The Dark Lady (17 page)

"Love? Why should love be involved?"

"Isn't it usual?"

"With the young it's desirable. Perhaps even essential. But your father's not young. Neither, for that matter, is Elesina. Between them there can be respect, congeniality, affection. But those things don't add up to love."

David studied her long, serious, brown countenance; then his eyes dropped to the heavy gold bracelet on her wrist. Yet he felt sure that there was something softer in her that her exterior was designed to hide. "I should have thought you were more romantic, Mrs. Dart."

"Do I look romantic?"

"Not on the surface. But behind all that discipline, well ... I wonder."

Mrs. Dart's pale blue eyes settled for a moment on her impudent interlocutor. He thought he could make out a friendly gleam in them. "You are right, David. I
am
romantic. And you're smart to have spotted it. Or are you a fellow romantic? But how can anyone born in the twentieth century know what passion is?"

"Nineteen hundred is the cutoff year?"

"One has to approximate. The climate today is more conducive to mating than to romance."

"And that, I take it, is a bad thing?"

Her attitude was milder than he had expected. "I don't suppose it is really good or bad. But like everything in life, it has to be paid for. I believe that sex is a constant. Everyone starts with more or less the same amount. If it's poured out, it gets thin. If it's bottled, it seasons. Different eras have different tastes."

"So the cloistered nun, dreaming of Galahad, may be as well off as Cleopatra?"

"Perhaps better off. I measure experience by intensity. I've loved only one man in my life, David, and I had the good fortune to be married to him. We were the lucky ones! Perhaps it will happen to you, despite your century."

"But supposing I've already loved?"

"Oh, with a man, that's all right. I don't say one can't love twice, or three times, in a lifetime. It's a question of when dilution begins. It may be different with different people."

"But I thought we all started with the same amount!"

"Well, some of us may be leakier than others."

"What about your daughter?" he demanded, emboldened by her tone. "She's been married three times. Can she ever know passion?"

Mrs. Dart looked down the table to where Elesina was talking with Fred Pemberton. She shrugged. "No, I don't think Elesina will ever know passion. Elesina, God help her, is a child of her century. Or should I say: God help
you?
"

Elesina was very serious about the plans for Broadlawns, and she and Ivy were soon engaged in reducing them to paper. Two experts were retained to make an inventory of the collection; Irving's lawyers were consulted about the creation of a foundation, and a prominent architect was invited to inspect the house and grounds with a view to their conversion to a public purpose. David accepted a post as adviser, and his name appeared on the special stationery which Ivy designed for the future institute: "Broadlawns, the Irving Stein Foundation for the Arts." It was agreed that until he put his law career into some kind of order he would come out to Rye twice a week and help in the library. This resulted in a rather tense scene with his mother.

"First you were too much on my side of the boat," Clara observed dryly. "Now I wonder if your shifting seats won't capsize us."

"Don't you want me to have a hand in what happens to the collection?"

"Oh, that's the least of my worries."

"You think I will fall under the divine Elesina's spell?"

"Is it still a question of 'will'?"

"I'm afraid I'm not a sufficiently modern person," David retorted with some heat. "I was all for cutting Dad and his bride, but you and Lionel and Peter cried out that I was going too far. All right! So I made it up with them! Is there no pleasing you?"

"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about, David, so you needn't take that injured attitude. It's a question of degree. I never meant that you were to
live
at Broadlawns."

He let the argument go by default. The vision of his father, so pale and frail, and the contrast which Clara offered of an unbreakable health and of a seemingly ineluctable complacency, had begun to alter his point of view. Of course, it was possible that his mother was not truly complacent; perhaps, deeply within, she suspected that if life at Broadlawns could go on so well without her, it might be that she had not contributed so much to it. Certainly David began to understand how totally the place was his father's creation. He remembered what Eliot had said: that Clara, like Eliot's own mother, belonged to a generation of New York ladies who did nothing with their hands or bodies—no cooking, cleaning or even sewing—and whose minds, like high white corridors, seemed too lofty and clean for ideas. But then he at once felt guilty for even thinking such thoughts.

"I'm sorry, Mom," he blurted out.

"Oh, it's all right, dear. It's quite all right."

