The Dark Lady

by Louis Auchincloss

  "Those were her husbands?"

  "Both now shed. I trust there'll be no others for a while."

  "Not while Ivy, the dragon, is on watch. Are there babies?"

  "One little girl, who lives with Everett. He's poisoned the child's mind against Elesina." Ivy put down her soup spoon to be able to turn to David for full emphasis. "My poor friend has nothing to show for either of her marriages."

  "You mean no alimony?"

  "Nothing!"

  David chuckled. "Forgive me if I point out, Ivy dear, that in that case your protégée must have been on the wrong side in two divorces. And that in itself tells me something about the divine Elesina."

  "You're a brute, like all your sex! No wonder Elesina is so bitter. Look, the table's changing. Talk to the lucky lady on your right."

  Ivy, left in silence, compared the occupants of the great formal blue chamber with the handsomer, haughtier ladies and gentlemen who condescended to them from the walls, subjects of the art of Lawrence, Romney and West, in scarlet uniforms and billowing dresses, against Palladian backgrounds or hunt picnics or fashionable malls. But her pleasure in this, an old game, was spoiled by the recollection of her talk with Clara. It was curious how penetrating Clara's vision could be. A hundred women could come to her house and receive the tactile, breathy attentions of the Judge without causing the lift of one of her long penciled eyebrows, but she could flare at the least change of his tone of voice, even from the other end of the long table, when a special impression had been made. Oh, yes, Clara, for all her airs, for all her cultivation of Greek poetry and early American hymns, could be a woman and a cat! Ivy watched her critically as she chatted with Al Schurman. Did she and Irving still make love? Then she shifted her gaze to Elesina, and in doing so it crossed David's broad shoulders and half-averted profile. Now she mated David with Elesina. They were Paris and Helen on the ship, flying from Menelaus. Unashamedly on deck, oblivious of the sailors as they would have been of dogs, naked, they copulated, his hair long and blond, mixed with hers, long and black...

  "Irving seems to admire Miss Dart," Fred Pemberton, the Shakespearean scholar, observed to Ivy with a throaty chuckle. "The lofty Clara may yet deign to pucker her noble brow..."

  2

  Elesina was seated on Irving Stein's left and Pat Schurman on his right, but as Elesina and her host occupied the two chairs at the end of the long table she was given the appearance of being guest of honor. The obvious interest of the table in this striking new member of their group, this repertory actress with an obscure reputation for disaster, was gratifying, but Elesina was still irked that dinner had interrupted her quest of a second cocktail. Why did one never get enough to drink in Jewish houses? She noted sourly that there was only a single wineglass at each place. And these people had millions! Suddenly she was restless, oddly elated by her own bad humor.

  "It was so good of Ivy to bring you into our lives, Miss Dart." Irving Stein's full, warm handclasp enveloped the fingers of her right hand under the table. "We hope you will become a regular visitor to Broadlawns. I could tell by the way you studied my little Bibiena that you have the eye of a connoisseur. That is what we care about." The voice, soft and low, dropped to a rumbling whisper. "Tonight, however, is not typical. The Schurmans are family. Very fine people, of course, but with no eyes or ears for the things we love. Pat's idea of celestial bliss is to watch her boys play hockey."

  "Judge, do you think I might have a glass of wine now?"

  "Why certainly, my dear." Even in his surprise he failed to release her fingers. His free hand beckoned the butler. "Some wine for Miss Dart."

  Elesina with a slight effort brought her right hand up to table level. Only then did he release his hold. "Oh, don't let go," she protested, smiling across him at the obliquely watching Pat. "I'm always proud to have my hand held, aren't you, Mrs. Schurman? Only I insist that everybody witness my honor!"

  "Very amusing, I'm sure."

  Elesina turned away abruptly from Pat Schurman's pert stare. Let the little minx have Stein's paw in her lap if she wanted! Did she think Elesina Dart cared? Mrs. Schurman, indeed! Did Mrs. Schurman know there had been a Dart at Valley Forge? And a Dart at the Treaty of Ghent? Wouldn't all the Steins and Schurmans in this pompous room have given all their purchased portraits for her own little Copley, now unfortunately sold, of Elisha Dart?

