The Embezzler (25 page)

But one did not "save" people in 1910. I could only conclude that I was being sucked into the bogs of Guy's sentimentality. I have been called a hard man, but that is because I know when I must make up my mind.

"I'm afraid I did mean it, Guy."

He smiled dryly and shook my hand. "There you are, fella. You see?"

And he turned to go to his father. I was not to see him again for a year and a half, until I went to Paris to be his best man.

I
N ANALYZING GUY'S
narrative, I am struck by the way it skips over the years between his marriage and the ultimate catastrophe: a period of more than a quarter of a century. I wonder if there may not be a peculiarly American significance in such an emphasis on youth. Was Guy at twenty-five already complete and fixed in his groove, so that the balance of his story was simply the inevitable slide down the tracks to disaster?

Consider the outline biography that one fills in for a college reunion questionnaire. Most of it is apt to be given over to school, college and trade school, to fraternities, academic honors and athletic teams, to military service, marriage and children, all matters occurring in youth, while the bulk of life, even in many cases the passion of life, is sloughed off with: "Employed by Buckley Carpets as assistant sales manager, 1912. Became President 1940." Anyone who has watched the sentimentality of a college reunion will have noticed how deeply old graduates love to indulge the dream that their finest hours occurred before they had to face the world.

In Guy's case this was particularly true. Even before his marriage to Angelica the small pilot light of his idealism had been snuffed out. I have tried to be candid in explaining my own role in its extinguishment. A defense could be made that so mild a blowing must have been evidence of a rather mild flame, but such as it was, that flame had irradiated Guy's younger years with the glow that had won him so many hearts. I am afraid that his character changed with his direction when he left his youth behind at de Grasse. Before then he had aspired, in simplest terms, to be everything in the world, regardless of incompatibilities: to be a poet and a millionaire, a Don Juan and a family man, a gallant soldier on the battlefield and a general at headquarters clinking with medals. Afterwards, the attainable universe seemed suddenly to have shrunk to what? To the brokerage house and the country club!

Now, you will say, how could that have happened? How could a man of Guy's parts have sunk so quickly from Shelley to Babbitt? I can only answer that life
is
that way, that man is perverse. Guy was so desperately afraid of being Babbitt (long before Lewis had even created the character) that what may strike us now as a series of mild disillusionments may have been enough to confirm his underlying despair. But unhappily for the rest of us, he never forgot what he had left behind. He must have passionately resented the extinguishment, by himself or by me or by fate, of that more glowing Guy, for out of the pieces of his resentment he was slowly to fabricate the engine that ultimately blew us up.

I first met Angelica Hyde in Paris, whither I journeyed to be Guy's best man, just after the time when Lucy had at last agreed to become engaged to me. To my horror and chagrin I experienced immediately the same violent attraction that had flared up in me on first meeting Alix Prime and that I had naively supposed to be safely channeled into the calmer waters of my devotion to Lucy. Of course, I was man enough by then to be in control of my words and actions, but all my thoughts and fantasies rioted about the image of this dark pale beautiful girl so intriguingly remote from her own nuptial festivities, like a Roman princess captured by Barbarians and forced to marry the big blond son of the Goth leader. Goth? Who was I to cast aspersions at Goths or Primes, I who had betrothed myself to a gallant girl back home for whom, despite all my respect and reverence, I felt no part of the terrible emotion that now shook me?

Angelica in later years used to pooh-pooh this. She accused me of making it up to accord with a myth which I was constructing that there had really been only one woman in my life. Why, she would demand, if I had felt that way, had I not broken my engagement to Lucy, who was always the soul of understanding? Well, firstly, I could not bear to hurt Lucy, but, secondly, and even more importantly, I had decided that the savage brute within me must at all costs be put down. For what but a brute in the course of a single year could have proposed to two women and fallen in love with a third! I had no idea then what protracted continence could do to a man, and I concluded that I was a lost soul whom Lucy alone could redeem. I even managed to convince myself that Lucy might be better off not having to cope with the kind of passion that Alix and Angelica had aroused! Remember, reader, those were different days.

