfectly cordial to me, and no reference was ever made by either of us to the terrible accusation that he had thrown at me in his despair, but I could not help feeling that somehow, as a male Prime, I was identified in his mind with the forces that had kidnapped his beloved. In time a kind of intimacy was restored, and I was always considered by the world to be Rex Geer’s closest friend, but things were not as they had been. Rex never, for example, bothered to chide me any moTe for my frivolity. He did not consider himself my keeper, nor me his. My consolation was that the position that I had occupied in his life was never taken by another. I am sure that Rex came as close to friendship with me as he ever came. Oh, there was Lucy Ames, of course. Lucy came to New York and took a job and went after her childhood sweetheart and caught him soon enough, with no competition. But Lucy, after all, was a woman, not a friend.

  The Christmas season of our second
year at de Grasse brought an event that ended for a time my social distractions. Poor Mother succumbed at last to her multitudinous ailments, but it was a hideously prolonged departure. She had a series of heart attacks, each causing terrible pain and panic, and the religion which she had succored all her life for this emergency now deserted her. When I was with her, she whimpered constantly about hell fire. I am sure I suffered more at her dying than I ever will at my own. It was not simply the animal terror in her eyes or the incessant roll of her head on the pillow; it was not even her ghastly sense of waste behind and punishment ahead. It was the total loss of communication between us. Not once in all that time did she ask me about my friends or my girls or my plans in the great world where she was leaving me. Mother’s death may have made a man of me, but what sort of a man?

  Rex was very properly sympathetic and called at the house many times. It so happened that he was with me when Mother actually died. I had been sent out of her room while the doctor was giving her an injection of morphine, and I found him downstairs in the library. In a sudden burst of my old feeling I made a suggestion that surprised myself.

  “When it’s all over, old man, what do you say we go around the world together?”

  “What on earth do you mean, Guy?”

  “Just what I say. Chuck de Grasse. Take a leave of absence. I can swing the whole thing with my share of poor Mother’s little trust. We’ll go to India. Siam. Tahiti. Think of it, Rex!”

  “And Mr. de Grasse?”

  “Oh, I’ll fix it with him! He’s always talking about enlarging one’s vision. It may be your last chance to see the world, you know. Success can be very confining.”

  “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “Yesterday, he took me out of Credit. I’m to skip Mortgages and be his personal assistant.”

  I stepped back. “Which means, of course, that you’ll be a partner.”

  “In time, one hopes.”

  “Oh, in time, surely.”

  I saw Father’s face in the doorway, nodding to me, and I dashed past him upstairs. Even in the moment that I knew was my dear mother’s last, I had room in my mind for Rex’s news. It seemed to me now that I had only his past and he my future.

  9.

  WHAT AN EVENING we had at Meadowview, to return to 1936 and the day when I broke the news of my misappropriations to Rex! My reader may remember that he was to answer my plea for a loan that night after a family dinner. The suspense was so great that I tried to minimize the pain by stepping outside myself and viewing what was going on as if it were a play. Lucy Geer, as usual, was too ill to come, and Rex arrived just before we went into the dining room. He was more taciturn and craggy than ever, and when, handing him a drink, I asked him if he had come to a decision, he simply brushed me off with a grunt.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he muttered.

  It was hardly a gay party. Angelica, distraite as usual, listened vaguely to our son Percy’s chatter. Our daughter Evadne and George Geer, the lovebirds, looked at each other. Rex said nothing. Stride, the old butler, who acted on the twitch of my eyelid, filled and refilled my glass with champagne. It was very hot, and through the wide-open French windows came, every few minutes, the roar of one of Angelica’s black angus bulls which grazed in the pasture abutting the front lawn.

  I understand that Meadowview has been condemned and a turnpike put through it, so I will say here, for the benefit of such of my grandsons who may not remember it, that it was indeed a dream place and all Angelica’s dream. Left to myself, I would probably, like my uncles, have put up a French chateau or an Italian palazzo. But Angelica had built a poem, a long, rambling, two-storied, amber-brick manor house that was at its most beautiful as then, in an early spring dusk, with candelabra flickering in the high-ceilinged dining room and the scent of roses and geraniums in the air.

  I lifted my glass to Evadne. “Every sip tonight is a toast for you and George, sweetheart.”

  “Then our health should be horselike,” she responded calmly, her large gray eyes taking in my again empty glass.

  “Have you fixed a wedding day?”

  She glanced at George. “We thought November.”

  “But that’s six months off!”

