The Dark Lady Read online

  "But, Cousin Eben, you should be on Mother's side!"

  "I can never forget the times when your father has helped me out. And I know how I should feel were Eliot to cut me off."

  When, ten days later, David received an embarrassed letter from Eben Clarkson, informing him that there had not, after all, been the vacancy in the firm which had been anticipated, he was more surprised than disappointed. Eliot came that evening for drinks on the top floor of the 68th Street house which David had converted to an apartment. He silently read the letter which David handed to him.

  "Do you think your father has appointed himself a public censor of my moral position in Dad's divorce?" David demanded. "Surely, his attitude will cause surprise among the Clarksons. I should suppose they would have applauded my stand!"

  "But that's not it, David. Your stand is not involved."

  David took in now a gravity unusual even in Eliot. "Your father exceeded his authority in offering me the job? Is that it?"

  "No, Father had the authority to offer you a job. What happened was that the firm overruled him. They decided not to depart from their old practice."

  "You mean not to hire people in the middle of the year?"

  Eliot's voice became very flat now. "I mean not to hire Jews."

  David rose and walked to the window. In the darkened street below he could make out the shiny top of his mother's old Packard town car. She was going out for dinner. She was going out a little more now. He had encouraged that. Was she going to a "mixed" dinner? It surprised him to note that his fists were clenched.

  "It's funny, you know. I've never been banned before. I've lived twenty-five years and never been banned. Even at Sheldon they took me in. Oh, of course, I've known there were clubs and schools and dances which excluded Jews, but somehow I always thought they were pompous and stuffy and faintly absurd, not dangerous. That was always Dad's attitude, anyway. They didn't want us—well, we didn't want them. Except whenever they changed their attitude, he was quick enough to change his." He turned around, too full of anger to utter another word. He had to swallow before he spoke again. "What a damnable world, Eliot!"

  Eliot rose, as if his own pain had forced him to do so. "There are plenty of big Wall Street firms just as good, better, than Tyler, Cobb which don't take that attitude. Father told me that he would make out a list for you. He feels very strongly about the whole thing. After all, he betrayed the confidence of his partners in telling me. That's almost unthinkable for him."

  "He needn't be concerned," David said bitingly. "They will never learn of it. And I shall not use his list."

  "Why don't we start our own firm? There's nothing I'd rather do!"

  David saw that Eliot was as much upset as he. He came over to put his hands on his cousin's shoulders and give him a quick friendly shake. "No, you're happy where you are, and I don't want to practice law. Not yet, anyway. There are too many things I have to think out first. What this Tyler, Cobb thing means to me. And what it should mean to me. And how it fits in with what's going on in Germany. And with what's going on in my own family. I don't think Dad ever really faced the basic issue. I've got to think, Eliot."

  "You'll think too much, that's the trouble. You'll forget your blessings. You may think of me as a privileged Clarkson, but I'd change shoes with you any day."

  "Why?"

  "Well, you're rich, to begin with."

  "Oh, be serious."

  "And you have lots of blond hair. Mine is getting thin already."

  "Eliot!"

  "And you have a devoted friend in me."

  "That's better."

  "And girls like you."

  "I always wondered if Noreen didn't have a secret yen for you."

  "Noreen had a not-so-secret yen for all the boys. But you were first choice. You'll always be first choice." Eliot hesitated. "What I really mean is that you have a bit of genius."

  "For what, please?"

  "I don't know. I really don't know. But I'd hate to see it wasted."

  3

  David saw a great deal of his mother during the following winter. She tried to dissuade him from dining at home so often, but he would insist that he had nothing better to do, and indeed it struck her that he was as antisocial as he was idle.

  "You might have had a possessive mother," she protested. "So many people do. Why turn me into what you're lucky enough to have escaped?"

  "Because I'm a possessive son! I've always wanted you all to myself, without Dad or Lionel or Peter, and now I've got you!"

