The Embezzler (14 page)

Our cruise now moved into its final phase. We sailed for Corinth and Corfu and then steamed up the Adriatic Coast towards Venice, where we were to disembark. I knew that whatever was to happen between me and Angelica would have to happen before that time, and it did, on a cool, calm night as we were passing Ragusa.

I was ready for bed and standing by my porthole watching the dusky outline of the mountainous coast when my door opened and as suddenly closed again, and I turned to find Angelica, shivering in a white nightgown, her eyes burning, looking, with her long hair and clasped hands, for all the world like a Lucia or Ophelia about to play a mad scene. Without even speaking, I put my arms about her, if only to keep her warm.

"Angelica, dearest, what's happened?"

She burst into tears, and I led her to the single chair of the cabin, and sat on the deck beside it, holding her hands. "I've been playing with you," she sobbed. "I've been an absolute bitch during the whole cruise. I'm not going to marry you, Guy, but I'm going to make up for my bitchiness. It's the least I can do. I'm going to give myself to you. Here I am. Take me!"

"My poor girl. Be quiet."

I kept hold of her hands and leaned my head against her trembling knees as I thought. Men can think at such moments. Oh, yes, they can. I could see with perfect clarity the role of the young man as the romantic code of the day, or perhaps the yesterday, would have conceived it. I would have drawn Angelica to her feet, led her to the door, implanted a chaste kiss on her brow and told her: "No, my dearest, if you will not be mine, freely, of your own will and forever, let us part. I cannot take advantage of a mood that, however generous, is misguided."

And she would have gone weeping to her cabin and told me in a week's time that she would be my wife.

But would she?

I knew rather more about women than most of my contemporaries of my own milieu. It was my specialty. I sensed that Angelica, however passionate, was still a virgin, and I was quite sure that she had no conception of what might happen to her if a man made competent love to her. She had come to me out of desire, but she had still enough of the prudery of her generation to wish to mask it to herself as the discharge of a moral debt. She expected to lie inert on the altar of Venus, a passive penitent, a prim Iphigenia. She never imagined that she would participate lustily in her own sacrifice.

But that's what happened. When Angelica left my cabin in the early morning she was a confused but different woman. She was in a daze all the next day, and the following night, moored off Venice, we made love again. Before the break-up of our little cruising party a week later I was able to take her, secretly panic-stricken that she might be pregnant, to Mrs. Hyde and tell her that we were engaged.

Mrs. Hyde took it all just as easily as Angelica had originally predicted.

"I couldn't be more pleased. In my day it was always said that the Primes made good husbands. I had kind of an eye on Chauncey Prime myself once. We'll cable your father, Angelica, and what would you say to a Paris wedding? Or do you prefer Tuxedo Park?"

Angelica and I both preferred Paris, and it was decided that we would have a small wedding there in six weeks' time. The interim was not easy for either of us. Our physical bond proved strong enough to get us through it, but there were terrible gaps that had not been bridged. Angelica may have sneered at her mother and brothers, but it was a defensive kind of sneering, for basically she dreaded their scorn. She was always nervous when I was talking to Ted and Lionel, and I was hardly flattered to deduce that she was constantly apprehensive I would make a fool of myself. The Hydes were "special" people, and Angelica was sure that her brothers inwardly felt that she had let them down by engaging herself to a man who was determined to be a stockbroker. For that was what I had told her I was going to be. Worse yet was her mother's continuing satisfaction, humiliating to both of us, that she had done as well as could be expected under all the circumstances.

The arrival of our fathers did not make matters any easier. Mr. Hyde plainly resented being dragged across the Atlantic for so trivial a thing as a daughter's wedding, and my own poor father, for all his effort to please everybody, struck me for the first time as an almost tinny figure in a Hyde midst, the least little bit like a hand-rubbing floorwalker in a department store. He was not pleased with the match, but, unlike Mr. Hyde, he became almost unctuous in his anxiety to conceal his real feelings, and Angelica, professing to see in him the essence of the world into which she was marrying, drew back in alarm.

"Darling, now that we have each other, we don't need to worry about parents any more," I tried to assure her. "All that's in the past."

