The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  As the hearing went on, as he blandly and specifically uncovered for our benevolently despotic government every last detail of his peculations, I began to understand the motives that I have outlined at the beginning of this chapter. I saw that I had been Guy’s tool from the beginning, first in de Grasse and later, when he set up his own firm, as a forwarder of business. Angelica had helped, his father and his uncles had helped, even his unhappy cousin Alix, by marrying me, was meant to have helped. Everything and everyone that Guy touched, even the country club that was his dream child, had had to be molded into instruments to bring about his greater glorification. If he had spent half the energy trying to achieve success directly that he had striving for it indirectly, he might have been one of the big names of finance. But his bigness, such as it was, was to be in his failure. He had to bring us all down with him, to soil the revered name of de Grasse, to disgrace the Stock Exchange, and to give the New Deal the ammunition, which until then it had lacked, to legislate out of existence the free economy in which he had failed. To save the name of Guy Prime from ignominy he had to make his era ignominious. He had hoped that in the future men would admiringly say: “Guy Prime? Bad? But he was the symbol of his time, wasn’t he? It may have been a buccaneer age, but you’ll have to admit he was a glorious buccaneer!”

  Some of his motivation may have been deep below the surface; some of it may have been even subconscious. But the point is that it was there. Guy had to destroy a world—a world that I still believe was fundamentally a good one—because he could not dominate it. To my dying day I will hate him for that. Now the reader may say that he was a neurotic, a child; the reader may argue that he could not help what he was doing. Very well. But so am I a neurotic, a child. I cannot help hating a man who did what he did.

  Part III

  Angelica

  1.

  WHEN REX HANDED ME his memoir, I had still not written a line of my own—at least not a line that I had kept—and I doubt if I would have ever completed it had he not given me the impetus of his straight, honest, Rex-like approach to the mystery of Guy. I suppose that this approach has a kind of truth in that it is utterly sincere and that the sincerity of its author had an important function in Guy’s history. But it is still misleading. Rex never understood anyone’s sincerity but his own.

  He certainly never understood Guy’s. He never even understood how much Guy worshiped him. I realize that Guy in his own memoir makes a great deal of his supposed hatred of Rex, but this must have come later, as hindsight, while he was brooding over the past in the rains and bars of Panama. In my early married years Rex was invariably held up to me as the model of all that a man should be. Guy had an ideal of friendship, as he did of everything else. He and Rex had to be Damon and Pythias.

  Guy never lost the dangerous capacity for convincing himself that his own shimmering vision of life was the true one. It only made things worse that he was able to convince others in the same way. He could convince Rex, for example, in areas where Rex was not a specialist. He got Rex to swallow, hook, line and sinker, his whole fantastic conception of the social position of the Primes.

  I loathe everything about “society” and always have. I know that this is a frequent pose of society people, but it is no pose with me. However, as Guy and Rex seem consistently to agree on the “splendor” of the Prime family, I may as well start by exposing that particular myth. One cannot possibly comprehend the temple of illusion in which Guy maintained his nervous existence without a long, hard look at its foundation.

  He knew well enough that his family were worldly and snobbish, but he reconciled himself to these unlovable characteristics by endeavoring to see them as mere details in a canvas refulgent with gold and silver tones. It is easier for an English historian to accept the streak of cruelty in the Virgin Queen if he thinks of her in her ruff collar, decked out in a thousand diamonds. But how does she look naked, without her wig, her rouge, her gems? And suppose she had never had such accoutrements? Guy saw his family as the readers of tabloids saw them, in tiaras and opera boxes. Like many people in the social world he preferred the account of a party in a gossip column to his own recollection of it.

