Those four weeks jump out of my chronology as a period with no true part in my story, a chapter of lurid fiction irreverently inserted in a sober Victorian two-volume “life and letters,” a ballet stuck into a social problem play. It was dope or euphoria or ecstasy. It was the highest point or the nadir. It was not I—at least the “I” that I had been and was to become again. It was Rex Geer posing as somebody else, Rex Geer so terrified of what he was posing as that, in the hours outside that furnished apartment overlooking a wintry river, he plunged convulsively into work and, when there was no work, grabbed people, buttonholed people, went into people’s offices and clubs, did anything, in short, to avoid being caught alone with his conscience. And when he came home at night he would take two sleeping pills, he, who had never taken a sedative in his life!
I staved off remorse for two of those four weeks, and then it exploded in me like a fire bomb. People at the office asked me if I was sick or in pain. Walking down the corridors of de Grasse I sometimes put my hand to my side as if to allay an agony that seemed to be physical. But I did not give up Angelica. There was never the remotest idea of that. If anything, my agony increased my pleasure in what caused it.
On a Saturday night at the end of those four weeks I happened to be alone, except for the caretaker and his wife, in my Long Island house. During Lucy’s absence I had given the staff a vacation. I was in the library reading, when Angelica, in a red evening dress and mink stole, appeared suddenly and defiantly in the doorway. Her hair was blown, and she was panting.
“I’ve left him!” she cried. “I’ve left him, and you can’t make me go back!”
“Did you leave your dinner party, too?” I asked, as casually as I could, to calm her, and walked over to take off her wrap. “Didn’t you tell me you were entertaining the local gentry?”
“We were entertaining all the idiots on the board of his damn club. An annual affair. And right in the middle of dinner up he jumps, with a half a bun on, to make one of his incessant toasts. You know how he loves toasts. He could make one in an Automat!” Here she went to the fire to warm her hands, but in a moment she had whirled around at me. “You won’t believe what he toasted tonight. Us!”
I gaped. “You and me?”
“Well, not quite, though he would have been capable of that, too.” She laughed, a bit wildly. “He toasted him and me. Our marriage. He said, with tears in his eyes, mind you, that it was our twenty-second wedding anniversary and he wanted to drink to ‘two point two decades of bliss.’ And he meant it, that’s what kills me. I could stand anything in the world but his meaning itl”
“Is that when you departed?”
“No, I waited till dinner was over. I did that much for him. I slipped away while the ladies were out. Ma will see that they join the gentlemen.” Here she snorted at my concern for detail. “Ma is always sublime in a crisis. It brings out the Roman in her.”
“Oh, your mother is there,” I said, relieved.
“Yes, and she’ll keep Guy in hand. I left her a note, telling her to persuade him that it would be useless to come after me.”
“And will she?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care!”
I busied myself now at the cupboard getting her a drink. For the first time in a month my mind was working clearly, however feverishly. “You propose to stay here?”
“If I may?” she exclaimed in surprise. “If you’ll take a poor refugee in?”
But I rejected her lightness of tone. “When I bought this house, I put the title in Lucy’s name. That was more than a legal technicality. I regard it as her home.”
“Pardon me. I’ll leave right now!”
“No, my dear. You will spend the night. In a guest room. Tomorrow we will figure out a plan.”
“Oh, Rex, how can you be so cold?” Angelica’s tone had changed abruptly to one of throbbing appeal. “I respect how you feel about Lucy. I respect your delicacy. You can lock your door tonight if you want. What do I care about this house? Let Lucy have it. Let her have all your money, too, if she wants. Not that she does, worse luck. That would be too easy. But, poor sick darling creature that she is, isn’t it enough if she has the home and George and the sympathy of all the world? Can’t she let you go? Can’t you and I have a little something of what’s left of our lives? Good God, it’s ridiculous! Here we are living in an age of universal divorce and acting like two characters in The Scarlet Letter. If you put it up to Lucy, do you think she’d refuse us?”
