The Embezzler (34 page)

The parallel with Mrs. Stedman is reinforced by the fact that, after Guy and I had our first candid talk about the affair, his attitude began to change. He started to court me again. Perhaps in his fantasties I had actually become Rex's wife, and therefore he could revenge himself by making Rex the cuckold. Or did he rather wish to cement his intimacy with Rex by sharing Rex's mistress? In any case he was always now looking at me slyly, sidling up behind me to slip a hand around my waist, blowing kisses at me over the dining room table. It was his rather fatuous theory that any woman could be broken down by enough of this. I felt that I was being treated like a tramp and became very indignant. At last, after his revolting sentimentality at the Glenville Club dinner and his coarseness in alluding to the possibility of our future issue, I fled the house to take refuge at Rex's. Little did I dream that in six months' time I would be pregnant, and by my lawful husband!

I returned to Meadowview that night, crushed in defeat, with hate in my heart, led, as if on a leash, by my triumphant mother. Like Hermione in
Andromaque
I would have been capable of urging Guy to slaughter my smugly virtuous lover. But Guy had no such murderous intentions. He was entirely concerned with our reconciliation and treated me as a nurse might treat a hurt child, which was as good a way as any to treat me. It was not long before he obtained what he wanted. How could it have been otherwise? He was my husband; he was gentle; he was
there.
And I was wild with anger and humiliation and the need to hurt Rex for preferring his peace of mind to my caresses.

Guy interpreted my response to his love-making as proof of his own irresistibility. But, far more than that, it was evidence of my own passion to do something for any human being who needed me (even my own husband!), to fill in the terrible vacuum left by Rex's holy departure. If I had once felt in that period that Guy really loved me, it is possible that our reconciliation would have been the beginning of a new life. But Guy did not love women. He conquered them. His idea of the act of love was a kind of rape, and of a man's greatest triumph in the seduction of a woman who sincerely loved another. His heart was always a virgin.

Maybe he was afraid that a woman who really loved him might have pitied him. Or maybe, having deep down so low an opinion of himself, he despised her for her bad choice. At any rate, he never encouraged me to love him as I interpreted love, and he was entirely satisfied with what to me was the cheap carnival of our briefly renewed intimacy. After my miscarriage we never made love again.

Guy charges me with inducing this event. If I did, it was not consciously. It is perfectly true that I went riding, and even jumping, against what he claimed was the doctor's advice, but he never stopped to consider how essential this exercise had become to my mental and physical well being. In my other pregnancies I had ridden almost to the last month. When I realized that my renewed intimacy with Guy was not going to do anything for either of us, that I had betrayed my and Rex's love for nothing of value, I had to go back to my horses to prevent a complete nervous collapse. In that state, I am sure, I would have as surely lost the baby.

As to his accusation that I did not want to have my pregnancy known because I did not want Rex to know of it, just the opposite was true. In my fury against Rex I would have been delighted to fling it in his teeth! As it turned out, anyway, Rex did not learn of it until I mentioned it to him, quite casually and thinking he knew, two years later. By then my rancor was gone, and I was merely distressed to find that I had hurt him.

My rancor, indeed, disappeared with the convalescence that followed my miscarriage. During the slow, dull days, lying in bed too listless to read, I did a lot of thinking. The most important result of it was that I forgave Rex. I comprehended at last the torture that adultery had been to him, and I even suffered at my new understanding of his suffering. Months later, when I met him by chance at Mother's, I was able to be jocose, if a bit metallic. He was relieved, and he was hurt. That was as it should have been. My life was under my own control again. I went back to my hunting and Guy to his deals and his girls, each a bit more reckless, each a bit more frantic, and so we remained until the final debacle.

I
ASSOCIATE THE
disastrous summer of 1936 with beaches, at the Cape and on Long Island. Whenever I left my adored Meadowview, I used to seek out surroundings that were as opposite to it as possible. Guy had told me that he would not be able to get away that summer, occupied as he ostensibly was in liquidating his firm, in accordance with his promise to Rex, so I took a cottage at Cape Cod where Evadne and I would be able to sit on the sand and look at the sea and enjoy the long talks that mothers and about-to-be-married daughters were traditionally supposed to enjoy.

