My hardest time was the two years that followed my unspectacular debut at a tea dance in the shabby brownstone that my parents, who both hated New York, had reluctantly rented for the season. I knew few young people in the city, and Father, whose social ideas were of the eighteenth century (“Did you speak to him?” was his only comment on hearing that I had sat next to Jay Gould’s grandson at dinner), absolutely forbade me to go to college. “Do? What do you mean you have nothing to do?” he would bellow at me. “Have you no needlework?” The only alternative to spending the next two winters with him in Tuxedo was to travel with Mother. Neither of them would have heard of my getting my own apartment, and I had no money except for a meager allowance. My only hope was that Mother would stay long enough in one place for me to meet some men.
By twenty, I was in a really bad way. I had fallen in love twice, but briefly and very unsatisfactorily: once with a big red pig of a guards officer who was looking for a fortune and thought all Americans must be rich, and again with Mother’s Italian courier whom even I had to disqualify as a suitor. Moody and intractable, I derived my sole pleasure in sneering at the people and things that Mother admired. I hated Europe, yet dreaded to go home. I envied my New York contemporaries who had gone unsensationally to Miss Chapin’s or Brearley, made their debuts at Sherry’s and had now settled down in the suburbs with nice young lawyers or stockbrokers. I must have been a trial to be with. I doubt if it was entirely by accident that I left Mother’s precious inscribed copy of the privately printed Education of Henry Adams on a train between Florence and Milan. It was this episode, I think, more than anything else, that drove her at last to action.
When she told me, one beautiful spring morning in Paris that she had asked a “handsome young man” to go with us to Senlis, I said abruptly that I wouldn’t go. I assumed that it would be another of the twittering homosexuals whom she gathered about her as the Pied Piper did children. But Mother knew exactly what I was assuming.
“I wonder how Mr. Baylies will like him,” she mused, referring to the moth-eaten old bachelor who was providing the limousine for our excursion. “Dear Henry is hardly used to football players.”
Well, of course, she was being subtle, as they say, like a meat axe. But why should she have wasted anything subtler than a meat axe on me? The bait was quite enough. The next morning I was ready to go when the car came, and she was far too wise to make any reference to my change of mind.
Let nobody tell me that love at first sight is an invention of poets! Guy was waiting for us at the doorway of his hotel in a red blazer, and when he bounded towards the car sweeping off his straw hat, when I saw that crown of blond hair and those sky-blue eyes, I knew that I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I fell in love on the spot and remained in love for ten full years. When I emerged at the end of my amorous decade, the wife of a prosperous stockbroker and the mother of his two fine children, possessed of all the wonderful American things that I had thought I wanted, I found that it was a bit late to start my emotional life over from scratch.
The most amazing thing to me in Guy’s memoir is his obvious unawareness, during the months of his courtship, of what was going on inside me. Although I naturally took the greatest pains to conceal it, I should have thought no young man could have helped but guess. The answer must have lain in Guy’s uncanny talent for turning the world into a romantic stage. Looking back on our Mediterranean cruise aboard “The Loon,” I may see a worldly mother who had lured a young man on board to get rid of a petulant daughter, but that is a set on which Guy would have promptly rung down the curtain. When he raised it again the mother would have become a benign and worldly-wise philosopher and the daughter a dark, brooding, sultry Electra. It would have been Aeschylus with a happy ending, where Orestes, the brother turned lover, by a valiant exercise of his brilliant personality would dissuade Electra from her morbid preoccupations and lead her to the altar with Clytemnestra smiling over an orchid in the front pew. What became of this magnificent mish-mash, of the Oresteia ending in Pinafore, if Electra simply collapsed in a heap at the first appearance of the hero from the wings?
