The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  In short, she was an ass.

  But an ass married to Judge Stedman, that was the point. What a fate I To write (and publish) lacquered love lyrics and know that he read them, to giggle and coo at dinner and know that he heard, to believe in one’s stormy soul and be subject to the prick of his needle of dissection—it was not an enviable lot. Lavinia was one of those women who was so false that there was a kind of integrity to her very phoniness. One would have been shocked to find anything straight in her.

  It was on the night of one of her parties that I was able at last to put my Paris interlude into focus. The great parlor of the house was a horrendous second empire; there was even a huge ottoman in the center with a forest of tropical plants on the back rest, and between the scarlet curtains on the windows were Bouguereaus and Cabanels of more than life-size nudes and cupids. It was a perfect background for Lavinia, had anyone noticed her. She took out some of her frustration on me, ordering me about with little whispered hints as if I were a daughter or niece in residence.

  “Look, child, take a glass of punch to old Mr. White. Can’t you see he’s dry as a bone, poor dear? Land sakes, girlie, never mind the Arab delegation. They don’t drink nohow. And where’s that lummox of a husband of yours?”

  That night I drank enough of her champagne to lose control of my manners. At eight o’clock I told Guy that I was ravenously hungry and insisted that he take me out for dinner. He responded curtly that we could not leave until Mrs. Stedman gave us permission. I told him boldly that I would go and ask her, at which point he took in my condition and decided that it might be better, after all, to get me out of there. He spoke to Mrs. Stedman, who looked very dark indeed, got Mother away from Mr. White, and we three went to Maxim’s.

  It was hardly a gay evening. I eased my heart of the stored-up venom of several weeks and told Guy that Mrs. Stedman was an old tramp. He was scandalized.

  “Please, Mrs. Hyde, do something about your daughter. She’s quite out of hand. Lavinia Stedman is one of the remarkable women of our time. Not only is she a poetess of merit…”

  “You can’t be serious!” I almost shouted.

  “Not only is she a poetess of merit,” Guy repeated angrily, trying to suppress me with a stare, “but she is a bit of a pioneer in her own right. When her first husband died and left her with a Texas ranch of seventeen hundred head of cattle, an alcoholic manager and no cash, she…”

  “Spare us, please,” I interrupted him. “Mamma and I don’t want to hear the inventory of her wealth or of her charms. If you have to look for a mother in every old Southern tart that walks the boulevards, that’s your affair. But don’t extol her to the ladies of your family.”

  “Angelica, dear!” Mother protested. She had not seen me in such a mood since before I had been married. Indeed, I had not been in such a mood since before I had been married. Suddenly, the loneliness of my Paris visit and Guy’s new strangeness was too much for me.

  “A mother!” he exclaimed angrily. “Just because I had the misfortune to lose my mother early in life is no reason to make mock of me every time I make friends with a woman a few years my senior.”

  “A few years! Twenty!”

  Guy looked so angry at this that I was a bit sobered. “All right, then, not your mother,” I muttered with a shrug. “Call her your mistress if you like.”

  It so happened that I was looking at my mother as I spoke, and I caught a small involuntary sparkle of yellow in the iris of her eyes, almost as if she were trying, against her better discretion, to warn me. And then, in a moment, everything was clear. Lavinia Stedman was Guy’s mistress. Incredible, revolting, it was still true. And everyone knew about it: Mother, the judge, everybody.

  “I want to go home,” I said in a dead voice.

  Guy looked up quickly. “Home?”

  “Back to the hotel.”

  I said not another word until he faced me in our hotel room, after bidding Mother good night, his back to the door he had just closed, a defiant half-smile on his lips. Guy, as the world was to learn one day, was always defiant when caught. He was a combination between Peck’s bad boy and the George Washington who cut down the cherry tree.

  “How could you?” I hissed. “With a woman that age? With Paris full of pretty girls? All right, so I grant a soldier with his wife across the ocean isn’t going to be a saint, but does he have to give Granny a whirl?”

