The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  Yet whatever the reasons or motives there was no possible doubt that Angelica and Rex were carrying on a passionate affair. For years she had paid me only a perfunctory attention, ignoring my questions and opinions in the manner of many a more happily married wife, but now I seemed not even to exist for her. I had almost to shout my remarks to get an answer. She would dream listlessly through meals and sometimes rise from the table in the middle, even when we had company. It reached a point where, if I met her walking across the hall, I had to step out of her way to avoid physical collision. I learned the bitter lesson of the Southern Negro who knows, when he passes a white girl in the street, that he has become an invisible man.

  Yet I dared not discuss it with her. I knew that if I did, she would fling the truth brutally in my face. To have lived with Angelica was to have learned to doubt if hypocrisy was necessarily a vice. Rex, on the other hand, took the greatest pains to avoid a confrontation. He even found an excuse to cancel our biweekly Monday lunches, a custom of twenty years’ standing, by writing me that his doctor had ordered him to stay in his office at noon and take a nap. As if Rex ever took a nap! If I encountered him at Meadowview on weekends, riding with Angelica, if I stopped my car to wave at them and chat, his constraint and embarrassment were absurd to witness. Rex had learned only one mask in his struggle up the business ladder: that of the stern and magisterial moneylender. He was incapable, to save his life, of assuming a casual pose. He had to be heavy about everything, including adultery.

  For the first time in my life I was in the grip of an emotion that I did not understand. Was my febrile agitation the agony of humiliation or was it some strange species of ecstasy, a perverse satisfaction in watching the thing happen to those two people that I had always wanted to happen to myself? I felt as if the top of my head were expanding and rising in the air like a balloon. There were moments when I thought I was actually going mad.

  Was I in love with Angelica again? Or was it simple male possessiveness that made me abhor her defection? Did I resent her conquering Rex’s heart, which I could never conquer? Was it her taking Rex from me that I minded? Was I in love with Rex? Oh, in my desperation I knocked on every door!

  The only thing which I could be sure of was that I was romantic again. I wanted to feel light rain on my fevered face; I wanted to peer through leafy hedges at a loved one bathing in a fountain who knew that I was looking at her; I wanted to kiss scented notes that accorded me secret rendezvous. I certainly did not want to be relegated to the Glenville Club while Meadowview throbbed with passion. Meadowview that Angelica had constructed as a temple to the chaste goddess of the hunt!

  Maybe it was all hokum; maybe I was simply in love with love, their love. But it was still true that Angelica appeared to me with a freshness and a desirability that she had not manifested in twenty-two years. What was the key that Rex had found that I could not? And if he had awakened long dormant things in her, might not he be providing a forgiving husband with a second chance? As the weeks drew by, there seemed to be no alternative to my finding out.

  13.

  OUR TWENTY-SECOND wedding anniversary, in 1934, coincided with my annual dinner at Meadowview for the Glenville Club trustees, and we had guests for the weekend, including Angelica’s mother. Mrs. Hyde, now widowed and old, was nonetheless as admirably brisk and decisive as when I had first met her. She had remained, in her own phrase, “the priestess of the life of reason.” At Meadowview she found herself in the heart of Philistia and liked it. She had seen, after all, most of the beautiful things in the world, and she could afford to relax now and then in an easy atmosphere where comfort was more important than art, and food and wine considerably more important than talk.

  “My friends will bore you to death,” I warned her.

  “Not over one weekend. Besides, they make themselves pleasant. You run a good house, Guy. That is an art which I by no means despise.”

  At Meadowview we always gave her the same room, overlooking the garden, and she spent most of her time in it, writing letters and reading. She would descend in the afternoon, crisply booted and buttoned for a solitary walk in the woods, and then she would not appear again until dinner time, at the end of the cocktail hour, in black velvet with a pearl choker. With her formal friendliness and her pleasant, incisive questions, she brought out the best in my friends.

