Manhattan Monologues (7 page)

My rise from a clerk in the Standard Loan and Trust Company to that of senior trust officer seemed somehow inevitably wedded to my rise to a highly respected niche in Manhattan mens' club life and Knickerbocker society. I also found myself in a position to pay Harry back for his kindness to me by rectifying some of the damage he had done to the family finances. When I discovered that Father, clinging in his old age, to the starchy habits of old-time lawyers in having no social contact with the less savory of the firm's clients, was losing much of his percentage of its profits to greedy younger partners who failed to recognize the kudos that Father's small civic reputation had brought to them, I was able to arrange not only that my bank should continue to give its substantial legal business to them (the use of another law firm had been strenuously urged by the officers of another bank with which we had merged) but that Father's name should be kept in the firm's books as the partner in charge. And after his death I persuaded Mother to place all of her much-diminished assets in a trust, with my bank and myself as trustees. At the last moment she insisted that Harry, from whose importunities I was, of course, protecting her, should be a third trustee, and I acceded to her wish, confident that the bank and I could always outvote him if necessary and perfectly willing that he should get the commissions that I would gladly renounce.

Was there hidden envy of or hostility to Harry in my making up for his depredations? Was it intensified by our parents' stubborn refusal to see in what I did for them anything more than my duty, while the smallest favor conveyed by Harry was greeted with hugs? At any rate I must have been sorely tried.

Harry's last venture was the waxwork museum, with which he hoped to rival Madame Tussaud's in London. But it was from the beginning a small and somewhat tawdry affair, based on one floor of a loft building in Chelsea with dioramas of scenes from New York City history, financed insufficiently by a rich army friend. (His pre-war pals were disillusioned, at least with his businesses.) I had put up a small sum and vowed that was all.

World War II was in its closing weeks, and Harry, who had served as lieutenant colonel on MacArthur's staff in Australia but had been released from duty after a mild heart attack, had had a year to develop his new project. I found Mother, who had welcomed old age as an overdue admirer, gaunt, bent over and beshawled before the big pasteboard on which she had affixed the newspaper clippings of the gallant war doings of younger friends and relations around a large central photograph of Harry receiving his honorable discharge from the hands of the great liberator of the Philippines. The contrast between the pictured uniforms and my habitual black made me feel like a minor minister of state having a wartime conference with his august sovereign. I almost wondered whether I should take a seat before I was bidden.

"Will Harry have a waxwork of General MacArthur in his museum?" I asked, as little sarcastically as I could.

"Why not?" Mother demanded indignantly, picking up at once such sarcasm as appeared. "There might be a wonderful one of his wading ashore on the beach of Leyte. It ill becomes those who have stayed at home to sneer, Charles."

"Nor had I any intention of doing so, Mother. But I suppose it wasn't to discuss subjects for Harry's dioramas that you sent for me."

"Not at all. I am afraid that Harry is going to need a substantial sum of money to save his museum from bankruptcy."

"And how can he expect to raise that? No bank will look at him, as we know, and even this latest of his army friends must have seen the writing on the wall."

"You're very harsh on the subject of your brother's finances, Charles. Not everyone has had the good fortune that has favored you. And I wonder that it doesn't occur to you that those men who were exempted from military duty in two world wars may have incurred the obligation to come to the aid of those who served their country in the battlefield."

I could almost admire my intrepid parent for scorning to be anything but undiplomatic. "It was not my fault that the army rejected me. And I have always been ready to assist Harry in his personal needs, though not in his business enterprises, except for a token contribution. If Harry needs money to pay his household bills, he knows he can send them to me. I never give him cash, because I know what he'll do with it."

"But that's so insulting, Charles!"

"It's based on painful experience. Anyway, to anticipate your request, I am not prepared to give him a cent for his waxworks."

"I am not asking you to do that," Mother retorted with considerable hauteur. "I know you too well, Charles. What I am suggesting—or rather what I am requesting—is that you advance Harry the hundred thousand dollars that he needs from my trust."

I bit my lip in surprise. Such a sum was a small fortune in 1945. "It can't be done. It's out of the question."

