The Dark Lady (7 page)

But all of this mattered little enough; the time had come for boys. Linda Dart had to give up some of her own social activities to supervise and chaperone her giddy daughter through the fever of her debutante year, and that Elesina was still a virgin when she eloped with Bill Nolte a month before her coming-out party was attributable entirely to the indefatigable maternal endeavors. But the elopement was to cost Elesina more than she had reckoned. It was to cost her a large portion of her mother's interest and care. From now on she was on her own. Linda, to be sure, was available for consultation, for advice, but Elesina had heard the splash of washed hands. Bitterly in her mind she accused her mother of having objected more to her elopement than to her marriage. Had it not mortally offended Linda's very grandest friend, Mrs. Emory, whose ball in Elesina's honor, the product of the subtlest Dart planning, had had to be called off after the invitations were out?

Nolte was a cipher. In later years Elesina found it difficult to recall even what he had looked like. He was one of those pretty boys who went to every party and knew every debutante without having any clearly identifiable family or even friends. In fact, he had attended Columbia and was a customers' man in a small brokerage house. He was also endowed with a dull but respectable widowed mother who lived in Orange, New Jersey, and who detested Elesina on sight. With marriage Nolte rushed to domestic dullness as if it were a heaven of limited seats and lost his looks, as it seemed, overnight. Who was this chubby, pompous little bore to whom Elesina now found herself bound? In less than a year she was home again.

Alas, it was not the same home. Amos had cancer, and in the bleak months that were left to him his despairing wife had little time for her troublesome daughter. Elesina turned to the stage and obtained two walk-on parts. Then she had a break. A season in summer stock in Westchester resulted in a Broadway role that she was uniquely fitted to play: the bored heiress who yearns for a "real" experience and becomes the willing tool of a cynical but charming jewel robber. The play was trash, but Percy Hammond noted in his review: "Miss Dart brings to her part the authenticity of a lady and the
sansgêne
of a flapper—a fine job of balance. One wonders where she will go from here."

The good luck of this part was largely canceled by its bringing Elesina into the orbit of Ted Everett, who played her brother in the play. He was the son of a Wall Street banker, and his real reason for being on the stage was to irritate his father, though he fancied that his loud, shrill voice and morbid temperament might one day make him a distinguished Hamlet. He was good looking, in a weak, blond, attenuated way, and he made an excellent first impression when he wished to, knowing how to endow his interlocutor with the flattering conviction that he was one of the few who were capable of responding to Ted Everett's intense vibrations. Elesina, like many who fancy that they wish to escape from society, was enchanted to discover a fellow refugee in her new milieu, and soon she and Ted were having supper together every night after the show, drinking whiskey and exchanging horror stories about their families. Ted was amusing, until one realized that his only true interest was in himself and his imagined grievances, but Elesina did not know this until after they had gone down to that lavender chamber in City Hall and exchanged their vows. The very next morning Ted made a terrible scene because the newspaper item about their union described Elesina as a rising actress and himself as merely the son of Lawson Everett.

The marriage, like Ted's acting career, seemed to draw its principal support from paternal disapproval. Mr. Everett, a Southern Baptist who did not recognize divorce and would not countenance actresses, refused even to meet Elesina, which gave Ted a saturnine satisfaction. But what little chance of happiness the young couple might have had was eliminated by Ted's failure, when the run of their play was over, to find another part. He expected that Elesina would share his idleness so long as their bit of money lasted, but she was offered a role in a new comedy and accepted it. Only then did she discover the full depths of her husband's egotism. For ten days he did not address a single word to her. Then she received a telephone call from his father asking her to come downtown to lunch.

"Everything that my son Theodore does is designed to thwart me," this large bland disciplined man of money explained to her over an omelette and a glass of claret. "His marriage to a divorced actress is merely the most recent example of this. Don't take offense, my dear. You're too intelligent. Face the fact that you've married a weakling, and leave him to me. When he is finally convinced that he cannot anger me, he will become manageable, and I may be able to make something at least respectable of him. But while he is married to you and fooling about theaters, I can't do a thing. Give him up. I cannot believe that your emotions are deeply involved. Give him up, and I'll make it worth your while."

