The Dark Lady (11 page)

This new tranquillity, however, was shattered by Irving's infidelities. Clara was shocked at the vulnerable femininity of her own nature. It seemed unworthy of her to notice such low things, but notice them she did. That her husband should care too much for Clarksons and works of art she could tolerate. She could disdain but overlook his near unctuosity with the older members of her family and his tactile affection for porcelains, ivory and gold. But when it came to a retention and pawing of pretty hands, a silly chuckling over silly female jokes, a walking aside with younger guests to garden limits and beyond, she began to see in the splendid Oriental who had courted her a sentimental Western burgher in fancy dress, like one of those Rembrandt models arrayed in a warlike finery that his countinghouse nose makes ridiculous. And then she would have moments of silent fury.

Lionel and Peter were always more Irving's sons than hers. They were big noisy boys, friendly enough, without a shred of their father's distinction but with some of his shrewdness, who treated Clara with an affectionate but rather awed respect and never seemed to have much to say to her. They took Irving's side in everything, because he gave them lavish presents and wished to chastise little David, a mother's boy, when David was impudent to his father. But the last time that this occurred was when Clara first learned of it. Irving had announced at a Sunday lunch that he had lost his wristwatch, and David, aged twelve, had shrilly demanded to know if he had looked in the bed of Madame Vibert, a pretty French actress who was staying in the house and whose knee Irving at that very moment was squeezing under the table. Lionel and Peter had jumped on David that afternoon by the swimming pool, but Clara, hearing his yells, had hurried to the rescue. Alone with David she had tried to reason.

"You must learn, my darling, that even if I love having a champion, it is sometimes better if we look the other way."

"But, Mother, I
saw
Dad go into that lady's room!"

"Your father, my love, is a very fine and good man, but he has a little weakness. You will understand it some day."

"Never!"

"I do not mean that you will share it, but that you will understand it. Now if you really want to help me—
really
—you will not notice what he does in that way."

"Not
notice?
"

"Not show you notice."

She finally convinced the angry boy, and he gave her his word and kept it, but he was always sarcastic afterward in family discussions which touched on the subject of romance. In time David came to like and, a bit grudgingly, even to admire a father whose affection it was difficult to resist, but he remained Clara's champion at heart. What kept her from becoming too close to this intense, beautiful son was a species of timidity, or austerity, or perhaps even something akin to fear. She had never in her life surrendered herself to another human being, and there was a fire in David that might have singed her. She would kiss him on the forehead or the cheek, but she would never fondle him or hug him. She kept him under a slight restraint—as she might have a too demonstrative dog. Sometimes she wondered if David were not perhaps the adventure that she had been waiting for as a young woman. But if he were, what on earth could she do with him?

Certainly, it was of David that she most constantly thought in the week after Irving moved out. David was coming down for the weekend from law school, and she would have to tell him then. Should she do it in such a way as to induce him to break altogether with his father? Something fierce and pounding in her head urged her to it. Was it not time, after years of equivocation, to strike, to be free, to take David with her? Had there not been a sick weakness in the passivity with which she had so long accepted a life that had offered little but disillusionment?

On the afternoon when David was expected Clara had an unexpected caller at 68th Street. Had she ever imagined that Ivy Trask would have the nerve to present herself, she would have left word in the hall that she be denied. As it was, the maid who answered the door, recognizing in the brisk little caller an old family friend, ushered her at once upstairs.

"I know you don't want to see me, Clara, but I have terms from Irving that you can't afford not to consider."

"You don't really believe that I will discuss my affairs with you?"

"When I'm authorized to offer what I am? Don't be a fool, Clara. Nothing in the world can bring Irving back to you now. Give him what he wants, and he'll give you what you want. Everybody's face is saved. Everybody's rich!"

"Nothing is lost but honor," Clara quoted grimly.

"We'll even leave you that! You'll get the divorce on any terms you wish. If it's blood you want, blood you'll have."

"I think you'd better go."

"You won't even hear what he'll do for you? And for the boys?"

