The Dark Lady Page 10

  "You really enjoy it, don't you, Eliot?" he asked him. "I wonder what you would have done if I had never come to Sheldon."

  "Oh, there's always a lost cause knocking around somewhere," Eliot retorted with his harsh laugh. "I might have taken up the cause of that Chinese boy."

  "Thanks!"

  But the real trouble for Eliot was not that the cause was lost but that it wasn't. Schoolboys tire even of cruelty, and Nelson Weed was smart enough not to push things beyond their normal limit. When David made a touchdown in the last football game of the season, he publicly congratulated him, and the conflict was officially over.

  "We might even be friends," Weed told him on their way back to the locker room. With the charm of a superficiality transcending cynicism he threw an arm around his former victim's shoulders.

  "You want a Jew boy for a friend?" David retorted, pushing himself roughly free.

  "Maybe I do, at that!" Weed exclaimed with a high laugh in which only Eliot could have detected malice.

  David could not long resist such overtures. He was perfectly willing to be on good terms with the school, if peace was offered without dishonor. He knew that he would not soon forget the bitterness of being called a Jew boy, but he also knew that in a violent world one could not be always fighting. It was odd that it should be Eliot, a Gentile, who urged continued resistance. David suspected that his friend took a dusky pleasure in isolation, that he might create issues even where they did not exist in order to splash his dark dungeon with the gold spangles of romance and idealism. Was Nelson Weed anti-Semitic or was he just a horrid boy like other boys, ready to seize any aspect of a new kid's personality as a target for abuse—his race, his religion, his accent, his warts, his bad breath?

  "Don't trust him," Eliot insisted.

  "What can I lose?"

  Eliot had to come around, for he had too much sense not to realize that he could never hold David unless he shared him with others. The vision of the two alone against a cruel world had been a pleasing one, but Eliot had learned early that pleasing things had short lives. David, after all, did not abandon him for his new friends; he always made it evident that Eliot had to be included. Nelson Weed and his friends became summer visitors at Broadlawns, and at Yale they borrowed considerable sums from David. Eliot wondered bitterly in time if his own intransigency had not done more for David's social career than all of Irving Stein's ambition.

  Their relationship, however, was not always one-sided. It had elements of symbiosis. At Yale, if Eliot acted as a kind of tutor to keep David from an overdistraction in fleshpots, it was also true that David opened up a larger college life than would have been otherwise available to his monastically inclined relative. At law school they became almost equals; they reviewed courses together and made the law review. But their equality fell away again before the intrusion of sex. There Eliot's role was always that of a tactfully self-removing third.

  In Ireland, when they went on a walking trip in the summer after their second year at law school, David fell in love with a beautiful undergraduate whom he met at a party at the University of Dublin. Noreen Leslie was a student of economics, a poet and a rebel, whose father had been shot by the British in 1920, and who was determined to dedicate herself to the liberation of the northern counties. She never had any intention of complicating her life by a permanent union with what she deridingly called the "spawn of a Yankee Jew banker," but she joined the American pair in their hike through Connemara, and Eliot spent lonely nights looking up at the stars while David and Noreen were more intensely engaged under a blanket in another part of the field. At the end of the trip, in Galway, there was a violent scene when Noreen refused either to marry David or to go to America with him. He became almost hysterical when she tried to persuade him that she was adamant about closing the episode. She had to take Eliot out to a pub for a private talk.

  "Look after my blue-eyed boy," she told him. "He's taking it harder than I thought he would. Show him you love him, Eliot. Don't be scared of it. You're not what you're afraid you are. No, you're not, my dear, not a bit of it. Oh, I can always tell. One of these days you'll make some girl a fine lover. Though I suspect she'll have to marry you to find out! You're the connubial type. Like David. You Americans are altar mad. That's not my tea. David will get over me soon enough, never fear. But there'll always be something else. He doesn't know what he is or what he wants. His parents, I gather, live in a fantasy world. It's been hard on him. He needs you. He needs you badly."

  "Well, I'll always be there. So long as he wants me."

  Noreen gave him a kiss on the lips of which David would have been jealous. When she left the bar, she had made him agree to assume the burden of telling his friend that she was not going back to the hotel.

  David got over his misery, though not so soon as Noreen had predicted. In his last year at law school he was a quieter and more industrious student, but his conversation at drinking parties was now larded with remarks indicative of acerbity or cynicism about women. Happily he found a new god in the New Deal and a prophet in Felix Frankfurter. On weekends at Broadlawns he delighted to hold forth on the iniquities of the old regime, and only Irving Stein's obvious bedazzlement at the brilliance of his last-born kept some of the banking brotherhood from leaving the table.

  On one occasion David had serious words with his uncle, Percy Symes, who had married Clara's sister. Symes was a hard-drinking, red-complexioned stockbroker, a huntsman and sailor, a member of the Racquet Club, who had lost his money in the crash and found it bitter tea to live on the handouts of Irving Stein. After dinner on a Saturday night, half drunk, he sauntered over to David who was smoking a cigar by himself on the patio.

  "You want it both ways, is that it, David?"

  "Both ways, Uncle Percy?"

