The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I do think that was tactful of you, old boy. Troubles of the heart are peculiarly undiscussable with children. For you to have substituted another in their minds, equally undiscussable, was sheer genius.”

  And, all of a sudden, Angelica and I were friends again. But I was careful not to push her. Oh, so careful! Everything I had learned in twenty-two years I now put to good use. I did not talk about my usual subjects, but neither did I presume to talk about hers. I steered our conversation as much as possible to neutral territory where she could not have unfavorable preconceptions of my opinions. These I could now adapt to fit the image of the gentler, more liberal Guy that I was creating. Premeditated? Naturally! All courtship is premeditated. I was in the ridiculous situation that French comic playwrights delighted to explore: I had fallen in love with my wife!

  “Of course, I see you have a plan,” Angelica told me. “But I’m darned if I see what it is.”

  “It couldn’t be the very simplest?”

  “The simplest?”

  But we were riding, and she spurred her horse ahead to avoid my answer. Obviously, she knew what it would have to be, and I assumed that she did not want to have to repudiate it.

  I wonder if Angelica today, so many years afterwards, would still deny that something rather beautiful was happening to us. Certainly at the time it was apparent to both that our reconciliation was going to be more than a handshake and a sharing of the morning crossword puzzle. Angelica may not have wanted it to be more, but she was like a person lost in indolence, floating down a sluggish stream in a canoe. By simply dipping her paddle in the water she could have stopped it altogether, or at least changed its direction, but the gentle movement had become habitual, almost pleasant. She was tired; she was humiliated; she was lovelorn. And there was I, her lawful, wedded husband.

  I will not embarrass my reader with further details. I took Angelica off to my Caribbean island, wisely representing it as a business trip so that pleasure should not seem unduly to predominate to her embarrassed eyes, and there we had a second honeymoon, more wonderful, if briefer, than the first.

  Angelica did not tell me when she became pregnant. I learned of it from her doctor who suggested that I persuade her to give up riding. She was forty-five and had not given birth for seventeen years. He warned me that she might not have too easy a time. Exuberant and exhilarated at his news, if not his warning, I rushed home from his office to embrace her and to be sharply repulsed.

  “Please don’t talk about it yet, please!” she cried in anguish.

  “But, darling, why not?”

  “It’s so ridiculous at my age! How can I face Percy and Vad?”

  “Why, they’ll be tickled pink! Wait till I tell them. You’ll see!”

  “Don’t tell them, Guy. Don’t. I beg of you!”

  I knew enough about the moods of early pregnancy to obey her and leave her alone. But, alas, I proved unable to be as discreet abroad as I was at home. I had now resumed my golf, and on a glorious Sunday morning, after I had gone around in seventy-four, I took my customary place at the men’s bar with overflowing spirits. As luck would have it, one of my cronies was boasting that his newly born son, the fruit of his second marriage, was younger than a grandson, issue of the first.

  “But you used two wives!” I burst forth. “Anyone can do that. The trick is to do it with one.”

  “Like whom?”

  “Like me!” I turned to thunder at the bartender: “A round for all the gentlemen, Pierre. I may not have a grandson, but I have a boy at Harvard who is perfectly capable of giving me one. And in eight months’ time that boy will have a baby brother or sister. A full brother or sister, gentlemen!”

  I realized from the shout of congratulation that followed how grave my error had been, but what could I do but join in the toast and pray to be forgiven?

  Angelica found out the very next day when the wife of one of my bar friends called up to “commiserate.” Everyone assumed, of course, that the child was a “mistake.” Angelica was angrier than I had ever seen her. I found her waiting for me that night in the hall when I came home.

  “You couldn’t wait, could you?” she hissed at me. “You couldn’t wait to boast of your triumph in that sordid bar of yours! Like an old rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo before the other old roosters!”

  “I’m sorry, dear.”

  “Sorry! Why should you be sorry? You’re only being yourself. The same self you’ve been from the beginning, I’m the one who should be sorry. I learned once what you are, and I learned to live with it. And then I was fool enough to let myself get caught in the same old trap. Well, it won’t happen again!”

