The Embezzler Read Free Page B

the memory of that softer, dryer green and of the high, serene porch front of the club house, a bigger Mount Vernon, overlording the rolling acres of its golf course, the neat copses of its woods, the polo field, the shimmering grass courts with their white-clad players. A country club? my grandsons may ask. What was so wonderful about a Long Island country club? Well, you see, my boys, there were clubs and clubs, but only one Glenville.
    I was once offered a hundred thousand dollars to propose a dry goods tycoon for membership. Just to propose him, mind you, not even to guarantee his election. It may surprise you to learn that I indignantly rejected the offer and black-balled the would-be member when he had the audacity to have his name put up by another. Glenville, like all institutions that wish to survive, had to take its share of parvenus, but only when they had learned, if not altogether to be gentlemen, at least to recognize what gentlemen were.
    To make it the first club of the Eastern Seaboard was my hobby. Don't think it was an easy matter. Young people never recognize the toil that goes into such things. I had the most efficient manager, the best golf and tennis pros, the quickest bartenders and the least rude waiters that money could hire, but these are all nothing without a vigilant master's eye. I checked every yard of the golf course myself, as I played it, and made periodic inspections of the kitchen, like an admiral, with white gloves. I met each candidate for membership and spoke to every delinquent dues payer. It was a working hobby.
    You have probably already guessed that my real motive was to make Glenville my home. There I could be master; at Meadowview I was more like a guest. The latter was all Angelica's; she had copied it from a Georgian Irish house and blown her entire inheritance into it. Its moody romanticism, its big windows open on a field of black angus, its cool, high-ceilinged rooms and dusky canvases may have been as beautiful as her arty friends said, but it was a beauty that ruled me out. I was not so obtuse as to miss the point that Meadowview had been designed to enshrine everything that Angelica thought of me as threatening. We had long reached the point in our marriage where no questions were asked. I had my club, and she her Irish dream.
    My happiest weekly moment was on Sunday when, after eighteen holes of golf with my usual foursome: Bill Dawson, my partner, Alphonse de Grasse and Bertie Armstrong, president of Merchants' Trust, and after a shower and an alcohol rubdown by the miracle-fingered Luigi, I would proceed, gorgeous in one of my many sport coats, made for me in Glasgow, and a Charvet tie, new each Sunday, to the submarine coolness of the men's bar for the first gin of the day.
    I would take my stand at the far end from the door. If another was so ignorant or so presumptuous as to take my place, he would receive a discreet whispered warning from Pierre, the bartender. Conversation was general; those who wished to be private went to tables. If there was a guest, I would address him first, with my best "old New York" manners. Formality is not a pitfall to one brought up to use it. With fellow members I was louder and more blunt and with friends I might open with the stentorian insult, delivered without hint of humor. "Well, Judge, what decisions have you sold this week?" or "Good morning, Commissioner, who wrote that last speech of yours?" I was a specialist in the seemingly filthy story that turned out innocently—and in its opposite. But I never repeated myself. I even kept a notebook to be sure.
    Oh, yes, the old ham, you will say. How he loved the deference, the prompt explosion of laughter, the exchanged glances that implied: "Guy Prime is in rare form today." So long as they laughed, did it matter if they were amused? Did I care if they muttered in their teeth, "Look at the old fart!" so long as they acknowledged the authority that limited their protest to a mutter?