The Dark Lady (6 page)

"I suppose she sees me as a kind of avuncular figure."

Ivy pretended to give it up. "Yes, that must be it."

"Or even a father?"

"More like a grandfather."

Irving's look of disappointment was comic. "I must expect that sort of attitude at my age!"

She slapped his wrist. "Oh, Irving, don't be such an ass. I said she
liked
you. That means she's attracted to you. Do I have to cross all the t's in 'attracted'?"

"You mean she's the type that likes older men?"

"Well, I don't say she likes you
because
you're an older man. Both her husbands were rather callow youths. Perhaps they taught her to appreciate judgment and maturity. And you're still very good looking, Irving. Don't pretend you don't know it. I used to have a bit of a thing about you myself!"

She watched the Judge narrowly. But his vanity was proof against all suspicions. The lull in their argument was now interrupted by a livelier one between Sam Gorman and Fred Pemberton. It was, of course, Shakespeare again.

"It is one of the rare situations in which the bard seems dated," Pemberton was explaining. "He shared the morbid Elizabethan belief that a woman should never give herself to more than one man. How they loved to rant about this! Their faith in God would be lost, their sun and moon eclipsed, their universe degraded to an unweeded garden, if some poor female chose to exercise the simple human prerogative of sleeping around."

"But surely a man's compulsion to keep a woman to himself is not restricted to the Elizabethans," Irving interposed. "What about the Arab world? What about those harems guarded by eunuchs?"

Ivy looked about the pleasant little green-paneled room where the eight were assembled so cozily. Pemberton was doing just what she had wanted. His chatter was creating the same pedantic-erotic atmosphere of the disastrous night at Broadlawns. A fire crackled in the small grate under the marble Victorian mantel; Tiffany lampshades sparkled with iridescent hues. Elesina in black velvet looked creamy and elegant, as in a Sargent portrait. The other two women, magazine editors, were decorative without being competitive, and Irving, large, leonine, gravel-voiced, made a splendid guest of honor.

"Trust the Judge to assert the rights of the great proprietors," Sam Gorman chuckled. "I can just see you, Irving, as the master of a harem, striding through it, like Rembrandt's Grand Turk."

"And I can see you, too, Gorman. Perhaps in a different capacity."

"That should teach you to cross swords with Irving, Sam!"

"But, Elesina, if he's a Grand Turk and I'm a eunuch, what do you think that makes
you?
" Sam retorted. He appealed to the others. "Don't you think Elesina's an odalisque? I find her decidedly an odalisque!"

"Then look after your charges," Elesina told him, handing him her glass. "Get me a drink. I want to hear Fred's reply to Irving's interesting observation."

"Orientals are not relevant to the issue," Pemberton responded dogmatically. "The pashas simply strangled naughty wives; they did not become suicidal over them. They were realists. The stout walls of the harem indicated a healthy awareness that the weaker sex might be expected to bolt at the first opportunity. But somewhere along the line Christian society went off the tracks. It may have had to do with the deification of the Virgin. A man raised to believe that there was something holy in virginity could only forgive the woman who surrendered hers to himself. But I admit that the aberration produced some of the most beautiful poetry in the world. Art often flourishes on a denial of nature."

"I confess I have always been something of a medievalist," Irving observed. "Like Henry Adams, I am inclined to Mariolatry."

"Ah, one can see that in the divine Clara," Gorman exclaimed impertinently. "You have enshrined her at Broadlawns. It is your Chartres!"

Ivy was a bit uneasy at this, though Irving appeared to take it as a compliment. She decided it was time to move her guests in to dinner, where she placed Irving, to his barely contained displeasure, at the opposite end of the table from Elesina. Her plan cost her his cooperation during the meal, for he remained for the most part rather sullenly silent, but she knew that she could count on Fred Pemberton to keep things going, and her reward came later when they returned to the living room and Irving pressed angrily close behind her.

"I trust I shall be allowed two words with Miss Dart before I go home?"

Ivy stared with affected surprise. "Why, Irving, you old darling, of course! What
can
I have been thinking of?"

At midnight, when the guests were gone, Elesina, glass in hand, stared moodily into the dying fire.

