This was very bad, and for the balance of the wretched meal I made nervous conversation about the new pool at the swimming club with Mrs. de Grasse.
Rex apologized to me in sulky fashion on the way home, but I told him, a bit shortly, to forget it. That afternoon I took my copy of his award paper up to the big house and left it with a note for Mr. de Grasse saying: “It may be better to read Rex than to hear him.”
In the morning I went up again and found the old boy in his study, actually reading the paper. I say “old,” for so he always seemed to me, though I doubt if he was more than fifty-five at the time.
“I heard a great horned owl at two this morning,” I told him. “I have an idea he sleeps in the big elm by the old stable. Would you care to walk down and see?”
“What about your friend? Won’t he come?”
“He thinks he’s not exactly persona grata.”
“Is he such a sensitive plant?”
“Not in the least. He simply doesn’t like to push in where he’s not wanted.”
Mr. de Grasse sighed. “Doesn’t he know anything about the petulance of the elderly? Tell him to make allowances. And give him this.” He opened the superb leather-bound copy of Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics that was always on his desk and wrote on the fly-leaf: “From d’Artagnan to Richelieu: ‘Almost thou persuadest me to give up dueling.’” “There. Bring him up for lunch. If he’ll come. I don’t feel up to the great horned owl today.”
From then on, for the rest of Rex’s visit, everything went beautifully between him and Mr. de Grasse. Inevitably, I felt excluded from their technical discussions of economic matters, but I consoled myself by remembering that they owed their friendship to my machinations. My satisfaction was complete when, after Rex’s return to Vermont, on a Sunday night after supper in the big house, Mr. de Grasse asked me:
“Do you think your friend would be interested in coming to work at de Grasse?”
“Why don’t you write him and ask?”
“Because he’s so prickly. But I’ll certainly try.”
My scheme, however, was still not implemented. Back at Harvard I found that Rex had received Mr. de Grasse’s offer but had not yet accepted it. He was suspicious.
“I can’t owe everything to you, Guy. You get me a prize that keeps me in college…”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Well, anyway, that’s the way it’s beginning to seem to me. You give me a summer vacation, you launch me in a swank resort, and now you get me a job. You’ll probably fix me up with an apartment in New York and a rich wife!”
“But don’t you see what you do for me?” I retorted with mock gravity. “I was a libertine, and you’ve made me serious. I was a prodigal, and you’ve made me respectable.”
“You don’t even know me,” Rex continued gloomily. “You’ve never met my family. You probably can’t imagine how different they are.”
“Why don’t you invite me to your home?”
“Would you come?”
“Ask me!”
And so it was arranged that we should go to Vermont on the first weekend when Rex thought he could properly cut his Saturday classes, which was not until November. In East Putnam I shared his bedroom on the third floor of the old Gothic rectory that was attached to the church, and, for the first and last time, I met his parents. It was not, in later years, that Rex was ashamed of them. On the contrary, he was tremendously devoted and tender. But they were simple folk, very pure and very silent, and he saw nothing to be gained by disturbing them with the company of more sophisticated souls. He did not hide them; he protected them.
Jude Geer was afraid that his son would be corrupted by New York sharks; his wife, that he would be corrupted by New York women. I thought they were both very dear and very naive; later, I was to wonder if they were not rather shrewd. The girl whom they favored, the girl “next door,” Lucy Ames, as bright and pert and good as the heroine of a Trollope novel, was obviously in love with Rex, and he, equally obviously, was not in the least in love with her. The three of them made rather pathetic efforts to win my favor, as if I represented Rex’s future and they only his past. They did not understand that nobody represented Rex, I perhaps less than any.
It was nice of them, however, not to identify me with the evils and temptations that would await Rex in New York. They seemed charmingly to take for granted that his best friend must have all the virtues and not the vices of the dangerous new world that he hoped to conquer. Lucy discussed with me whether or not Rex should go to law school before becoming a banker, his mother asked me if he ate regular meals at Cambridge, and the Reverend Geer, to whom I devoted my particular attention, ended by consulting me about his next week’s sermon. When Rex discovered me with his father, in the latter’s study, examining on a biblical map the route of Moses from Egypt to the promised land, he burst into a hoot of laughter.