  In truth he was as worried about her as she about him. Various of the old faithful group at Broadlawns had continued to call on her at 68th Street, but as she did little for their entertainment, they were beginning already to defect and to slip over the border to Rye from where word came back that the new Mrs. Stein was entertaining brilliantly. David made out in his mother's sporadic and ineffectual efforts to amuse her old friends a vague fear that if she should be abandoned now, she would be abandoned permanently. It was not, moreover, he saw, that she feared this result so much for herself as that she was afraid that her solitary state would shackle him in ever-strengthening bonds of pity to her side. It was to free him that she had to seem busy and occupied, and as she had no experience in the technique of giving parties, or even of running a house—for Irving had always done everything—she became the least bit frantic, like someone in a baffling dream where a happy party, an Easter egg hunt, begins to take on sinister forms, the bunnies presenting shark jaws, the painted egg faces leering.

  "Why don't we dine alone tonight, and you just play me hymns?" he would ask her.

  "Oh, my darling, let me dine alone. I'm so happy with my hymns!"

  Two of the most devoted to Clara's cause were the Shake-speareans, Fred Pemberton and Erna Cranberry, who had long since made up their little row. Yet the seeds of another lay in the poetess' suspicions of Pemberton's fealty, and when word finally came that the unriddler of the sonnets had been seen at John Gielgud's Hamlet in the company of Elesina Stein, Erna's wrathful denunciations filled the parlor at 68th Street.

  "He's like that idiotic George of Denmark, the husband of Anne, who sat about the dwindling court of James II, crying: 'I can't believe it!' with the news of each defection to William of Orange. And when Anne at last decamped herself, taking George along by the ear, and word was brought to the poor King, all he could say was: 'Has "I can't believe it!" gone, too?'"

  It began to seem that what was left of Clara's court was worse than what was gone. Erna was constantly with her, and her clamorous sympathy provided a strange chorus to Clara's hymns. One evening David invited Erna out to dinner with no other motive than to remove her from the house. The poetess, drinking freely and eating well at the expensive restaurant of her choice, became confidential. After she had given David a particularly long smiling look, he began almost to wonder if, despite her years and bulk, she were not planning a seduction.

  "If you'll buy me another brandy, David, I'll tell you my secret project."

  Gallantly, he signaled the waiter. "See how fast you can bring us a brandy."

  "Shall I tell you, dear boy, what I would do if I were as young and handsome as you?"

  "Make love to America's greatest poetess?"

  "Make love, yes. But not to a poetess. To an actress. Or perhaps I should say, to an ex-actress. To the beautiful but unscrupulous woman who now styles herself Mrs. Irving Stein!"

  David stared, astonished, at those small, pale, squinting eyes. Erna's lantern chin was thrust forward, and her head was slightly tilted back. She held her expectant pose.

  "You wish me to reverse the roles of Hippolytus and Phaedra?"

  "Elesina's not your father's wife. She's his concubine."

  "But do nice boys make love to their fathers' concubines?"

  "Why not? If it's for their good? Poor old Irving is having a bad time of it, I hear."

  "You mean the concubine is unfaithful? Already?"

  "Well, I don't know a
s I'd go that far. But I hear she leads him quite a dance. I shouldn't be surprised if he didn't begin to pine for the peace and calm of your mother's presence."

  "And all those hymns?" David laughed, in sudden nervous irritability, provoked, for the moment, by the thought of both his parents. But he was nonetheless struck by the image of his father as a possibly pathetic figure. Did the old sultan hear giggles from the harem? "And do you think that courting the divine Elesina would help my relations with the august author of my being?"

  "Could it make them any worse?" Erna became even more animated in her approach. "I'll tell you how I see it, David. If Elesina should respond to your advances, she would cease to be an issue between you and your father. For you would have proved to him that she was worthless! It would be like the wager between Posthumus and Iachimo in Cymbeline. If Imogen should reject Iachimo, he would have to fight her husband. But if she succumbed, she was not worth a duel. Oh, I go very far! I see my way! I'm not afraid of consequences. Not a bit."

  "Erna, I begin to think you're serious."

  "Of course, I'm serious!"

  "You really believe I should attempt to seduce the woman my father calls his wife?"

