The Dark Lady (12 page)

When she was gone, Ivy hurried over to her friend.

"Elesina!" she exclaimed. "What's going on? Don't you care?"

"About what?"

"Don't you care that he's left his wife, that he's ditched himself with all his friends, with his own children, just for
you?
"

"Oh, Ivy, don't be dramatic."

"It's true! How can you treat him so?"

Elesina left the trunk now to light a cigarette. She seemed bored, impatient, but Ivy noted nonetheless that the hand which held the match trembled slightly. "I'm not treating anybody any way."

"You mean you won't marry him?"

"Ivy, you're out of your mind! He hasn't even asked me. And how could he, in his position?"

"As if his position couldn't be changed! Elesina, don't you care about him at all? Don't you care about yourself? What
do
you care about?"

"Isn't it a question of what
you
care about, Ivy?" Elesina seemed now to draw herself up. Her listlessness had been the costume for a scene that was now finished. "Isn't it a question of the restoration of Ivy Trask to her beloved Broadlawns? Don't you see yourself there as a triumphant Catherine de Medici with a puppet king and queen under your sway? Hasn't it been your scheme all along to undo poor Clara Stein and replace her with a creature of your own?"

Ivy smiled at the absurdity of the misconception. She walked over to Elesina deliberately and reached up to place a firm hand on each of her shoulders. "Don't you know that I love you more than anyone or anything in the world? More than anyone has ever loved you? Or
could
love you? Don't you know that you're my child? Don't you know that I am never going to rest until I see you rich and famous, one of the greatest women in the world? And happy, too, Elesina. Happy!"

When Elesina turned her head at last to gaze back with something between alarm and curiosity into her friend's burning green eyes, Ivy burst into a shrill laugh. She knew that she had won!

E
LIOT
C
LARKSON
was not only David Stein's cousin and closest friend, he had been his classmate through the Sheldon School, Yale and Harvard Law. In most friendships there is a cultivator and a cultivated, and Eliot occupied the former role. David's feelings were composed of respect, affection and gratitude; those of his friend came closer to a restrained adoration. To Eliot, a thin, dark, cerebral man, in marked contrast to the shorter, stockier, blond David, the latter was a Romantic hero. Eliot admired David's impulsiveness, his easy generosity, his independence, his courage. It was not that he himself lacked such qualities. But Eliot was one of those who, though possessed of many virtues, missed the fire to make his engine race. His sustained attitude of judicious reserve implied the choice, early made, of a secondary position from which he might watch and perhaps coach contenders for the first. But he had never had more than one candidate: David.

Although they were second cousins, and both of New York families, they did not meet until their sixteenth year, when David was sent to Sheldon, a boarding school in northwestern Connecticut where Eliot had been enrolled for a year. Large New York clans like the Clarksons tended to spread out and lose sight of each other, and the Stein connection had not been one to induce a reversal of this process. Eliot's parents were amiable, easygoing persons who liked Irving and Clara Stein, but they were true to their philistine type in finding Irving's artistic and social pretensions a bit ridiculous. In New York Eliot had gone to the conservative Buckley School, and David to the more liberal Bovee. There had been little occasion for the boys to meet.

It certainly never occurred to Irving Stein that Sheldon would prove an ordeal for his son. He was well aware that it was a Protestant church school with hardly any boys of acknowledged Jewish origin, but he was determined that questions of race and religion should not bar David from social advancement. He had been privately disappointed that Peter and Lionel, whom he had sent to Grover Academy, a school supported by the New York German Jewish community, should have become so enthusiastically Jewish in their looks and associations. Secretly, he hoped for a different future for his youngest son. Being eminently a man of reason, he did not believe that a social prejudice which he regarded as basically superficial would persist long enough to spoil the school life of an intelligent child. And indeed it might not have, but for two factors that he failed to take into account: David's own passionate nature and the violence of his cousin Eliot's support.

