The Dark Lady (15 page)

"Mrs. Stein is welcome to the name and to the money," he observed. "But she can't have all the family, too. I think I'm going to stay in my corner, Ivy."

"Lionel and Peter see her. So do their wives."

"Then she should be satisfied. She can let me off."

"But you're the one she wants! You're the one everyone wants. Oh, Elesina's doing very well, it's true. People are beginning to forget the unpleasantness and come to her parties. And she's a brilliant hostess. You should see her! But she minds that you won't go there. And it hurts your poor father terribly."

"He might have thought of that before he did what he did."

"Oh, David, I can't believe it's my old friend talking. When did you get this stuffy? Wake up! We're in nineteen thirty-eight!"

"I stand behind my mother, Ivy. She has not protested, and she has not sued. She has been as modern as you. But I cannot see that being modern obligates me to take by the hand the woman who has ruined her life."

"Life, fiddlesticks! And I suppose your father had nothing to do with it."

"I hold them both responsible."

"Now let me tell
you
something." Ivy's eyes moved quickly from side to side to make sure that nobody else could hear. "Your father has had an operation."

"I know. Peter told me. The prostate. But that's normal for his age."

"What Peter doesn't know is that it left him entirely impotent."

David looked away in anguish from those popping green eyes. What nightmare had overtaken his world that the paternal genitalia, the source of his being, the creator of
him,
should now be the sport of this dyed-haired witch's cocktail-party gossip?

"You can imagine what that does to a man of your father's vanity, married to a beautiful young bride!" Ivy continued relentlessly. "And you think you and your mother have troubles! What's the use of children if they abandon a parent just when they're needed most? Your father loves you, David, and it's a bloody shame if you don't go to him now."

David looked at her pleadingly. Please, Ivy, he wanted to implore her, go back to the way you were, be again the funny friend who was so good to a little boy! He felt he could not endure the other vision. "And Elesina?" He enunciated the name with difficulty. "Elesina minds? She makes it hard for him?"

"Elesina is an angel from heaven! All she wants from your father is love and affection. All she asks is to take care of him, to treasure him.
He's
the one who cannot reconcile himself to the situation."

"Poor Dad. How it must humiliate him."

"And
now
will you come, David Stein?"

He stared. "Where?"

"To Broadlawns. This weekend. Tomorrow!"

When David left the party with Eliot, he had not promised Ivy that he would come, but he had also not refused. Eliot, listening to his friend's version of the conversation, seemed amused.

"What do you suppose Elesina really does for Ivy in return for all her services?"

"Services?"

"Like getting you to Broadlawns."

"But Ivy was doing that for Dad."

"How much does Ivy worry about your old man? Isn't she Elesina's retriever? No, no, it's Elesina who has her eye on you. And what Elesina wants, Ivy delivers!"

"Eliot, you're absurd."

"Am I? My dear boy, you'll have to admit that so far I've been a shrewd observer. And I note that Erna Cranberry and Ivy Trask seem to have a trait in common: the desire, for one reason or another, to deliver you, a pretty blond bundle, to your beautiful stepmother's bed. Why don't they try me? They'd have much less trouble."

"Because they don't like silly asses. Where shall we dine? Twenty-One?"

Irving had always supposed that he thought less about death than most people, but his immunity was now at an end. The prostate operation, beset with complications and studded with agony, had produced a near fatal heart attack. As he and Elesina had agreed in advance that he was to have no visitors, it had been possible to keep this from the family and business associates, but he had been dismissed from the hospital only with the severest injunctions that he not quit Broadlawns for three months. He passed long, slow, dressing-gowned days in his library and in the patio or, now that the spring weather had come, in a wheelchair in the rose garden. The household was devoted: the nurses efficient, Elesina consoling, tactful, perfect. Yet he read his own demise in the very smoothness of the ministrations that surrounded him.

