The Dark Lady Read online

  "Oh, I always can. You're strong. You're honorable."

  The quick, hot pleasure that he felt in his chest as quickly turned to resentment. Was he to be taken in by a performance even after he had been warned that it was one? "Ivy says you were a bad picker of husbands."

  She laughed again, still without taking her eyes off his. "I suppose she meant only the first two. After all, she was responsible for the third. But I think I knew from the beginning that Bill and Ted were losers. Not that I exactly told myself so. On the contrary, I tried to persuade myself that they were great. Yet, deep down, I had a pretty good idea what they were like. My trouble, you see, was perversity, not stupidity. A desire to throw myself away. From that point of view, my choices showed definite perspicacity."

  "But with Father it was different?" he asked roughly.

  "I've told you all about that, David," she said in a soft voice, as she turned away. "I don't think I have to go into it again."

  He was now the prey of an almost continual fantasy of sexual relations with her. Her smooth, hard side, her enameled exterior, her brisk stride, the quick way in which, at her desk, pushing back her long hair, she got right down to business seemed to suggest, by very contrast, a warmth within, a need for submission, a dedication to the ideal of love. In his thoughts David was a violent, a raping lover, Valentino in The Sheik. He tore off her robe by the swimming pool; he loomed in the door of her bedroom; he reached a hand under her dress in the dining room beneath the eyes, unseeing, of the somnolent Arthur. She was angered, but not for long. Her resistance was formal, her ultimate acquiescence enthusiastic. David, looking at his own silly, guilty expression in the mirror of his bathroom, felt the tears of shame that such maudlin dreams evoked. Yet his loins ached with frustration, and in New York he did something which he had not done since his last year at college. He went to a brothel.

  He was less troubled now by disloyalty to his father. What he yearned for it was no longer Irving's privilege to take. On the contrary there was even a kind of fire around the fringes of his imagination kindled by the idea that a rape or taking of Elesina would be a fitting revenge for the youngest son, the dearest son, the Joseph, that only thus could the heavy score be balanced, that Erna Cranberry's idea of a Judgment Day in his father's own bed was the sole way to yank victory out of the roaring rumble of the Steins' defeat. But then he would extend his fantasy to magnanimity. After the guilty Elesina had been exposed in her alabaster nudity to camera lights, after she had been repudiated, divorced, flung back penniless on a sneering world, who would pick her up out of the street, console her, love her, marry her but the guilty David? Marry her and take her off to a new world, a new life...

  "David, you haven't said a word in five minutes."

  It was not, however, Elesina coming into the library, but Eliot at lunch with him in a cafeteria in New York.

  "I'm sorry, Eliot. I'm preoccupied."

  "So I observe. And I think I can imagine what preoccupies you." He smiled at David's startled look. "Never fear, we needn't discuss it. We both know what it is. You see how tactful I am. But I think you'd better take that job in the Schurman firm. You can hardly object now to their being your father's lawyers."

  David had to accept the discussion as offered. He could never fool Eliot. "What makes you think the job's still open?"

  "Mr. Schurman. I saw him at a closing yesterday, and he said I could tell you."

  "He could have told me himself."

  "You turned him down, old boy! It's up to you now to make the next move."

  David mused. "You really think I ought?"

  "I think damn well you ought!"

  David looked at his friend narrowly, but Eliot remained inscrutable. "Very well, then. I'll go around this afternoon."

  7

  Elesina liked to picture her life in scenes. She quarreled with Fred Pemberton because he saw each play of Shakespeare as a whole and not as an amalgam of acted episodes. The bard, she would argue, had been a total theater person—actor, producer, director as well as playwright. He would not have been in the least concerned by inconsistencies in characters which good performances could conceal. Readers? He had no readers, except for the few who might have got hold of a pirated quarto. Elesina would cite with approval Mrs. Pritchard, the eighteenth-century Lady Macbeth who had never read act four because she did not appear in it.