Ivy, back from locking the front door, asked: "Well?"

"I feel like a whore. And what do you think that makes
you?
"

"Our customers didn't pay anything. We must be novices in the business."

"Novices! Everything went just as you planned. I shall have no trouble raising the money for the play. No trouble, that is, other than we anticipated."

"And what did we anticipate?"

Elesina turned now to look at her scornfully. "I shall have to sleep with him, of course."

"Did he say so?"

"What do you take him for? He's a gentleman. But we know what these understandings are."

"The madam doesn't."

"Oh, Ivy, stop being funny."

Ivy came over to take an opposite seat by the fire. "All right, I'll be serious. If you become Irving Stein's mistress, I shall never have anything to do with you again."

Elesina seemed only mildly surprised. "You wish me to lead him on?"

"Certainly not. I want you to be perfectly direct and perfectly honest. I want you to marry him." Elesina continued to contemplate the embers. "Fred Pemberton is not altogether the ass he seems. He has some shrewd insights. We women have been unjustly treated. Oh, I'm not talking about the political side," she added as she saw Elesina's shrug. "I'm no militant. I can make do with things as they are. But men have to be jockeyed a bit. There is no reason why Irving should not make up for what his sex has done to you. Particularly when he will find a new life and a new happiness in doing so."

"What about Clara?"

"You find me disloyal?"

"I find you ... interesting."

"Clara has had quite enough out of life. She has had a lot more than she needs or even wants. She doesn't care for Irving physically anymore. I doubt she ever did. It's only right that she should give him up to a younger woman. She will have money, and the devotion of children and grandchildren. She should not complain."

"Ivy Trask, you're a very wicked woman!" Elesina exclaimed with a sudden laugh. "I see now I was right to be afraid of you from the start."

"I take the world as I find it," Ivy retorted. "I have had to maneuver and scheme for every bone that's been flung at me in the yard. Clara has only had to sit on her ass and receive the bounties of the world. It's all very well for her to hold up her moral titles and cry: 'Hands off!' But the only laws I obey are the laws of the land. I never subscribed to any others. I never benefited from any others. So let Clara watch out! There is no law against divorce."

Elesina said nothing more, and Ivy, who always knew when to stop, rose and bade her good night.

When Elesina was sixteen, she played Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice.
It was the custom of Miss Dixon's Classes, as her school was named, to produce one Shakespeare play a winter, and the dramatics coach had assumed that Elesina Dart, who had made such a hit the year before as Juliet, would seek the role of Portia. Great had been the astonishment in Miss Dixon's "green room" when Elesina had not only insisted on the role of the Jew, but had performed it with such fire and spitting venom that some of the mothers had complained about the choice of play. Where on earth had Elesina Dart, so admirably reared, learned to impersonate an oleaginous Hebrew moneylender? Surely not from anyone in the guarded circle of Mr. and Mrs. Amos Dart.

Mrs. Dart made no secret of her distaste, either for her daughter's role or for her success in it.

"I don't approve of girls acting in any case," she remarked to Elesina after briefly watching the closing minutes of a rehearsal. "And I certainly don't approve of the attitudinizing required by a character part. It brings out the worst social characteristics. Don't forget, my dear: the greatest clown on the stage can be the biggest bore at a dinner party."

But the value of her role to Elesina was precisely that it taught her for the first time to question her mother's social judgments and to wonder if she wanted a life whose supreme sacrament was the evening meal. Until then her parents had seemed so strong, so well attired, so correct of speech and coordinated of movement, so in control of their bodies and tempers, whether on the golf course or at the bridge table, like improbable aristocrats in luxury advertisements, that she had been forced to assume the existence of some kind of true faith behind such impressive orthodoxy. But now she began to wonder if it were not all a front. She began to question the rule at home and the rule at school. Shylock became her protest against three hundred incipient female anti-Semites clad in the bulging green bloomers, plain green blouses, black cotton stockings and low-heeled shoes which Miss Dixon required as the uniform necessary to mortify the vanity of her sex in preparation for a lifetime devoted to its gratification.