"Why do you assume he'll come back to you if I give him up?"

"Because he has no place else to go. After all, you're paying the rent now. You see, I'm well informed."

"But do you really want him to come back?"

"I want to do my duty. There's nothing you can do for him. There's something I might."

"Poor Ted." Elesina reflected for a moment. "The trouble is that I'm pregnant. I'm afraid we'll have to go on with what we've started."

It was like Elesina to be able to take in the little scene as it was being enacted. She saw just what would have been wrong with it on the stage: none of the three persons involved really cared about either of the others. It wouldn't play. Nor did it, in the ensuing two years. Little Ruth was born; Ted took minor jobs in advertising, in publishing, in radio; he and Elesina gave periodic drinking parties for a motley group of actors, writers and publicists whose common denominator was a disposition to failure. For Ted had an instinct which always recognized in others his own particular weakness. Only Elesina, of all his group, seemed bound for better things, and even her career seemed to have reached its top when she joined the Columbus Circle Repertory, an institution as applauded by the liberal press as it was neglected by the general public.

Nor had life been kind to the Darts. Amos Dart was dead, and Elesina's brother, Billy, had become an interior decorator in partnership with the man who was his lover. Linda Dart's passion for her son did not survive his choice of a career and mate. She passed through what was to her a tunnel of the blackest humiliation and emerged as contained and uncomplaining as before, but colder and even more reserved. She lunched with her two children now at regular intervals, and she was always civil, amusing, interested, but both knew that they had disappointed her beyond the possibility of redemption. Linda now devoted all of her time to her rich friends, and she found herself in greater demand than ever. Her arrival in a drawing room, erect, cheerful, crisply neat, with the right greeting for everyone and the latest gossip strained through a sieve of worldly wisdom, gave a cachet to a party. The astute climber would know that he had arrived when he heard his neighbor say: "Ah, there's Linda Dart. I always know I'm in for a good evening when I see her. Would you believe she's sixty-five?"

Elesina was surprised at her own reaction to her mother's cooling toward Billy. There was not the least hint of sibling jealousy in it. She was simply shocked. Somehow it did not seem to matter which child their mother loved so long as she loved
one.
That Linda Dart should turn from Billy showed a hollow in the very core of a family love that Elesina had somehow regarded as basic to her environment even if it did not wholly include herself. It taught her to face the shabby fact that her indifference to little Ruth was something more than the "horror of babies" that she had, with a show of the charming actress' easily forgiven capriciousness, affected for the benefit of herself and others. Ted was more and more boring; he listened to her now only in discussions directed to some aspect of his own self-pity. He drank more, and Elesina began to drink with him.

Theater life is conducive to love. Not only is romance the usual subject of the drama, with all the accompaniment of public strutting and public embraces, but a humid atmosphere of lubricity invades even its technical conversations. Everyone is "darling" or "sweetie"; hands are held; arms are stroked; even hostility is expressed erogenously. Elesina drifted into the habit of casual affairs, usually with other actors, vaguely hoping that a great passion would come her way, but never much surprised that it failed to. Ted, furnished with information and money by his father, who had remained Elesina's implacable opponent, sued her at last for divorce for adultery and claimed sole custody of their daughter. Elesina did not bother to defend the suit, and she found herself, with her thirtieth birthday already well retreating into a disordered past, in the midst of a world depression, childless, husbandless, homeless and penniless, except for the precarious income derived from her repertory company. Even this ceased when, drunk, she failed for a third time to appear for a rehearsal of
Rosmersholm.

Linda Dart was as kind as could be expected. She took Elesina into her apartment and kept her as long as either could stand it. Elesina found the order in her mother's life a daily reproach, and Linda in turn was disgusted by her daughter's carelessness as to hours and engagements. Eventually it was agreed that Elesina should live in a small hotel around the corner at her mother's expense and come home for certain meals. This was still their arrangement when Elesina announced her proposed move to Ivy Trask's.

