The Embezzler (19 page)

One thing, however, I was perfectly clear about. If we should decide that Guy's memoir had to be shown to his grandsons, they should not be allowed to read it without a rebuttal. Even if morals had gone out—which I still did not for a minute admit—I would insist on my right to argue that they had once existed.

I gave it to Angelica to read that night. She was much less upset than I. She professed to find it the kind of apologia that she would have expected of Guy, and she had even the detachment to be amused by parts of it that were not in the least amusing to me. She had no hesitation about showing it to her grandsons, and she made the telling point that Evadne might break down altogether if she were to tear up the manuscript and then, in a fit of remorse, decide that she had abandoned her father living and disobeyed him dead. Angelica pooh-poohed my plea that we at least suppress the chapters on Guy's courtship and on our affair.

"Certainly not. I never could bear the sanctimonious sort of person who takes an unfair advantage of survivorship to censor the dead. Let's either burn Guy up or keep him whole. Do you think Evadne's and Percy's children are going to be shocked that I had an affair with each of my husbands before I married them? Think of it, to have been twice made an honest woman! Anyway, it's nothing to what young people do nowadays. And, besides, they won't believe it because nobody really believes their parents or grandparents ever made love. My mother used to hint that she had had affairs, but I always thought she was boasting!"

I sighed at such evidence of my wife's intransigent honesty, but I knew there was nothing to be done about it. "You don't think the memoir contains some rather grave misrepresentations?"

"It depends what you call 'grave.' I certainly never found Guy's father the charmer he makes him out. Nor did I ever think Alix Prime had any looks. But I daresay that's
one
point on which both you old dogs might agree."

I coughed. "I was thinking of more fundamental things."

"Well, I'm sure your rebuttal will straighten the boys out on those. That is, if they can ever get through it. Don't be too heavy and bankerish, my dear. Remember, this is a job of persuasion. You have to write a short story, as Guy did. I doubt if you can write half as good a one!"

I could sense the defensiveness in Angelica's mood which always accompanied her suspicion that people were being too hard on Guy. Second husbands learn to recognize such things. "Why don't you write your own story?" I suggested. "We could bind the three together, as a kind of package deal, or time capsule, against mistakes."

"It's just what I've been thinking of!" Angelica responded, with an eagerness that surprised me. "Two men could not possibly tell all of a story like Guy's. And only one woman could have."

"Just so."

"Oh, I don't mean myself. I will do my best, but only as a supplement. I meant your Lucy. She knew everything."

"Ah, Lucy."

"But failing her, the three of us might have a fling at it."

Angelica went straight to work the very next day, but although she started at a great pace she was constantly revising and tearing up sheets of paper, and in the end the job took her six months. For a while, I was glad to have her occupied, for she had been restless ever since the doctor, on her seventieth birthday, had made her give up riding, but as the weeks passed I began to fear that there was something obsessional in her frantic scribbling and ripping. When I suggested that she give it up, things became a great deal worse.

"I'm not going to leave poor Guy to your tender mercies, thank you," she said tartly. "A lot I care for your bankers' codes and lofty rules. Guy had no more to do with all that—fundamentally speaking—than the man in the moon. He didn't live in your world, or in mine, for that matter. He tried to do right, by his own lights." She looked at me now with the dark, resentful eyes of Guy Prime's wife. "You're all so high and mighty about him. Evadne, particularly. I daresay her boys will be, too. Well, I've got to find a way to make them feel poor Guy. She paused, to speculate on her method, and seemed to forget for a moment that I was there. "I wonder if my mother didn't have the key to Guy. She had an extraordinary instinct about people. But if she did, why did she ever throw us together? Couldn't she have seen it wouldn't work?"

I knew by now when it was best to leave Angelica alone. Besides, I could not help her with her problem. I had a big enough one of my own. Out of my countless memories of Guy, which ones should I select to show the growth in him of the hate that led him to place his fingers on the jugular vein of the world that had nurtured him?