It seemed to him that everything about him was young. The older servants, except for the butler, Arthur, had gone with Clara, and Broadlawns was full of neophytes. And what was not young, the trees, the works of art, seemed to promise to live forever. Irving likened himself to another dying collector, Cardinal Mazarin, who used to paddle down the corridors of his gorgeous palace, in slippers and bathrobe, past rows of great statues and walls of peerless paintings, murmuring tremulously: "
Le moyen de quitter tout ga?
"

Because he would never again be able to make love to Elesina, she had begun to take on some of the luster of a goddess in a dream. His thoughts about her seemed to defile her by their very helplessness. And when he considered with despondency the decay of his flesh, the approaching decomposition of the man Stein, it appeared to him that his reality was the dream, that the greater truth was in his vision of the new deity at Broadlawns. He seemed to have survived, in some curious fashion, his own extinction and was now witnessing the translation of his old domain to a female fashion. It was as if by the hubris of marrying a young woman he had brought about his own humiliation and at the same time the austere privilege of being audience to it.

All, however, was not young at Broadlawns. Elesina's mother, who had soon reconciled herself to the marriage, had her regular room for weekends. Irving surmised that her other invitations must have been diminished by the death and illness of her contemporaries and that she found Broadlawns, where nothing was expected of her, a pleasant substitute for visits to ailing friends where she was under the increasing burden of being cheerful. He had no objection to her presence, for she was quiet and self-sufficient, entertaining herself with reading and solitary walks. The person whom he really minded was Ivy Trask. Elesina was trying to persuade Ivy to give up her job at
Tone
and become her full-time housekeeper-secretary. As Irving was no longer able to manage the household, his wife insisted that she needed this additional help, and he felt sadly sure that it was only a matter of time before the terrible Trask was mistress of all. Ivy was living in the house, although she still commuted to New York. She hired and fired the servants, and Arthur, the one old retainer who had remained loyal to Irving, had already made his peace with her.

Social life, interrupted by Irving's illness, had now been resumed on a moderate scale, and Elesina had begun to put together little house parties. Nothing was asked of Irving but to have himself wheeled into the dining room for any meal that he chose, even at the very last moment, or to chat occasionally at cocktails in the patio. Nobody said a word if he suddenly beckoned his nurse and asked to be taken to his room or the library. Oh, yes, he had to admit that his confinement was beautifully handled, by Elesina, by Arthur, even by Ivy Trask—blast her!—but the trouble was that it was precisely a confinement, almost a captivity. He yearned for David, but dared not write him.

On a Friday afternoon as he was sitting alone with his
Wall Street Journal
in the Fragonard room, he turned at the sound of Elesina's quick, light step. She was standing by the doorway, and a shaft of sunlight cut across the middle of her face, just failing to illuminate her smile and making it, he suddenly and quixotically thought, faintly sinister. But it wasn't sinister. It was friendly, very friendly. Elesina's equanimity of temper, after six months, never ceased to astonish him. He remembered with a shudder the tart answer to the question he had rashly put to his mother-in-law:

"You ask me if Elesina can possibly be as contented as she looks? Don't you know there are two types of acquisitive women? Those, the great majority, who are still discontented after they get what they want, and those, the one percent, who are satisfied. You've had luck, my dear Irving!"

Elesina sat down by the table and placed a small unframed canvas before him. It was a French seventeenth-century painting, perhaps a design for a ceiling or overdoor. A naked woman was holding up an oval portrait of the young Louis XIV. On either side of her cherubs were heaping up shields, spears, sheafs of wheat, emblems of peace and victory. In the rear of the picture two other cherubs were chasing away a horned figure, a satyr, a symbol of war. The curtain that another cherub was holding back to permit the satyr to escape was of the same deep purple as Elesina's velvet suit. Irving pointed this out.

"Ah, but that isn't the reason I brought it to you," she replied. "No such vain thoughts occupy me now. I wanted you to see how I was progressing. That French dealer who was here last week told me it was a Le Brun. He based his opinion on the fact that the portrait of the King is a copy of a known Le Brun portrait. But if you will compare the lady with nudes by Watteau and Fragonard, you will see that she must be much later."

Irving smiled patiently at her enthusiasm. "Why do you say so, my darling?"

