The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

his best in the public eye. Camilla had even once wondered if he shouldn't have been an actor; he might have lacked the subtlety for the graver dramatic roles, but he certainly had the looks of a movie star. He denied boldly all the charges leveled against him. He had simply acted, he maintained, on the orders of his boss, in whom he had had and continued to have implicit faith. He even sneered at the prosecuting attorneys, who, in his lofty view, were simply misguided Marxists incapable of detecting the grand and noble overall projects of the Wall Street mighty behind the petty details of daily trading, which were subject to malign misinterpretation. But it was difficult for the jury—and for the sadly listening Camilla—to believe that any grand overall scheme had dictated the plundering of his wife's little trust fund.
    He even continued to insist on his innocence at home in the brief period before his incarceration. He openly resented his wife's downcast eyes and lachrymose silence, which, for all her head shaking, so clearly expressed her agreement with the jury's finding, and his bursts of temper culminated in his request that she not visit him in jail but leave him to such peace as he could find there.
    This was Camilla's bitterest blow. She went up to the prison, of course, and he did allow her to see him. He craved such news as she could bring of the outside world, and besides, a refusal to see his wife might have been deemed by the authorities a demerit in his carefully sustained record of good behavior. He was indeed a model prisoner, even popular with his fellow inmates, who were not immune to the attractive note of democratic friendliness that he so easily knew how to assume. David had always known how to appeal to both sexes.
    At home, during the Sing Sing years, Camilla reduced her living expenses to a Spartan minimum and earned some extra dollars by giving old friends lessons in bridge, a game at which she had always been adept. At first she received many dinner invitations from sympathetic friends and acquaintances, but as she felt it would be disloyal to David to go to any houses where she had reason to believe he had been roundly excoriated, and as most of her old world was of the unconcealed opinion that David and Jonathan Stiles had been traitors to their class, betraying it to the gloating mob of the new left, she spent most of her evenings alone. David Junior, who had had a nervous breakdown over his father's collapse and been expelled from Andover for drinking, was a bitter trial to her, but he ultimately emigrated to Hong Kong, where he was able to support himself as a bartender in surroundings where his name was not known.
    Camilla had one opportunity to supplement her income substantially, but her sense of honor compelled her to reject it. Her lawyer advised her that the bank that had been cofiduciary with her husband of her trust fund was legally liable for the money it had negligently allowed him to embezzle and would replenish the account if requested. She could not see herself making the request.
    Such, however, was by no means David's attitude when he was at last released, a coarser and moodier man. He professed himself utterly disgusted with the small apartment Camilla had taken in an unfashionable West Side district and was irate that she could not come up with the sum needed for his new wardrobe. And he really exploded when he heard from their lawyer what she had failed to do about her trust fund.
    "Have you completely lost your mind, Millie? Do you realize the difference even that little income will make to us? Plus the fact that the income's been accumulating for three years. I'm going after the bank at once!"
    "But, David, I can't touch that money! And you, of all people, ought to know why!"
    "You can give it to me to touch, then. I'm not so finicky."
    She gave in. He was her husband, after all. If she didn't look after him, if she didn't help to rehabilitate him, who would? She