Would he ever get over his own pity, pity at the pain which he very likely simply imagined behind her stiffly held head, her large troubled eyes? It was a relief now to leave 68th Street for Broadlawns.

He always spent his first half-hour there with his father. Irving slept a great deal, but he liked to hear David talk about the library or about Europe—Germany had just opened her campaign of propaganda for the Sudetenland. He would keep his eyes fastened on David's, a little half smile playing about his lips.

"My only regret, dear boy, is to see you in the role of curator rather than collector. I should love to think of you putting something together for yourself. Can't I help you?"

"With the world about to blow itself up?"

"Maybe it won't."

"Won't fight? Then it won't be worth blowing up."

David sought distraction from Hitler in Broadlawns. He and Elesina worked in different rooms, he in the library, she in the parlor, but consultations were frequent. Was the Veronese genuine? Wasn't it possible that the Fragonard was really by Boucher? Were the acoustics in the patio adequate for a concert? The summer of 1938 moved sluggishly by. He gave up even thinking about a job.

"I'm turning myself into a catalogue," he told Eliot. "Perhaps that's all we can do for the moment: make records of what may be destroyed in Armageddon."

"
If
that's what you're doing" was the sarcastic reply.

Lunch for David and Elesina at Broadlawns in the smaller dining room paneled with Japanese screens, cool at least in contrast to the heat of the garden beyond the open french doors, was pleasanter than on the more crowded weekends. The whole great house and place, when Irving was in his room and Ivy Trask in town, seemed a counterpart to Elesina. It was as if, an actress in search of a setting, she had finally found the right one, and the servants had become stagehands or choruses dedicated to the enhancement of her exits and her entrances. Elesina's quick sharp step on the marble of the front hall, her dark head bending over the cutting table in the flower room, the smoke from her cigarette in the jade holder rising from the long Venetian sofa when she read, the sound of her sudden, gusty laughter all combined to make him feel an audience of one in the drama of the union of a place and a mistress that seemed to have been always destined for each other. It was as if Clara Stein had never lived there.

The unreality of the atmosphere was intensified by David's horror at the turn of events in Europe. He felt at moments in the hot morning in the big library, with the chirping of crickets outside, as if the top of his head were coming off. What in God's name did he think he was doing, checking the morocco-bound quartos of Webster, Massinger and Shakespeare with the inventory prepared by Swan's, turning the pages gingerly, reading the golden phrases in the quaint old print, while abroad the world crumbled and at home a new Mrs. Stein eradicated his very sense of the family? When she came into the library to slip into the chair beside him, to share a joke about the poor young man who was having such trouble with the prints, to take a few quick puffs on a cigarette or simply to pick up one of the quartos and silently read for a few minutes, he had a curious feeling that
she
might be his reality, his only reality, that the rest of the world of mothers and law firms and Hitler might go away if he could only succeed in turning his back.

Elesina was more practical. She was practical in everything, even in foreign affairs. She refused to see the Nazi issue as one between simple right and wrong. She talked about the wrongs to Germany in 1919, about the perils of communism. She did not believe that Hitler's ambitions were limitless. She advocated American neutrality in the event of war. David tried to make excuses for such heresy.

"It's because you're not Jewish," he told her. "You can't be expected to feel as we do."

"But I'm married to a Jew," she insisted. "And anyway, it doesn't make that much difference. After all, you're in no more danger of being put in a concentration camp than I am. It's merely sentimental to get so upset about cruelties in faraway places that you can't prevent."

He wondered if this was philosophy or simple callousness. Her eyes were sympathetic, her tone warm, but she had a way of turning her attention suddenly to other subjects.

"I suppose my trouble is that I'm not sure I can't prevent those faraway cruelties," he said. "Or at least
do
something about them. In however small a way."

"How? Be practical."

"Well, I could be getting ready to be a soldier. Learning to fly, for example."

"Wait and see if there's going to be a war first. You'll still have plenty of time, don't worry. And in the meantime what is more important than the Stein collection? If we don't preserve our art and beauty, are we really worth saving?"

"Yes! But that's not the point. The point is you don't really need me to preserve the collection."

"Ah, but I do, David."