  But Elesina could never long enjoy this kind of snobbish fantasy. She felt her spirits suddenly deflate. How petty it all was! What did these people care about the Darts? What was all her family's past but a few tattered albums of faded snapshots of ladies in big hats on broad verandahs, of bearded men at the wheels of unbelievable autos, a box of yellow newspaper clippings of weddings and funerals, a memory of memories, a story written on the opaque waters of the East River, gone with the dirty snows of yesteryear?

  She had to beckon the astonished butler to refill her glass. Really, it was too much! And now she was aware of a louder voice, addressing her with heavily ironic politeness.

  "Your little interchange with the Judge, Miss Dart, puts me in mind of that sonnet of the divine bard's where he contemplates his mistress' fingers on the keys, or jacks, of a spinet. It evokes this happy conceit which I presume, facetiously, to offer in my own behalf at our host's expense: 'Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.'"

  Fred Pemberton, on Pat Schurman's right, was leaning across her to gain Elesina's attention. His intrusive, watery eyes, his fixed little smile made her shiver in disgust. She decided to indulge the impulse to cut him down.

  "But those dark lady sonnets were only a cover-up. Wasn't it the 'lovely boy' whose lips he really wanted to kiss?" Elesina now glanced down the table to where David Stein was talking to Ivy. "The divine bard, as you call him, would have addressed himself to our host's son rather than to me."

  Pemberton, to her surprise, cackled with pleasure. Apparently any attention pleased him. "Aren't you forgetting, Miss Dart, the evidence of the twentieth sonnet? Where our poet tells us that nature, in molding the body of the beloved youth, intended him originally for a girl, but then fell a doting and added 'one thing to my purpose nothing.'"

  "You interpret that as a reference to the young man's sexual organ?" Elesina's question was designed to insure that Mrs. Schurman should understand the reference, which she clearly did, for her thin lips were now pursed into a ball of disgust. Irving Stein coughed loudly, uneasily. "I suppose it's clear enough. But the presence of such an organ might still have been 'nothing,' or no impediment, to the poet's particular taste. However, a truce to such speculations! I am not sure that Mrs. Schurman appreciates our scholarly freedom. Let me simply point out that this sonnet may have been intended to put the reader off the track. After all, sodomy was a serious crime in Elizabethan England. Even if it flourished at court, you could still be burned alive for it. A man in Shakespeare's unprotected social position did not lightly twit authority."

  "But, my dear Miss Dart," Stein intervened, "you are a veritable mine of authority! I told you you'd be one of us!"

  "Oh, I once played the dark lady in a comedy based on the sonnets." Elesina laughed deprecatingly. "I believe it had three performances. However, it gave me the chance to study the sonnet sequence and make my own guesses. Why not? It's a garden where nobody fears to tread."

  "And I, of course, have been one of the nonangels in that enclosure," Pemberton told them. "I have even published a work on the subject entitled, perhaps optimistically, The Riddle Solved. It was my theory that Shakespeare's feeling for the youth was the most intense passion of his lifetime and the principal source of the high tragic mood that preceded the composition of Hamlet and Othello. Of course, it had a homosexual aspect, but not necessarily in any vulgar or physical sense. The young man was obviously of the highest birth—very possibly the Earl of Pembroke himself—and a corporeal liaison may not have been feasible."

  "I suppose the Earl's family may have had something to say about th
at," the now utterly disgusted Pat Schurman put in sharply. "Shakespeare may be a god to you, Professor Pemberton, but to the Pembrokes he was probably a dirty old man."

  "Hardly old, Ma'am."

  "I confess I've had misgivings about the sonnets," Elesina interjected, to take the initiative from Pat. "To me there is something malsain about them. They are too crawling, too syrupy, too self-pitying."

  Irving Stein seemed shocked at this. "But, Miss Dart, you are speaking of the greatest love poetry in the English language!"

  "Oh, love, pooh, Judge. It's not love at all. It's a kind of crush. Or series of crushes, really. For if the sonnets cover a period of many years, as some scholars say, they must have been addressed to a series of young men. We all know that middle-aged pederasts keep changing the objects of their affection. After all, how long does a pretty boy stay pretty?"

