The Dark Lady Read online

  "What shall I do now? Go back to town?"

  "Not because of Elesina," she replied at once. "Do you flatter yourself that your presence will embarrass her? She may not speak to you, except for the minimum civilities, but that will be simply because there is nothing to say. She doesn't bear grudges."

  "Not even for what I said?"

  Ivy shook her head. "The past has no importance for her. If it had, it would have crushed her long ago. She knows there's always a new deal coming up and that eventually her luck will change."

  "Don't you think it has? Don't you think she's won now?"

  Ivy considered this for a moment. "It's a game; it's not the rubber."

  "And you want a grand slam!"

  "Oh, I want the world for her, yes. You'd better get on our side, David."

  "Do I strike you as an opportunist?"

  "You strike me as a man who can learn to face facts. I know a bit about injustice. I've had my share. It taught me not to dwell on the bad moments. Keep looking ahead!"

  "You forget that it is not only the past that nags me. It's the present. Mother's present."

  "Your mother has no present. She lives in the past. How does it help her for you to make the same mistake?"

  "I suppose nothing helps her," he confessed, throwing up his hands. "How would you suggest I make my peace with Elesina?"

  "The way rude little boys always make peace with those whom they've offended. By saying they're sorry."

  "And you think she'll accept my apology?"

  "Try her."

  Which David did, before dinner, as the house party assembled in the parlor. He went straight up to Elesina. "My conduct this afternoon was abominable. Ivy leads me to hope that I may be forgiven."

  She did not even look at him. "Leave Ivy out of it."

  "Will you forgive me?"

  She turned to him suddenly at this, with a rather artificial brightness, and he was sure that Ivy had warned her. "I shall." She stuck out her hand, as if not caring who noted the gesture. "Or rather I will. As Fred Pemberton would say, it's more than simple future. It's determination. Let us be friends, David."

  This was rather further than he had intended to go, but how was one to be so churlish as to reject her? The large dark limpid eyes laughed at him, took him in, like flooding water over a valley, filling up the flat basins of cracked mud. How did she make one's loyalty, one's faith, one's word seem quaint, rather dear, old-fashioned things? "Are you sure you want to give them up?" her smile, half mocking, half commanding, seemed to ask. "Don't do it just for me, you know. I'm not a bit sure I'm worth it. After all, it might be fun to be a crank, a joli garçon of a crank, like you."

  He reached for her hand. "Yes—let us be friends, Elesina."

  There was a flicker of withdrawal in her eyes, perhaps at the pressure of his grasp. "Your father will be so pleased," she said in a more perfunctory tone and turned to speak to Arthur, who already too obviously preferred her to his old mistress. It occurred to David, with an inward chuckle that helped to leash his conscience, that it might be Ivy's function to scare the servants, leaving Elesina free to be worshiped. What a pair!

  "You make it all easier than I would have thought possible," he said when she turned back to him.

  "Why should things not be easy? Is there a law against it? Anyway, you can do something for me if you wish. You can be nice to my little daughter."

  "Oh, is she coming here?"

  "I hope so. Things have changed. Her Grandpa Everett, like so many of the parsimonious, has proved a reckless gambler. He's lost his fortune in oil ventures. And now that my situation has changed, too, he seems to want to have Ruth off his hands."

  "I'd like to meet my stepsister."

  "But of course you will. Isn't this your home? Why don't you help us catalogue the collection? At least until you get a job. You could be the most immense help. Your father says you're the only member of the family who cares about his things."

  This was her first reference to the museum project of which Ivy had told him, and he mused about it as the house party now moved toward the dining room. Elesina seemed perfectly serious, although it was a cliché in his mother's circle to lament the fate of the Stein collection, destined, it was always asserted, to be converted into jewels and furs and yachts for "that woman." At dinner he found himself next to Mrs. Dart, a large, stylish woman, with big bones and lanky brown-freckled arms. Her hair was a dyed chestnut, and she smoked constantly, even at table, puffing her cigarettes with thick, deeply rouged lips.