I had some small sense of this, very early in our relationship, some faint suspicion of the role in which he had cast me and of the importance of my maintaining it, but that was only one of my reasons for resisting him with such apparent ferocity. Another was a virginal instinct of self-defense. Never had my senses been so violently assaulted, and I was appalled that a single ride in a motorcar from Paris to Senlis opposite a young man in a jump seat who directed all of his conversation, with an exasperating relish, to my vain old mother, should have reduced me to such a state of wanton submissiveness. As he and I roamed about the cathedral after Mother and Mr. Baylies, my thoughts were wildly inappropriate for a house of God. It was my first intimation that a respectable girl could be turned into a tart in an hour’s time.
Worse still, much worse, he was Mother’s candidate. That was what she thought of me. She had borne my tantrums with a maddening patience until I had lost her precious Henry Adams. That had marked the boundary of my permitted iniquities; clearly, it was time to turn on a young man. What kind of a young man? Oh, any bland young Yankee with a Charles Dana Gibson face and football shoulders, the kind one could find by the dozen, yawning through Europe, spending their days in cathedrals and their nights in bordellos, filling in the prescribed interregnum between the college years where they had left their souls and the downtown office where they would lose their looks. Just the kind of young man, too, that Mother most despised, representing everything that had driven her to near expatriotism! But good enough for Angelica. Oh, yes, if anything, too good for Angelica. Her total indifference to my chaperonage aboard “The Loon” and on our shore excursions smacked of the procuress. How could I reconcile myself to being so exactly what she took me for?
Then there were my brothers. Unlike Mother, who never wavered in her professed approval of Guy, they made constant mock of him behind his back and even to his face. Poor Guy did not recognize their sarcasms. They would pick up his banal comments on any ruin that we visited and toss them back and forth with ostensible admiration. I suffered obvious agonies, which of course delighted them. It was the gentle, sympathetic Giulio de Medici, one of Mother’s epicine young men, whom Guy so comically persisted in seeing as the object of my adoration, who helped me with my brothers.
“Angelica, cara, do not trouble yourself about Teddy and Lionel. They think they are superior to Guy because they know Europe a tiny bit better. But it is a very tiny bit, believe me. To us who belong here your Yankee young men are very much alike. The difference is that we prefer the more genuine product. Look at Guy now.” We were in a Sicilian village, and Guy, in white flannels and a sun helmet, was bargaining in a bazaar, a little crowd of successfully begging children at his heels. “He is a generous man and a good one. Why should you be made to feel ashamed for admiring so fine a product of your native land? Let your brothers sneer if they want. I believe they’re only envious of him, anyway.”
I considered this for a hopeful moment before at last rejecting it. “No,” I said gloomily. “My family envy nobody.”
“How very unwise of them,” Giulio retorted. “I make a point of envying many people. I envy Guy, for example, the pleasant impression he makes. He thinks I make one on you. Which is quite all right.” Giulio drooped his left eyebrow in what was as near as I ever saw him come to a wink. “Let him.”
It was all too much. Guy wanted to marry me, and everyone, even my brothers, thought he was quite as good a match as I was likely to make. Guy and I, indeed, were the only persons on board “The Loon” who were not convinced that his courtship would succeed. I found myself in a shocking position, for in 1911 I was still, for all my petty revolts, very easily shocked. I wanted Guy for a lover, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted him for a husband. There were moments when I thought I was going to explode into tiny pieces and be plastered from one end of the yacht to the other.
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br /> The final stage was shame. I was suddenly horribly ashamed of the whole farce. Here was a nice young man, a fine young man, as Giulio said, a young man whom any decent American girl should have been proud to marry, being taken in by a mean old woman and her two snotty sons, who were trying to pawn off a sulking, bad-tempered girl by taking advantage of his naive faith in their supposed international sophistication! And what was the girl doing but pretending to be in love with a pansy in order to excite his passion? What a shoddy crew of expatriate adventurers! It was like a sordid parody of a Henry James tale. I had read Ibsen and Strindberg and Baudelaire and Zola. What business did I have acting like a coy debutante? Could I not rise once beyond the miasma of convention and live? If I wanted Guy, could I not have the simple honesty to tell him so?
