The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  It was a Saturday night, and he was dressed for one of his grand dinners, but he always went first to a bar in the old Waldorf, near which he lived, for a Martini cocktail and a dish of oysters. He had persuaded me that evening to join him there, and leaning against the bar, beneath the huge Bouguereau of a satyr teased by naked nymphs, his evening cloak open to show his white shirt front and pearl studs, he seemed absurdly youthful and at the same time quaintly old, like a schoolboy in a charade, personifying the dandy of the Edwardian era.

  “My father has a dream. Shall I tell you what it is?”

  “To see you make the greatest of all the Prime matches.”

  Guy’s smile approached condescension. “How little you two understand each other. No, Father has poetry in his nature that you would never suspect. But the dream, will you hear it?”

  “I can hardly imagine that I play a role in it.”

  “That depends on my role in its realization. If I tell Father: Rex and Guy, it’s a package deal, then a package deal it will be.”

  “But what is the deal?”

  Guy raised his glass to the nymphs in the painting. “Our own firm. Geer & Prime. Our own office. Our own seat on the Exchange. Say the word, and Father’s ready. He has the capital already pledged.”

  All my life I have suffered from an unwillingness to express appreciation. It must go back to an infantile sense that gratitude is somehow self-betrayal. I had no interest in Guy’s father’s dream, but it would not have killed me to thank him for including me in it. Yet what did I say? “Pledged? By all your uncles’ wives, I suppose.”

  Guy’s eyelids did not flicker, but for a moment his features assumed the peculiar blandness that meant that he had been hurt, or at least puzzled. His tone, however, was mild enough. “Does it matter where he gets the money? It’s honest money.”

  “And what would be the business of Geer & Prime?”

  “Well, I suppose we’d have brokerage for a base,” Guy replied apologetically, for he knew how I felt about that. “It would be our bread and butter until we got on our feet. But I would take care of that; you wouldn’t have to be bothered. I’d pick up enough accounts if I had to put on my white tie and dine in Yonkers!”

  “Greater love hath no man. And what would I do?”

  “All the rest.”

  “The rest?”

  Guy described a wide half-circle with his left arm. “The whole point of the firm. The capital. The guts of Geer & Prime. That would be yours, my friend. To do what you wanted with. Investing. Loaning. Underwriting. You’d be a one-man de Grasse Brothers. Do you know that between us we could go to the top of the financial world?”

  For a moment I was intrigued. I had to admit that his scheme was designed to make maximum use of both our talents. But what it left entirely out of consideration was my love of de Grasse Brothers. I could hardly believe that he seriously expected me to give up a career of my own making to become the tool of his aunts’ fortunes.

  “Your family would say that having missed Alix’s money one way I was going after it another.”

  Guy stared. “Would you really care if anyone said anything so stupid?”

  Oh, your youth, Rex Geer! Your bitter, grudging, miserly youth! The contrast between the dinners that awaited us that night, his with gold plate and champagne, mine with a piece of cold meat and a market report, was enough to blind me to his need for a little friendliness. And yet had I not chosen my dinner? And was not his a kind of toil? “You’d better go on to your party,” I said gruffly. “I’d hate to be responsible for the least slip-up in so brilliant a social career.”

  And so ended, for the time being, the firm of Geer & Prime. Guy was to mention it to me only once again.

  I was in an irritable mood at this time because Lucy would not agree to a formal engagement. I had made a clean breast of the whole business about Alix, and she had objected that my wound was still too green. I had always taken for granted Lucy’s partiality, and it irked me to have her now stiffen in direct proportion to my availability. My irritation was not diminished, either, by the new and unexpected friendship that had sprung up between her and Guy.

