The Dark Lady (28 page)

Ivy taught her to emulate Franklin Roosevelt in never condescending to her electors, never allowing the least note of folksiness to mar her speech. She had to be always what they knew she was, the great lady of Broadlawns who had transformed a vast estate into a museum and park for the people and who now felt that her duty obliged her to offer herself as well to the service of her district. But if she would never insult her hearers by pretending to be other than she was, she had still to remember that in a democracy class lines must always be made to seem easily crossable, and she would illustrate her own knowledge of poverty and despair by a reference to the Depression years when she had spent dull days waiting for bit parts. She would even imply, with a slight shrug, a half smile and a brief sideways glance, that as a single woman she had had to master every aspect of the art of surviving in a city of sin.

If Elesina, the actress, had learned not to play the proletarian, she had learned also not to play the man. She relied boldly on her beauty and her femininity, and never allowed her speeches to be dull. Her aides learned how to make tangled topics clear. Elesina would demand a single page on each issue, stating the principal arguments pro and con. She never allowed her attention to be squandered on details. She made a merit of superficiality by giving the impression of always going straight to the main point. It was frequently the only one she knew.

Because of her looks, her social position and her speaking ability, she had achieved a public recognition far above what any ordinary state assemblyman could have expected. Her picture was carried in
Time,
in
Life,
in
Newsweek,
and she faced her first congressional primary as a cosmopolitan figure, whereas Julius Schell, the favorite of the ultraconservatives, was hardly known outside Westchester County. But Elesina had disadvantages, too. She was a woman, she had been twice divorced; she had been on the stage. Ivy proposed to make up for these liabilities with a whispering campaign to spread three responses: that Julius Schell was not really a man; that if he had never been divorced it was only because he had never been married; and that he, too, was known for his enthusiasm for the stage, and in particular for handsome, young actors.

"I want a clean campaign, Ivy," Elesina warned her sternly when she heard these suggestions.

Ivy abruptly changed the subject. It was always difficult to tie Ivy down. Elesina suspected that she rigidly separated the morality of the candidate from that of the campaign manager. It was all very well for the former to proclaim a belief in ideals; it was even acceptable that this belief should be sincere—so long as the manager had a free hand in the sewers. Elesina was determined, however, to bring matters to a showdown. She was perfectly aware of all that she owed her friend, but she knew, too, that gratitude was the cause of half the sinning in public life.

Was she a hypocrite? She put the question to herself occasionally. Where had her new sense of virtue come from? Was it not possible that it had come from her own admiration of her own portrait: that of the noble matron on the podium, the tall lady in black with one arm raised to assert her faith in the better life? Well, what of it?

Certainly her daughter considered her a hypocrite. Ruth had passed from Mummie-worship to Mummie-envy. In reaction to the splendors of Broadlawns she had married a tedious, radical journalist, and, unhappy with him, seemed to live to find fault with her increasingly successful mother. Elesina's only cruelty was to be sweet to her. Poor Ruth, who had not lost her childhood weight or looks, was not worth a quarrel. If Elesina read the resentment of a whole world in her daughter's eyes, she knew that it was only one world in many. But it was unfortunately the world that contained the two persons closest to her.

That Ivy, for all her refusal to discuss the issue between them, was well aware of it, became evident on the morning when she entered the library in Broadlawns to deposit a typescript triumphantly on Elesina's desk. Before she stamped out of the room, she grunted:

"Read Julius' speech to the Rotary and then tell me that old Ivy is unscrupulous!"

Alone, Elesina read the following:

"Some of my listeners tonight may have heard of a touching little volume entitled
The War Letters of David Stein.
The letter writer was a young resident of this very electoral district who enlisted in the British army in nineteen thirty-nine and, unhappily, was killed in the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk. His letters have been edited by his good friend and cousin, Eliot Clarkson. In them the reader will find many references to a certain married lady with whom David Stein was romantically involved. This married lady is given the alias: Clarissa.