“I think, Dad, we’re giving the poor man quite a dose of East Putnam!” he exclaimed. “But he’s passed every test with flying colors.” As he led me forcibly away, he spoke in a tone that was almost gentle: “You win, Guy. You’ve seen me everywhere now: at school, in Bar Harbor, at home. You’ve seen me every place I’ve ever been! If you think de Grasse is the spot for me and that I’ll fit in there, well then, let’s try de Grasse. Who am I to slam the door in opportunity’s face?”
7.
REX AND I took an apartment together when we came down from Harvard to work in de Grasse. My uncle Lewis Prime let us have the commodious third story of his carriage house just off Lexington Avenue in Sixtieth Street for a nominal rent, and I decorated it gaily, as I hoped, with art nouveau theatrical posters and odd bits of Tiffany glass. Father wanted me to live at home, and he looked askance at my continued friendship with Rex, whom he had found a surly, socially unprepossessing fellow in Bar Harbor, but he was much too wise openly to oppose the arrangement. He thought it entirely fitting when Rex informed him that he would always regard the apartment as mine and himself as merely the subtenant of a single bedroom. But I, of course, could have none of that. I would have shared anything with Rex, even my girls.
Most fathers of that day worried that their sons’ friends would lure them to pleasures; mine was afraid that Rex might entice me to overwork. Father seemed to see my poor subtenant as a clerkish Lorelei with an account book instead of a golden comb, and, as an antidote to Rex’s influence, he reminded me constantly of my duty to take up what he called my “position” in New York society.
“Success, my boy, isn’t only a matter of grinding away at the office. That’s all very well for a fellow like Rex Geer who hasn’t any other way up. You mustn’t forget that we live in an overpopulated, overeducated world where it’s always possible to hire a hack to do the technical job. It’s getting the job that counts. And where do you get the big jobs? Where the big people are, of course!”
I pointed out that Mr. de Grasse seemed to care very little about the business that his clerks brought in and quite a lot about how they did their work.
“I don’t say you’re not to do your work properly,” Father retorted testily. “Of course, you are. And de Grasse is an excellent place to be apprenticed. But I have greater plans for you than to spend your life as junior partner to some de Grasse heir or nephew, looking after old Marcellus’ daughters’ money!”
I knew what Father’s “greater plans” for me were: he wanted to set me up in a brokerage house to be called “Guy Prime & Company.” My next question was indiscreet enough to bring on one of our rare quarrels.
“Will there be room for Rex in those greater plans?”
“My dear boy,” Father answered, with his most provoking condescension, “you will forgive me for saying that you seem to be quite infatuated with that young man. If I am to set you up on Wall Street, it will be with men of your own class. I haven’t worked all my life for the future of Reginald Geer.”
“Worked!” I could not help exclaiming. “Excuse me, sir, but when did
you work?”
Father’s face turned a faint pink, a most unusual phenomenon with him, and those long agile fingers twined and re-twined themselves around the silver handle of his walking stick. “Never mind how I’ve worked,” he reproved me sharply. “One day you’ll find out and beg my pardon for your impertinence. One day you’ll learn which is your truer friend: your father or that young man.”
“Do you imply that he’s using me?”
“Certainly, he’s using you, and I don’t blame him in the least. These things aren’t done in cold blood, mind you. The circumstances create them. You will understand that when you’ve watched the human ant heap as long as I have. Young Geer is by nature a self-aggrandizing animal. He moves upwards wherever you put him. Of course, he’ll crawl over you, if you let him. He can’t help himself. He wants the moon. He wants to be first in de Grasse, first in Wall Street, first in society.”
“Rex cares nothing for society!” I cried indignantly.
“Rex cares for anything he hasn’t got,” Father said emphatically. “You think, because he doesn’t enjoy things, that he doesn’t want them. You’re dead wrong. He may want them just because someone else has them, but he still wants them.”
