The Dark Lady Read online

  And so it was, for many years, even permanently, so far as Auburn was concerned. Uncle Fred enjoyed his high office for a decade, through the terms of Roosevelt and Taft, and Ivy had a liberal education, not only in politics, but in the social and cultural life of the capital. Such intellectuals as Henry Adams, Senator Lodge and Lord Bryce, admirers of Uncle Fred's Constitutional History of the United States, were frequent visitors. They rarely spoke directly to Ivy, but their words and manners were tucked away in her unwritten diary. Ivy had the combined reverence and cynicism of a London shopgirl watching royalty on parade. She saw that the great thinkers of the Theodosian court held themselves superior to the crude politicians, but she also noted that their pretensions were based, at least in part, on wealth and social position. The American Renaissance, it appeared, like the earlier Italian, had started at the top.

  Ivy was smart enough to make herself indispensable to her aunt, who, like many of the Trask women, had little gift for organization. Aunt Amy was a gently indolent creature who nursed a rather faded blond beauty like a string of fine old pearls, but she was capable of noting even minor derelictions in subordinates. Ivy became adept at seating dinner parties, matching affinities without violating protocol, and her aid was soon sought by other Cabinet wives. "Get the little Trask to do it," the word went out. "See if Amy Porter can spare her for the afternoon." Sometimes, when Aunt Amy was ailing, Ivy acted as hostess for her uncle, and then she was always careful to conduct herself in such a way as to be appreciated without being overpraised. For she knew that her job would not survive the day when the first guest failed to miss Aunt Amy.

  For a long time no man came into her life. Where would he have come from? Washington was not a town for romance; the men who came there were not only married but middle-aged, and many who dined at the Porters' were old. It never would have occurred to Aunt Amy or Uncle Fred to invite a "beau" for Ivy, and her looks were not the sort that made males leap boundary marks. Besides, she was shy with her contemporaries. She did not believe that she could attract them, and she could conceive of no greater humiliation than being detected in an attempt to do so. Yet on the whole she was not dissatisfied with her life. She considered that, judged by her scanty equipment, she might be deemed to have done well. Even a paid niece, she would tell herself with a private smirk, was not too lowly to be occasionally smug.

  Eventually a man, a sort of man, did come. Edouardo Calabrese was a secretary in the Italian legation, a bachelor, past fifty, of a well-to-do Florentine banking family whose sisters had married into the nobility. Edouardo was charming; he had wide cultural interests, spoke perfect English and knew America intimately. He even collected American art, and his house in Georgetown had many samples of the work of Hassam, Bellows and Eakins. He greatly admired Uncle Fred's near classic book on the Constitution and was a constant guest at the Porters', one of the very few to whom Ivy became more than the efficient, bustling little assistant to her aunt. He would talk to her as if she were the equal of any lady present.

  "Tell me, Miss Trask," he asked her one night before dinner, "do you write down the things you observe? Do you keep a journal?"

  "No. Why?"

  "Because I've been watching you. Those fine green eyes of yours seem to take in everything and everybody. What a record it would be, if you set it all down!"

  "But then it would be somebody else's, wouldn't it? Now it's mine. Because it's true. If I wrote it out it would become a work of art—bad art, at that."

  "Do you believe, then, that we can live just in ourselves?"

  "Who else should I live in?"

  "I see you're a realist, Miss Trask. And a very live one, too. I sometimes feel that if I were to touch the tips of your fingers, I should get an electric shock."

  "Merci du compliment!"

  "I mean it well." He held up a long thin hand to show her his tapering fingers. "Don't you think this old Italian appendage needs a stimulus?"

  "Why do you call it old? Can it be older than you?"

  "I wonder." He contemplated his hand whimsically now, as if it might suddenly disappear. "It goes way back. We are bourgeois, but we go back. Like the Medici."

  Ivy laughed and touched her fingertips to his. "There! Did you feel the shock?"

  "Oh, yes. I'm better already. I think we're going to be friends, Miss Trask."