"Now why am I telling you this tonight? Is it because I am in a position to prove that the mysterious Clarissa is none other than my worthy opponent? And stepmother of the late David Stein? No. I have no wish to pry into family scandals or long-past romances. I have no wish to have others pry into mine! In revealing this fact, then, do I not seem a hypocrite? Perhaps so. But, racking my brain, I have not been able to think of any other way to bring before you certain other facts which are of vital importance to every voter in this district. To do this I am duty bound to unveil Clarissa.

"My other facts are these. David Stein could not await his own country's decision to go to war. He was the kind of impetuous young man who lets his enthusiasm outrun his discretion. Idealistic and confused, he dreamed fuzzily of a better world for all. In his hurry to achieve it, he was inclined to disdain the means. Young men of hot blood and careless thinking have always been an easy prey for their radical friends, and David found his carnivore in a seemingly quiet and scholarly cousin, Eliot Clarkson. But this same Clarkson, my friends, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party! Read these letters if you can bear it! Read David's juvenile onslaughts on our American free-enterprise system! And remember when you do so that the third musketeer of this tight little trio was the lady now seeking the Republican nomination for Congress, Elesina Stein!"

Elesina sat in silent contemplation of the typescript for several minutes. Then her telephone buzzed.

"You'll never believe who's here, Mrs. Stein!" the cheerful volunteer operator's voice communicated. "It's your honorable opponent himself!"

"He has his nerve. What does he want?"

"To speak with you on a matter of the greatest urgency, he says."

"Send him in."

Julius Schell, standing in the doorway of the great library, glanced at the high shelves of the Stein collection with his usual contained smile. It was the smile of the extreme Tory. It seemed to profess that the wearer, who had seen all, knew all, was now beyond passion, beyond anger, almost beyond disgust. It purported to accept at last the sorry fact that men were blind beasts and seemed to say: "Well, let us not tear our hair about it, let us see what little can be done."

"Good morning, Julius. I am surprised that you expose yourself to this communist den."

"I am impregnably armored in my virtue," Julius replied in his mocking tone. "I take it that my remarks at the Rotary Club have not altogether escaped your notice?"

"Have you come to gloat?"

"No. I have come because I believe, despite what my campaign managers assert to the contrary, that you are a person who fundamentally believes in telling the truth."

Elesina stared at the strange, soft, fanatical brown eyes of her opponent. "And
I'm
the one who hasn't been telling it?"

"Perhaps it has not been altogether your fault. Perhaps advantage has been taken of your confidence. It happens in politics. But are you aware of the filthy slander the woman Trask is spreading about me?"

"What slander?"

"She is saying that Giles Bennett and I are lovers,"

Again Elesina stared with astonishment into those glinting eyes. "And that's a lie? You needn't get so excited, Julius. In the theater we used to take those things very lightly."

"Damn the theater! I've never touched Giles. I've never touched any man that way!"

"Or boy?"

"Or boy!"

"Well, Julius, suppose I believe you? What earthly difference is there between Ivy calling you a homosexual and you calling me a communist?"

"I didn't call you a communist! I said you had a communist association. And you had! Can you deny it?"

"Certainly I deny it."

"Do you deny that you were a lover of David Stein's, whose best friend is—or at least was—a communist?"

Elesina's indignation began to subside a bit before her now awakened interest in his evident sincerity. "I think I begin to see your point. It doesn't matter that I wasn't a communist. It only matters that I had a communist association, is that it? Like a game of hearts? So many points off if I hold the Queen of Spades? No matter how hard I've tried to get rid of her?"

"The point is that in such dangerous times the voters must be told of
all
affiliations with Moscow. They can then judge which are innocent and which are guilty."

"Well, then, isn't it
my
duty to bring before those same voters your association with Giles Bennett?"

"Because of his reputation for inversion?"

"No! Because of his affiliation with Eliot Clarkson."

"What are you talking about?"

"It was considerably more intimate than any that existed between Eliot and poor David."

Julius' air of utter amazement could hardly have been faked. "You mean...?"

