“Tomorrow morning!”
“Is there any difficulty, Mr. Prime? Are the securities not physically in your office?”
“Of course they are. But I don’t understand your tone. To call up a co-fiduciary, after years of allowing him to keep constantly traded securities in his office—a great convenience, incidentally to both trustees—and expect to reverse the procedure over night—well, it sounds as if you were suspicious of something!”
“I regret how it sounds, Mr. Prime. But our messenger will be over for the securities in the morning.”
“Do you realize, Mr. Landers, that your attitude means that I shall never do business with Standard Trust again?”
“We have calculated the risks, Mr. Prime.”
No, Mr. Geer was not in, his secretary told me when I called. Mr. Geer had left the office and was dining out—she did not know where—but was going to the opera later. I called Bertha who had Aunt Amy’s box on Monday nights and asked her if she could spare a seat for me.
“Since when did you become an opera fan?”
“Be nice, Bertha,” I sighed. “I’ve had a hard day.”
“Well, if you sleep, don’t snore. My friends are not the kind who go to the opera just to be seen.”
I was late for Traviata and thought I would have to wait for the intermission to seek out Rex, but then I spotted him in a box only two away. I tiptoed out to the corridor and into the back of his box and stood for just a moment behind his chair before placing my hand on his shoulder. He looked up and, without even a word or a whisper, followed me from the box. He must have been prepared for the worst. No doubt to Rex my face had become the symbol of his personal doom. He would take it, as he took all things, like a man.
In a comer of the empty bar we sat at a small round table, and I looked about for a waiter.
“No, no,” he muttered, “give it to me straight.”
So I did, watching him as I spoke, seeing the too familiar process of his slow congealment. When I had finished there was a moment of silence, a moment of something almost like peace between us. What would have been the point of violence now?
“I realize that you may be the victim of an obsession,” he said at last. “The rational part of me tells me that men like you may really not be responsible for their acts. But I wonder how much the concept of personal fault means to me. What seems important now—in fact, the only thing in the world that seems important now—is for me to recognize and learn to face the thing in you that is wicked. Maybe you can’t help being wicked, any more than you can help the shape of your nose. But there it is, your nose and the wickedness. Before me. I see them.” And he looked straight through me, as if at something strange and distant, but somehow no longer threatening. I had the distinct feeling that I was dead at last not only to Rex but to my whole world. There were many things in that feeling, but I wonder if relief may not have been one of them.
“Go ahead, Rex. Get it off your chest. I have it coming to me.”
“We’re beyond recriminations, you and I.”
“Then let’s not be beyond reason. Put up the money once more and I will sign over everything I own to you. You will hold it for Angelica and Evadne and Percy under any terms you wish. When my ship comes in—and it will come in—they will be rich. I will take myself away—to a Pacific island, anywhere—I’ll never bother you again. All you will have to do is hold the securities and wait.”
“How much will it take this time, Guy?” he asked wearily.
“Three quarters of a million. You see, I don’t beat about the bush.”
Rex continued to be inscrutable. “I’ll have to go to my firm. I can’t raise that much on such short notice. Your last loan cut me too low.”
I stared. “But surely, Rex, you must be several times a millionaire!”
“It’s all in trust for Lucy and George. I did what you did. Only I’m not an Indian giver. However, I can go to Marcellus de Grasse. Of course, I’ll have to tell him.”
“Of course,” I murmured, without conviction. “But you will go to him?”
“Where will you be tonight?”
“In my room at the Schuyler Club.”
“What will you do if the answer is no?”
“What can I do?”
Rex’s gray-green eyes fixed me with a defiant glitter. The defiance was at my thinking that he would not say it. “Men have been known to kill themselves under these conditions.”
“Well, I won’t do that,” I retorted with a grunt. “You can trust me to see the show out. I never could leave even a movie early. I like to know how things end.”
