The Embezzler (8 page)

"Rex cares nothing for society!" I cried indignantly.

"Rex cares for anything he hasn't got," Father said emphatically. "You think, because he doesn't enjoy things, that he doesn't want them. You're dead wrong. He may want them just because someone else has them, but he still wants them."

None of Father's suspicions, however, could cloud my relationship with Rex. In that first year of our apprenticeship our friendship was at its apex. He came with me to my family's for Sunday lunch and was asked to my uncles' on holidays and special occasions, as if he had been a Prime. Sometimes I took him to parties, but more often he preferred to stay home and work and hear about them later from me, sitting up over a cigar and a glass of brandy. Our only disagreements were over my failure to work as hard as he. One night, after a particularly grand dinner at Uncle Lewis', I must have described the guests with some of Father's fulsomeness, for I provoked him into retorting:

"Those men didn't get where they are by going out to dinner parties when
they
were young."

"Didn't they? Where would Chauncey DePew have been without the Vanderbilts? Where would the Pratts and Paynes have been without Mr. Rockefeller?"

"You think too much of money-making, Guy."

"But we're in the money-making game! You may not judge a doctor or even a lawyer by his income, but how can you rate a money-maker except by the size of his pile?"

"Banking isn't just money-making. Banking is starting new businesses and saving old ones. Banking is helping the right man over a bad time. Banking is keeping the heart of the economy pumping. If you don't feel that way about it, you ought to quit and become a stockbroker."

"You and Father!"

But I had no idea of becoming a stockbroker, and seeing that I had really irked him, I held my peace. I was determined to make good at de Grasse, and Rex, in his own way, was trying to help. He was constantly checking on my work, reading over my market reports, suggesting areas of additional research, filling up our brief lunch periods with talk of stocks and bonds. His attitude was rather irritatingly tutorial, but I knew that it did me no harm.

What
did
do harm was the contrast that he unconsciously obtruded between himself and me, not so much to other eyes as to my own. There was something about Rex that made all non-Rex activities seem foolish. And so I was constantly pretending to be something I wasn't, nodding my head and clearing my throat and starting sentences, statistic-laden, that I could never seem to finish. I read much of what Rex read, but I could never retain it as he so uncannily did. His mind was a whole glittering philosophy of finance, and every customer of de Grasse, like one of Browning's broken arcs in the poem he loved to quote, seemed part of a perfect round above. It was only away from Rex that I could abuse him as an astigmatic who saw order in the jungle and Christian discipline in the wolf pack. In his presence, his relentless logic and inexhaustible figures reduced me to sullen acquiescence.

I see now that he should have had more sympathy for the role played in Wall Street by men like myself. I was a salesman and he was a moneylender: that was the basic difference. What he should have encouraged me to do was to develop myself into a salesman of de Grasse. My view of Wall Street may have been naive compared to his—I admit that I took a childish pleasure in the crisp heavy paper on which securities were engraved and in the promises of fairy tale wealth that they seemed to contain—but a naive view can still be a contagious one. Reading and study, at least of business facts, were not my
forte.
My mind simply turned off after too many pages, and I would be torn between angry resentment and drowsiness. When I came home I was glad to go out again to dinner, any dinner, to sit next to a pretty woman and drink a good deal of champagne and talk gaily. Was that not youth? What else was youth for?

Our best times together were on weekends. Rex loved of a Sunday to take a train down to the South Shore of Long Island and hike through the marshes and along the beaches of Cedarhurst and Lawrence. On these occasions he would throw off the monastic earnestness of his banking hours and behave with a gay and infectious enthusiasm. He would even sing, loudly and off tune. Like many men of large intellect and moral seriousness, he could be very boyish when he relaxed. One had to have seen him in such moods to understand the attraction that he was capable of exercising.

All of this brief gaiety, however, blew away with his first love affair. Of what use is the wisdom of the ages? Young men will still go to war and still fall in love with the wrong women. They will believe, till doomsday, that dolls like Alix Prime will catch fire from their fire and learn love from their ardor. It is really hardly fair to the dolls, who are not to be blamed for their doll-like natures. Rex, like many impoverished, ambitious young men of his day, had kept sex too long at bay. To cause an explosion within him, Alix did not have to be either beautiful or charming. She had only to be female.