  His smile faded into a rather ugly sneer. “You don’t know anything about those things, little girl. Sex is not a matter of age, but experience. If you’d read your Benjamin Franklin…”

  “I have read my Benjamin Franklin. But he didn’t mean a woman that age I Honest to God, Guy, I think there’s something wrong with you. I’m going to have it out with the Judge and get you transferred.”

  He became very white. “Do you want to kill him?”

  “Kill him? Do you mean you think he doesn’t know?”

  When Guy reached out and slapped me brutally across the cheek, I think I must have been the most surprised woman alive in those surprising times.

  “I ought to wash your mouth out with soap! Speaking of a great man that way! Do you know what the Judge has done for me? Why, he’s educated me, that’s all. He’s simply educated me. He has taught me more about life and law, and men and God, than all my years at school and college put together! And you!”

  I had it on my lips to suggest that if this was the case, Guy was requiting his mentor in shameful fashion, but I dared not risk another slap. Guy became more and more emotional as he ranted on about the Judge, and he finally got out a bottle of whiskey. We sat up late, I not saying a word, occasionally in wonderment stroking my bruised cheek, while he talked, in what seemed to me near hysteria, about his debt to the Judge and what it meant to have been the intimate of one of the great figures of American history. Neither of us had the bad taste to mention Lavinia Stedman again, and when we retired at last we made up our quarrel in the most conventional of fashions.

  Guy went to sleep but not I. Through that long night I lay awake and considered, dry-eyed, what I had learned. I reflected that my husband had not deemed his affair with Lavinia of sufficient importance to apologize for it. He had simply assumed a furious offensive when I had, naturally enough, implied that the Judge was a mari complaisant. It was Judge Stedman, then, with whom Guy was in love, an old man, not an old woman, an old man in whose image he fancied he could make out the distinction that was always eluding him. Guy thought he could get close to Judge Stedman by sleeping with his wife!

  These were not pretty things for a woman in love to learn. But I was no longer a woman in love. I had grown up in the course of a single night. I had had my first long clear look into Guy’s soul and the frenzy of his need to identify himself with things braver and bigger than the Primes. I could never again see him as my master. He would have to be a man whom, at the best, it was my simple duty to help. My brothers, way back, had been right. Guy was ridiculous, and I was ridiculous to have married him.

  The next morning, at breakfast, he acted as if nothing had happened, but I interrupted his cheerful discussion of the Stedmans’ party.

  “I want you to come home, Guy,” I told him flatly. “I want you to resign from the army and come home with me. I’ve been away from the children long enough, and I most assuredly am not going to allow you to stay here and continue your intrigue with Mrs. Stedman. You needn’t look at me like that. I’m not going to say a word against her to the Judge. I’m simply telling you that it is not fitting for things to continue this way, and I do not intend to put up with it. I repeat: it’s time we went home.”

  Guy walked to the window and stared for a long time down at the Place Vendôme. When he spoke, his gentler tone seemed to recognize my new air of authority.

  “It was all over anyway with Lavinia,” he said. “You’re right. It’s time we went home.”

  4.

  GUY AND REX BOTH speak of the little change brought by the middle years. How true! What h
appened to my life between 1919 and 1933? Nothing but a mystifying and relentless decline. Youth is said to pass fast enough, but middle age goes at a gallop, and one hears the refrain in the hoof beats :“Too late for this, too late for that.” One learns to face the fact that all one’s small ambitions are never going to be realized; that one is never going to perfect one’s French or Italian, that one is never going to achieve that perfect game of bridge. One learns to accept the bitter knowledge that one is no better a parent than one’s parents, and no better a spouse. One learns the humility of recognizing the sameness of human material.

