The Dark Lady (3 page)

Miss Cranberry's heavy, square face turned, with slowly mounting hostility, to her critic. "As much as unmarried men, anyway," she retorted with a grunt.

"I understand that
you
are not married, Miss Dart," Pat Schurman observed suddenly. "But surely nobody could accuse you of naivete where Shakespeare is concerned."

The acidity of the comment created a general atmosphere of embarrassment. "Oh, well, I'm an actress, and we don't count," Elesina responded with a shrug. "There was a time when we couldn't even be buried in hallowed ground. But the professor, Miss Cranberry, seems to imply that you turn Shakespeare into a sort of Kate Greenaway."

"Better than turning him into a sort of Oscar Wilde. I have often wondered if those critics who persist in finding evidence of inversion in the sonnets do not betray what I shall be polite enough to call their subconscious preferences."

"My friends, my friends!" interposed Clara Stein. "Please let us not be so heated. Erna, do talk to Mr. Simkins. He has told me how much he loves your poems. And David, you must help our end of the table to understand the sonnets." Clara, with a nod to her husband and a wink at David, signified that she wished the table divided into two sections to separate the combatants. It was an instance, Elesina supposed, of what Ivy had told her: that the detached mistress of the house always knew how to resume her rule.

"You must think we literary buffs have strange preoccupations." Elesina had turned now with affected humility to Pat Schurman. "The Judge tells me you're a great hockey fan."

"It doesn't mean that I can't read, Miss Dart."
"I never meant to imply it." Elesina glanced at her host, who, she was glad to note, had instantly resented Pat Schurman's insulting tone. "I'm sure you have just as interesting theories about Shakespeare as anyone here."

"I don't know if they're as interesting, but they're certainly a good deal cleaner. If that's a virtue, which I don't suppose you believe."

"Cleaner?"

"Yes, Miss Dart. I am frankly revolted at what I have heard at this table tonight!"

"Pat, my dear, you mustn't take that attitude," Judge Stein intervened earnestly. "It isn't as if there were young people present. I..."

"I'm sorry, Cousin Irving, but I cannot agree with you. I should not be honest if I did not tell you that I consider the moral tone of the conversation tonight very low indeed. And I deem it a fault on your part to permit and encourage it."

Irving Stein had turned quite red. "Am I to credit my senses?" he almost shouted, with a slight accentuation of Teutonic accent. "Surely you, a cousin by marriage, and a younger one at that, cannot be criticizing
my
moral tone?"

Patricia Schurman's self-possession was wonderful to behold. She had put down her fork and was facing her host with a small, steady, mocking smile. "I suggest you ask some of your other guests what they think of the dirty talk we've been exposed to tonight."

Her husband, at the other end of the table, was looking cruelly embarrassed, but it was still apparent that, if it had to be war, he was going to be on the side of his wife. In the silver-tinted air over the long table there hung a sense of the shivering jealousies between the two families. "Pat, will you drop it, please? What do we gain by bringing these things out?"

"I am only too happy to drop the whole distasteful subject," his wife retorted. "It was certainly not I who brought it up. But in dropping it I wish to make it entirely clear that I stand by everything I've said."

Something at this seemed to tear within the Judge. His head sagged for a second, but when he raised it and faced his opponent, his words came out in a rush that was something between a bleat and a gasp. "It is an outrage for a woman in your position to say such things! I will not permit it in my house!"

"I'm perfectly willing to repeat it, Judge."

Stein rose from his chair, his face now scarlet. In a moment, with a rush of silk, Clara was at his side. "Come away, dear," she said placatingly. "We can finish our dinner in the library. No, David, you stay here. Please, everyone! Don't get up. Go on with your dinner. Pretend that nothing has happened. It is difficult, I know, but it's the only way to handle these things. Sarah," she murmured as she passed Peter's wife, "take over, dear."

There was a nervous bustle of conversation around the table as the Steins left the dining room, her hands clasping his arm. Everyone babbled the first thing that came to mind. After dinner, when the ladies had retired to the drawing room, Elesina went over to Ivy.

"Your friends are extraordinary. Do they put on this act every weekend? It's like that party at the Macbeths'. Except there it was the guests who had to leave."

