The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  Guy met me for our Monday lunch as usual after the weekend of Angelica’s departure and return, but he made no reference to these events. Instead, he talked about his phosphate mine, in which the de Grasse loans had given me a controlling interest. Discussion of business and little more was the characteristic of this stage in our relationship, the penultimate and, in retrospect, the most offensive to me. For I was always conscious now of a leer behind what I had once considered the simple friendliness of his eyes, and when we walked together back to our offices I half expected to receive a sly poke in the ribs or some such tacit signal that we were fellows in the red plush school of deceit and adultery. I hated it, but I hated it in silence. There was nothing between us that would not have been made viler by discussion.

  And so I conclude this chapter that has been the hardest thing to write that I have ever written. It was made necessary by Guy’s decision to strut posthumously before his grandsons in the role of Othello. It is nobody’s fault but his own that I have been obliged to uncover his closer resemblance to Iago, who pretended that his plotting against the Moor had been motivated by the latter’s affair with his wife.

  10.

  WHEN GUY CAME to me in the summer of 1936 with the shameful story of the Glenville Club’s bonds, I assumed, despite his protestations, that this must have been the climax of a long course of embezzlements. I could only comprehend it as having begun accidentally, in an office sloppily run by golfing partners, with the pledging of a bond thought to belong to one of them and subsequently discovered to be the property of a Prime aunt. How quickly it must have been put back in her account! But the memory would have lingered of so simple and painless a way of raising funds in a pinch. And then, with the depression and tight money, another aunt’s bonds would have been used and replaced, always replaced, of course, and then another’s, until at last, with the passage of years and the hardening of habit, Guy had calmly appropriated three hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of a country club’s building account. Why not? Wasn’t it good business? Didn’t perhaps everyone do it secretly? Even holy old Rex himself?

  But that was not, after all, the way it happened. Guy says that he first converted securities from a customer’s account in 1934, only two years before the episode of the Glenville Club’s bonds, and that he did it then, not accidentally but with a cold calculation. I have talked to his partners and gone over the accounts of his firm, and I have not been able to disprove this. Everything, on the contrary, tends to confirm the bracketing of his initial crime with the failure of his attempted marital reconciliation, and obviously I cannot evade the further bracketing of this same failure with what had happened between myself and Angelica.

  Guy must have hated me as deeply as one man can hate another. To his inflamed imagination I had robbed him of the career that was his birthright and tossed his wife on top of the pile of my loot. The fact that he had played the role of the complacent husband had simply crowned my iniquities: it was as if by pushing him into this position I had tried to rob him of his resentment as well. In the two years that elapsed between my giving up Angelica and the collapse of his firm, the same years of his embezzlements, he treated me with a graveled heartiness that was an almost insulting parody of our former friendship. Yet there was never anything approaching an explanation between us. We knew each other too well.

  The peculiar hardness and boldness of Guy in this era, which was so to strike and shock the public at his trial, was much more than a melodramatic defiance of fate. Old Mr. de Grasse put his finger on it when he suggested to me during the Congressional hearings that Guy was enjoying himself. He was. He believed that he had brought me down at last and with me de Grasse Brothers and with de Grasse the whole world of serious men who had denied him the leadership that he had so long and so almost crazily claimed. Oh, yes, he was a fiddling Nero, only a more dangerous one. Rome could be rebuilt. My Wall Street never was.

  I do not mean that Guy intended to go bankrupt, but that sometime in that period he embarked on a course of action that could have only two possible endings, both heady personal triumphs for him. Either he would become the richest man in Wall Street or he would destroy Wall Street. Either he would be monarch of that famous thoroughfare or he would turn it over, with grass growing in its streets, to the jackals of the New Deal. As it began to look as if the second eventuality would be the one to produce his “cloudy trophies,” Guy moved to enmesh me in his fall. It was essential to his plan that I should become his creditor, with full knowledge of his embezzlement. It was vital that I should become his accessory.

