“The thing to remember, my dear, is that men like that are never really a threat. As long as they’re listened to, they won’t interfere, and it’s easy enough to listen. In time you can learn to think your own thoughts while they’re talking.”
In time I did, but in the meanwhile I had to listen to exhortations from the grandfather of my future children, of which the following may be a fair sample:
“Two attractive young people like you and Guy, my dear, should have all New York at your feet. Between you, you’re related or connected to practically every family that counts, both old and new. For I am not one to neglect the new, Angelica. Some old fogies used even to suggest that we Primes had let down the bars a bit too much, but I don’t think many people think that any more. To be young, to be healthy, to be handsome—ah, my dear, what a gentle prospect for you and Guy! It may be a positive advantage for you both to have little money for a while. I won’t conceal from you that I had always visualized Guy as marrying more of an heiress than yourself, but that was simply because the heiresses were always after him. Now I see it’s even better this way. A Guy and an Angelica who had a fortune on top of everything else—perhaps it would be too much. People might be glutted by it and envious. This way, everyone will be able to do things for the young Primes. You’ll find you’re the pet couple of all the older people. Don’t let it go to your head!”
As if I was apt to!
It was the arrival of Rex Geer, in the midst of all this, that helped save my day. He is gallant enough to write in his memoir that he was attracted to me from the beginning. I, too, found him attractive, but not in the same sense. I could see no man but Guy, and that was to remain the case, as I have already said, for a long time. What helped me in Rex’s presence was to see that a man of obviously high character and ability, a man who was not in the least social, should be Guy’s best friend and best man. One had only to talk to Rex for a very little while to realize that he was not in the least impressed by wealth or social pretension, that, on the contrary, he was very easily put off by these things. If he had picked Guy as a friend across the sea of snobbery in which Guy’s father had sought to drown him, it must have been because he had seen that in his heart Guy was sound. And was it not equally to Guy’s credit that he had picked out Rex? Did it not prove that he could substitute his own judgment for his father’s when he saw fit?
And so we were married. Looking back at those first years of our shared life, I am struck at how they have run together and blurred in my mind. I was at once very happy and acutely, even agonizingly, apprehensive. To dull the latter feeling I tried blindly in everything to adopt Guy’s standards. I went so far as to quarrel with my brothers when they sneered at our “perfect little house” and “perfect little parties.” I made it entirely clear that I did not care to see anyone who would not accept Guy on his own terms. But if I presented a loyal face to the world, I often found that I could present none at all at home, and I would turn away from Guy lest he perceive to what extent I was not with him.
Passivity was my answer for that decade. All the people asked to our house were Guy’s friends; all the parties we attended were given by people cultivated by him. It was Guy, the gourmet and amateur chef, who planned the meals; it was Guy, with his flair for color, who decided on the decoration of the living room; it was Guy who chose the places we went in summer, the schools for the children, my very clothes. The more vacuums that I left the more speedily he filled them. Nor did he seem to object to my listlessness. He adored running things. Our relationship was that of a strong, indulgent father and a pampered child. I did as I was told and tried not to wonder too much where, if anywhere, we were headed.
My readers may say that such a life is incredible, that I must have “repressed,” to use a psychological term, my memories of our fights and arguments. But I do not think so. I even think that my docility in those years was characteristic of many young matrons of the period. It must be remembered that Guy and I had a glorious sex life, that the birth of two children was an absorbing experience and that there was nothing in my premarital existence that I missed. Furthermore, Guy in those days had great charm and gaiety and could be extremely amusing when he chose. And, finally, with his passion for company, we were rarely alone. Many of my contemporaries thought I had everything a woman could want. Many of them would think so today. I stilled my doubts as best I could by reminding myself that I was what Guy had called me in Paris when he had first lost his temper: a “spoiled brat.” And who could have denied the truth of that?