"I've inquired about Miss Trask," Linda told her daughter dryly. "She seems to come of a respectable upstate background. I believe there was even an uncle in TR's cabinet. But she's identified now with that slick, rather sleazy fashion world, and she's intimate with the Steins. I should think you could do better. Is she a lesbian?"

"No. At least I don't think so. She says not."

"Did you ask her? Anyway, I wouldn't be sure. But I don't expect my advice to be followed by my children. Isn't it funny? All my friends come to me for guidance."

"You pick your friends. You didn't pick your children."

"That's true enough. Speaking of which, what do you hear of little Ruth?"

If Elesina had had any further doubts about the wisdom of her move, the tone of her mother's question would have convinced her. "Little Ruth is very well, I believe. I shall be glad to have a place where she can visit me without disturbing anyone."

Elesina had to admit that Irving Stein's attentions came at an opportune time. The author of her new comedy had withdrawn it from production under a charge of plagiarism, and she found herself without a prospect. It was an occupation in her idleness to study her new friend's procedure. Both she and Ivy were surprised at the Judge's conservatism. He took them to dine at a restaurant and then to hear Flagstad as Isolde. He took them to a private viewing of Leonardo drawings, to a Lunt-Fontanne matinee, to a lecture at the Bar Association by Justice Cardozo. On these occasions he devoted his attention exclusively to Elesina, treating Ivy with the perfunctory courtesy that is accorded by the tenor in Italian opera to the duenna contralto. But it was interesting to both women that he made no effort to drop the chaperone.

"Maybe he's afraid to be alone with me," Elesina suggested. "Maybe he thinks
I'm
the schemer."

"No, he has a plan. I've known Irving a long time. He's a very deliberating man."

"What does the divine Clara think of our excursions? Surely, she must be back from Florida."

"Oh, she's long back. She's just being her Sphinx-like self. You're not, after all, my dear, Irving's first illicit passion. Even if it does happen to be my theory that you'll be his last. Clara gives him a lot of rein."

At last came the invitation for Elesina alone. It was formal, by letter, and entirely proper. Could she lunch with Irving at the 21 Club and discuss a business matter? When she arrived, strictly on the hour as became the nature of such an engagement, she found him, regal at a corner table, discussing wines with the proprietor. He had already ordered for her. They discussed no business over the soup or fish. Irving was in an expansive mood: he held forth on the economic inequities of the modern world and of the warnings to public figures that he had issued in vain. He had said this to Franklin Roosevelt, that to Alfred Landon. He was a bit pompous, to be sure, but there was a touch of majestic gravity, of senatorial dignity in his measured tones and gesticulating hands, in the great nodding head, the plump, rigid figure. Irving was at least the portrait of a statesman.

When he turned at last to business, the change was marked by a pause, a muffled cough. "Have you ever read
Les Corbeaux,
or
The Vultures,
by Henry Becque?"

"No."

"Well, you must do so now. I am planning to underwrite its revival by the Columbus Circle Repertory. On condition that you play the part of Marie Vigneron."

"Are you aware that I have blotted my copybook with that company?"

"Oh, yes, we've discussed all that. They are quite ready to forget those missed rehearsals. I told them it had been a difficult period in your life."

She might have been an erring student before an amiable, omnipotent headmaster, but there was sympathy and even humor in the reddish pupils of his solemn gray eyes.

"Tell me about the play."

"The scene is laid in Paris, in eighteen eighty-one. We are in the happy domestic interior of Monsieur and Madame Vigneron, prosperous burghers. They have three daughters and a little boy. All is love and good will. One daughter is engaged to a young noble, a big social step forward. But at the end of the first act the father suddenly collapses and dies. Instant ruin. His lawyer, his architect, his business partner, all combine to cheat and destroy the widow and children. These are the major vultures; the minor ones are tradesmen who dun the poor women for already paid bills. The young count withdraws from his engagement, and his fiancee goes mad. You see, there was no way for untrained women in that time to earn any effective income; they were perfectly helpless. At last Marie Vigneron decides to accept the offer of marriage of Teissier, her father's old business partner and the worst vulture of all."