The Embezzler (16 page)

"Whom he loves!"

"And whom he must therefore expel from the premises. Think of it, Mrs. Hyde! Think what may happen when your desperate daughter is turned away from her lover's door!"

"Guy Prime, I believe you're a fiend!"

"But you forget. I love her too!"

"Love!" Mrs. Hyde's shrug was a vivid repudiation. "Thank God I was spared your kind of love!"

The formidable old lady was half-angry and half-amused, half-alarmed and half-intrigued. She and I had more in common than any of her family cared to recognize. We were both deeply involved with life, but at the same time understood the role of the looker-on. We could love and see ourselves loving. We could hate and laugh at ourselves hating. And we both resented the world for its audacity in feeling superior to us.

M
RS.
H
YDE BROUGHT
Angelica back that night. Things happened essentially, although not precisely, as I had supposed they would. Rex did not bar his door to my errant wife, but he did send her home, and his doing so meant the rupture of their relationship. Angelica had her pride, at least enough not to go back to him after that. It helped, too, that Lucy Geer returned from Arizona in the following week. There was no further question of Rex riding at Meadowview. Mrs. Hyde, curiously enough, seemed to blame him for this. She was a thoroughly immoral old woman.

"What it boils down to is that Mr. Geer would rather have an easy conscience than an easy love," she told me bitingly. "But be gentle with Angelica. She doesn't suspect the subtle role you've played. That is just as well, believe me. Let it fall on my already despised shoulders."

Angelica's reaction was stronger than I had expected from so brief an affair. She was wan and listless, and for weeks she would not even ride. She would mope about the house, paying no attention to me or to the servants. She reminded me of Emily Bronte in a play that I had once seen, gaunt, proud and dying, roaming about Haworth Parsonage and pausing from time to time to gaze out a window at the moors.

Except Angelica was not dying. Her health was too rude to be destroyed by disappointed love. Never had she seemed more beautiful or romantic to my eyes. I stayed home every night and tried to devise things for her amusement.

Happily, as her mother had suggested, she seemed not to hold me in any way responsible for Rex's defection, and the ugly little scene in her bedroom before the Glenville Club dinner had apparently dropped from her mind. Or perhaps I was simply too unimportant to be resented. She sat impassively on the sofa while I read Trollope aloud and occasionally pulled herself together for a game of backgammon.

One evening she came out of herself enough to remark on the change in me. "Why are you so nice to me?" she asked bleakly. "What do you expect to get out of it?"

"Believe it or not, I feel sorry for you. Is that offensive?"

"No, but it's hardly necessary. I feel sorry enough for two."

"At least then we can be sharing something again. It's a start."

"To what?" she asked suspiciously.

"To a friendlier and more civilized relation," I replied simply.

For I was determined now to win my way back to the place in Angelica's heart that I had occupied a decade before. I was determined, no longer jealously but zealously, to be to her something of what Rex had been. I was perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that for years—from the very beginning, if she insisted—I had treated her badly by demanding too arbitrarily that she be the kind of wife I fancied myself as needing and then, having driven her to rebellion, by casting her too completely upon her own devices. Maybe my friends
were
loud and dull; maybe I was loud and dull myself. But did I
have
to be? Had I not won Angelica originally by subtlety, and might I not win her back with a little of the same quality?

I gave up going to the Glenville Club; I even gave up golf and went riding on the weekends with Angelica. When the children were home, I warned them to be very gentle with their mother, going so far as to insinuate that she was traversing the nervous tensions of a change of life. When Angelica learned this from a talk with Evadne, she was touched and even amused. For the first time since her break with Rex, I got a bit of her former banter.

"I do think that was tactful of you, old boy. Troubles of the heart are peculiarly undiscussable with children. For you to have substituted another in their minds, equally undiscussable, was sheer genius."

