The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And what should we be doing?” I demanded, still thinking that he was going to suggest a walk or a game of tennis.

  “Why, anything else!” Guy threw up his hands. “I never saw two people more in love who did less about it.”

  “Shut up!” I cried.

  “What should we do about it?” Alix demanded now in a high, strained voice. She was staring with a fixed horror at her cousin.

  “Elope, you dumbbells! Elope and wait for a ‘come home, all is forgiven’ letter. I promise you’ll get one, if I have to send it myself!”

  Alix gave a little cry and fled into the house. I turned hotly to Guy who raised his hand immediately to silence me. “I know, I know,” he said coolly. “You’re going to suggest I mind my own business. But this is my business. You have made it my business. Don’t worry. She’ll come around. Someone had to do something.”

  Alix came down for dinner, seemingly collected, and our life resumed its usual if unsatisfactory flow. On the next to last day of my vacation, however, she complained of a migraine and retired to her room. That evening her mother showed me a wireless that she had received from her husband. “The Wandering Albatross” was en route to Bar Harbor.

  “But isn’t that a change of plans?” I exclaimed.

  “Oh my, yes. They weren’t planning to go further than Iles-boro.”

  “You meant they were sent for?”

  “My dear boy, I don’t know!”

  I could see that she was agitated, even frightened, and I went to look for Guy. I found him in his room, smoking a pipe and reading, and the picture of his ease unreasonably provoked me.

  “Your uncle and Commodore Thompson are coming to Bar Harbor!” I cried. “Do you suppose your father sent for them?”

  “My dear fellow, why would he?”

  “Because he suspects that a scheming pauper has designs on his niece!”

  “My father is many things, Rex, but he is not obvious. Sending for Uncle Chauncey would be obvious.”

  His suavity at such a moment infuriated me. “Did you, then?”

  Guy was on his feet in a moment. “Is that what you think of me?”

  I turned away sullenly. “I don’t know what I think of anybody,” I muttered. “Why should you want a cousin of yours to marry anyone like me? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’ll try to remember you’re under a strain,” he said coldly, “and that you no longer realize what you’re saying.”

  “Well, who did send for him, then?”

  “Why did he have to be sent for? Couldn’t he have come on his own? Daddy may have written him, quite innocently, that you were here. Couldn’t he put two and two together?”

  “You assume then,” I asked wretchedly, “that he is coming because of Alix?”

  Guy shrugged. “Why else would he come? He loathes Bar Harbor. That much we all know.”

  “And you assume too, I suppose, that she will pack her bags and jump on the yacht as soon as he gives her a nod?”

  “Do you think she won’t?”

  “Oh, I’m not thinking any more. Except that it was a bad day when I first got mixed up with you Primes.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  I did not fall asleep until the morning, and when I awoke it was past nine o’clock. With an immediate sense of disaster I looked over at Guy’s bed and saw that it was empty. Jumping up and going out to the porch, I found him, in his pajamas, peering out at the harbor through a pair of binoculars. As both hillside and water were enveloped in fog I asked him irritably what he was looking at. He handed me the glasses and pointed. Out in the middle of the bay there was a large clearing, and framed in that clearing, like a marine print, long and low and as ominously white as Moby Dick, lay a great steam yacht.

  “‘The Wandering Albatross.’”

  “No kidding,” I said grimly.

  “Admit she’s a beauty.”

  “As beautiful as death! Has your uncle come ashore?”

  “Oh, no. Newport is the only dry land Uncle Chauncey ever touches in cruising. People go to Uncle Chauncey. He doesn’t go to them.”

  “People?” When Guy simply shrugged I repeated harshly, “People? Meaning whom?”

  “Meaning, if you must know, that I saw Alix leave the house fifteen minutes ago. Aunt Amy’s car took her off towards the village.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it perfectly natural for her to go to see her father?”

  “At this hour in the morning? When even God has never seen Uncle Chauncey before ten? And why did she take two suitcases and her maid?”