  Edouardo, it turned out, had a reputation most unusual for an Italian; he was not a ladies' man. The relationship that he and Ivy developed was accepted with a smile and a shrug by the Porters and their friends; nobody gossiped when he took Amy's old-maid niece to a concert or for a drive in Rock Creek Park. Ivy was too shrewd to be falsely modest. She divined at once that her value to Edouardo was more in what she was not than what she was, and she was perfectly willing to have it that way, to play Jane Eyre to his expurgated Rochester. She liked to sit by him in the old victoria that he rented for drives by the river or to walk with him by the cherry trees. His formal, balanced phrases, his velvet tones opened a new world for her. She noted now for the first time all the colors of spring and of sunset, and she learned the stories behind the lacquered diplomacy of the day. She even put together a picture of the Italy of his boyhood, replete to the ravens around the towers of the villa in Fiesole and the smell of incense in the damp darkness of the family chapel. Ivy hugged herself with delight at the realization that she was at last able to put her hard-won knowledge of human beings to good use. How many silly girls would have spoiled it all by trying to marry him!

  One Sunday spring afternoon, as they walked by the bank of the river, in the full, damp, heart-moving air, Edouardo's discourse became more personal.

  "It is not always easy to be Italian, you know. So much is expected of one. There are days when I curse our reputation for romance! My sisters are always ready to cut me to pieces when I so much as look at a lady who is not their candidate for Signora Calabrese."

  "I guess it's lucky there's an ocean between them and me!"

  "But you are sensible, my dear Ivy. I sometimes think you are the most sensible individual in all Washington. Or the only one. So many of your compatriots seem to view life through a kind of screen which converts individuals into types. Your old men become wise, your maidens innocent, your youths lusty, and..."

  "And our Italians lovers!" Ivy interrupted with a sharp laugh to cover her tension. "Yes, my only asset as a child was seeing the world as it was. And my only education was learning not to tell people what I saw."

  "But will you tell me, Ivy?"

  "Yes!" she exclaimed with sudden decision, walking on quickly ahead so that she would not have to look at him. "I see that you are afraid that I may be a goose. That I may develop ideas about our friendship. That you may even find my uncle waiting on your doorstep with a shotgun in his hand! You needn't worry. I'm the one he'd shoot. But that's not the point, anyway: what he would think or what my aunt would think or what anybody would think. It only matters what we think. And here it is, Edouardo. I have no fantasies of becoming your wife. No fantasies about romance. I have no desires, no interests, in that field. All I care about is our friendship. It is important to me that it should continue. Unchanged." She stopped now and faced him, breathing hard. "And I feel I could murder any lumbering fool who interferes with it!"

  Edouardo clasped her hand in both of his. "Dear Ivy," he murmured. "We will always be friends. I know that now."

  Walking home, she trembled at the narrowness of her escape. It was as if she had been crossing a bare heath under the crack of thunder. Big ugly gods, like buddhas, glinted malevolently at her. They knew whom she loved! And was not love a thing to be revealed, to be leered at, to be opened up like a package on their dirty altar before prying eyes and held up, a bloody, aborted fetus to the humiliation of any man who had failed to respond to it, who had denied Venus? Oh, no, she would clutch the fetus to her breast, take it from the vile temple, bury it in the black, bare earth outside. And then she could defy the glinting idols, or at least fool them,
dangerous game though it was, parading under their very eyes her heretic's game of unfleshly friendship, exulting in the whiteness, the spermlessness, the heady sanctity, the simple forbidden goodness of her friendly passion.

  Edouardo did not raise the subject again, and their friendship continued in apparent serenity. In the spring of 1914, at any rate, he became too preoccupied with European rivalries to be troubled further over sexual inadequacies. He was deeply pessimistic about the outcome of what he now saw as inevitable war. On their long carriage rides by the river he spoke forebodingly of the might of Wilhelm II.

  "People know the Kaiser is strong, Ivy, but they have no conception of how strong. His triumph will be the end of our way of life. We have had peace too long. We have cared too much about art and beauty and good manners. We are lost things. It is sad, for we are still better than those who will come after."

  "I don't think the Kaiser could conquer this country. I'd like to see him try!"