In New York, after Lucy and I were married, I took care to see as little as possible of Angelica. This was not difficult, as she and Guy were very social, and it was made even simpler by what seemed to be Lucy's instinctive aversion to her.

"You'll have to accept it, darling," she told me. "I can't look at a woman like Angelica Prime without wondering if you wouldn't have done better with a more elegant wife. Now, don't tell me that underneath the beautiful enamel Angelica is the same shrinking violet I am. Maybe she is. But with women, beautiful women anyway, I have to judge by externals. That's the woman in
me!
"

There now followed, despite our inauspicious beginning, the good years for Lucy and me. I worked desperately hard, frequently at night, and she was constantly left to her own devices, but it was always clear that we were ascending the ladder of fame and fortune. A great
esprit de corps
prevailed in de Grasse Brothers that reached even to the wives, who rarely resented their husbands' preoccupation with the "cause." Besides, our son George, as a boy, was a delicate child and required much of Lucy's attention. Life was full enough. Later, when the money came, she regretted those days, for she never cared about wealth except for her charities. And with the money came the event that darkened our existence, the loss of our baby daughter, a Mongolian idiot, whom Lucy pathetically and unreasonably adored, and the advent (now believed to have been psychologically connected) of her long, terrible arthritis.

Guy always made a great deal of how desperately he had sought combat duty in the first war and how shabbily General Devers had treated him by tearing up his applications and insisting to Pershing himself that he was an indispensable staff officer. It may be true, but I could never quite overcome my prejudice, as a graduate of the trenches, against those who professed to regard our experience as the great ball of the century that it was their tragedy to have missed. If it was a ball, we had not
all
found it so hard to crash. The Guy, at any rate, who emerged from the ashes of world catastrophe, bustling and busy, with the whispered message from Jupiter, the wink that sealed the hidden pact, the hand that propelled one out of the crowded antechamber and through the back corridor to the inner citadel, the Guy who ran errands for Mars and dined with Venus, the Guy, in short, of so many splendid façades that one felt a churl even to inquire about interiors, was the Guy of the 'twenties and of their inescapable symbols: the speakeasy and the bull market.

He accuses me of wanting all the same things that he wanted, but of refusing to admit it. It would be truer to say that I was afraid of wanting them. From the beginning of our relationship I had resisted fiercely, and at times, ungraciously, the temptation of things Prime. Actually, I exaggerated the danger of that temptation. My weak spot, as the reader should now be aware, was more in the flesh than in the pocketbook. Guy sneers at my "big dreary house," but I would never have bought it if Mr. de Grasse had not absolutely insisted that Lucy and I raise our standard of living. So it was that, with little heart in it, we acquired the Tudor mansion on the north shore of Long Island and filled it with Jacobean furniture purchased at what we hoped were good auctions. Over the mantel in the living room we hung a Rembrandt portrait of a money-lender, a Shylockian character selected by Lucy, that turned out to be a fake. Mr. de Grasse, inspecting the premises, chuckled repeatedly and murmured "Perfect." Of course, he was making fun of us, but even my eye was good enough to detect that his chateau at Fontainebleau suggested more Nana in her prosperity than the dean of the New York banking world in his. Old New York, however cynical, had its vulgar side.

I am afraid that I became even more dry and austere at this period of my life. It was my way of adapting myself to Lucy's increasing invalidism. I was what is called "devoted," but my devotion must have seemed at times mechanical to her. Poor darling, it was her discipline to accept it as devotion. She knew that, like many healthy male animals, I instinctively "disapproved" of illness. She would have preferred, I am sure, to have had me less faithful and more spontaneous. When infidelity came at last, as I shall record in its place, she never complained. But for the most part she had to live before the spectacle of my rather grim solicitude. She accepted it as she accepted her illness, with the gallantry that never deserted her, even when she pretended that it had, in order not to weary us with the spectacle of it. At the risk of inviting Evadne's boys to accuse me of the reckless sentimentality of a guilty conscience, I will aver that Lucy was a saint.