Evadne, however, was just as self-contained engaged as she had been free, and I found that I had all the time I should have needed to plan how Guy and I would live when he retired. I would walk miles down the beach and sit by myself, a lone speck of humanity under wheeling gulls, and speculate idly on where we would go if we had to give up Meadowview. And then my thoughts would drift into a sun-beaten, sleepy incoherence, and I would abandon myself to the negative delights of passivity. I might have been a clam on that seashore for all that I accomplished. But the real reason that I could not think about this particular future was that I did not believe it would happen. And it didn't.

George Geer used to come up on the weekends, and one Saturday morning, when I was sitting under my usual dune, I made out, way down the beach, his white-trousered figure approaching. It was not like him to leave Evadne to seek me out, and I had a vague feeling of apprehension. He greeted me cheerfully enough, but his eyes avoided me. George, happily for one of Evadne's strong character, was less formidable than his father, but he was no better an actor. He sat down in front of me and scooped sand with both hands.

"Have you and Vad had a quarrel?"

"No. Why?"

"Where is she, then?"

"Back at the house. No, it's not Vad that's bothering me. I'm terribly sorry to say this, Mrs. Prime, but I'm afraid your husband's not sincere about retiring. Instead of going out of business, he seems to be going a great deal further in. He's borrowing again."

I could see why Evadne loved this boy. He was so earnest and good that one wanted at such moments to hug him. Those sad brown eyes betrayed a heart that, unlike most hearts, really suffered at the prospect of others suffering. I was touched that he should assume that I cared as much as he did about what Guy was up to. Of course, I cared, but it did not surprise
me
that Guy should double-cross a friend.

"Can't my husband change his mind about retiring?" I asked.

"He gave Dad his word of honor."

"Did your father tell you why?"

Now, at last, those eyes, like Rex's, confronted me. "He told me everything, Mrs. Prime. My father trusts me. And he told me that
you
would see that the agreement was carried out."

"Did you tell Evadne?"

"Oh, Mrs. Prime, what do you think of me? How could you imagine that I'd destroy Evadne's faith in her father? This whole business has driven me almost frantic. If it ever becomes public, I think it will kill Evadne!"

I looked at him musingly. "It won't kill Evadne," I said, with a touch of grimness. "But I'm beginning to wonder what it will do to
you.
I suppose I'd better go and see Guy."

"But he's all the way down in Westhampton with Miss Prime!"

I rose now to my feet and smiled at him. "Then I suppose I'll have to go all the way down to Westhampton to Miss Prime's!"

It was eleven the next day, a Sunday, when a taxi from the station set me down at my sister-in-law's old shingle beach house. Bertha was standing on the front steps, as I drove up, peering down in her cross way to see who her uninvited visitor might be.

"Why, Angelica! Is anything wrong?"

"Perhaps I should ask that of you. Have I come too unexpectedly? Has Guy got one of his girls here?"

Bertha became crimson. "What do you think I keep here? A disorderly house?"

At this point her little group of guests, except for Guy, came out of the house, all dressed for church. What a crew! Guy has described them, and I will not repeat him, except to say that he was charitable. I was told that he was walking on the dunes, and I went to the porch in back to wait. As I sat there, once again looking at the sea, I tried to imagine wherein lay the charm for such a man in Bertha and her collection of lame ducks. It was certainly a side of him I had not seen before.

"So you couldn't stay away from me, is that it?"

I had slept badly on the train the night before, and I must have dozed off, for I awoke with a start to find Guy standing over me, smiling broadly but somehow impersonally. He was dressed in white, wearing a Panama hat and smoking a cigar. With his bull neck and big shoulders, his thick curly hair and wide girth, he might have been a magnificent overseer, stopping by, whip in hand, to look over a new slave. The impression, anyway, was enough to put me on the offensive.

"I hear you've been borrowing again."

"Who told you that?"

"George."

