The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  Certainly nothing about the examination was designed to alleviate this prejudice. Mr. Cohen spared Rex none of the details of his loan to me or the second attempted loan, underlining remorselessly his full knowledge of my depredations. At the end their two philosophies were summed up in pointed contrast:

  Cohen: Tell me, Mr. Geer, as the partner of a member firm and as yourself a former governor of the Exchange, did you never feel that it was your duty to disclose to the Business Conduct Committee what you had discovered about Guy Prime?

  Geer: You mean, did I feel it my duty to take the confidences of my friend and use them as the basis for his prosecution? It did not. I am not so Roman, Mr. Cohen.

  Cohen: It is not only a Roman custom, Mr. Geer. In many American schools and colleges the honor system is practiced. It will only work, I am told, if the students are willing to report offenders.

  Geer: Perhaps so. But the honor system is not practiced in the business world.

  Cohen: The honor system, Mr. Geer, or honor?

  Geer: I resent that, Mr. Cohen. It was quite uncalled for.

  Unfortunately, the committee did not agree. Its findings spelled out the end of the age of the gentleman in all the complacent jargon of the new panacea:

  It is manifest from the testimony of the witnesses who loaned money to Guy Prime, all of whom were members of the Stock Exchange, and in particular from the testimony of Reginald Geer, that these men regarded the Exchange more in the light of a private club than a public institution. If a member erred, he had to be handled in such a way that the matter would not cause a scandal. This kind of code is hardly a policing adequate to protect the interests of today’s investing public. The purchaser of a bond or stock is entitled at least to the protection accorded the purchaser of a patent medicine.

  The legislation that followed the hearing had been drafted long before my arrest. Like the flight to Varennes and the fall of the French monarchy, my folly affected only the timing of things. But Rex and the others chose to see me as the traitor who delivered them to the Roosevelts and the Cohens of the New Deal. This was more dramatic than to face the fact that they were mere pebbles under the juggernaut of the socialist state.

  Before I proceed to how it all happened I should offer a brief description of myself, as none of my grandchildren has ever seen me, nor does it now look as if any would. I have always been sturdy, but I am past the biblical life span, and the humid climate of Panama does not agree with me as did the cold dirty air of New York. My hair is as thick and curly as ever, but it is white as the snow I never see, and if I can still boast the broad shoulders and the straight build that made me the champion hockey player of St. Andrew’s School, I must confess to a sizable pot. Still there are few wrinkles in my face, and my blue eyes are not yet gummy. “When I slap my hand on the table at the Rivoli bar every afternoon at four and thunder at George for my first gin and tonic, people jump. Oh, yes, I am still what they call a “fine figure of a man.”

  Yet in my youth I was briefly beautiful. There is no other word for it. My grandsons may squirm, but let them look at the charcoal sketch that my adoring father commissioned Sargent to do of me (he could not afford an oil) when I was on my “grand tour” after Harvard. Maybe the features are banal in their regularity; maybe the curly hair, the straight nose, the manly eyes suggest a magazine cover hero, but show it to any girl in her teens and watch her reaction! In parlor comedy the heroine may turn down the blond athlete for the poet, the man “with a soul,” but how often does it happen in life? Don’t believe, my boys, all the claptrap you hear about women not caring about looks in a man. They know that beauty is rarer than “soul,” and they grab it when they can. Ask your grandmother.

  As early as my mid-twenties my face had filled out, and my shining quality was gone. I made the most of what was left of the Sargent youth by dressing immaculately and holding myself erect, but I fear that the word “beefy” was used behind my back, and Angelica in an ugly mood once likened me to an “Irish cop.” When I was young I sought to charm; in my long middle age I sought to impress. Now, with dotage around the corner, I have returned to the earlier and safer tactic.

  My life is very regular. Carmela and I have a small white stucco house with a red roof and a screened veranda from which we can see the Pacific. The dining alcove is set off from the living room area by a raised level and a partition of grilled ironwork. We have wicker furniture with gaily colored chintz, a mosaic cocktail table and a large watercolor of a clipper ship in full sail on a white-capped sea. How Angelica and Percy would sneer! But Carmela thinks it all very beautiful; she is perfectly content with her old Yankee husband of the inexplicable (and to her uninteresting) Yankee past, who has raised her from a lower-middle-class status to one that is at least unclassifiable. She keeps a tidy house and leaves me alone. We never go out or entertain. She has her girlfriends for lunch, while I am in the city, and I have my precious two hours, from four to six, at the men’s bar of the Rivoli Hotel. Only if I have one too many gins and fall asleep at supper does Carmel show her Latin temperament.