None of Father’s suspicions, however, could cloud my relationship with Rex. In that first year of our apprenticeship our friendship was at its apex. He came with me to my family’s for Sunday lunch and was asked to my uncles’ on holidays and special occasions, as if he had been a Prime. Sometimes I took him to parties, but more often he preferred to stay home and work and hear about them later from me, sitting up over a cigar and a glass of brandy. Our only disagreements were over my failure to work as hard as he. One night, after a particularly grand dinner at Uncle Lewis’, I must have described the guests with some of Father’s fulsomeness, for I provoked him into retorting:
“Those men didn’t get where they are by going out to dinner parties when they were young.”
“Didn’t they? Where would Chauncey DePew have been without the Vanderbilts? Where would the Pratts and Paynes have been without Mr. Rockefeller?”
“You think too much of moneymaking, Guy.”
“But we’re in the moneymaking game! You may not judge a doctor or even a lawyer by his income, but how can you rate a moneymaker except by the size of his pile?”
“Banking isn’t just moneymaking. Banking is starting new businesses and saving old ones. Banking is helping the right man over a bad time. Banking is keeping the heart of the economy pumping. If you don’t feel that way about it, you ought to quit and become a stockbroker.”
“You and Father!”
But I had no idea of becoming a stockbroker, and seeing that I had really irked him, I held my peace. I was determined to make good at de Grasse, and Rex, in his own way, was trying to help. He was constantly checking on my work, reading over my market reports, suggesting areas of additional research, filling up our brief lunch periods with talk of stocks and bonds. His attitude was rather irritatingly tutorial, but I knew that it did me no harm.
What did do harm was the contrast that he unconsciously obtruded between himself and me, not so much to other eyes as to my own. There was something about Rex that made all non-Rex activities seem foolish. And so I was constantly pretending to be something I wasn’t, nodding my head and clearing my throat and starting sentences, statistic-laden, that I could never seem to finish. I read much of what Rex read, but I could never retain it as he so uncannily did. His mind was a whole glittering philosophy of finance, and every customer of de Grasse, like one of Browning’s broken arcs in the poem he loved to quote, seemed part of a perfect round above. It was only away from Rex that I could abuse him as an astigmatic who saw order in the jungle and Christian discipline in the wolf pack. In his presence, his relentless logic and inexhaustible figures reduced me to sullen acquiescence.
I see now that he should have had more sympathy for the role played in Wall Street by men like myself. I was a salesman and he was a moneylender: that was the basic difference. What he should have encouraged me to do was to develop myself into a salesman of de Grasse. My view of Wall Street may have been naive compared to his—I admit that I took a childish pleasure in the crisp heavy paper on which securities were engraved and in the promises of fairy tale wealth that they seemed to contain—but a naive view can still be a contagious one. Reading and study, at least of business facts, were not my forte. My mind simply turned off after too many pages, and I would be torn between angry resentment and drowsiness. When I came home I was glad to go out again to dinner, any dinner, to sit next to a pretty woman and drink a good deal of champagne and talk gaily. Was that not youth? What else was youth for?
Our best times together were on weekends. Rex loved of a Sunday to take a train down to the South Shore of Long Island and hike through the marshes and along the beaches of Cedarhurst and Lawrence. On these occasions he would throw off the monastic earnestness of his banking hours and behave with a gay and infectious enthusiasm. He would even sing, loudly and off tune. Like many men of large intellect and moral seriousness, he could be very boyish when he relaxed. One had to have seen him in such moods to understand the attraction that he was capable of exercising.
All of this brief gaiety, however, blew away with his first love affair. Of what use is the wisdom of the ages? Young men will still go to war and still fall in love with the wrong women. They will believe, till doomsday, that dolls like Alix Prime will catch fire from their fire and learn love from their ardor. It is really hardly fair to the dolls, who are not to be blamed for their doll-like natures. Rex, like many impoverished, ambitious young men of his day, had kept sex too long at bay. To cause an explosion within him, Alix did not have to be either beautiful or charming. She had only to be female.
