Guy’s letter to Percy was even more matter of fact.
“My own dear boy: this is not a time to mince words. You have never had the highest opinion of me, and events have amply borne you out. But you have always been a good son, and now you are exempted from further duties. You will find that you will do better in life on your own than as a child of privilege. Like many fathers, I have been obtuse about such things. My fall may give you the jolt you have needed. That, anyway, must be my consolation. But to the point.
“There is one important service that you can render your mother. Standard Trust Company will be bound by law to restore the money I took from the Prime trust. They were obviously negligent in allowing me, even as a co-trustee, to have possession of the securities for so long a time. Even if your mother should want to let them off the hook, it would still be beyond her power to do so, because unborn Primes and collaterals have a contingent interest in the money. What I want you to do, therefore, is to persuade your mother to accept the income and rebut any of her grand ideas of renunciation. If you will all only do as I tell you, everything can still be all right!”
Percy and I were simply surprised that Guy knew us so little as to suppose that we would ever touch a penny of the money that the bank was forced to restore because of his peculation. Ultimately an arrangement was worked out whereby the trust income was accumulated, and on my death it will go, with the principal, to Percy’s and Evadne’s children. As they were not living when the moral question arose, I assume they will feel that they can take it with impunity. I hope so, for if not, it will go to old Bertha who, I am sure, will survive us all!
When I had time to consider my own position, I found that, except for Meadowview, I was penniless, and Meadowview was condemned that same year by the state. One of Mr. Moses’ favorite highways was run through the house itself. It seemed an appropriate finale to the saga of the Primes. The wicked were jailed and destroyed, and a beneficent government would not, even after a law suit, give me more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the place (remember, it was 1937). When I had given Percy enough to complete his law school education and paid all my expenses I found that I had three thousand a year to live on. This was not starvation in those days, but it was penury for one who had lived as I had lived.
I was planning to set myself up as a riding instructor when Lucy Geer sent for me. There was a vacant superintendent’s cottage on their place, a charming old Long Island farm house, that would be at my disposal, with water, gas, heat and electricity thrown in and service from the gardeners and maids at the big house. Add Lucy’s open invitation to all meals and I could pretty well spend my little income on clothes!
“Now before you refuse it pointblank in a glorious gesture of pride,” Lucy warned me, “let me tell you something. I am not asking you to take it for your own sake or for Rex’s. I am asking you to take it for mine. I am a sick woman, and I need a lot of attention. Believe me, Angelica, you will more than earn your keep.”
It was so big of Lucy to put it that way that I burst into tears and, after making a sloppy scene, I accepted. For the ten years that she survived I lived gratefully in that farm house and saw her daily. I came to be as close to her as I was to Rex, closer in many ways, for Lucy had an understanding and a shrewdness about people that made communication extraordinarily simple. She was a bit like my mother, if my mother can be imagined as an unworldly woman.
Rex suffered a long nervous depression after the Congressional hearing. For a period of almost half a year he did not go to his office. His silence and his abstraction made our curious triangle a simpler one to live in. Lucy and I both ministered to him, and in doing so we almost forgot the brief time when our relationships had been so different. When Evadne and George had their first little boy, we were drawn even closer together. He was a grandson, after all, of all three of us.
Rex emerged from his depression a gentler, kinder man. He was less irascible with those of whom he disapproved, less impatient with those whose efficiency did not match his own. He lost some of his severity, some of his awesome, magisterial quality. What he and I had been to each other the reader knows. But now we became friends, deep friends, in a friendship that revolved around Lucy. In the last years of her life, despite increasing pain, I think that the three of us achieved something like peace, something even like happiness.
When Lucy died, nobody, even Evadne, with all her Prime sense of propriety, thought that Rex and I had to wait a year before marrying. It was so indicated, so obvious, so precisely what Lucy herself had wanted. I was sixty, Rex was sixty-two. Whom, in any event, should we have consulted but ourselves?
We have been married now fourteen years. I do not know if either of us would go quite so far as Rabbi Ben Ezra, because there are a lot of nasty physical things about old age, but they have been good years, and I am grateful to my Rex for them. I am also grateful to my God. Mother always said that my Catholic faith would become stronger towards the end, and she was right. Therefore, because Rex and I have agreed to read each other’s memoranda, I will close with a request to him. Now that Guy’s death has removed the impediment, I want him to marry me in the church.
The Embezzler Page 28