  Now that she was not on the stage, this feeling of life as episodic was actually quickened. Off the boards, in fact, she was more than ever on them in imagination. Broadlawns seemed a stage, and she marveled at the roles that her predecessor had eschewed. For the community was utterly prepared to be an audience. People were fascinated by the beautiful new chatelaine of the principal estate in the neighborhood. Scandal collapsed into curiosity; curiosity swelled to enthusiasm. Mrs. Stein was "so gracious," "so human," "so natural." She was not stiff and standoffish like the aristocratic Clara. Elesina was delighted to have the Girl Scouts use the grounds for their spring outing, or to open the pool on Friday afternoons to boys' groups, or to invite the town band to give a concert in the patio. It was rumored that only by her tender administrations was the poor old Judge kept alive, and this despite the fact that his death would vastly enrich her! Ivy Trask had predicted that a year would make Elesina the most popular woman in Rye. She now admitted that she had overestimated the time by six months.

  But what was a play without love? Elesina had no intention of playing in so bleak a drama. She had always, more or less, been in love; she found it a comfortable state. Now that she fancied herself in love with David, life at Broadlawns was supplied with the needed extra dimension. It was delightful to have him there, to watch him, to listen to him, to take in his obvious interest in herself, even to sense the misery of what to him must have been an agonizing disloyalty. Her own conscience was not even faintly troubled. She did not regard either her heart or her body as the moral property of Irving Stein, and she was actually proud of the way she had fulfilled what she deemed her wifely duties. But at the same time she had no intention of risking a scandal or of rocking her smoothly sailing marital boat. She saw that David was going to be more and more difficult to handle and that any translation of their relations to a physical plane might always be a practical impossibility. She could handle such a change, but could he? Yet the very fact that he was so intense, so guilty, so fevered, added to her excitement.

  Each day now offered a different scene. She would seek him out in the library on the excuse that he was working too hard and take him to the pool. They would sit there for an hour, usually with Ruth, her dull, stout daughter, who had converted her former resentment into a possessive passion for "Mummie," and talk of other peoples' marriages and romances. Ruth's presence, however irksome to her, was necessary to keep David under control. His looks and tones were always on the verge of indiscretion. He told her about Eliot Clarkson, who had fallen in love at last, but with a much older married woman, a vulgar, ridiculous creature, and they discussed at length what David's role in the matter should be. Elesina told him about her first two husbands and he told her about the Irish girl and read her some of his novel. Each agreed that the other had had the worst possible luck.

  One Thursday morning before lunch she was surprised to find her mother's smart blue suitcases standing like two cadets by the door in the front hall. Linda Dart, in a blue city suit, was consulting a timetable.

  "I thought you weren't going till tomorrow."

  "I wasn't. But Agatha Gray telephoned to say she could have me tonight, so I'm making it a long weekend. I leave after lunch."

  "Will you be back next week?"

  "We'll see. I don't want the household to think me a permanent encumbrance."

  "Why not?" As her mother did not answer this, Elesina pursued: "What's wrong, dear?"

  "Shall we take a turn in the garden?"

  Out of earshot of any servant, to the crunch on the fine gravel of their high heels, Linda explained.

  "I do not pr
esume to lecture you, Elesina. You have long since passed out of the maternal orbit. But there are things that I need not countenance by being your houseguest. I tell you frankly that I do not approve of your relationship with David."

  "Do you suppose I'm trying to seduce him?"

  "I suppose nothing. What I see you doing is bad enough. I shall not remain a guest in the house of Irving Stein while you flirt with his son."

  "Oh, Mother, flirt, what a term!"

  "Use any you prefer. Or use none. We both know precisely what I mean."

  "Don't you think David can take care of himself?"

  "I think he might be hurt."

  "Flirt, hurt, oh, those terms! They're so much your generation, Mother. When everyone was brought up to regard sex as a dangerous, lugubrious thing to be shackled by oath and sacrament. Sex should be as light as spring air!"

  "That's all very well for you, my dear. I never suggested that you'd be hurt."

  "Mother, how nasty of you!"

  "Why nasty?"

  "Because your tone implies that people who can't be hurt are shallow and hard."

  "I don't judge them."

  "Oh, but you do! You've always peered down at me scornfully from the peak of your blissful marriage with Daddy. It's not that I don't admire happy marriages. I do. But there are lives and lives. You shouldn't be so smug about yours."