Ivy sighed. "I seem to have brought the apple of discord to the banquet of the gods. You're a very potent influence, my dear."

Elesina smiled. Decidedly, the weekend was proving more lively than she could have hoped.

Ivy always thought of herself as having had no individual childhood, but as having been an amorphous part of the jumbled noisy life of the Trasks in their ancestral shingle mansion by the lake at Auburn, New York. For reasons that she never quite fathomed the Trasks, like a noble Italian family, seemed to cling to the same habitation, so that her memory of meals was of a long board at which several uncles and aunts, at least one grandparent and numberless cousins ate and chattered. Trasks would sometimes marry and leave the tribal roof, but they had a way of coming back, for long summers or Christmases, or even permanently, with the death or defection of spouses or with economic reverses. Some Trasks were poor and others well off, but all were indoctrinated with a sense of responsibility for fellow Trasks, or for persons who had married Trasks or whose mothers or grandmothers had been Trasks—Parkers, Sewards, Tremaines, Gardners, Sewells. The history of the family was a history of "upstate."

Yet as Ivy grew up she was soon made aware that, despite a good deal of evenly distributed affection, there were still social distinctions to be observed. Uncle Fred Porter, for example, was a "personage"; he had been lieutenant governor of the state, and even the little boys hushed up when he talked. Aunt Eleanor Sewell was "unfortunate," because her husband had been a gambler and because she drank. Julia Trask was "fast," so that no nice boy, at least no nice local boy, could be reasonably expected to marry her. Ted Tremaine was "smart," which meant that he would go far, and Blanche Trask was "too good for this world," which signified religious hysteria and an early demise. But what was Ivy? What was plain little Ivy, whose sharp green eyes took in so much more than was good for her? She seemed as much a part of the old house as the Duncan Phyfe dining room chairs and the languid ladies in the Morse portraits, as the horsehair sofa and the stillness of the dark dining room in midmorning, because she never went away, like the others, to other homes, or even for vacations. Ivy was an orphan, and she didn't have a cent.

It sometimes seemed to her that her parents had simply been lost. She could not be sure whether she remembered her mother or remembered only the photographs of that pretty, pouting, perversely happy face. Her father, too, had been beautiful, but he had been "weak," though whether this referred to his health or character Ivy had never been sure. He had died of a brain fever when only twenty-five, and his widow had followed him less than a year later. Ivy was told that her mother's heart had given out, but in later years she suspected that the words concealed a suicide. She was kindly treated by everyone, but it was evident that her extra helping of affection was inspired by the general sense of her aloneness. What in the name of heaven were they going to do with her?

Ivy conformed carefully to what she gleaned was expected of her. She heard that she was bright, so she worked hard to obtain good marks at school. She was told that she was always a help in the house, so she made herself useful to Kate the cook and Millie the chambermaid. She heard from beautiful Aunt Amy Porter that boys weren't everything in life, so she accepted her plainness and obscurity and thought as little as she could of parties and dances. She learned from Grandma that unmarried women should be allowed careers, so she asked to be sent to college and read every book in the library from Cooper to Bryant. And she would indeed have gone to New York City and to Barnard College had President Theodore Roosevelt not named Uncle Fred Porter Secretary of Commerce and had Aunt Amy not suggested that Ivy go with them to Washington and be her social secretary. The whole household at Auburn rang with the felicity of this decision. The problem of Ivy was solved!

And so it was, for many years, even permanently, so far as Auburn was concerned. Uncle Fred enjoyed his high office for a decade, through the terms of Roosevelt and Taft, and Ivy had a liberal education, not only in politics, but in the social and cultural life of the capital. Such intellectuals as Henry Adams, Senator Lodge and Lord Bryce, admirers of Uncle Fred's
Constitutional History of the United States,
were frequent visitors. They rarely spoke directly to Ivy, but their words and manners were tucked away in her unwritten diary. Ivy had the combined reverence and cynicism of a London shopgirl watching royalty on parade. She saw that the great thinkers of the Theodosian court held themselves superior to the crude politicians, but she also noted that their pretensions were based, at least in part, on wealth and social position. The American Renaissance, it appeared, like the earlier Italian, had started at the top.