  In agony I rushed back to our room, flung on my clothes and dashed down to the dining room where, as I had dreaded, I found a pink envelope propped up at my place. “Dear Rex,” her stiff little note ran,

  I am joining Papa and Uncle Sidney for the rest of their cruise. I have thought things over very carefully, and I am convinced it is best this way. At some rather later time, I hope that you will come to see me. Until then, please accept my gratitude for your kind opinion of me, as ever,

  ALIX PRIME.

  Guy’s memory is correct about my rowing out to the yacht, but it is wrong about my being refused permission to board. I was received at the gangway with perfect good manners and told that Mr. Prime would see me in the lounge.

  The fact that he did not own “The Wandering Albatross” and was aboard simply as his brother-in-law’s guest, Alix’s father managed, in the inimitable fashion of the Primes, to convert into evidence of his greater prestige. Commodore Thompson, a small, hirsute, bustling man, had been somehow reduced to the position of a chartered skipper who took his great boat up and down the coast for the delectation of Chauncey Prime and who had remained a bachelor only to swell the inheritance of Prime nieces. When he had led me down a spotless white corridor to the broad white lounge where Mr. Prime, in a blue blazer and gleaming white flannels, was seated, he was asked, like a privileged inferior, to remain.

  “Please, Sidney, stay with us,” Mr. Prime enjoined him. “I prefer to have a witness. Now, Mr. Geer, will you kindly state what is on your mind as briefly as possible? We are anxious to get under way.”

  I stammered out that I loved his daughter and wanted to marry her. I said that I fully realized that in my position I must appear presumptuous, but that I hoped to rise in the world. I told him that I did not ask for his approval, but simply that I might see Alix alone to say good-bye.

  “But has my daughter not written you?” he interrupted testily.

  “She has, sir. But under the circumstances I feel that her letter came more from you than from her.”

  “You imply that I used force?”

  “Only strong influence.”

  “I must always be the villain, mustn’t I, Sidney?” Mr. Prime demanded of his brother-in-law in a sneering tone. “I must always be made out as slamming the door on true love because I can’t see that the swineherd is really Prince Charming in disguise. You saw the state Alix was in when she came abroad this vessel. Was it her ogre of a father who had caused it?”

  “Hardly, Chauncey. You’ve been at sea with me for the past month.”

  “Exactly, Sidney, thank you. I’ve been at sea. And I’m still at sea, Mr. Geer,” Mr. Prime continued wrathfully, turning on me, “as to what my good brother could have been thinking of to allow you to pester that poor child within an inch of her sanity. Look at that, if you please, Mr. Geer.” And he thrust before my incredulous eyes a ship’s form of wireless with the typed words: PLEASE, DADDY, COME AND GET ME. “I suppose I sent that to myself! No doubt, you may think so. But I cannot afford to have my conduct guided by your hallucinations. No, indeed, I will not permit you to see Alix, either now or later. So long as she chooses to make her home with me—and she still does, sir, and of her own free will—there will be no further visitations or harassments from you. Now, sir, will you please go ashore?”

  “May I not even say good-bye to her? In front of you?”

  “You may not.”
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  “You’re afraid of what she might say!”

  “I’m afraid of what you might do.”

  “I beg of you, sir. Let me see her. For five minutes!”

  “Never!”

  “I insist!”

  “Must I ask Commodore Thompson to have his crew put you forcibly off the yacht?”

  It was then that the regrettable scene occurred that so much mortified Guy and his father. I left the yacht of my own accord, but I rowed around it, shouting Alix’s name, hoping that she might at least appear at a porthole. She did not, and I was almost hysterical when I finally came back to the Percy Primes’. Guy’s father told me with white-lipped disgust to pack my bag at once, and so my visit to Bar Harbor was concluded. Some sores always remain partially open, no matter how much time goes by. I have never gone back to the beautiful island that Champlain named, most appropriately to my way of thinking, for its “desert” hills.