“Very well.” Rex rose. “Let this be good-by, then. Whatever happens, I don’t think I want to see you again. I shall deal through George. George, too, will have to know all.”
“Yes,” I said, in the final flare-up of my bitterness, “he will have to know all, your all. Nobody will ever know mine!”
“Not even the creditor who shares your disgrace? Who is involved in your crime?”
“Oh, shucks, Rex, you won’t have to go to jail.”
“There are worse things than jail.”
“That’s the ultimate Rex!” I cried, in sudden, passionate anger. “That’s the Rexest thing I ever heard! You’ve robbed me all my life, and now you want to steal the final iniquity of my punishment. And you call me the thief! When were you not picking my pockets? Father was on to you from the beginning. You envied me my popularity, my family, my whole bright little place in the sun. You hated those things because they weren’t yours. You had to have them, not to enjoy them, but to destroy them. You grabbed the fortune that I should have made, and what have you ever done with it but build a big house that’s as dreary as yourself and prate about morals while you practiced adultery? You made a world that’s more sordid than the old Prime world that you sneered at, only yours isn’t even gay. It’s drab as a crow!”
Rex listened to all of this without the twitch of an eyelid. Then he rose.
“I’ll send word to your club,” he said in his stoniest voice, “when I’ve made up my mind.”
He left the bar, and I returned to my seat in the back of Bertha’s box. It was a strange place to review my life, with Bertha and her friends, at a performance of Traviata, yet it was there that I brought to its finest pitch the sense of detachment that I had cultivated all summer. It was the only thing that got me through my years in jail.
I saw that the common denominator of the little group in the box, other than myself, was that none of them had ever lived. The old bachelor colonel, a frustrated pederast, clutching the Republican principles of the Reconstruction era, lived only in his silly politenesses to spinsters and in the mutterings of his hate as he read of socialism in the newspapers at his club. The widow with the necklace of garnets and the turkey’s neck lived in an imaginary past, the squeaky spinster twin sisters in an imaginary present, and Bertha, sleepy with her double potion of gin, beating time with her big foot to the music, dreamed of being a courtesan in the second empire, of giving up her house and jewels for a tiny villa in the country and a beautiful pale ardent young man.
Did I wish I were one of them? Did I wish I had stayed with Bertha, shared an apartment with her as a bachelor brother, gone to meetings of the Society of the Cincinnati and watched Armand and Violetta with moist eyes on Monday nights? Did I wish to be, like Bertha’s friends, exempt?
No. Not even then. Not even with all the black void that loomed. I was happy that I had engaged with life, that I had married a beautiful woman and fathered healthy children and made and spent fortunes and founded a great club. New York would not soon forget Guy Prime. And if all ended hideously, New York would forget him even less.
When the big golden final curtain fell at last, on Traviata and on me, I knew that I would find a message at the Schuyler Club, that Rex had failed in his mission. I felt only numbness in my heart as I remained standing and applauding until the last curtain call. Then I followed Bertha to her car and talked about
the singers until we reached my club. I slightly surprised her by kissing her goodnight on the lips.
The boy at the desk handed me the message for which I had already extended my hand. The next morning Prime King Dawson & King was suspended from trading, and by noon it was generally known in the street that we were bankrupt. The long Manhattan career of the Primes had ended in a hell as bright as any in the Bishop’s sermons.
16.
ON TUESDAY afternoon, after my firm had closed its doors forever, I consulted with our aghast old lawyer, Horatio Carter, whose white cuffs fluttered like moths as I spoke, and told him that I meant to plead guilty to an indictment for embezzlement. I interrupted when he began to expostulate and requested him firmly to go to the District Attorney, who would be preparing a warrant for my arrest, and tell him that in the morning, after a night at Meadowview, I would be at his disposal. In the meantime, the Chief of Police of Glenville, an old friend, would guarantee my availability. When Carter had departed, his cuffs still aflight, I took my last drive to Long Island.
