The Dark Lady

by Louis Auchincloss

  "And where does that leave the poor twentieth-century female?" she demanded.

  "With everything before her. There is nothing women did in the past they cannot do in the present."

  "Oh, pooh, Irving, you know that isn't so. You speak of women giving men an ideal. What woman ever gave you yours? Your ideal was to create a temple of beauty at Broadlawns, and you've done it. You could have done it as a bachelor."

  "No, my dear, I needed a priestess for the shrine."

  "And that was Clara?"

  "Certainly. Clara played an immense role in the conception of Broadlawns."

  Elesina noted the use of the past participle. It was as near as he would come to denying the continuing function of Clara. Really, he was almost too tactful. She closed her eyes in sudden giddiness, and she was back in the doctor's chamber, now lying on the examining table. In her fantasy she raised her knees, and his clinical fingers deftly searched.

  "Irving!" she exclaimed in a rasping tone as she opened her eyes. "Do you have any place that we could go? I loathe hotels." He reached at once to take her hand, but she drew it quickly back. "Please, no preliminaries. But we'd better go now. I might change my mind."

  "I don't think you're going to regret this." She rose, and he helped her into her coat. "I have a house in the West Fifties. It's empty, but furnished. They clean it every morning. I use it to store things I haven't room for at home. It's a bit heterogeneous but entirely comfortable."

  After that he had the sense to be silent until they arrived at his house. It was in a huge Louix XIV canopied bed, in a chamber filled with baroque armoires and tapestried bergères, with the fading winter sunlight filtered through silk curtains, that Elesina tested the identity of her fantasy doctor with Irving Stein. Like all her other experiments it had its elements of disappointment. But it was not as bad as she had feared it might be in the renewed sobriety of the taxi ride from the art gallery.

  7

  Irving Stein sat in his office, thirty floors above Broad Street, turning the illuminated pages of a fourteenth-century book of hours, made for a king's brother. No matter what his perturbation of mind, he could usually find consolation in the primitive figures of saints in golden orbs, equally at peace whether feeding birds on tiny emerald lawns under fairy-castle towers or lying prone on flaming braziers. "Everything can be made to fit," he would say, "if only one sees the whole."

  His office was appropriate to the contemplation of a book of hours. It was a Burgundian library, with gray panels interspersed in checkerboard design with painted boards, representing crude but charming landscapes, a green blob for a bush, a silver cord for a stream, a gray stone for a castle. The ceiling was arched into a cupola with a fresco of the Last Judgment; the walls contained cupboards with dark grilled doors to protect the gold gleaming folios. But Irving rose now, restless, unable to read, and walked to the window.

  The week that had followed his afternoon with Elesina in the empty brownstone had been one of a strange sustained exhilaration. At the office, at his club, at home, his mood had been vague, detached, inattentive. He was like a mystic who had penetrated to a finer realm of truth; for those less privileged he had only a remote pity which merged with a faint impatience when they forced themselves between him and his vision.

  It had always been his habit of mind to fit each new event into an aesthetic pattern. He liked to match the successful underwriting of an issue of municipal sewer bonds to the discovery, after months of seeking, of the twin of a Cellini dolphin, completing a gold centerpiece. He liked to think of Cicero when he addressed a stockholders' meeting, and he had even gone so far as to try to identify the furtive handpressings and clutchings of his later years with a lifelong pursuit of beauty. Everything could be made to fit if only one saw the whole.

  In his youth he had agonized his Orthodox parents by what had seemed to them his casual abandonment of their faith. They had even taken his interest in collecting reliquaries as a threat that he might become a Catholic convert. They had never been able to comprehend that the search for beauty was bound to take him across religious and even moral lines. If Irving had any faith at all, it was that an assemblage of the finest objects, heaped up before the eyes of the supreme critic and offered as the ultimate tribute of man, might induce that deity to forgive, or at least to overlook, the crimes that lay behind art: the Inquisition behind the Gothic cathedral, the gladiatorial combat behind the Roman temple, the slave ship behind the porticoed Southern mansion. Certainly, in his cultivation of rich Episcopalian bankers, the type of American most distrusted by his parents, Irving had been more apt to see the art-loving trustee of the Metropolitan Museum than the anti-Semitic trustee of the Metropolitan. Club. But then he had always found it hard to see evil in any soul that shared his passion.

