Angelica in later years used to pooh-pooh this. She accused me of making it up to accord with a myth which I was constructing that there had really been only one woman in my life. Why, she would demand, if I had felt that way, had I not broken my engagement to Lucy, who was always the soul of understanding? Well, firstly, I could not bear to hurt Lucy, but, secondly, and even more importantly, I had decided that the savage brute within me must at all costs be put down. For what but a brute in the course of a single year could have proposed to two women and fallen in love with a third! I had no idea then what protracted continence could do to a man, and I concluded that I was a lost soul whom Lucy alone could redeem. I even managed to convince myself that Lucy might be better off not having to cope with the kind of passion that Alix and Angelica had aroused! Remember, reader, those were different days.
In New York, after Lucy and I were married, I took care to see as little as possible of Angelica. This was not difficult, as she and Guy were very social, and it was made even simpler by what seemed to be Lucy’s instinctive aversion to her.
“You’ll have to accept it, darling,” she told me. “I can’t look at a woman like Angelica Prime without wondering if you wouldn’t have done better with a more elegant wife. Now, don’t tell me that underneath the beautiful enamel Angelica is the same shrinking violet I am. Maybe she is. But with women, beautiful women anyway, I have to judge by externals. That’s the woman in me!”
There now followed, despite our inauspicious beginning, the good years for Lucy and me. I worked desperately hard, frequently at night, and she was constantly left to her own devices, but it was always clear that we were ascending the ladder of fame and fortune. A great esprit de corps prevailed in de Grasse Brothers that reached even to the wives, who rarely resented their husbands’ preoccupation with the “cause.” Besides, our son George, as a boy, was a delicate child and required much of Lucy’s attention. Life was full enough. Later, when the money came, she regretted those days, for she never cared about wealth except for her charities. And with the money came the event that darkened our existence, the loss of our baby daughter, a Mongolian idiot, whom Lucy pathetically and unreasonably adored, and the advent (now believed to have been psychologically connected) of her long, terrible arthritis.
Guy always made a great deal of how desperately he had sought combat duty in the first war and how shabbily General Devers had treated him by tearing up his applications and insisting to Pershing himself that he was an indispensable staff officer. It may be true, but I could never quite overcome my prejudice, as a graduate of the trenches, against those who professed to regard our experience as the great ball of the century that it was their tragedy to have missed. If it was a ball, we had not all found it so hard to crash. The Guy, at any rate, who emerged from the ashes of world catastrophe, bustling and busy, with the whispered message from Jupiter, the wink that sealed the hidden pact, the hand that propelled one out of the crowded antechamber and through the back corridor to the inner citadel, the Guy who ran errands for Mars and dined with Venus, the Guy, in short, of so many splendid façades that one felt a churl even to inquire about interiors, was the Guy of the ‘twenties and of their inescapable symbols: the speakeasy and the bull market.
He accuses me of wanting all the same things that he wanted, but of refusing to admit it. It would be truer to say that I was afraid of wanting them. From the beginning of our relationship I had resisted fiercely, and at times, ungraciously, the temptation of things Prime. Actually, I exaggerated the danger of that temptation. My weak spot, as the reader should now be aware, was more in the flesh than in the pocketbook. Guy sneers at my “big dreary house,” but I would never have bought it if Mr. de Grasse had not absolutely insisted that Lucy and I raise our standard of living. So it was that, with little heart in it, we acquired the Tudor mansion on the north shore of Long Island and filled it with Jacobean furniture purchased at what we hoped were good auctions. Over the mantel in the living room we hung a Rembrandt portrait of a moneylender, a Shylockian character selected by Lucy, that turned out to be a fake. Mr. de Grasse, inspecting the premises, chuckled repeatedly and murmured “Perfect.” Of course, he was making fun of us, but even my eye was good enough to detect that his chateau at Fontainebleau suggested more Nana in her prosperity than the dean of the New York banking world in his. Old New York, however cynical, had its vulgar side.
