The Embezzler (2 page)
"But he did not do so in the case of the first loan."
"I keep telling you, Mr. Cohen, that first loan was to Geer personally!"
"I see. What I see less clearly is why you needed advice of counsel in such a matter."
"Counsel? My dear young man, I consult counsel in everything."
"I suggest that Mr. Geer wanted you to buy a respite for Guy Prime so that Prime could cover up his embezzlements. Did a firm of your standing need the advice of counsel before rejecting such a proposition out of hand?"
There was a gasp of indignation from the bankers' seats, but Mr. de Grasse seemed quite unruffled. He took the high position of his years. "When you have lived a little longer, young man, you will learn that these problems are never quite so simple as they appear. I had known Guy Prime since he was a boy. He had once worked for me, and his firm handled our brokerage. I knew all of his partners, who were innocent of any irregularity, and who were bound to go down in his ruin. Several of his customers had accounts with me. They too would be affected. I was certainly not going to consign Guy Prime to perdition on any sudden impulse of righteousness. The matter had to be thoroughly explored. When counsel had done this, they concluded that we could have no further dealings with Prime. That we ran the danger of becoming accessories after the fact." Here de Grasse raised his hands and let them drop. "So there we were. We had to let him go."
"You mean if you could have saved him without criminal liability, you
would
have?"
"Isn't that question a bit hypothetical, Mr. Cohen? If it wouldn't have been a crime to save him, would it have been a crime that he had committed?"
I remember that I was as surprised as the rest of the courtroom that the old boy had it in him. The laughter that followed turned the El Greco friar into a grand inquisitor.
"Very well, Mr. de Grasse. Let me put you one more question. Did you ever consider that it might have been your duty to inform the governors of the Stock Exchange of what you had learned about Guy Prime?"
"Never."
"Yet your firm was a member, was it not?"
"Oh, yes. We have two seats. But I have never considered that they put me under the obligation to be an informer. Perhaps if I had had the benefit of
your
counsel, Mr. Cohen, I might have felt otherwise. But I was not so fortunate."
"Thank you, Mr. de Grasse. No more questions."
I am not without a conscience, be it said at once. I know what I did and why I did it, and I believe that I have paid the penalty and should be quits with society. Yet I confess to a lingering remorse that I should have contributed to Mr. Cohen's little game. Like so many of the early New Dealers, he was a bit of a fanatic. Perhaps in the ideal society men will betray their friends and relations to the state, but I hope I shall not live to see it. When loyalty becomes the slave of patriotism, it is no longer loyalty.
The climax of the hearing came when Rex Geer was called. Rex at fifty-two was at the zenith of his banking career, which but for me might not have been the zenith. His appearance announced that his success was not superficial; it was as innate a part of him as his measured tread and his stocky build. Face to, his square regular face and small pronounced features, his high forehead and stiff waved graying hair made up too granite a wall to be quite handsome, but in profile and when talking, always with perfect articulation, the narrowed eyes, the raised chin, the slight hook of the nose, gave an impression of lively sensibility and intelligence. There was always a Lord Byron lurking behind Rex's Daniel Webster. In his youth, when he had been paler and thinner, and his eyes had been sadder and darker, girls had even found him romantic. Certainly my cousin Alix Prime did. But he was not romantic that day, in his costly black suit, the fingers of one thick hand clutching the Phi Beta Kappa key at his waist, his wide-apart gray-green eyes staring at Mr. Cohen with an unblinking balefulness. Rex would never admit it, but he was deeply anti-Semitic.
Certainly nothing about the examination was designed to alleviate this prejudice. Mr. Cohen spared Rex none of the details of his loan to me or the second attempted loan, underlining remorselessly his full knowledge of my depredations. At the end their two philosophies were summed up in pointed contrast:
Cohen:
Tell me, Mr. Geer, as the partner of a member firm and as yourself a former governor of the Exchange, did you never feel that it was your duty to disclose to the Business Conduct Committee what you had discovered about Guy Prime?
Geer:
You mean, did I feel it my duty to take the confidences of my friend and use them as the basis for his prosecution? It did not. I am not so Roman, Mr. Cohen.