  "You want all the shekels of the old world and all the liberal laurels of the new."

  David abruptly threw away his cigar. "Why do you say shekels?"

  "Well, isn't that your national coin? Isn't that the secret of the Jews: to play both sides? How can you lose? Communism, capitalism, what the hell? Don't get angry, young man. Maybe you're smart. Maybe we should all be like you."

  "I think you'd better leave this house before I forget you're Mother's brother-in-law and punch you in the nose!"

  David had a long talk with his father later that night. Irving Stein had had a few words with the Symeses before their abrupt departure, but he had contained himself until the house was free of guests and Clara had gone to bed.

  "I know you think I compromise too much, David, but you must try to understand that the attitudes of your elders may spring from experience as well as timidity. I did not invent anti-Semitism, but I have learned to live with it. To paraphrase a Gentile saying: 'Some of my best friends are anti-Semites.' Your uncle is a coarse and stupid man, but he is also a very unhappy one. He would rather blame my prosperity and his poverty on a Jewish conspiracy than on my greater brains. When he's sober, he has just sense enough to conceal what he suspects most people will rightly consider as a low prejudice. But when he's drunk, out it comes! To condemn a man for what he says when he's drunk is to condemn a man for what he's thinking. How can he help it?"

  "By cultivating a little human decency."

  "Ah, but how many people do that? You must take the world, David, as it is. I hoped that you had learned that at Sheldon. I have found it wiser not to push peoples' anti-Semitism in their faces. I try to ignore it, as I should ignore a hiccup or the breaking of wind. There are moments, when I deal with certain kinds of Jews, particularly in real estate transactions, that I feel almost anti-Semitic myself."

  "But, Dad, don't we have to stand together? Won't Nazism otherwise spread all over the world and be the end of us?"

  "I fail to see any necessary correlation between atrocities in Germany and anti-Jewish social feeling in New York. On the one hand you have a political campaign directed against a helpless minority, arbitrarily chosen as victims for the purpose of uniting
a nation by blood lust. The thing was cynically, fiendishly planned. On the other, you have the snottiness of an Anglo-Saxon upper crust with no real animus behind it. People like your Uncle Percy don't even know what a Jew is. They don't dislike people for being Jewish; they call people Jewish whom they dislike. Percy claims that Franklin Roosevelt changed his name from Rosenfelt!"

  David brooded. "I wonder if that same argument wasn't used in Berlin before Hitler."

  "Possibly. I did not mean to imply that there was no anti-Semitism in Germany for him to work on. It's a question of degree. But now let me tell you something that will surprise you, David. You don't know what a Jew is any more than Uncle Percy. Because you're not really Jewish."

  "I am so!"

  "You are as much a Clarkson as a Stein. But none of that really matters. What really matters is that you should be first and foremost a human being. A free soul. A citizen of the world. That is what I have tried to be."

  "It's easier for you, Dad." David shook his head. "You have no Clarkson blood to deny. When I heard Uncle Percy tonight, I was ashamed to think that any part of me might belong to his world."

  Irving's eyes became misty as he gazed at his angry son. "That's you all over, my boy. To take the Jewish side if it's a liability. If you had lived in the glorious reign of King Solomon, you'd have sympathized with the Egyptians. But the first Hebrew reverse would have brought you back to the Temple!"

  "I don't see it as a liability to be a Jew," David retorted. "Certainly it had not kept you from reaching the top."

  Irving looked as if there were a great many things that he might have said to this. But after a few moments he simply sighed and changed the subject. "Try to spare your mother this. She cannot abide this issue between her family and us. I told her that Aunt Eve was taking Uncle Percy home because he'd had too much to drink. If she suspects the truth, she'll never have them in the house again. And you know you don't want to be the cause of that kind of a breach."

  No, David did not. That was always the trouble. He could never bear to hurt his mother. This was made more difficult by the fact that he was never sure what hurt her and what did not. One could not tell by complaints, for Clara did not complain. Why should it be that he always suspected pain behind her stillness, her averted head, her pale stare? Lionel and Peter never had; they had hugged her and shouted at her and ignored her, just as if she had been an ordinary mother. They did not seem to have any sense of her priestess quality. But then there was little difference between such relationship as they had with her and the one supposed to exist in the average convivial American family of Sunday drives to crowded beaches. David wanted to think of his own relation with his mother as something more special. Secretly, half ashamedly, he liked to imagine that the fashionable mother-child portrait of the two of them, done in 1920 by a protégé of Irving's, had caught an essential element of their bond, contrasting as it did the look of coaxing curiosity in the curly haired youngster, dressed in red velvet and sprawled before a chaise longue, with the faraway gaze of the reclining, gray-robed parent. But how much did Clara really care, even about her baby? What could one do with a heroine who kept slipping off to the wings?

  With the great crisis of his parents' separation David had hoped briefly to be his mother's effective champion at last. When she had declined to shut herself off altogether from the paternal resources and depend on his, his bitterness had reached a climax. At a bar with Eliot he had heaped scorn on what he called his mother's lassitude and had passionately indicted his father. But Eliot, to his shocked surprise, did not concur.

