The Embezzler (3 page)

Oh, yes, the old ham, you will say. How he loved the deference, the prompt explosion of laughter, the exchanged glances that implied: "Guy Prime is in rare form today." So long as they laughed, did it matter if they were amused? Did I care if they muttered in their teeth, "Look at the old fart!" so long as they acknowledged the authority that limited their protest to a mutter? I have always known what people thought of me. My son Percy, who shrilly took his mother's side in everything, long regarded me as the monarch of Philistia. How many times at table, when I had expressed my fondness for the novels of Galsworthy or the art of Rodin or the music of Mascagni, had I caught the exchange of visual sneers between him and Angelica! Really, they seemed to be asking each other, how Babbitt could Babbitt be? No doubt they still feel that way.

But they have never been to jail. They have never learned the fundamental secret that one man is very like the next, that our poor old shoddy human material is pretty much the same beneath its surface manifestations. Consider how little flesh you have to cut off two faces to make them look alike. Guy Prime was a mask; we all wear masks. Thank heaven for them: they are what give us our individuality. Behind the mask my love of Galsworthy was the same palpitation as Percy's preference for Henry James. I cared as much as he for high thoughts and passions. As a young man I was even rather an aesthete, as he today, no doubt, is already rather a Philistine. But to my story.

My first hint of disaster, as ominous as the first dull throb of a fatal growth, came on a brilliant spring Sunday in 1936. As I proceeded, after my golf, from the locker room to the bar down the Audubon corridor, noisy with its prints, I saw Mr. Elkins, the club cashier, waiting to intercept me at the door of his office. He was a small, dry, tousled graying creature, a symbol of fidelity to duty in minor posts, with dandruff on the worn shoulders of his blue suit and eyes that looked like beetles behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. I nodded, a bit impatiently, for he was always waylaying me about trifles.

"Please, Mr. Prime, could I have a word with you?"

"What is it, Elkins? Don't you even take Sunday off?"

"I just came in to clear off my desk, sir. It makes Monday less rushed. Could I ask you about those America City bonds? The ones that were sent to your office to be sold and that the board then decided not to sell? They're still there, of course?"

"Where else would they be?"

"Oh, nowhere else, sir, of course. But it's been six months now, and Mr. Beal says it's most irregular for securities to be left that long in a broker's office."

"Even when the 'broker' happens to be president of the club?"

"It's not that anyone's worried, sir..."

"I should hope not, Elkins!"

Poor Elkins at this seemed about to weep. "It's the merger with Dellwood Beach, sir. The auditor has to see those bonds."

"Merger? Auditor?" I had arranged for Glenville to take over a small near-bankrupt beach club on the Sound so that our members could have the benefit of salt-water swimming. The operation was only technically a merger. "Do you mean to tell me, Elkins, that Dellwood has the presumption to look into our books?"

"It's the agreement, sir, that the lawyers drew up. It calls for each club to submit a statement. The auditor has to check our securities. Mr. Beal wants me to make an appointment for him to come to your office."

"You may tell Mr. Beal, Elkins," I retorted, "that when the treasurer of the Club wants something of the president he can come to me himself. It is not your function to discuss with him my duties as bailee of club property. May I remind you again that it's the Lord's Day?"

And I proceeded ineluctably on my way to the bar.

The America City bonds with which Mr. Elkins was so unhappily obsessed that morning represented the bulk of a million dollar fund that I had raised from the membership for the construction of a stately pleasure dome that was to contain, among other amenities, a vast swimming pool and two indoor tennis courts. Remember that we were still in 1936 when the dollar could buy something. The reason that the bonds had not been returned was that a portion of them (a small one, as I then believed) was sitting in the vault of de Grasse Brothers as security for one of my personal loans.

