The Dark Lady (2 page)

"It was the second. The first was to love thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind. It doesn't leave much over, does it?"

"We don't often hear you in so religious a vein, Clara."

"Well, I interpret God in my own peculiar way. But one thing he is surely not—he is surely not my fellow man."

"I don't see how you can love God and not his creatures. I have to love individuals. Like you. And Irving. And your dear boys."

"And Miss Dart?"

"Yes. And Elesina." Ivy's irritation dwindled before the continued rigidity of Clara's gaze. It was not like Clara to preserve this coolness so long. Usually she would break suddenly into a smile that would dismiss the topic as a shadow before the reality of the welcome, the weekend, the warm little world of the Steins. "What is it, Clara? What has come over you? Don't you like Elesina? Do you want me to take her home?"

"Of course not, dear." Clara leaned over to touch Ivy's hand with the tips of her fingers. "It's just that at times one happens to see things. Perhaps too clearly. There now. Let us forget it."

"Clara!" Ivy's world rocked. "You dislike me!"

"Don't be a goose, Ivy. Ah, at last. There are the Schurmans."

Clara rose and walked with her quick stride to where the guests of honor stood with her husband. There were little cries of greeting and exchanged snips of kisses. Albert Schurman, stout, grinning, balding, still a handsome young man though doomed to weight, looked about the patio with a gleam of mischief as though to set himself apart from Stein things. His wife, very blond and cold of countenance, seemed to be trying to make a formal greeting even more formal.

Ivy was interrupted in her gazing.

"I'm supposed to take an old bag called Ivy Trask in to dinner. Could you tell me which she is?"

"Oh, David, sweetie!" Ivy threw her arms around his neck.

David was the youngest and brightest of the three Stein sons. He was a bit on the short side, stocky and well built, and there was a fullness in the round nostrils of his small aquiline nose, a fleshiness in the red lips, a determination in the square chin that might one day make him too like his father. But at twenty-four David had still the aspect of a Romantic poet and some of the exuberant idealism that Ivy associated with her schoolgirl visions of Shelley. He had blond wavy hair and blue eyes, and when he grinned, he showed teeth so perfect they might have been capped.

"The old man's hopping mad," he told Ivy when they were seated in the dining room before the porcelain centerpiece of Arion charming the dolphins with his song from the fragment of a wrecked vessel. "You know the Houdon
Madame Vic
toire
in the hall? Al Schurman put his derby hat on it for a joke. And Dad saw it!"

"Oh, David, no." There was no flaw in Irving's integrity as a collector.

"It's all right. Dad simply walked up, removed the hat and silently handed it back to him. But it makes a cool start for the evening." David's eyes were fixed on his father, who was talking to Elesina. As Ivy followed his glance, she saw the Judge's large hand descend upon her friend's. David smiled maliciously.

"Tell me about Miss Dart. It is Miss?"

"It's a professional name. Elesina is an actress. Actually, it's her born name. You must have heard of the Darts. They're old New York."

"You mean she's a lady, like Ma." David seemed to consider himself as his father's son, while Clara, however much adored, occupied her own cerulean sky. "Why do you make a point of it?"

"Because so few ladies can act. It goes against the central rule of their bringing-up—always to mute things, to tone them down."

"And Miss Dart doesn't?"

"If you'd seen her Hedda Gabler at the Columbus Circle Repertory, you wouldn't have to ask."

"Columbus Circle? Can't she do better than that?"

"Oh, I hope she will. Elesina has had her problems."

"Men?"

Ivy's glare was snubbing. "There always has to be that, doesn't there? Yes, I'm afraid she's been a bad picker. Bill Nolte was a total nonentity. And Ted Everett was putty in the hands of his old fascist father."

"Those were her husbands?"

"Both now shed. I trust there'll be no others for a while."

"Not while Ivy, the dragon, is on watch. Are there babies?"

"One little girl, who lives with Everett. He's poisoned the child's mind against Elesina." Ivy put down her soup spoon to be able to turn to David for full emphasis. "My poor friend has nothing to show for either of her marriages."

"You mean no alimony?"

"Nothing!"

David chuckled. "Forgive me if I point out, Ivy dear, that in that case your protégée must have been on the wrong side in two divorces. And that in itself tells me something about the divine Elesina."