  He had met her, of course, in East Putnam when he had visited my family, and when she came to New York he insisted on taking us out to dinner at one of those swell French restaurants where he knew so well how to play the host. Lucy was nervous about the dinner, fearing to appear a very plain wren beside this brilliant bird of paradise, and indeed it seemed to me that she was just the opposite of the type of girl to attract Guy. She had no beauty, no silly banter, no interest in the New York social life, of which, quite naturally, she knew nothing at all. But when she saw that Guy was not trying to impress her with grand names and that he seemed genuinely interested in her experiences as a secretary in a law firm, she opened up with a rapidity that amazed me. By the end of our meal I had the disagreeable feeling that they had formed a humorous alliance against me.

  “I always thought I was a committee of one to keep down the stuffiness of Rex Geer,” Guy observed to her. “Now I see I’m only a Johnny-come-lately in a field where you have been a worthy pioneer.”

  “But if I’d been that worthy, there’d be no need for you!” Lucy exclaimed. “And here you’ve had to work Rex right through Harvard and New York!”

  Guy nodded with mock gravity. “My friends call me Sisyphus.”

  I suppose we always like a person by whom we have expected to be snubbed. When Lucy told me, a week later, that Guy had asked her to dine at his family’s and that she had gone, she was delighted that I was jealous.

  “Why, you old silly, what would your fine-feathered friend be doing with the likes of me? He wanted to look me over, that was all. It’s really touching how much he cares about you. I like Guy. I like his good spirits. Though the house was rather funereal. You know, of course, his poor mother is dying.”

  This was indeed the sad case. Guy was not coming to the office now, but spending his days at her bedside. When I called at the house after work one evening he received me in the downstairs parlor, looking haggard and sleepless. Yet he brushed aside my solicitous inquiries to express his enthusiasm about Lucy.

  “She’s just the girl for you, old man! She’s got everything Alix didn’t have. If you let her go, you’re a bigger fool than I take you for!”

  This was all very well, and I was touched and pleased, for Lucy in my second New York winter had become the only thing in the world for me outside my work. But I certainly did not like what seemed to be going on between her and Guy. When she told me that he had taken her out alone to dinner at Sherry’s, I blew up altogether.

  “Guy’s concept of friendship is a bit too broad for me if it means sharing my girl friend!”

  “You use the term as if you were speaking of a chattel. I’ll thank you to remember that I’ll go out with whom I please, when I please!”

  “Then you may find that ‘whom you please’ doesn’t include me.”

  “You can suit yourself about that!”

  “Ah, Lucy, how can you be so hard?”

  “Because you’re hard, Rex!” Lucy was immediately at her most serious and most didactic. “You’re very hard indeed. That poor fellow is in desperate trouble. He adores his mother, and he can’t face the fact that he’s losing her. If going out to dinner at an expensive restaurant and letting him talk is going to help him, I’m going to help him! I wish it were always so easy to help one’s fellow man.”

  “So long as it’s just that,” I muttered.

  I tried to accept it, but I found that I could not. The next time Lucy told me that she had been to Sherry’s with Guy (she was entirely open about it), I asked her if she could assure me that he had said nothing that could be construed, even by an old maid, as love making. When she laughed in my face and said that she hoped he was better company than that, I became very somber indeed.

  “You admit then he’s flirting with you?”

  “I admit nothing!”

  Where
upon we had the most serious quarrel in our lives, and when I went home, it was without kissing her good night or even arranging for a next meeting. For a week I brooded, and then, in a cold dry despair, I called at the Percy Primes’. The doctor was upstairs with Mrs. Prime, and I found Guy alone in the library. He seemed vague and preoccupied, and I should have sensed a crisis in his mother’s condition, but my jealousy had driven everything but Lucy from my mind.

  “I want an explanation.”

  “An explanation?”

  “Of your intentions towards Lucy.”

  For a moment he looked utterly bewildered. “But I haven’t any intentions towards Lucy.”

  “You’ve been acting as if you had.”

  Guy shook his head ruefully. “You’re not really jealous, are you? It’s too ridiculous. I suppose Lucy told you of our dinners. That’s so like her. But she’s been nothing but a Good Samaritan, you know. She’s got such a big brimming heart that I thought you could spare me a few drops of it.”