  To put it bluntly, the Primes were a shabby lot, and were so regarded, when I was a girl, by most of the people whom they sought to impress. I do not deny that they were an “old” family, as New York families go, but they were utterly undistinguished. There was no Prime patriot or statesman or judge or man of letters; there was not even a Prime fortune. The old bishop, Guy’s grandfather, was famous for his unctuosity even in that unctuous age. His fawning, mellifluous tone with the rich was laughed at by people whose own bowing and scraping would be regarded as comic today. The joke on which we all used to be brought up was that, en route between two fashionable resorts, Bishop Prime was asked to stop in a humble village to confirm a class of children. When he asked impatiently if an hour would be enough, the indignant local minister was supposed to have retorted: “Let me bring the children down to the station, Bishop, and you can wave your blessing as the train goes through.”

  That three of Guy’s uncles married great fortunes there is no disputing, but they were three very new and peculiarly odoriferous ones. And let me note here an odd social phenomenon. It was presumably the function of the Prime men (being good for nothing else that I could ever see) that they would teach their more humbly born wives the social graces. Yet precisely the opposite happened. They lost their own! Guy’s uncles, and even his father, seemed instinctively to prefer the vocabulary of the parvenu to that of the gentleman born. They would always say “wealthy” instead of “rich,” “estate” instead of “country place,” “socially prominent” instead of “snappy.” Their talk, like their over-pressed clothes, smacked of a musical comedy about Newport or Bar Harbor. I have always suspected that there was something innately vulgar in even the oldest New York society that half a dozen generations could not breed out. Guy’s newly rich aunts, on the other hand, pursued a different course. They all ended up as ladies.

  Aunt Amy was the one I cared for most, mother of the unhappy Alix and a most unhappy woman herself, but who, when she had not been drinking or when she was not deferring to her odious husband, was capable of the greatest affection and understanding. For all her heavy features and heavy breathing, and, alas, occasionally heavy breath, she had more natural distinction than any Prime. I remember a party at her house when she walked serenely out of the dining room in her stocking feet, having kicked her slippers off during dinner and never noticed it. But of such trivia, alas, was made up the talk of the town. If poor Aunt Amy had only had the courage of her convictions, she could have been a great woman. As it was, she was only admirable to her intimates.

  It was to her that I owed most of my knowledge of the Primes. Her outward submission to Uncle Chauncey did not encompass any loyalty to his blood, and she regarded a sympathetic niece-in-law as a natural confidante. She and I might have been girls at boarding school, smoking up the chimney and running down the faculty. She told me that Uncle Reginald Prime had been suspected of cheating at cards at the Knickerbocker Club and that the Bishop, as a senile widower, had made a fool of himself by proposing to every rich widow in Newport. But most fascinating of all she told me the true story of Percy Prime’s courtship of Eunice Fearing.

  Guy, of course, had built this up into the romance of the ages. Yet apparently his father, far from flouting the family tradition of good matches, had simply miscalculated the quantity of the Fearing fortune. He had fallen into the habit of denigrating the success of his younger brothers in the newer social fields by telling everyone that there was more money in old New York than people suspected, and he had ended by convincing himself. Mr. Fearing had not had to promise a penny to get an ailing and aging daughter off his hands, and when death had at last uncovered the modesty of his means, his crestfallen son-in-law had no one but himself to blame.

  “Poor Percy,” Aunt Amy would say, shaking her head, “I almost found
it in my heart to feel sorry for him. Eunice would have been a sore trial to a rich husband, let alone a poor one. He might have learned to put up with her hypochondria, but not with the constant farce that she was being brave. Eunice always insisted that illness was boring and that she could not bear to talk about her own, but I would have defied you to get a word out of her on any other subject. When I used to call, after each of her ‘attacks,’ she would give me a dimply smile and exclaim: ‘Oh, Amy, I’m afraid I’ve been silly again!’ Now in my experience, dearie, people who say they’ve been ‘silly’ when they’ve been ill, are inevitably soaked in self-pity. What a strain for Guy and Bertha! To have to live in a house pretending there was illness when there wasn’t any, and pretending that they weren’t talking about the illness that wasn’t when they were, and pretending that poor Mamma was being so brave about it when the very air was infected with her panic! At least, my girls only had to put up with a bit of gin on my breath.”

  “But, Aunt Amy,” I can remember pointing out, “you say there was no illness, but she died when Guy was only twenty-two.”