  As a young man he had been dedicated to literature and had purchased the great Shakespeare quartos for his library, but as he had grown older his tastes had become more sensual. It was not that he abandoned poetry and philosophy and other pleasures of the mind, but rather that he came more to value the aesthetic experience that involved the senses: the ear, the eye, even the touch. It seemed to Irving that the act of love must be the closest that a human could come to the comprehension of perfect beauty, and he would play over and over his discs of the second act of Tristan, sensing in its rhythms the finest interpretation in any art of the movement of lovers in sexual intercourse. He had even gone so far as to play the scene while he and Clara were in bed, hoping to give her some faint conception of the joys locked in her fine body, but the experiment had been a shaming failure.

  Everyone, he had always been aware, both in the Stein and Clarkson worlds, had taken for granted that he had married Clara for social advantage, and in a sense this was true, though it seemed less crude to a bridegroom who filtered it through the tints of a hyperactive imagination. For Irving had seen in Clara a sort of Roman princess, tall, beautiful, proud, chaste, a Julia or Honoria, garbed in white, last daughter of a dying race, a final chapter of a mighty history, and in himself an Attila, splendid in energy, savage in sensuality, yet redeemed in the eyes of the captive princess by his vision of the glory of Rome. Their union might have been the saving of two worlds! He had had splendid plans for a Clara-Honoria who would condescend to him, attracted, for all her high birth, by his vitality, by his very lowness, and had seen already in his mind's eye the palace of beauty that he would construct for her when love had softened her features and transformed her into the Venus of his ideals. But this fantasy, although vivid enough to keep his sexual urge for Clara alive for years after their marriage, was never shared, and after David's birth they slept in separate bedrooms.

  The long succession of mistresses in his middle and later years had usually been drawn from among the houseguests at Broadlawns, pretty young wives of impecunious artists or musicians who needed financial help for their husbands and lovers or pin money for themselves from the rich patron. The commercial aspect of such affairs, combined with the icy contempt of Clara, who always seemed to discover them, had kept Irving in a state of perennial apprehension, and when, at the age of sixty, he failed to function with a young opera ballerina whose reputation for sexual agility may have unduly alarmed him, he decided that he was old and impotent and should confine himself in the future to sugared compliments and hand stroking. It thus happened that he had been continent for six years when Ivy brought Elesina to Broadlawns. But the first time that his knee touched hers under the dining room table he knew that he had greatly exaggerated his incapacity.

  He had been perfectly honest when he had told Elesina that any change in their relationship would have to be proposed by her, and equally honest in assuring her that he did not anticipate any. He had allowed himself to dream that it might come, but he had also resolved to content himself with her conversation and career. When, therefore, she had gone with him to the brownstone and given him some indication that she might have received pleasure there, he had felt that the great gold curtain
s of his imagined opera house had opened at last on his own second act. In that unbelievable afternoon he had almost lost consciousness in bliss.

  But the very next day had brought a shock. When he had telephoned Elesina, Ivy's voice had answered with the barking news that she had left on a Caribbean cruise with her mother.

  "One of Mrs. Dart's rich friends had a cabin that she suddenly couldn't use because of illness. It was the chance of a lifetime. But Lord, how we had to rush the packing! They'll be gone a month."

  "A month! How did Elesina seem?"

  "Why do you ask that? Didn't you see her yesterday?"

  "I just wondered."

  "Actually, she seemed upset about something. What were you and she up to, Irving?"

  "What kind of upset? Not unhappy, I hope?"

  "No. Not exactly. It was as if something had happened that had, well ... bewildered her."

  "Such as?"

  "Such as being molested by an old satyr!"

  Irving felt as if his heart had stopped. "And she hated it?"