Cohen:
It is not only a Roman custom, Mr. Geer. In many American schools and colleges the honor system is practiced. It will only work, I am told, if the students are willing to report offenders.
Geer:
Perhaps so. But the honor system is not practiced in the business world.
Cohen:
The honor system, Mr. Geer, or honor?
Geer:
I resent that, Mr. Cohen. It was quite uncalled for.
Unfortunately, the committee did not agree. Its findings spelled out the end of the age of the gentleman in all the complacent jargon of the new panacea:
It is manifest from the testimony of the witnesses who loaned money to Guy Prime, all of whom were members of the Stock Exchange, and in particular from the testimony of Reginald Geer, that these men regarded the Exchange more in the light of a private club than a public institution. If a member erred, he had to be handled in such a way that the matter would not cause a scandal. This kind of code is hardly a policing adequate to protect the interests of today's investing public. The purchaser of a bond or stock is entitled at least to the protection accorded the purchaser of a patent medicine.
The legislation that followed the hearing had been drafted long before my arrest. Like the flight to Varennes and the fall of the French monarchy, my folly affected only the timing of things. But Rex and the others chose to see me as the traitor who delivered them to the Roosevelts and the Cohens of the New Deal. This was more dramatic than to face the fact that they were mere pebbles under the juggernaut of the socialist state.
Before I proceed to how it all happened I should offer a brief description of myself, as none of my grandchildren has ever seen me, nor does it now look as if any would. I have always been sturdy, but I am past the biblical life span, and the humid climate of Panama does not agree with me as did the cold dirty air of New York. My hair is as thick and curly as ever, but it is white as the snow I never see, and if I can still boast the broad shoulders and the straight build that made me the champion hockey player of St. Andrew's School, I must confess to a sizable pot. Still there are few wrinkles in my face, and my blue eyes are not yet gummy. "When I slap my hand on the table at the Rivoli bar every afternoon at four and thunder at George for my first gin and tonic, people jump. Oh, yes, I am still what they call a "fine figure of a man."
Yet in my youth I was briefly beautiful. There is no other word for it. My grandsons may squirm, but let them look at the charcoal sketch that my adoring father commissioned Sargent to do of me (he could not afford an oil) when I was on my "grand tour" after Harvard. Maybe the features are banal in their regularity; maybe the curly hair, the straight nose, the manly eyes suggest a magazine cover hero, but show it to any girl in her teens and watch her reaction! In parlor comedy the heroine may turn down the blond athlete for the poet, the man "with a soul," but how often does it happen in life? Don't believe, my boys, all the claptrap you hear about women not caring about looks in a man. They know that beauty is rarer than "soul," and they grab it when they can. Ask your grandmother.
As early as my mid-twenties my face had filled out, and my shining quality was gone. I made the most of what was left of the Sargent youth by dressing immaculately and holding myself erect, but I fear that the word "beefy" was used behind my back, and Angelica in an ugly mood once likened me to an "Irish cop." When I was young I sought to charm; in my long middle age I sought to impress. Now, with dotage around the corner, I have returned to the earlier and safer tactic.
My life is very regular. Carmela and I have a small white stucco house with a red roof and a screened veranda from which we can see the Pacific. The dining alcove is set off from the living room area by a raised level and a partition of grilled ironwork. We have wicker furniture with gaily colored chintz, a mosaic cocktail table and a large watercolor of a clipper ship in full sail on a white-capped sea. How Angelica and Percy would sneer! But Carmela thinks it all very beautiful; she is perfectly content with her old Yankee husband of the inexplicable (and to her uninteresting) Yankee past, who has raised her from a lower-middle-class status to one that is at least unclassifiable. She keeps a tidy house and leaves me alone. We never go out or entertain. She has her girlfriends for lunch, while I am in the city, and I have my precious two hours, from four to six, at the men's bar of the Rivoli Hotel. Only if I have one too many gins and fall asleep at supper does Carmel show her Latin temperament.