  “Lucy and I are not engaged, you know,” I said in my gravest tone. “If you and she want to go out together, of course, you’re at liberty to do so. I simply want to know where I stand.”

  “Shut up, you silly ass, and don’t go on like that,” Guy interrupted me. “Lucy’s crazy about you, and that’s as it should be. I don’t say if she hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have fallen for her. Hell, I probably have fallen a bit for her. What’s the harm? But don’t worry, I promise never again to see her without you. Does that satisfy you?”

  “If you’re serious.”

  “Of course, I’m serious. Listen, Rex. When it’s all over upstairs, I want to go off for a bit. To the Pacific, to the Orient, I don’t know. Would you like to come with me? Before you’re bogged down in marriage and swamped with babies? It may be your last chance to live a little. What about it?”

  “And my job?”

  “Haven’t I offered you a better one?”

  Had it not been for the business about Lucy, I might have managed, with his mother dying upstairs, at least to give him a civil answer. But I was still too bitter. “De Grasse is the place for me, Guy. I’m not going to leave it now. Maybe your father’s dream is right for you.”

  Guy’s eyes narrowed in a rare expression of resentment. “Meaning that I may not make the grade in de Grasse?”

  “Meaning that you may not be the type to be a banker.” I shrugged to lighten the effect of it. “Is that so terrible? Does one have to be a banker?”

  “You do.”

  He continued to stare at me, when I did not answer this, with a funny little smile that might have been the prelude to a much uglier scene had we not both become aware that someone was standing in the doorway.

  “If your friend can spare you, Guy,” Mr. Prime said in his most frigid tone, “I think your mother needs you.”

  I remained alone, in what discomfort can be imagined, while the sound o£ feet above me and on the stairway gave me a horrid sense of the deepening crisis of Mrs. Prime’s condition. I can see to this day that dismal downstairs library with the bronze stags pursued by wolves, the loudly ticking, violently striking, oversized grandfather clock that seemed, with its preliminary whirrings and rumblings, to shriek for my eviction on the quarter hour. It was a maid, weeping no doubt as much for excitement as for sorrow, who told me that Mrs. Prime was dead, and I fled, leaving a scrawl of sympathy for her son.

  I saw Guy next on the day of the funeral. When I say that he looked very well in raven black I do not mean to imply that he was not grief-stricken. He and his father received the friends in the vestibule of the church after the service, and when I shook his hand he asked me to wait. I did so, until most of the crowd had gone, and then he took me aside.

  “I’m chucking de Grasse,” he said gravely. “I’m going abroad for a year. Everything points to a semicolon in my life, and I may as well acquire a bit of international polish.”

  “I hope it has nothing to do with what I said the other day.”

  “Of course, it has everything to do with it. How could it not? Are you going to tell me that you didn’t mean it? Are you going to tell me that you don’t want me to leave de Grasse?”

  “But, Guy,” I protested, appalled, “what I said had nothing to with what I wanted. All I meant was that you weren’t necessarily cut out to be a banker.”

  “I don’t understand that at all. If I like somebody, I want him with me. You and I went into de Grasse together. It was planned that way. I thought we were a team, to stay there or leave together. If you’ve changed your mind about it now, it’s because you don’t want me there.”

  I have always been very Yankee about the emotions. I have thought of ‘“love” as something related only to a man’s family, and friendship more in terms of trust than affection. No doubt this has been because of my Puritan association of sex with the least warmth between two human beings. But at that moment, in the dark sanctuary of the church vestibule, through which the ushers were already carrying the huge floral offerings (trust the Prime sisters-in-law 1) that were to accompany the casket to its last resting place, I had a glimpse of a different world as Guy conceived it. Guy did not shut the heart up in boxes with labels of “wife” or “mother”; he did not worry about Puritans, and he did not worry about sex. Love was the color scheme of his landscape, and it made mine seem suddenly very bare and dry.

  “You couldn’t imagine I might be thinking of your best interests?”

  Guy shook his head. “No, I couldn’t. And with that in mind, will you look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t mean what you said?”