Eliot took an immediate interest in his new form mate, appointing himself as a guardian "old kid" over the affairs of the "new kid." He was a serious boy, tall and very thin, with a long, lean, nobbly, slightly pockmarked, intellectual face, short black scrubby hair and large, evasive, sensitive eyes. His air of standing off, of waiting to see how you would take his approaches—
if
he approached—suggested, or might have been meant to suggest, that if one broke through, one would find a loyalty more intense than that provided by less special souls. He appeared in David's cubicle while the latter was unpacking and introduced himself.

"We are second cousins, I believe. That means that out of eight great-grandparents we share two. At home it is de rigeur to see one's first cousins, at least while one is young, but with seconds one may pick and choose. I suggest you pick and choose me, David. As an old kid, I may be able to help."

David searched for sarcasm in the bland expression of his caller. "Will I need help? Everything seems so pleasant here."

"Appearances can be deceptive. And boys can be vile."

David turned back to his half-empty suitcase. As he did so his eyes took in the gentle green roll of the countryside. It was a beautiful site. He shrugged. "I guess I can take care of myself."

"But you won't reject my proffered assistance?"

"Oh, I reject nothing!"

Life started easily enough. The masters were kind, and the work was not difficult. The hazing of new kids had been reduced by a new and benevolent head to a mere handful of formalities. David's form mates observed each other critically, like leashed dogs in a park; their sniffs did not necessarily imply hostility. Some even made overtures of friendship. But the episode with Nelson Weed changed everything.

Weed, like Eliot, was an old kid, and the undisputed social leader of the form. His appearance was pleasant enough, and there was apt to be a little smile on his handsome, rounded face that suited his rounded figure and lolling gait, but he could be cruel if his authority was questioned. One day, between classes, accompanied by a group of his sidekicks, he paused before David, who was reading a letter from home.

"I hope all is well with the Steins, Stein."

David looked up in surprise. "Very well, thank you."

"Are your family enjoying their riches?"

David flushed. "What do you mean by that?"

"I thought it a simple question. I asked if your family were enjoying their riches. One asks if people are enjoying good health. Why shouldn't one ask if they are enjoying good wealth? Your parents
are
wealthy, are they not, Stein?"

"I don't know what you mean by wealthy."

"You don't? Dear me." Here Weed glanced about with a mocking eye at his fellows. "Then let me tell you precisely. I did not mean to imply that the Steins were Rockefellers. It is a banality for minor Croesuses to claim they are not rich because they are not as rich as Rockefeller. But I should be surprised if your old man couldn't lay his hands on ten million bucks. What do you think?"

"I don't think."

"You don't or you can't?"

"I don't care to discuss it."

Weed's tone became very mild at this. "I'm afraid you're being impertinent, Stein. Haven't you been told about new kids?"

"It's not my fault. You drove me to it. You have no right to make remarks about my family."

"Is it making remarks to say they are rich? I beg your pardon. I thought it was a compliment. At least in Jewish circles. Isn't it considered a great thing for a Jew to be rich?"

"No more so than a Christian!"

"Really? But again I beg your pardon. I forget that you're a Christian, too. It's quite a feat."

"My mother's Episcopalian. My father belongs to no church. I haven't decided what I want to be."

"Well, to me, Stein, you'll always be one thing." Here Weed's voice dropped almost to a whisper. "And would you like to know what that one thing is?"

David stared at his tormentor, hypnotized in spite of himself. "What?"

"A Jew boy. A fresh Jew boy."

David flew at him and blacked his eye. Such retaliation in a new kid was a scandal, and Weed's gang felt no compunction in proceeding to beat him up. It might have gone very badly indeed with him had Eliot Clarkson not intervened. He was not a strong boy, but his fury made up for the deficiency, and when the bell for the next class brought relief, he and David were in a corner, still holding the group off.

Weed, however, had no idea of letting the matter drop, and the sympathy of the form was on his side. Most of the boys came from families where social anti-Semitism was taken for granted, and they did not see why David Stein should get so excited at being called what he so evidently was. Besides, for a new kid to strike an old kid, no matter what the provocation, was intolerable insubordination. And for that new kid to be supported by an old kid was a compounding of the scandal. Was nothing sacred?

