The Embezzler (18 page)

Rex listened to all of this without the twitch of an eyelid. Then he rose.

"I'll send word to your club," he said in his stoniest voice, "when I've made up my mind."

He left the bar, and I returned to my seat in the back of Bertha's box. It was a strange place to review my life, with Bertha and her friends, at a performance of
Traviata,
yet it was there that I brought to its finest pitch the sense of detachment that I had cultivated all summer. It was the only thing that got me through my years in jail.

I saw that the common denominator of the little group in the box, other than myself, was that none of them had ever lived. The old bachelor colonel, a frustrated pederast, clutching the Republican principles of the Reconstruction era, lived only in his silly politenesses to spinsters and in the mutterings of his hate as he read of socialism in the newspapers at his club. The widow with the necklace of garnets and the turkey's neck lived in an imaginary past, the squeaky spinster twin sisters in an imaginary present, and Bertha, sleepy with her double potion of gin, beating time with her big foot to the music, dreamed of being a courtesan in the second empire, of giving up her house and jewels for a tiny villa in the country and a beautiful pale ardent young man.

Did I wish I were one of them? Did I wish I had stayed with Bertha, shared an apartment with her as a bachelor brother, gone to meetings of the Society of the Cincinnati and watched Armand and Violetta with moist eyes on Monday nights? Did I wish to be, like Bertha's friends, exempt?

No. Not even then. Not even with all the black void that loomed. I was happy that I had engaged with life, that I had married a beautiful woman and fathered healthy children and made and spent fortunes and founded a great club. New York would not soon forget Guy Prime. And if all ended hideously, New York would forget him even less.

When the big golden final curtain fell at last, on
Traviata
and on me, I knew that I would find a message at the Schuyler Club, that Rex had failed in his mission. I felt only numbness in my heart as I remained standing and applauding until the last curtain call. Then I followed Bertha to her car and talked about the singers until we reached my club. I slightly surprised her by kissing her goodnight on the lips.

The boy at the desk handed me the message for which I had already extended my hand. The next morning Prime King Dawson & King was suspended from trading, and by noon it was generally known in the street that we were bankrupt. The long Manhattan career of the Primes had ended in a hell as bright as any in the Bishop's sermons.

O
N
T
UESDAY
afternoon, after my firm had closed its doors forever, I consulted with our aghast old lawyer, Horatio Carter, whose white cuffs fluttered like moths as I spoke, and told him that I meant to plead guilty to an indictment for embezzlement. I interrupted when he began to expostulate and requested him firmly to go to the District Attorney, who would be preparing a warrant for my arrest, and tell him that in the morning, after a night at Meadowview, I would be at his disposal. In the meantime, the Chief of Police of Glenville, an old friend, would guarantee my availability. When Carter had departed, his cuffs still aflight, I took my last drive to Long Island.

One more shock awaited me, and that was the inundation of sympathy in which I found Meadowview sopped. Limousines jammed the drive, the hall overflowed with flowers and, in the living room, a bewildered Angelica, still in riding habit, was serving coffee to solicitous friends. Something buckled in my resolution of detachment at the impact of so much affection and concern, and the tears boiled up in my eyes. But they evaporated soon enough at the realization that the love in that room was not for me. It was for Guy Prime, the bankrupt. They did not yet know of Guy Prime, the crook.

Standing in the doorway I raised my voice to dominate the assembly. "My friends, you are here under a misapprehension. You think that merely my firm has failed. That is the least of my concerns. Tomorrow I expect to be criminally indicted for the misappropriation of trust funds in my custody. I regret to inform you that I shall have to plead guilty to that indictment. I leave you now to offer your sympathies to my unfortunate family. This news is as much of a shock to them as to yourselves."

I have never known silence like the silence that followed this announcement. In the moment before I turned and strode to my study, it seemed that the very walls and floor must have been saturated with it, and the white looming faces of which I was conscious only in mass were no longer the faces of friends, but a composite expression of dread and horror. I had become a specter in my own home.