  He was sure, of course, that he had me in his hands. He was de Grasse’s broker and my friend and affiliate; a scandal was bound to spatter my walls. He was well aware (who better?) of my feeling for Angelica; he assumed that I would be anxious to spare her the humiliation of her husband’s disgrace. And then, most potently of all, my only son was engaged to his daughter. Surely all he had to do was tell his tale of woe and pocket my incriminating money.

  Yet there was a stubborn side of my nature that might have prevailed over all these things. Indeed, Guy’s very cocksureness that he had me where he wanted me might have been enough to turn me against the loan. I have always hated to be taken for granted. But fortunately for his plans and unhappily for me, my stubbornness was aroused that day by another person.

  The reader will remember that I told Guy on the telephone that I would give him my answer to his desperate appeal that night at Meadowview. After some hours of frenetic self-examination I decided to lay the case before Lucy. I left my office and drove to Glen Cove, where I found her on the flagstone terrace in her wheel chair, enjoying the early spring weather. By her side was the little table on which her necessaries were always laid: her books, her writing board, her field glasses (she loved birds), her journal, and the little radio which brought her the appalling soap operas to which invalids grow so attached. She listened intently, but without seeming surprise, as I told my grim tale.

  “Are you going to give him the money?” was all she asked when I had finished. It was like her to waste no time in ejaculations and laments.

  “Don’t you think I have to? For Evadne’s sake, if no one else’s?”

  “Forgive me if I say that’s tosh, my dear. Evadne and George can survive Guy’s disgrace. If they can’t, there’s no stuff in them, and I think they have stuff. As for Angelica, she’s been looking for challenges all her life. “Why deprive her of one as real as this? Let’s get down to brass tacks. You’re thinking of de Grasse Brothers. Or you think you’re thinking of it.”

  “I’m thinking of Guy.”

  “Are you?” Lucy’s stare was intent. “I should have thought you would have been remorseless in a case like this. Is there a single extenuating circumstance? You haven’t mentioned one.”

  “You forget how far back Guy goes into my past.”

  “I don’t forget how much you dislike him. Isn’t it time you faced that? And how much it motivates you? You’re afraid of letting Guy go to jail because you want him to go to jail. You’re ashamed of this, so you fall back on the other motive of saving de Grasse from being publicly associated with a swindler.”

  I breathed heavily. I never liked it when Lucy was coldly analytical, and, of course, she was particularly apt to be so where the Primes were concerned. Unfortunately for me, unfortunately for everyone, I ascribed her detachment that evening to a continued jealousy of Angelica. I believed that Lucy believed that I wanted to save Guy for Angelica’s sake. “Well, of course, it’s true that the tie-in between Guy and de Grasse has always been close,” I said. “Some of that mud would be bound to stick.”

  “Not as much as if it were found out that you were covering up for him.”

  Oh, had I listened to herl “Then there’s the question of his innocent partners. They’ll be ruined, too.”

  “What do you care about Guy’s partners, Rex? Can’t you be honest about yourself for once in your life?”

  There was s
omething so icy about Lucy on this occasion that it virtually resolved me in Guy’s favor. That is the tragedy of the closest relationships of life. At the most crucial moments irritation often occupies the center of the stage. Lucy did not believe that I was really concerned about Guy, and her distaste for what she considered my hypocrisy made her put her excellent advice in unpalatable form. I, in turn, believed that she would not face in her own heart a hostility for Angelica that made her welcome the prospect of disaster for the Primes.

  “I am sorry to give the impression of so little feeling,” I said dryly, and I went to my room to dress for dinner at Meadowview. It was while shaving that I conceived my plan of making Guy give up his business in return for my loan. Fatuously, I congratulated my image in the mirror on its brilliance. It seemed to me that this way I saved everybody and that I protected society into the bargain by chaining Guy up with his promise to retire. Of course, I was taking the law into my own hands, but in my conceit I never doubted that this was where it belonged. Who else, indeed, could rescue the innocent and restrict the guilty? The law would have punished both.