But doubts stilled were not doubts smothered. There was a limit to the number of times that I could tell myself that Guy was just like anyone else’s husband. There was something else about him, something that warned me, in the dusty little corner of my mind where reason still maintained its precarious existence, of a special failing. His estimates of people were always wrong. Now this might have seemed a small thing in another man, but in one so intensely gregarious and of such multiple enthusiasms, it struck me as alarming. Guy was a hero-worshiper who lived in a gallery of plaster-cast figures that he took for marble.
He was never, I will concede, wholly wrong. His “great” man of letters was always a competent writer, his great statesman an able politician, his great banker a successful accumulator. But they still looked pretentious in the golden frames in which he encased them. My mother, for example, was never quite the high priestess of the life of reason that Guy saw, nor was even Rex the Michelangelo of financiers that Guy imagined. It sometimes seemed to me that my husband’s mind was turning into a private hall of fame and that the day might come when the last door that connected it to the avenue of life would be closed.
What I did not realize was that I would be the one to close it, and close it with a bang.
3.
I THINK REX is unfair when he implies that Guy may have deliberately avoided combat duty in the first war. Nobody could have prepared for it more assiduously, with all his training in the Seventh Regiment and at Plattsburg. It was hardly Guy’s fault if he stuck out from the multitude as the perfect aide. General Devers could no more have missed him than could a collector of shells have missed a chambered nautilus on top of a heap of clams.
The army was Guy’s idea of the true society. His astigmatism was corrected within the walls of its hierarchy. A world where power went according to rank and where it was constantly recognized by salutes and heel clicking was a world that made basic sense to him. He would have been equally happy at Versailles under Louis XIV or at Sans-Souci with Frederick the Great. Absolute authority does not repress or depress those who know how to live with it. On the contrary, they find it exhilarating.
For all his disappointment about not getting to the front, Guy’s happiness in France was the greatest of his life. His letters were filled with it. He tried to make me think that I was missed and that he was saddened by the carnage from which his role exempted him, but it was no use. He was doing what he deemed vital, useful work, and he adored it. In the glitter of an international headquarters, Guy, who understood authority under every flag and insignia, knew just when to wheedle, when to cajole, when to whisper and when to shout. General Devers told me, some years later, that he had Guy’s sergeant under secret orders to warn him of each move that Guy made for a transfer to combat duty. “I was not going to be left in a frog puddle without my tongue and one of my eyes.”
The hardest time that Guy had in the war was when Rex visited him on leave. He wrote me a revealing letter about it which I here transcribe. I wish I had kept more of Guy’s letters, for he wrote more frankly than he talked.
“Rex has come and gone. It was wonderful to have him, but terrible to see him go back to danger when the end may be so near. I did what I could to amuse him but the boys from the front live in another world. It is understandable that we at headquarters, in our nice clean uniforms, with our nice clean motorcars and all our good food and wine (not to speak of girls—for the unmarried officers, of course) shoul
d strike them as simply playing at war. And yet shall I confess it, dearest? I expected a tiny bit more from Rex. After all, he’s not a raw kid, like most of them; he’s thirty-one years old. He’s seen enough of the world to know that it isn’t the man laboring on the railroad or in the coal mine who makes the vital decisions of industry. It’s that pot-bellied gentleman stroking his whiskers as he stares out the window of de Grasse Brothers. Why should war be different? And yet there is something about Rex that has always made me feel, not exactly inferior, but as if I somehow wasn’t really there. At Harvard he managed to imply that I wasn’t quite a student and at de Grasse not quite a banker. And now I’m not really a soldier! Sometimes I want to tweak that masterful nose of his and shout: ‘Look here, old man, there are other ways of living than Rex Geer’s!’”
My glimpses of such failures in Guy’s self-confidence had been rare. I had seen him weep distractedly at the funerals of elderly relations whom I had not thought he had known that well, and I had heard him rave against imagined bosses in his sleep, but he had never told me that Rex made him feel like nothing. I wrote him at once, telling him that Rex was the worst kind of show-off, the silent type of stuffed shirt, but his next letter contained no further reference to Rex. It was full of the excitement of a visit of the Prince of Wales to the front. Guy’s confidences were one-way streets. Sympathy only provoked collision.
