The Embezzler (11 page)

"I'm sure, if his wife suspected anything, she didn't give a hoot," Angelica was saying. "Women love men of mystery. Of course, it never lasts. One of the fascinations is precisely that it doesn't. Only dull things last. And dull men."

"Like stockbrokers?" I suggested with a smile, looking at Rex, who stared down into his plate.

"I don't see anything particularly fascinating about Landi, Mummie," Evadne protested. "His whole life was a cheap trick."

"Yes, but a trick that worked! For a while, anyway. Ordinary millionaires try to delude themselves into thinking they're happy with different kinds of private transport: planes or cars or yachts—vulgar things to carry them from distraction to distraction. Landi knew that the only point of money was to create a child's dream of fairy palaces with golden bathtubs full of asses' milk. He made the dream real—for a minute."

"Hasn't Meadowview been your dream, my dear?" I asked.

"Me? Dream? Why, Guy, I haven't even been to sleep!"

"You should have told me you wanted a pirate. I might have complied."

"What would your Sunday foursome at Glenville have said?" Angelica retorted.

I shrugged and sipped more champagne. I was beginning to enjoy the conversation. My sense of Rex's outrage, conveyed by his stubbornly lowered head and immovable shoulders, made up a little for my sense of moral inferiority. "What do
you
think, Percy?" I asked my son. "Does Count Landi appeal to the romantic in you? Or hasn't that side survived the impact of your too rarely visited law school?"

Percy looked up in indignation. "I'm hardly a romantic, Pa. If you'd ever bother to look at me, you'd see I am the coolest of realists. But families, naturally, are myopic."

"They are, my boy. They are just that."

Poor Percy had none of the Hyde charm. He had the looks of the Hyde men: the short, stiff, curly black hair, the pale long face, the thin cheeks that somehow never seemed to be properly shaven, the large, aquiline, porous nose. But he moved awkwardly, and his tone was shrill. He was intelligent, even sensitive, but he was not brilliant. He had the knobbly personality that is accepted in geniuses, but only in geniuses. At school and college he had gone in for every activity: sports, dramatics, glee club, journal, debate, but he had been remarkable more for the energy that he had scattered than for the quality of accomplishment. He had talked at different times of becoming a composer, a poet, an actor. But here Angelica had stepped in. The Hydes liked charades, not theatre; they could write jingles, not odes. When it came to a question of the artist's life there was not much to choose between them and the Primes, except that my family was franker. Angelica would never admit to what depths of subtle persuasion she had descended to bring about Percy's enrollment in Columbia Law.

Percy now treated us to his opinion of Landi.

"Gall on that scale is to me the highest kind of courage. I would call his the perfect life. To be dealt a hand without a single honor card, and to play it for a grand slam, knowing all the time that it can never be made, that the most one can hope, even by magic, is to take twelve tricks and lose the last! And then when it happens, when one sees the ace of trumps finally played, to retire without a word or a sigh, without even a joke, to one's magnificent Renaissance library and there, after a sip of Napoleon brandy and a nod to one's peerless Masaccio triptych, to take out the jeweled revolver that one has bought years before for just this purpose and put its single gold bullet in one's fertile brain. How fine!"

"What about his wife, his children?" I inquired.

"Oh,
family,
Pa! What has such a man to do with family?"

Even at this Rex wouldn't look at me! I turned to his son George, my about-to-be son-in-law. "What about you, my boy? Does the Count excite your imagination?"

"Not in the least, sir." George Geer's soft brown eyes hardened like his father's. "Dress him up as you will, the man is a criminal, purely destructive, purely wasteful. And with all due respect to Mrs. Prime, I doubt if she'd have found him so romantic. I think it's sufficiently notorious that criminals make disappointing lovers."

"Ah, George," Angelica reproached him, "after a lifetime in the bogs of respectability and disillusionment, are you going to deprive me of my last hope?"

"Poor Mummie," Evadne murmured. "She has always wanted to be abducted by a knight in armor. And you tell her the
Decameron
was written by Sinclair Lewis!"