  My resolution faltered a bit that night at Meadowview when I had to sit at Guy’s table, in the presence of his family and my son (all, of course, ignorant of the impending crisis), and listen to him bandy cheap jokes about the suicide of Count Landi, whose position had been morally the twin of his own. This performance should have convinced me that the man whose promise to retire from business I was about to take (or rather to exact) had become totally depraved. But my heart went out instead to his wife and children, sitting there listening to his chatter and not knowing how close they were to a similar disgrace.

  Why then, my reader will ask, did I not watch Guy, in the summer that followed, to make sure that he carried out his part of our bargain? I was in England, to be sure, but that was no excuse. I could still have had him properly supervised. The answer is that the very thought of Guy had become so nauseating to me that I weakly (and I hope uncharacteristically) tried to put him out of my mind. To explain this, I can only relate a conversation that I had with Angelica after what Guy calls the “Meadowview Pact” and before my departure for England.

  She asked me to lunch with her alone. She said that she wanted to learn more precisely just what it was that Guy had done and why it was so wrong. I was pleased at her interest, for I had been upset at how casually she had taken the news of Guy’s defalcations. But I soon found that she had other things on her mind. Women simply do not care as men care about the morals of the marketplace.

  “How far back do you think these ‘defalcations’ as you call them, go?” she asked me. “As far back as 1934?”

  “But that’s only two years.” Then I flushed as I thought I followed her thinking. “You mean you think there might be a connection between what he did and us?”

  “Oh no. Between what he did and my miscarriage.”

  “Miscarriage? What miscarriage?”

  “Didn’t you know I had a miscarriage that fall?” Angelica took in my look of consternation and suddenly burst out laughing. “Oh no, you old silly, it wasn’t you. It was Guy all right; the baby was only a few weeks on. But Guy seemed to mind it all so desperately, I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with turning him bad.”

  He minded it! I think I minded it more than the discovery of his embezzlements. How had I missed it? Lucy must have deliberately kept it from me, with heroic delicacy, to spare my feelings. Or else she may have thought that it was my child and that I must have known. Heaven and earth! I do not recall what further conversation I had with Angelica at that lunch, but I know that I allowed nothing more to be said of the miscarriage and that I tramped all the way back from Fourteenth Street to my office afterwards. Dearest Angelica, you never knew what torture you put me through!

  Of course, I forgave it. Of course, I blamed it all on Guy. It seemed to me, that dismal afternoon, that he had smeared everything he had ever touched and everything that I had ever loved. Had he not cheapened his cousin Alix by making me see her only as an heiress and myself as a fortune hunter? Had he not cheapened the whole trade of banking until I had had to drive him out of de Grasse? Oh, yes, I had driven him out—I saw that now! Had he not debased Angelica by winking at our love? And had he not now cheapened her again, hideously, unbearably? I could think of no nook or cranny of my life that had not been degraded by Guy Prime.

  My trip to England was like a flight from a burning city. I did not want to think about Guy or hear his name mentioned. Before I left I told George the story of the embezzlements and asked him to be my watchdog. Poor George! Asked to watch his beloved’s father! Besides, he was too young, too inexperienced. He did not even move in the world where he would have learned of Guy’s borrowings. I had left a puppy to guard my fox.

  When Lucy and I returned from England, we did not see the Primes, but George informed me that there had been rumors of Guy’s borrowing. He said that he had reported this to Angelica and that she had told him that Guy was renegotiating an old loan that had fallen due.

  “An old loan!” I exclaimed. “But surely he has dozens of those! He should have come to us. He knows that I want to settle this whole business, once and for all.”

  George flushed and said nothing, and I saw that he was as unsatisfied as I. What did I expect? How could he question his future mother-in-law’s estimate of her husband’s affairs? Angelica, who didn’t know a stock from a bond!

  And so it was, as Guy reports, that the moment I felt his heavy hand on my shoulder at the opera, I knew that my silly game was up.