How well I knew she wouldn’t! I think that moment was the climax of my agony. For there was no escaping the fact now that I was cheating two women. Nor is there any telling how I would have got out of it had not Swain, my caretaker, appeared just then in the doorway, very embarrassed and apologetic, to announce that a Mrs. Hyde was asking for me. Angelica and I exchanged glances.
“Alone?” I asked.
“Well, she’s alone in the hall, sir. But she came in a big yellow car with a chauffeur.”
It was Angelica who answered for us. “Tell her to come in. And, oh, Swain,” she called as he turned to go. “Mrs. Hyde is my mother. I asked her to pick me up here tonight.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Have I saved your reputation?” she demanded sarcastically, when Swain had gone. “Let me ask, in return, that you not desert me while Ma is here.”
Mrs. Hyde, then in her seventies, with unwrinkled skin and white hair, dressed in black velvet with no jewelry but a small antique necklace, was more effectively feminine, more persuasively authoritative than when I had first met her. She came into the room as if she were making a simple after-dinner family call. She was carrying a knitting bag and paused before the portrait of the moneylender, which she examined with a tranquil attentiveness.
“I’m afraid it’s a fake,” I murmured.
“Ah, but one forgives it for making such an effort,” she answered pleasantly. “I’ve never seen a picture trying harder to be a Rembrandt.”
“Won’t you sit by the fire?” I urged her. “And can I get you something? A liqueur?”
“No, thank you. At the Primes’ one dines very well. We had everything a body could want.” Here she sat down and at once took out her needlepoint. As she prepared to work, she cast an oblique glance in Angelica’s direction. “Except perhaps a hostess. Although in her mood, there’s some question as to how much one wanted her.”
Angelica strode back to the fireplace and, putting her hands on the mantel, kicked a log back. “I’m not going home tonight, Mother. You may as well save your breath.”
“That’s what I assumed. That’s why I’ve brought a night bag.”
“Do you really think I need a chaperone at my age?”
“Certainly not. After the lives that you and Guy have led, it would be a ridiculous formality. I’m thinking of Mr. Geer. From what I understand, he still has some shred of reputation left.”
“So that’s your line tonight!” Angelica swung around angrily from the fire to face her. “Well, you’re very resourceful, I will admit. My mother’s a great diplomat, Rex,” she continued, turning to me. “She knows just where to apply her pressure. If there’s a bit of religion left in you, she can put on her tiara and preside over the Vatican like Lucrezia Borgia! Or if it’s society you’re afraid of, she can frown like Queen Victoria. Watch out, poor man!”
The old lady never flinched. “Poor man?” she queried. “I had thought he was an exceedingly rich one. I wonder if you have discovered already with your own offspring, Mr. Geer, that children think of parents as natural hypocrites. Angelica takes it for granted that I’m trying to reach her through you. It’s very vain of her, really. Why shouldn’t I be capable of wanting to reach you through her?”
“Because you hardly know him!” Angelica intervened indignantly. “You haven’t seen him half a dozen times in your life. What can he possibly be to you?”
“Your victim, dear.” Mrs. Hyde spoke with ominous mildness, and Angelica flushed.
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p; “And why should you be concerned with my victims?” she demanded with a childish rudeness. “Haven’t you enough of your own?
“Because if I bear the responsibility for my own, I must bear some for you. Surely, I should have given you a better orientation in how to live and love.”
“Love?” Angelica asked sneeringly. “What could you have taught me about love?”
“More than you think, my girl,” retorted her mother, whose tone became cooler as Angelica’s became more petulant. “You aren’t the only woman who’s had to conform to a pattern in which she didn’t believe or to give the appearance of loving where she didn’t love. But in my day we didn’t think it was necessarily a high honesty to capsize the boat and drown the crew!”
“And whom, pray, am I drowning? Could anyone as buoyant as Guy go under?”
