The Dark Lady

by Louis Auchincloss

  Clara stopped playing and turned around. She did not seem surprised to find him there.

  "I saw Ivy Trask in the street yesterday," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "I did not speak to her. In fact, I rather hurried past. I was afraid that she might ask me to invite her friend, Miss Dart, for a weekend. Apparently, she told Fred Pemberton that it was very odd that we had never asked Miss Dart a second time."

  Irving was dazed by the suddenness of the attack. "And why should we not?" he asked blankly.

  "Because I dislike her. I dislike her intensely."

  "You only met her once."

  "It was quite enough."

  Clara had risen now and was standing before the harpsichord with an air of cool defiance that was certainly premeditated. Of all things that he had not predicted, this would have seemed the least likely—that she should take the offensive.

  "Of course, you are aware that Miss Dart is not only my protégée. She is a friend."

  "A friend." Clara weighed the word. "Of course, I know that. Just as I have known of all the others." She paused to let him consider this. "You are wondering what leads me to speak now, when I have so long and tactfully held my tongue. I shall tell you. I am speaking now because this woman is different. Or rather you are different. You're getting old, Irving. You're getting soft and sentimental. You're making too much of this last fancy. You're making a public fool of yourself. It is time for your friends to speak up and bring you back to your senses. And you have no truer friend than I."

  "You see me as an old fool, Clara. That is clear enough. But do you suppose that everyone sees me in that light?"

  "Everyone does not have my insights."

  "Or your prejudices. It is impossible for you to believe that a woman might find something in me that you miss, that she might..."

  "Like Miss Dart, I suppose," Clara broke in contemptuously. "Are you really going to try to persuade me that that woman loves you, Irving? Can't you see that she's nothing but a juicy bait that Ivy Trask has dangled before you? And that you swallowed, hook, line and sinker, like the old carp you are!"

  The shocking crudity of her language, so unusual for Clara, seemed to obliterate the very room with its yellow hangings and smoky mirrors, to dissipate the dim, golden air, so that he and she were somehow standing, in tatters, amid rubble, like two survivors of an air raid in a cartoon. But it was this, was it not, that Clara had always wanted, to pull him down, to tear down his tapestries and pictures and statues, to isolate him from all his attributes, so that, naked, he would have nothing to contemplate but the ostensible superiority of her nakedness? He seemed even to make out, in that cool blue gray stare, the scorn of a Nazi storm trooper. He had a shivering sense of huddled bare bodies summoned to a dawn reveille on a freezing morning in a prison camp that stank of feces.

  "How do you suppose it feels to be married to someone who despises you?" he shouted at her. "Who looks down on you as a dirty Jew?"

  "I only look down on your weaknesses. I have never looked down on you for being a Jew. The accusation is absurd."

  Even in his anger he had to concede this. But might it not still be true that for all her chilly tolerance she yet despised the great Jewish gifts: the imagination, the love of color, the love of life? Could he not pick up the suggestion of a sneer in the tinkle of her arid nineteenth-century hymns? He lost all control.

  "You have been against me from the beginning! All your life you have pretended to be above the attitudes of your family. But you haven't! The Clarksons have always dominated your soul. Except for your father, they all sneered at art and beauty." He had to pause for a moment because of his pounding heart. "And so what do you do about that besotted vulgarian Irving Stein? You spend your life sneering at his excrescences, his showoffs, his parvenu display, with little shrugs, little smiles. The great Clara, whose head is in the clouds and stars! Do you wonder that I want a wife, for the few years that may remain, who has some sympathy with my aspirations?" The last sentence he brought out in a kind of bellow. "Who knows I have the soul of an artist?"

  And now what had happened to her? There was a fissure in the marble wall. It stood, but it had been shaken. Proud, firm, controlled, Clara might have received an arrow under the heart. It was she now who answered reveille on the biting morn, clutching an old wrapper around her trembling frame, terrible in her vulnerability, in her unyieldingness, in her hopelessness.