One more shock awaited me, and that was the inundation of sympathy in which I found Meadowview sopped. Limousines jammed the drive, the hall overflowed with flowers and, in the living room, a bewildered Angelica, still in riding habit, was serving coffee to solicitous friends. Something buckled in my resolution of detachment at the impact of so much affection and concern, and the tears boiled up in my eyes. But they evaporated soon enough at the realization that the love in that room was not for me. It was for Guy Prime, the bankrupt. They did not yet know of Guy Prime, the crook.
Standing in the doorway I raised my voice to dominate the assembly. “My friends, you are here under a misapprehension. You think that merely my firm has failed. That is the least of my concerns. Tomorrow I expect to be criminally indicted for the misappropriation of trust funds in my custody. I regret to inform you that I shall have to plead guilty to that indictment. I leave you now to offer your sympathies to my unfortunate family. This news is as much of a shock to them as to yourselves.”
I have never known silence like the silence that followed this announcement. In the moment before I turned and strode to my study, it seemed that the very walls and floor must have been saturated with it, and the white looming faces of which I was conscious only in mass were no longer the faces of friends, but a composite expression of dread and horror. I had become a specter in my own home.
Angelica followed me to the study. She was very nervous and kept striking her leg with her riding crop. Rex, it appeared, had already telephoned and told her the worst. She seemed undecided as to what reaction was the most appropriate: indignation, sympathy or simply impatience at so bizarre an interruption of normal life.
“I know it is not the embezzlement that you will most mind,” I said grimly. “It will be my letting Rex down after all that he’s done.”
“Well, I mind that, of course, I mind it terribly, but it’s not Rex who’s going to prison. Rex will survive. My concern, believe it or not, is for you, old boy. One can’t be married to a man for twenty-five years and see him go off to jail with a dry eye. There must be some way I can help. What can I do, Guy?”
“Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all. In crime one is all alone. One never knows how much till it happens.” I paused, making out the sudden warmer sympathy in her eyes. Poor Angelica! It was so like her to spurn participation in my success and then reach out to share my bread and water. Whatever else she was, she was a lady.
“I want you to know that I’m not being sentimental,” she was saying. “I’ve thought it all out because I’ve seen it all coming. Not your going to jail, perhaps, but our being broke and under a cloud. I’ve had the summer for that. I think I’m even beginning to understand the role that our incompatibility has played. It occurs to me that this may be our golden last chance to make up to the children for our selfishness. Let’s do the thing with style, Guy! Prison, poverty, the works! Let’s show the world we know how to live on the bottom even if we didn’t know how to live at the top!”
Did she mean it? Was it anything more than a handsome Hyde gesture, a bow to the code of behaving well? But whatever it was, it was too late. There had been too many years of laughs, too many shrugs, too many quips, too many sneers, too much of each seeing the worst in the other. No, we could never go back. What was there to go back to?
“That’s very sweet of you, Angelica, but it’s also very sentimental. Your feeling does you credit, but it’s not a feeling to build on. It’s too high class, too much the noble thing. My div honesty has inspired you. But I have a better plan. I want to get out of your life, once and for all, and give you another chance. It’s not too late.” I paused, to give what was coming its full effect. “I want you to divorce me, Angelica. I want you to divorce me, and when Lucy Geer dies, which can’t be too far off, I want you to marry Rex.”
Angelica’s dark eyes slowly hardened into two slate discs. “Did you have to become a crook, Guy, to get rid of me? Couldn’t you have asked me for a divorce before?”
“Please. Angelica, don’t make a drama of this. Try to understand.”
“I’m trying! I’ve been trying for twenty-five years! Tell me what more I can do for you. Shall I get the divorce while you’re in prison? Shall I go hunting tomorrow while you’re being arrested? Shall I wear yellow when you’re wearing a striped suit?”