"You're a brute, like all your sex! No wonder Elesina is so bitter. Look, the table's changing. Talk to the lucky lady on your right."

Ivy, left in silence, compared the occupants of the great formal blue chamber with the handsomer, haughtier ladies and gentlemen who condescended to them from the walls, subjects of the art of Lawrence, Romney and West, in scarlet uniforms and billowing dresses, against Palladian backgrounds or hunt picnics or fashionable malls. But her pleasure in this, an old game, was spoiled by the recollection of her talk with Clara. It was curious how penetrating Clara's vision could be. A hundred women could come to her house and receive the tactile, breathy attentions of the Judge without causing the lift of one of her long penciled eyebrows, but she could flare at the least change of his tone of voice, even from the other end of the long table, when a special impression had been made. Oh, yes, Clara, for all her airs, for all her cultivation of Greek poetry and early American hymns, could be a woman and a cat! Ivy watched her critically as she chatted with Al Schurman. Did she and Irving still make love? Then she shifted her gaze to Elesina, and in doing so it crossed David's broad shoulders and half-averted profile. Now she mated David with Elesina. They were Paris and Helen on the ship, flying from Menelaus. Unashamedly on deck, oblivious of the sailors as they would have been of dogs, naked, they copulated, his hair long and blond, mixed with hers, long and black...

"Irving seems to admire Miss Dart," Fred Pemberton, the Shakespearean scholar, observed to Ivy with a throaty chuckle. "The lofty Clara may yet deign to pucker her noble brow..."

Elesina was seated on Irving Stein's left and Pat Schurman on his right, but as Elesina and her host occupied the two chairs at the end of the long table she was given the appearance of being guest of honor. The obvious interest of the table in this striking new member of their group, this repertory actress with an obscure reputation for disaster, was gratifying, but Elesina was still irked that dinner had interrupted her quest of a second cocktail. Why did one never get enough to drink in Jewish houses? She noted sourly that there was only a single wineglass at each place. And these people had millions! Suddenly she was restless, oddly elated by her own bad humor.

"It was so good of Ivy to bring you into our lives, Miss Dart." Irving Stein's full, warm handclasp enveloped the fingers of her right hand under the table. "We hope you will become a regular visitor to Broadlawns. I could tell by the way you studied my little Bibiena that you have the eye of a connoisseur. That is what we care about." The voice, soft and low, dropped to a rumbling whisper. "Tonight, however, is not typical. The Schurmans are family. Very fine people, of course, but with no eyes or ears for the things we love. Pat's idea of celestial bliss is to watch her boys play hockey."

"Judge, do you think I might have a glass of wine now?"

"Why certainly, my dear." Even in his surprise he failed to release her fingers. His free hand beckoned the butler. "Some wine for Miss Dart."

Elesina with a slight effort brought her right hand up to table level. Only then did he release his hold. "Oh, don't let go," she protested, smiling across him at the obliquely watching Pat. "I'm always proud to have my hand held, aren't you, Mrs. Schurman? Only I insist that everybody witness my honor!"

"Very amusing, I'm sure."

Elesina turned away abruptly from Pat Schurman's pert stare. Let the little minx have Stein's paw in
her
lap if she wanted! Did she think Elesina Dart cared? Mrs. Schurman, indeed! Did Mrs. Schurman know there had been a Dart at Valley Forge? And a Dart at the Treaty of Ghent? Wouldn't all the Steins and Schurmans in this pompous room have given all their purchased portraits for her own little Copley, now unfortunately sold, of Elisha Dart?

But Elesina could never long enjoy this kind of snobbish fantasy. She felt her spirits suddenly deflate. How petty it all was! What did these people care about the Darts? What was all her family's past but a few tattered albums of faded snapshots of ladies in big hats on broad verandahs, of bearded men at the wheels of unbelievable autos, a box of yellow newspaper clippings of weddings and funerals, a memory of memories, a story written on the opaque waters of the East River, gone with the dirty snows of yesteryear?

She had to beckon the astonished butler to refill her glass. Really, it was too much! And now she was aware of a louder voice, addressing her with heavily ironic politeness.