  "Is this what you want, Irving? To marry her?"

  The pain was wracking. He had to do something, for his pain, for hers. He had to find a club; he had to strike her, crush her skull, end her, end it. "Yes!"

  "And you want me to agree to a divorce?"

  "Isn't it more realistic? You can have this house. You can have anything you want."

  She seemed to tremble for a moment; then she resumed her seat on the stool. "The boys warned me about this," she said with a slight quaver. "I did not credit them. So it has come to this. At last. But I know what I have to do." She was looking away from him now, staring at her music. "I shall not see a lawyer. I shall not consent to anything. If you wish to go to Reno, that is your decision. I shall never go to law with you. Here I am. Here I stay. And I think that is going to be my last word on this impossible subject."

  "Clara, you must listen to me. Let us not cross Rubicons and burn bridges. Let us be rational."

  But for answer she simply resumed the playing of her hymn, and after a few moments of consternation he could only leave the room.

  8

  When Clara was fifteen she had a religious experience before the western portal of Amiens Cathedral. Her father, an amateur student of Gothic art who had even written a private monograph on apsidal chapels, was in the habit of taking his large family with him on French ecclesiastical tours, and Clara at an early age had learned the names of all the saints who appeared in the niches and the symbols of their martyrdom and could even identify those apostles supposed to be grandsons of Saint Anne. But on that sunny afternoon before Amiens, waiting outside in the square while her indefatigable father paid a second visit to the crypt, it occurred to her that she had gone through Europe seeing more of guidebooks than of churches, and, looking up, she took in the cathedral for the first time.

  What she noted was something that she was later to recognize in Monet's studies of Rouen. The towering façade was high, cluttered, complicated, formidable, a looming, terrifying mass, like a mammoth breaker about to crash at sea. But then, even as she caught her breath in near terror, she saw that it was not about to crash. On the contrary, it might stand forever. Why was the edifice so much greater than its individual parts? Why did it speak to her now? Was it possible that the faith of the toiling, believing multitudes who had constructed it, stone by stone, had actually entered into the walls, the soaring tower, the sweeping voussoirs, the pointed arches? Or was it simply that God was there?

  Religion for her now began to have color and vividness. She loved to read about the martyrdom of the saints whose images covered the dark walls and portals of the cathedrals or were emblazoned on glass or tapestry within. It seemed to Clara that it might be a very glorious thing to die in torment, one's eyes fixed on the heavens, confident of salvation and bliss. Was it not possible that with adequate faith there would be no torment? It was said of some of the early martyrs that they seemed to feel no pain, and Saint John and the Virgin were believed to have ascended directly to Paradise without the mortal experience of death. Clara did not feel that it was necessary for her to become a Roman Catholic. The great sky-thrusting cathedrals seemed to transcend the small arbitrary creeds of the little men who had built them. She felt herself a part of a vast spiritual cosmos of which the planet earth was only one tiny natural aspect.

  By eighteen she had succeeded, at least in her own estimate, in reconciling her spirituality with the demands of a Clarkson world. She continued to derive comfort from her elevated thoughts and feelings, but she was able to care for her family and friends and to enjoy her reading and
music. She had grown into a tall, fine-looking woman who dressed with a flair for simplicity. What more did people want? But people were unreasonable. "Clara is remote," they said. "Clara is never quite with us." "What is Clara dreaming about?" Never mind, her parents' bland faces seemed to reply. A man will come along, a fine man, the right man, who will be attracted to Clara's noble looks and character. And then you'll see her change fast enough!