  At the Rivoli I live again. I sit every afternoon at the same table on the big white porch overlooking the palm tree garden and let any join me who care to. For some years few did, but I have now become a local character, even an institution, and the Rivoli management regards me as a drawing card. Not only do I drink free there, I receive cases of whiskey on my birthday and at Christmas. Panamanian officials of high rank, American army and navy officers, the Governor of the Canal Zone himself, join my table to discuss politics and personalities, wars and women. I think I get a greater kick out of having established the “round table” of the Rivoli than I ever did from being founder and president of the Glenville Golf and Tennis Club. But now I must be sure to limit my drinks even below the number that Carmela stipulates, for I plan to write this memoir in the evenings, and my head must be clear. A moment of truth, pure truth, may be my compensation. Surely it might be as intoxicating as gin!

  2.

  WHEN I THINK back on my days of glory, which reached their climax with their finale in 1936, they seem to merge with the glory of the Glenville Club. We both survived, but we survived as shells. We belonged too entirely to the era that made us.

  Sometimes I think that, with the exception of Evadne, Glenville is the only part of my old life that I still miss. In the devitalizing humidity of the Isthmus, especially on those occasional Saturday afternoons when Carmela and I drive to Colon on a straight white bandage of a road through the wet, cluttered jungle alive with its glittering birds, I feel, like a damp cloth across my burning forehead, the memory of that softer, dryer green and of the high, serene porch front of the club house, a bigger Mount Vernon, overlording the rolling acres of its golf course, the neat copses of its woods, the polo field, the shimmering grass courts with their white-clad players. A country club? my grandsons may ask. What was so wonderful about a Long Island country club? Well, you see, my boys, there were clubs and clubs, but only one Glenville.

  I was once offered a hundred thousand dollars to propose a dry goods tycoon for membership. Just to propose him, mind you, not even to guarantee his election. It may surprise you to learn that I indignantly rejected the offer and black-balled the would-be member when he had the audacity to have his name put up by another. Glenville, like all institutions that wish to survive, had to take its share of parvenus, but only when they had learned, if not altogether to be gentlemen, at least to recognize what gentlemen were.

  To make it the first club of the Eastern Seaboard was my hobby. Don’t think it was an easy matter. Young people never recognize the toil that goes into such things. I had the most efficient manager, the best golf and tennis pros, the quickest bartenders and the least rude waiters that money could hire, but these are all nothing without a vigilant master’s eye. I checked every yard of the golf course myself, as I played it, and made periodic inspections of the kitchen, like an admiral, with white gloves. I met each candidate for membership
and spoke to every delinquent dues payer. It was a working hobby.

  You have probably already guessed that my real motive was to make Glenville my home. There I could be master; at Meadowview I was more like a guest. The latter was all Angelica’s; she had copied it from a Georgian Irish house and blown her entire inheritance into it. Its moody romanticism, its big windows open on a field of black angus, its cool, high-ceilinged rooms and dusky canvases may have been as beautiful as her arty friends said, but it was a beauty that ruled me out. I was not so obtuse as to miss the point that Meadowview had been designed to enshrine everything that Angelica thought of me as threatening. We had long reached the point in our marriage where no questions were asked. I had my club, and she her Irish dream.

  My happiest weekly moment was on Sunday when, after eighteen holes of golf with my usual foursome: Bill Dawson, my partner, Alphonse de Grasse and Bertie Armstrong, president of Merchants’ Trust, and after a shower and an alcohol rubdown by the miracle-fingered Luigi, I would proceed, gorgeous in one of my many sport coats, made for me in Glasgow, and a Charvet tie, new each Sunday, to the submarine coolness of the men’s bar for the first gin of the day.

  I would take my stand at the far end from the door. If another was so ignorant or so presumptuous as to take my place, he would receive a discreet whispered warning from Pierre, the bartender. Conversation was general; those who wished to be private went to tables. If there was a guest, I would address him first, with my best “old New York” manners. Formality is not a pitfall to one brought up to use it. With fellow members I was louder and more blunt and with friends I might open with the stentorian insult, delivered without hint of humor. “Well, Judge, what decisions have you sold this week?” or “Good morning, Commissioner, who wrote that last speech of yours?” I was a specialist in the seemingly filthy story that turned out innocently—and in its opposite. But I never repeated myself. I even kept a notebook to be sure.

  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.