So I went that night to his cabin, and the scene occurred that he has quite sufficiently related. I shall not attempt to embellish his lush paragraphs, but I will admit that he is correct in concluding that I had not realized how completely the act of love would deliver me into his power. After that night there was no further question of my not marrying Guy. Had he bade me apply a match to a fuse that would blow up “The Loon” and escape with him on a lifeboat I would have done so. In those last days of our cruise, if Teddy or Lionel dared to make a single joke about Guy, I was on them at once like a spitting cat. They soon learned to let me alone. I even tried to trap Mother into some remark that I could construe as derogatory to the Prime family so that I could jump on her, too, but she was too clever for me. She was entirely consistent in her attitude that Guy’s family were all one could hope for as in-laws.
“None of the Primes were ever fat,” she observed in her unexpected way. “That always seemed to me the worst thing about New York social life: the stoutness of the men and women. It may come from too little conversation and too long meals. But the Primes are civilized folk. They talk while they eat.”
What could you do with a mother like that? Yet there was apt to be an uncanny relevance to everything she said. Some years later, when Guy started putting on weight, I remembered it.
Until we arrived in Paris Guy showed only his lover’s side, and I lived in a state of drugged euphoria. With the announcement of our engagement, however, and preparations for the wedding, I saw a very different man emerge. Had I seen this Guy on our first meeting, he might not have exercised so strong an attraction. But it was far too late for any such considerations. Had he turned out to be the devil himself, Angelica Hyde would have been stuck.
Of course, I would have preferred the devil. I think the hardest thing that a healthy American girl can face is the discovery in her beloved of a rigid sense of the importance of social observances. Guy in Paris decided that it was time to bring me down from my cloud and to teach me to face what he considered the realities of life. What realities! The first thing I had to learn was the Prime family tree, on which he gave me, in all seriousness, a detailed lecture. The picture of such a silly topic on the lips of such a beautiful young man struck me as too ridiculous, and I interrupted him with shrieks of laughter. There was no answering mirth.
“I know it’s fashionable to laugh at these things, dearest, and of course one has to in company. Nobody wants to seem stuffy. But all these social attitudes are only conventions, you know. Your friend Giulio bows to the rule that ‘smart’ Italian aristocrats must laugh at their ancestry, but if you ask him privately to explain his relationship to Catherine de Medici, he’ll talk for an hour. Your trouble, sweetheart, is that your mother is so sincerely above these things, so genuinely intellectual, that you don’t realize that underneath all the chatter most people know their family trees, if they have one, to the last twig.”
This attitude was decidedly repellent to me. Not only did I reject his concept of the preoccupations of the “real” world, but I passionately rejected his concept of Mother. I told him angrily that I wasn’t marrying his family tree and that I would be delighted to discover that he had been a foundling.
“Very well, I see you’re in no mood for this today,” he said in a mild enough tone, but with a sudden flicker of bronze in his blue stare that chilled me. “I’ll come again when you are.”
We had met in the sitting room of Mother’s hotel suite, and now he rose. “Guy!” I exclaimed. “You don’t mean you’re leaving because I won’t let you bore me with all those silly old Primes who are dead and buried?”
“No. I only care that you should learn about the living ones. For the most practical of reasons. When we get back to New York I expect to set up my own brokerage firm, and until I get my head above water I must depend on family business.”
“You mean you want me to be a retriever!” I cried indignantly. “You want me to fawn on all your rich relations so we can get their business. I never heard anything so contemptible!”
For the first time I saw Guy really angry. His voice became deep and resonant. “You’re nothing but a spoiled brat,” he shouted at me. “You’ve taken for granted all your life that money comes out of taps. Just the way you take for granted that someone will make your bed and clean your bathroom. Well, I’m not marrying any little Miss Muffet, thank you very much. When you’ve made up your mind that you want to be Mrs. Guy Prime—a very different thing, I can assure you, from being Miss Angelica Hyde—you can send a note to my hotel. Only I wouldn’t wait too long if I were you.”
And he walked out. He really walked out.
