The Dark Lady

by Louis Auchincloss

  We have talked and talked. We have beaten our breasts and shouted about our own crimes. We have said this and that about the wrongs meted out to Germany. But nothing will do in the end but to take a gun and kill the people who, guiltily or innocently, are supporting this wickedness. It is even a relief to know that the Nazis may have to kill David Stein to get to England. My generation may not have found things worth living for, but it has certainly found things worth dying for. And maybe that is just as good. Maybe it's even the same thing.

  As it looks now, there may be a Nazi victory. But it won't last. It can't last. For eventually people will not stand for it. Or if they do, they're not worth saving. I guess it's necessary for this scourge to come into the world every so often so that we may know that men can still be men. Unless we reach the point where the bombs become so big that we dare not fight anymore, even Hitler, and that is a world I do not care to think about. I am still glad that I have lived when I have lived. Eliot calls me a romantic. But then so is he. We are a romantic generation.

  I still think of Elesina. I have never written to her, though she has written, regularly, once a month, to me. I have destroyed her letters unread. I hear from Mother that she is an isolationist and that people are speaking of her running for public office. She is quite the great lady now.

  Suppose I had taken her aside after dinner on that first evening when Ivy brought her to Broadlawns and said: "You're the most beautiful and wonderful creature I have ever beheld! Will you marry me?" And suppose she had accepted? What would our life have been?

  Perhaps a happy one. Elesina is very agreeable when she gets her own way. That is what Ivy has had the genius to see. Give that little girl one half the world, and she'll get the other on her own. Look out, Hitler!

  I think that war has heightened the colors for me. I have always yearned for colors, and I imagine that in our century they have faded. Again, that must be the romantic in me. I have always deplored Dad's fondness for Gentiles. I thought he ought to stand out, magnificent in his Semitism, a prince of Judah! And perhaps I looked too eagerly for anti-Jewish feeling in New York. It could be exciting to be the victim of prejudice. A world where everybody was nice to everybody, where every club was open to everybody, seemed to me flabby and dull. Wasn't the love of Romeo and Juliet intensified by the feud between their families? Didn't the risks of my affair with Elesina make it more ecstatic? Maybe I was looking for a world of thrills, which war could satisfy better than peace.

  If that were so, I have indeed lived at the right time, and I need not now deplore an otherwise lamentable finale. If I am wounded, if I suffer, if I die miserably, at least I shall be sharing some of the wretchedness of those whom Hitler has penned in his concentration camps. I am tired of my immunity from their sufferings.

  What shall I miss? The invasion of England is too ghastly to contemplate. The most jaded appetite for thrills could hardly enjoy a Nazi occupation of London, or even the passionate last-ditch fight that will undoubtedly be put up. And then what? A compromise between two hemispheres: America leading one, Germany the other? Elesina will marry again, and we can be sure that this time it will not be a Jew. I seem to see her as ambassadress to Berlin, being charming to everybody. With victory there would be a relaxation of persecutions. It might even become fashionable in younger circles of the Berlin elite to whisper that Hitler had gone a bit too far, that now perhaps a few talented Jews could be helpful in the administration of so vast an empire. And the lovely American ambassadress, becoming confidential at dinner with the German Vice-Fuehrer of France-Belgium, might say:

  "I had an affair with a Jew once. He was very dear, very sympathetic. Can you believe that?"

  "Of course, dear madame. Who wouldn't be sympathetic with you?"

  "He died fighting you at Dunkirk." Oh, how I see the benign sorrow of her glance! The dazzling thing about Elesina is that she is always perfectly sincere. "He believed that life would not have been worth living if you won."

  "So many good men felt that way. It is sad, the deaths which history seems to require. He was English, your friend?"

  "No, American."

  "Ah, yes. It took your countrymen so long to learn who their true friends were. Well, half the martyrs of the world died for wrong causes."