I am afraid that I became even more dry and austere at this period of my life. It was my way of adapting myself to Lucy’s increasing invalidism. I was what is called “devoted,” but my devotion must have seemed at times mechanical to her. Poor darling, it was her discipline to accept it as devotion. She knew that, like many healthy male animals, I instinctively “disapproved” of illness. She would have preferred, I am sure, to have had me less faithful and more spontaneous. When infidelity came at last, as I shall record in its place, she never complained. But for the most part she had to live before the spectacle of my rather grim solicitude. She accepted it as she accepted her illness, with the gallantry that never deserted her, even when she pretended that it had, in order not to weary us with the spectacle of it. At the risk of inviting Evadne’s boys to accuse me of the reckless sentimentality of a guilty conscience, I will aver that Lucy was a saint.
I was particularly anxious, in this period that ended with the market collapse of 1929, to distinguish myself from Guy. The plainness of my house was meant to redeem itself in the contrast that it afforded to the beauty of his, as my dark suits were to find their merit in their difference from his gay tweeds. I did not want my George, who was first a friend and then a beau of Evadne’s and a constant visitor at Meadowview, to confuse her father’s meretricious success with what I had the egoism to regard as my own more substantial contribution to the economy. What it really boiled down to (and it hurts even now to admit itl) was that Guy’s constant identification of our careers and aims bred occasional doubts in my own heart as to their variety. When I beheld him in all his glory at the Glenville Club, shouting at me to join him at the bar, when he passed me on the road in some glittering foreign car, even when he strode into my office, dazzling the staff with the remembered first names that he so freely distributed, I could not altogether down the ugly little suspicion that we were the same, two boys who had made good together, I with his connections and he with my “savvy,” two smart youngsters who had got more than their share of the icing on the world’s birthday cake. The only difference, his broad grin implied, was that I was a hypocrite.
The depression changed my world, but in no way more importantly than by bringing the event that to Guy’s mind was forever to justify his insinuated charge.
8.
DURING THE first years of the depression I toiled as never before to keep the great galleon of de Grasse off the navigational hazards that strewed that terrible time, and by the summer of 1933, when I was beginning at last to see my way into the future, my body abruptly signified its protest. One morning I fainted at my desk, and my doctor prescribed total rest for a fortnight. There was nothing organically wrong, he assured me, but the engine needed oiling. When I confessed that I had taken no regular exercise since 1929, he was shocked.
“Very well,” I told him glumly. “What shall I do?”
“I know that look of yours, Mr. Geer. You don’t think anything will do you any good unless you hate it. You want me to prescribe some repulsive kind of calisthenics. Didn’t you used to ride?”
“I used to ride with Lucy. Until she had to give it up.”
“Did you like it?”
“Pretty well.”
“Then ride!”
So I bought a mare and went riding every Saturday afternoon. After a month I took jumping lessons at the Glenville Club, and by fall I decided that I was good enough to join the hunt. At my first meet Angelica Prime, very impressive in a black habit and tall silk hat, rode up to me.
“Since when did you become a hunter?”
“Since this morning.”
“How can I tell till I’ve tried?”
She looked me up and down and shrugged. “Your seat’s all right, anyway. Follow me, and don’t take any jumps that I don’t.”
Of course, I had to show her how good I was, as though I had been twenty-seven instead of forty-seven, and it served me right that I went off at the very first one that she passed up and that I attempted, knocking my wind out and spraining an ankle. Angelica, to my intense mortification, insisted on leaving the hunt to drive me home. On the way she gave me a lecture.
“There’s no reason you shouldn’t be as good a rider as you are a banker, but you can’t do it overnight. I’ll be your teacher. Why not? You’re the oldest and best friend Guy has and the only one, if you ask me (which he doesn’t) that we can really count on. I’m the idlest woman in the world, with both children at school, so why shouldn’t I turn you into a hunter? You probably never want to see a horse again now, but next week you’ll be feeling differently. We’ll go out together.”