  "Nor you so confident."

  Elesina became angry. "Did I make Bill Nolte unhappy? Or Ted Everett? Or any of my friends in the interim? You exaggerate my power, Mother. You flatter me unduly."

  "You've changed," Linda replied in a grimmer tone. "You're more attractive rich than you were poor. Odd, how few people that's true of. And, anyway, David Stein bears no resemblance to either of your first two husbands. He's not only a man, he's a gentleman."

  "But he bears a resemblance, I suppose, to my third?"

  "Very well, my dear. I've had my little say. I shan't mention it again."

  Elesina was thoroughly provoked. It struck her as most unfair that a parent who had shown as little maternal love as Linda had should still be able to upset her. There was a reproach to the daughter in the simple discipline of the mother's life that no amount of wishful thinking could ever quite dispel. Linda was utterly convinced that a love like hers and Amos's was the only reality in life, and anything short of it struck her as shabby. Elesina knew that nothing would ever convince her mother to the contrary. "Why can't I accept it?" she asked herself angrily. But she couldn't, and she stamped her foot as she walked away.

  At the swimming pool she found David with Ruth. The poor girl looked unusually absurd in a red bathing suit decorated with knitted white bunny rabbits.

  "Ruth, will you please go to the house and change into the new bathing suit I bought you? And throw that rag you have on away!"

  "But, Mummie, I love the bunny suit! It was a present from Grandpa Everett."

  "I don't care if it was a present from the Queen of Sheba. You're never to wear it while you're staying with me."

  "All right, Mummie. I promise." But the girl made no move to go in to change.

  "Now, Ruth."

  Ruth jumped up to obey, but was diverted again by her need to communicate an item of seemingly passionate interest. "Oh, Mummie, the most wonderful thing has happened! David is going to tutor me in French."

  "I have Mademoiselle Lannais coming out from New York to do that."

  "But I don't like Mademoiselle Lannais! She makes everything so hard, and David makes it all so easy."

  "Perhaps too easy." Elesina glanced skeptically from the pleading eyes of her daughter, who was now clasping David's hand, to the latter's sheepish countenance. She did not approve the liberality with which Ruth had distributed the confidence that in the first two weeks had seemed her mother's monopoly. Besides, was there not a criticism of herself implicit in this appeal to David? Should not she herself have been tutoring the child? "I think you'll do better, my girl, with a professional teacher."

  "I've taught French before, Elesina," David explained hastily. "I tutored Lionel's little girl last summer when she had the mumps."

  "What am I to tell Mademoiselle?"

  "Tell her to stay home. Tell her you'll pay her anyway. After all, I won't charge." He winked at Elesina over the girl's head to communicate his sense of the importance of obliging the child.

  "Oh, please, Mummie! I can't stand Mademoiselle!"

  Elesina understood the very different plea in David's worried eyes. He was begging her to accede, not for Ruth's sake, but for his own. She could read in their nervous glimmer the message: "Be nice, for God's sake! Be the woman I can't help falling in love with. Don't be the bitch people say you are. Oh, please!" Elesina felt giddy with the sharpness of her conflict. She wanted, on one hand, to send the wretched Ruth packing to her room, but...

  "Please, Mummie!"

  It was too much! "I have told you, Ruth, never to make scenes in public. In our family we wash our dirty linen in private."

  "But David's not public. He's my brother!"

  Elesina moistened her lips, dry now with anger, and glanced again at David. His white skin and broad, rounded shoulders were those of a marble gladiator. No, this was madness.

  "We'll see, darling," she said with a great effort. "Mademoiselle is coming out this afternoon, so we must go through with the first lesson. But as for the others ... well, I'll talk to her. If David really has the time."

  "Oh, I'll make the time, Elesina. On weekends, anyway. Okay, Ruth? Now go and change that suit. I quite agree with your mother it's hideous!"

  Ruth padded away across the flagstones, and Elesina's anger dissolved as she saw the gratitude in his eyes.