She was an heiress, the daughter of Uncle Chauncey, the stiffest of my uncles and the one who had made the greatest match. She was pale, blonde and well shaped, with a high chirping voice that expressed enthusiasm for all the things over which a debutante was supposed to wax enthusiastic. You couldn't fault her; she liked the best books and the best plays and the best scenic views and the best people. It might have been forgivable, even in a first cousin, had she only been dumb. But Alix wasn't dumb. None of the Primes were dumb.

I knew, of course, that she and Rex had met. He had been with me to Aunt Amy's and Uncle Chauncey's on two or three occasions. What I did not know was that he had gone back alone. One Sunday afternoon, in early spring, as he and I were exploring a marsh near the sea in Lawrence, our conversation fell, accidentally as I then thought, on my cousin. I described her casually as a stuck-up mannequin. Before I knew it, he had jumped on my back and thrown me to the ground. I wrestled desperately for some minutes before he was on top of me, his knees pressing my shoulders down. Of course, he had surprise on his side. I could not at first believe he was in earnest.

"Take it back," he demanded hoarsely.

"Oh, Rex, for Pete's sake!"

"Take it back or I'll stuff your mouth with mud."

"All right, all right, she's anything you want, an angel, a goddess, what the hell!"

I got up sullenly while he excoriated me. "The trouble with you, Guy, is that you're a cynic. You can't see that girl's a million miles above the usual debutante type. Oh, she lives in your silly social world, yes. Where else can the poor creature live? She has to do what her parents say. But that doesn't mean she wasn't born for better things."

"Like Rex Geer," I suggested sulkily, brushing off my pants.

"Don't even think it!" he exclaimed wrathfully. "How would I dare aspire to the likes of her?"

"That's right, she's a Prime, isn't she?" I retorted. "Forget her, peasant."

Well, obviously he wasn't going to do that, and how could he court Alix without my help? We were in 1908, and Uncle Chauncey was not about to hand over his finest flower to adorn the buttonhole of the son of a penniless rural parson. In a few more minutes he had to beg my pardon, and when I grudgingly accorded it, he threw an arm over my shoulder and gave me a squeeze and then hurried off to lose his embarrassment in a rapid walk. We did not speak again until the station, and then, as we sat waiting for our train, he asked me a dozen questions about Alix. In the crowd of hot excursionists returning to the city, amid soft drinks and crumpled newspapers and howling babies, we talked of Alix at dancing class, Alix at Miss Chapin's, Alix reciting "Evelyn Hope" at Aunt Amy's Christmas party, Alix in pink and white sitting with her mother for a portrait by Porter. I did not tell him of the time Alix did wee-wee on the rug and let me be punished for it, or of how we used to make fun of her for her crushes on older girls, or of her temper tantrums or of how Aunt Amy was supposed to have wept before Miss Chapin to keep her from being suspended for cheating. No doubt Alix no longer remembered these things herself. When the violence of the teens congeals into the kind of sandy surface that she presented to the world, it is possible that the memory itself may be affected.

What I found difficult to make out from Rex's version of his romance was to what extent his emotion was reciprocated. I suspected that Alix was probably both flattered and surprised by the passion that she had aroused, but that she did not know what
to
do with it. What does one do, after all, with a real stove in furnishing a doll's kitchen? Yet I was sure of one thing. I was sure she was Prime enough to appreciate that it had some value.

"You'd better let me work on it," I told him later that night. "We'll see what ideas I come up with. After all, it's more my field than yours."

The following Wednesday was Aunt Amy's "at home," and I left the office early to call at the great red and white brick Louis XIII
hotel
that Uncle Chauncey had reared with her money on upper Fifth Avenue. Aunt Amy was the biggest, simplest, nicest, plainest old shoe in New York society. She looked like a cook dressed up as a duchess; she had pink hair and a round brown face that was inclined to be sad when it was not very merry, and she kissed half the people who came into the room. Unfortunately, she was also a secret drinker and had little of the will power that one usually associated with hostesses of her type. My uncle, small and dour and generally absent from her receptions, controlled her absolutely.