  "I didn't say that."

  Whereupon Ivy had cackled in her ugly way and hung up. But beyond the strident sound of that laugh Irving had seemed to hear the chorus of angels. She hadn't hated it! He could face now even the prospect that Ivy Trask would be part of his future life. For maybe she would be useful. The future was going to take a lot of planning. One thing he promised himself was that Elesina was not going to be like the others. Elesina was going to have everything!

  That had been a week ago, and since then he had not heard from Ivy. Nor had he dared to telephone her, for fear that the wicked little woman would say something, in sheer malice, to disillusion him. Standing now by the window of his office he looked out over the misty harbor and made great plans for the apartment that he would furnish for Elesina. Her boudoir would be hung with Bouchers and Fragonards; her drawing room with examples of the Pont-Aven school which he had purchased only last year and which were still in storage, and her dining room...

  The telephone rang. "A Miss Trask" was waiting to see him. A minute later Ivy was seated, somehow insinuatingly, in the chair opposite him, her elbows on the black, baroque table that served for a desk, her green eyes popping.

  "Have you heard from Elesina?" he asked anxiously.

  "No. That's not what I've come about. I've come on my own. I want you to tell me what you plan to do about Elesina. Don't turn away from me like that, Irving."

  "I can't imagine why I should be accountable to you."

  "Because I consider myself responsible. She is my dearest friend. She lives in my apartment. It was I who introduced you to her. Of course, you can call me an old meddler and kick me out of here. That's your right. But I doubt that you will find it improves your relations with Elesina. She is very loyal to her friends."

  "Friends? Aren't you and I friends, Ivy? Older friends by many years than you and Elesina?"

  "Well, I hope we are, Irving. But I was put off by your tone."

  Irving kept silent now until he felt sure of his temper. After all, there was no reason he should not cope with Ivy. All he had to do was change her category. He had classified her among the extras who swelled the chorus of his and Clara's dinners, like the guests in Tannhäuser, or Lucia, who arrive in a unit and leave in a unit and exclaim with uplifted arms over the heroine's madness or the hero's presumption. But now she was singing her own aria; she was part of the plot.

  "You ask me what I plan to do about Elesina. Let me assure you that she shall have everything her heart desires."

  "Everything? Are you talking about money, Irving?"

  "I am talking about whatever she wants."

  "Do you mean that you intend to treat Elesina as a kept woman? It will do you no good to look disgusted, Irving. I am determined to dot my i's."

  Was there no way to burn this witch? The pain around Irving's heart became acute. "What reason is there for you to use such vulgar terms? I am a married man, Ivy. I offer Elesina everything that it is in my power to offer her."

  "Except what she wants."

  "And what is that?"

  "What does any woman want but the chance to marry the man she loves?"

  "Loves?" The library seemed to spin under its cupola.

  "You heard me. Elesina loves you, you old fool!"

  "Did she tell you that?"

  "No. I don't know if she even knows it herself. But I know how upset she was when she came home after that afternoon with you. And it was hardly like her to rush off on that cruise with her mother. Who, by the way, is totally unsympathetic to you."

  "Why did she go then?"

  "Because she doesn't know where she's at. She's never had an experience like this before. She doesn't understand that a woman can be in love over such a gap in years. And then she doesn't want to be a homebreaker. She doesn't want people to say she's after your money. Can't you see it, Irving? On one side there is this mysterious new feeling, this unexplored country into which you have led her, and outside, in the big world, are sneers and giggles and low interpretations of her motives..."

  It was as if all the little panels of the Burgundian landscape had turned into open windows on a cool, early spring day. Irving felt a moistness in his eyes and a soothing fullness about his heart. The shrieking old gypsy, the malevolent Azucena, was now a melodious Brangaene, chanting from the watchtower. He saw Elesina suddenly, not in a West Side brownstone, but as mistress of Broadlawns, standing in the swimming pool by the yellow Spanish patio, splendidly naked, the surface of the water playing about her alabaster thighs, her hands stroking her low hanging breasts, her eyes mistily seeking his, where he stood, clad in a red velvet robe, smiling benignly, possessively, adoringly...