I was particularly anxious, in this period that ended with the market collapse of 1929, to distinguish myself from Guy. The plainness of my house was meant to redeem itself in the contrast that it afforded to the beauty of his, as my dark suits were to find their merit in their difference from his gay tweeds. I did not want my George, who was first a friend and then a beau of Evadne's and a constant visitor at Meadowview, to confuse her father's meretricious success with what I had the egoism to regard as my own more substantial contribution to the economy. What it really boiled down to (and it hurts even now to admit itl) was that Guy's constant identification of our careers and aims bred occasional doubts in my own heart as to their variety. When I beheld him in all his glory at the Glenville Club, shouting at me to join him at the bar, when he passed me on the road in some glittering foreign car, even when he strode into my office, dazzling the staff with the remembered first names that he so freely distributed, I could not altogether down the ugly little suspicion that we
were
the same, two boys who had made good together, I with his connections and he with my "savvy," two smart youngsters who had got more than their share of the icing on the world's birthday cake. The only difference, his broad grin implied, was that I was a hypocrite.

The depression changed my world, but in no way more importantly than by bringing the event that to Guy's mind was forever to justify his insinuated charge.

D
URING THE
first years of the depression I toiled as never before to keep the great galleon of de Grasse off the navigational hazards that strewed that terrible time, and by the summer of 1933, when I was beginning at last to see my way into the future, my body abruptly signified its protest. One morning I fainted at my desk, and my doctor prescribed total rest for a fortnight. There was nothing organically wrong, he assured me, but the engine needed oiling. When I confessed that I had taken no regular exercise since 1929, he was shocked.

"Very well," I told him glumly. "What shall I do?"

"I know that look of yours, Mr. Geer. You don't think anything will do you any good unless you hate it. You want me to prescribe some repulsive kind of calisthenics. Didn't you used to ride?"

"I used to ride with Lucy. Until she had to give it up."

"Did you like it?"

"Pretty well."

"Then ride!"

So I bought a mare and went riding every Saturday afternoon. After a month I took jumping lessons at the Glenville Club, and by fall I decided that I was good enough to join the hunt. At my first meet Angelica Prime, very impressive in a black habit and tall silk hat, rode up to me.

"Since when did you become a hunter?"

"Since this morning."

"Are you really up to it?"

"How can I tell till I've tried?"

She looked me up and down and shrugged. "Your seat's all right, anyway. Follow me, and don't take any jumps that I don't."

Of course, I had to show her how good I was, as though I had been twenty-seven instead of forty-seven, and it served me right that I went off at the very first one that she passed up and that I attempted, knocking my wind out and spraining an ankle. Angelica, to my intense mortification, insisted on leaving the hunt to drive me home. On the way she gave me a lecture.

"There's no reason you shouldn't be as good a rider as you are a banker, but you can't do it overnight. I'll be your teacher. Why not? You're the oldest and best friend Guy has and the only one, if you ask me (which he doesn't) that we can really count on. I'm the idlest woman in the world, with both children at school, so why shouldn't I turn you into a hunter? You probably never want to see a horse again now, but next week you'll be feeling differently. We'll go out together."

And so it started. Soon Angelica and I were riding on Sunday as well as Saturday and, at Guy's insistence, I moved my mare to the Meadowview stables. Guy professed to be delighted that Angelica was "taking me in hand," and Lucy, upset by my tumble at the hunt, expressed relief that I had so competent an instructor. In fact, both our spouses seemed to nod over our weekend expeditions as if we were two young creatures whose artless innocence made a charming tableau. But I knew perfectly well that I had no business seeing so much of Angelica.

I tried to persuade myself that it was ridiculous to suppose that the feelings which she had aroused in me twenty years before could be aroused so easily again. I mustered in my mind all the arguments against such an eventuality—my own greater age and presumably greater wisdom, the fact that Angelica herself was now a middle-aged matron with nearly adult children and, finally, the total disparity of our tastes and interests. What had I to fear from a woman who seemed to fling in my face her espousal of every principle that I despised, who embodied in her trimly clad frame the sporting life of what I considered total irresponsibility?