“I thought we had decided that Guy, like yourself, was immune to the perils of your social adventurousness. It is Mr. Geer who is in danger of death by water.”
How awesome is the power of a mother, particularly the power of a mother capable of such devastating detachment! I shuddered with sympathy for Angelica, standing before her terrible parent with tear-stained eyes and trembling lip, a small pouting girl again. But I said nothing, no, not even then. I was as much in the old lady’s grip as she. I knew that the drastic therapy which she was meting out was our only salvation.
“Rex, tell her it’s not so!”
“Yes, Rex, if I may call you that, tell her it’s not sol” Mrs. Hyde had dropped all pretense of banter now. She knew when to drive home her points, and she was not in the least bit shy of emphasis. She struck the handle of her work bag with the top of her long needle as she summed up the situation. “Tell her and tell me if you want to crown your career with the legalization of a double adultery. And tell us, too, if you want to add a final chapter to the charming little book that you wrote about your rectory boyhood and call it ‘How I married my best friend’s wife’!”
“My God, Mother, you monster!” Angelica groaned. “Rex, don’t listen to her!”
How can I describe my feelings at that moment? All I remember is suspecting that there would be little of me left to come out of the vise formed by the opposed wills of these two powerful women. Can I convince a modern reader that I adored Angelica and was at the same time passionately relieved by her mother’s interference? No, that’s hardly romantic, is it? I was a very long way from believing that the world was well lost for love. The vision of Lucy’s pain-ridden eyes was an icy hell in which the greatest heaven that Angelica could offer fizzled out like a burning coal. I yearned for it all to be over, and, like a coward, I clung to Mrs. Hyde’s skirts.
“I’m waiting for an answer,” the inexorable old woman continued.
“Yes, Rex, answer her!”
“Angelica, my dear, she’s right. You know she’s right.”
Angelica became alabaster. “You mean I’m to go back?”
“What else have I to offer you?”
With a little cry she turned and fled from the room. When I was going to follow her, Mrs. Hyde called me sharply back.
“Rex! I think I’d like that glass of brandy now. The one you were kind enough to offer when I came in.”
“But Angelica may do something to herself!”
“Don’t flatter yourself. Or me. She’ll be down in a minute and ready to go home. Believe me,” she said, even more firmly as I hesitated, “I know her better than you do.”
Quelled by that bleak, remotely twinkling stare I went to the cupboard and poured her a brandy, which she consumed in three quick sips. It was her only sign that the preceding scene had been a strain.
“It is not easy to talk to you, Mrs. Hyde,” I said. “You must feel I have done you a great wrong.”
“Not at all. In my generation, these things were blamed on the women, and not much on them unless they made fools of themselves. As Angelica did tonight.”
“That is the European point of view?”
“I should prefer to call it the civilized point of view. An affair is one thing. Breaking up a marriage, or two of them, is quite another.”
“It humiliates me to have to admit that your Catholic faith comes out of all of this better than my Protestant. I hang my head in shame, Mrs. Hyde.”
“That will get neither of us anywhere,” she replied briskly. “Besides, my Catholic faith has very little to do with it. I am indeed a Catholic, and I believe in the teachings of my church. But I would continue to believe in its rules even if I lost my faith in its teachings.” She held out her glass. “One more tiny drop, please, and I’ll tell you something. Because I think I like you, Rex.” I poured her the drop, and she contemplated the glass as she contemplated her speech. “I may as well relieve your conscientious mind. Why, after all, should you labor under a debt of gratitude to me? I didn’t come here tonight to save your marriage. It wasn’t in danger. I didn’t even come here to save you. You weren’t in danger. I came here to save Angelica.”
“From me?”
“Well, more precisely, to save her from the humiliation of slipping between two stools. To save her from discovering that you wouldn’t leave your wife at a time when it might be too late for her to go back to Guy. For it’s not too late now. Guy will overlook this episode. He is very tolerant. But even Guy has his limits.”
“And what sort of a life will she have with Guy when she goes back?”
