The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  I was so confused now that I could only rise and mumble a second incoherent apology. Mr. de Grasse, however, seemed to wax more ebullient with my embarrassment.

  “Sit down, my dear fellow, sit down. I still haven’t answered your question.” When I was again seated, he stared at me with twinkling eyes. “You want to know why I offered you a job. I offered you a job because I think you have brains and character. Because I expect you to go far in de Grasse. I fully realize that this is not the kind of thing an employer is meant to say to a prospective employee. I should emphasize the magnitude of the task and your slender qualifications. But I know that as a true New Englander you are far too guilt-ridden to be carried away by compliments. If you could see how wretched you look now!”

  “I am grateful for your confidence, sir,” I stammered. “I shall work my hardest for you.”

  “Work for yourself, dear boy. Don’t worry about me. And now I’m going to tell you a secret. It is not you who owe your job to Guy. Before I met you, I was thinking of suggesting to him that he might not, after all, be cut out for a banker. But when I saw that he had the intelligence to pick a friend of your caliber, I concluded that he must be more serious than I had thought.”

  “Oh, Guy can be very serious, sir.”

  Mr. de Grasse did not answer this. He continued to gaze at me quizzically, as if debating how much more to tell me about my friend. “I have never been entirely fair to Guy,” he said. Then he picked up a small bronze Antinoüs, which I later learned was the work of Cellini, and gazed at it pensively for some seconds. “Guy is a very beautiful human being. He has not only beauty of body but beauty of heart. I have seldom known a more generous or outgiving nature. As you know, my home is full of women. When Guy presented himself, quite of his own accord, as a kind of summer son, the charm of the prospect was irresistible to me. He has an amazing way with older people. He doesn’t seem to be even aware of the difference in years. I was able to teach him a good many things, but nothing to what he taught me.”

  “What could Guy teach you, Mr. de Grasse?”

  “What I am.” The long white hand fluttered for a moment over the jades. “He taught me that I did not care about beautiful things as much as I thought I did. Or about beautiful people or about beautiful hearts. He taught me, quite unwittingly, that what I really care about is beautiful minds. And Guy does not have one.” He sighed and seemed to appeal to me for a merciful judgment. “Guy bores me a bit, that’s the trouble. And it’s my fault that he bores me. He’s never pretended for a moment to be anything he wasn’t. But why must he fix his affections where they can’t be returned?”

  From the silence that followed I understood that Mr. de Grasse’s question had not been entirely rhetorical. “Surely he doesn’t always, sir.”

  “But I suggest he does!” he snapped back in a voice that surprised me. “I suggest that Guy is a perverse little moth that will always desert the rich linen closet of his natural inheritance for the deadly heat of the candle.”

  I began to see that I was being sounded out. “Meaning that you’re a candle, sir?” I asked more boldly.

  “And that you’re one too, young man. And that candles get blown out, if moths are big enough.”

  “Is that what moths want?”

  “Moths don’t want,” he retorted. “Moths are moths. I’m an old candle and can look after myself. But it takes some looking, with Guy. He knows where to have one. He knows, for example, that I love to play the wise old Roman emperor to a worshipping young tribune. He sees me seeing myself as Marcus Aurelius, aloof, way up above the mob, reading books in my box at the circus. Oh, he has my number!”

  “And mine? He has that too, you imply.”

  “Ah, that’s where he’s really subtle.” Mr. de Grasse chuckled, with more than a touch of malice. “Subtle by knowing when to be obvious. He sees that the son of a good country parson must see the ‘great world’ as wickedness. As Sodom and Gomorrah. And that he will be fascinated by what he most expects: a canvas of cupidity and vain sacrifices. A Hieronymous Bosch. Guy knows how to call a Baal a Baal!”

