Manhattan Monologues

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Authors: Louis Auchincloss
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the grim group of bankers gathered around him, or the dapper figure of Mayor Jimmy Walker skipping down the steps of City Hall with a gorgeous flapper on his arm. I was contemplating the representation of Diana Vreeland at her desk in the office of the editor of
Vogue
when a voice from behind me sounded suddenly in my ear.
    "That is not a waxwork. That is Diana herself. She comes every day in her lunch hour and poses. Don't you love it?"
    Of course, it was Harry, but for a moment I almost believed him. As a joker, he could be amazingly dead pan.
    "Can you never be serious?" I asked with a sigh. "You know why I've come."
    "Aren't trusts too serious to be taken seriously? Think of what a wonderful diorama we could make of you and Mr. Burnside when you discovered the missing notes. Or rather when you didn't discover the missing notes."
    I looked about in search of a more fitting place for our talk. But what could be more private than the empty gallery? There was a bench in the center, and we moved to it.
    "Burnside is behaving perfectly well," I told him. "He hasn't made any insinuations. He simply wants the notes or the proceeds of their sale deposited in the bank tomorrow. Or he will go to our president. It's the only thing he can do."
    "And the president will go to the cops?"
    "He will go, unless I can give him an acceptable explanation, to the district attorney. It's the only thing
he
can do."
    "It would be an even better diorama with which to close my ill-fated museum! Harry Pierce in a striped suit!"
    "Harry, for God's sake, what have you done with those notes?"
    Harry was as calm and reflective as if I had asked him about an ordinary business transaction. "Well, I had only a limited time, three weeks as it turns out, to make the hundred gees double themselves so that I'd be able to save my museum and put the money back in the bank. There was just one way to do that, and that was by gambling. I had a glorious week in Las Vegas. At one point I was up to a hundred and eighty thousand. And then I lost it all."
    "All of it? I thought that only happened in French nineteenth-century novels!"
    "Maybe that's where I belong. I haven't a friend in the world who would lend me the money now. I'd have to tell them why, and then they'd drop me like a hot potato."
    "Why would you have to tell them?"
    "Because they're friends, damn it all! I should have told Mother, but she said you'd never invade the trust, so there was no point."
    "I guess that leaves me."
    "No, Chas! Never!"
    "It won't bust me. Don't worry."
    Harry was suddenly deeply earnest. He turned to face me and grasped my shoulders. "You can't do it. Not now that you know what I've done. You'd be compounding a crime."
    "Oh, bosh. No one need know."
    "Burnside would know."
    "I can take care of Burnside."
    "But you'd be in his hands. If ever he needed you to back his promotion. No, Chas, I can't accept that."
    "Leave the details to me, Harry."
    He jumped to his feet, more worked up than I had ever seen him. "I absolutely forbid it! All your life you've been the good boy and I've been the bad. And what have you got for it? Precious little. Even from Father and Mother. Even after you made up to them for all the losses I'd caused. Oh, I knew about all that; yes I did! And now you want to turn yourself into a crook to save a crook. Well, I won't have it! If there's one decent thing I can do now, I'm going to do it. Don't stand in my way, Chas. I mean it!"
    "But, Harry," I cried, aghast, "you'll go to jail!"
    "And tell me, dear brother, isn't that where I belong?"
    ***
    Harry went to the penitentiary for two years, and I eventually made up the loss to Mother's trust out of my own pocket. But did I get any credit for that? Far from it. She and plenty of others among the family and friends excoriated me for not doing it in time to save him, and when Harry wrote to her that he had forbidden me to compound his crime, the universal attitude was that I should have saved him in spite of

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