  I went to her room, dressed for dinner, on the evening of the Glenville Club party and found her sitting in a chair by the window. She looked up at me as if she had anticipated my need of communication.

  “How nice, Guy. Are we to have a little chat before the festivities? I was just feeling the need of company. The evening’s almost too nice for reading.”

  It was true. The windows were open, and her room was full of the mild spring air. Below, in the garden, the tulips were out.

  “I’m worried about Angelica, Mrs. Hyde.”

  “Tell me why.”

  She listened gravely, without interruption, until I had finished the story of the affair with Rex. Then her voice betrayed neither surprise nor shock. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I want you to keep Angelica from making a terrible mistake.”

  “You wouldn’t say she’s already done that?”

  “I mean like leaving me and the children.”

  Mrs. Hyde shrugged. “Why should she do so? Doesn’t she have everything a sane woman could want? A beautiful house, an assured position, plenty of money and a husband who does not begrudge her the company of Mr. Geer. In my day that would have been regarded as a kind of paradise.”

  “Well, I can’t very well reproach her,” I said, flushing at the uncomplimentary picture of myself in the background of Mrs. Hyde’s bleak conversation piece. “My own record is not exactly stainless.”

  “Perhaps not, my dear, but a man’s never has to be. However, far be it from me to deprecate tolerance in a husband. I have never considered jealousy a necessary attribute of virility.”

  “But I am jealous!” I exclaimed warmly. “I am hideously jealous. There are more ways of showing jealousy than murdering one’s wife. I want her back. I want another chance with Angelica.”

  Mrs. Hyde really stared at this. “I thought all that was over between you two.”

  “Is ‘all that’ ever really over?”

  “Between a husband and wife, it certainly can be.”

  “Well, let’s put it that this thing with Rex has revived it.”

  “On the theory that we never really value a thing till we’ve lost it?”

  “Or until someone else has taken it.”

  “Someone else, I suppose, whose taste and habits of acquisition we have always admired.”

  I did not flinch under that cool stare. If one went to Mrs. Hyde for help, one had to be ready for the long reach of her speculations.

  “Rex will never marry her,” I said flatly. “He’ll never leave his afflicted Lucy. So Angelica is bound to be hurt. That’s where you come in. You must save her.”

  “But, my dear fellow, I repeat: why isn’t the present arrangement tailor-made for their needs? Why must there be any question of marriage?”

  “Because Angelica belongs to a marrying generation. As does Rex. They’re not old-fashioned, like you and me. They won’t be able to stand the guilt of their affair. And when they can’t stand it any longer, they’ll simply blow up.”

  Mrs. Hyde now seemed more interested. “Do you mean that they will do something violent to themselves? Or to each other?”

  “Such things have been known. But people never anticipate them. Only when it’s too late, then everyone says: ‘Oh, if I’d only had the smallest suspicion!’”

  But I had not, after all, convinced her. She weighed my argument for a silent moment, and in the end she shook her head. “Nothing of that kind is going to happen here.”

  “But you’ll keep your eyes open?”

  “I always keep my eyes open.”

  There was never any point pleading with Mr
s. Hyde. Whatever one had got from her was all that one was going to get. It was almost time to go downstairs; the guests would be assembling. But I could not pass Angelica’s door without saying something about our anniversary. I found her at her dressing table, in a splendid red evening gown that must have been new, in the process of putting on her diamond earrings. It occurred to me that she had never worn these for a Glenville Club evening. Was it conceivable that she was wearing them to please me? After all, Rex was not to be there.

  “My dear, you look perfectly stunning!”

  She looked up briefly at my reflection in her glass. “Ma said I was getting sloppy. She said it was high time I took some trouble about my appearance.”

  “Well, the trouble has certainly paid off. Twenty-two years, think of it! And you look younger now than you did then. You’ve been a good wife, Angelica.”