In many families of one boy and one girl, each child turns to the parent of the opposite sex. But if Percy followed the rule, Evadne did not. It was always singular that she loved me and Angelica equally.

"What about you, Vad?" I asked. "Would you have a spot in your heart for an old swindler?"

"Oh, I agree with George," she said flatly. "I see no romance in thieves. Even ones with jeweled revolvers. They strike me as merely stagey. But if you'll forgive me, Pa, I'm bored with Landi. I had thought we were going to have a whole evening of wedding plans after dinner, and now George tells me you and Mr. Geer will be tied up. What can you two possibly have to discuss that's so much more important than our wedding?"

"Money, my dear," I said grimly. "Without which there would be very few wedding plans for anyone to discuss."

It seemed to me, in the silence that followed, that the unfortunate Count Landi had created an unexpected unity in my little family, as if Angelica and I and Percy were all suddenly concerned in pulling a quilt of fancy colors over the dirty, unmade bed of our ordinary lives. We might have been almost united for the moment, our hands, so to speak, touching, our backs turned to anything as foolish as poor old reality. Only Evadne looked to George, who seemed, in turn, to be looking to his father, raising his head at last like an angry Wotan and preparing to hurl his spear.

After dinner Rex went directly to my study while I, perversely, lingered over a brandy in the dining room with Percy. Not until I had quite finished did I rise from the table and amble down the long library corridor to hear my fate. The little study at the end of it was the only part of Meadowview that was entirely mine. There I was allowed to keep my framed letters of American presidents, my collection of bronze bears and bulls (stock market symbols), my leather-bound sets of Victorian novelists and the John Alexander portrait of my father (which Angelica detested), a study of Edwardian elegance, with a cane resting against his crossed knees.

Rex's back was to me; he was staring into the empty grate. He did not turn until he heard the door close, and then I saw that his small, green-gray eyes were as hard as emeralds. "I'll never understand you, Guy. How could you sit there and talk so glibly about Landi? How
could
you?"

"What does it matter? The question is: do I go under or do I not? Of course, anything you advance me will not be lost. All I need is time."

"But don't you know what all this means?"

"Who better?"

"Don't you realize you're asking me to compound a crime? To be an accessory after the fact?"

I shrugged. "I suppose technically that's so. But you know how often it's done."

"Technically! Don't you understand, Guy, that you've done something that is
morally
as well as technically wrong?"

"Oh, Rex, what a time to preach!"

"I've got to know the answer to that."

"Well, of course, I know it was morally wrong. I'm not an idiot."

"Has it happened before?"

I began to be irritated. "Maybe once or twice. Never on this scale."

"Once or twice! My God, man, what assurance do I have that it won't happen again?"

"Look here, Rex. If it were just myself involved, I wouldn't have even asked you. I'm thinking of Evadne and George."

"So am I thinking of Evadne and George! And of Angelica, too."

"Oh, yes, no doubt you're thinking of Angelica, too," I said with a sneer.

Rex ignored the sneer. "Have you told Angelica?"

"Certainly not. Why should I?"

"Then I suggest you call her in and tell her now. First, I should inform you that I
am
prepared to cover the amount of the bonds. I might even go further and help you settle your other debts. But only on the express condition that your firm be liquidated and that you give me your word that you will stay out of the market in the future."

I stared in astonishment at that square white face and those unblinking eyes. "Liquidate Prime King! Why, in the name of all that's holy?"

"It is the only way I can protect the public from a repetition of this kind of thing. If I am to stand between you and justice, I must certainly see that you get out of business and stay out. And I shall require Angelica as a witness to our compact and a guarantor that it be performed!"

My anger, which had been growing since the morning before when I had sent the glass hurtling into my staring image in the mirror over the Glenville Club bar, now tore its way out of my chest with a violence that left me trembling from head to toe.

"Has it occurred to
you,
Rex Geer, that it may be morally wrong to get so much pleasure out of humiliating an unfortunate friend? Was it not enough for you to have had an affair with my wife without dragging her in now to see me spiritually cuckolded?"

Rex seemed to congeal as I expanded; he turned back to the empty grate. "You know that I will never discuss that with you. If you want the money, those are my terms. They are not negotiable. Will you get Angelica or shall I go home?"