"Simply that Giles was kept by Eliot for a year."

"It's not true!"

"I suggest you ask him. He can hardly deny it."

"Ask him? I'll never see him again!"

"But the communist association has already been established. According to you, isn't that enough? Aren't you as contaminated as I? Isn't it my duty to illuminate the electorate?"

"There is the difference, of course, that I never knew of the connection with Clarkson."

"Shouldn't you have known? Shouldn't you have inquired? Isn't that the duty of every aspirant for public office in these troubled days?"

"I admit my negligence." Julius seemed at last to be genuinely humbled. "I shall even admit it publicly." As the idea became clearer to him, he raised his head with renewed assurance. "I shall repudiate Giles!"

"Another person to fling in the fire. What a pity you weren't born in Toledo in the reign of Philip the Second. How you'd have loved it!"

"But you, Elesina. What will you do about Ivy Trask? Will you muzzle her?"

"Oh, Julius, get out. You bore me. You bore me inexpressibly."

"You will continue, then, I gather, your sewer campaign?"

"What I shall do or not do you will learn from my actions. Just remember that Pandoras shouldn't go around opening boxes."

But as soon as the door was closed behind him, she rang for Ivy. When the latter appeared she cried out angrily:

"What have you been saying about Julius and Giles?"

"Don't ask about things you're not supposed to know."

"I think, if you don't mind, Ivy, I'd like to know everything about my own campaign." Elesina paused to let the authority in her tone have its effect. Ivy, approaching the desk, began nervously to play with a paperweight. "Is it true that you've been spreading the word that they're lovers?"

Ivy sniffed. "Some news!"

"Have you?"

"Little-known facts about well-known people!" Here Ivy gave vent to one of her jeering laughs.

"Do you believe that a candidate's sexual taste is relevant to his qualification? I had thought you more tolerant."

Ivy shrugged. "I suppose there's always the danger of blackmail."

"If Julius' homosexuality is as well known as you imply, where is the danger of blackmail?"

"If it's that well known, where is the harm in saying it?"

"Because I suggest it's not true!"

"Not true? That Julius has hot pants for little boys? Be your age, Elesina!"

"I intend to be. And I still have reason to believe that Julius is a virgin. With both sexes."

"The more fool he! Am I to blame for his inhibitions? I know what I'm doing. Trust old Ivy. If Julius wants to sue me, I can prove enough about his posing for art classes to convince any jury in the land he's a bugger!"

"Posing for art classes?"

Ivy explained.

"But that doesn't prove anything," Elesina retorted. "A man can do those things without being a practicing homosexual. Indeed, the mere fact that he does them suggests to me that he isn't."

"Well, what does it matter?" Ivy exploded. "If he
did
do anything, you know what it would be. He wants to prove you a Red by association. Well, I'm proving him a faggot the same way!"

"I've noticed, Ivy, that when you like a homosexual, he's a free soul. When you don't, he's a faggot."

"What's wrong with that? If I don't like him, you can be sure he's a son of a bitch. So anything goes."

"Not with me. And certainly not in my campaign. I am going to answer with the truth. I shall tell the story of me and David."

Ivy looked aghast. "Elesina! There's not only Eliot Clarkson and all those radical letters. My God, there's incest! Have you never heard of a senator called Joseph McCarthy?"

"I wonder if people aren't getting a little tired of McCarthy. Can he last forever?"

"No. He's a loudmouth, a lush and a faggot, too. And when he slips, it'll be just as dangerous to be for him as it is now to be against him. But the first ones to resist a demagogue always get clobbered. Wait for the second wave. The timing in these things is everything."

"Ivy, do you believe in nothing?"

"I believe in you, baby. My faith there never wavers. I'll bring you through, never fear. Sometimes I think I have a kind of second sight where you're concerned."

Elesina shook her head firmly. "It's not enough, my friend. It won't do. I must run my own campaign my own way. Let me therefore give you an explicit order. There is to be no further use of sex smears. Shouted or whispered. Is that entirely clear?"