  I always found Evadne very beautiful, though she was generally considered merely pretty. She had the pale oval face and rich blond hair of so many of the Prime women. At this time she looked somewhat as my cousin Alix had looked at her age, except that Evadne had more character. Her silences were the silences of a contented rather than a nervous woman. She had always been a perfect daughter: affectionate, neat, industrious, good tempered. She had extraordinary equanimity, almost at times placidity. But I suspected that she was more deeply in love with George than she cared to show, and her reserve irritated me. I quite concede that demonstrative affection would have irritated me just as much. I was as inconsistent as any fond father. Evadne was a one-man dog, but I suspected that she could change her attachment, like a poodle, from one owner to another. She was all George’s now, and it bothered me that she was cool enough to pretend to the contrary.

  “If George finds somebody else in that long cold wait,” I pointed out, “you’ll have only yourself to thank.”

  “I’ll have myself to thank for finding out he’s not the man for me. Before it’s too late.”

  “That sounds so calculating.”

  Evadne gave a faint shrug. “I’ve noticed something about parents, Pa. They’re always complaining that children have no common sense, but they hate it when we do.”

  “May I say that you seem particularly Prime today, my dear?”

  “Where did I get it from, old sweet?”

  “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Prime,” George put in. “I could wait seven years for my Rachel.”

  “But who would be Leah in the meantime?” Angelica demanded suddenly from her end of the table, and there was perfunctory laughter. It was the only laughter that I can recall that night.

  Angelica was wearing the loose-flowing black velvet robe that she kept for family evenings. Except for nights when we went out together, which were rare now, she hardly needed other clothes, for she was in riding habit all day. Her brown, wrinkled skin and crinkly, glinting smile, her thin braceleted arms, her rough voice and raucous laugh, all cried her independence from the world—and from me. Fox hunting was her only passion now, and she was known in Nassau County for her daring jumps and persistence to the kill. So also, and less fortunately, was she known for her extravagance, of purse and of tongue, for her barbed wit, for her ability to drink like a man, for her fondness for younger company, particularly male. Yet Angelica’s flirtations had only once been more than that. There was a curious discipline to her riot, a heritage of the Hydes.

  She brought up a topic now, in all innocence, that had a grisly relevance to my situation: the failure and suicide of Count Landi. He had been one of those weird international manipulators, by birth an Armenian, by nationality a Panamanian, with a Vatican title, a French wife and a universal fortune. The papers had been filled that morning with revelations of his hoaxes: the nonexistent warehouses, the forged letters from crowned heads, the concealed youth of poverty and crime.

  “I’m sure, if his wife suspected anything, she didn’t give a hoot,” Angelica was saying. “Women love men of mystery. Of course, it never lasts. One of the fascinations is precisely that it doesn’t. Only dull things last. And dull men.”

  “Like stockbrokers?” I suggested with a smile, looking at Rex, who stared down into his plate.

  “I don’t see anything particularly fascinating about Landi, Mummie,” Evadne protested. “His whole life was a cheap trick.”

  “Yes, but a trick that worked! For a while, anyway. Ordinary millionaires try to delude themselves into thinking they’re happy with different kinds of private transport: planes or cars or yachts—vulgar things to carry them from distraction to distraction. Landi knew that the only point of money was to create a child�
��s dream of fairy palaces with golden bathtubs full of asses’ milk. He made the dream real—for a minute.”

  “Hasn’t Meadowview been your dream, my dear?” I asked.

  “Me? Dream? Why, Guy, I haven’t even been to sleep!”

  “You should have told me you wanted a pirate. I might have complied.”

  “What would your Sunday foursome at Glenville have said?” Angelica retorted.

  I shrugged and sipped more champagne. I was beginning to enjoy the conversation. My sense of Rex’s outrage, conveyed by his stubbornly lowered head and immovable shoulders, made up a little for my sense of moral inferiority. “What do you think, Percy?” I asked my son. “Does Count Landi appeal to the romantic in you? Or hasn’t that side survived the impact of your too rarely visited law school?”

  Percy looked up in indignation. “I’m hardly a romantic, Pa. If you’d ever bother to look at me, you’d see I am the coolest of realists. But families, naturally, are myopic.”

  “They are, my boy. They are just that.”

  Poor Percy had none of the Hyde charm. He had the looks of the Hyde men: the short, stiff, curly black hair, the pale long face, the thin cheeks that somehow never seemed to be properly shaven, the large, aquiline, porous nose. But he moved awkwardly, and his tone was shrill. He was intelligent, even sensitive, but he was not brilliant. He had the knobbly personality that is accepted in geniuses, but only in geniuses. At school and college he had gone in for every activity: sports, dramatics, glee club, journal, debate, but he had been remarkable more for the energy that he had scattered than for the quality of accomplishment. He had talked at different times of becoming a composer, a poet, an actor. But here Angelica had stepped in. The Hydes liked charades, not theatre; they could write jingles, not odes. When it came to a question of the artist’s life there was not much to choose between them and the Primes, except that my family was franker. Angelica would never admit to what depths of subtle persuasion she had descended to bring about Percy’s enrollment in Columbia Law.