  Mr. de Grasse, fortunately, was in New York—he never went to France before the cold weather—and I repaired straight from the opera house to his red brick Federal mansion on Washington Square. It had belonged to his father and grandfather before him (an almost inconceivable rarity in New York), and I wondered if the Duncan Phyfe chairs and the Paul Revere tankards would not blush at the nature of my revelations. I had telephoned from a booth of the gravity of my mission, and Albert Simmons, senior partner of Simmons, Bly & Slater, our counsel, was there ahead of me. In the library, by a fire into which Mr. de Grasse pensively gazed, the three of us held our grim conference.

  I had never much cared for Simmons, and that night I came near to hating him. He was an unctuous, soft little man with a mellifluous, never-ceasing voice, and he clasped and unclasped his fat little hands as he talked and shook his head so that the pince-nez on the thin bridge of his bulging nose was always aquiver. In a bonnet and cape he would have looked like a dear old granny, and it was perhaps to counter this image that he asserted his opinions so aggressively. Oh, of course, he was a brilliant lawyer, but I did not need a brilliant lawyer to tell me that to cover up for Guy Prime would be compounding a felony. Had I not already done it once?

  “Thank you, Albert,” Mr. de Grasse said when he had finished, or at least paused. “That seems to be perfectly clear, doesn’t it? Let me beg your forgiveness for an interrupted evening. My car will take you home.”

  When Simmons had gone, obviously surprised and put out by his abrupt dismissal, having expected, no doubt, to linger luxuriously over the corpse of Guy Prime, savoring the scandal, deploring the crime, rejoicing in his sense of being the first to know, Mr. de Grasse looked up at me with an enigmatic little smile.

  “So much for the law, Rex. Now for you and me. De Grasse Brothers obviously can do nothing. But Marcellus de Grasse is another matter. Draw on me for what you need.”

  With sudden, burning tears in my eyes I took his thin cold hand in mine. “God bless you, sir. Of course, I can’t accept it. Guy must go under. And I must resign from de Grasse.”

  “Nonsense!” The old man had risen to clasp my shoulder. “A de Grasse partnership means more than a business association. Surely you have learned that in all these years. We stand together to the end.”

  “But if I’ve hurt the firm, sir?”

  “If you’ve killed the firm, we stand by you. But, of course, it wo
n’t come to that. There will be a bit of a blow, and we may ship some water, but hang on, and we’ll come through.”

  “I still think, sir…”

  “Oh, go home and go to bed, Rex. You know you’d feel the same way if it was one of the other partners.”

  It was the memory of this scene that sustained me through the agonizing days that followed. When I consider what I have been to Lucy, to Angelica, to Guy and even to my poor over-indoctrinated, over-lectured son George, I cannot help wondering if my relationship with this cool, cynical old man was not the one successful relationship of my life. We asked very little of each other, gave less and fully appreciated what we received.

  In the Congressional hearing that followed Guy’s conviction, Mr. de Grasse continued his kindness. He knew that this would be the hardest part of all for me, harder than the newspapers, harder than George’s misery, harder than all the terrible letters. He sat by me throughout the hearing and endeavored to lighten it by whispering joking comments about the witnesses and making fun of the zealous chief counsel for the Committee. When I stepped down after my ordeal in the witness box, he muttered:

  “Cohen’s a cad, that’s all there is to it. A gentleman can’t take that kind of thing too much to heart.”

  Perhaps not. But since when had I been a gentleman?

  My ultimate revelation came with Guy’s testimony. It was not in what he said, for that, of course, was well-traveled territory, but in the way he said it. Guy was what is called a good witness: grave, courteous, patient, simple and clear. It was as if he had been called as an expert on the history of Prime King Dawson & King and was testifying with perfect detachment. It was difficult for most observers in that chamber to realize that this calm, dignified, almost magisterial gentleman would, when the hearing was over, return to the penitentiary to serve out his three-year term.

  Towards his partners, his associates, his friends and creditors in that crowded room his conduct was perfect. They might have been total strangers. He spoke to nobody and caught nobody’s eye. When he and I passed in the corridor he looked neither through me nor away. He simply appeared not to recognize me. Nobody would ever have the opportunity to cut Guy Prime.