  That is enough. I turn my eyes from that future. Death has no sting for those who envision it. But let me suppose, on the contrary, that Britain survives, that Britain even wins, that with American help—will it ever come?—the Nazi beast is beaten back in his lair, exterminated. Will it then be the new world that Eliot loves to contemplate, where a benevolent communism, throwing off the bloody gloves of Stalin, leads the whole world to peace and plenty?

  And Elesina?

  "No, my dear commissar," I hear her saying at dinner, "I never had any faith in the greedy structure of the old world. It is true that I fought for my husband's fortune. Why not? I sought to preserve this great collection for the people, and here it is today, in the Peoples Art Institute at Rye. What do you ask? The Steins today? Well, I understand that Lionel and Peter are very useful on a dairy farm. Yes, there was another son. David. Oh, he was much the best of the lot." Again the faraway look. "I think he would have been much heard from, had he survived the war. Oh, yes, I had a very special knowledge of him!"

  I guess the present is good enough for me. I have few regrets. Mother will play one of her hymns if the worst happens. She will look very fine, very noble. The profile view will be the best.

  PART THREE

  ELESINA

  1

  GILES BENNETT began to live when he first came to New York in 1950. He used to tell people that it was as if he had died and gone to heaven. It was not, to be sure, that life was all hosannas and golden bells. Jobs were temporary and part-time: in his first year Giles worked as a waiter, a necktie salesman, a back elevator operator and a dog-walker. But he was young and high-spirited, and his looks were widely admired. Though small, he was neatly made. His reddish blond hair fell over his round pate in flat ringlets. His high, broad forehead and faintly olive complexion gave him the appearance of a bronze figurine of a boyish Roman emperor. But there was nothing imperious in his gentle hazel eyes, nor did his temper seem to correspond to the red tints of his hair. Giles was an affectionate creature who simply wanted to live and let live. He was always bewildered by the fuss that was made whenever he changed roommates.

  He had grown up in Waverly Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh, the son of a prosperous dentist, who was also a political rightist and active Legionnaire, and of a shy, self-effacing pretty little woman who drank. An older brother, with a great local reputation as an athlete, had disappointed the family by becoming a policeman. Giles, a dreamy and romantic boy, had never had the least congeniality with his noisy father or violent brother, and his mother's furtive sympathy had offered small support against their early campaign to keep him from being a "sissy." How had they known? As if he had divined their suspicion and taken it for a high truth, Giles turned at fourteen to the boys, and by junior year at the University of Pennsylvania he was a confirmed and contented homosexual. When his father learned of this, there was a frightful scene, and Giles was ordered to drop his friends and see a psychiatrist as the price of any further support. Giles, with a fire that surprised them all, refused out of hand and decamped for New York with his father's curse and his mother's nest egg. The latter, slipped to him surreptitiously, was barely enough to keep him a year.

  But as it turned out, he was never uncomfortably hard up. The large male world in which he soon found himself was friendly and hospitable. He lived for three months in the apartment of a middle-aged decorator and for another six in that of two Chinese youths who ran a gift shop. He went to many parties and theaters, and had several romances, but nothing really serious occurred until his meeting with Eliot Clarkson at a cocktail party.

  Giles was blithely ignorant of politics and current events, and he had had no idea who Eliot was. His host, the decorator with whom he ha
d briefly lived, explained that the lean, angular, balding, disputatious-looking man who was talking so emphatically to an intently listening group by the window was a famous professor at Manhattan Law School, known for his brilliant and radical books.

  "A communist?" Giles inquired. Communists bored him.

  "Perhaps. The issue was certainly raised by the trustees at Manhattan. They only gave in when the students organized a mass protest." Giles's host had long forgiven Giles's desertion of him. He was a practical man, large, dark-complexioned, faintly piratical in appearance. "Come on over. He wants to meet you."

  "Meet me? What on earth does he know about me?"

  "What I've told him." The decorator laughed coarsely. "I wonder what that would be?"

  "He's like us, then?"

  "Of course, he's like us, stupid. Why the hell else would he be here? But he's the kind who's ashamed of it. Don't expect him to introduce you to his Knickerbocker folks."