"When the old watchdog's away, he leaves the puppy to guard me, is that it?"

"The boy's only doing his duty."

"Boy!" He snorted loudly. "I suppose Rex told him the whole pretty story. He would." Then he seemed abruptly to weary of George. He walked over to a wicker chair and sat heavily down. "Very well, Angelica, I've been borrowing. What's it to you?"

"Do you forget that you and I promised Rex that you would close the firm? Is borrowing necessary for that?"

"It could be. It so happens that it's not."

"Then you admit you're breaking your promise?"

"A promise given under duress is not valid."

"Duress? After what Rex did for us?"

"Rex never did anything except for himself."

"Oh, Guy!"

"Oh, Angelica!" His tone mocked me.

"You give me no alternative," I said angrily. "I shall have to cable him."

"What can he do about it?"

"You're not so grand, my dear, that a word from Rex can't shut off your credit!"

"But what would he gain by saying that word? Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a pretty stiff sum to lose, even for the pleasure of seeing
me
in a bankruptcy court!"

"The money means nothing to Rex. It's a matter of honor."

"Oh, honor." Guy shrugged and took a deep pull at his cigar. Then he turned away to contemplate the sea. "Well, you honorable people had better do what your honor dictates. But don't talk to me about it. I have nothing to do with such things."

He sat absolutely still now except for the mechanical gesture of lifting his cigar to his lips. For several minutes I watched him watching the sea. I had a curious feeling that he was no longer conscious that I was there. There was an extraordinary power of rejection in that stocky white motionless figure.

As we contined to sit, watcher and watched, on the big veranda of that crazy old shingle house, I wondered again why he was there. There was nothing in the house or in its weather-beaten furniture, or in its mild, sweet, faintly nutty occupants that had anything in common with Guy. Nothing except Bertha, and she, I suppose, represented childhood. Was Guy trying to return to his childhood? Was he rejecting all that had happened since?

I felt a thickening in my throat as I pictured, behind that humped, seated figure, my beautiful bridegroom of a quarter century before. How he had seemed to bound at life! How he had grasped at all its good things: friendship, romance, success! It struck me that they had all rejected him, that they had sent him back to Bertha. And now he was through. Now, a sullen child, he was signing off.

"Guy," I pleaded, "we're not all against you, you know."

"Which of you is not?"

"
I
'm not."

"Yet you're about to cable Rex. You're about to let your former lover put your husband out of business."

His tone was extraordinary. It was devoid of the least anger or bitterness. It was detached, remote, factual, bored.

"But I'm not!"

"You mean George will do it for you?"

"No, because I'll tell George ... oh, I don't know what I'll tell George!" I got to my feet in astonishment at my own commitment. But I knew now that I could not join the pack against this broken man. "Tell me what to tell George, Guy!"

He eyed me curiously, I suppose to assess the staying power of my reaction. "Tell him I've been borrowing to pay off an old debt." His voice was level, but I thought I could nonetheless detect a throb of eagerness in it. "Tell him I'll be out of business by Labor Day."

"And if everything goes to rack and ruin, it will all be my fault?"

Guy actually chuckled. "That's it, my girl. If everything goes to rack and ruin, it will be
your
fault." He rose and crossed the porch to put his hands on my shoulders. "But stick by the old man, and he won't let you down." I stared into the blue expressionlessness of his eyes and wondered if anyone had ever known this man.

"Suppose you call me a taxi," I proposed.

"Are you going back to the Cape?"

"No, I'm going to Southampton. I'm going to my brother Lionel's. I think I'll stay there awhile. Then I won't have to face George. I can be more convincing by letter, don't you think?"

Guy nodded as he considered this. "Let me write it out for you," he suggested. "That will be best. You can copy it when you get to Lionel's."

Together we went into the library, and the letter to George was drafted. It was my first intrusion into Guy's business life, but I admitted a very large steer into that porcelain cabinet. I have never been properly ashamed of this, as no doubt I should have been. Had Rex been home, I might have consulted him. But I could not side with young George against my poor old husband. There are loyalties that may be senseless, but there they are.