  "We have an unusual relationship," she instructed him. "My daughter's stepson." She nodded, as if to accept the bond. "Let's see what we can make of it."

  "I have made my peace with Elesina. Will the same treaty include you?"

  "Certainly not. I don't need a treaty. I don't take sides. I'm too old, and besides, I don't care. I can perfectly imagine that you and your brothers would have been less than overjoyed by your father's marriage."

  "Oh, if he's happy, that's all we care about."

  "Really? In your case, I should have cared about the money."

  David was taken aback. "But we don't," he protested. "Or at least I don't. If Father and Elesina really love each other..."

  "Love? Why should love be involved?"

  "Isn't it usual?"

  "With the young it's desirable. Perhaps even essential. But your father's not young. Neither, for that matter, is Elesina. Between them there can be respect, congeniality, affection. But those things don't add up to love."

  David studied her long, serious, brown countenance; then his eyes dropped to the heavy gold bracelet on her wrist. Yet he felt sure that there was something softer in her that her exterior was designed to hide. "I should have thought you were more romantic, Mrs. Dart."

  "Do I look romantic?"

  "Not on the surface. But behind all that discipline, well ... I wonder."

  Mrs. Dart's pale blue eyes settled for a moment on her impudent interlocutor. He thought he could make out a friendly gleam in them. "You are right, David. I am romantic. And you're smart to have spotted it. Or are you a fellow romantic? But how can anyone born in the twentieth century know what passion is?"

  "Nineteen hundred is the cutoff year?"

  "One has to approximate. The climate today is more conducive to mating than to romance."

  "And that, I take it, is a bad thing?"

  Her attitude was milder than he had expected. "I don't suppose it is really good or bad. But like everything in life, it has to be paid for. I believe that sex is a constant. Everyone starts with more or less the same amount. If it's poured out, it gets thin. If it's bottled, it seasons. Different eras have different tastes."

  "So the cloistered nun, dreaming of Galahad, may be as well off as Cleopatra?"

  "Perhaps better off. I measure experience by intensity. I've loved only one man in my life, David, and I had the good fortune to be married to him. We were the lucky ones! Perhaps it will happen to you, despite your century."

  "But supposing I've already loved?"

  "Oh, with a man, that's all right. I don't say one can't love twice, or three times, in a lifetime. It's a question of when dilution begins. It may be different with different people."

  "But I thought we all started with the same amount!"

  "Well, some of us may be leakier than others."

  "What about your daughter?" he demanded, emboldened by her tone. "She's been married three times. Can she ever know passion?"

  Mrs. Dart looked down the table to where Elesina was talking with Fred Pemberton. She shrugged. "No, I don't think Elesina will ever know passion. Elesina, God help her, is a child of her century. Or should I say: God help you?"

  6

  Elesina was very serious about the plans for Broadlawns, and she and Ivy were soon engaged in reducing them to paper. Two experts were retained to make an inventory of the collection; Irving's lawyers were consulted about the creation of a foundation, and a prominent architect was invited
to inspect the house and grounds with a view to their conversion to a public purpose. David accepted a post as adviser, and his name appeared on the special stationery which Ivy designed for the future institute: "Broadlawns, the Irving Stein Foundation for the Arts." It was agreed that until he put his law career into some kind of order he would come out to Rye twice a week and help in the library. This resulted in a rather tense scene with his mother.

  "First you were too much on my side of the boat," Clara observed dryly. "Now I wonder if your shifting seats won't capsize us."

  "Don't you want me to have a hand in what happens to the collection?"

  "Oh, that's the least of my worries."

  "You think I will fall under the divine Elesina's spell?"

  "Is it still a question of 'will'?"

