The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss [Auchincloss, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780395073629
Publisher: Buccaneer Books
Published: 1966-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Part II

Rex

1.

WHEN I HEARD of Guy Prime's death in Panama last January (1962) of a stroke in the bar of the Rivoli Hotel, my first reaction was that I could not have wished him a more merciful or appropriate end. My second was concern for the old sores and sorrows that must now be reopened for Angelica and the children. My third was apprehension as to what last dirty trick he might have in reserve for me.

As the weeks went by I began to be ashamed of this last reaction. Guy, as it turned out, had left his affairs in scrupulous order. He had owned his house in Panama City free and clear, and he had no debts. There was even enough money to support his second wife, of whom I had always assumed I would have to take care, and to provide small legacies for Evadne and Percy. I began to wonder if the dreaded final trick might not simply turn out to be a changing of card hands, a switching about that would make us, the wronged, seem like Guy's persecutors, a volte-face that would present his deserted and plundered family in the guise of haughty and unforgiving patricians who had cast him into outer darkness. Evadne, who had not seen her father in twenty-five years, was assailed with terrible guilt feelings, and Percy flew down to Panama to see what he could do for Carmela.

But no. I was wrong, or rather, I had been right in the first place. There was a last trick, and just as dirty a one as I had feared.

A month after his death Evadne, at once grave and flustered, strode into my office downtown and plunked on my desk the memoir that her father had written two years before and that his widow, acting on his posthumous instructions, had forwarded to her, unopened.

"I'm sorry but you'll have to read it, Uncle Rex. Every word of the wretched thing. When you and Mummie married, you became my real father. Now you'll have to see what the other one has done. Do I have to show this libel to my boys? He says the most ghastly things—really, you wouldn't believe it. I've simply got to have your advice. And Mummie's, too."

When she had left, I read the manuscript at a single sitting. Guy had had the consideration to have it typed. It was the last consideration that he had showed his survivors.

What he had to say about Angelica and myself was wormwood but I supposed that the grandchildren could take it. Youth had become extraordinarily tolerant about such matters, much too tolerant, I thought, but now was not the time to quibble about that. What was very much worse to an old man, what, in fact, turned my heart to black ice, was the prospect of having to show my three grandsons this baldly cynical account of their other grandfather's crime.

Obviously, Guy, to his dying day, had not believed that he had done anything really wrong.

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