  Being young, I thought that this was merely a sample of the kind of advice that older people felt compelled to give to younger and to which it was the bounden duty of the latter respectfully to listen. Indeed, I believed that the giving and receiving of such exhortations was of the essence of a proper relationship between the generations. But I never really considered that such warnings were meant to be acted upon. All the dragons that I feared were out in the open and had to be killed with spears. I had not yet met the kind of which Mr. de Grasse was speaking.

  3.

  GUY’S VERSION of what happened between me and his cousin Alix Prime is perhaps the most distorted portion of his narrative. I do not suppose that it was a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, but rather a fantasy of what actually happened, nursed by his vanity and resentment in the lonely years at Panama.

  His description of Alix as a doll has some physical truth. She had creamy, blemishless skin, an oval face, beautifully waved golden hair and large, blue eyes which, probably because of a slight thyroid deficiency, might have been described as “popping.” She was pretty but, except when talking, curiously lacking in animation. Guy suggests that I fell in love with her looks. It was not so. What attracted me, quite against my better judgment, was something of which he as a cousin was totally unconscious. It was a sense of urgency under Alix’s candy-box cover, a vivid hint of feeling in her giggle, an intensity behind her blue stare that made a man think the very things that may have put that near-panic in her eyes. Alix had great sex appeal, even if she had no idea what to do with it.

  If her looks, by themselves, would not have attracted me, her conversation would have done so even less. On my first visit to her home I thought her the dizziest, most empty-headed creature I had ever met and the very prototype of what, in my bias, I considered the New York debutante to be. When I was invited, as I left, to come to tea the next day by her large, noisy and surprisingly friendly mother and when I heard myself actually accepting. I felt that I must have taken leaves of my senses. Was this how the devil of the big city caught one? It had never occurred to me that I would trot down the primrose path in full awareness that I was making an ass of myself.

  The Chauncey Primes’ house on Fifth Avenue was certainly the grandest I had ever been in. At last I could appreciate what Guy meant by the “poverty” of his branch of the family. It was a four story Louis XIII hotel, of red and white brick with a steep mansard roof, like a segment of the Place des Vosges, handsomer than its Fifth Avenue neighbors, but with an interior made dreary by the gilded opulence of the era. I sat with Alix, away from the older people at the tea party, in a stiff little parlor that opened on the empty ballroom like a summer hotel porch on the ocean. She chattered on, nervously and pointlessly, about opera. I observed that I did not care for it.

  “But why not?” she asked in astonishment. “I thought everybody liked opera.”

  I muttered something about silly plots and sad endings and received a spirited lecture.

  “But operas are supposed to have tragic endings. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be operas. They’d be musical comedies. In opera everything is just the opposite of the way things are in real life. The characters sing, to begin with. What would you think of me now if I suddenly jumped up and led Mamma’s friends in a rousing chorus? That I was crazy, of course. In opera you let your emotion out; in real life you keep it in. At least, the people one knows do. And in the end the hero or heroine, or both of them, die, to show us the make-believe is over. Then we can get up and put on our wraps and go back to the real world.”

  “Is it a better one?”

  “That depends on what you want.” Oh, yes, she had thought it all out. “Things happen to characters in opera. Wonderful things and terrible things. But somebody has to die in the end. In real life nothing very much happens.”

  “But we all still die in the end.”

 
“Yes, but it’s different. It’s not apt to be so violent.”

  “Which do you prefer?” I asked, beginning, in spite of myself, to be intrigued. “The opera or real life?”

  “Oh, real life, of course. That’s the right answer, isn’t it? One is always supposed to prefer real life. Besides, who wants to die violently in the end?”

  “Even for a handsome tenor?”

  “Not I.” She giggled suddenly. “I prefer bassos. Except they’re usually fathers or villains. Do you prefer sopranos or contraltos?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t get much chance to tell. A decent seat to the opera is a bit stiff for a first year clerk in de Grasse, and I’m not enough of a fan for the peanut gallery.”

  “Oh, but I’m sure Mamma would be delighted to ask you to come in our box! We go to all the matinées.”