  "Oh, I don't mean your great nation," Edouardo replied with a smile. "No, I believe an army of Ivys could still drive back the Hohenzollerns. I was thinking of the gold-laden empires of Britain and France and of poor old Italy, with all her past and treasures."

  "You forget Russia!"

  "No, Ivy, I don't forget Russia. Promise me something. If I am called home, will you write to me?"

  "Edouardo, you know I will!"

  He returned to Italy in the war, and he wrote to her every month thereafter. Uncle Fred retired and went back to live in Auburn, and Ivy went with him and her aunt because it seemed unthinkable to do otherwise. It was there that, after the Armistice, she received the letter from Edouardo which asked her to come to Florence to be his bride.

  "I have been ill," he wrote, "and I am not what I was, but I am still something. I have a few years, perhaps, and a bit of money and an old house to share with you. I think you might be amused. Of course, if something better has turned up for you I understand—from the bottom of my heart."

  There was nobody to go with her—Aunt Amy and Uncle Fred were far too old—but Ivy never hesitated for a moment. She had more than ten years of savings. She bought herself a trousseau and a passage to Genoa and departed.

  The train from Genoa to Rome paused for an hour in Florence, but Ivy was ready to get off the moment it stopped. A very tall woman, with a huge beak of a nose, frigidly fashionable in black furs, stepped forward to take her by the arm.

  "My dear Miss Trask, I am Antonina de Selli, Edouardo's sister. He has sent me to talk to you. Could we go back into your compartment? Never fear. The train won't leave without our being warned. That has been arranged."

  Ivy calculated afterward that she had been thirty-seven years, two months and three days old when her life was cut in two. For what she now learned, shivering in the cold, dusty compartment, looking at the photographs of the Forum and of the Villa d'Este over her interlocutor's grim face, was that Edouardo had changed his mind. He was too old, too ill, to marry her. He had cancer, which he had kept from her. His family had persuaded him that it was his duty to leave his diminished property intact to them. He had sent his sister to break the news, but he had armed her with a confirmatory letter and with a check that he hoped would be expended on a wonderful vacation in Italy. Antonina went on so long and in such detail, in her grave, grating phrases, that Ivy had more than the time she needed to prepare her answer.

  "You are relieved, Contessa, to see how middle-aged and plain I am. I am also poor. You marvel that your brother could have contemplated so unequal a match. But let me tell you something. I could get off this train right now and go to Edouardo and make him change his mind. I could! And looking at me now, you know I could! But you needn't worry. I shall not do it. Because I know it would kill him. I can imagine what you've all been up to—hounding him, persecuting him. And even if I rescued him from you, he'd always wonder if I'd done the right thing. You see, I know him. I leave him to you because it's easier that way. Easier for him. And I'll take that check, only because I despise you so utterly that it would be overrating you to reject it!"

  Ivy was never to forget the look of astonishment on the Contessa's face. Twenty minutes later she was on her way to Rome. In the dreary wilderness which choked her heart and mind she had yet the energy to face the fact that her disaster had not come wholly as a surprise. An expurgated Jane Eyre had become an expurgated Portrait of a Lady. That was all.

  When Ivy disembarked in New York she decided that she would remain in the city. It was not that she did not wish to expose herself to the humiliation of family sympathy in Auburn, it was simply that nobody could make a life for her now but herself. She owed her job on Tone to the intervention of a cousin, but thereafter she owed little to her relatives except for an occasional dinner at a restaurant when one of them came to the city, and this she more than paid for with her services as a guide. Her rise at Tone was slow but steady. She learned each department fully and finally settled in fashion, where she became the editor. She was never ill, never missed an opening, went to Paris every fall and developed a pungent style of her own, which made sensible dressing attractive and available to middle-aged suburbanites. She also intermixed her column with personal items about the best-dressed ladies of Manhattan, so that a blend of gossip and garments became her trademark. "Ivy not only tells you what the ladies put on," Sam Gorman, the feature editor of Tone used to say. "She also tells you when they take it off."