"Go!"

"Very well." Ivy wagged her head from side to side. She had not seated herself, nor had Clara risen. She seemed to be contemplating her hostess with the final misgiving of a disappointed schoolmistress retreating before a recalcitrant pupil. "I guess you're hopeless, Clara. Like most women of your age and class. Hopeless and useless. Has the world ever struck you as anything but faintly ridiculous?"

"Isn't it?"

"No, it's
hugely
ridiculous! If you'd ever thrown back that haughty head of yours and let yourself go in a horse laugh, you might have lived."

"I think I prefer my death to your laugh."

But Ivy's words were still written like the smoke letters of an airplane announcing a public event across the pale sky of Clara's calm when, an hour later, she told David of his father's move. In her desperate need for an ally she had almost been looking forward to this, but now her mind seemed full of small jumping figures.

"He wants to marry this woman?" David shouted. "He must be mad!"

"Your father always knows what he's doing."

"Then he's wicked. How can he throw you off—like an old shoe?"

"I suppose there will be some legal difficulties."

"Let him go!" David jumped up and stamped about the room. "We don't need him. I'll look after you. Who wants his filthy money, anyway?"

"Is it really a question of that? Your father has already settled money on me. Long ago."

"Let's give it back then. Let's fling it in his face!"

"I don't think we can. It's in trust."

"We needn't take the income!"

Clara began to see that things were not going to be at all as she had imagined. She and David were not going to build a citadel against the world, not because he didn't want to, but precisely because he did. For how could she allow a young man with everything in life before him to tie himself down to a penniless old woman maintaining a futile stand against a husband's philandering?

"My God, is it Ivy Trask's world, after all?" she muttered.

"What has Ivy to do with it?"

"Nothing." Clara shook herself, as if to shake off the image of Ivy. "Or rather I mean everything. It was she who plotted the whole thing. She wants to put her creature in Broadlawns. Well, as you say, let her. But don't make things harder for me, darling, by asking me to be poor."

"I thought it would make them easier! Wouldn't you be happier owing Dad nothing?"

Clara closed her eyes for a moment in silent recognition of how well he knew her. Then she arrayed her forces to assist her with the needed lie. "One changes, dearest, with age. I am used to my creature comforts. It would be difficult for me now to do without them. And you mustn't break with your father. He's going to need you now. More than ever before."

"Need
me!
" David snorted in disgust. "When he has his Elesina? I'll wait, thank you very much, until she bleeds him and fools him and leaves him. And
then
maybe the poor old besotted fool will crawl home to me for comfort!"

"David! He's still your father!"

"What do Lionel and Peter say about it?"

"Oh, they're horrified, of course. For the moment they won't speak to him. But they'll come around. You'll see."

"Of course," David sneered bitterly. "They're in business with him, aren't they? They won't want Elesina made senior partner."

"Oh, my child, I'm sorry about the way the world is. But we didn't make it, did we?"

"We certainly didn't!"

And Clara realized sadly that there was more love in David's bitterness, even for his erring father, than in all of Lionel's and Peter's shrugs. Once again life had refused her an adventure. Once again her way would be remorselessly smoothed.

When the world of Irving and Clara Stein learned that he had actually moved out of the 68th Street house and was living alone in one of his brownstones, the furor was immense. Not a voice was raised in Irving's behalf; everyone who had ever been to Broadlawns, it seemed, came to reaffirm their allegiance to Clara. One would have thought that Irving had invented the idea of divorce, that it was somehow essential for the security of their own marriages that they drag him to trial, crown him with a heretic's cap, burn him at the stake. Clara, usually so calm, so serene, seemed for the first time a bit flustered, perhaps a bit annoyed, as if she were inclined to resent so marked a disturbance of her customary detachment. She was still the gray-robed priestess chanting at the altar of the chaste goddess, but now she had occasionally to turn her head, interrupted by the murmuring of the congregation behind her, and to frown, or at least to pucker her brow, as if to remind the disrespectful throng that to those who exist in the divine presence the rantings and infidelities of mere males are to be brushed aside.