Angelica followed me to the study. She was very nervous and kept striking her leg with her riding crop. Rex, it appeared, had already telephoned and told her the worst. She seemed undecided as to what reaction was the most appropriate: indignation, sympathy or simply impatience at so bizarre an interruption of normal life.

"I know it is not the embezzlement that you will most mind," I said grimly. "It will be my letting Rex down after all that he's done."

"Well, I mind that, of course, I mind it terribly, but it's not Rex who's going to prison. Rex will survive. My concern, believe it or not, is for you, old boy. One can't be married to a man for twenty-five years and see him go off to jail with a dry eye. There must be some way I can help. What can I do, Guy?"

"Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all. In crime one is all alone. One never knows how much till it happens." I paused, making out the sudden warmer sympathy in her eyes. Poor Angelica! It was so like her to spurn participation in my success and then reach out to share my bread and water. Whatever else she was, she was a lady.

"I want you to know that I'm not being sentimental," she was saying. "I've thought it all out because I've seen it all coming. Not your going to jail, perhaps, but our being broke and under a cloud. I've had the summer for that. I think I'm even beginning to understand the role that our incompatibility has played. It occurs to me that this may be our golden last chance to make up to the children for our selfishness. Let's do the thing with style, Guy! Prison, poverty, the works! Let's show the world we know how to live on the bottom even if we didn't know how to live at the top!"

Did she mean it? Was it anything more than a handsome Hyde gesture, a bow to the code of behaving well? But whatever it was, it was too late. There had been too many years of laughs, too many shrugs, too many quips, too many sneers, too much of each seeing the worst in the other. No, we could never go back. What was there to go back
to?

"That's very sweet of you, Angelica, but it's also very sentimental. Your feeling does you credit, but it's not a feeling to build on. It's too high class, too much the noble thing. My div honesty has inspired you. But I have a better plan. I want to get out of your life, once and for all, and give you another chance. It's not too late." I paused, to give what was coming its full effect. "I want you to divorce me, Angelica. I want you to divorce me, and when Lucy Geer dies, which can't be too far off, I want you to marry Rex."

Angelica's dark eyes slowly hardened into two slate discs. "Did you have to become a crook, Guy, to get rid of me? Couldn't you have asked me for a divorce before?"

"Please. Angelica, don't make a drama of this. Try to understand."

"I'm trying! I've been trying for twenty-five years! Tell me what more I can do for you. Shall I get the divorce while you're in prison? Shall I go hunting tomorrow while you're being arrested? Shall I wear yellow when you're wearing a striped suit?"

"Angelica!" I exclaimed firmly. "You will do no such thing. The divorce can wait my release. It would look otherwise as if you were leaving a sinking ship. I'll be the rat, thank you, if there have to be rats. I'm getting out of your and the children's lives forever. And it will be very much to everyone's good that I do!"

"And my heart has bled for you all afternoon!" Angelica continued in a trembling voice. "You're right, Guy Prime. I'm an arrant sentimentalist. Why, you're having the time of your life!"

It was a terrible ending to a marriage unless one remembered that the marriage had really ended long before. The pain that Angelica's pain might ordinarily have caused me was reduced to a mere dull ache by the anaesthesia of my impending conviction. When one is going to jail, believe me, boys, nothing else is quite real. I remember thinking at that moment that I understood the style with which the victims of the French Terror went to their deaths. The same dope enabled me to get through the even harder scene with Evadne and Percy that immediately followed.

Everything that followed my conviction worked out as neatly as everything before it had ended messily. Once those gods had me in jail, they appeared to be satisfied. Standard Trust Company, sharing my negligence if not my crime, put seven hundred thousand dollars back into Angelica's trust without even a protest. At the same time Meadowview was condemned for a highway, and Angelica got a good price for it. In a smaller house she continued to hunt and to live well enough. Evadne married George and had no further money problems; Percy became a first-rate lawyer. Everyone survived the war, and everyone today is prosperous and happy.

