The Embezzler (30 page)
"And he never caught on?"
"I thought he might be going to when she died. But all was lost in the general horror of her leavetaking. Her panic blinded him to everything she didn't ask, everything she didn't say. And then the whole family extolled him as a perfect son. How could he really be that unless he had a perfect mother? Don't those things go best in pairs?"
I suppose it was natural for Bertha to sneer at Guy for being taken in (as she believed anyway) by his mother. Gullibility is always ridiculous. One of the first things a child learns is to disguise his ignorance. But when I think of that handsome sunny-natured boy making the best he could out of a bad deal in parents, my heart is more touched than it is by Bertha's vindictiveness. How easy it is to tear a mother to bits! I should know. I did a pretty good job on my own. Maybe it's the function of parents to let themselves be so used. Maybe a mother or father is a teething ring on which the little darlings should sharpen their molars. But when one of them chooses generosity, should we shake our heads? Should we not at least weep?
Guy took that ring out of his teeth and wore it over his heart. He took the shabby home of his actuality and converted it to a glittering palace. He made of his empty fop of a father a Thackerayan gentleman, of his whining hypochondriacal mother a saint and a martyr, of his scheming uncles the titans of a splendid society. He infused his imagined world, not only with glory and elegance but with love and goodwill. He inherited a Daumier lithograph and turned it into a lace valentine.
All right, sneer, my readers. Call me dotty, senile, what you will. I realize (who better?) that all Guy accomplished in the long run by his wishful thinking was to shift the burden that should have been borne by his parents to the shoulders of his wife and children. But just now I don't care. Just now it gives me a nostalgic pleasure to remember that Guy's vision of his world, although not a particularly fine one, was a good deal finer than its reality. And perhaps it is important for me to remember it, too, for I seem to be the only person living (except perhaps for the little widow down in Panama) who has still a kindly feeling for Guy. The others think he blackened our world. Perhaps so. But only after years of trying to give it a spot of color.
S
O MUCH FOR
Guy's background. What about my own? He and Rex have already said enough to make it clear that I too had a mother problem. What self-respecting girl does not? But since I have grown old (and I am now nearing the age that Mother was when she died) I have learned to see these things more dispassionately. I have even learned to appreciate the possibility that Mother herself may have been afflicted with a female parent.
Yet still I envy her. Still it seems to me that she and all her lucky group were the last human beings to have had everything. Europe before 1914 was as yet unspoiled: they had the motorcar to flee up and down its highways and the steam yacht to scout its waters. A generation earlier, and travel was all dusty discomfort; one later and the world had fallen apart. But for the elect of Edwardian and early Georgian days, our little planet was a delectable oyster. The same long white hands clutched each other across the same Cunarder-crossed sea. In Washington one dined with Henry Adams and Bessie Lodge; in Boston with Mrs. "Jack"; in London with Ottoline Morrell and "Emerald," or else drove down to Rye to see poor old Henry James. In Paris there was "Dear Edith," in Rapallo "Max"; in Florence "BB." And, oh, the remorseless, insatiable thirst of Mother's friends for the beautiful! In their talk and letters, roaming through churches and palaces, looking at painting and statuary, sipping wine, savoring food, even gossiping, there was hardly a minute of the day or night when they relaxed their militant aestheticism. Yet for all their bustle and sincerity (it was true that in time, like dope addicts, they could hardly subsist without beauty) some of the indelible silliness of their era put its heavy stamp upon them. Like Victorian paintings of classical scenes, they betrayed their true date by a bright, naive exactitude, by an air of "dressing up," by an inner faith, peeping out like a slip under a skirt, that all their quest of beauty was a mere charade against the sober reality of their social snobbishness.
Many of the "elect" were critics or artists themselvesâsome of them very considerable onesâbut Mother was pure of the smallest foray into the world of participation. Not only did she never compose a rhyme or paint a still life; she never purchased so much as a watercolor or set finger to a musical instrument. She maintained that, as art was only communication among the enlightened, he who received had to be the equal of he who gave. Indeed, I suspect that Mother in her heart may have felt that she played the superior role. After all, whereas the mere artist had but one vision, his own, she had her own and his.
