The Embezzler Read Free Page A

am still what they call a "fine figure of a man."
    Yet in my youth I was briefly beautiful. There is no other word for it. My grandsons may squirm, but let them look at the charcoal sketch that my adoring father commissioned Sargent to do of me (he could not afford an oil) when I was on my "grand tour" after Harvard. Maybe the features are banal in their regularity; maybe the curly hair, the straight nose, the manly eyes suggest a magazine cover hero, but show it to any girl in her teens and watch her reaction! In parlor comedy the heroine may turn down the blond athlete for the poet, the man "with a soul," but how often does it happen in life? Don't believe, my boys, all the claptrap you hear about women not caring about looks in a man. They know that beauty is rarer than "soul," and they grab it when they can. Ask your grandmother.
    As early as my mid-twenties my face had filled out, and my shining quality was gone. I made the most of what was left of the Sargent youth by dressing immaculately and holding myself erect, but I fear that the word "beefy" was used behind my back, and Angelica in an ugly mood once likened me to an "Irish cop." When I was young I sought to charm; in my long middle age I sought to impress. Now, with dotage around the corner, I have returned to the earlier and safer tactic.
    My life is very regular. Carmela and I have a small white stucco house with a red roof and a screened veranda from which we can see the Pacific. The dining alcove is set off from the living room area by a raised level and a partition of grilled ironwork. We have wicker furniture with gaily colored chintz, a mosaic cocktail table and a large watercolor of a clipper ship in full sail on a white-capped sea. How Angelica and Percy would sneer! But Carmela thinks it all very beautiful; she is perfectly content with her old Yankee husband of the inexplicable (and to her uninteresting) Yankee past, who has raised her from a lower-middle-class status to one that is at least unclassifiable. She keeps a tidy house and leaves me alone. We never go out or entertain. She has her girlfriends for lunch, while I am in the city, and I have my precious two hours, from four to six, at the men's bar of the Rivoli Hotel. Only if I have one too many gins and fall asleep at supper does Carmel show her Latin temperament.
    At the Rivoli I live again. I sit every afternoon at the same table on the big white porch overlooking the palm tree garden and let any join me who care to. For some years few did, but I have now become a local character, even an institution, and the Rivoli management regards me as a drawing card. Not only do I drink free there, I receive cases of whiskey on my birthday and at Christmas. Panamanian officials of high rank, American army and navy officers, the Governor of the Canal Zone himself, join my table to discuss politics and personalities, wars and women. I think I get a greater kick out of having established the "round table" of the Rivoli than I ever did from being founder and president of the Glenville Golf and Tennis Club. But now I must be sure to limit my drinks even below the number that Carmela stipulates, for I plan to write this memoir in the evenings, and my head must be clear. A moment of truth, pure truth, may be my compensation. Surely it might be as intoxicating as gin!

2.
    W HEN I THINK back on my days of glory, which reached their climax with their finale in 1936, they seem to merge with the glory of the Glenville Club. We both survived, but we survived as shells. We belonged too entirely to the era that made us.
    Sometimes I think that, with the exception of Evadne, Glenville is the only part of my old life that I still miss. In the devitalizing humidity of the Isthmus, especially on those occasional Saturday afternoons when Carmela and I drive to Colon on a straight white bandage of a road through the wet, cluttered jungle alive with its glittering birds, I feel, like a damp cloth across my burning forehead,