  "But there's Clara, Ivy!" he cried in a choked voice.

  "Do you think I'm forgetting her? Clara has had you for thirty years. Isn't that enough for any woman? You men are so vain. You think Clara will be lost without you. Give her a trust fund. She's never cared about anything but herself. Be frank with me, Irving. When did you and Clara last sleep together?"

  He turned away again, in horror. "We needn't go into that," he muttered. "Surely you will admit that divorce at my time of life, after so many years of marriage, with grown children, is something of an undertaking?"

  "And so is Elesina an undertaking!" Ivy exclaimed indignantly. "Do you know what you are gambling with? Her very life. Oh, she has suffered, that poor girl. With an indifferent mother, with two beastly husbands, with a child torn from her arms, with the distractions of gin and whiskey ... I tell you, Irving Stein, if you let this girl down, now that she believes in you, now that she thinks she's found something at last to cling to, you'll be responsible for anything that happens."

  "And what may happen?"

  "Who knows? She might go out the window. She's threatened to."

  "Oh, Ivy, no!"

  "Oh, Ivy, yes! That girl can stand so much and no more. And why do I have to talk as if I were begging a favor? Do you know what a pearl you've got hold of? Do you know what she could do for you? She could make you happy, Irving. Happy as you've never dreamed of in your play-acting life with Clara."

  "You think she really wants to marry me?"

  "I tell you, she doesn't know what she wants. She doesn't want to bust up a home. But I do! Because I know it's a sham home, a sham marriage. If you leave Clara now, if you take the blame on yourself, if you persuade Elesina that it's a fait accompli, irreversible, and that you've done it all for her, she'll probably fall on her knees and bless God for you!"

  "It's not you who'll have to face Clara," he murmured.

  "Do you want me to? I will."

  "Oh, no. No." He shuddered. "But I have to talk to Elesina. Where is she?"

  "I don't know."

  "Will she call you?"

  "Possibly."

  "Then will you tell her..."

  "That you'll do as I say? I won't tell her anything else."

  "Oh, Ivy, you're impossible," he groaned.


  "It's up to you, Irving. Whether you and Elesina are to be happy, or whether you and Elesina are to be miserable. You know that old hymn that Clara's always playing: 'Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide.' Well, this is yours. Every day that Elesina spends with her mother will take her further away from you."

  "Why?"

  "Because Mrs. Dart would rather have her daughter called your mistress than Mrs. Stein!"

  The appalling creature let out an impudent cackle. Irving rose, trying to shake off some of his fury in motion, and turned his back to her.

  "Go now, Ivy. I've had all I can take."

  Alone, he telephoned his secretary to order his car. Leaning back on the cushions of the Isotta's rear compartment as they sped uptown, he felt himself return to reality. He saw the Hudson River and not a Burgundian landscape. How was it possible that he could have contemplated even for a moment the dissolution of a union as venerable as his and Clara's? Were not the Steins an integral part of the culture of the city? Were they not old, respected, important? Important, he explained to himself, as being part of reality, to the extent that an Irving without a Clara and a Clara without an Irving would somehow be a fantasy, even if that fantasy had its titillating, throat-filling aspect? And Lionel and Peter and David, what would they say to such an impossibility?

  He had planned to spend the afternoon in the music room in <58th Street playing the harpsichord, but as soon as he let himself into the dark front hall through the grilled glass door he heard the sound of that instrument. Stepping to the door of the long narrow chamber, all yellow curtains and smoked glass and ballroom chairs, which he had built into the old yard in back, he saw Clara playing one of her hymns. As he stood there, listening to the plaintive tinkle of the old evangelist strain, so evocative of the desperate emotional faith of rustic American communities, he had a surge of sympathy for that upright figure. Clara's air of pale integrity seemed to stand for some primitive American concept of honor against the luxury of a wicked old Europe. She might have been Elizabeth, struggling with Venus for Tannhäuser. But after a few moments the impression passed.