Ivy Trask was very discreet when she encountered members of the Stein court. She refused to condemn Irving's conduct, but neither did she condone it, simply nodding her head as one too well informed by high sources to indulge in idle chatter. She was quick to perceive that the new social vacuum in Irving's life had better be filled by herself before the sons, temporarily not on speaking terms with their father, should deem it prudent to resume relations. She filled the ears of the dazed Irving with accounts of the scathing denunciations issuing from his offspring, magnifying their threats and warning him that if he failed to be firm he would be sold back into conjugal slavery and made to stand, a domestic dunce in a stale domestic corner, at the beck and call of an eternally aggrieved, never pacified wife.

"Your sons seem to have forgotten one of the commandments," she observed to Irving tartly. "I hope you will find occasion to remind them of it. Don't Lionel and Peter depend on you in the firm?"

"They're partners. I can hardly fire a partner."

"But I'm sure you have a voice in their percentages. Be strong, Irving. Let them know who's boss."

"But everyone seems so against me, Ivy. I feel bewildered. Not myself."

"Just hang on. Things will straighten out. I've observed the institution of marriage for a long time, and I have the advantage of being single. People don't really object to divorce any longer. They just think they do. Things change so fast today that our moral posturings have to scamper to keep up with the facts. Everyone's on Clara's side now, but Clara's a bore. She'll never hold them. It is the rising star that will lure them all."

"The rising star?"

"I mean Elesina Stein!"

"Ivy, you're being ridiculous. I told you that Clara would never give me a divorce."

"Get one yourself in Reno. Marry Elesina out there! What can Clara do but sue you? And what can she get but the money you're already willing to give her?"

Ivy even proceeded to redecorate Irving's brownstone. The house was filled all day with painters and plasterers, and she hoped that the hammering would symbolize to the distracted owner the driving of nails into the coffin of his union to Clara. But she had had no communication, not even a postcard, from Elesina, and when she went down to the Hudson pier to meet the returning cruise ship she was ignorant of the mood in which she would find her friend.

Elesina and Mrs. Dart were still on board, but Ivy had a pass that admitted her to the vessel. She found them in the large first-class suite that had been given to Mrs. Dart by her ill friend. Linda, in tweeds, packed and ready to disembark, was sitting smoking while Elesina hung garments listlessly in a tall trunk. Both greeted Ivy casually, without the smallest expression of surprise or pleasure at the pains which she must have taken to meet them so far from her office in the middle of a working day.

"I was less than pleased, Miss Trask, at what I heard from friends in Nassau about this distressing Stein affair." Mrs. Dart's tone was contained, cool, faintly hostile. "I gather that Elesina's name has been bandied about in it. Of course, it's all nonsense, but I hate to have her involved with that kind of thing and that kind of people."

"Irving Stein is a very distinguished man, Mrs. Dart."

"Spare me such distinction! Of course, people know that he backed Elesina's play, and I suppose malicious minds will always draw odious conclusions from that."

"I grant it's all very distressing."

"I understand that you have some acquaintances in the Stein world. Perhaps, if you ever have the opportunity, you will be good enough to deny Elesina's involvement."

Ivy glanced at her friend, but the latter seemed interested only in her packing. She looked back at Mrs. Dart and took her measure. Should she take issue with her? She knew that Elesina was inclined to discount the maternal influence, but she had observed enough of the world to be aware of the persistent tug of the umbilical cord. No matter how frayed and chafed, it had a way of suddenly tightening and throwing the most seemingly independent child off balance. Linda Dart's contempt for Steins and Trasks, her well-bred scorn of all that was at once public and disorderly, might still affect Elesina.

"I already have denied it, Mrs. Dart. Nobody has more concern in the matter than I. But would you mind if I took Elesina out on deck, just for a minute? There's a question I have to ask her."

"Of course." Mrs. Dart rose at once. "Please stay here. I have to see the purser, in any event."