The Embezzler (35 page)

Reading Guy's trial in the newspaper, I learned that it was
after
my visit to Westhampton that he plundered the family trust. Had I cabled Rex as I had threatened and had he put a stop to Guy's activities, I might have saved him from jail. But I do not believe that Guy would have thanked me. He was perfectly content with the progress of the events that he had set in motion.

If I had had any doubts about this, they would have been dispelled by his behavior on the fatal day when his firm was suspended from trading. Rex had telephoned me in the morning and told me the whole story. I was obviously not too surprised, but I was dazed. Typically, I went out for a long ride and returned to find the house full of friends calling to offer their sympathy. Of course, they had heard only of the failure of the firm, not of the reason for it. Then Guy himself strode in and made the speech in which he announced his pending indictment.

What most struck me about that little oration was how carefully rehearsed it must have been. No man could have been at once so concise and so effectively dramatic had he not planned it that way. The same eerie conviction came over me that I had experienced at Bertha's in Westhampton: Guy was delivering a long-planned valediction.

The offer that I made him, when the friends had gone, to share disaster as we had never shared prosperity, was perfectly sincere. Not only did I feel a responsibility in not having acted to interrupt his downward course, but I did not see that I was any use to anybody else. Lucy Geer was right when she told Rex that this was the challenge I had waited for. I never had a moment's doubt as to where my duty lay. This sick man, this sinner, this compulsive escapist was my husband. Where else did I belong but at his side?

His rejection of me was calculated and complete. He told me how I should live until Lucy Prime should die. I remember falling on the living room sofa, sobbing with uncontrollable anger and humiliation, and when I got up, he was gone. I never laid eyes on him again. In prison he refused to see me, although he saw Percy, and when he came out he hired a lawyer who wrote to tell me that his client was seeking a divorce. By then, however, I was ready for it, and our marriage was dissolved very simply and without undue publicity by a Reno decree. I had learned the futility of trying to stand between Guy and his imagined liberty. Nothing was going to keep him from the particular suicide that he had planned so long.

N
OT EVEN
P
ERCY
could break through the barrier that Guy erected. He visited his father once a month during the whole of his prison term and reported that he found him affable and friendly, but that it was like talking to a stranger. Guy would listen to Percy's account of his problems and enthusiasms as a law student and make polite answers. Poor Percy was upset by his inability to narrow the gap.

"I'm sure that Dad's convinced himself that he is only a liability to us and that the sooner we forget him the better," he told me. "If only I could make him see that it would help
me
to be close to him!"

Percy never succeeded in this, but I was proud of him for trying. Of all of us, he came out of our tragedy the best. He seemed to mature overnight, and having started Harvard Law School as a playboy, he ended as an editor of the Review.

Evadne's problem was harder. She married George, when he at last convinced her that she would not disgrace him, and they are very happy together, but neither he nor I were ever able to persuade her to see her father. She was altogether inexorable in her condemnation.

"It is not the embezzlement," she kept repeating to us. "If he were ten times a thief, he would still be Daddy. But when George's father stuck out his neck for him, and Daddy broke his word, that, to me, was unforgivable. Mr. Geer has suffered far more in all of this than anyone else. Daddy told me to be a Roman and adopt my husband's family. Very well, I'm doing so. I'm all Geer now."

There was a point in Evadne's argument that I could not entirely deny. Certainly, George and his father had been badly treated. But I do not for a minute believe what Rex believed: that Guy deliberately embroiled him in his disgrace. That was not the way Guy's mind worked. I am sure that he had no conception of how great the scandal of his trial would be. He intended to bow quietly out of society as simply another of the numberless embezzlers of financial history and start a new life for himself. He intended to leave all of us better off by his departure, even Rex, who, if he lost the money that he had put up, was to be compensated with me. Guy was a testator who planned to survive the probate of his own will and to watch from afar his legatees enjoying their bequests. But what he was going to enjoy most of all was his own liberation into a new life: a life that would be just like the old with one all-important exception. He would not disappoint anybody in it, including himself, because nobody in it would have expected anything else of him, including himself. This life he was to find in Panama.

In support of my supposition that Guy was seeking extinction and not revenge, I submit here the letters that he wrote to our children on that last night at Meadowview, before he was placed under arrest. The first is to Evadne.

"My own darling daughter: from your face today and from your paucity of words, I see you are all Geer and no longer Prime. That is as it should be. In ancient Rome a wife was adopted by her husband's family and ceased to be a member of her own, even for purposes of inheritance. This was a wise system and avoided many complications. Your mother would never become a Prime. Profit by her error and cease to be one.

"You told me that you were ashamed now to marry George. Forgive me, dearest, if I say this is drivel. The scandal of my conviction will be blown away in five years' time. And if the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, I never heard that they were visited on the daughters. Because I have made George suffer, must you? Surely you will see that it is rather your duty to make up to him for my misdeeds by becoming a good wife.

"And now I am going to give you a piece of advice that will not be agreeable. Do not desert me too openly. People will be very critical if you do. Come to visit me in the pentitentiary. I will make it very easy—you will not even have to see me. But you will win golden opinions from the multitude. I would suggest further, if it doesn't sound too cynical, that you take, for a couple of months anyway, a job as a secretary or receptionist. By the time you become Mrs. George Geer you will be so admired for your fortitude in adversity that you will bring more luster to old Rex than you would have in the greatest days of Meadowview!