  "Seduction is a strong word. Elesina has always been—how do you call it?—easy. She's a very beautiful woman, and you're a healthy, handsome young male. You needn't play the prude with me, David Stein. I heard all about that walking trip in Ireland. Your father even boasted about it! And, anyway, if you had scruples, you wouldn't have to go all the way. A simple flirtation could do the trick. Once your father saw his pretty bride taken up with a younger man, he might regret the whole business."

  "And Elesina? You think she'd throw over Broadlawns and a fortune for my beaux yeux? How little you know her."

  "Oh, I don't say that Elesina isn't going to cost the old boy a pretty penny. Unless he catches her, as you lawyers say, in flagrante. But as he would catch you, too, under my hypothesis, we must forgo that amusing alternative. Would that you were more Elizabethan, David! But let us play the hand no that is dealt us. I suggest that all you have to do is make your father homesick for his old home. The rest should be a simple cash transaction. Elesina will have her price, never fear. Ivy Trask will see to that!"

  "It may be a stiff one."

  "Well, we needn't pay it, need we? We can always bargain. The point is to get the thing started."

  David in the days that followed found his mind returning in fantasies to Miss Cranberry's theory. He remembered Pemberton's statement that an old maid could never comprehend the Elizabethan male. Now it seemed to him that just the opposite was true, that the big, hulking, sandy-haired poetess might have the gusty realism and sharp nostrils of the Virgin Queen. His reflections were invaded with hot, foolish visions of rose red brick and brown gold paneling, of tapestried chambers with slits of windows, of a beruffed Elesina in a dress parted between her breasts to expose her front right down to the navel, smiling expectantly, confidently, at a David, scarlet-cloaked, bowing deeply. Suddenly he sprang forward to take her roughly against the paneled wall. Really! What rot!

  When he told Eliot of Miss Cranberry's suggestion, his friend responded gruffly with a Shakespearean quotation:

  "'My only love sprung from my only hate!'"

  "Love? Miss Cranberry didn't suggest that I had to love the iniquitous Elesina."

  "Love, make love, what's the difference?"

  "But can a man make love when he hates?"

  "Of course! It might be even better that way. Look at animals. They're always angry and snarling in the mating season. Hunger and sex provide our greatest drives. Both are apt to be accompanied by nasty shows of temper."

  "Are you saying that love is hate?"

  "I'm saying it can be."

  They were on their way to a cocktail party given by Sam Gorman. Sam, as feature editor of Tone, gave parties where he tried to mingle the world of fashion with those of society and finance. He had met David and Eliot at Broadlawns and had been indefatigable in his subsequent invitations. Neither much cared for Sam or his parties, but it seemed crude to decline them all. Certainly David would not have gone that day had he remembered whom he was likely to see there. He was immediately accosted by Ivy Trask.

  "At last I catch you, David Stein! Now don't think you're going to escape. Haven't I loved you since you were a little boy? Didn't I keep you from being kicked out of school? Didn't you cry your heart out to me when Barbara Brannon told you she only cared for college men? Didn't I run interference with your mother that night at Broadlawns when you finished off the champagne in the pantry and were sick to your stomach? And..."

  "For God's sake, Ivy!" he exclaimed, putting his hand to her mouth. "Be quiet. I surrender. What do you want?"

  "I want you to come right over to that window seat and listen to me. Why have you been avoiding me? Why didn't you answer my letter?"

  "I figured we were in different camps."

  "Just because you're unreasonable and violent about your father and Elesina, is that a reason to cut me?"

  "I'm not cutting you, Ivy. We're talking, aren't we?"

  "I had to collar you first. And what's all this about your not taking a job? I hear you've been pouting because some stuffy firm didn't want a Jewish boy. Is that true?"

  "Not really. I was just sore for a bit."

  "As if it made any difference! You should know better. It's a great advantage to have a name like Stein. Elesina has found it so. She's becoming a great figure in Rye. I shouldn't be surprised if the day came when the women of Westchester would want her in the Assembly. You should come out and help her, David!"