  "I know it's hard to be objective about one's parents, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't try. Your father is getting on, David. He sees the imminent failure of his powers. If he wants a last fling with this girl, of course it's rough on your mother, but I'm damned if I can't understand. He sees himself dead, extinct, nothing. And then where will his virtue have got him?"

  "But, Eliot, you could say that about anything! Should we give in to every temptation because some day we'll be dead?"

  "I know it's not logical, but I want to make an exception for an old man and sex."

  "But he could have had an affair with her! We wouldn't have minded that."

  "I am assuming that marriage is her price."

  David fell into an uncomfortable silence. He had an uneasy sense that he might be ridiculous. Absurdly, he wished that he were a child, for surely a child would have the right to resent the destruction of his home. But now even Eliot, the defender of lost causes, declined to pick up this one. Would there never be a clear-cut issue where a man could stand up and hurl down his glove and cry: "Here I stand!"

  "I suppose you want me to act as his best man," he said sullenly.

  "Don't be an ass."

  2

  The Steins now proceeded to regroup themselves. David, on his graduation from law school, moved in with his mother on 68th Street, abandoning, in view of her loneliness, a plan to share a house in Greenwich Village with Eliot. Irving, on his return from Reno, where he had married Elesina, established her in Broadlawns and in a new Fifth Avenue apartment. Lionel and Peter agreed to see their father in the office and to dine with him and Elesina at the apartment, but, out of what David regarded as a rather technical sense of loyalty to Clara, they and their wives no longer went out to Rye.

  "Why didn't I tell Noreen I'd become an Irishman?" David complained bitterly to Eliot. "She might have married me then, and I could have spent a useful life making bombs. Now I don't know where I'm at. When Mother's relatives come to dinner and commiserate with her, I have the funny feeling that I'm somehow on the wrong side. Not because of Mother, God knows. But there's a faint stink of Nazism about the Clarksons, and Dad, for all his socializing in Gotham, is still at heart a Jew."

  "You ought to take a job."

  "That's the Clarkson in you, Eliot. Deep down, you can't really believe that writing a novel is a fit occupation for a gentleman." David, having rejected the job which he had earlier accepted in Schurman & Lister because they had represented his father in the divorce, was now writing a novel about a summer love affair between a young American tourist and an Irish girl.

  "You can do both in half the time you spend brooding about your old man," Eliot retorted. "I suggest that you go to see mine. He may have a job for you. Remember, the great Frankfurter himself suggested that you start with a Wall Street firm."

  Eliot's father, Eben Clarkson, was a partner in Tyler, Cobb & Tyson, but Eliot, because of their policy against employing sons, worked for another firm. David, who was fond of Cousin Eben, agreed at last to go downtown to lunch with him. The latter was immediately optimistic about David's chances for a job, despite his late application. Like his son, Eben Clarkson was not typical of the family. He was almost painfully good mannered; his bright clear Dickensian countenance under a halo of white hair beamed at David as if to assure him that it was a good world, a benignant world, that he, for example, wasn't really a Clarkson or a future boss or perhaps even a Wall Street lawyer at all, but just a simple, lovable being, full of sympathy and affection for his dear son's best friend. David remembered that Eliot had hinted once that his father had a neurosis about not being quite up to the standards of Tyler, Cobb, of owing his partnership to the intervention of a powerful client.

  "I am sure we'll find a place for you, David. Having you here will be the next best thing to having Eliot. Not that he isn't perfectly happy where he is. But I know how close you two have always been. I'll feel that I have a bit of Eliot here if you're here. However, there is one delicate matter. You had been going with the Schurman firm. Naturally, I understand that there could be no idea of that while they represented your father in the recent unpleasantness, but now that is all out of the way, and we're settling down to new circumstances and letting bygones be bygones..."

  "That's all very well for other people, Cousin Eben," David broke in, "but it won't do for me. For me some bygones can never be bygones."

  "Ah,
my dear boy, I'm so sorry!" Cousin Eben seemed as genuinely upset as if he had been personally involved. "I have always been so fond of your father, and I know that he feels about you as I feel about Eliot. I had so hoped that you might forgive him."

  "It is not a question of forgiving him, Cousin Eben. I think a son who forgives his father is presumptuous. But I do not see how I can countenance a life which is a daily insult to my mother. He and Miss Dart are not married, you know."

  "Indeed, I did not know. You astonish me, David. Surely, I read about it in the paper."

  "You read about an alleged marriage. My father obtained a unilateral divorce in Nevada without my mother's consent or appearance. In New York she is still his wife. His union with Miss Dart is a bigamous one."

  Clarkson regarded David with surprise and a faint embarrassment. "Ah, yes. Well, legally no doubt you're correct. But so long as your mother does not see fit to attack the situation..."

  "In which course of action she chooses not to follow my advice."

  "I see. But even so, society looks for guidance to the attitude of the wronged spouse. So long as she does not complain, how can others? Certainly the state would take no criminal action."

  "It's hardly likely. But I draw a line between not filing a complaint and giving public approval to what my father has done."

  "Oh, I don't suggest you do anything in public. If you could just see Irving, once in a while, in private, it would make such a difference to him."