  But Clara thought something else might happen, although she did not know what. A clarion message from the sky? A command to go to the Antipodes and wash the feet of savages? To be boiled in oil? To prepare herself for every eventuality she practiced a rigid humility. She accepted only such invitations as her mother regarded as mandatory. She studied Latin and Greek and church history. She taught literature to a class of aspiring stenographers; she played the piano for Sunday services in a settlement house. People began to say that she would never marry, that she was too devoted to good works, "a saint, you know." Unmarriageable girls of that era were either "horsy" or saints. Clara continued to wait, but she began to consider that the age of miracles might be past. The Clarksons remained complacent about the scheme of things, and New York in 1908 seemed the capital of a prosperous world at peace forever and ever.

  Irving Stein came to the larger Clarkson dinners. He was what Clara's brother called "Daddy's pet Jew." He was a rather splendid man, with flowing black hair and penetrating, unflinching gray eyes, who affected velvet suits and diamond cuff links, a bit of a dandy, with a touch of Disraeli and a fine stentorian voice. If Irving was a "pet Jew," it was only in the eyes of one snotty young Clarkson. He was highly cultivated and immensely well informed: in politics, in finance and in art. And he was rich. When he held forth at the Clarkson board, whether on trustbusting or the glass in Chartres, he spoke with authority and was listened to with respect.

  From the beginning he paid a marked attention to Clara. She had only to mention a current book, and a copy, with a box of roses, was delivered at the door, or a play, and an evening would be arranged with tickets in the first row. And he professed great interest in her charitable activities. He insisted on inspecting her settlement house and auditing her literary class, and his check to the former endowed her there with an embarrassing prestige. But, best of all, he loved to talk about the problems of the world; he impressed her with the gravity of his concern for human misery. At last, when his attentions began to show themselves as romantic, she wondered if this might not be what she had been waiting for: the opportunity to share with another noble soul the task of using imagination and money for the glory of God. The fact that she felt no passion did not have to concern her. She was quite sure that she cared for Irving as much as she would ever care for a man. Besides, he seemed perfectly content with her coolness.

  Her family were neither pleased nor displeased. They evidently thought it was as good as she could do. They declined to have anything to do with Irving's relatives, but they always treated Irving himself as a member of the family. Clara's first hint of how things were going to be was when Irving failed to support her request that his parents be asked for a weekend to the Clarksons in Southampton. He made it very clear that in matters of race and religion he was not going to rock the boat.

  And so it was that the decades of smooth sailing in unrocked boats began. Clara never came wholly to understand the complicated personality of her interesting husband, for the simple reason that she lost her desire to do so at an early date. She knew soon enough that he was not what she had been foolish enough to suppose. Was it his fault that she had been a dreamer? He was a good man, and she owed him her respect and affection. If her failure to respond to his ardor only inflamed him the more, this was something that had to be endured. Time was bound to make her nights more peaceful, and as for her days, they could be devoted to the task of keeping up the appearances of a religion that had suddenly collapsed. For Clara no longer thought of Gothic cathedrals, of Reims or of Amiens. She thought of a ruined abbey by moonlight, beautiful even if its glass and roof and choir and altar were gone and grass filled the stately nave. She began to develop the curious faith that was to dominate her middle years: a faith in the form and appearances which survived the substance.

  This new tranquillity, however, was shattered by Irving's infidelities. Clara was shocked at the vulnerable femininity of her own nature. It seemed unworthy of her to notice such low things, but notice them she did. That her husband should care too much for Clarksons and works of art she could tolerate. She could disdain but overlook his near unctuosity with the older members of her family and his tactile affection for porcelains, ivory and gold. But when it came to a retention and pawing of pretty hands, a silly chuckling over silly female jokes, a walking aside with younger guests to garden limits and beyond, she began to see in the splendid Oriental who had courted her a sentimental Western burgher in fancy dress, like one of those Rembrandt models arrayed in a warlike finery that his countinghouse nose makes ridiculous. And then she would have moments of silent fury.