  "I'm afraid I'm not a sufficiently modern person," David retorted with some heat. "I was all for cutting Dad and his bride, but you and Lionel and Peter cried out that I was going too far. All right! So I made it up with them! Is there no pleasing you?"

  "You know perfectly well what I'm talking about, David, so you needn't take that injured attitude. It's a question of degree. I never meant that you were to live at Broadlawns."

  He let the argument go by default. The vision of his father, so pale and frail, and the contrast which Clara offered of an unbreakable health and of a seemingly ineluctable complacency, had begun to alter his point of view. Of course, it was possible that his mother was not truly complacent; perhaps, deeply within, she suspected that if life at Broadlawns could go on so well without her, it might be that she had not contributed so much to it. Certainly David began to understand how totally the place was his father's creation. He remembered what Eliot had said: that Clara, like Eliot's own mother, belonged to a generation of New York ladies who did nothing with their hands or bodies—no cooking, cleaning or even sewing—and whose minds, like high white corridors, seemed too lofty and clean for ideas. But then he at once felt guilty for even thinking such thoughts.

  "I'm sorry, Mom," he blurted out.

  "Oh, it's all right, dear. It's quite all right."

  Would he ever get over his own pity, pity at the pain which he very likely simply imagined behind her stiffly held head, her large troubled eyes? It was a relief now to leave 68th Street for Broadlawns.

  He always spent his first half-hour there with his father. Irving slept a great deal, but he liked to hear David talk about the library or about Europe—Germany had just opened her campaign of propaganda for the Sudetenland. He would keep his eyes fastened on David's, a little half smile playing about his lips.

  "My only regret, dear boy, is to see you in the role of curator rather than collector. I should love to think of you putting something together for yourself. Can't I help you?"

  "With the world about to blow itself up?"

  "Maybe it won't."

  "Won't fight? Then it won't be worth blowing up."

  David sought distraction from Hitler in Broadlawns. He and Elesina worked in different rooms, he in the library, she in the parlor, but consultations were frequent. Was the Veronese genuine? Wasn't it possible that the Fragonard was really by Boucher? Were the acoustics in the patio adequate for a concert? The summer of 1938 moved sluggishly by. He gave up even thinking about a job.

  "I'm turning myself into a catalogue," he told Eliot. "Perhaps that's all we can do for the moment: make records of what may be destroyed in Armageddon."

  "If that's what you're doing" was the sarcastic reply.

  Lunch for David and Elesina at Broadlawns in the smaller dining room paneled with Japanese screens, cool at least in contrast to the heat of the garden beyond the open french doors, was pleasanter than on the more crowded weekends. The whole great house and place, when Irving was in his room and Ivy Trask in town, seemed a counterpart to Elesina. It was as if, an actress in search of a setting, she had finally found the right one, and the servants had become stagehands or choruses dedicated to the enhancement of her exits and her entrances. Elesina's quick sharp step on the marble of the front hall, her dark head bending over the cutting table in the flower room, the smoke from her cigarette in the jade holder rising from the long Venetian sofa when she read, the sound of her sudden, gusty laughter all combined to make him feel an audience of one in the drama of the union of a place and a mistress that seemed to have been always destined for each other. It was as if Clara Stein had never lived there.

  The unreality of the atmosphere was intensified by David's horror at the turn of events in Europe. He felt at moments in the hot morning in the big library, with the chirping of crickets outside, as if the top of his head were coming off. What in God's name did he think he was doing, checking the morocco-bound quartos of Webster, Massinger and Shakespeare with the inventory prepared by Swan's, turning the pages gingerly, reading the golden phrases in the quaint old print, while abroad the world crumbled and at home a new Mrs. Stein eradicated his very sense of the family? When she came into the library to slip into the chair beside him, to share a joke about the poor young man who was having such trouble with the prints, to take a few quick puffs on a cigarette or simply to pick up one of the quartos and silently read for a few minutes, he had a curious feeling that she might be his reality, his only reality, that the rest of the world of mothers and law firms and Hitler might go away if he could only succeed in turning his back.