But Elesina dwelt only passingly on the ethnic aspects of the play. It was in Shylock's passion that she found her balm for the sore inflicted on her soul by the aridity of her world. As she scuffled about the stage, clutching her cloak around her neck and snarling at Antonio, she had a gleeful sense of corrected vision, of being able, in the few short hours devoted to a rehearsal for what would be the mere two of performance, to glimpse a greater reality of hate, of indignation and of joy, pure joy, at creating a little nugget of beauty out of the spit and sediment of her inheritance. For the trouble with all the world, she could see now, was just that it was not a stage, or even a decent replica of one. The most one could do with it, if one had any gift at all, was to turn it into an audience.

Amos and Linda Dart were the kind of doves whose lifelong satisfaction was to perch and coo on the tiptop rung of the social ladder. They differed from more ordinary social aspirants in that they never felt the smallest urge to impress others with their achievement. One could have taken a cruise around the world with the Darts without hearing them once drop the name of Grace Vanderbilt or Mona Williams. Nor had they anything in common with those little brothers of the rich who, constantly in debt, cadge loans and scant tips. Their income from a modest Dart trust, however exiguous for their milieu, was never overspent. They had just enough, with careful planning, to equip themselves smartly, to keep a little jewel of an apartment in Manhattan, to send Billy and Elesina to private schools and to travel in first-class accommodations to the various country houses where their presence was regularly sought.

In summertime the Darts often enjoyed the loan of an unoccupied villa by the sea or of a comfortable gatehouse, but they were always careful not to place themselves too much under even moral obligations, and any benefactor was apt to regard himself more in their debt than they in his. "Think of my luck," he would exclaim to friends. "Amos and Linda are going to be in Far Hills all of August in our guest cottage!" For the Darts not only played games with skill and perfect sportsmanship, they talked well; they were never sick, late, drunk or ill tempered, and they could be counted on to be charming even to poor relatives. It was also a source of gratification that they were happily married and much in love, which not only removed them from the suspicious probings of jealous spouses, but gave them a rather stylish little air of independence from the social pattern in which they were otherwise so deeply enmeshed. Only a stupid observer could have failed to see that Amos and Linda would have given up anything for a dinner party but each other.

Amos as a husband was more led than leading, not because he was weak, but because Linda had the clearer eye, the sharper mind. He in turn had the greater sex appeal, being gentle and affable, with sunny blue eyes and curly hair, while her Grecian nose and erect posture suggested an armature under her handsome figure. Had Linda's motto, "Nothing in excess," been applied to her domestic life, her children might have grown up in the pattern of their parents, but nature betrayed her to a single exaggeration: a passion for her sullen, delicate, brooding, dark-eyed son. She did not neglect Elesina; no mother could have been more correct in her attentions, but the girl was never under the smallest illusion that Billy was not the favorite child.

Obviously, it was up to Amos to correct this imbalance of family emotion by making a particular thing of his relationship with his daughter, and being a gentleman he did what was expected, but Elesina from childhood had a suspicion, murky at first, clearing later and at length bathed in laughter, that both were playing parts. When she flung her arms about his neck and cried: "Oh, Papa, my beloved Papa, swear you'll never leave me!" and he cried back: "Liebchen, I'll shoot the man who tries to take you from me!" they would smile broadly enough at the benignity of their performance, but behind that smile there was always, at least on her part, the suspicion of tears, tears that their reality was not what they played, could not be what they played, because reality could never be art, because truth could never be more than the mirror of aspiration.

In the two years that followed her success in
The Merchant
Elesina became even less emotionally involved with her family. She was occupied now in a love affair with herself, intoxicated with the discovery of her own dark beauty. She would spend hours before her mirror, making herself up, doing her hair in different ways, posing as Nazimova, as Pola Negri, as Natasha Rambova. She formed passionate, brief attachments to girls in her class; she wrote a whole novel about a debutante who was abducted by a bootlegger; she was even suspended from Miss Dixon's Classes for smoking. Only her mother's threat to send her to a strict boarding school in the South induced her to come back to graduate. Her classmates voted her most likely to succeed—in all matters not pertaining to domesticity.