  Guy never knew that Alix, as well as his father, had sent a wireless to the yacht. I blush to record this in view of the accusation that in my anguish I had flung in his teeth. I should certainly have told him when I wrote my letter of apology, but I was too proud to confess that my beloved had had to send for her father to get away from me. I yearned for the satisfaction of seeing Alix and myself as a pair of star-crossed lovers. But what happens to “Romeo and Juliet” if the heroine rushes from the balcony to arouse old Capulet? And if Tybalt, her fiery cousin, is on Romeo’s side?

  Poor Tybalt! I did him a grave wrong. Guy had put himself wholeheartedly at my service; he had toiled as best he knew to make smooth my course of love. It was not really his fault if he had set Alix’s and my romance in a gilded frame that was precisely the one to terrify her most and to paralyze my powers of courtship. Guy put gilded frames on everything. Mr. de Grasse had warned me of moths. But this moth had meant well, and I hurt him cruelly, first with my accusation and later with my refusal to take it back as completely as it was in my power to do. I should have eaten my silly pride and stayed on in the New York apartment that he and I had shared. But instead I allowed myself to harbor a grudge against him for being a Capulet, and that grudge was all the deeper for being both unuttered and unjust.

  5.

  I WENT BACK to New York and to a shabby boarding house, where I hugged my disappointment. I rejected all distractions and immersed myself in my job, day and night. Alix went abroad. She wrote me that her father had decided to spend the autumn in London. Her tone was distant, her news all of Windsor Castle and the Tower of London. There was no further reference to the bond that had existed between us. Alix had evidently accepted her father’s veto, as Guy had predicted she would. What else could I do?

  The humiliating part was that I found that I, too, could accept it. For a while there was a dim comfort in my hopeless love, a grim consolation in my sense of life’s injustice. Over the dusky desert of that first year of unremitting toil the memory of Alix rose with the pale radiance of a Ryder moon. But my darkness could not last forever, and in the early morning of my renewed and youthful normality I was ashamed to discover that Alix was becoming a rather thin presence in my disloyal sky. I found that the Alix who had explained to me the incredible plot of Il Trovatore seemed hardly credible herself. Again and again I would invoke the scene in the motorcar on that April day when Mrs. Prime was leaving cards, but although I saw Alix’s mother and the chauffeur and even the footman, I found it harder and harder to recapture the image of Alix herself. She began to seem as fanciful as a childhood game in the dry masculine world in which I was living. I had put her away without in the least wishing to.

  And then, of course, there was Lucy Ames, who could have been defined in opposites to poor Alix. Lucy had come to New York to make a career as a secretary in a law firm; she was the best of the new type of young woman—independent, capable, inexpensively but smartly dressed, jolly, a good sport and glad to spend an evening at the theater in the top gallery or a Sunday afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum. Lucy was pretty without being beautiful, sensible without being dull, and, ultimately, loving without being cloying. She had been in love with me since she was a girl. I can admit that without fatuity because she always told our son George so. Lucy made me everything that I became in life, and if she caught me, as she used to relate, on the rebound, it was the rebound of waking up to life from a dream.

  We were engaged a year later, when I went abroad to be Guy’s best man. Alix was at the wedding, and when we talked, seated together at the bridal dinner, it was as if we had met for the first time. Had I once been in love with this tensely chattering, archly staring society girl with the high silly laugh? It was in another country, and besides the wench was dead.

  Later, when Lucy and I were married, I took her to call on Alix in the Louis XIII hotel on Fifth Avenue. As we came away I told her how odd it seemed to me that our hostess should have inspired such seeming depths of feeling. But Lucy shook her head.

  “No, I can see it. There’s something very appealing in her. She reminds me of that song about the bird in a gilded cage. You want to let her out, but what would happen if you did? Wouldn’t she be pecked to death by street sparrows?”

  “Like me?”

  “Exactly! Oh, she loved you all right—she still loves you—a woman can sense that. But she’s afraid of you. Afraid of what you might be like when you discovered what she was like. When you stopped seeing her through a misty lover’s haze.”

  “But I didn’t see her through a haze! I always saw her limitations. Basically, she didn’t want love. Love was for opera. Basically, she was relieved when Papa came to rescue her and take her away from the bassos and tenors.”