She was an heiress, the daughter of Uncle Chauncey, the stiffest of my uncles and the one who had made the greatest match. She was pale, blonde and well shaped, with a high chirping voice that expressed enthusiasm for all the things over which a debutante was supposed to wax enthusiastic. You couldn’t fault her; she liked the best books and the best plays and the best scenic views and the best people. It might have been forgivable, even in a first cousin, had she only been dumb. But Alix wasn’t dumb. None of the Primes were dumb.
I knew, of course, that she and Rex had met. He had been with me to Aunt Amy’s and Uncle Chauncey’s on two or three occasions. What I did not know was that he had gone back alone. One Sunday afternoon, in early spring, as he and I were exploring a marsh near the sea in Lawrence, our conversation fell, accidentally as I then thought, on my cousin. I described her casually as a stuck-up mannequin. Before I knew it, he had jumped on my back and thrown me to the ground. I wrestled desperately for some minutes before he was on top of me, his knees pressing my shoulders down. Of course, he had surprise on his side. I could not at first believe he was in earnest.
“Take it back,” he demanded hoarsely.
“Oh, Rex, for Pete’s sake!”
“Take it back or I’ll stuff your mouth with mud.”
“All right, all right, she’s anything you want, an angel, a goddess, what the hell!”
I got up sullenly while he excoriated me. “The trouble with you, Guy, is that you’re a cynic. You can’t see that girl’s a million miles above the usual debutante type. Oh, she lives in your silly social world, yes. Where else can the poor creature live? She has to do what her parents say. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t born for better things.”
“Like Rex Geer,” I suggested sulkily, brushing off my pants.
“Don’t even think it!” he exclaimed wrathfully. “How would I dare aspire to the likes of her?”
“That’s right, she’s a Prime, isn’t she?” I retorted. “Forget her, peasant.”
Well, obviously he wasn’t going to do that, and how could he court Alix without my help? We were in 1908, and Uncle Chauncey was not about to hand over his finest flower to adorn the buttonhole of the son of a penniless rural parson. In a
few more minutes he had to beg my pardon, and when I grudgingly accorded it, he threw an arm over my shoulder and gave me a squeeze and then hurried off to lose his embarrassment in a rapid walk. We did not speak again until the station, and then, as we sat waiting for our train, he asked me a dozen questions about Alix. In the crowd of hot excursionists returning to the city, amid soft drinks and crumpled newspapers and howling babies, we talked of Alix at dancing class, Alix at Miss Chapin’s, Alix reciting “Evelyn Hope” at Aunt Amy’s Christmas party, Alix in pink and white sitting with her mother for a portrait by Porter. I did not tell him of the time Alix did wee-wee on the rug and let me be punished for it, or of how we used to make fun of her for her crushes on older girls, or of her temper tantrums or of how Aunt Amy was supposed to have wept before Miss Chapin to keep her from being suspended for cheating. No doubt Alix no longer remembered these things herself. When the violence of the teens congeals into the kind of sandy surface that she presented to the world, it is possible that the memory itself may be affected.
What I found difficult to make out from Rex’s version of his romance was to what extent his emotion was reciprocated. I suspected that Alix was probably both flattered and surprised by the passion that she had aroused, but that she did not know what to do with it. What does one do, after all, with a real stove in furnishing a doll’s kitchen? Yet I was sure of one thing. I was sure she was Prime enough to appreciate that it had some value.
“You’d better let me work on it,” I told him later that night. “We’ll see what ideas I come up with. After all, it’s more my field than yours.”
The following Wednesday was Aunt Amy’s “at home,” and I left the office early to call at the great red and white brick Louis XIII hotel that Uncle Chauncey had reared with her money on upper Fifth Avenue. Aunt Amy was the biggest, simplest, nicest, plainest old shoe in New York society. She looked like a cook dressed up as a duchess; she had pink hair and a round brown face that was inclined to be sad when it was not very merry, and she kissed half the people who came into the room. Unfortunately, she was also a secret drinker and had little of the will power that one usually associated with hostesses of her type. My uncle, small and dour and generally absent from her receptions, controlled her absolutely.
The Embezzler Page 6