I was terribly upset when he did not come home after the Armistice. He wrote me, rather pompously, that one of the liabilities of a non-combat officer was the moral obligation to stay on and help pick up the pieces, but I knew that ambition was his real motive. There was always the chance, as the great peace conference loomed and the eyes of the world turned to Paris, that an able young lieutenant-colonel with the proper connections might make his name.
Indeed, as it turned out, the one thing more suited to Guy than war was peace, or at least the making of peace. His letters began to read like the pages of Saint-Simon as the great ones of the planet filled up the City of Light. When Wilson arrived with the American Mission, Guy was assigned to it as a liaison officer and later attached to Judge Stedman, who needed an army assistant in his conferences with Italian and Balkan representatives on Dalmatian boundaries. With this Guy appeared to have reached his zenith.
“Entirely aside from the fascination of the work,” he wrote me in rhapsody, “it is a privilege to live in such constant proximity to a man of the stature of Judge Stedman. I am keeping a notebook, and every night I write down the better things he has said during the day. Sometimes he is very fierce and sarcastic, but this, of course, is best! Last night he said the League of Nations should support itself by selling ‘indulgences’ for little wars. ‘We have to have little wars,’ he insisted. ‘That’s the trick. What we’ve just learned is that we can’t afford big ones.’ He thinks diplomacy would go out the window with war, as he thinks manners went out the window with dueling. But then, of course, it’s impossible ever to tell what he really thinks. Is that a characteristic of great men?”
Mother was in New York, and fascinated by all the details of the peace treaty. For once I was the possessor of superior knowledge, and I read all of Guy’s letters aloud to her.
“Why do we get it all second hand?” she demanded at last. “Why don’t we go over? Get that sister of Guy’s, what’s her name, to move into your house and take care of the children, and you and I’ll go over. Why not? I’ll blow you to the trip!”
Once again I found myself back in Mother’s competent hands, but oh, the difference! I was docile now and grateful as I watched her, with her customary competence, make all the arrangements—no easy feat in the winter of 1919. Only our accommodations in Paris did she leave to Guy. He had been staying in the big house by the Pare Monceau that Judge and Mrs. Stedman had leased, but he cabled that he would secure hotel rooms and move in on our arrival. I had been apprehensive that he might feel that Mother and I were like teachers from school looming up unexpectedly in the midst of a carefree vacation, but there was no such note struck in his correspondence. He seemed perfectly enthusiastic about sharing his postwar Paris.
When I spotted him on the pier in Le Havre on the damp dark day when we arrived, his smiling face, with upturned searching eyes, was a beacon light of warmth. I burst into tears and waved my arms and made what Mother called a spectacle of myself. Guy responded superbly. He bounded over; he was the first to board the ship and he gave me a wonderful hug. Yet even in those first exciting moments, as he busied himself about our baggage, I had a quaint little feeling, distinctly unlike anything I had felt before, that we were playing a comedy for the staring people on deck, a French comedy, one from Musset. I was the jeune fille, just out of the convent, and Guy was the young officer whose suit was approved by my family, and Mamma was the wise old Countess who sees how pretty the young lovers are but knows how fast it all can change. Fortunately, when he and I were alone in our suite in Paris that night the stage quality of our reunion evaporated. That side of our relationship was all right to the very end. How I have laughed at people who claim that when a marriage fails, it fails in bed!
In the days that followed, the comedy kept coming back. Guy was very busy, but he managed to find the time to take Mother and me out to lunch or to drive us to places where he could catch a glimpse of the “big four” arriving or departing for conferences. Mother was tactful and tried to persuade him to leave her out, protesting that Paris was full of her own friends, whom it behooved her to see, but Guy always insisted that she come with us. At last I began to be afraid that he did not want to be alone with me, and with the subtlety of my generation, I blurted it all out to him. He shocked me with his look of sudden fatigue.