  It is hard to recall just how conscious were all my cerebrations, but I am sure that somewhere in the bottom of my mind was an awareness of the romantic fallacy that underlay Guy’s philosophy of friendship. If he identified himself with a friend, then what he did for a friend he did for himself. I seem also to recall a pull in my heart, a pull of pity, perhaps even of remorse. I know that I had a sudden vivid sense of disaster to come, as if I could make out in that murky air, perfumed by the passing flowers, the presence of some draped warning figure. It was up to me—that seemed to be the message that flooded my astonished mind—to save this man.

  But one did not “save” people in 1910. I could only conclude that I was being sucked into the bogs of Guy’s sentimentality. I have been called a hard man, but that is because I know when I must make up my mind.

  “I’m afraid I did mean it, Guy.”

  He smiled dryly and shook my hand. “There you are, fella. You see?”

  And he turned to go to his father. I was not to see him again for a year and a half, until I went to Paris to be his best man.

  7.

  IN ANALYZING GUY’S narrative, I am struck by the way it skips over the years between his marriage and the ultimate catastrophe: a period of more than a quarter of a century. I wonder if there may not be a peculiarly American significance in such an emphasis on youth. Was Guy at twenty-five already complete and fixed in his groove, so that the balance of his story was simply the inevitable slide down the tracks to disaster?

  Consider the outline biography that one fills in for a college reunion questionnaire. Most of it is apt to be given over to school, college and trade school, to fraternities, academic honors and athletic teams, to military service, marriage and children, all matters occurring in youth, while the bulk of life, even in many cases the passion of life, is sloughed off with: “Employed by Buckley Carpets as assistant sales manager, 1912. Became President 1940.” Anyone who has watched the sentimentality of a college reunion will have noticed how deeply old graduates love to indulge the dream that their finest hours occurred before they had to face the world.

  In Guy’s case this was particularly true. Even before his marriage to Angelica the small pilot light of his idealism had been snuffed out. I have tried to be candid in explaining my own role in its extinguishment. A defense could be made that so mild a blowing must have been evidence of a rather mild flame, but su
ch as it was, that flame had irradiated Guy’s younger years with the glow that had won him so many hearts. I am afraid that his character changed with his direction when he left his youth behind at de Grasse. Before then he had aspired, in simplest terms, to be everything in the world, regardless of incompatibilities: to be a poet and a millionaire, a Don Juan and a family man, a gallant soldier on the battlefield and a general at headquarters clinking with medals. Afterwards, the attainable universe seemed suddenly to have shrunk to what? To the brokerage house and the country club!

  Now, you will say, how could that have happened? How could a man of Guy’s parts have sunk so quickly from Shelley to Babbitt? I can only answer that life is that way, that man is perverse. Guy was so desperately afraid of being Babbitt (long before Lewis had even created the character) that what may strike us now as a series of mild disillusionments may have been enough to confirm his underlying despair. But unhappily for the rest of us, he never forgot what he had left behind. He must have passionately resented the extinguishment, by himself or by me or by fate, of that more glowing Guy, for out of the pieces of his resentment he was slowly to fabricate the engine that ultimately blew us up.

  I first met Angelica Hyde in Paris, whither I journeyed to be Guy’s best man, just after the time when Lucy had at last agreed to become engaged to me. To my horror and chagrin I experienced immediately the same violent attraction that had flared up in me on first meeting Alix Prime and that I had naively supposed to be safely channeled into the calmer waters of my devotion to Lucy. Of course, I was man enough by then to be in control of my words and actions, but all my thoughts and fantasies rioted about the image of this dark pale beautiful girl so intriguingly remote from her own nuptial festivities, like a Roman princess captured by Barbarians and forced to marry the big blond son of the Goth leader. Goth? Who was I to cast aspersions at Goths or Primes, I who had betrothed myself to a gallant girl back home for whom, despite all my respect and reverence, I felt no part of the terrible emotion that now shook me?