And so it started. Soon Angelica and I were riding on Sunday as well as Saturday and, at Guy’s insistence, I moved my mare to the Meadowview stables. Guy professed to be delighted that Angelica was “taking me in hand,” and Lucy, upset by my tumble at the hunt, expressed relief that I had so competent an instructor. In fact, both our spouses seemed to nod over our weekend expeditions as if we were two young creatures whose artless innocence made a charming tableau. But I knew perfectly well that I had no business seeing so much of Angelica.
I tried to persuade myself that it was ridiculous to suppose that the feelings which she had aroused in me twenty years before could be aroused so easily again. I mustered in my mind all the arguments against such an eventuality—my own greater age and presumably greater wisdom, the fact that Angelica herself was now a middle-aged matron with nearly adult children and, finally, the total disparity of our tastes and interests. What had I to fear from a woman who seemed to fling in my face her espousal of every principle that I despised, who embodied in her trimly clad frame the sporting life of what I considered total irresponsibility?
Obviously, everything. But by the time I realized this, idiot that I was, I was too committed to those weekends to give them up. I felt, somewhere deep within me, a new, shocking, surly defiance of the sense of duty that had always dominated me. “What have you really had for all your work?” the truculent inner voice kept snarling. “What have you had but money that you didn’t want and a home that has become a hospital?” Oh, I would be loyal to that home! I swore in my odious guilt that I would be. But how would it help Lucy if I gave up my rides?
Never had I discussed my life so intimately with anyone as I did that spring with Angelica. She and I were well prepared for this new friendship as we already knew the important things about each other. I knew about Guy and his philanderings; she about Lucy and her arthritis. She knew my George as well as I knew her Evadne. We were each hilariously refreshed by the novelty of the other’s point of view in areas which we had thought too familiar for further surprises.
Nor was the danger only for me. Angelica made little effort to conceal that she found me a welcome contrast to the society that Long Island had offered her in such heaping doses. She liked my indifference to her husband’s adored Glenville Club; she liked my seriousness about things that had been simply funny to her; she even professed to like my stuffiness and what she called my “axeless” religiosity. “You carry out so scrupulously the mandates of a God in whom you don’t really believe,” she told me. “I find that stylish!” I suspected ( and it was more than the wish being parent to the idea) that she had lived too long without love. There was a candor about the pleasure that she took in our rides which had a quaint and charming innocence to it. But what happened to innocence if there was no conscience? And did she not boast of being an epicurean?
So, obviously, we should not have gone riding together, but after only two weekends it was equally obvious that we were going right on with it. There was not even any further pretense that I was being trained for the hunt. Our talk was too important to us. Sometimes we would proceed at a walk for as much as an hour at a time while Angelica talked of her life, her children, her mother, her house—and Guy. She seemed to take it for granted that I would accept any confidences, as if, in all the years of our acquaintance, we had both known that our brief and rather formal communications were destined one day to flower into this equestrian understanding.
One morning as we left the stable, Guy came speeding down the driveway in his yellow Packard roadster with a very vivid blonde, one Mrs. Apsley, on the seat beside him. He jammed on his brakes, hailed us, wished us a good ride and roared on.
“Guy always wants me to have a good time,” Angelica observed dryly. “He might do me the courtesy occasionally to frown when he sees me with another man. Just for manners’ sake. But no. He never had a jealous bone in his body. Even in the days when he cared.”
“He never cares now?” My effort to make the question casual was so clumsy that she smiled.
“Well, he cares for Evelyn Apsley, but that, of course, won’t last. What I mean is that Guy is totally without sexual jealousy. Some animals are like that.”
“Rather low forms of animals, I should say. Are you jealous of Mrs. Apsley?”
“Not in the least. But then I’m not in love with Guy. I haven’t been for ten years. But before that I was jealous. Oh, yes, passionately! I could have torn the eyes out of every girl he looked at. But he was always willing to allow me the same latitude he allowed himself.”