At the Rivoli I live again. I sit every afternoon at the same table on the big white porch overlooking the palm tree garden and let any join me who care to. For some years few did, but I have now become a local character, even an institution, and the Rivoli management regards me as a drawing card. Not only do I drink free there, I receive cases of whiskey on my birthday and at Christmas. Panamanian officials of high rank, American army and navy officers, the Governor of the Canal Zone himself, join my table to discuss politics and personalities, wars and women. I think I get a greater kick out of having established the "round table" of the Rivoli than I ever did from being founder and president of the Glenville Golf and Tennis Club. But now I must be sure to limit my drinks even below the number that Carmela stipulates, for I plan to write this memoir in the evenings, and my head must be clear. A moment of truth, pure truth, may be my compensation. Surely it might be as intoxicating as gin!
W
HEN
I
THINK
back on my days of glory, which reached their climax with their finale in 1936, they seem to merge with the glory of the Glenville Club. We both survived, but we survived as shells. We belonged too entirely to the era that made us.
Sometimes I think that, with the exception of Evadne, Glenville is the only part of my old life that I still miss. In the devitalizing humidity of the Isthmus, especially on those occasional Saturday afternoons when Carmela and I drive to Colon on a straight white bandage of a road through the wet, cluttered jungle alive with its glittering birds, I feel, like a damp cloth across my burning forehead, the memory of that softer, dryer green and of the high, serene porch front of the club house, a bigger Mount Vernon, overlording the rolling acres of its golf course, the neat copses of its woods, the polo field, the shimmering grass courts with their white-clad players. A country club? my grandsons may ask. What was so wonderful about a Long Island country club? Well, you see, my boys, there were clubs and clubs, but only one Glenville.
I was once offered a hundred thousand dollars to propose a dry goods tycoon for membership. Just to propose him, mind you, not even to guarantee his election. It may surprise you to learn that I indignantly rejected the offer and black-balled the would-be member when he had the audacity to have his name put up by another. Glenville, like all institutions that wish to survive, had to take its share of parvenus, but only when they had learned, if not altogether to be gentlemen, at least to recognize what gentlemen were.
To make it the first club of the Eastern Seaboard was my hobby. Don't think it was an easy matter. Young people never recognize the toil that goes into such things. I had the most efficient manager, the best golf and tennis pros, the quickest bartenders and the least rude waiters that money could hire, but these are all nothing without a vigilant master's eye. I checked every yard of the golf course myself, as I played it, and made periodic inspections of the kitchen, like an admiral, with white gloves. I met each candidate for membership and spoke to every delinquent dues payer. It was a working hobby.
You have probably already guessed that my real motive was to make Glenville my home. There I could be master; at Meadowview I was more like a guest. The latter was all Angelica's; she had copied it from a Georgian Irish house and blown her entire inheritance into it. Its moody romanticism, its big windows open on a field of black angus, its cool, high-ceilinged rooms and dusky canvases may have been as beautiful as her arty friends said, but it was a beauty that ruled me out. I was not so obtuse as to miss the point that Meadowview had been designed to enshrine everything that Angelica thought of me as threatening. We had long reached the point in our marriage where no questions were asked. I had my club, and she her Irish dream.
My happiest weekly moment was on Sunday when, after eighteen holes of golf with my usual foursome: Bill Dawson, my partner, Alphonse de Grasse and Bertie Armstrong, president of Merchants' Trust, and after a shower and an alcohol rubdown by the miracle-fingered Luigi, I would proceed, gorgeous in one of my many sport coats, made for me in Glasgow, and a Charvet tie, new each Sunday, to the submarine coolness of the men's bar for the first gin of the day.
I would take my stand at the far end from the door. If another was so ignorant or so presumptuous as to take my place, he would receive a discreet whispered warning from Pierre, the bartender. Conversation was general; those who wished to be private went to tables. If there was a guest, I would address him first, with my best "old New York" manners. Formality is not a pitfall to one brought up to use it. With fellow members I was louder and more blunt and with friends I might open with the stentorian insult, delivered without hint of humor. "Well, Judge, what decisions have you sold this week?" or "Good morning, Commissioner, who wrote that last speech of yours?" I was a specialist in the seemingly filthy story that turned out innocentlyâand in its opposite. But I never repeated myself. I even kept a notebook to be sure.