  When I had seen Guy once, as I had seen him in Paris, clearly and steadily, I found that I could not go back again to my old habit of blinking. I did not dislike him; I did not even disapprove of him, but I saw him, and what I saw I could smile at, I could even at times be fond of, but I could never love. What was worse was that Guy saw me looking at him. Sometimes I thought I could read in his eyes a desperate plea for help, but it was not uttered, and if it had been, I do not know what I should have done about it.

  Why, my reader may want to know. Why could I not have reached out a helping hand? It was not as if there were other men in those years. There was never another man until Rex. What was the reason for this reluctance to do what I could for the one man who needed it?

  I suppose it was my inability to forgive myself for having been such a fool. For a woman to have invested her ten best emotional years in a blind alley is a sorry state of affairs. I did not even have the satisfaction of being able to blame Guy, for he could not help being himself, and I could have helped seeing him as something other than what he was. It seemed to me that whichever way I turned I saw myself sneering at myself.

  There was, of course, the remedy of divorce. My generation was the first to avail itself in large numbers of this new freedom and to make it as respectable for women as drinking hard liquor or smoking. But Guy never wanted it, and I was a Catholic, not a good one to be sure, but good enough to have qualms about such a step. I felt I had no business undoing a bargain that I had made when I was free and twenty-one. There was more of my mother in me than I usually cared to admit.

  And so I built Meadowview and made it my refuge from the world. I turned not to men but to horses, and Guy, eager to make up for his increasingly flagrant infidelities, let me spend what I wanted. Even when the depression came, and he and I agreed to economize, I never cut down on Meadowview. I had a Hyde feeling that money spent on horses and gardens and outdoor things was not extravagance. Because I bought few clothes and no jewelry, because I rarely dined in a restaurant or went to a play, because I did not gamble at cards, I was able to convince myself that I was economical. My needs were “basic”: plants, live stock and a house whose beauty should edify the countryside. Guy and I ruined ourselves expressing our natures in brick and mortar: he with his country club and I with my home.

  There were men who made up to me occasionally, usually members of our hunt, but I had nothing to do with them. It was as if, in those years, tearing across fields and through woods, leaping ditches and fences, I was trying to forget my long subjection to sex, yearning to recapture my virginity and escape men forever in the guise of Diana. They were nervous, foolish years, but they were not altogether unhappy ones.

  Unhappiness came with Rex and with the return of love. When we started riding together, I understood, almost at once, that it was a serious involvement. This grave, deliberate, obviously powerful man impressed me as the very embodiment of everything that Guy was not. I was adequately armed against any man with anything of Guy in him, and for years there had seemed to be none without. But now it was different. Now I was faced with something I had ceased to believe in: a total man who was also a total gentleman. I am afraid I acted like a teenager on her first date with the captain of the high school football team.

  I certainly must have been obvious, for Rex knew right away that I had my eye on him, and Rex, at that time, knew very little about women. He has had occasion to learn more since. This will make him angry, but he never knew, for example, and neither did Guy, what was the matter with Alix Prime. Alix fell in love with both of them. That same summer, when her father took her away, she fell in love with a sailor on “The Wandering Albatross.” Alix, in short, was a bit of a nymphomaniac, and her subsequent goings-on had a good bit to do with Freddy Fowler’s suicide. I have spared Rex’s pride all these years, but now that we seem to be telling everything, he may as well know that, too.

  Oh, the Primes buried it, of course. Trust them! The Primes were masters at the art of covering up. Aunt Amy’s drinking, Uncle Reginald’s slipperiness at the card table, the awful legend about the old bishop and the pretty choir boy—well, Alix’s problem was relatively simple. Guy was never told about it, because Guy, for all his great popularity with the family, had a reputation (well deserved) for conversational indiscretion.

  I had no qualms about my affair with Rex. It seemed to me to be nobody’s business, even that (may He forgive me!) of my Catholic God. My children were almost of college age; Lucy Geer, poor creature, had become a wife in name only, and Guy had pledged his marital rights for an easy loan. Whom was I really hurting? Did not life owe me one piece of unsullied bliss? Of course, I can see now that I was hurting three people badly: Lucy, Rex and, most of all, Guy. Yes, most of all the person who had forfeited all right to feel hurt.