  Elesina was more practical. She was practical in everything, even in foreign affairs. She refused to see the Nazi issue as one between simple right and wrong. She talked about the wrongs to Germany in 1919, about the perils of communism. She did not believe that Hitler's ambitions were limitless. She advocated American neutrality in the event of war. David tried to make excuses for such heresy.

  "It's because you're not Jewish," he told her. "You can't be expected to feel as we do."

  "But I'm married to a Jew," she insisted. "And anyway, it doesn't make that much difference. After all, you're in no more danger of being put in a concentration camp than I am. It's merely sentimental to get so upset about cruelties in faraway places that you can't prevent."

  He wondered if this was philosophy or simple callousness. Her eyes were sympathetic, her tone warm, but she had a way of turning her attention suddenly to other subjects.

  "I suppose my trouble is that I'm not sure I can't prevent those faraway cruelties," he said. "Or at least do something about them. In however small a way."

  "How? Be practical."

  "Well, I could be getting ready to be a soldier. Learning to fly, for example."

  "Wait and see if there's going to be a war first. You'll still have plenty of time, don't worry. And in the meantime what is more important than the Stein collection? If we don't preserve our art and beauty, are we really worth saving?"

  "Yes! But that's not the point. The point is you don't really need me to preserve the collection."

  "Ah, but I do, David."

  Whenever she touched an intimate note, she would quit him, or alter the topic, or do something abrupt, like closing a book. He wondered if she were trying to create a special kind of friendship in which to clothe their new relationship, something warm but elevated, flicked with romance but not devoid of dignity. What the French called an amitié amoureuse? No, less than that. But wasn't anything less than that simply the old platonic friendship of frustrated virgins and anemic bachelors, the butt of endless vulgar comedy? No, Elesina was better than that, bolder than that. What was it then? Did she know what herself?

  She went into the city less often now. She had closed the apartment, she said, without the least regret. She explained her love of the country to David as a natural reaction to her own bringing-up.

  "Like so many girls raised in Manhattan, I've a secret yen for the small town. All my life I've wanted to put down roots. Well, now I'm doing it! I'm going to become Mrs. Rye."

  "Won't you miss the stage?"

  "But I'm on it! Do you know Henry James's The Tragic Muse? It's the best novel ever written a
bout an actress. A rising young diplomat asks the heroine to give up her career to become his wife and a future ambassadress. She won't even consider it! Ah, how James saw it, the idiocy of any man's thinking that a real actress could even consider balancing love against the stage! But now I begin to see something that James didn't see. She might have wanted to add the part of ambassadress—in diamonds—to her roles."

  "So that's what you're doing now—acting a part?"

  "Don't we always? I certainly was when we had the Girl Scouts here last week. And I loved it! Don't look at me with those sad eyes, David."

  "I don't like to think you're not sincere."

  "But actresses are sincere. I'm always sincere."

  "I wonder if you're not playing with me." He was suddenly bitter at the idea that her charm was a matter of manipulation, as uninspired by himself as it could have been by any other man sitting in the dark beyond the footlights. He searched angrily about for a weapon. "The way you play with Ruth?" Elesina's daughter had arrived the week before, a block of a girl, looking closer to fourteen than eleven, and she already had a crush on David.

  But Elesina only laughed, perhaps complimented by the feeling which such rudeness manifested. "So you've noticed that I play with Ruth? I guess I can't be such an actress, after all. But children, despite the old saying, are easy to fool. Ruth wants desperately to believe that she has a loving mother, and the least I can do is to provide her with the image of one."

  David, to his own disgust, found himself preaching. "Mightn't it become a reality?"

  "It might. But I'm not a maternal creature. That used to worry me, but one learns to accept oneself."

  "I haven't."

  "Why? You're a good person, David."

  He flushed before the apparent sincerity of her gaze. "How can you tell that?"