"What do you mean, it can't be done?"

"Correction. I mean it won't be done."

"Does the trust deed not give the trustees the power to invade principal?"

"For your benefit. Not for Harry's."

"But you wouldn't be giving the money to Harry! You'd be giving it to me first, of course, if you must be technical about it. And I'd be directing you to pay it to Harry. Can't I do what I wish with my own?"

"When it's your own, yes. But your fiduciaries must use their discretion in distributing capital for your benefit. And two of your three trustees, the bank and I, will hardly find it discreet to strip the fund, on which you none too lavishly exist, for a waxwork museum."

"But it might kill me if Harry fails! Isn't that such an emergency as the trust might call for? Think of all that poor boy has been through, with his heart trouble and losing that darling little wife and child and not being able to finish the war in the company of his great idol, the general!"

I couldn't help wondering what horrors could befall me that would "kill," or even grievously upset, my wonderful mother. The reflection would have helped to tighten, if tightening were needed, my resolution never to exercise that trust power except for the direst emergency affecting the life tenant. My reply perhaps sounded pontifical, but an undervalued son must have some compensation.

"We must pray then that the refusal of your fiduciaries to stretch the exercise of their power beyond the limits prescribed by law will not have the dire effect on the income beneficiary that you so dismally predict."

"Oh, Charles, you're impossible."

"It is not I who am that, Mother. It is what you ask of me."

"Leave me alone. Go away."

Which I was glad enough to do.

I did not hear of the matter for another month, and then it was only indirectly. Indirectly but fatally. At the bank one morning when I was getting ready to depart for my lunch club, Ray Burnside, the fussy but earnest diminutive assistant trust officer in charge of Mother's affairs, faced me across my desk with a pale countenance drawn with apprehension. It appeared that a hundred thousand dollars worth of U.S. Treasury notes were missing from her trust.

"You mean stolen?" I asked, gaping.

"No, no. At least I dare not think so. You will remember that we had agreed to sell them, and your brother asked me to deliver them to him so that he could use his own broker."

I felt at once sick. "You shouldn't have done that. You should have come to me."

"But after all, he is a trustee."

"Even so. How long have the notes been gone?"

"Three weeks. I've telephoned your brother several times to ask whether he's sold them and, if so, where the proceeds are. He keeps putting me off and insisting on more time. Says it's not a good market to sell in, which is ridiculous, of course, and gives me all sorts of odd excuses. If you can't get him to give us back the notes or the money, Charles, I'll have to go to the big boss."

I thought for a moment and then nodded. "Give me till tomorrow. I'll take care of it."

What made me so immediately sure that Harry had embezzled the money? What right had I to accuse, even in my mind alone, my amiable brother of a crime, when he had never been known to commit one? It may have been because I had come to my limit in believing in a universe that was so consistently perverse as to favor Harry with everyone's smiles and love and me with their sniggers and reluctant respect. There had to be somewhere a stop; Harry had to have his comeuppance. And wasn't the horrid thrill that seemed to trickle through my being one of an odious satisfaction? Wasn't it an essential part of the creature I had been made? And, after all, I hadn't made myself, had I? I could be at fault only if I acted on it.

I telephoned Harry to say that I was coming over to his museum to ask about the notes, and he replied, quite without agitation, that he would meet me in the main gallery. This long dark chamber was empty when I arrived, although the place was open to the public. It contained a dozen dioramas of city history, some moderately amusing, such as J. P. Morgan immersed in a game of solitaire as he awaits the answer to his proposition of how to bolster a crashing stock market from the grim group of bankers gathered around him, or the dapper figure of Mayor Jimmy Walker skipping down the steps of City Hall with a gorgeous flapper on his arm. I was contemplating the representation of Diana Vreeland at her desk in the office of the editor of
Vogue
when a voice from behind me sounded suddenly in my ear.

"That is not a waxwork. That is Diana herself. She comes every day in her lunch hour and poses. Don't you love it?"

Of course, it was Harry, but for a moment I almost believed him. As a joker, he could be amazingly dead pan.

"Can you never be serious?" I asked with a sigh. "You know why I've come."