  The life that Alix led was considered a highly restricted one, even for those days. She took no courses, did no charity work and spent most of her time with her female Prime cousins. On Saturday afternoon after Saturday afternoon they overflowed the Chauncey Primes’ opera box like violets in a red vase and scribbled their names in each other’s programs with ecstatic comments. As no Prime ever threw anything away, I am sure that there are still bundles of these in attics in Newport and Southampton with such finely flowing marginal comments as: “Sem-brich magnificent! Ten curtain calls. Gladys—Manuela—Alix—-Mamma—Miss Pym.”

  How I see them again, those bright-eyed, gushing, overdressed Prime girls, so romantic, so earnest, so idealistic! One might have thought that they were too soft and gentle for a hard world, but that would have been because one did not know how much of that world they owned. They did not forget it. Look at them today. They may no longer have their looks or their figures, but they have still their fortunes and, more curiously, their ideals. The American heiress is as tough as the heir is weak.

  Except Alix. Alix was always the exception to every rule. She was more childish, at nineteen, but she was also more sensitive. She had a funny, intense way of going about all her small daily occupations. She knew her opera plots, down to the last villain’s disguise and the last lady’s maid’s lament, and loved to talk about them. I had not been to the Chauncey Primes’ more than twice before I realized that people treated Alix specially. They listened to her in the patient way that people listen to a temperamental and difficult child. The surface of her calm was a brittle one and covered a murky, perhaps even tumultuous adolescence.

  As I have already said, it was before the days of popular psychiatry, and young girls who suffered from what is now called “manic depression” were simply sent to their rooms, or to country estates, until they were in a more presentable mood. Guy’s mother, who struck me as having “nerves” herself, was the one who warned me about Alix.

  “She’s been different, ever since she was a child. First way up and then way down. Gay as a lark and gloomy as an owl. People talk about it, and of course my brother-in-law fancies that any young man who looks at her is after her money.”

  “How horrible!”

  “Well, I daresay some of them are.”

  “But Alix is an enchanting creature!” I protested warmly. “She doesn’t need money to attract a man. Can’t he see that? Can’t her mother see it?”

  “Oh, Amy sees things through her husband’s eyes. Even when her heart tells her otherwise.”

  Guy’s mother was right about this. Mrs. Chauncey Prime was not what she seemed. Everything about her appearance suggested a “no nonsense” attitude, a brusque but kindly straightforwardness, a large capacity for pulling aside confining drapery and letting in air. She was big and plain and hearty, and she used her parasol, like a terrible duchess in an English parlor comedy, to poke young people and summon them to her side. But what in reality was this paragon, this sweeping, feathered gorgon, this splendid despot, but a craven creature who trembled at the frown of the insignificant man whom she had made rich? I was to find New York society full of such paradoxes.

  I went on three Saturday afternoons with Alix and Mrs. Prime to the opera before I was asked to meet their lord and master at Sunday lunch. Chauncey Prime was a smaller, dryer version of Guy’s father, similarly immaculate, but instead of holding himself straight he hunched his shoulders and shook his head in endless exercise of an endless capacity for disapproval. He did not once evince the smallest interest at any topic of conversation at lunch.

  “I hear you work for Marcellus de Grasse,” he said to me gruffly. “I suppose you’re a great admirer of his. All the young men seem to be.”

  “He has a great imagination, sir. In fact, I doubt if any man has a nobler concept of the role of capital in modern society.”

  Mr. Prime grunted. I should have guessed that enthusiasm was anathema to him. The man who had married his money could afford to admire only the bare fact of its possession.

  “De Grasse may be all very well,” he continued, “but he belongs to a bygone era. Men like Rockefeller and Carnegie could buy and sell him twenty times over today. He puts me in mind of a baronet in a powdered wig poking about in a steel foundry.”

  “But surely capital isn’t only a question of quantity,” I protested, perhaps too warmly. “Isn’t the great thing to know where it’s needed? A few dollars in the right place can still make industrial history. And I think de Grasse Brothers, with their flair for this kind of thing, will be around as long as your Rockefellers and Carnegies. Perhaps longer.”