  Even after making every allowance that I could for her condition, I still could not explain away the near hate that I read in her eyes. “Angelica, please,” I begged her, as the tears started into my own, “don’t spoil the last two months!”

  “Spoil them?” she retorted. “I think I can safely leave that little job to you!”

  At this I lost all restraint. If the reader is astonished that our new happiness should have been so quickly dispelled, let him remember that it had been preceded by ten years of mere mutual toleration and, more immediately, by the affair with Rex. “It’s because you don’t want him to know, isn’t it?” I shouted at her. “It’s because you don’t want him to know how soon you consoled yourself!”

  Angelica, as she walked away, threw her retort over her shoulder in a voice of cold disdain. “You’re not fit to discuss him. Not with me, anyway. I’ve told you that before.”

  A week later, in the big pasture, taking a four-foot fence she fell and miscarried. I was playing golf when word was brought to me. I drove home at a reckless pace and tore upstairs to the room where Angelica was lying in bed, her face a whitish blue, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She turned to look at me, but she did not speak, and my heart overflowed with bitterness.

  “You wouldn’t have done it,” I said with a sob, “if it had been Rex’s child!”

  Angelica simply turned her head away. The Hydes were intrepid people!

  When she was well again, we went back to our old lives, she to her horses, I to my business and clubs. It was surprising how little animosity was apparent in our personal relations. But this was the period of my first embezzlement. I used bonds belonging to Aunt Amy as security for a private loan. In a month’s time I had put them all back, and nobody was the wiser. Thereafter, I did the same thing in other accounts, perhaps half a dozen times. Each time, of course, it was a crime, punishable by jail. Yet I do not recall that I ever felt the faintest twinge of conscience.

  Why? Why did a man brought up as I had been, a gentleman born and bred, after so many years of straight conduct, suddenly become a thief? And why did I feel no remorse? It was suggested at the time of my trial that I suffered from megalomania, that I was a kind of sun king of stockbrokers who recognized no distinction between his own accounts and those of his customers, that I strutted up and down between Trinity Church and the East River declaiming: “Wall Street, c’est moi.” But this was drivel. I would rather have people raise their hands about my morals than shrug their shoulders about my sanity. At all times I was perfectly aware of what I was doing and of the consequences of discovery.

  What had happened was that I had lost my faith in the world as a place in which there was any point for me to live except as a rich man. Angelica and Rex, between them, had destroyed my faith in myself. He had scorned me as an equal in the man’s world of business; she had scorned me as her master in the man’s world of the home. So low had I fallen in my own esteem that I could no longer imagine that anyone in my family, in my office or in all my large circle of friends would be interested in seeing a poor Guy Prime. Like a prima donna who has lost her voice or a priest who has lost his faith, such a Guy Prime would have struck me as being without use or function. The world insisted on seeing me only in the role of king of the Glenville Club. Very well. It would never see me in any other. I would be that or I
would be nothing.

  I will say this much in extenuation of what I did. I never took a penny that its owner could not have spared. Not for me was the widow’s mite, the orphan’s pence. I “borrowed” from only three sources: from the profits that I had made for my rich friends and relatives, from the portfolio of the country club that I had founded and from a family trust that I had set up out of my own pocket. To keep up the position that the world expected of me, I borrowed the funds of that world. In a way, I still think it owed them to me.

  15.

  THE MORNING after the “Meadowview Pact” between Rex and myself in that fateful spring of 1936, when I bargained away my birthright to engage in business (my very manhood, by the standards of downtown) in return for a loan that was the merest pittance to him, I arrived in my office to find that, good to his dearly purchased word, he had already delivered the America City bonds from my loan account at de Grasse. By ten o’clock these had been delivered in turn to Jo Beal, Treasurer of the Glenville Club, and I was again a free man. Free, that is, to do nothing. Free to liquidate Prime King. Free to commit suicide and remove an unpleasant reminder from the high and mighty gaze of Reginald Geer!