"That is how to play the hand I have dealt you. That is what I expect of my girl. Farewell."

But Evadne was not to be persuaded by any such arguments as these. She refused to take the smallest advantage of her situation to win the approval of a sentimental public. It was her idea of integrity to fling in the face of our world her repudiation of her father, and our world made her suffer for it. People said terrible things about Evadne. They said that she was ashamed of her father. They said that she had made a rich marriage to get rid of her old name and her new poverty. It was a great pity that her engagement to George had not been announced in the newspapers before Guy's disgrace. But Evadne was able to stand up to sneers. The only thing I worried about was the possibility of her subsequent remorse, a worry that has now been to some extent justified. As for Guy, I knew that Evadne's scorn would not reach him. He had immunized himself from more than his family.

Guy's letter to Percy was even more matter of fact.

"My own dear boy: this is not a time to mince words. You have never had the highest opinion of me, and events have amply borne you out. But you have always been a good son, and now you are exempted from further duties. You will find that you will do better in life on your own than as a child of privilege. Like many fathers, I have been obtuse about such things. My fall may give you the jolt you have needed. That, anyway, must be my consolation. But to the point.

"There is one important service that you can render your mother. Standard Trust Company will be bound by law to restore the money I took from the Prime trust. They were obviously negligent in allowing me, even as a co-trustee, to have possession of the securities for so long a time. Even if your mother should want to let them off the hook, it would still be beyond her power to do so, because unborn Primes and collaterals have a contingent interest in the money. What I want you to do, therefore, is to persuade your mother to accept the income and rebut any of her grand ideas of renunciation. If you will all only do as I tell you, everything can still be all right!"

Percy and I were simply surprised that Guy knew us so little as to suppose that we would ever touch a penny of the money that the bank was forced to restore because of
his
peculation. Ultimately an arrangement was worked out whereby the trust income was accumulated, and on my death it will go, with the principal, to Percy's and Evadne's children. As they were not living when the moral question arose, I assume they will feel that they can take it with impunity. I hope so, for if not, it will go to old Bertha who, I am sure, will survive us all!

When I had time to consider my own position, I found that, except for Meadowview, I was penniless, and Meadowview was condemned that same year by the state. One of Mr. Moses' favorite highways was run through the house itself. It seemed an appropriate finale to the saga of the Primes. The wicked were jailed and destroyed, and a beneficent government would not, even after a law suit, give me more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the place (remember, it was 1937). When I had given Percy enough to complete his law school education and paid all my expenses I found that I had three thousand a year to live on. This was not starvation in those days, but it was penury for one who had lived as I had lived.

I was planning to set myself up as a riding instructor when Lucy Geer sent for me. There was a vacant superintendent's cottage on their place, a charming old Long Island farm house, that would be at my disposal, with water, gas, heat and electricity thrown in and service from the gardeners and maids at the big house. Add Lucy's open invitation to all meals and I could pretty well spend my little income on clothes!

"Now before you refuse it pointblank in a glorious gesture of pride," Lucy warned me, "let me tell you something. I am not asking you to take it for your own sake or for Rex's. I am asking you to take it for
mine.
I am a sick woman, and I need a lot of attention. Believe me, Angelica, you will more than earn your keep."

It was so big of Lucy to put it that way that I burst into tears and, after making a sloppy scene, I accepted. For the ten years that she survived I lived gratefully in that farm house and saw her daily. I came to be as close to her as I was to Rex, closer in many ways, for Lucy had an understanding and a shrewdness about people that made communication extraordinarily simple. She was a bit like my mother, if my mother can be imagined as an unworldly woman.

Rex suffered a long nervous depression after the Congressional hearing. For a period of almost half a year he did not go to his office. His silence and his abstraction made our curious triangle a simpler one to live in. Lucy and I both ministered to him, and in doing so we almost forgot the brief time when our relationships had been so different. When Evadne and George had their first little boy, we were drawn even closer together. He was a grandson, after all, of all three of us.

Rex emerged from his depression a gentler, kinder man. He was less irascible with those of whom he disapproved, less impatient with those whose efficiency did not match his own. He lost some of his severity, some of his awesome, magisterial quality. What he and I had been to each other the reader knows. But now we became friends, deep friends, in a friendship that revolved around Lucy. In the last years of her life, despite increasing pain, I think that the three of us achieved something like peace, something even like happiness.

When Lucy died, nobody, even Evadne, with all her Prime sense of propriety, thought that Rex and I had to wait a year before marrying. It was so indicated, so obvious, so precisely what Lucy herself had wanted. I was sixty, Rex was sixty-two. Whom, in any event, should we have consulted but ourselves?

We have been married now fourteen years. I do not know if either of us would go quite so far as Rabbi Ben Ezra, because there are a lot of nasty physical things about old age, but they have been good years, and I am grateful to my Rex for them. I am also grateful to my God. Mother always said that my Catholic faith would become stronger towards the end, and she was right. Therefore, because Rex and I have agreed to read each other's memoranda, I will close with a request to him. Now that Guy's death has removed the impediment, I want him to marry me in the church.