And, all of a sudden, Angelica and I were friends again. But I was careful not to push her. Oh, so careful! Everything I had learned in twenty-two years I now put to good use. I did not talk about my usual subjects, but neither did I presume to talk about hers. I steered our conversation as much as possible to neutral territory where she could not have unfavorable preconceptions of my opinions. These I could now adapt to fit the image of the gentler, more liberal Guy that I was creating. Premeditated? Naturally! All courtship is premeditated. I was in the ridiculous situation that French comic playwrights delighted to explore: I had fallen in love with my wife!

"Of course, I see you have a plan," Angelica told me. "But I'm darned if I see what it is."

"It couldn't be the very simplest?"

"The simplest?"

But we were riding, and she spurred her horse ahead to avoid my answer. Obviously, she knew what it would have to be, and I assumed that she did not want to have to repudiate it.

I wonder if Angelica today, so many years afterwards, would still deny that something rather beautiful was happening to us. Certainly at the time it was apparent to both that our reconciliation was going to be more than a handshake and a sharing of the morning crossword puzzle. Angelica may not have wanted it to be more, but she was like a person lost in indolence, floating down a sluggish stream in a canoe. By simply dipping her paddle in the water she could have stopped it altogether, or at least changed its direction, but the gentle movement had become habitual, almost pleasant. She was tired; she was humiliated; she was lovelorn. And there was I, her lawful, wedded husband.

I will not embarrass my reader with further details. I took Angelica off to my Caribbean island, wisely representing it as a business trip so that pleasure should not seem unduly to predominate to her embarrassed eyes, and there we had a second honeymoon, more wonderful, if briefer, than the first.

Angelica did not tell me when she became pregnant. I learned of it from her doctor who suggested that I persuade her to give up riding. She was forty-five and had not given birth for seventeen years. He warned me that she might not have too easy a time. Exuberant and exhilarated at his news, if not his warning, I rushed home from his office to embrace her and to be sharply repulsed.

"Please don't talk about it yet, please!" she cried in anguish.

"But, darling, why not?"

"It's so ridiculous at my age! How can I face Percy and Vad?"

"Why, they'll be tickled pink! Wait till I tell them. You'll see!"

"Don't tell them, Guy.
Don't.
I beg of you!"

I knew enough about the moods of early pregnancy to obey her and leave her alone. But, alas, I proved unable to be as discreet abroad as I was at home. I had now resumed my golf, and on a glorious Sunday morning, after I had gone around in seventy-four, I took my customary place at the men's bar with overflowing spirits. As luck would have it, one of my cronies was boasting that his newly born son, the fruit of his second marriage, was younger than a grandson, issue of the first.

"But you used two wives!" I burst forth. "Anyone can do
that.
The trick is to do it with one."

"Like whom?"

"Like me!" I turned to thunder at the bartender: "A round for all the gentlemen, Pierre. I may not have a grandson, but I have a boy at Harvard who is perfectly capable of giving me one. And in eight months' time that boy will have a baby brother or sister. A
full
brother or sister, gentlemen!"

I realized from the shout of congratulation that followed how grave my error had been, but what could I do but join in the toast and pray to be forgiven?

Angelica found out the very next day when the wife of one of my bar friends called up to "commiserate." Everyone assumed, of course, that the child was a "mistake." Angelica was angrier than I had ever seen her. I found her waiting for me that night in the hall when I came home.

"You couldn't wait, could you?" she hissed at me. "You couldn't wait to boast of your triumph in that sordid bar of yours! Like an old rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo before the other old roosters!"

"I'm sorry, dear."

"Sorry! Why should
you
be sorry? You're only being yourself. The same self you've been from the beginning,
I
'm the one who should be sorry. I learned once what you are, and I learned to live with it. And then I was fool enough to let myself get caught in the same old trap. Well, it won't happen again!"

Even after making every allowance that I could for her condition, I still could not explain away the near hate that I read in her eyes. "Angelica, please," I begged her, as the tears started into my own, "don't spoil the last two months!"

"Spoil them?" she retorted. "I think I can safely leave that little job to you!"

