Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston 1977
Copyright © 1977 by Louis Auchincloss
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Auchincloss, Louis.
The dark lady.
I. Title.
PZ3.A898Dar [PS3501.U25] 813'.5'4 77-3666
ISBN 0-395-25402-7
Printed in the United States of America
V
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR MY SISTER, PRISCILLA
ContentsHere is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.T. S. Eliot,
THE WASTE LAND
PART ONE
IVY
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PART TWO
DAVID
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PART THREE
ELESINA
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I
VY
T
RASK
could never make up her mind which of the Irving Steins' dwellings she preferred: the rather huddled but comfortable Beaux-Arts town house on East 68th Street or the great gray two-story Parisian
hôtel,
a rectangle enclosing a glass-covered courtyard, which they had erected and surrounded by flat, rich green lawns for their summers and weekends in Rye. The delight of dinner parties in the city in the Venetian dining room with its corner cupboards full of Meissen and Spode and a fire in the grate on stormy winter nights, the coziness about the round table that almost filled the chamber and the pleasing relation of the iced champagne in Ivy's cut crystal glass to the freezing temperature safely outside were all the least bit tainted by the knowledge that she would have to return before midnight through snowy streets to her lonely rooms at the Althorpe. In the country at Broadlawns, on the other hand, she could rest assured that when Clara Stein should rise from the pheasant-tailed wicker chair that she always occupied in the conservatory, Ivy would have only to go to her bedroom, from the window of which she would be able to gaze out, as long as she wished, over the moonlit woods beyond the wide lawn and listen to the soporific din of crickets. The two places, in any event, with all their large assets and small liabilities, had comprised, before the advent of Elesina Dart, the major part of Ivy's emotional life.
She was, at fifty-five, and might be, with any luck, for another fifteen years, the fashion editor of
Tone,
a monthly magazine of limited but regular circulation in New York and its suburbs. It had struggled to preserve the ideal of a woman's role as a pioneer in art and elegance through the worst of the Depression and now, in 1937, seemed moderately sure of survival. Ivy epitomized in her own appearance the incongruity between the ideal of her periodical and its average reader. She was short, even dumpy; her features were sharp, her lips thin, her abundant, red dyed hair difficult to wave. But her clothes, if subdued, were of high fashion and of deep colors, and her eyes were very fine, with large, pale green irises, capable, she liked to believe, of an arresting intensity. God had given her her eyes, as
Tone
had given her her clothes, and she had little better use for either than to bring them to the Steins.
Ivy had been an inner member of their circle, or salon, for a decade. Judge Stein, a lawyer and one-time surrogate, now an investment banker and collector of art, had married into the Clarkson family, one of the proudest of old Manhattan, but he had long since discovered, despite a fervent zeal for upper-class Gentiles sadly at odds with the grandeur of his imagination, and despite his eschewal of Jewish faith, that the doors of his wife's world were opened for him only grudgingly and on occasion. As he had with his marriage burned many of his own bridges, he had been constrained to put together a special society, but as an indefatigable and openhanded host, with beautiful things to show and great music to play, he had had no difficulty assembling about him a heterogeneous group of relativesâpoor Clarksons and richer Steinsâof people from his banking firm, of artists and musicians, some poor and hungry, some merely hungry, of decorators and art dealers, of old friends of Clara's who scorned the prejudices of their group and of others who through their own marriages or unacceptable conduct had run afoul of these prejudices themselves. Clara, pale, remote, serene, accepted each new recruit at her husband's suggestion; she viewed her fellow humans with an eye that seemed to relegate judgment to a higher sphere for which she was not responsible. Her husband, large and hearty, with a wide scholarly brow and thick gray wavy hair, responded to flattery with kindness and to beggary with generosity, so that their salon contained, in addition to some famous artists and composers, an occasional character who would have been chased from the door of a more conservative home.
Ivy had first come to the Steins professionally, when the Judge, who managed everything in his houses and who even chose his wife's dresses, had decided that his theory of how to present Clara would not survive her middle years. His idea had been to show her off as the centerpiece of his collection, the beautiful woman to whom the beautiful porcelains, the ivories and jades, the medieval tapestries and stained glass paid silent tribute, and to this end he had arrayed the noble, if rather ample, figure of his chestnut-haired wife in exotic robes, vaguely historical. It was Ivy's genius to see that Clara's importance to the collections that surrounded her could be enhanced by making her as different as possible from them. She had emphasized the priestess, the vestal virgin, and had put Clara in togas of gray or white or light blue, worn with large stones in old-fashioned settings. The result had pleased both Steins, and Ivy's position at Broadlawns had for a long while seemed secure.
On a Saturday night in the fall of 1937, as the Stein houseguests at Rye assembled in the courtyard where cocktails were served to await the arrival of those who came by automobile, Ivy was feeling less than her usual anticipatory pleasure. The evening did not promise to be one of the best. To begin with, the guests of honor, the young Albert Schurmans, were not true members of the Stein circle. They belonged to the interrelated world of rich German Jewish banking families who continued for business and family reasons to visit Irving, but who frowned upon his social ambitions. Albert Schurman was the son of an ambassador and the nephew of a senator; his wife gave herself airs. There was apt to be a row. But what made Ivy really uneasy was Elesina Dart. Elesina, her wonderful new young friend, was a stranger to Broadlawns and had only been asked at Ivy's suggestion.
"Do they always sit out here?" Elesina asked with a little shiver. "Don't they find it cold?"
"It isn't really. It's just that you think it must be. The plants wouldn't live if it were."