  There was another brief glance at my reflection, this time a quizzical one. “You don’t have to say that, you know.”

  I decided that this meager opening was as good as I was going to get. “Listen, Angelica. Take your time about Rex. These things are short enough anyway. But when you and he touch earth next, try to remember that you have some ties here.”

  Angelica’s face had congealed while I was talking. Now she rose menacingly to her feet and turned on me. “What ties?”

  “The children and me.”

  “Leave the children out of this!” she cried, with sudden, shocking harshness.

  “Very well, then. Me.”

  “What right have you to claim them?”

  “Doesn’t a husband have any rights today? Even in the horsy set of the north shore?”

  “Oh, don’t try to be funny!” she exclaimed brutally. “What has Rex taken that you have not freely accorded him? What has he taken that you have not sold?”

  “Sold!”

  “Have you not been borrowing enormous sums from him?” Angelica drew herself up now to a magnificent stance of contempt. “My only scruple, I can assure you, has been whether or not I was worth it!”

  I think that my first reaction, before the humming in my ears became a roar, was simple astonishment that it had never occurred to me that this construction of my conduct might have occurred to them. I had too many relationships with Rex to see a necessary connection between the creditor and the betrayed husband. Besides, I did not regard my financial salvation as so personal to myself as to be inextricably tied up with honor. Guy Prime was an institution on which a small multitude of people depended: my old father, who lived, at almost ninety, like Anchises, on the vision of my glory, my partners and employees, my children and servants, even to some extent Rex himself and his sacred de Grasse partners. But now, oh yes, I saw it all, and now the noise in my ears became deafening. I raised my hand threateningly. But when Angelica simply continued to stare at me defiantly, I turned and stamped out of the room.

  I drank many cocktails that night, but despite the glitter in my eye and the feverishness of my manner, on which Mrs. Hyde later commented, I think I was still at the height of my social form. Yet my mind, all the time, was hard at work on my problem. My mind has always worked best under pressure. It seems to have chambers that can be sealed off, like compartments in a vessel. I had wanted to save Angelica from violence. Now it was clear that I would have to drive her to it.

  In the middle of dinner I rapped a spoon against the edge of my champagne glass and rose to announce that it was our wedding anniversary. I pride myself that no man, after twenty-two years of the most idyllic nuptial bliss, could have made a more moving address. I raised friendly laughter by saying that I had had to share my bride with the Meadowview Kennels and the Glenville Hunt. I charmed the wives present with the delicacy of my apology to Angelica for the distractions of my office work and the long hours which the troubles of a depression era had cut out of our shared lives. I made graceful allusions to my absent children and to my present mother-in-law. I delighted everybody by emphasizing how much a happy marriage always owed to friends, and particularly, in our case, to those there gathered about our board. I got a roar of laughter and a standing ovation by toasting future children as well as those in being.

  Angelica behaved even worse than I had hoped. She refused to respond to the toast at all, and after dinner she complained of a headache and went upstairs. Mounting guard by the window in the library where the men were smoking cigars and drinking brandy, I waited until I saw her figure in a coat flit across the turn-around towards the garage. Then I rang for Stride and told him to ask Mrs. Hyde to meet me in the hall. In the hilarious atmosphere of the library my preoccupation and disappearance were hardly noticed.

  Mrs. Hyde needed no briefing. “Has she gone?” she asked at once.

  “Oh, yes, she’s gone to him.”

  “But isn’t his wife there? How can she?”

  “Lucy’s in Arizona. She’s been there all winter. I’ll send for the car. Will you go after her?”

  She eyed me grimly. “You expect a lot of an old woman, Guy.”

  “Do I expect too much?”

  “Probably. But I’ll give it a try. Why in the name of all that’s holy did you have to make that toast?”

  “So I could make you take this trip.”

  “You have your nerve!” she exclaimed sharply. “I think I shan’t go, after all.”

  “Suppose Rex throws her out?”