"Because she's sexy! Surely you can see that, Irving? You, of all men! A nymph or goddess in a Louis Quatorze painting would be a man in a woman's skin, an Amazon, a Michelangelo. This gal looks as if she'd been surprised in her bath."

"Then how do you explain the Le Brun?"

"Well, some noble in seventeen thirty or seventeen forty may have wanted a fresco to celebrate the military glory of a grandfather who fought under Louis Quatorze. We think of people in the past as being surrounded by things of their period. But they had pasts, too."

"My dear, I think you're on to something. It's astonishing how you see it. Now, I look at that little picture, it seems clear that it's eighteenth-century!"

Elesina was very pleased. There was no need for him to tell her that her deduction was obvious, and that the French dealer was an ass whom he tolerated only because of his connection with a museum in Marseilles which sometimes disposed of items in its collection. What was important was the speed with which Elesina was mastering a field that was new to her. She worked every day with his curator, Leon Feld, taking up the Stein possessions century by century, room by room. Irving had never forgotten the impression which she had made on him at their first meeting with her knowledge of Shakespeare's sonnets derived from a single role in a trashy play.

"And the nymph, or whatever she may be," Elesina pointed out, "doesn't give a hoot about the emblems heaped up beside her. She'd much rather sport in the shade with that satyr they're kicking out of the house!"

"Poor nymph," Irving sighed. "Perhaps I, too, find myself in the wrong century. I ought to be content with one of those marble Louis Quatorze heroines. We could talk of old wars and past glories. But you, my dear, are like the Fragonard nymph at whose feet the cherubs pile up unwanted treasures."

"Treasures, on the contrary, which I want very much!" Elesina retorted with a peal of laughter. She jumped up to kiss him on the forehead. "And you know you're naughty to talk that way. Haven't we agreed that subject is taboo?"

"You must forgive a bitter old man."

"But I shan't! You've got to get it through your silly old head that you have a happy woman on your hands."

"Ah, but for how long?" Suddenly he caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. "How long, my beautiful girl?"

"Just as long as you keep away from that subject." She withdrew her hand firmly and gave him an admonishing tap on the shoulder. "Just as long as you try to keep it off your mind. I mean it, Irving. You can try."

Was it possible? Did she mean it? He could suppose so, anyway. Did life have to be wretched? Was there any law that decreed misery? Was it not possible, at least conceivable, that she was one of those women—there were such, one knew, nuns, nurses, teachers—who could live in peace with their dormant senses? Irving closed his eyes in a sudden seizure of pain as another thought struck him: that she might have been actually relieved by his operation!

"Elesina, dearest," he exclaimed hurriedly, in a frantic need to obliterate the idea, "let me tell you something. Something I've been thinking about recently. I've never been sure what to do with the collection. My will directs my executors to turn Broadlawns into a museum. But will they do it right? Will they really care? Lionel and Peter know nothing about art, and David will be off on some tangent of his own. Suppose you and I take care of it? Why wait till I'm dead and gone? We could convert the place into an art center and open it in my lifetime."

He noted the way her lips parted and the way her eyes fixed themselves again on the little picture. She was obviously struck. How long would it take to catalogue the collection, to set up the project? Two years? Three? It would see him out.

"Irving, I think it might be a wonderful idea!"

"What would?" a voice demanded.

Irving turned with a half-suppressed snort of anger to face Ivy Trask, standing in the doorway. Behind her was Mrs. Dart.

Elesina, very excited now, proceeded to tell them of the plan. Ivy clapped her hands with instant enthusiasm, but Mrs. Dart was denigrating.

"Oh, come now, Irving. You've had your kicks putting it all together. Let other collectors have theirs."

"You mean I should sell it all?"

"Not you, your executors. Our body goes back to the eternal earth. Why shouldn't our things go back to the eternal market? To me a memorial museum is like a mummy."

"But think of the Frick, Mrs. Dart!" Ivy protested. "Think of the Wallace Collection. The Freer Gallery!"

"I do. To me they're simply smug tombs. I detest their air of complacency. All those fat-cat collectors putting themselves on a par with the beautiful things they've simply bought!"