  But I never despised Guy as a cooperative cuckold, as he seems to have thought. I was simply angry at the least interference with my affair and brutal to Guy when he offered any, even if it was only a social engagement to which we were both committed. His good nature about Rex was more disarming than contemptible. His attitude seemed to be one of congratulation on my good luck in finding love on this planet of disillusionment. Once he went so far as to say that if Rex should ever bring himself to seek a divorce, he would not stand in my way. Small wonder that I did not suspect that he was seething underneath! Knowing his long standing worship of Rex I wondered if he did not somehow view the possibility of my becoming Mrs. Geer as a personal triumph. This may sound fantastical, but had I not observed him trying to get closer to Judge Stedman by sleeping with his wife?

  The parallel with Mrs. Stedman is reinforced by the fact that, after Guy and I had our first candid talk about the affair, his attitude began to change. He started to court me again. Perhaps in his fantasties I had actually become Rex’s wife, and therefore he could revenge himself by making Rex the cuckold. Or did he rather wish to cement his intimacy with Rex by sharing Rex’s mistress? In any case he was always now looking at me slyly, sidling up behind me to slip a hand around my waist, blowing kisses at me over the dining room table. It was his rather fatuous theory that any woman could be broken down by enough of this. I felt that I was being treated like a tramp and became very indignant. At last, after his revolting sentimentality at the Glenville Club dinner and his coarseness in alluding to the possibility of our future issue, I fled the house to take refuge at Rex’s. Little did I dream that in six months’ time I would be pregnant, and by my lawful husband!

  I returned to Meadowview that night, crushed in defeat, with hate in my heart, led, as if on a leash, by my triumphant mother. Like Hermione in Andromaque I would have been capable of urging Guy to slaughter my smugly virtuous lover. But Guy had no such murderous intentions. He was entirely concerned with our reconciliation and treated me as a nurse might treat a hurt child, which was as good a way as any to treat me. It was not long before he obtained what he wanted. How could it have been otherwise? He was my husband; he was gentle; he was there. And I was wild with anger and humiliation and the need to hurt Rex for preferring his peace of mind to my caresses.

  Guy interpreted my response to his love-making as proof of his own irresistibility. But, far more than that, it was evidence of my own passion to do something for any human being who needed me (even my own husband!), to fill in the terrible vacuum left by Rex’s holy departure. If I had once felt in that period that Guy r
eally loved me, it is possible that our reconciliation would have been the beginning of a new life. But Guy did not love women. He conquered them. His idea of the act of love was a kind of rape, and of a man’s greatest triumph in the seduction of a woman who sincerely loved another. His heart was always a virgin.

  Maybe he was afraid that a woman who really loved him might have pitied him. Or maybe, having deep down so low an opinion of himself, he despised her for her bad choice. At any rate, he never encouraged me to love him as I interpreted love, and he was entirely satisfied with what to me was the cheap carnival of our briefly renewed intimacy. After my miscarriage we never made love again.

  Guy charges me with inducing this event. If I did, it was not consciously. It is perfectly true that I went riding, and even jumping, against what he claimed was the doctor’s advice, but he never stopped to consider how essential this exercise had become to my mental and physical well being. In my other pregnancies I had ridden almost to the last month. When I realized that my renewed intimacy with Guy was not going to do anything for either of us, that I had betrayed my and Rex’s love for nothing of value, I had to go back to my horses to prevent a complete nervous collapse. In that state, I am sure, I would have as surely lost the baby.

  As to his accusation that I did not want to have my pregnancy known because I did not want Rex to know of it, just the opposite was true. In my fury against Rex I would have been delighted to fling it in his teeth! As it turned out, anyway, Rex did not learn of it until I mentioned it to him, quite casually and thinking he knew, two years later. By then my rancor was gone, and I was merely distressed to find that I had hurt him.