“The same she’s always had. The life she chose. Don’t stare at me that way, Rex. It isn’t as if he beat her. Personally, I’ve always liked Guy. He’s a good-humored man, which, as Dr. Johnson said, is a rare thing. Angelica’s always picking on him for being vulgar. Yet all he’s really doing is dabbing a badly needed spot of rouge on the poor old skeleton of our universe.” She rose now and crossed the room to the door nearest the hall stairs. “Angelical” she called up in a voice as casual as if they had been late for a dinner engagement. “Are you coming?”
And Angelica came.
She swept down the stairs and passed me like a queen evacuating her palace and making her proud quick way through the jeering rebel mob. I was that mob. I followed her and her mother out to the porte-cochere, where the Prime Hispano and chauffeur were waiting. So even that was a bluff! Mrs. Hyde had never expected to spend the night. She had had too much confidence in her own diplomacy to dismiss the car.
I did not see Angelica for six months, nor did we correspond. When we met at last, it was accidentally, in New York at her mother’s, where I now regularly called. We came away together, and I walked with her to the door of the Colony Club.
“I’ve gotten over my hate of you,” she said in her old brusque way. “I might even go so far as to say that you and Ma were right. But if you so much as look ‘I told you so,’ I shall take a small, pearl-handled revolver from my purse and shoot you straight through the heart. Isn’t that what Joan Crawford would do?”
“I don’t go to the movies.”
“Then take it from me,” she said, more grimly than her seeming joke implied, “that’s what she’d do.”
“There wouldn’t be much to shoot. I’ve been pretty much in pieces.”
“And to think I did that to the great Reginald Geer! I shall have it engraved on my tombstone. To the scandalization of the Prime mausoleum!”
If that was the note she wanted to strike, I would not be the one to jangle her tune. If I suspected that a passionate resentment was still seething beneath it, I would not be the one to let it out. Humbly, gratefully, a bit shame-facedly, I picked up my cue, and from then on I continued to see Angelica, as I had seen her before our intimacy, in groups, at her own house and at the houses of friends. I do not think that, while Lucy was living and while Guy remained Angelica’s husband, we had a conversation that either Lucy or he would have begrudged us. Curiously enough, these social meetings, which might have seemed impossibly frustrating, were of immense comfort to me. On the threshold of fifty innocence was preferable to ecstasy.
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bsp; The reaction of each of our spouses to Angelica’s flight from the dinner party was characteristic. When Lucy returned from Arizona, I made a clean breast of the whole sorry business. She listened patiently, without a single comment, until I had finished.
“You must think me very obtuse,” she said at last, “if you suppose I didn’t know about you and Angelica. I do not blame you, not in my mind, anyway. My mind tells me that a healthy man needs love. My heart can’t help being bitter about it. Nor can it resist a certain unworthy glee in knowing what purgatory your conscience must have made it for you. That is my sin, you see. We’re in pari delicto. And the best we can both do is to make a pledge not to talk about your lady loves. It’s this chatter that I find hardest of all.”
“There will be no more lady loves to chatter about. I swear it, Lucy.”
“Oh, my dearest, don’t make a pledge like that. I know you’re quite capable of keeping it. Don’t, for God’s sake, put me in the position of having to urge you to go and get what I can’t give you. It’s beyond flesh and blood!”
“Lucy, my darling, listen.” I got down on my knees by her chair. “I am going to be faithful because I want to be faithful. Because it makes me happy to be faithful. I am making the pledge to myself, not to you. Does that make it any better?”
“Oh much better, my love. Except that it makes me want to die!”
I kept my pledge, and I can only pray that I did not hurt Lucy more that way than I would have by breaking it. She only let down her guard on a single other occasion when, years later, as she lay dying, she took my hand and murmured: “I’m sorry you’re so old!” And immediately the pain flooded her eyes at the realization of what, poor selfless creature, she must have considered an unforgivable self-indulgence.
The Embezzler Page 21