"Guy, honey," she exclaimed when she saw me, "you're cute to come! Tell me about that handsome roommate of yours. He's become quite a caller here. How do you make him talk? I declare I can't get two words out of him."

"Rex is not a ladies' man. I suppose he chats with Uncle Chauncey?"

"With Chauncey? I don't think Chauncey's even met him."

This was good. Certainly, the less Rex saw of Uncle Chauncey, the better. "Maybe you scare him, Aunt Amy."

"Me? As if I could scare a fly!"

"Perhaps it's your pearls, then. They are ominously large."

I found Alix in the library and took her to a window embrasure. As the oldest of my generation I was rather a hero with my female cousins. I used to quiz them and advise them on all their little love affairs.

"You've been holding out on me," I said severely. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?"

Alix cast down her eyes with a demureness that I was supposed to be stupid enough to take seriously. "I can't imagine to what you are referring."

"You can't imagine that, sharing an apartment with my best friend, I might have a suspicion when he's smitten?"

Alix's oval, pale face became almost stern. What did he
see
in her? She twitched her shoulders, and her satin crackled. More than ever she was like a doll in an expensive dress. "I fear that Rex has been indiscreet."

"If you call infatuation indiscretion. The poor fellow's in such a bad way that he almost beat the life out of me for abusing you."

"I wish he had!" she cried indignantly. "How were you abusing me?"

"I was only telling him that old story about your trouble with the boy who took away the wet bathing suits at Bailey's Beach."

"Guy Prime, you made that up!"

"And then about the footman with the big calves whom Uncle Chauncey had to get rid of."

"Really, you're too disgusting to be borne. I'm glad Rex beat you up."

"Look at the glint in those eyes! What a pity poor Rex didn't pick a simple girl from his own home town. But seeing he's stuck on a 'sassiety' type, I suppose I must plead his cause."

"Some pleader," Alix retorted with a sniff. She was beginning to realize that she would not get anything out of me without betraying some interest, but she still tried. "Tell me about this unhappy swain," she continued airily. "One knows so little about him. His father, I gather, is a minister?"

"His putative father."

"His
what?
"

"It's all part o£ the mask. Rex is in reality the son of a very great man."

"He
is!
" Alix's eyes were now really popping.

"Yes, his real father is the Stuart pretender to the British crown. But don't tell anyone. His life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if fat old King Edward were to catch him."

Alix's little red puff of a mouth formed poutily into an oblong like her face. "Oh, Guy, you can never be serious."

"But I am serious. I was just trying to find out something, and I succeeded."

"What?"

"That the only thing you have against Rex is his humble birth. If he were an eligible millionaire, you'd fly into his arms soon enough."

"I'm not flying into anyone's arms, thank you very much," Alix responded tartly. When I had no comment to make on this, she continued with a shrug of impatience: "Well, of course, one cares who people are. I have Pa to face. You have your pa. Be fair, Guy."

"Oh, my pa." I dismissed him with my own shrug. "He married for love."

"You're perfectly odious today! I won't talk to you."

"Then I'll talk to
you,
" I said, catching her by the arm. "Where do you think your branch of the family would be today if a young man called Thompson, born in much humbler circumstances than Rex, a tailor's son, had not robbed his way to the top of the textile industry?"

"How can you talk so vulgarly? Grandpa Thompson was a most distinguished man!"

"He was when he died." But people of recent fortune in that day lived so utterly in the present that the past did not exist for them, even as a thing to be ashamed of. "Tell me, Alix, do you ever stop to consider that when you marry, you'll be marrying a way of life as well as a man?"

"I hate to consider what sort of a way of life
your
wife will be marrying!"

"No, be serious, please. Who do you think had more fun: your grandparents in their clamber to the top of the pile, or your parents in their dull existence at the summit? Which would you want for a husband: a man who would take you with him to the places where the exciting things of our century are happening, or a pink-faced boob out of a Turkish bath at the Racquet Club?"