“Angelica!” I exclaimed firmly. “You will do no such thing. The divorce can wait my release. It would look otherwise as if you were leaving a sinking ship. I’ll be the rat, thank you, if there have to be rats. I’m getting out of your and the children’s lives forever. And it will be very much to everyone’s good that I do!”
“And my heart has bled for you all afternoon!” Angelica continued in a trembling voice. “You’re right, Guy Prime. I’m an arrant sentimentalist. Why, you’re having the time of your life!”
It was a terrible ending to a marriage unless one remembered that the marriage had really ended long before. The pain that Angelica’s pain might ordinarily have caused me was reduced to a mere dull ache by the anaesthesia of my impending conviction. When one is going to jail, believe me, boys, nothing else is quite real. I remember thinking at that moment that I understood the style with which the victims of the French Terror went to their deaths. The same dope enabled me to get through the even harder scene with Evadne and Percy that immediately followed.
Everything that followed my conviction worked out as neatly as everything before it had ended messily. Once those gods had me in jail, they appeared to be satisfied. Standard Trust Company, sharing my negligence if not my crime, put seven hundred thousand dollars back into Angelica’s trust without even a protest. At the same time Meadowview was condemned for a highway, and Angelica got a good price for it. In a smaller house she continued to hunt and to live well enough. Evadne married George and had no further money problems; Percy became a first-rate lawyer. Everyone survived the war, and everyone today is prosperous and happy.
When I was released from prison in 1941, where I had been allowed to work, not too unhappily, as a librarian, I went to Panama. Angelica, at my repeated request, divorced me in 1942. Lucy Geer survived until 1948, and Angelica and Rex, two elderly lovebirds, were finally wed. From all that I hear it has been a most happy union. The relationships that it created may seem a bit bizarre: Evadne and her husband became stepsister and step-brother, and Angelica became her own daughter’s mother-in-law. However, in present-day New York such things probably no longer raise an eyebrow. Only the fundamentals count, and Rex has always been full of them.
Sometimes it seems to me that I was an Iphigenia, that the gods had simply demanded my neck as the price for according victory to the army of Agamemnon. Certainly as soon as I had detached my illfated self from the baggage train of the Geers and Primes, their progress became smoother. I was perfectly content for many years to philosophize to myself by the shores of the still Pacific and was proud to be above the need of self-justification. But now tha
t a new generation is growing up that does not know me and that I do not know, I find that I do not want to exist for them only in newspaper accounts and in the smooth, no doubt charitable interpretations of my conduct offered by Angelica and Rex. I want, after all, to be heard. Please, Evadne, think twice before you tear this up.
Part II
Rex
1.
WHEN I HEARD of Guy Prime’s death in Panama last January (1962) of a stroke in the bar of the Rivoli Hotel, my first reaction was that I could not have wished him a more merciful or appropriate end. My second was concern for the old sores and sorrows that must now be reopened for Angelica and the children. My third was apprehension as to what last dirty trick he might have in reserve for me.
As the weeks went by I began to be ashamed of this last reaction. Guy, as it turned out, had left his affairs in scrupulous order. He had owned his house in Panama City free and clear, and he had no debts. There was even enough money to support his second wife, of whom I had always assumed I would have to take care, and to provide small legacies for Evadne and Percy. I began to wonder if the dreaded final trick might not simply turn out to be a changing of card hands, a switching about that would make us, the wronged, seem like Guy’s persecutors, a volte-face that would present his deserted and plundered family in the guise of haughty and unforgiving patricians who had cast him into outer darkness. Evadne, who had not seen her father in twenty-five years, was assailed with terrible guilt feelings, and Percy flew down to Panama to see what he could do for Carmela.
But no. I was wrong, or rather, I had been right in the first place. There was a last trick, and just as dirty a one as I had feared.
A month after his death Evadne, at once grave and flustered, strode into my office downtown and plunked on my desk the memoir that her father had written two years before and that his widow, acting on his posthumous instructions, had forwarded to her, unopened.
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