Wicked? Certainly, by all the ancient laws. But those laws were passed when little children were hanged for stealing spoons. The first thing that a fiduciary of our era requests is that he be given the broadest possible powers. And he is promptly given them. Fluidity is what people seek. My customers showered me with powers of attorney. They did not want a bailee or a trustee out of some dry volume of Blackstone. They wanted Guy Prime, and the reason they wanted Guy Prime was that he knew his market. Had I not been adviser to Herbert Hoover in the first days of panic and the voice of de Grasse Brothers on the big board? Was not my firm known to the wags on the floor of the exchange as "Jesus Christ, Tom, Dick and Harry"? I had trained my own ship, picked my own crew and set my own course. In the roughest financial seas of our century I had kept her off the shoals, and I would have continued to do so had people only let me. Why should I weep for the money they lost in my wreck? It was the price they paid for the luxury of sending me to jail.

The group at the bar now opened to greet me. My opinion was sought about Karl Vender, a rough-and-tumble character who had made a killing in the Insull collapse and who had recently purchased one of the old estates in the neighborhood. Would he make a proper member? I thought so. It was one of my functions to pass on the new people.

"My father as a young bachelor in the 'seventies used to call on Commodore Vanderbilt," I told the attentively listening group, when Pierre had handed me the white brimming glass of my first Martini. "Of course, the ladies of the family did not accompany him. The Vanderbilts were not then what they are today, and the old boy's house was full of clairvoyants and charlatans and even worse. But Father always said that a bachelor could go anywhere, except, of course, to a fag party." Here I paused, raised my glass for a sniff and then drank off half the contents at a gulp. "He told me an interesting thing about Vanderbilt. The old pirate was not naturally coarse. He only pretended to have come from a low social milieu to magnify his success and to irritate his children. He made a tableau for history, and history bought it. I suggest that Vender may be doing the same."

George Geer had joined the group and was watching me with the respectful look of a prospective son-in-law. He was then twenty-six, a smaller, slighter, handsomer version of his father, under whose exacting supervision he toiled at de Grasse. He was informally engaged to my daughter Evadne, and everybody took for granted that I was delighted. Perhaps I should have been. He was honorable and industrious, and would probably one day be as big a man as his father. Yet at the moment he was an unpleasant reminder of the bonds sitting in that same father's vault. Rex had always condescended to me, and now his boy had to have my girl.

I left the bar, carrying my drink, and, putting my free hand on George's elbow, propelled him to a table. "Tell me something, fella. I know you have your father's memory. Do you happen to recall how many America City bonds I put up for my loan at your shop?"

"I think it was three hundred and fifty thousand, sir. I can check it for you right away. There's always someone in the office."

"No, no, don't bother." As I stared at George's face and made out the gathering mist of surprise in his bright eyes, I realized that an astonishing thing had happened. I had momentarily lost control. I was paralyzed, and in my paralysis I was perfectly aware that I could not afford it, that I had to smile, to cough, to whistle, to do anything to check that young man's growing astonishment. I even had a sudden shocking glimpse of a future in which such dissimulation might always be necessary, a future that was separated from all my past by the scarlet band of this very moment.

"Is there something wrong, Mr. Prime?"

"Nothing, George, nothing at all. Only I think I'll go back to the bar. Sometimes, when I look at you and think that here's the man who's actually going to take away my Evadne, I have a kind of shock. But don't worry. I'll come around. God bless you, my boy."

I talked with the men at the bar, but I could talk to them and think of the other thing. I could talk to them and speculate that I might at last be losing my mind. Three hundred and fifty thousand! My stock of Georgia Phosphates, the principal security for my loan, had been dropping badly all winter, and I had been tossing everything I could lay my hands on, including some of the America City bonds, on the pile at de Grasse to prevent a sale, but I had not dreamed that it had reached even a fraction of such a total. If what George said were true—and could one doubt it?—more than half the Club's bonds were hypothecated for my loan.

"Coming to lunch, Guy? It's nearly two."

"No, go ahead, fellows. I'll join you later."