  Mr. Prime gave another grunt and addressed no further remarks to me for the balance of our meal. If there was one thing he hated more than enthusiasm, it was an enthusiastic young man.

  Alix walked in the park with me that afternoon. It was the fifth time I had seen her and the first that we had been alone. I was mortified to find that I trembled so that I could hardly speak. When I took her back to her house we had not exchanged a word that could not have been spoken in the presence of both her parents. Yet I was sure, from her own constraint and averted glances, that she was in trouble, too.

  All my life I had fancied myself in charge of my destiny. One day, of course, I would marry, and my bride would be Lucy Ames, or a girl much like her. What I had never seen or wanted to see in my cards was an heiress. Yet here I was, choked to incoherence by my passion for a rich girl whom I did not even admire! Why in God’s name was love called blind? I saw every fault in poor Alix and every disadvantage to me, by my peculiar lights, of her worldly advantages.

  To do her justice, if she did not fit into my picture of what my life should be, she fitted even less into the Primes’ picture of what she should be. Indeed, there seemed to be no pictures where she did fit. She dressed and talked more like someone playing a society girl on the stage than a society girl. At first I had suspected her of sarcasm, but better acquaintance routed this theory. Her nature was not rebellious. In fact, the very key to her character might have been in her absolute submission to the world in which she found herself. I doubt if it ever crossed her mind to question the validity of her father’s rule or the point of her family’s gilded vacuous existence. Yet this did not mean that she was lacking in character. Even her younger sisters, who were inclined to make fun of her, did not laugh when Alix’s tone rose to shrillness. There were certain things she could not bear: she would clap her hands to her ears at any tale of physical brutality, of man’s unkindness to man or to animals. Her greatest distress was that her sensitivity made her useless in any kind of hospital work. Sometimes it seemed to me that she clung to the world of the Primes only because it was so insulated from horror, that she picked her way across the carnage of the universe without daring to look down. But that was what distinguished her from the others. She knew that the carnage was there.

  Something had to happen. I could not go on so. If I could not speak before Alix alone, I had to speak before others. One Saturday afternoon in that cold early spring, when I called at the house, I saw the tall maroon Daimler parked before the door and met Mrs. Prime and Alix coming out. Th
ey were going calling, and Mrs. Prime, in her usual friendly fashion, asked me to join them. She probably had not expected that I would accept, as calling was a ladies’ pursuit, but I abruptly decided that this was my moment, and jumped into the car before she could change her mind.

  We drove off. Mrs. Prime was dropping cards on the people with whom she had recently dined and on the people who had recently dropped cards on her, and in the smaller society of that day she could dispose of as many as five in a single street. She had a footman as well as a chauffeur, a not uncommon circumstance for the rich of that ostentatious era, and we sat in the back of the car, I on the strapontin and Alix and her mother on the cushioned seat, while the footman climbed the long stoops with the little envelopes. The lady of the house usually had the tact not to be “in,” but occasionally she was, which would be signaled by a nod to the chauffeur, who would turn to alert Mrs. Prime, who would sigh and grumble and gather up her skirts to descend.

  It was wonderful what the fashions of 1909 did to romanticize this simple bourgeois scene. Mrs. Prime’s stalwart figure carried well the straight sweeping lines of silk, the puffed shoulders, the wide-brimmed hat with its ostrich feathers, while Alix, demure in a white blouse and plain black skirt seemed absurdly young and very sweetly filial. I think to this day of that street of cluttered brownstone stoops under a slatey April sky as the quintessence of romance.

  While Mrs. Prime was making one of her calls, Alix must have felt the contagion of my mood, for she asked me: “What on earth can you be thinking about? You look as pleased as Daddy when someone asks him a genealogical question about old New York.”

  I burst out laughing. “I was just thinking that I’d like to go on doing just this, forever and ever!”

  “Leaving cards?”

  “Yes!”