Whenever she touched an intimate note, she would quit him, or alter the topic, or do something abrupt, like closing a book. He wondered if she were trying to create a special kind of friendship in which to clothe their new relationship, something warm but elevated, flicked with romance but not devoid of dignity. What the French called an
amitié amoureuse?
No, less than that. But wasn't anything less than that simply the old platonic friendship of frustrated virgins and anemic bachelors, the butt of endless vulgar comedy? No, Elesina was better than that, bolder than that. What
was
it then? Did she know what herself?

She went into the city less often now. She had closed the apartment, she said, without the least regret. She explained her love of the country to David as a natural reaction to her own bringing-up.

"Like so many girls raised in Manhattan, I've a secret yen for the small town. All my life I've wanted to put down roots. Well, now I'm doing it! I'm going to become Mrs. Rye."

"Won't you miss the stage?"

"But I'm on it! Do you know Henry James's
The Tragic Muse?
It's the best novel ever written about an actress. A rising young diplomat asks the heroine to give up her career to become his wife and a future ambassadress. She won't even consider it! Ah, how James saw it, the idiocy of any man's thinking that a real actress could even consider balancing love against the stage! But now I begin to see something that James didn't see. She
might
have wanted to add the part of ambassadress—in diamonds—to her roles."

"So that's what you're doing now—acting a part?"

"Don't we always? I certainly was when we had the Girl Scouts here last week. And I loved it! Don't look at me with those sad eyes, David."

"I don't like to think you're not sincere."

"But actresses
are
sincere. I'm always sincere."

"I wonder if you're not playing with me." He was suddenly bitter at the idea that her charm was a matter of manipulation, as uninspired by himself as it could have been by any other man sitting in the dark beyond the footlights. He searched angrily about for a weapon. "The way you play with Ruth?" Elesina's daughter had arrived the week before, a block of a girl, looking closer to fourteen than eleven, and she already had a crush on David.

But Elesina only laughed, perhaps complimented by the feeling which such rudeness manifested. "So you've noticed that I play with Ruth? I guess I can't be such an actress, after all. But children, despite the old saying, are easy to fool. Ruth wants desperately to believe that she has a loving mother, and the least I can do is to provide her with the image of one."

David, to his own disgust, found himself preaching. "Mightn't it become a reality?"

"It might. But I'm not a maternal creature. That used to worry me, but one learns to accept oneself."

"I haven't."

"Why? You're a good person, David."

He flushed before the apparent sincerity of her gaze. "How can you tell that?"

"Oh, I always can. You're strong. You're honorable."

The quick, hot pleasure that he felt in his chest as quickly turned to resentment. Was he to be taken in by a performance even after he had been warned that it was one? "Ivy says you were a bad picker of husbands."

She laughed again, still without taking her eyes off his. "I suppose she meant only the first two. After all, she was responsible for the third. But I think I knew from the beginning that Bill and Ted were losers. Not that I exactly told myself so. On the contrary, I tried to persuade myself that they were great. Yet, deep down, I had a pretty good idea what they were like. My trouble, you see, was perversity, not stupidity. A desire to throw myself away. From that point of view, my choices showed definite perspicacity."

"But with Father it was different?" he asked roughly.

"I've told you all about that, David," she said in a soft voice, as she turned away. "I don't think I have to go into it again."

He was now the prey of an almost continual fantasy of sexual relations with her. Her smooth, hard side, her enameled exterior, her brisk stride, the quick way in which, at her desk, pushing back her long hair, she got right down to business seemed to suggest, by very contrast, a warmth within, a need for submission, a dedication to the ideal of love. In his thoughts David was a violent, a raping lover, Valentino in
The Sheik.
He tore off her robe by the swimming pool; he loomed in the door of her bedroom; he reached a hand under her dress in the dining room beneath the eyes, unseeing, of the somnolent Arthur. She was angered, but not for long. Her resistance was formal, her ultimate acquiescence enthusiastic. David, looking at his own silly, guilty expression in the mirror of his bathroom, felt the tears of shame that such maudlin dreams evoked. Yet his loins ached with frustration, and in New York he did something which he had not done since his last year at college. He went to a brothel.