  Lionel and Peter were always more Irving's sons than hers. They were big noisy boys, friendly enough, without a shred of their father's distinction but with some of his shrewdness, who treated Clara with an affectionate but rather awed respect and never seemed to have much to say to her. They took Irving's side in everything, because he gave them lavish presents and wished to chastise little David, a mother's boy, when David was impudent to his father. But the last time that this occurred was when Clara first learned of it. Irving had announced at a Sunday lunch that he had lost his wristwatch, and David, aged twelve, had shrilly demanded to know if he had looked in the bed of Madame Vibert, a pretty French actress who was staying in the house and whose knee Irving at that very moment was squeezing under the table. Lionel and Peter had jumped on David that afternoon by the swimming pool, but Clara, hearing his yells, had hurried to the rescue. Alone with David she had tried to reason.

  "You must learn, my darling, that even if I love having a champion, it is sometimes better if we look the other way."

  "But, Mother, I saw Dad go into that lady's room!"

  "Your father, my love, is a very fine and good man, but he has a little weakness. You will understand it some day."

  "Never!"

  "I do not mean that you will share it, but that you will understand it. Now if you really want to help me— really —you will not notice what he does in that way."

  "Not notice?"

  "Not show you notice."

  She finally convinced the angry boy, and he gave her his word and kept it, but he was always sarcastic afterward in family discussions which touched on the subject of romance. In time David came to like and, a bit grudgingly, even to admire a father whose affection it was difficult to resist, but he remained Clara's champion at heart. What kept her from becoming too close to this intense, beautiful son was a species of timidity, or austerity, or perhaps even something akin to fear. She had never in her life surrendered herself to another human being, and there was a fire in David that might have singed her. She would kiss him on the forehead or the cheek, but she would never fondle him or hug him. She kept him under a slight restraint—as she might have a too demonstrative dog. Sometimes she wondered if David were not perhaps the adventure that she had been waiting for as a young woman. But if he were, what on earth could she do with him?

  Certainly, it was of David that she most constantly thought in the week after Irving moved out. David was coming down for the weekend from law school, and she would have to tell him then. Should she do it in such a way as to induce him to break altogether with his father? Something fierce and pounding in her head urged her to it. Was it not time, after years of equivocation, to strike, to be free, to take David with her? Had there not been a sick weakness in the passivity with which she had so long accepted a life that had offered little but disillusionment?

  On the afternoon when David was expected Clara had an unexpected caller at 68th Street. Had she ever imagined that Ivy Trask wo
uld have the nerve to present herself, she would have left word in the hall that she be denied. As it was, the maid who answered the door, recognizing in the brisk little caller an old family friend, ushered her at once upstairs.

  "I know you don't want to see me, Clara, but I have terms from Irving that you can't afford not to consider."

  "You don't really believe that I will discuss my affairs with you?"

  "When I'm authorized to offer what I am? Don't be a fool, Clara. Nothing in the world can bring Irving back to you now. Give him what he wants, and he'll give you what you want. Everybody's face is saved. Everybody's rich!"

  "Nothing is lost but honor," Clara quoted grimly.

  "We'll even leave you that! You'll get the divorce on any terms you wish. If it's blood you want, blood you'll have."

  "I think you'd better go."

  "You won't even hear what he'll do for you? And for the boys?"

  "Go!"

  "Very well." Ivy wagged her head from side to side. She had not seated herself, nor had Clara risen. She seemed to be contemplating her hostess with the final misgiving of a disappointed schoolmistress retreating before a recalcitrant pupil. "I guess you're hopeless, Clara. Like most women of your age and class. Hopeless and useless. Has the world ever struck you as anything but faintly ridiculous?"

  "Isn't it?"

  "No, it's hugely ridiculous! If you'd ever thrown back that haughty head of yours and let yourself go in a horse laugh, you might have lived."

  "I think I prefer my death to your laugh."

  But Ivy's words were still written like the smoke letters of an airplane announcing a public event across the pale sky of Clara's calm when, an hour later, she told David of his father's move. In her desperate need for an ally she had almost been looking forward to this, but now her mind seemed full of small jumping figures.