I would go to Karl Vender in the morning. He would give me the money quickly enough. But I would have to watch myself in the future. I was alone now in the bar, for Pierre had gone to the pantry, and I surveyed the desolate pink face that loomed over the sport coat in the mirror facing me. Was
that
Guy Prime? That scared rabbit? That fat phony? Slowly, carefully, almost solemnly, I raised my empty glass until it was high above my head and then hurled it with all my force at that fatuously staring image. The shocking smash brought instant ease to my troubled soul as it brought Pierre, unblinking, back to the bar.

"There's been an accident, Pierre," I said impassively. "I seem to have broken my glass."

"Yes, sir. Shall I fix you another drink, Mr. Prime?"

"No, that will be quite enough. I'm going in to lunch now."

If the rest of the world would only be as sensible as Pierre, I reflected, I might still come out all right. But Pierre was part of the club I had created. I had not created the world that I faced each Monday.

W
HAT WAS
the background? Well, what is a family? Is it anything more, as I have already suggested, than the predominance of male issue over female? We speak of families "dying out," simply because the direct male line from father to son has been snapped. The hundreds of descendants of Lewis Prime, who came from Liverpool to New York in 1740 to establish an auction business, include some of the most distinguished merchants and lawyers of Manhattan's history, but few of them were Primes. All of our renown, such as it is, rests on the simple fact that my grandfather, the Reverend Chauncey Prime, Rector of Trinity Church and later Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, had seven sons who made almost as many famous matches.
Puck's Weekly
in 1881 ran a cartoon that showed railroad and steel magnates desperately piling up their bags of gold before a group of tall, indolent, blond young men in sports clothes, with tennis rackets under their arms, who barely condescend to glance at the bait thrust under their languid eyes. It was entitled: "What Your Money Will Buy, or The Quest of the Primes." A decade later, in the 'nineties, the same bait was sent over the Atlantic in search of coronets, but by that time my uncles were all comfortably settled.

How did they do it? What did they have? Certainly not brains, nor business acumen, nor imagination, nor wit, nor even great looks. They were tall, slim and very straight, and had long, rather wooden, oblong faces that bore age well. Their resemblance to each other, which was of great assistance to the younger ones, was almost comic, for the father of an heiress, seeing that his neighbor in Newport had done well with one Prime, was pleased to find another available. The new rich always copy each other, and once the Prime fashion had started my uncles had only to bow to it. They had only, in short, to believe in themselves and in the world that constituted their immediate environment.

That may have been the answer, that they never questioned anything. They were too serene ever to suffer from the acidulous suspicion that is the bane of the conservative; they smiled with a sniff at the future, just as they smiled with a shrug at the mention of a name that they did not know socially. They did everything one had to do well but not too well; excessive expertise in the saddle, at the card table, even on the golf course, might have seemed "showy." Only in clothes did they really let themselves go, as if from some deep consciousness that their true function was to decorate the stage of society and persuade the observer that it was real. When I think of them now, I think of grays and whites and blacks, of striped trousers never wrinkled, of maroon gleaming shoe leather, of pearl studs and gray spats and gloves, of canes and tall gray hats, of gray against emerald garden parties, of gray against the glittering blue of a Newport sea and under a bright sun. My uncles at least made measured sense out of a life that was notoriously a source of discontent to the many who lead it.

Oh, they were bargains, all right, cheap for the relatively little they cost. They were faithful husbands, unlike the peers who followed them, and conscientious stewards of the money they had married. Like figures in Saint-Simon, they had implicit confidence in the validity of the social game as it was played from day to day. They grasped it by instinct, which was the only way to grasp a game without logic or even a set of rules, sensing intuitively which parvenu would make the grade and which divorcée would be forgiven, covering up the inconsistencies, like good priests of Mammon, with a mellifluous roll of generalities in which they at times almost believed. It is not surprising that their descendants should have totally lacked their style, for the later Primes inherited caution and thick skins with the maternal wealth, and concentrated more on the keeping of dollars than the making of friends. Indeed, by the time I grew up, the money of Fisks and Goulds and Villards had become so associated with my relatives that people began to believe there must have been a great Prime fortune. It was this legend, perpetuated in the social columns of a thousand evening journals, that created the particular problem of my youth.