  "They don't know?"

  "Oh, they must. Eliot would never conceal anything. He's too proud. I only meant that he won't mix his worlds. And when I say he's ashamed of being like us, it's not for snobbish reasons. He's ashamed, deep down. Under all that atheism lurks a Calvinist heart. He thinks it's sin!"

  Giles found this rather intriguing; he looked at the professor now with more interest. "But what will I talk to him about? I don't know anything about law or politics."

  "Talk to him about his book."

  "What book?"

  "The War Letters of David Stein. It's having quite a vogue these days." He moved Giles toward the group.

  "But I haven't read it!"

  "What difference does that make, silly? Tell him you found it divine."

  "Give me a clue then. What's it about?"

  "The mysterious lady who betrayed David Stein."

  "And who was David Stein?"

  But already Giles was being introduced. Clarkson looked at him hard for a moment and then glanced down at his glass.

  "I guess I need a refill. How about you, Bennett?" And placing a hand on Giles's shoulder he maneuvered him toward the bar. Giles was rather shocked by his abruptness.

  "Oh, I mustn't take you away from your friends."

  "I didn't come here to talk about why we dropped the A-bomb," Clarkson said impatiently. "I came here to relax. Phil tells me you're the only person he's ever known who's really learned the art of living from day to day."

  "How else can one live?"

  "As many other ways as there are people in this room!"

  With refilled drinks they moved to a window seat that overlooked the garden at Turtle Bay. It was a warm, pleasant spring night. But Clarkson seemed moody. He stared out the window in silence. Giles decided that he had to say something.

  "I hear you've written the most divine book. Everybody's reading it."

  "I didn't write it. I edited it."

  "Oh, you mean David Stein was a real person?"

  "Why do you talk about books you haven't read? Does The War Letters of David Stein sound like the title of a novel?"

  "Yes! But then I guess everything sounds to me like the title of a novel."

  "I don't write novels. Or read them. There are too many grim facts in this world for me to bother with fantasies."

  "Really? I'm just the opposite. I hate facts."

  Clarkson at this seemed to relax. He almost smiled. "You and Justice Holmes."

  "He hated them, too?"

  "Brandeis used to give him statistical reports on labor to improve his mind in the summer recess. But Holmes would have none of it. He reached for his Plato instead. And he was right, too! But why do I tell you this? You probably never heard of Brandeis."

  "I may not be one of your brilliant law students, Professor Clarkson, but I'm not a complete ignoramus. Brandeis is a college in Boston."

  Clarkson laughed good-naturedly and took a gulp of his drink. "Tell me about yourself, young man. What do you do besides go to parties like this?"

  "I go to the theater. And to art galleries. And I love ballet."

  "But what do you do?"

  "I guess I don't really do anything much."

  Giles hated to talk about himself, and besides there was not much to tell. He liked to discover private things about the other person. He returned now to the subject of books, having heard that no author could resist this topic for long. Soon enough, indeed, Clarkson was talking about the little volume of war letters which had been so unexpected a best seller.

  "Nobody was more surprised than myself," he confessed. "I thought people were sick of war books."

  "And so they are. But yours isn't just a war book, is it? Wasn't your David Stein in love with a mysterious lady who treated him cruelly?"

  "Mysterious only in the sense that the reader doesn't know who she is. Clarissa is an obvious alias."

  "Has nobody guessed her identity?"

  "Not so far as I've heard."

  "But you know?"

  "Of course, I know, dummy." But there was a note of friendliness in the gruff voice. "How could I not know? The letters were written to me."

  "And she's still alive, this Clarissa?"

  "You may assume so. It was only a dozen or thirteen years ago. She wasn't at Dunkirk." Clarkson smiled a bit grimly. "No, you can be sure she wasn't anywhere that bombs were flying."

  "Ah, that gives me a hint."

  Clarkson looked surprised. "As to who she is?'

  "No. As to what she is. I'll bet you one thing. Her name's not Clarissa."

  "But I told you it wasn't!"