I decided that I could only tell the story in terms of the imprint upon myself of a growing awareness of his character and motives. When I had my thread, I was able to write the memoir in a week's time. I would have taken less had I not remembered Angelica's warning that I had to "persuade." For the boys' sake, may I succeed!

T
O GIVE
the reader some sense of the strong initial impact that Guy made upon me, I should explain the depression into which my spirits had fallen at the time of our first meeting at Harvard. He speaks sarcastically of the little book that I had privately printed for my son George about my "rectory boyhood," and it may be true that I made too much of the serenity of my parents' home. I wanted my descendants to know that a life of small means and high ideals could have its reward in this world as well as the next. But in the greater candor of my old age I will confess that it was not always so. My father, it is true, elevated by the three pillars of faith, naïveté and a habit of depending on others to take care of the practical problems of life, breathed a fine, clear air of which he was constantly urging his family to partake, but my poor mother, who had to market, cook, sew and clean for a family of ten and to be the lady of the parish as well, was too occupied for many such inhalations. It is a bitter truth that sheer hard work can dry up some of a mother's love, or at least the expression of it, and I am afraid that our home was a bit arid even for my austere tastes. As a natural defense, when in later years I encountered demonstrative affection between parent and child, I was inclined to regard it as stagey and insincere. I was often unjust.

At Cambridge my first two years were a terrible drudgery. I had a series of part-time jobs: in a laundry, in a bakery, in a tutoring agency. Working one's way through college was not then as systematized as it later became, and the odds were against the student. When Guy first thrust himself on my attention, I was virtually at the end of my rope. The illness of a younger sister had obliged my father to withdraw even the meager allowance that he had been making me, and although nobody at home ever suggested it, I had the uneasy feeling that I ought to leave college and help out. It can be imagined with what sullen eyes I witnessed the antics of my future friend, then in his golden prime.

I must be fair. I will admit that Guy, in our junior year, was as handsome as he himself claims. His was a glorious youthful presence, of high color and high spirits, and a charm that only a churl could resist. I was that churl. I could not imagine why he sought me out or what he wanted of me. It was not, as I first suspected, to do his term papers for him, for he had good enough marks of his own. It was not for my friends, for I had none. It was not even for my companionship, for I worked too hard to have much of that to offer. Was I, then, a kind of charity case, or did he wish to learn how the lower orders lived? If he sat next to me in class or followed me across the yard afterwards, bubbling with questions about Keats or Browning, I would be curt to the point of incivility. But nothing seemed to rebuff him. He was impervious to hints, and even I was not enough of a churl to go beyond them.

Then came the affair of the economics prize and Guy's intervention to obtain the early news of my winning it. Of course, I was overwhelmed. Who would not have been? Even today, half a century later, my heart still warms at the memory of his imaginative generosity. I was grateful then to accept his proffered friendship, and when I took time from work to discuss the world and its company in his rooms or to drink with him in Boston bars, my conscience was somewhat quieted by the thought that I was paying a debt of gratitude. Guy in those days was the best company imaginable: he seemed never to be in a bad mood, never to lose his fascination in the passing parade. It was before the day of popular psychiatry, and I did not pause to speculate what tensions might lurk under so persistently sunny a surface.

His conversation was intimate, but never unpleasant, mildly impertinent and extremely funny. He mocked my somber moods, my inhibitions, my small town prejudices, but affection always glowed in his raillery. I was too proud, too reserved, to give that much of myself in friendship, but his example taught me that this was a lack and not, as I had primly supposed, a virtue. Guy was an artist in living. In handball, in squash, in dining, in drinking, in reading, he was unaffectedly strenuous and enthusiastic. I can still see him lying in my window seat on a hot May day, one foot dangling out the open casement, reciting "Tamburlaine" in a stentorian voice that attracted a little crowd of students on the grass outside.

Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king
'And ride in triumph through Persepolis?'

How I hear that voice! The students may have laughed and even whistled, but not too much or too meanly. There was something disarming in Guy's spontaneity, and then, too, he had a quick temper and quicker fists. For all his colored vests and dandified airs he was very much of a man.