  Pemberton proved unexpectedly hospitable to this variation of his theory. "You have a point, Miss Dart! As a matter of fact, in The Riddle Solved I state that Shakespeare's great love could have been for two men, first Southampton and then Pembroke. But I fear we're going to shock Miss Cranberry." He lowered his voice as he glanced down the table at the poetess, a huge blond woman with straight hair pulled to a bun in back and a fleshy, pendulous, menacing face. "You know her theory, don't you? She claims there was no youth or dark lady. That the sonnets are a literary exercise, a novel in verse, a jeu d'esprit. But how can an old maid comprehend the eclecticism of the Elizabethan male?"

  "We're talking about you, Miss Cranberry!" Elesina called boldly down the table. "Professor Pemberton doesn't believe that unmarried women can understand Shakespeare."

  Miss Cranberry's heavy, square face turned, with slowly mounting hostility, to her critic. "As much as unmarried men, anyway," she retorted with a grunt.

  "I understand that you are not married, Miss Dart," Pat Schurman observed suddenly. "But surely nobody could accuse you of naivete where Shakespeare is concerned."

  The acidity of the comment created a general atmosphere of embarrassment. "Oh, well, I'm an actress, and we don't count," Elesina responded with a shrug. "There was a time when we couldn't even be buried in hallowed ground. But the professor, Miss Cranberry, seems to imply that you turn Shakespeare into a sort of Kate Greenaway."

  "Better than turning him into a sort of Oscar Wilde. I have often wondered if those critics who persist in finding evidence of inversion in the sonnets do not betray what I shall be polite enough to call their subconscious preferences."

  "My friends, my friends!" interposed Clara Stein. "Please let us not be so heated. Erna, do talk to Mr. Simkins. He has told me how much he loves your poems. And David, you must help our end of the table to understand the sonnets." Clara, with a nod to her husband and a wink at David, signified that she wished the table divided into two sections to separate the combatants. It was an instance, Elesina supposed, of what Ivy had told her: that the detached mistress of the house always knew how to resume her rule.

  "You must think we literary buffs have strange preoccupations." Elesina had turned now with affected humility to Pat Schurman. "The Judge tells me you're a great hockey fan."

  "It doesn't mean that I can't read, Miss Dart." "I never meant to imply it." Elesina glanced at her host, who, she was glad to note, had instantly resented Pat Schurman's insulting tone. "I'm sure you have just as interesting theories about Shakespeare as anyone here."

  "I don't know if they're as interesting, but they're certainly a good deal cleaner. If that's a virtue, which I don't suppose you believe."

  "Cleaner?"

  "Yes, Miss Dart. I am frankly revolted at what I have heard at this table tonight!"

  "Pat, my dear, you mustn't take that attitude," Judge Stein intervened earnestly. "It isn't as if there were young people present. I..."

  "I'm sorry, Cousin Irving, but I cannot agree with you. I should not be honest if I did not tell you that I consider the moral tone of the conversation tonight very low indeed. And I deem it a fault on your part to permit and encourage it."

  Irving Stein had turned quite red. "Am I to credit my senses?" he almost shouted, with a slight accentuation of Teutonic accent. "Surely you, a cousin by marriage, and a younger one at that, cannot be criticizing my moral tone?"

  Patricia Schurman's self-possession was wonderful to behold. She had put down her fork and was facing her host with a small, steady, mocking smile. "I suggest you ask some of your other guests what they think of the dirty talk we've been exposed to tonight."

  Her husband, at the other end of the table, was looking cruelly embarrassed, but it was still apparent that, if it had to be war, he was going to be on the side of his wife. In the silver-tinted air over the long table there hung a sense of the shivering jealousies between the two families. "Pat, will you drop it, please? What do we gain by bringing these things out?"

  "I am only too happy to drop the whole distasteful subject," his wife retorted. "It was certainly not I who brought it up. But in dropping it I wish to make it entirely clear that I stand by everything I've said."

  Something at this seemed to tear within the Judge. His head sagged for a second, but when he raised it and faced his opponent, his words came out in a rush that was something between a bleat and a gasp. "It is an outrage for a woman in your position to say such things! I will not permit it in my house!"

  "I'm perfectly willing to repeat it, Judge."