  "I mean it's not even a woman's name. What is the male for Clarissa? How about Clarry?"

  For a moment Clarkson looked actually shocked. Then he shook his head emphatically. "No, no. David wasn't that way at all. Even if he was a friend of mine."

  "But you spoke of Clarissa avoiding bombs. Why should that be reprehensible in a woman? I assumed this was a man who had not only treated David badly, but who had shirked the draft."

  Clarkson considered this for a moment. "That, I admit, is reasonably deduced. But it's still wrong. I meant that Elesina—Clarissa, I should say—was the kind of person who is always at the head table, or on the grandstand, or wherever the prizes are being given out. She is immune to the ugliness of life."

  "Elesina. What a curious name. It shouldn't take me long to run her down."

  Clarkson smiled ruefully, recognizing his slip. "Would a dinner at Twenty-One buy your silence?"

  "No. My respect for you will do that. But I should love to dine with you just the same. At Twenty-One or at some place less expensive. I should be honored if you would tell me the story of David Stein."

  Clarkson's friendly expression dissolved again to a mask, but his voice almost shook. "I think I shall like to do that, Giles. I shall like it very much."

  Thus it began. In two weeks' time Giles had moved into Eliot's apartment in the Village. In three, he was working for Sam Gorman on Tone magazine. The job was arranged by Eliot, an old friend of Sam's. It struck Giles as rather odd that a man as austere as Eliot should be on such intimate terms with a merry, gossip-loving old queen like Sam, but he found that the relationship went back to the David Stein days, and everything that originated there was sacred.

  It was never a happy affair. When Giles's initial pride at occupying so much of the attention and affection of this strange, interesting man began to subside, he was surprised to discover that he was actually bored. Eliot's friends, teachers, law students, radical writers, finding Giles ignorant in all subjects which interested them, ignored him. He was made to feel like a pretty creature to be winked at or chucked under the chin and then forgotten. If Eliot's friends had no disapproval of his relations with Eliot, they also had little interest in them. On the other hand, Eliot's old world, his school and college mates and the great host of his relations, was firmly closed to Giles. If Eliot did not conceal his sexual tastes, neither did he flaunt them. For nothing on earth would he have taken Giles to dine with his o
ld mother, or with his aunts or cousins. There were certain things, he would say, that didn't mix. And he would make matters worse, when he was going out to such haunts, by leaving lists of suggested evening reading. He never quite abandoned the idea that Giles could be educated.

  In the meanwhile, however, Giles was obtaining success at Tone. He had an eye for knickknacks, for tricky gadgets, for catchy designs, for all kinds of new household ideas; he was the perfect assistant to Sam. He went to fashion shows, to department store openings, to commercial previews, and he wrote up his discoveries and recommendations in a spicy style that soon made his column popular. Sam took a great fancy to him and asked him to all his parties. This was the cause of the first major falling-out with Eliot.

  "I've gotten rather fond of Sam through the years," Eliot told Giles, "but I cannot abide his chattering parties of society hags and fashionable faggots. Spare me!"

  "I mean to spare you, Eliot. There's no reason you should go. But the people at Sam's parties are just the ones I want to meet. They're my kind of people. You've got your brain trusts. You must let me have my feather trusts, as I suppose you call them."

  Well, of course, there was nothing Eliot could say to this. It was too manifestly reasonable. And they both knew that what was really behind Eliot's reluctance to let Giles go to Sam's was his fear that he would be seduced. And, of course, Giles did find lovers there. He tried to keep this concealed, but the gossip in his world was fierce. There were scenes, terrible scenes, followed by days of moody silence on Eliot's part. Silence would at last give way to lectures.

  "What you can't see, Giles, is that your whole life on Tone, that whole world, in fact, is going to limit you hopelessly. I know I was responsible for getting you into it, but I thought it was just a temporary job. People like Sam and Ivy Trask only play at life. They decorate it, pulling up a corner here and pushing one down there, patting things. I want to send you back to school. I want you to start thinking."