He was also very much of a ladies' man, both in the drawing room and at the stage door. His activities in this latter respect might have caused bad blood between us had he been less of a diplomat. I was inclined to be prudish and would have taken offense had Guy, like most college youths, boasted of his triumphs. But his charm never failed him. He won me to his side by professing to be ashamed of his fleshly weakness and to admire my chastity. I blush to think of the pompous sermons that I must have delivered to him, but I doubt if he laughed at me, even up his sleeve. He must have regarded me as a kind of talisman to protect him from becoming the frivolous creature he was afraid of becoming. Seeing him in the company of the sober and industrious Reginald Geer, would not people have to weigh their judgments? Might not some of that dark sobriety even rub off on him?

Guy was terribly keen to have me meet his family, and he finally prevailed upon me, with the help of a railway pass, to visit him in Bar Harbor the summer after junior year. I found his father even worse than I had feared, a boundless snob who could not be bothered to conceal his small opinion of his son's unprofitable new friend. Mrs. Prime, however, a soft sad gentle invalid, made up for his brusqueness in the sweetness of her welcome. It was almost as if she were looking for friends who would stand by and steady her son when she was gone. I was touched, too, by Guy's devotion to her. There was nothing put on about this. One had only to see the tears start to his eyes when she had one of her coughing spells to be convinced of his utter sincerity. Like many American men, Guy was at his finest as a son.

The great event of my visit was meeting Marcellus de Grasse, who owned the big hill on which the Primes' villa stood. Our first encounter was as disastrous as Guy relates. I went back to the Primes', thinking there was little to choose between my host and the crotchety "malefactor of great wealth" (I knew all the T.R. phrases), except that my host at least was a fine-looking older man while Mr. de Grasse, with alabaster skin and dyed auburn hair, hook nose and humped back, struck my youthful eye as an old woman. I was sure that nothing would induce me to accompany Guy on another visit to the top of the hill. If he enjoyed the company of such economic fossils, he could enjoy it alone.

Then came the beautifully bound copy of
Social Statics
with its handsome inscribed apology, and I was disarmed. At Guy's suggestion I went alone to thank Mr. de Grasse and received a second and even more gracious retraction.

"You must learn, my dear young man, the obligations of your generation to mine. You have to keep us from freezing. Everything in my life conspires against fluidity: my seniority in the office, my female household at home, my intellectual isolation in a money-grubbing era. Small wonder that I have become a petty tyrant! But what particularly distresses me about last Sunday lunch is that I put myself in the false position of defending economic monopolists. What, after all, have I to do with the Harrimans and the Hills of this world? My grandfather outfitted a frigate in the War of 1812 as a gift to the nation. I betray my essential self in taking sides between the cops of government and the robbers of business. I am an observer, Mr. Geer. Help me to preserve that detachment!"

And so a lifelong relationship with my future boss and partner began. I had been exposed to some great teachers at Harvard: Copeland and Santayana and William James, but only as a student. Never in my short life had I been in close contact with a mind as richly informed and as speculative as Mr. de Grasse's. Banking was only a small part of his interests which ranged from the excavations at Knossos to the possibility of life on Jupiter. The quality of detachment that he feared was shriveling within him seemed to me, on the contrary, his most enduring characteristic. Indeed, it was to increase with the years. Mr. de Grasse lived into his nineties. Let me record to his credit, although it worried me at the time, that he objected less to Franklin Roosevelt than he had to Theodore. In the end our roles were reversed.
He
was the one who tried to argue me out of a sullen conviction that the New Deal was pure iniquity.

When Mr. de Grasse wrote, in the fall of senior year, to invite me to come to work for him with Guy after our graduation, I went through a sharp emotional crisis. It suddenly seemed to me that it was all too slick and too easy, that I had betrayed the principles of my Puritan forebears and sold my birthright for a meretricious success. Did I even exist any more except as a little brother of the rich? And had it not, perhaps, been deliberate? Was all my churlishness of manner any better than a fawning coyness? Had I not pined for the Prime luxury from the beginning and set my snares to catch Guy's attention by the crude expedient of being the one member of our class to turn him a cold shoulder?