The Embezzler Read online

  The Embezzler

  Louis Auchincloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  …

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Part I

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  Part II

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  Part III

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  Houghton Mifflin Company • Boston

  The Riverside Press • Cambridge

  Sixth Printing W

  Copyright © 1966 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved including the right to

  reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66–11231

  Printed in the USA.

  ISBN 0395298458

  For two Blakes:

  My son Blake Leay and

  his grandfather, Blake Lawrence

  Contents

  PART I

  Guy [>]

  PART II

  Rex [>]

  PART III

  Angelica [>]

  Part I

  Guy

  1.

  I HAVE THE distinction of having become a legend in my lifetime, but not a very nice one. In this year 1960, perhaps not every schoolchild (for what do they know of America’s past?) but surely every college man who has taken even a casual course in current history knows of Guy Prime. I am a symbol of financial iniquity, of betrayal of trust, of the rot in old Wall Street before the cleansing hose of the New Deal. If I had not existed, Franklin Roosevelt (who had a far more devious soul than mine) would have had to create me. The Jews were not more useful to Hitler than was my petty embezzlement to the Squire of the Hudson. And the legend it has made of me has almost destroyed my poor self. To my old friends and business acquaintances, such as still survive, even to Angelica and our two children, I long ago ceased to have any real existence.

  Of course, there must be occasional unpleasant things that recall the man as well as the legend. “Oh, yes, he is still alive,” I can hear them telling the persistent inquirer. “He lives down in Panama, if you call that living. No, he’s not so old. Seventy-four, perhaps. Seventy-five? He was always strong as a horse. We hear he has a nice little export business and a young Panamanian wife. He probably leads the life of Riley. Why not? He always had the skin of a rhinoceros.”

  It is just as well that I should be remote, from mind as well as eye. My grandchildren may have a better chance of being disassociated with my deed. Evadne’s children, of course, are Geers, not Primes, and in American society, a maternal grandfather is too distant a connection to be much of a liability. The danger, if any, would be for Percy’s boys, but happily for them, particularly if I am not around to force myself on the public attention, the fluffy abundance of Prime wool may almost suffice to cover that one dark hide. For the wool is fluffy. Considering the small civic contribution of the many descendants of Lewis Prime, that smug eighteenth-century Manhattan diarist and auctioneer, it is curious that the name should have developed so high and so aristocratic a flavor. I suppose a family is only the predominance of male issue, and certainly the male Primes, except for my own father, married well. As in the portrait gallery of a European castle where one’s host, serene in his knowledge that a grand lineage swallows all, points out with equal complacency the ancestor who was a pirate and the grandfather who was a prime minister, so my descendants may take a collector’s pride in bracketing, for the delectation of less exotic folk, the nefariousness of my peculations with the unctuosity of Bishop Prime’s sermons.

  Why then remind them? Why then this memoir? Because I have enough of my old egotism to think they may be interested. One may be interested, even if one does not care enough to be ashamed. Besides, I will let Evadne be the judge of who is to see these pages and when. If she thinks that my revelations will be painful to her children or to her nephews, or if she thinks that history has already done ample justice to my side of the story, then she need only consign this memoir to the flames. I trust her judgment better than I do my own. Portia has always been her natural role.

  What I trust her to do, however, and what I want her to do may be two very different things. I passionately hope that my descendants may hear my case. I am convinced that I have been treated with the greatest injustice, not as to my prison term, which was perfectly in order, for I pleaded guilty, but as to the general opprobrium which followed it. What I did, however jailworthy, was not nearly so wicked as the world tried to make out, and in testing this I suggest that my grandchildren use either the moral standards of 1936 or of their own day, whichever they choose. If I have been made a pariah, it has been for the convenience of a great many people.

  What it all boils down to is simple enough. Roosevelt in 1936 had already decided to regulate the New York Stock Exchange, but he still lacked an excuse that the greater public could understand. I came along providentially, and my example was howled to the nation. If a man in my position was a crook, what more had to be said? But Wall Street never understood this. Wall Street, the perennial ostrich, had no idea that regulation was already inevitable. Consequently it seemed to all those good burghers that I had let them down, that I had opened the gates, poisoned the reservoir, contaminated the air. I took my place in history as a financial Benedict Arnold.

  I could laugh, I suppose, today, if I were not nearer tears. I have lived to see morals become frankly a game and businessmen treated by government as schoolboys are treated by strict masters. Prominent men now go to jail for evading taxes, or fixing prices, or forming monopolies, but nobody thinks the worse of them. In public life there may be rules of conduct, but they are purely formal ones. A presidential adviser may not accept the gift of a wristwatch from an old friend, but the senator who denounces him may make millions in office. So completely is it taken for granted that a man will prefer his own interest to that of his nation that our cabinet officers, men of the highest responsibility in the land, are advised to invest their private fortunes in government bonds. Compared to us the Panamanians are idealists.