But her brooding look of doubt confirmed my own suspicion of how wrong I was. In the deepest part of my nature I loved the Primes; in the deepest part of hers she worshipped the Hydes.

Rex came over to Paris, to be my best man. It was wonderful for me, after a year and a half of the condescension of Europe and Europeanized Americans (granting that I had sought it!) to be again with a friend who, for all his criticisms, still cared about me. He was delightful in his enthusiasm; success, of which he was already having a taste, had softened him. He amused Mrs. Hyde with tales of the business world, of which she knew little, and delighted her husband with market tips. He listened affably now to Father's social anecdotes, and he won Angelica by telling her about his Lucy Ames and how they hoped soon to be in a position to marry. In fact he gave a dignity to the whole life that Angelica and I were about to live without which I believe at the last moment she might have broken off.

Angelica had no attendants, and I had only Rex. But at my bachelor's dinner at the Travellers' Club I had both fathers, all the Hyde brothers, old Mr. Baylies, our host of "The Loon," and Giulio de Medici. The latter, I may say by way of conclusion, was the gayest of all.

W
HAT REAL
happiness could be expected of a marriage so flawed in its advent? What true union could emerge from the collision of two such illusions? I had hoped to find in Europe and in Angelica something better than the ratrace for commercial success in which Rex had outstripped me, and she had dreamed of discovering in New York a refuge from the wear and tear of aestheticism and the domination of an unbeatable mother. We both misjudged ourselves. Basically, I was born for a Yankee business life, and Angelica for the world of arts. Basically, I was always my father's child and she her mother's.

From the start, she was ashamed of me. That was the gist of it. She tried to be a good wife in the early years, but in a tepid, passive sort of way. She did most of the things that I expected of her (after a few terrible blow-ups) and adapted herself outwardly to the stock-market society in which I both wished and needed to live, but she was always a bit like a grand duchess in exile, making her noble best of an unfamiliar civilization of neon lights, and never quite coming alive. Sometimes I thought that her obedient conformity was a greater insult to my friends than the grossest insubordination would have been. "I'm not blaming you, any of you; really I'm not," her half-shrugging, mildly deprecatory air seemed to imply. "It's all my own fault, the whole thing; I've no illusions about that. What the devil am I doing
dans cette galère?
"

Of course, this is hindsight. In actual life the decay of our conjugal happiness was a gradual process. Our mutual attraction remained strong, at least until I went abroad in the first war; we had two children, who provided a naturally binding force, and there was always Angelica's Catholicism, stronger in her than she would allow. Many couples have stayed together with less in common. But after I returned from the army, and the nineteen-twenties, so much my era and so little hers, began their noisy course, our drift apart became a thing that we recognized and accepted. There was never any question of divorce.

I had regarded the war as a final opportunity to be something other than Guy Prime, the stockbroker. I had fancied myself becoming a hero, and if this should have happened, it would not have mattered if I had been a dead one. I had gone eagerly to the volunteer training camp at Plattsburg and thereafter to officers' school in Louisville, only to find myself kidnaped by General Devers and placed on staff duty near Paris for the duration. Rex, on the other hand, who had been far too busy in de Grasse Brothers to go to Plattsburg, far too indispensable a man of affairs to go to Louisville, obtained a commission at the last minute by simple pull and went to France where he was awarded the silver star for taking an enemy machine gun nest, one week before the Armistice. The gods had evidently closed their books on any competition between him and me!

I came back from France, determined to enjoy life in what I now deemed was the only way I could: I would make as much money as possible and spend it as gaudily. I would ignore Rex's hauteur and Angelica's moodiness. If there was not love enough under my own roof, there would be plenty of it elsewhere. The era, God knows, was propitious for all of this. It was the heyday of the stockbroker, and my little firm did a bounding business. In five years' time I had founded the Glenville Club, and Angelica had built Meadowview.

The latter was the price of "no questions asked." Angelica forgave me my girl friends in return for a
carte blanche
for her stables and kennels. It was never put so vulgarly, but that is what it amounted to—a
modus vivendi.
To be queen of the Glenville Hunt seemed to be all that she wanted, and the common gossip was that she had put romance behind her. "Does anyone?" I used to retort with a wink. I was to regret my coarseness on the day I was proved right.