  Half an hour later, at lunch in the big dining room under the Romneys, Elesina recaptured her good humor. A mild scented breeze was wafted from the garden through the open french doors. Irving had been wheeled to his place opposite her and had ordered one of his finest white wines. David, dressed for the city, as he was going back with Linda Dart, was telling the table how he had lost his morning's work in the library by not having been able to take his nose out of a second quarto of King Lear. Fred Pemberton became jumpy, as he always did when others poached on his territory.

  "I see that Lear is to be produced in town next fall," he called down the table. "But I shan't go. They're playing the fool as an old man." He glanced about, as if appealing for snorts of derision, which did not materialize. "Does that shock nobody? It has always seemed to me that the fool should be played as a brilliant, sensitive youth, of poor health and deep feeling, a bit effeminate perhaps, but precocious, bitter and loyal to the death."

  "Why not a girl?" Elesina demanded, raising the wineglass to her lips. It was very cold, very dry, as she loved it, as Irving knew she loved it. She nodded down the table to him gratefully. "It could be played as a girl, you know. We were going to do it that way in Columbus Repertory, but we ran out of money and did Charley's Aunt instead." She could tell by the way David was looking at her that he did not want to leave that afternoon. Perhaps he would change his mind. But what did it matter? He would come back. She felt a tingle of exhilaration in her sides, her arms.

  "Were you going to play the fool?" David asked.

  "Yes! And Cordelia, too. There's a tradition that in Shakespeare's time the same boy played both parts."

  "It's very likely," Pemberton asserted, anxious to regain the initiative. "The fool disappears from the play toward the end of act three with the famous line: 'And I'll go to bed at noon.' He and Cordelia are never on stage together, and his absence from the last two acts is not explained. Of course, some commentators have argued that Lear's remark at the end, 'And my poor fool is hang'd,' means that the fool was hanged by the soldiers who killed Cordelia. But why would they have done that? One didn't butcher clowns. No, the better view is that 'poor fool' is there used as a term of affection for Cordelia."

  "But why should he call his favorite daughter a poor fool?" David asked.

&n
bsp; "We had a different theory in Columbus Repertory," Elesina intervened, her mind suddenly aglow with a happy vision of that time. Why had she ever given up acting? "We claimed there was no fool, that he is really Cordelia in disguise. You see, she knows her father is going to have a bad time, and that's the only way she can stay at court and watch over him."

  "And what in the meantime has happened to the real fool?" Irving asked, reacting with a wink to Pemberton's expression of disgust.

  "He pined away, don't you remember?" Elesina replied. "He pined away when his lady went to France. Perhaps he died. Cordelia, artfully made up, could easily take them in. Who, after all, recognizes Kent or Edgar in disguise? It wasn't a very observing court. Besides, Lear is half senile."

  "There I object!" cried Irving.

  "Ladies and gentlemen!" protested Pemberton. "Surely this kind of levity is not fitting in a discussion of the bard."

  "But why not, Fred?" Elesina insisted. "The quartos are corrupt. You can tell that from ours. A line might have been dropped that explained the whole thing. And don't Shakespeare's heroines frequently disguise themselves as boys?"

  "As boys, to be sure. Not as clowns."

  "But they do disguise their sex? How many?"

  Pemberton was faintly appeased by this appeal to his scholarship. "Four. Julia, Viola, Rosalind, Portia." He paused. "And Imogen. Five."

  "Very well. It was evidently a common stage trick. So Lear in his hour of tribulation on the heath is accompanied by his three truest friends, the three loyal characters of the play, Kent, Edgar and Cordelia, all in disguise! I suppose Cordelia confesses it to her father in prison. She would, wouldn't she? Of course, she would! And in the end the brokenhearted old man, leaning over her corpse, moans: 'And my poor fool is hang'd.' Why, it's terrific! Only Shakespeare could have thought of it!"

  "I suppose I must take you seriously," the scholar responded now, with a desperate effort at self-control. "Let me see if I can quell this madness. Very well. How do you explain the change in Cordelia from a grave, literal, almost inarticulate character to the uninhibited fantasist that the fool is? Granted she could change her face. Could she change the very essence of her character?"