It is a pity that Mother did not take as much trouble communicating with her children as she did with her friends. There were six of us, three boys and three girls, and until we were of an age to accompany her on her European peregrinations we were either left at home in Tuxedo Park with governesses, or the boys were shipped off to boarding schools and the girls to convents. Not that our education was neglected. We had the best of instruction in everything, and Mother quizzed us carefully herself whenever she was home. But too much was left to discipline. The best that I'll say for Mother was that, unlike Guy's mother, she was never a hypocrite and never expected gratitude or applause.
My hardest time was the two years that followed my unspectacular debut at a tea dance in the shabby brownstone that my parents, who both hated New York, had reluctantly rented for the season. I knew few young people in the city, and Father, whose social ideas were of the eighteenth century ("Did you speak to him?" was his only comment on hearing that I had sat next to Jay Gould's grandson at dinner), absolutely forbade me to go to college. "
Do?
What do you mean you have nothing to do?" he would bellow at me. "Have you no needlework?" The only alternative to spending the next two winters with him in Tuxedo was to travel with Mother. Neither of them would have heard of my getting my own apartment, and I had no money except for a meager allowance. My only hope was that Mother would stay long enough in one place for me to meet some men.
By twenty, I was in a really bad way. I had fallen in love twice, but briefly and very unsatisfactorily: once with a big red pig of a guards officer who was looking for a fortune and thought all Americans must be rich, and again with Mother's Italian courier whom even I had to disqualify as a suitor. Moody and intractable, I derived my sole pleasure in sneering at the people and things that Mother admired. I hated Europe, yet dreaded to go home. I envied my New York contemporaries who had gone unsensationally to Miss Chapin's or Brearley, made their debuts at Sherry's and had now settled down in the suburbs with nice young lawyers or stockbrokers. I must have been a trial to be with. I doubt if it was entirely by accident that I left Mother's precious inscribed copy of the privately printed
Education of Henry Adams
on a train between Florence and Milan. It was this episode, I think, more than anything else, that drove her at last to action.
When she told me, one beautiful spring morning in Paris that she had asked a "handsome young man" to go with us to Senlis, I said abruptly that I wouldn't go. I assumed that it would be another of the twittering homosexuals whom she gathered about her as the Pied Piper did children. But Mother knew exactly what I was assuming.
"I wonder how Mr. Baylies will like him," she mused, referring to the moth-eaten old bachelor who was providing the limousine for our excursion. "Dear Henry is hardly used to football players."
Well, of course, she was being subtle, as they say, like a meat axe. But why should she have wasted anything subtler than a meat axe on me? The bait was quite enough. The next morning I was ready to go when the car came, and she was far too wise to make any reference to my change of mind.
Let nobody tell me that love at first sight is an invention of poets! Guy was waiting for us at the doorway of his hotel in a red blazer, and when he bounded towards the car sweeping off his straw hat, when I saw that crown of blond hair and those sky-blue eyes, I knew that I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I fell in love on the spot and remained in love for ten full years. When I emerged at the end of my amorous decade, the wife of a prosperous stockbroker and the mother of his two fine children, possessed of all the wonderful American things that I had thought I wanted, I found that it was a bit late to start my emotional life over from scratch.
The most amazing thing to me in Guy's memoir is his obvious unawareness, during the months of his courtship, of what was going on inside me. Although I naturally took the greatest pains to conceal it, I should have thought no young man could have helped but guess. The answer must have lain in Guy's uncanny talent for turning the world into a romantic stage. Looking back on our Mediterranean cruise aboard "The Loon," I may see a worldly mother who had lured a young man on board to get rid of a petulant daughter, but that is a set on which Guy would have promptly rung down the curtain. When he raised it again the mother would have become a benign and worldly-wise philosopher and the daughter a dark, brooding, sultry Electra. It would have been
Aeschylus
with a happy ending, where Orestes, the brother turned lover, by a valiant exercise of his brilliant personality would dissuade Electra from her morbid preoccupations and lead her to the altar with Clytemnestra smiling over an orchid in the front pew. What became of this magnificent mish-mash, of the
Oresteia
ending in
Pinafore,
if Electra simply collapsed in a heap at the first appearance of the hero from the wings?