Rex, too, prospered in these years, rising rapidly to the position of managing partner of de Grasse, but his glory was shadowed by the increasing illness of his wife Lucy, who developed a crippling arthritis. It was very sad, yet I doubt if under the best of circumstances he would have enjoyed the 'twenties. Too many undeserving people were also making fortunes. Too many Guy Primes! And what made things much worse, much darker to this self-appointed judge of his brethren's morals, was that not only did the brethren pick up fortunes, so to speak, at the roulette wheel, but they had the time of their lives spending them. Shocking! The only job that Rex would have relished in a casino would have been handing out pistols to the departing bankrupt.

His time came with the depression, the odious depression. It was peculiarly a Rex thing. De Grasse not only survived with him at the tiller; it survived even more solidly than before. To Rex, shaking his head and puckering his brow, the crash on the big board came as a wonderful
Dies Irae.
He had not spent his money ostentatiously so it was difficult for the ordinary observer to tell how brilliantly he had avoided the general ruin, but Rex never minded the ordinary observer. He wanted to be judged only by his peers. A handful of the right people knew the full extent of his accomplishment in guiding his bank through those terrible times, and this was good enough for him. No cricket ever hummed more cozily on his warm hearth to see the snow-bedraggled grasshoppers outside. As Rex's big dark car turned slowly into Wall Street in the early morning, the very spokes of its glittering wheels seemed to be saying to the apple vendors: "I told you so."

Whoa! my exhausted reader may cry. Do I realize, he demands, that I have covered the events between my marriage in 1912 and the bottom of the depression in 1933, a period of twenty-one years, greater than the age of most of my grandsons? Yes, I am well aware of it. But time is truly measured in intensity, which is why a brief youth seems so huge and vital a portion of a lifetime and a long old age so small and trivial a one. Consider how often a vessel must change its course in leaving a harbor, yet once on the high seas a single heading may bear it to its destination. So it may be with us. When I married Angelica and came back to New York to buy a seat on the Exchange my course was set. Only a major navigational hazard could make me change it.

In the first years of the depression I sustained my firm with a series of personal loans. I looked naturally first to my family, but by the end of 1933, even though I always paid punctually, my visitations to aunts and cousins were becoming less welcome. It was time to turn to Rex, whom I was seeing more frequently than usual, as he had taken to riding on weekends at Meadowview. This had been at my suggestion, when his doctor had prescribed regular exercise following a collapse from overwork. Angelica had even been teaching him to jump. Indeed, I had noticed with surprise and gratification that, despite the difference in their temperaments and interests, they seemed at last to be becoming the best of friends.

When I went one morning to Rex's bare cell of an office in de Grasse, with its single picture, a charcoal sketch of old Marcellus, on the wall behind his desk, and asked him for a loan of a hundred thousand dollars, he agreed after only a moment's hesitation, with a stare and not a sermon, with a grunt and not a growl, and with the odd flicker of something like shame in those gray-green eyes.

I
T WAS MY
first hint of what was going on. I found out the truth of the old adage that the husband is the last to know. It is not that I would have begrudged Angelica a lover, other than Rex. I had always been uniquely free of jealousy. She could have had discreet affairs with the gentlemen of her hunting crowd, and I would have been careful to look the other way. But no, she had to choose the one man whom I could not tolerate as a "rival." For if Rex and Angelica came together, was it conceivable that the force which drove them was not directed at least in part to the destruction of Guy Prime? What did they have in common but me? How could the two people whom I had most loved and on whom I had built so many vain hopes and ambitions, love each other except at my expense?

It was not like Angelica to fall in love at all, let alone so violently. I was well aware that she had a reputation of frigidity in hunting circles. The very recklessness with which she jumped her fences was evidence of a compensatory motive. And if she settled on a man at last, in what should have been the common sense of her middle years, why should it have been a man who had nothing to do with sport or art or beautiful houses, a man who, if possible, was even less of a Hyde than myself? Why should it have been a man who cared exclusively for the downtown world that she had always professed to despise?