“Look, honey, take things easy, will you?” he begged me. “We’ve been away from each other for more than a year, and I’ve been through some pretty jarring times. Maybe I haven’t been in the trenches, but that’s not the only kind of hell a man can experience. Back home I took a lot of worry off your shoulders. Now it’s your turn to take a little off mine. Just let things develop easily and naturally. All right?”
Well, what could have been more reasonable? I promptly assured him that I would bother him no longer with my doubts and suspicions, and I tried to assume that we were as close by day as we were by night. But I could not forget the happy note of his letters in the whole of his year abroad. If he had been so strained by worry, why had none of it appeared?
It also irked me that we had to see so much of the Stedmans, whom Guy treated as if they were Zeus and Hera. It was like the Prime aunts all over again, except that I could not see what earthly good they would do us once Guy was out of the army. However, as even Mother seemed to think that they had to be cultivated, I did my best. The old judge took a fancy to me, and I went driving with him in the afternoons. Unlike his assistants, he seemed to have a great deal of time on his hands.
“When you get to be my age,” he explained, “you let the others mark up the drafts until they work their way back to the first one.”
It did not take me long to discover that Judge Stedman was a very different man from Guy’s hero. He was one of those dignified Southern intellectual gentlemen, tall, grave, courteous, snowy-haired, whom one associates with mint juleps, quotations from Catullus and the gentler sort of darky stories told in dialect, who, with the least bit of drawing out, could show a savage, almost anarchical cynicism and, I am sure, in male company, a fascination for obscenities. The distinctions that he had obtained in public life meant nothing to him; those that he had missed were constant sores. He had resigned from the Supreme Court of Virginia to run unsuccessfully for governor; he had given up the United States attorney-generalship to be defeated for the Senate. Of a naturally aristocratic and judicial temperament, he yet hankered after success in popular politics. He was a Coriolanus who ran after the multitudes that he despised. Now, as an old man, he had come to Paris, simply another of many distinguished consultants, to help draft a peace, as he put it, “among jung
le cats.” He loved to orate on our drives.
“Wilson’s idealism I found a bit trying until I met the people over here. When I heard every tailcoated monkey from the Balkans jabbering about how Mr. ‘Weelson’ didn’t know a fig about practical politics, I began to think it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Except ‘Weelson,’ bless him Jove, was at least trying. Sometimes I think he’s the only one who is. America is no longer Yankee Doodle, my dear. America is still young, but beginning to be a bit knowing, a bit paunchy. America is the tiniest bit like Guy, if you’ll forgive me. Handsome, stalwart in uniform, but just beginning to expand at the waist, just learning how to kiss the hand. And Europe—well, Europe is like my Lavinia, a bit too gay for her age, a bit too smart for her own good, fooling nobody with her make-up and convinced that it’s perfectly proper to flirt with truth—even to jilt it—in the name of diplomacy.”
Such detachment about a spouse told its own story. Lavinia Stedman, fifteen years younger than her husband, was still a good fifty. They had been married, he a widower and she twice widowed, ten years before—time enough for him to have learned more than he evidently wanted to know. The peace was to her a simple social oportunity. Independently wealthy, it was she who had rented the big house by the Pare Monceau and who gave the big pointless receptions. I say pointless because they accomplished nothing, even for her. Delegates simply ate and drank at them as at a cafeteria. Lavinia, swathed in veils like a contemporary movie star, dark-eyed, raven-haired, wide-hipped, smiled and blinked at everyone and went almost unnoticed. Looking back at her, I can see that she represented a bridge from art nouveau to the jazz era. It was as if Sarah Bernhardt had stepped down from one of her Salome posters to do the Charleston.
The Embezzler Page 25