  But I had never for a minute intended to give him that satisfaction. I had already made my plans for the summer which, fortunately, proved to be a solitary one. Rex was in England, partly for pleasure, partly for business (de Grasse had a London branch), and Angelica had rented a cottage at the Cape where Evadne and Percy joined her. I gave up my apartment as a needless expense and took a room at the empty Schuyler Club. If I had changed my name I could not have removed myself more effectively from my Long Island world.

  All during those hot months a part of me sat and watched Guy Prime struggle for his financial life. For instead of closing down my firm, I was using every last resource to place it once more among the first in Wall Street. Such was my real crime, if crime it was. As I saw it then and as I continue to see it today, my moral guilt turns on one question: what would have been Rex’s damages had I succeeded? Should he not have been glad to have his son’s future father-in-law a power again in Wall Street? And if I failed, where were these same damages? I would still be unable to repay his loan, that was all. It boiled down to this: Rex had stipulated that I cut my throat and leave his debt unpaid. I proposed to have my throat and pay him back. Was I bound to lose all for his pride?

  I wanted to see no one from my old life. I was even glad that Evadne was away. I felt that the disgrace of being a small boy reprimanded by a stern headmaster had to be wiped clean before I figured again in the social world. However invisible the stain of this imagined shame, I would keep to myself until I could appear, both inwardly and outwardly, as the old Guy Prime. I would not so much as step across the threshold of the Glenville Club so long as I was the creature of Rex Geer.

  During the week I was busy enough, and on the weekends I went to my sister Bertha in Westhampton, where she had a shingle cottage on the beach to which she invited her chattering old maids and her crusty old bachelors. Poor Bertha, who had lived with Father until he died, had developed with long delayed freedom into the petty tyrant that she had hated him for being to her. She had long straight sandy hair, tied in a knot in back, a heavy countenance with chin thrust forward and watery pale eyes. She lived, despite tweeds and walking sticks, and a considerable consumption of whiskey, on a gross mental diet of romantic art: of Verdi and Puccini and Saint-Gaudens and Rodin and Greta Garbo.

  She pretended to sneer at me and held me up to her friends as Goliath himself, but she was really delighted to show me off. I was the wind of the greenback prairies of the real world into their closed interior, and I had come batting in—that was the great thing!—not at their own timid solicitation but of my own accord. I was the proof (or a little wishful thinking could make me seem so) that the captains and the kings of earth, if they ever listened for a moment to their hearts, would come down to the beach and to Bertha Prime and sit on the veranda to talk of death and beauty. Bertha had resented that Father and life had loved me and scanted her, but she was all ready to forgive. Oh so ready! A little scolding, and I was her big darling brother again.

  “I’m not surprised, Guy, after all that horsy set of Angelica’s and all those sports-coated golfers, that your soul should cry out for a bit of companionship with those to whom the planet is more than a field for organized sport. You’re late in starting, but you’re not too late. After all, I can remember the dear dead days when you and Rex read Browning aloud.”

  I was oddly content, in the suspended existence of those weekends, with Bertha and the gentle little group that obeyed her and liked obeying. We walked on the dunes; we read plays aloud; we listened to symphonies on the Gramophone, and we put away a lot of cocktails. Angelica, calling me from the Cape, thought I had taken leave of my senses, and of course I had. Waiting for things to happen, one did not want to feel the interlude.

  From the beginning of September to the middle of October a series of disasters occurred, one after another, that proved, if proof were needed, that the gods were against me. No protagonist of ancient Greek drama was more buffeted and with less cause than I. Had I once spurned Aphrodite when she reached out her snowy arms to me? Had I enjoyed a nymph for whom jealous Zeus had lusted? Or was it a matter of inheritance, and did I, like my father, have to pay for the hubris of some Prime ancestor? An early fall hurricane wrecked my Caribbean resort so that its opening had to be postponed a year. An injunction in that almost settled title suit closed down the operation of Georgia Phosphates. And finally the government insisted on additional studies before authorizing the issuance of my little drug company’s new pill to reduce apprehension. I could have swallowed our entire production.