"Aren't trusts too serious to be taken seriously? Think of what a wonderful diorama we could make of you and Mr. Burnside when you discovered the missing notes. Or rather when you didn't discover the missing notes."

I looked about in search of a more fitting place for our talk. But what could be more private than the empty gallery? There was a bench in the center, and we moved to it.

"Burnside is behaving perfectly well," I told him. "He hasn't made any insinuations. He simply wants the notes or the proceeds of their sale deposited in the bank tomorrow. Or he will go to our president. It's the only thing he can do."

"And the president will go to the cops?"

"He will go, unless I can give him an acceptable explanation, to the district attorney. It's the only thing
he
can do."

"It would be an even better diorama with which to close my ill-fated museum! Harry Pierce in a striped suit!"

"Harry, for God's sake, what have you done with those notes?"

Harry was as calm and reflective as if I had asked him about an ordinary business transaction. "Well, I had only a limited time, three weeks as it turns out, to make the hundred gees double themselves so that I'd be able to save my museum and put the money back in the bank. There was just one way to do that, and that was by gambling. I had a glorious week in Las Vegas. At one point I was up to a hundred and eighty thousand. And then I lost it all."

"All of it? I thought that only happened in French nineteenth-century novels!"

"Maybe that's where I belong. I haven't a friend in the world who would lend me the money now. I'd have to tell them why, and then they'd drop me like a hot potato."

"Why would you have to tell them?"

"Because they're friends, damn it all! I should have told Mother, but she said you'd never invade the trust, so there was no point."

"I guess that leaves me."

"No, Chas! Never!"

"It won't bust me. Don't worry."

Harry was suddenly deeply earnest. He turned to face me and grasped my shoulders. "You can't do it. Not now that you know what I've done. You'd be compounding a crime."

"Oh, bosh. No one need know."

"Burnside would know."

"I can take care of Burnside."

"But you'd be in his hands. If ever he needed you to back his promotion. No, Chas, I can't accept that."

"Leave the details to me, Harry."

He jumped to his feet, more worked up than I had ever seen him. "I absolutely forbid it! All your life you've been the good boy and I've been the bad. And what have you got for it? Precious little. Even from Father and Mother. Even after you made up to them for all the losses I'd caused. Oh, I knew about all that; yes I did! And now you want to turn yourself into a crook to save a crook. Well, I won't have it! If there's one decent thing I can do now, I'm going to do it. Don't stand in my way, Chas. I mean it!"

"But, Harry," I cried, aghast, "you'll go to jail!"

"And tell me, dear brother, isn't that where I belong?"

***

Harry went to the penitentiary for two years, and I eventually made up the loss to Mother's trust out of my own pocket. But did I get any credit for that? Far from it. She and plenty of others among the family and friends excoriated me for not doing it in time to save him, and when Harry wrote to her that he had forbidden me to compound his crime, the universal attitude was that I should have saved him in spite of himself and that my reaching for the excuse of a breach of law, which would have never been discovered or, if it had, probably been condoned, was a mere blind to hide my jealousy and resentment of my popular and beloved sibling. And they may have been right, too, in the funny way that people have of being right when they attribute nasty motives to one. For had I not been sure that Harry would reject my offer to save him, and didn't that give me the excuse I may have consciously or unconsciously needed to throw him to the dogs?

When Harry's term was over, after only sixteen months because of model prison behavior, he was greeted at his club with a huge and hearty "coming-out" party, to which I was not invited. But, as I have said, people don't laugh at me anymore. And that's something.

T
HE THING THAT
intrigues me most about my mother-in-law's family—almost as much as it irritates me, but never quite, oh no!—is the way they silently, and yet so audibly, disapprove of what they reluctantly concede to be my charm, a quality notably lacking in all of them, with the exception of my husband and two children, and at the same time expect me to use this sole asset of mine (if such it be) to pull them out of the social and financial holes into which they ever more deeply sink. And there we were, in 1937, the year of which I am writing, incurably wed to our expensive tastes and just as incurably lacking what used to be a moderately comfortable little family fortune.