  “And when she was fifty-seven. She was no spring chicken, you know, when she married. That was one of the reasons Percy went after her. He was never much of a hand with the ladies. Still, I grant you, fifty-seven is young to die.” Aunt Amy at the time was well into her eighties. “But I doubt if there was anything really wrong with her until the last couple of years. I think she must have frightened herself at last into a fatal illness. Eunice played sick so long that she finally fooled the gods, and they whisked her off!”

  Aunt Amy’s theories about her sister-in-law were echoed by Bertha Prime. Guy’s sister and I always got on surprisingly well considering how different we were. All my real friends were men, and all hers were women. I do not know if Bertha was ever a practicing Lesbian—her background may have too much inhibited her—but she had all the earmarks of one: the stocky figure, the straight hair, the mannish stride. Only in her gushing sentimentality over the arts was she feminine, whereas Mother’s training had taught me to approach beauty dry-eyed. Bertha felt superior to what she called my “horsy set,” but she respected my directness, and she always needed an ally against the combination of her father and Guy. Her early life must have been horribly lonely.

  Guy, she admitted, had always been adequately nice to her, but not so her parents. All of her father’s affection and as much of her mother’s as she could spare from herself had gone to the handsome boy who was supposed to make up for what life had scanted them.

  “I used to think that Guy had all the breaks at home,” Bertha told me, “but time proved otherwise. Poor boy, he was quite taken in. All Mummie’s and Daddy’s false metal rang true to his ears. But I, being neglected, learned the hard way. I learned to see through people. When I was twenty-one I had my own job and my own apartment. Daddy expected me to stay at home and keep house for him. Well, he expected in vain!”

  She used to relate a terrible story about Guy and St. Andrew’s School. His mother had never considered herself well enough to make the trip to Massachusetts, but in his sixth-form year, when he was captain of the football team, she at last consented to come to the St. Paul’s game, the great event of the school year. The day before, however, she had a “relapse” and sent Bertha in her stead with Mr. Prime. Poor Guy, after his victory, had the humiliation of sitting at the headmaster’s table at supper with his stout dumpy pigtailed sister. And, worse still, Mr. Prime, flushed with his son’s triumph and egged on by sixth formers whom Bertha saw nudging each other, held forth, like a Yankee Major Pendennis, on the glories of social life in the ‘nineties and the famous Vanderbilt fancy dress ball in which he had gone as Suleiman the Magnificent. Guy must have had to work his imagination night and day to eradicate from the background of his Titianesque portrait of Papa the smirks of his merciless contemporaries!

  “But didn’t he resent his mother’s not coming up?” I asked Bertha.

  “He would have if she hadn’t been so clever. You see, she knew enough to make a hubbub about how hard it was on her to have to miss her big boy’s big victory. She always did this whenever Guy won any sort of game or prize. Sometimes she would even bring on a small fit to recapture the family limelight. I believe, when she was first married, that she used to do the same thing to Papa when they entertained or went out together. She would faint or burst into tears or go mysteriously upstairs—anything to ruin his pleasure in the one thing that he was good at: parties. But with Papa she had a limited amount of goodwill to run through. When that was exhausted, he left her home and dined out en garçon. Mother was quick to catch on when she was wasting her time—she knew that I, like Papa, was on to her—and she turned her attention to the richer field of an only son.”

  “And he never caught on?”

  “I thought he might be going to when she died. But all was lost in the general horror of her leavetaking. Her panic blinded him to everything she didn’t ask, everything she didn’t say. And then the whole family extolled him as a perfect son. How could he really be that unless he had a perfect mother? Don’t those things go best in pairs?”

  I suppose it was natural for Bertha to sneer at Guy for being taken in (as she believed anyway) by his mother. Gullibility is always ridiculous. One of the first things a child learns is to disguise his ignorance. But when I think of that handsome sunny-natured boy making the best he could out of a bad deal in parents, my heart is more touched than it is by Bertha’s vindictiveness. How easy it is to tear a mother to bits! I should know. I did a pretty good job on my own. Maybe it’s the function of parents to let themselves be so used. Maybe a mother or father is a teething ring on which the little darlings should sharpen their molars. But when one of them chooses generosity, should we shake our heads? Should we not at least weep?