"Your little interchange with the Judge, Miss Dart, puts me in mind of that sonnet of the divine bard's where he contemplates his mistress' fingers on the keys, or jacks, of a spinet. It evokes this happy conceit which I presume, facetiously, to offer in my own behalf at our host's expense: 'Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.'"

Fred Pemberton, on Pat Schurman's right, was leaning across her to gain Elesina's attention. His intrusive, watery eyes, his fixed little smile made her shiver in disgust. She decided to indulge the impulse to cut him down.

"But those dark lady sonnets were only a cover-up. Wasn't it the 'lovely boy' whose lips he really wanted to kiss?" Elesina now glanced down the table to where David Stein was talking to Ivy. "The divine bard, as you call him, would have addressed himself to our host's son rather than to me."

Pemberton, to her surprise, cackled with pleasure. Apparently any attention pleased him. "Aren't you forgetting, Miss Dart, the evidence of the twentieth sonnet? Where our poet tells us that nature, in molding the body of the beloved youth, intended him originally for a girl, but then fell a doting and added 'one thing to my purpose nothing.'"

"You interpret that as a reference to the young man's sexual organ?" Elesina's question was designed to insure that Mrs. Schurman should understand the reference, which she clearly did, for her thin lips were now pursed into a ball of disgust. Irving Stein coughed loudly, uneasily. "I suppose it's clear enough. But the presence of such an organ might still have been 'nothing,' or no impediment, to the poet's particular taste. However, a truce to such speculations! I am not sure that Mrs. Schurman appreciates our scholarly freedom. Let me simply point out that this sonnet may have been intended to put the reader off the track. After all, sodomy was a serious crime in Elizabethan England. Even if it flourished at court, you could still be burned alive for it. A man in Shakespeare's unprotected social position did not lightly twit authority."

"But, my dear Miss Dart," Stein intervened, "you are a veritable mine of authority! I told you you'd be one of us!"

"Oh, I once played the dark lady in a comedy based on the sonnets." Elesina laughed deprecatingly. "I believe it had three performances. However, it gave me the chance to study the sonnet sequence and make my own guesses. Why not? It's a garden where nobody fears to tread."

"And I, of course, have been one of the nonangels in that enclosure," Pemberton told them. "I have even published a work on the subject entitled, perhaps optimistically,
The Riddle Solved.
It was my theory that Shakespeare's feeling for the youth was the most intense passion of his lifetime and the principal source of the high tragic mood that preceded the composition of
Hamlet
and
Othello.
Of course, it had a homosexual aspect, but not necessarily in any vulgar or physical sense. The young man was obviously of the highest birth—very possibly the Earl of Pembroke himself—and a corporeal liaison may not have been feasible."

"I suppose the Earl's family may have had something to say about
that,
" the now utterly disgusted Pat Schurman put in sharply. "Shakespeare may be a god to you, Professor Pemberton, but to the Pembrokes he was probably a dirty old man."

"Hardly old, Ma'am."

"I confess I've had misgivings about the sonnets," Elesina interjected, to take the initiative from Pat. "To me there is something
malsain
about them. They are too crawling, too syrupy, too self-pitying."

Irving Stein seemed shocked at this. "But, Miss Dart, you are speaking of the greatest love poetry in the English language!"

"Oh, love, pooh, Judge. It's not love at all. It's a kind of crush. Or series of crushes, really. For if the sonnets cover a period of many years, as some scholars say, they must have been addressed to a series of young men. We all know that middle-aged pederasts keep changing the objects of their affection. After all, how long does a pretty boy stay pretty?"

Pemberton proved unexpectedly hospitable to this variation of his theory. "You have a point, Miss Dart! As a matter of fact, in
The Riddle Solved
I state that Shakespeare's great love could have been for two men, first Southampton and then Pembroke. But I fear we're going to shock Miss Cranberry." He lowered his voice as he glanced down the table at the poetess, a huge blond woman with straight hair pulled to a bun in back and a fleshy, pendulous, menacing face. "You know her theory, don't you? She claims there was no youth
or
dark lady. That the sonnets are a literary exercise, a novel in verse, a jeu d'esprit. But how can an old maid comprehend the eclecticism of the Elizabethan male?"

"We're talking about you, Miss Cranberry!" Elesina called boldly down the table. "Professor Pemberton doesn't believe that unmarried women can understand Shakespeare."