When I was released from prison in 1941, where I had been allowed to work, not too unhappily, as a librarian, I went to Panama. Angelica, at my repeated request, divorced me in 1942. Lucy Geer survived until 1948, and Angelica and Rex, two elderly lovebirds, were finally wed. From all that I hear it has been a most happy union. The relationships that it created may seem a bit bizarre: Evadne and her husband became stepsister and step-brother, and Angelica became her own daughter's mother-in-law. However, in present-day New York such things probably no longer raise an eyebrow. Only the fundamentals count, and Rex has always been full of
them.

Sometimes it seems to me that I was an Iphigenia, that the gods had simply demanded my neck as the price for according victory to the army of Agamemnon. Certainly as soon as I had detached my ill-fated self from the baggage train of the Geers and Primes, their progress became smoother. I was perfectly content for many years to philosophize to myself by the shores of the still Pacific and was proud to be above the need of self-justification. But now that a new generation is growing up that does not know me and that I do not know, I find that I do not want to exist for them only in newspaper accounts and in the smooth, no doubt charitable interpretations of my conduct offered by Angelica and Rex. I want, after all, to be heard. Please, Evadne, think twice before you tear this up.

W
HEN
I
HEARD
of Guy Prime's death in Panama last January (1962) of a stroke in the bar of the Rivoli Hotel, my first reaction was that I could not have wished him a more merciful or appropriate end. My second was concern for the old sores and sorrows that must now be reopened for Angelica and the children. My third was apprehension as to what last dirty trick he might have in reserve for me.

As the weeks went by I began to be ashamed of this last reaction. Guy, as it turned out, had left his affairs in scrupulous order. He had owned his house in Panama City free and clear, and he had no debts. There was even enough money to support his second wife, of whom I had always assumed I would have to take care, and to provide small legacies for Evadne and Percy. I began to wonder if the dreaded final trick might not simply turn out to be a changing of card hands, a switching about that would make us, the wronged, seem like Guy's persecutors, a
volte-face
that would present his deserted and plundered family in the guise of haughty and unforgiving patricians who had cast him into outer darkness. Evadne, who had not seen her father in twenty-five years, was assailed with terrible guilt feelings, and Percy flew down to Panama to see what he could do for Carmela.

But no. I was wrong, or rather, I had been right in the first place. There
was
a last trick, and just as dirty a one as I had feared.

A month after his death Evadne, at once grave and flustered, strode into my office downtown and plunked on my desk the memoir that her father had written two years before and that his widow, acting on his posthumous instructions, had forwarded to her, unopened.

"I'm sorry but you'll have to read it, Uncle Rex. Every word of the wretched thing. When you and Mummie married, you became my real father. Now you'll have to see what the other one has done. Do I have to show this libel to my boys? He says the most ghastly things—really, you wouldn't believe it. I've simply got to have your advice. And Mummie's, too."

When she had left, I read the manuscript at a single sitting. Guy had had the consideration to have it typed. It was the last consideration that he had showed his survivors.

What he had to say about Angelica and myself was wormwood but I supposed that the grandchildren could take it. Youth had become extraordinarily tolerant about such matters, much too tolerant, I thought, but now was not the time to quibble about that. What was very much worse to an old man, what, in fact, turned my heart to black ice, was the prospect of having to show my three grandsons this baldly cynical account of their other grandfather's crime.

Obviously, Guy, to his dying day, had not believed that he had done anything really wrong. He had been the one to get caught; that was all. In the cartoon of his mind his judges wore striped suits beneath their ermine. There was no such thing as justice to be expected from such a bench, only cant. Wall Street became a kind of Nottingham, and Guy, Robin Hood.

Had he written the memoir at the time of his conviction, and had we been back in those days, I should not have so much feared its effect on young men. What disheartened me was the odious suspicion that time might have been on Guy's side, that perhaps young men today would
not
be so shocked at what he had done. Was it, as he implied, like being caught with a trot in school? Were rules and regulations more than penalties in sport? Was the whole sad business simply a game?