  But if I returned to New York today, would I benefit from this greater candor? Would it help me to point out that I served my term and paid my penalty and that the only persons who were out of pocket by my crime (in which I do not include my bankruptcy) were my wife, who had received from me far more than I ever took, and Rex Geer, a millionaire for whose financial start in life I was solely responsible? Certainly not. The late Mrs. Edith Wharton, who was a childhood friend of my mother’s, wrote a very apt little story on this subject called “Autres Temps.” It deals with a wife who is cast out of New York society for eloping with her lover and who comes back, a generation later, to find that the doors of her erstwhile friends, who have accepted the same conduct in her own daughter, are still closed to her. The world is too busy to revise old judgments.

  Yes, they would all cut me dead in the street today, my old friends. Rex Geer, who might be a haberdasher in Vermont but for our Harvard friendship, would turn away his stony countenance and splash me with the wheels of his Rolls-Royce. Alphonse de Grasse, his partner, and one of my old golf foursome, might furtively no
d as he hurried by, but only if he was sure that Rex’s glassy eye was not upon him. Angelica’s brothers, with their high harsh voices, might even insult me. And I remember them all, gathering about the long table in the sea-green dining room of “Meadowview,” under Angelica’s great Monet lily-pads, to organize, over the brandies and crême-de-menthes, a pool to push Oglivy Motors. Oh, yes, even the holiest of them went in for pools in those days, driving the stock up to dizzy heights before they dumped it and left the public to pick up the tab. Yes, even you, Rex, reading this memorandum over the shoulders of our common grandchildren! It may not have been quite “the thing,” like the middle-aged husbands of Park Avenue who slipped off to stylish cat houses in West Side brownstones, but they did it!

  The drama for which I could never be forgiven was not the drama of my trial, which was only a sentencing, but the drama of the federal investigation which followed. A hearing was held in New York in Foley Square, in one of those big bare varnished courtrooms that fail so oddly to capture either the spaciousness or the nobility of their eighteenth-century counterparts. Congress wanted to know all about the failure of Prime King Dawson & King and the extent of the involvement of de Grasse Brothers. Summoned from the penitentiary to testify, I sat with a police guard, watching the averted faces of my erstwhile associates. All of Wall Street, all its counsel, all the press were there. It was the Götterdämmerung of an era.

  When old Marcellus de Grasse rose to testify, I thought his partners were going to rise with him, like a congregation following its priest. There was a tremor in his section, then a surge, then a subsiding as, coming to their senses, they restrained the impulse. The old dean of the banking world made his unsteady way to the stand, smiling with the timid graciousness of royalty, as if to fend off the assistance which even the humblest subject might presume to offer. In point of fact, this snowy-haired, pink-cheeked old gentleman, son of the founder of the firm whose name he bore and not founder himself, as the public believed, had lived largely in France for years and knew little of business affairs. I recall his gift to the Alliance Française of the busts of twelve figures famous in the history of Anglo-French relations. They began with Lafayette and ended with Marcellus de Grasse! Yet the Stuart adherents were not more scandalized by the spectacle of Charles I on trial in Whitehall than were the partners of de Grasse Brothers at the sight of their senior under the examination of Harry Cohen.

  “When your partner, Mr. Geer, borrowed six hundred thousand dollars from the firm last September, did he consult you about it?”

  “He did. It was a rule, when I was in New York, that I should be consulted about all advances in amounts over a hundred thousand. In my absence, my nephew would be consulted.”

  “Did it strike you as odd that Mr. Geer should need so large a sum?”

  The pale blue eyes that Mr. de Grasse now fixed on his interlocutor suggested, despite the patrician benevolence of his manner, that he was quite aware of the other’s antagonism. “Not in the least. He might have been low in cash and reluctant to market his own securities.”

  “Did he, in fact, tell you why he needed the money?”

  “In fact he did, Mr. Cohen. But as the loan has since been paid in full, I fail to see its relevance.”

  “It is relevant to this investigation, Mr. de Grasse. In fact, I may say, it is of the essence.”

  “Very well. He told me that he needed the money for Guy Prime.”

  “Did he tell you why Mr. Prime had to have that much money?”

  “He did not.”

  “What did you suppose?”

  “I did not suppose, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Well, did you think it was for some unmentionable purpose?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no. It was much too large a sum.” Here the courtroom tittered, and Mr. de Grasse looked up to envelop it in his gaze of innocent surprise. “I knew Mr. Prime, and I knew that Mr. Geer was one of his closest friends. I assumed that there was some good reason for the loan. But that is not the point. The point is that Reginald Geer asked for the money. I would have given it to him had he vouchsafed no reason at all.”

  “So great was your faith in him?”

  “So great, Mr. Cohen, is my faith in all my partners.”

  There was a stir of admiration in the room, but Mr. Cohen never flinched. As counsel for the Congressional Committee, he knew that he would have the last word. Balding, pale, with a lean feral face, blue cheeks, a fine strong nose and melancholy eyes, he might have been an ascetic monk by El Greco, but for an aridity about the thin lips, a twitch of the brow, a mannerism of scratching his chin that suggested our own more nervous era. I remember contemplating how apt it must have seemed to the de Grasse partners that the Mephistopheles of the New Deal should be represented by a Jew.