I had some small sense of this, very early in our relationship, some faint suspicion of the role in which he had cast me and of the importance of my maintaining it, but that was only one of my reasons for resisting him with such apparent ferocity. Another was a virginal instinct of self-defense. Never had my senses been so violently assaulted, and I was appalled that a single ride in a motorcar from Paris to Senlis opposite a young man in a jump seat who directed all of his conversation, with an exasperating relish, to my vain old mother, should have reduced me to such a state of wanton submissiveness. As he and I roamed about the cathedral after Mother and Mr. Baylies, my thoughts were wildly inappropriate for a house of God. It was my first intimation that a respectable girl could be turned into a tart in an hour's time.
Worse still, much worse, he was Mother's candidate.
That
was what she thought of me. She had borne my tantrums with a maddening patience until I had lost her precious Henry Adams. That had marked the boundary of my permitted iniquities; clearly, it was time to turn on a young man. What kind of a young man? Oh, any bland young Yankee with a Charles Dana Gibson face and football shoulders, the kind one could find by the dozen, yawning through Europe, spending their days in cathedrals and their nights in bordellos, filling in the prescribed interregnum between the college years where they had left their souls and the downtown office where they would lose their looks. Just the kind of young man, too, that Mother most despised, representing everything that had driven her to near expatriotism! But good enough for Angelica. Oh, yes, if anything, too good for Angelica. Her total indifference to my chaperonage aboard "The Loon" and on our shore excursions smacked of the procuress. How could I reconcile myself to being so exactly what she took me for?
Then there were my brothers. Unlike Mother, who never wavered in her professed approval of Guy, they made constant mock of him behind his back and even to his face. Poor Guy did not recognize their sarcasms. They would pick up his banal comments on any ruin that we visited and toss them back and forth with ostensible admiration. I suffered obvious agonies, which of course delighted them. It was the gentle, sympathetic Giulio de Medici, one of Mother's epicine young men, whom Guy so comically persisted in seeing as the object of my adoration, who helped me with my brothers.
"Angelica, cara, do not trouble yourself about Teddy and Lionel. They think they are superior to Guy because they know Europe a tiny bit better. But it is a very tiny bit, believe me. To us who belong here your Yankee young men are very much alike. The difference is that we prefer the more genuine product. Look at Guy now." We were in a Sicilian village, and Guy, in white flannels and a sun helmet, was bargaining in a bazaar, a little crowd of successfully begging children at his heels. "He is a generous man and a good one. Why should you be made to feel ashamed for admiring so fine a product of your native land? Let your brothers sneer if they want. I believe they're only envious of him, anyway."
I considered this for a hopeful moment before at last rejecting it. "No," I said gloomily. "My family envy nobody."
"How very unwise of them," Giulio retorted. "I make a point of envying many people. I envy Guy, for example, the pleasant impression he makes. He thinks I make one on you. Which is quite all right." Giulio drooped his left eyebrow in what was as near as I ever saw him come to a wink. "Let him."
It was all too much. Guy wanted to marry me, and everyone, even my brothers, thought he was quite as good a match as I was likely to make. Guy and I, indeed, were the only persons on board "The Loon" who were not convinced that his courtship would succeed. I found myself in a shocking position, for in 1911 I was still, for all my petty revolts, very easily shocked. I wanted Guy for a lover, and I wasn't sure that I wanted him for a husband. There were moments when I thought I was going to explode into tiny pieces and be plastered from one end of the yacht to the other.
The final stage was shame. I was suddenly horribly ashamed of the whole farce. Here was a nice young man, a fine young man, as Giulio said, a young man whom any decent American girl should have been proud to marry, being taken in by a mean old woman and her two snotty sons, who were trying to pawn off a sulking, bad-tempered girl by taking advantage of his naive faith in their supposed international sophistication! And what was the girl doing but pretending to be in love with a pansy in order to excite his passion? What a shoddy crew of expatriate adventurers! It was like a sordid parody of a Henry James tale. I had read Ibsen and Strindberg and Baudelaire and Zola. What business did I have acting like a coy debutante? Could I not rise once beyond the miasma of convention and live? If I wanted Guy, could I not have the simple honesty to tell him so?