  “Maybe. But couldn’t she have wanted to be a soprano? Was it her fault that she had no voice? Or thought she had none? Which reminds me, when you were getting your hat, she asked us to the opera next week. It’s La Sonnambula.”

  And, indeed, we went to the opera with Alix and her mother, not once but several times. Alix seemed determined to relabel me as a piece of candy and fit me back into her candy-box existence. Sitting behind her as the lights went up on the great gold curtain and sensing in the stiffening of her spine how much she gave herself to this warbling world of make-believe, I felt the last drops of my bitterness drain off to expose the dregs of my male egotism. For the sadness of what happened to me was nothing to the sadness of what had happened to Alix. The crisis of her life had been resolved against her. She was never to have another chance.

  As she grew older she became less fée and more, like her sisters and cousins, encased in the mannered friendliness of the Prime women, a polite and seemingly democratic formality which blocked any kind of intimacy or real understanding. Alix made much of Lucy and myself and asked us to dinner parties at the Louis XIII hotel, where her father would grudgingly accord me a “howdy-do, Geer” and her mother would seat me at her right, no longer, alas, because of her bibulousness, a very desirable place. We were asked to the opera and to visit at Newport; we were indeed Alix’s “best friends,” but all that this meant was that we were admitted to the babble of her seeming confidences, which were not confidences at all. Poor Alix had become at last what Guy had always claimed she was: a doll.

  Yet behind her mask was the same susceptible heart. I had not, as it turned out, inspired a lifelong passion. When Alix was twenty-nine she fell in love with Alfrederick Fowler, one of those morose, blocky young men of good but undistinguished New York families to whom our rich burghers love to entrust their daughters. Freddy Fowler’s reluctance to ingratiate himself with the Primes was taken by them for integrity and his perennial boredom as immunity to the ordinary temptations. Besides, Alix was getting on, and even her father would not have cared to frustrate her twice. Fowler, whose worldly qualifications were little more than mine had been, was given, almost without the asking, the hand that had been so rudely torn from my loving grasp.

  Even so, it might have worked out, had Freddy not developed the most insidious disease that
can strike the husband of the American heiress: ambition. He decided that his pride required that he become as rich as his wife. But no man can make a fortune just because he wants one, and Freddy Fowler was doomed before he started. He lost his own money and all of his parents’. He did not lose Alix’s because he never got his hands on it. A Griselda in everything else, she was her father’s daughter when it came to the cash box.

  She tried to help him in other ways, but she had no ideas beyond those supplied by Primes. What did Primes do? They entertained. Very well, she would entertain. She would fill her house with important people and make her husband look like an important man. Unhappily, she accomplished the very opposite of what she sought. Freddy felt the irony of playing a part at dinner that he could not play in the office, of watching his creditors sip his wife’s champagne and having market tips tossed at him over the brandy that he could never have cadged in the day. It was a surprise to nobody but Alix when he shot himself in a downtown hotel.

  She came near to losing her mind, but in the end the Prime discipline carried her through. In her middle years Alix turned back again, this time for good, to the companionship of her own sex; it was the opera box filled with cousins as I had originally seen it. She lunched on regular occasions with Lucy, but to me she came now only for business. It was to my care, after her father’s death, that she consigned her fortune, and I was able at last to do something for her. I was able to turn her from a woman who was simply rich into a woman who was excessively rich. Had I made her a gift of a new book of opera plots, I could not have given her a more useless present.

  6.

  GUY MAKES OUT our relationship in that first year at de Grasse Brothers as that of grasshopper and cricket. He liked to fancy himself as a society will-o’-the-wisp, blown from hostess to hostess without motive or plan, and me, disappointed in love and unknown to the gay world, as a surly drudge whom it was charming of him to befriend. But one night I discovered the quantity of calculation in his social maneuvers. The surprising thing about his grasshopper was that, all the while it appeared to be lost in song, it should, like a very different insect, have been weaving a web.