  “Ah, but he won’t. You say his wife’s away.”

  “Yes, but it’s her house. Her home. Rex can be very terrible about such things. Angelica in that red dress on Lucy’s sober hearth will strike him as the Whore of Babylon.”

  “Whom he loves!”

  “And whom he must therefore expel from the premises. Think of it, Mrs. Hyde! Think what may happen when your desperate daughter is turned away from her lover’s door!”

  “Guy Prime, I believe you’re a fiend!”

  “But you forget. I love her too!”

  “Love!” Mrs. Hyde’s shrug was a vivid repudiation. “Thank God I was spared your kind of love!”

  The formidable old lady was half-angry and half-amused, half-alarmed and half-intrigued. She and I had more in common than any of her family cared to recognize. We were both deeply involved with life, but at the same time understood the role of the looker-on. We could love and see ourselves loving. We could hate and laugh at ourselves hating. And we both resented the world for its audacity in feeling superior to us.

  14.

  MRS. HYDE BROUGHT Angelica back that night. Things happened essentially, although not precisely, as I had supposed they would. Rex did not bar his door to my errant wife, but he did send her home, and his doing so meant the rupture of their relationship. Angelica had her pride, at least enough not to go back to him after that. It helped, too, that Lucy Geer returned from Arizona in the following week. There was no further question of Rex riding at Meadowview. Mrs. Hyde, curiously enough, seemed to blame him for this. She was a thoroughly immoral old woman.

  “What it boils down to is that Mr. Geer would rather have an easy conscience than an easy love,” she told me bitingly. “But be gentle with Angelica. She doesn’t suspect the subtle role you’ve played. That is just as well, believe me. Let it fall on my already despised shoulders.”

  Angelica’s reaction was stronger than I had expected from so brief an affair. She was wan and listless, and for weeks she would not even ride. She would mope about the house, paying no attention to me or to the servants. She reminded me of Emily Bronte in a play that I had once seen, gaunt, proud and dying, roaming about Haworth Parsonage and pausing from time to time to gaze out a window at the moors.

  Except Angelica was not dying. Her health was too rude to be destroyed by disappointed love. Never had she seemed more beautiful or romantic to my eyes. I stayed home every night and tried to devise things for her amusement.

  Happily, as her mother had suggested, she seemed not to hold me in any way responsible for Rex’s defection, and the ugly little scene in her bedroom
before the Glenville Club dinner had apparently dropped from her mind. Or perhaps I was simply too unimportant to be resented. She sat impassively on the sofa while I read Trollope aloud and occasionally pulled herself together for a game of backgammon.

  One evening she came out of herself enough to remark on the change in me. “Why are you so nice to me?” she asked bleakly. “What do you expect to get out of it?”

  “Believe it or not, I feel sorry for you. Is that offensive?”

  “No, but it’s hardly necessary. I feel sorry enough for two.”

  “At least then we can be sharing something again. It’s a start.”

  “To what?” she asked suspiciously.

  “To a friendlier and more civilized relation,” I replied simply.

  For I was determined now to win my way back to the place in Angelica’s heart that I had occupied a decade before. I was determined, no longer jealously but zealously, to be to her something of what Rex had been. I was perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that for years—from the very beginning, if she insisted—I had treated her badly by demanding too arbitrarily that she be the kind of wife I fancied myself as needing and then, having driven her to rebellion, by casting her too completely upon her own devices. Maybe my friends were loud and dull; maybe I was loud and dull myself. But did I have to be? Had I not won Angelica originally by subtlety, and might I not win her back with a little of the same quality?

  I gave up going to the Glenville Club; I even gave up golf and went riding on the weekends with Angelica. When the children were home, I warned them to be very gentle with their mother, going so far as to insinuate that she was traversing the nervous tensions of a change of life. When Angelica learned this from a talk with Evadne, she was touched and even amused. For the first time since her break with Rex, I got a bit of her former banter.