Elesina looked up doubtfully at the huge pale skylight and then at the beds of begonias and the pink marble benches. She beckoned abruptly to a waitress with a tray of cocktails.
"Oh, Elesina, do be careful."
"Ivy, you're absurd. Can't you see any difference between a girl who likes an occasional binge and a confirmed alcoholic?"
"Elesina, you promised me!"
"That I'd be careful. And I will. I'll limit myself to two." Elesina took a glass from the tray. "I can't be expected to face this crowd without a lift. Who are all these people, anyway? That old Shakespeare scholar who made a pass at me in the corridor upstairs, and the big, steamy lesbian poetess who ogled me all during lunch."
"They can't help being attracted to you, darling." Ivy took in with renewed admiration her young friend's dark beauty. Elesina was still too thin, even a bit haggard, despite Ivy's determined health program on her behalf, but her large agate eyes, full of a reserve that seemed half humorously, half irritably to expect the worst of a bullying world, her jet black bobbed hair with the long lock that kept falling across her ivory forehead and which she kept impatiently brushing back, her luminous skin and long loose limbs, her rather aggressive cross between carelessness and stubbornness seemed to suggest the nineteen twenties surviving into the thirties to say, "I told you so."
"Even our host has been paying me marked attention. You'd think I was in a
maison de passe.
What does Mrs. Stein feel about it? Isn't she jealous?"
Ivy looked across the little fountain pool to where Clara stood, in gray, fingering a long pearl strand. Nothing in their hostess' isolation seemed in the least either shy or inviting. She might have been alone in her garden. Now her sons, Peter and Lionel, large, dark, hirsute, rather lumbering versions of their father, crossed the patio with their wives to greet her. The way Clara put her hand on the shoulder of each as he kissed her seemed designed to keep the bestial at bay.
"Nobody really knows if Clara is jealous," Ivy speculated. "But Irving's too clever to take her for granted. There's something sinister under Clara's passivity."
"You mean he's afraid of her?"
"I think we're all a bit afraid of her. Clara is capable of ruthlessness. You should see her put her husband in his place. Once, last winter, when he was boasting that he had declined a bid to join the Tuesday Evening Club because. they wouldn't play Wagner's music in the war, Clara remarked for all to hear: 'That's funny. I don't remember our being bid. I thought we were too Jewish for them.'"
"How she must hate him!"
"Oh, not at all. I think she loves himâas much as she loves anyone. She simply likes occasionally to set the record straight."
"Watch it. Here he comes."
Judge Stein was indeed on his way over to them, or at least to Elesina. He managed, with his shaggy gray hair and his prominent, faintly mocking gray eyes, his pince-nez with its dangling red ribbon and his portly, thrusting build, to suggest some great composer, some bust of a romantic, burly Beethoven in a winter park.
"I thought you might like to see my new Francesco Bibiena, Miss Dart. A baroque palace design. Really a gem. I've just hung it in the library. You will be the first to see it in Broadlawns."
Elesina went off on her host's arm, glancing back at her friend with the suggestion of a shrug. Ivy was amused. Watching them retreat across the patio, she proceeded mentally to mate them. That Irving in his still vigorous sixties should find a beautiful woman in her thirties desirable needed little aid to fantasy. But Elesina? Perhaps she was one of those women who were attracted to older men, men who represented things opposite to themselves, sterner things, paternal things. Might there not be a thrill to exposing herself as weak and vulnerable to something hard and crushing? Ivy knew that the Judge had a weakness for prurient academic paintings, quite inconsistent with his finer eye for Italian drawing. She remembered the little Gerome in his library bathroom of the naked slave girl, her proud head averted in shame, exposed in a marketplace to a group of elderly Roman businessmen who were studying her contours with eyes which expressed a greater cupidity than lasciviousness. The girl could be Elesina. Why not?
"Ivy!"
She realized with a start that it must have been the second time that her name had been called.
"Yes, Clara?"
"You seem lost in thought. Come and sit with me. The Schurmans have just telephoned that they will be late."
Ivy went around the fountain pool to sit on the bench by Clara Stein's chair. Clara's plentiful chestnut hair rose from her head in a kind of fuzz that seemed inappropriate to the sedateness of her chalky oval face and blue gray eyes.
"Miss Dart is charming," Clara said, judicially.
"Oh, I'm so glad you find her so."
"Certainly the men do. Irving is quite infatuated. I hope she will not find us too dowdy."
"Clara! How could she?"
"Oh, very easily. To begin with, she is young. Her place is with the young. Of course, David is coming tonight, and the Schurmans, and that will help, but so far the weekend can hardly have been gay for her. Why did you bring her, Ivy?"
Ivy did not underestimate the criticism latent in her hostess' mild tone. "Why? Is that so surprising? That I should want to introduce her to the most brilliant salon in New York?"
Clara's eyes widened slightly as she weighed the extravagance of this avowal. "You're very fond of Miss Dart."
"Don't we care most about the people we can help?"
"And how do you help her by introducing her to Broadlawns?"
"Elesina has had great sadnesses. I'm trying to revive her appetite for life. For people."
Clara shook her head. "There you go, Ivy, with your eternal emphasis on people. Where do people get you to?"
Ivy began to feel aggrieved. "Of course, nothing seems much to one who has all that you have, Clara. You can be sufficient to yourself. But what have I got? People have been my life."
"People are a cul-de-sac. We all basically have to live in ourselves."
"I seem to remember a commandment about loving thy neighbor."