David and Eliot found themselves not only ostracized but subjected to myriad petty persecutions. Their desks would be messed up before inspection; their beds would be found soaking wet; the pockets of their overcoats would be filled with oozy mud. David wanted to write his parents to ask to be taken out of the school. He could not see the point of trying to survive the unpleasantness in order to be accepted by boys whom he did not like anyway. But Eliot saw the matter differently and persuaded him to endure it all. To Eliot the persecution was a glorious challenge. Nelson Weed and his cohorts were simply the forces of evil; to defeat them, to come out with one's heart and mind unscathed by their machinations, was to prove that decency was stronger than rottenness. There was a jubilance in the way he took up the crusade that at first fired but ultimately bewildered David.

"You really enjoy it, don't you, Eliot?" he asked him. "I wonder what you would have done if I had never come to Sheldon."

"Oh, there's always a lost cause knocking around somewhere," Eliot retorted with his harsh laugh. "I might have taken up the cause of that Chinese boy."

"Thanks!"

But the real trouble for Eliot was not that the cause was lost but that it wasn't. Schoolboys tire even of cruelty, and Nelson Weed was smart enough not to push things beyond their normal limit. When David made a touchdown in the last football game of the season, he publicly congratulated him, and the conflict was officially over.

"We might even be friends," Weed told him on their way back to the locker room. With the charm of a superficiality transcending cynicism he threw an arm around his former victim's shoulders.

"You want a Jew boy for a friend?" David retorted, pushing himself roughly free.

"Maybe I do, at that!" Weed exclaimed with a high laugh in which only Eliot could have detected malice.

David could not long resist such overtures. He was perfectly willing to be on good terms with the school, if peace was offered without dishonor. He knew that he would not soon forget the bitterness of being called a Jew boy, but he also knew that in a violent world one could not be always fighting. It was odd that it should be Eliot, a Gentile, who urged continued resistance. David suspected that his friend took a dusky pleasure in isolation, that he might create issues even where they did not exist in order to splash his dark dungeon with the gold spangles of romance and idealism. Was Nelson Weed anti-Semitic or was he just a horrid boy like other boys, ready to seize any aspect of a new kid's personality as a target for abuse—his race, his religion, his accent, his warts, his bad breath?

"Don't trust him," Eliot insisted.

"What can I lose?"

Eliot had to come around, for he had too much sense not to realize that he could never hold David unless he shared him with others. The vision of the two alone against a cruel world had been a pleasing one, but Eliot had learned early that pleasing things had short lives. David, after all, did not abandon him for his new friends; he always made it evident that Eliot had to be included. Nelson Weed and his friends became summer visitors at Broadlawns, and at Yale they borrowed considerable sums from David. Eliot wondered bitterly in time if his own intransigency had not done more for David's social career than all of Irving Stein's ambition.

Their relationship, however, was not always one-sided. It had elements of symbiosis. At Yale, if Eliot acted as a kind of tutor to keep David from an overdistraction in fleshpots, it was also true that David opened up a larger college life than would have been otherwise available to his monastically inclined relative. At law school they became almost equals; they reviewed courses together and made the law review. But their equality fell away again before the intrusion of sex. There Eliot's role was always that of a tactfully self-removing third.

In Ireland, when they went on a walking trip in the summer after their second year at law school, David fell in love with a beautiful undergraduate whom he met at a party at the University of Dublin. Noreen Leslie was a student of economics, a poet and a rebel, whose father had been shot by the British in 1920, and who was determined to dedicate herself to the liberation of the northern counties. She never had any intention of complicating her life by a permanent union with what she deridingly called the "spawn of a Yankee Jew banker," but she joined the American pair in their hike through Connemara, and Eliot spent lonely nights looking up at the stars while David and Noreen were more intensely engaged under a blanket in another part of the field. At the end of the trip, in Galway, there was a violent scene when Noreen refused either to marry David or to go to America with him. He became almost hysterical when she tried to persuade him that she was adamant about closing the episode. She had to take Eliot out to a pub for a private talk.