  Guy took that ring out of his teeth and wore it over his heart. He took the shabby home of his actuality and converted it to a glittering palace. He made of his empty fop of a father a Thackerayan gentleman, of his whining hypochondriacal mother a saint and a martyr, of his scheming uncles the titans of a splendid society. He infused his imagined world, not only with glory and elegance but with love and goodwill. He inherited a Daumier lithograph and turned it into a lace valentine.

  All right, sneer, my readers. Call me dotty, senile, what you will. I realize (who better?) that all Guy accomplished in the long run by his wishful thinking was to shift the burden that should have been borne by his parents to the shoulders of his wife and children. But just now I don’t care. Just now it gives me a nostalgic pleasure to remember that Guy’s vision of his world, although not a particularly fine one, was a good deal finer than its reality. And perhaps it is important for me to remember it, too, for I seem to be the only person living (except perhaps for the little widow down in Panama) who has still a kindly feeling for Guy. The others think he blackened our world. Perhaps so. But only after years of trying to give it a spot of color.

  2.

  SO MUCH FOR Guy’s background. What about my own? He and Rex have already said enough to make it clear that I too had a mother problem. What self-respecting girl does not? But since I have grown old (and I am now nearing the age that Mother was when she died) I have learned to see these things more dispassionately. I have even learned to appreciate the possibility that Mother herself may have been afflicted with a female parent.

  Yet still I envy her. Still it seems to me that she and all her lucky group were the last human beings to have had everything. Europe before 1914 was as yet unspoiled: they had the motorcar to flee up and down its highways and the steam yacht to scout its waters. A generation earlier, and travel was all dusty discomfort; one later and the world had fallen apart. But for the elect of Edwardian and early Georgian days, our little planet was a delectable oyster. The same long white hands clutched each other across the same Cunarder-crossed sea. In Washington one dined with Henry Adams and Bessie Lodge; in Boston with Mrs. “Jack”; in London with Ottoline Morrell and “Em
erald,” or else drove down to Rye to see poor old Henry James. In Paris there was “Dear Edith,” in Rapallo “Max”; in Florence “BB.” And, oh, the remorseless, insatiable thirst of Mother’s friends for the beautiful! In their talk and letters, roaming through churches and palaces, looking at painting and statuary, sipping wine, savoring food, even gossiping, there was hardly a minute of the day or night when they relaxed their militant aestheticism. Yet for all their bustle and sincerity (it was true that in time, like dope addicts, they could hardly subsist without beauty) some of the indelible silliness of their era put its heavy stamp upon them. Like Victorian paintings of classical scenes, they betrayed their true date by a bright, naive exactitude, by an air of “dressing up,” by an inner faith, peeping out like a slip under a skirt, that all their quest of beauty was a mere charade against the sober reality of their social snobbishness.

  Many of the “elect” were critics or artists themselves—some of them very considerable ones—but Mother was pure of the smallest foray into the world of participation. Not only did she never compose a rhyme or paint a still life; she never purchased so much as a watercolor or set finger to a musical instrument. She maintained that, as art was only communication among the enlightened, he who received had to be the equal of he who gave. Indeed, I suspect that Mother in her heart may have felt that she played the superior role. After all, whereas the mere artist had but one vision, his own, she had her own and his.

  It is a pity that Mother did not take as much trouble communicating with her children as she did with her friends. There were six of us, three boys and three girls, and until we were of an age to accompany her on her European peregrinations we were either left at home in Tuxedo Park with governesses, or the boys were shipped off to boarding schools and the girls to convents. Not that our education was neglected. We had the best of instruction in everything, and Mother quizzed us carefully herself whenever she was home. But too much was left to discipline. The best that I’ll say for Mother was that, unlike Guy’s mother, she was never a hypocrite and never expected gratitude or applause.