  It was difficult to know how to take Ivy. She was absurd, she was outrageous; at times she was almost sinister. David knew that his mother regarded her as the devil behind Elesina. But he could never forget the boyhood years in which he had poured out his heart in the lap of this taut, tense, avidly listening little woman who had known how to raise a shiny bridge between the shores of adults and of children. They had met in the middle and leaned over the side together to watch.

  "Mrs. Stein is welcome to the name and to the money," he observed. "But she can't have all the family, too. I think I'm going to stay in my corner, Ivy."

  "Lionel and Peter see her. So do their wives."

  "Then she should be satisfied. She can let me off."

  "But you're the one she wants! You're the one everyone wants. Oh, Elesina's doing very well, it's true. People are beginning to forget the unpleasantness and come to her parties. And she's a brilliant hostess. You should see her! But she minds that you won't go there. And it hurts your poor father terribly."

  "He might have thought of that before he did what he did."

  "Oh, David, I can't believe it's my old friend talking. When did you get this stuffy? Wake up! We're in nineteen thirty-eight!"

  "I stand behind my mother, Ivy. She has not protested, and she has not sued. She has been as modern as you. But I cannot see that being modern obligates me to take by the hand the woman who has ruined her life."

  "Life, fiddlesticks! And I suppose your father had nothing to do with it."

  "I hold them both responsible."

  "Now let me tell you something." Ivy's eyes moved quickly from side to side to make sure that nobody else could hear. "Your father has had an operation."

  "I know. Peter told me. The prostate. But that's normal for his age."

  "What Peter doesn't know is that it left him entirely impotent."

  David looked away in anguish from those popping green eyes. What nightmare had overtaken his world that the paternal genitalia, the source of his being, the creator of him, should now be the sport of this dyed-haired witch's cocktail-party gossip?

  "You can imagine what that does to a man of your father's vanity, married to a beautiful young bride!" Ivy continued relentlessly. "And you think you and your mother have troubles! What's the use of children if they abandon a parent just when they're needed most? Your father loves you, David, an
d it's a bloody shame if you don't go to him now."

  David looked at her pleadingly. Please, Ivy, he wanted to implore her, go back to the way you were, be again the funny friend who was so good to a little boy! He felt he could not endure the other vision. "And Elesina?" He enunciated the name with difficulty. "Elesina minds? She makes it hard for him?"

  "Elesina is an angel from heaven! All she wants from your father is love and affection. All she asks is to take care of him, to treasure him. He's the one who cannot reconcile himself to the situation."

  "Poor Dad. How it must humiliate him."

  "And now will you come, David Stein?"

  He stared. "Where?"

  "To Broadlawns. This weekend. Tomorrow!"

  When David left the party with Eliot, he had not promised Ivy that he would come, but he had also not refused. Eliot, listening to his friend's version of the conversation, seemed amused.

  "What do you suppose Elesina really does for Ivy in return for all her services?"

  "Services?"

  "Like getting you to Broadlawns."

  "But Ivy was doing that for Dad."

  "How much does Ivy worry about your old man? Isn't she Elesina's retriever? No, no, it's Elesina who has her eye on you. And what Elesina wants, Ivy delivers!"

  "Eliot, you're absurd."

  "Am I? My dear boy, you'll have to admit that so far I've been a shrewd observer. And I note that Erna Cranberry and Ivy Trask seem to have a trait in common: the desire, for one reason or another, to deliver you, a pretty blond bundle, to your beautiful stepmother's bed. Why don't they try me? They'd have much less trouble."

  "Because they don't like silly asses. Where shall we dine? Twenty-One?"

  4

  Irving had always supposed that he thought less about death than most people, but his immunity was now at an end. The prostate operation, beset with complications and studded with agony, had produced a near fatal heart attack. As he and Elesina had agreed in advance that he was to have no visitors, it had been possible to keep this from the family and business associates, but he had been dismissed from the hospital only with the severest injunctions that he not quit Broadlawns for three months. He passed long, slow, dressing-gowned days in his library and in the patio or, now that the spring weather had come, in a wheelchair in the rose garden. The household was devoted: the nurses efficient, Elesina consoling, tactful, perfect. Yet he read his own demise in the very smoothness of the ministrations that surrounded him.