The next day I waited for him to send me a letter of apology, but I knew in my heart that it wouldn’t come. Whatever else it might have been that I had hooked myself to, there was no question that it was a man. By evening I had worked myself into such a panic that I even appealed to Mother. As I might have known, she took Guy’s side.
“There’s always been a lot of that kind of back scratching in financial life,” she told me. “Your father and I have been able to avoid it and see only the people we like because your father’s mother had the good sense to be born a Bartelet in Brooklyn in the days when it meant something to be a Bartelet in Brooklyn. But I’m afraid your father has made rather a dent in his share of the Bartelet money. Your generation will have to go back to caring whom they ask for dinner. It’s too bad, but it’s the way most of the world lives.”
“But, Mother,” I protested, “you never could abide people who mixed business with social life! Don’t you remember that man in Tuxedo who was always asking you and Daddy to dinner because he wanted Daddy to invest in his sugar company?”
“Yes, and it’s a great pity we didn’t,” Mother said feelingly. “You and Guy could retire to Biarritz if we had. But he was such a vulgar man! I’m sure the relatives whom Guy wants you to be nice to can’t be that bad.”
“But is there no question of principle involved?”
“I should think none. The greatest luxury money can buy is choosing your own friends and snubbing the people you want to snub. Yet it’s curious how few even of the old rich avail themselves of these privileges. Most of them are as cautious as the worst parvenus.”
I thought Mother quite shockingly cynical, and I continued to believe that there was something dishonorable about cultivating frumps for business reasons. As a matter of fact, I continued to feel this way right up to the time when, as an elderly woman, I married Rex. Then I discovered that the saintly Lucy, right through her lifetime, had entertained exclusively for the benefit of de Grasse Brothers. Because her dinners had been dull and stately, I had assumed that they had been disinterested. I was quite wrong.
But for all my disapproval, I still surrendered. There was never any real question about this. My little principles and prejudices were swept aside like crisp, disintegrating autumn leaves before the stiff stern broom of my aching need. Before the second day I had gone to Guy’s hotel. It was true, to continue and no doubt to strain my metaphor, that those leaves were to form a compost heap that nurtured later dissensions, but at the time the issue was clear. I humbly begged his pardon.
He took it for
granted, but he was still magnanimous. He took me out for a superb dinner, and we were very gay and jovial. No more was said about the Primes or even about our wedding preparations. But the very next day my lessons were resumed.
I had to write a letter to each of his aunts, and although he did not say so, it was perfectly evident that the length of each letter was governed by the size of the aunt’s fortune. Grimly I determined, like a good little girl, to swallow without question whatever was placed on his inexorably extended spoon, and, after the first few gulps, I was rewarded by the taste of some sweeter elements in the ingredients of my medicine. Guy, I was relieved to discover, had more things in his mind than simple opportunism. Rich or poor, healthy or sick, weak or mighty, he never forgot a human being who had once entered his life.
Old servants of the family, old-maid cousins of his late mother living in shabby genteel retirement, old masters of St. Andrew’s School, old tutors and nurses, all these had to be written to, as well. Guy could never let any part of his past go. Whether it was affection, or generosity, or simply the natural desire to strut, in the role of the young heir, before devoted retainers who tugged their forelocks as they called down blessings upon his golden head, I did not know or care. I was only too happy to make the most of each good point that I could find in my new master.
My worst blow was the arrival of his father. I took an immediate dislike to this sporty old fraud that I was never able to overcome in all the years that elapsed before his demise. Not that I really ever tried. But I did have to try to keep my feelings to myself. It was obvious even to a callow girl that Guy’s passionate devotion and admiration for his progenitor were unbreakable. One had only to see them strolling down the Champs Elysée together, arm in arm, with matching gray trousers, gray coats and spats, lifting their tall hats in a uniform gesture of gallantry to a passing lady, to be convinced that one would never succeed in breaking through the clichés of a daddy who was “more of a pal than a parent” and a son who had no secrets, even of the boudoir, from his beloved mentor. Even Mother finally conceded that I had a problem with Mr. Prime.
The Embezzler Page 24