  “Three months later, I believe, Mr. de Grasse, Mr. Geer came to you once more for a loan,” Mr. Cohen proceeded. “It was again a case of helping Mr. Prime?”

  “Not ‘again’ Mr. Cohen,” the old man replied patiently. “It was the first case of helping Mr. Prime. The other loan had been to Mr. Geer. The emergency was now beyond the scope of Mr. Geer’s personal fortune. He came to me to recommend that de Grasse make a substantial loan to Prime King Dawson & King to save them from failure. That loan was not made.”

  “Why not, Mr. de Grasse?”

  “On advice of counsel. It appeared that Mr. Prime had been guilty of irregularities.”

  “What irregularities?”

  “The irregularities for which he was subsequently tried and convicted, Mr. Cohen!” Mr. de Grasse exclaimed testily at last. “The irregularities for which he is now serving a sentence in the state penitentiary! Surely, you don’t wish me to recapitulate them for you. I suggest you call the District Attorney.”

  “I only wish to know who called them to your attention, Mr. de Grasse. Was it your counsel?”

  “Of course not. It was because I had learned of these irregularities that I consulted counsel. Mr. Geer informed me of them. Before he could allow his partners to make the loan, he naturally had to give us the facts.”

  “But he did not do so in the case of the first loan.”

  “I keep telling you, Mr. Cohen, that first loan was to Geer personally!”

  “I see. What I see less clearly is why you needed advice of counsel in such a matter.”

  “Counsel? My dear young man, I consult counsel in everything.”

  “I suggest that Mr. Geer wanted you to buy a respite for Guy Prime so that Prime could cover up his embezzlements. Did a firm of your standing need the advice of counsel before rejecting such a proposition out of hand?”

  There was a gasp of indignation from the bankers’ seats, but Mr. de Grasse seemed quite unruffled. He took the high position of his years. “When you have lived a little longer, young man, you will learn that these problems are never quite so simple as they appear. I had known Guy Prime since he was a boy. He had once worked for me, and his firm handled our brokerage. I knew all of his partners, who were innocent of any irregularity, and who were bound to go down in his ruin. Several of his customers had accounts with me. They too would be affected. I was certainly not going to consign Guy Prime to perdition on any sudden impulse of righteousness. The matter had to be thoroughly explored. When counsel had done this, they concluded that we could have no further dealings with Prime. That we ran the danger of becoming accessories after the fact.” Here de Grasse raised his hands and let them drop. “So there we were. We had to let him go.”

  “You mean if you could have saved him without criminal liability, you would have?”

  “Isn’t that question a bit hypothetical, Mr. Cohen? If it wouldn’t have been a crime to save him, would it have been a crime that he had committed?”

  I remember that I was as surprised as the rest of the courtroom that the old boy had it in him. The laughter that followed turned the El Greco friar into a grand inquisitor.

  “Very well, Mr. de Grasse. Let me put you one more question. Did you ever conside
r that it might have been your duty to inform the governors of the Stock Exchange of what you had learned about Guy Prime?”

  “Never.”

  “Yet your firm was a member, was it not?”

  “Oh, yes. We have two seats. But I have never considered that they put me under the obligation to be an informer. Perhaps if I had had the benefit of your counsel, Mr. Cohen, I might have felt otherwise. But I was not so fortunate.”

  “Thank you, Mr. de Grasse. No more questions.”

  I am not without a conscience, be it said at once. I know what I did and why I did it, and I believe that I have paid the penalty and should be quits with society. Yet I confess to a lingering remorse that I should have contributed to Mr. Cohen’s little game. Like so many of the early New Dealers, he was a bit of a fanatic. Perhaps in the ideal society men will betray their friends and relations to the state, but I hope I shall not live to see it. When loyalty becomes the slave of patriotism, it is no longer loyalty.

  The climax of the hearing came when Rex Geer was called. Rex at fifty-two was at the zenith of his banking career, which but for me might not have been the zenith. His appearance announced that his success was not superficial; it was as innate a part of him as his measured tread and his stocky build. Face to, his square regular face and small pronounced features, his high forehead and stiff waved graying hair made up too granite a wall to be quite handsome, but in profile and when talking, always with perfect articulation, the narrowed eyes, the raised chin, the slight hook of the nose, gave an impression of lively sensibility and intelligence. There was always a Lord Byron lurking behind Rex’s Daniel Webster. In his youth, when he had been paler and thinner, and his eyes had been sadder and darker, girls had even found him romantic. Certainly my cousin Alix Prime did. But he was not romantic that day, in his costly black suit, the fingers of one thick hand clutching the Phi Beta Kappa key at his waist, his wide-apart gray-green eyes staring at Mr. Cohen with an unblinking balefulness. Rex would never admit it, but he was deeply anti-Semitic.