  All I needed was a little time to overcome my obstacles. As I have pointed out before, my ventures ultimately brought in millions—for others. Knowing that it was my last gamble, I now flung into my businesses everything I could lay my clutching hands on and borrowed from everyone I knew. Angelica was back at Meadowview, but I did not welcome her questions, or Evadne’s, and I stayed in town. My days and nights were devoted to meeting friends in search of loans, to delaying creditors, to pumping heart into associates. But still I needed time.

  When the idea occurred to me of using the securities in Angelica’s trust, my first reaction was simply a mild surprise that it had not occurred to me before. I had set up this trust for Angelica and the children on Father’s death, using all of my inheritance. I had wanted them to be independent, at least for necessities, of my own risky businesses. Standard Trust and I were the trustees, but because I was the donor of the fund and because the trust instrument had given me the widest powers of investment and discretion, the bank had tended to regard itself more as a depositary than a fiduciary, and had allowed me to buy and sell as I chose and to keep the securities in my office vault for months at a time. This may seem very relaxed to present-day readers, but we were in 1936, and my name on Wall Street was still a synonym for reliability. Ironically enough, I had done better with this trust than with my own things, and there were seven hundred thousand dollars of stocks and bonds in my possession on that autumn Monday morning when I decided to pledge the lot.

  The curious thing about my mental state was that I knew it was too late. I was convinced, in superstitious fashion, that nothing now could save me. There simply seemed to be a bleak and necessary logic in hurling this last log upon a dying fire. I do not, however, mean to imply that I acted from suicidal motives. I acted to save myself and my firm. I had to put down the last trump; it was the only way to play the hand. But in playing it, as coolly as I knew how, there was no longer hope in my heart.

  By the middle of October word of my multiple borrowings had penetrated even to the sleepy corner where Standard Trust Company, like the dragon Fafner, dozed over its hoards. It had been a great bank in its day, but, swollen with fat old trusts whose beneficiaries were now too numerous to be effective critics and under the presidency of my lat
e Uncle Chauncey, who had always been off yachting with his rich wife, its claws had dulled and only a faint puff of smoke was from time to time emitted from its clenched jaws. Now there were stirrings. Twice my obliging friend Pete Bissell lunched with me and asked timidly if it wouldn’t “look better” if the trust assets were kept in the custody of the corporate trustee.

  “It certainly would,” I agreed each time. “How would you look if your co-trustee made off with the corpus of the trust? I guess somebody at Standard would have your corpus!”

  Pete laughed, chokingly, half reassured, half scandalized. In the soft compliant eye of the eternally reassuring trust officer there was a little yellow spark of panic. But no. Not the senior partner of Prime King? Not the nephew of Chauncey Prime!

  “When will you send it over?”

  “Next week.”

  And next week I would forget.

  I might even have got away with it, miraculous as it now seems, had an article not appeared in the Sunday Times on the damage of hurricanes, with pictures of my battered resort and, alas, a picture of me. Fafner awoke at last, and on Monday evening, as I was about to leave my office, I heard his belated roar on the telephone.

  “Mr. Prime? It’s Howard Landers. I’m a trust officer at Standard Trust.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Landers?”

  “It has come to my attention that some of the securities of Mrs. Prime’s trust are actually in your custody.”

  “That has been our usual practice.”

  “It is most irregular, Mr. Prime. Most irregular.”

  “Look here Landers, this is not an ordinary trust, and I happen to be your co-trustee. Pete Bissell is the man over there I deal with. Have you cleared this call with him?”

  “He’s cleared it with me, Mr. Prime. I am taking over supervision of your wife’s trust. The first thing that I shall do is to correct at once this unprecedented irregularity. I must insist that all assets of the trust be delivered to the bank no later than tomorrow morning.”