Ivy was smart enough to make herself indispensable to her aunt, who, like many of the Trask women, had little gift for organization. Aunt Amy was a gently indolent creature who nursed a rather faded blond beauty like a string of fine old pearls, but she was capable of noting even minor derelictions in subordinates. Ivy became adept at seating dinner parties, matching affinities without violating protocol, and her aid was soon sought by other Cabinet wives. "Get the little Trask to do it," the word went out. "See if Amy Porter can spare her for the afternoon." Sometimes, when Aunt Amy was ailing, Ivy acted as hostess for her uncle, and then she was always careful to conduct herself in such a way as to be appreciated without being overpraised. For she knew that her job would not survive the day when the first guest failed to miss Aunt Amy.

For a long time no man came into her life. Where would he have come from? Washington was not a town for romance; the men who came there were not only married but middle-aged, and many who dined at the Porters' were old. It never would have occurred to Aunt Amy or Uncle Fred to invite a "beau" for Ivy, and her looks were not the sort that made males leap boundary marks. Besides, she was shy with her contemporaries. She did not believe that she could attract them, and she could conceive of no greater humiliation than being detected in an attempt to do so. Yet on the whole she was not dissatisfied with her life. She considered that, judged by her scanty equipment, she might be deemed to have done well. Even a paid niece, she would tell herself with a private smirk, was not too lowly to be occasionally smug.

Eventually a man, a sort of man, did come. Edouardo Calabrese was a secretary in the Italian legation, a bachelor, past fifty, of a well-to-do Florentine banking family whose sisters had married into the nobility. Edouardo was charming; he had wide cultural interests, spoke perfect English and knew America intimately. He even collected American art, and his house in Georgetown had many samples of the work of Hassam, Bellows and Eakins. He greatly admired Uncle Fred's near classic book on the Constitution and was a constant guest at the Porters', one of the very few to whom Ivy became more than the efficient, bustling little assistant to her aunt. He would talk to her as if she were the equal of any lady present.

"Tell me, Miss Trask," he asked her one night before dinner, "do you write down the things you observe? Do you keep a journal?"

"No. Why?"

"Because I've been watching you. Those fine green eyes of yours seem to take in everything and everybody. What a record it would be, if you set it all down!"

"But then it would be somebody else's, wouldn't it? Now it's mine. Because it's true. If I wrote it out it would become a work of art—bad art, at that."

"Do you believe, then, that we can live just in ourselves?"

"Who else should I live in?"

"I see you're a realist, Miss Trask. And a very live one, too. I sometimes feel that if I were to touch the tips of your fingers, I should get an electric shock."

"
Merci du compliment!
"

"I mean it well." He held up a long thin hand to show her his tapering fingers. "Don't you think this old Italian appendage needs a stimulus?"

"Why do you call it old? Can it be older than you?"

"I wonder." He contemplated his hand whimsically now, as if it might suddenly disappear. "It goes way back. We are bourgeois, but we go back. Like the Medici."

Ivy laughed and touched her fingertips to his. "There! Did you feel the shock?"

"Oh, yes. I'm better already. I think we're going to be friends, Miss Trask."

Edouardo, it turned out, had a reputation most unusual for an Italian; he was not a ladies' man. The relationship that he and Ivy developed was accepted with a smile and a shrug by the Porters and their friends; nobody gossiped when he took Amy's old-maid niece to a concert or for a drive in Rock Creek Park. Ivy was too shrewd to be falsely modest. She divined at once that her value to Edouardo was more in what she was not than what she was, and she was perfectly willing to have it that way, to play Jane Eyre to his expurgated Rochester. She liked to sit by him in the old victoria that he rented for drives by the river or to walk with him by the cherry trees. His formal, balanced phrases, his velvet tones opened a new world for her. She noted now for the first time all the colors of spring and of sunset, and she learned the stories behind the lacquered diplomacy of the day. She even put together a picture of the Italy of his boyhood, replete to the ravens around the towers of the villa in Fiesole and the smell of incense in the damp darkness of the family chapel. Ivy hugged herself with delight at the realization that she was at last able to put her hard-won knowledge of human beings to good use. How many silly girls would have spoiled it all by trying to marry him!