  Stein rose from his chair, his face now scarlet. In a moment, with a rush of silk, Clara was at his side. "Come away, dear," she said placatingly. "We can finish our dinner in the library. No, David, you stay here. Please, everyone! Don't get up. Go on with your dinner. Pretend that nothing has happened. It is difficult, I know, but it's the only way to handle these things. Sarah," she murmured as she passed Peter's wife, "take over, dear."

  There was a nervous bustle of conversation around the table as the Steins left the dining room, her hands clasping his arm. Everyone babbled the first thing that came to mind. After dinner, when the ladies had retired to the drawing room, Elesina went over to Ivy.

  "Your friends are extraordinary. Do they put on this act every weekend? It's like that party at the Macbeths'. Except there it was the guests who had to leave."

  Ivy sighed. "I seem to have brought the apple of discord to the banquet of the gods. You're a very potent influence, my dear."

  Elesina smiled. Decidedly, the weekend was proving more lively than she could have hoped.

  3

  Ivy always thought of herself as having had no individual childhood, but as having been an amorphous part of the jumbled noisy life of the Trasks in their ancestral shingle mansion by the lake at Auburn, New York. For reasons that she never quite fathomed the Trasks, like a noble Italian family, seemed to cling to the same habitation, so that her memory of meals was of a long board at which several uncles and aunts, at least one grandparent and numberless cousins ate and chattered. Trasks would sometimes marry and leave the tribal roof, but they had a way of coming back, for long summers or Christmases, or even permanently, with the death or defection of spouses or with economic reverses. Some Trasks were poor and others well off, but all were indoctrinated with a sense of responsibility for fellow Trasks, or for persons who had married Trasks or whose mothers or grandmothers had been Trasks—Parkers, Sewards, Tremaines, Gardners, Sewells. The history of the family was a history of "upstate."

  Yet as Ivy grew up she was soon made aware that, despite a good deal of evenly distributed affection, there were still social distinctions to be observed. Uncle Fred Porter, for example, was a "personage"; he had been lieutenant governor of the state, and even the little boys hushed up when he talked. Aunt Eleanor Sewell was "unfortunate," because her husband had been a gambler and because she drank. Julia Trask was "fast," so that no nice boy, at least no nice local boy, could be reasonably expected to marry her. Ted Tremaine was "smart," which meant that he would go far, and Blanche Trask was "too good for this world," which signified religious hyster
ia and an early demise. But what was Ivy? What was plain little Ivy, whose sharp green eyes took in so much more than was good for her? She seemed as much a part of the old house as the Duncan Phyfe dining room chairs and the languid ladies in the Morse portraits, as the horsehair sofa and the stillness of the dark dining room in midmorning, because she never went away, like the others, to other homes, or even for vacations. Ivy was an orphan, and she didn't have a cent.

  It sometimes seemed to her that her parents had simply been lost. She could not be sure whether she remembered her mother or remembered only the photographs of that pretty, pouting, perversely happy face. Her father, too, had been beautiful, but he had been "weak," though whether this referred to his health or character Ivy had never been sure. He had died of a brain fever when only twenty-five, and his widow had followed him less than a year later. Ivy was told that her mother's heart had given out, but in later years she suspected that the words concealed a suicide. She was kindly treated by everyone, but it was evident that her extra helping of affection was inspired by the general sense of her aloneness. What in the name of heaven were they going to do with her?

  Ivy conformed carefully to what she gleaned was expected of her. She heard that she was bright, so she worked hard to obtain good marks at school. She was told that she was always a help in the house, so she made herself useful to Kate the cook and Millie the chambermaid. She heard from beautiful Aunt Amy Porter that boys weren't everything in life, so she accepted her plainness and obscurity and thought as little as she could of parties and dances. She learned from Grandma that unmarried women should be allowed careers, so she asked to be sent to college and read every book in the library from Cooper to Bryant. And she would indeed have gone to New York City and to Barnard College had President Theodore Roosevelt not named Uncle Fred Porter Secretary of Commerce and had Aunt Amy not suggested that Ivy go with them to Washington and be her social secretary. The whole household at Auburn rang with the felicity of this decision. The problem of Ivy was solved!