  Little by little she developed a social life. She drew an allowance from the magazine to cover choice little dinners, parties for eight, in her tiny but charming apartment at the Althorpe, furnished with presents from firms which advertised in Tone. People came because she did things well; they loved the rapid talk over lively topics in the oval green-paneled parlor hung with exotic oriental birds on satin. Ivy's trick was always to have one important, unexpected guest, an actress, a visiting designer, a popular woman novelist, and to be sure that the other six would be the sort to amuse her star. The efforts to which she went to procure the latter were as laborious as they were carefully concealed. But nobody ever heard her complain about the toil that went into the creation of a social life which a pretty face or a bank account would have made for her in a day.

  Ivy's greatest success was with the Steins. Her value to them was very much what it had been to her aunt and uncle: an ability to straighten out a party as one would a sheet on a bed, by giving it, all unobtrusively, little pulls and twitches. When the Steins took her to Europe she was helpful with timetables and accommodations; when they were ill she was as good as a trained nurse. Once when they were in Mexico, and David had been caught smoking at boarding school, they delegated Ivy to go up to Connecticut to talk to the headmaster, a matter she handled so skillfully that the dreaded suspension was avoided.

  And yet all was not perfect. There were times when the Steins seemed to forget about her altogether, when as many as six weeks would pass without an invitation. And then, when Clara did call, there would be only the cool formality of her usual overture: "Ivy, dear, would you by any chance be free on Friday? We're having some amusing people in." Irving even presumed to disinvite her if he saw fit. "Oh, Ivy, I know I needn't stand on ceremony with as old a friend as you. Nicolo has just given out, and I haven't a man to balance you. Ordinarily I wouldn't care a hoot about an uneven table—you know I'm above such trivia—I ask my friends to dine, not to mate—but we're having Clara's old aunt, Angeline Warren, and you know what a stickler she is..."

  Ivy knew too much of human vanity to expect any gratitude for her social help, but she began to be afraid that if the Steins took her too much for granted, they would end by despising her. She was never allowed to forget that it was their home, their food, their children, their parties. Her proposal of Elesina Dart for a weekend at Broadlawns had been a deliberate effort to show Clara and Irving that she was capable of producing something of value herself. It had been impossible for her to imagine that everyone might not feel about her young friend as sh
e did.

  She had met Elesina at Sam Gorman's. Sam was the bright, funny, effervescent arbiter elegantiarum of Tone. He was small, and bald on top, and had the big sad eyes of a lemur, but he never stopped joking and laughing. His apartment was an ever-changing warehouse of the household gadgets which he promoted, and his guests were as frequently varied as the decorations. Visiting Sam's rooms was like flipping the pages of Tone. He was constantly amused by Ivy, who used him, he claimed, as her social retriever and whom he professed to find "deep and dangerous." "I act as her screen," he would tell people; "the old spider selects the flies she wants from my net." Sam was also an occasional guest at the Steins', but he was apt to irritate Irving with jovial references to their shared Jewish background.

  "Be nice to my friend Elesina Dart," he told Ivy one night. "She's just lost her part in Rosmersholm for cutting rehearsals. If she doesn't beat the bottle, she's finished. It's too bad, for she has a very nice little talent."

  It was not uncommon at Sam's buffets for two guests, even of the same sex, to eat their supper together in a corner, and when Ivy took a seat by Elesina, the latter welcomed her with a casual friendliness and an air of vague melancholy that seemed to relegate any expectation of a male companion to the realm of nonserious things. "Oh, how pleasant, Miss Trask. Will you join me? I want to hear about your work. I've often wondered what it would be like to be an editor. It's one thing I haven't tried so far."

  It was rare to meet a person of striking beauty who seemed so unconscious of her own effect. Elesina was not naive, or even modest; more probably she simply did not care. Her interest in Ivy's life on Tone was mild enough, yet it was stronger than her interest in anything else that the room seemed to offer. Did she realize, Ivy wondered, that anyone born a Dart was a bit déclassée at Sam's party? Yet it might have been precisely a part of Elesina's charm that she could throw away assets with scarcely a shrug—as her career, for example. Ivy protested when her new friend asked the waitress for more bourbon.