Looking at that stiff back, I felt the anger slowly subside. Had that affair not been over three years? What was the point
now
of scenes and protests? Rex had me in his hands.

"I'll get her," I said sullenly. "You can tell her the whole story."

Angelica and Rex were alone in the study for only twenty minutes before she called me. I was astonished to find her actually smiling, while Rex, standing with his back to the grate, looked hurt and embarrassed.

"But it's just like Count Landi!" she exclaimed. "Were you laughing up your sleeve at us all during dinner?"

I think for just that moment I loved Angelica as I had loved her when we had first been engaged. I went over to clasp her hand in mine, and then I turned triumphantly to our visitor. "You must forgive her, Rex. Women have no morals in business matters."

Had I gone then and there to the penitentiary, it would have been without bitterness in my heart. But life is not that way. Just give the gods time. They know what to do with it.

"Angelica's taking it magnificently," Rex said pompously.

"Oh, but, Rex, don't think I don't realize what
you'
re doing for us!" Angelica now went over to him and turned to face me, one arm tucked under his. "It goes without saying, doesn't it, Guy, that we'll do everything he asks? From now on, we're at his orders. What do we need this big barn of a house for? Let's put it on the market and start living within our means. It should be quite a novelty!"

Now, this, considering what Meadowview meant to her, was very handsome of Angelica. She had style, great style. But what did I care for her style if the gesture was made for Rex?

"I wouldn't do anything too quickly," Rex said judiciously. "While Guy is winding things up, it will be better not to alarm people. Tell them he's tired and needs a change. As to Meadowview, we'll wait and see. I hate to think of your not living here. Maybe you can sell some of the land and rent the stables. We'll think of something. Perhaps Guy could take a job as manager of the Glenville Club. Nobody else could handle it as well."

"I leave myself in your capable hands, Rex," I said in frigid anger, turning to the door.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going for a walk, thank you very much. I'm going to clear my head. May I come to your office in the morning tomorrow for the bonds?"

"You may."

"Then I'll go now."

Angelica hurried over to me, as if I were a child behaving badly before company. "Guy, aren't you
grateful
to Rex?"

"Perhaps I should be," I said grimly, looking from one to the other. "Without him I should look forward to years in a striped suit. But human beings, my dear Angelica, are so constituted that they adjust themselves very readily to the most unlikely rescues and sink their teeth remorselessly into helping hands. You, of course, think nothing of my giving up a lifetime's work. To you it's just one of those silly things men do downtown, and, granted, I've made a mess of it. But botchers still have their pride. Guy Prime was somebody yesterday. Today he is Rex Geer's creature. It takes a minute to swallow that. Don't worry, I shall swallow it. But will you both be good enough to give me that minute?"

Rex at least understood. "Go ahead on your walk, Guy," he muttered and turned away. Angelica, like a woman, was inexorable. "But, Guy, don't you see it's all going to be all
right?
"

I slammed the door and strode across the hall to get out to the lawn. At a safe distance, in the dark, I turned and looked back at the long, lighted house. With all the mighty events of those two days and with all of the past that their events had churned up in my brain, what burned into it as the hottest needle of humiliation was Rex's suggestion that I should take a salaried job at my club. That I would never forgive. I cannot forgive it yet.

This may surprise my grandsons. They may take it as an example of lightness of character. Perhaps that is a difference between 1936 and 1960. Or perhaps it is merely a difference between me and saner men. But in any case it was of the essence of
me,
or of what I had tried to make of my own and my father's ambition, that I was at least a gentleman and not a servant. And Rex knew that. Or was it precisely the essence of Rex, and of his own blind egotism, that he did not?

Father had gone to his grave convinced that Rex and Angelica had taken advantage of me: that one had used me as a ladder to fame and fortune, and the other as a lifeboat from a mother's domination. On that feverish night, as I took off to roam the darkened fields of Meadowview, I went so far as to wonder if Rex and Angelica were not bound in some kind of unholy conspiracy to fetter me and reduce me to helplessness.