At this I lost all restraint. If the reader is astonished that our new happiness should have been so quickly dispelled, let him remember that it had been preceded by ten years of mere mutual toleration and, more immediately, by the affair with Rex. "It's because you don't want
him
to know, isn't it?" I shouted at her. "It's because you don't want him to know how soon you consoled yourself!"

Angelica, as she walked away, threw her retort over her shoulder in a voice of cold disdain. "You're not fit to discuss him. Not with me, anyway. I've told you that before."

A week later, in the big pasture, taking a four-foot fence she fell and miscarried. I was playing golf when word was brought to me. I drove home at a reckless pace and tore upstairs to the room where Angelica was lying in bed, her face a whitish blue, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She turned to look at me, but she did not speak, and my heart overflowed with bitterness.

"You wouldn't have done it," I said with a sob, "if it had been Rex's child!"

Angelica simply turned her head away. The Hydes were intrepid people!

When she was well again, we went back to our old lives, she to her horses, I to my business and clubs. It was surprising how little animosity was apparent in our personal relations. But this was the period of my first embezzlement. I used bonds belonging to Aunt Amy as security for a private loan. In a month's time I had put them all back, and nobody was the wiser. Thereafter, I did the same thing in other accounts, perhaps half a dozen times. Each time, of course, it was a crime, punishable by jail. Yet I do not recall that I ever felt the faintest twinge of conscience.

Why? Why did a man brought up as I had been, a gentleman born and bred, after so many years of straight conduct, suddenly become a thief? And why did I feel no remorse? It was suggested at the time of my trial that I suffered from megalomania, that I was a kind of sun king of stockbrokers who recognized no distinction between his own accounts and those of his customers, that I strutted up and down between Trinity Church and the East River declaiming: "Wall Street,
c'est moi.
" But this was drivel. I would rather have people raise their hands about my morals than shrug their shoulders about my sanity. At all times I was perfectly aware of what I was doing and of the consequences of discovery.

What had happened was that I had lost my faith in the world as a place in which there was any point for me to live except as a rich man. Angelica and Rex, between them, had destroyed my faith in myself. He had scorned me as an equal in the man's world of business; she had scorned me as her master in the man's world of the home. So low had I fallen in my own esteem that I could no longer imagine that anyone in my family, in my office or in all my large circle of friends would be interested in seeing a poor Guy Prime. Like a prima donna who has lost her voice or a priest who has lost his faith, such a Guy Prime would have struck me as being without use or function. The world insisted on seeing me only in the role of king of the Glenville Club. Very well. It would never see me in any other. I would be that or I would be nothing.

I will say this much in extenuation of what I did. I never took a penny that its owner could not have spared. Not for me was the widow's mite, the orphan's pence. I "borrowed" from only three sources: from the profits that I had made for my rich friends and relatives, from the portfolio of the country club that I had founded and from a family trust that I had set up out of my own pocket. To keep up the position that the world expected of me, I borrowed the funds of that world. In a way, I still think it owed them to me.

T
HE MORNING
after the "Meadowview Pact" between Rex and myself in that fateful spring of 1936, when I bargained away my birthright to engage in business (my very manhood, by the standards of downtown) in return for a loan that was the merest pittance to him, I arrived in my office to find that, good to his dearly purchased word, he had already delivered the America City bonds from my loan account at de Grasse. By ten o'clock these had been delivered in turn to Jo Beal, Treasurer of the Glenville Club, and I was again a free man. Free, that is, to do nothing. Free to liquidate Prime King. Free to commit suicide and remove an unpleasant reminder from the high and mighty gaze of Reginald Geer!

But I had never for a minute intended to give him that satisfaction. I had already made my plans for the summer which, fortunately, proved to be a solitary one. Rex was in England, partly for pleasure, partly for business (de Grasse had a London branch), and Angelica had rented a cottage at the Cape where Evadne and Percy joined her. I gave up my apartment as a needless expense and took a room at the empty Schuyler Club. If I had changed my name I could not have removed myself more effectively from my Long Island world.