“How contemptible!” I exclaimed and kicked my horse into a trot. I was still sufficiently confused about my emotions to hate to hear Angelica talk dispassionately about her husband. She was my heroine, and I wanted my heroine to be very brave, very noble and very wronged, and how could she be all those things if she didn’t care what he did? It might seem that I should have been pleased at her conjugal indifference, that I had nothing to gain if she still cared for Guy, but what did I want to gain? Nothing that I would yet admit to myself!
Lucy had gone to Arizona for what was now her annual cure, and George was at Harvard, so that I was without the sense of a family at home to restrain me on the day that Angelica and I had our crucial talk. Once again it started with her analyzing Guy. Her curiosity about a husband whom she professed no longer to love exasperated me unreasonably.
“I suppose the secret of Guy is that he’s always content with the status quo,” she was speculating. “Any status quo. It can be very undermining to those who live with him. One finds oneself so constantly being used. And Guy uses one in such perfectly good faith, that’s the devilish thing! My house, my horses, my friends, my own mother, are always being converted into stage props for the glorification of Guy Prime. We end up looking as he wants us to look, as he thinks we are. And as, God help us, we may be! Do you know that if I didn’t lock my door at night he’d probably come from the arms of Evelyn Apsley to make love to me? As if we were a blissfully happy married couple? Sometimes I wonder which is the dreamer? Guy or I?”
“He is the dreamer,” I said firmly. “Your feet are on the ground.” I glanced away from her, over the meadows, to the long purple façade of her beautiful house. “So don’t unlock your door.”
I sensed the embarrassment in her averted head, but I knew that she was not offended. Her remark had been wildly provocative. “Never fear. I shan’t. All that is long over between Guy and me. Tell me one thing about Guy, and then I’ll stop talking about him.” She reined her horse to a stop and gave me a searching look. “Has he borrowed any money from you recently? I mean since we’ve been riding together?”
I flushed very red. “No.”
“Thank goodness.” Abruptly she trotted on. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
“Are you having money troubles?” I demanded anxiously.
“No more than usual. Never mind about them. I count on you for sympathy, not for cas
h.”
“But cash means so little to me!” I protested, spurring ahead to catch up with her. When she did not turn, I let slip the last cable of my common sense. “Nothing means anything to me but you!”
Angelica turned now, smiling, and reached over to hit my shoulder with her riding crop. “Pupils are not supposed to make love to their riding instructors!”
“Angelica, I adore you!”
For answer she simply kicked her horse and galloped away. All the way back to the stable she kept ahead of me, and when she dismounted, the presence o£ the groom prevented further confidences. But I noted the high color in her normally pale cheeks.
“Thank you, Rex,” she called to me cheerfully, “for a very pleasant ride!”
My car was parked at the stable, in full sight of the groom; there seemed no way to be alone with her. As she continued to smile, I walked over to the car and got in. She waved her riding crop, still smiling, as I drove off.
9.
ON OUR NEXT Monday lunch Guy looked very grave and told me that he had an important matter to discuss. For a terrible moment I thought it was going to be Angelica, but almost immediately my incredulous ears were hearing his plea for a loan of a hundred thousand dollars. With a trembling hand I wrote the check right there at the dining room table. The trembling was caused by a giddy combination of relief and anticipation. The bawd is only a loathsome figure to the satisfied lover. At that moment Guy seemed as benevolent as Santa Claus. He had given me back my good conscience.
Now I come to the part of my memoir where I can mince no words. Lucy was off for the winter in Arizona. Guy was “squared.” The next time I went riding with Angelica I proposed, in a dry, businesslike tone, designed to strip my words of any cheap seductiveness, that we become lovers. In like manner, if with the slightest parody of it, she agreed. Thereafter, we met every other afternoon, for a period of four weeks, in an apartment that I rented on Riverside Drive. Then our relationship was brought to a sudden close.
The Embezzler Page 20