The Dark Lady (24 page)

"Well, war is a great equalizer, you know. Harry and his friends may be a bit too posh, a bit Racquet Club for a Stein, but they're willing to make an exception. If I fight well enough, maybe they'll even take me in, after the war. Like Swann in Proust, and the Jockey Club."

Eliot assessed his friend's biting tone. "I suppose you might be elected to the Racquet Club without having your head blown off. I could put you up."

"No. I want to be the first member elected with his head blown off! Brains have never been a qualification there."

Eliot's heart was beating fast. He knew that if he did not speak now, he might never do so. The idea might not survive a night's contemplation. He had tried to live once in marrying Ailsa. Could he live again? "Would Harry Custis take me? Even if I'm not a social-climbing Hebrew?"

"Eliot! Don't be crazy! You don't want to get into this war."

"Do you think you're the only man who's lost his illusions through a woman?"

David stared at him and then burst out laughing. "God, man, do you think that's my only motive?"

"No. But I think it's your real one."

"You don't believe I care about fighting for civilization?"

"Oh, yes. That, too."

"And you, Eliot? What do you care about?"

"I care about caring. I care about
your
enthusiasm. It's a light at the end of the tunnel. Don't try to stop me, David. I'm going with you. How can Harry not want me? Food for powder, man, food for powder."

"You're making me feel it's my duty to give the whole thing up!"

"Give up civilization for Eliot Clarkson? Poor thing that it is, it must be worth more than that."

David's face at this became very grave. Then abruptly he walked over to shake Eliot's hand. "I'll call you at eight tomorrow. If you feel the same way then, I'll speak to Harry."

"Be sure to tell him I'm
in
the Racquet Club. He may be too grand to remember me."

David and Eliot were sent to England where they received their training on the Salisbury Plain and their commissions by January 1940. They were then separated, for Eliot, who spoke German, was assigned to an intelligence unit in London and David's infantry regiment became part of the British Expeditionary Force in France. Eliot was very bitter about their separation; he was convinced that they would never meet again. He felt a poor fool to have gone to war in order to be with a friend and to have lost him already. But. he conceded to himself that there was no reason why a world that had lost all sense and meaning should retain any logical sequence on his account.

He and David exchanged letters regularly until the German invasion of the Lowlands. After that Eliot heard no more. He was so convinced that David had been killed that he was not even surprised when he learned that he had been. In his near suicidal despair he sought consolation in a parallel. What else could have happened to Rupert Brooke?

David had been killed by strafing from a low-flying plane while attempting to board one of the flotilla of small craft sent out from England to evacuate the B.E.F. A few pages of a journal were found on his body on the beach at Dunkirk. These were ultimately sent by Clara Stein to Eliot:

May 28. Thirty pale green planes with black crosses on their underwings have just roared down the beach. There is no effective shelter. I am sitting under a dune, faced away from the still, black sea. There are hours, perhaps days to wait. It is difficult to believe that the army can escape by water. Surely the Nazis can blow up everything in the Channel. But it's a chance. The only thing any of us seem to be afraid of is that Churchill might ask for an armistice to save the B.E.F. from annihilation. Don't let him do that, God!

I may as well write. I have nothing to read, and nobody is talking much. I suppose these words will never be read, but what does that matter? What is read is soon enough forgotten, and many of the finest things ever written have perhaps been seen only by their authors.

Not that what I have to write is so fine. But I feel clear, clear as I have not felt before. What I want to write down here is the simple fact that I have enjoyed myself. I have been exhilarated. I have been happy!

There. It is said. It is recorded. Despite all the horror of the incredible mess, the crushing defeat, despite my own probable impending extinction, I have still been happy. I was even happy at the killing, the very little for which I was responsible: those three men who were rash enough to be sitting on top of their tank when they entered what they believed to be the deserted village of Neuville. It was not that I exulted in the deaths of three poor German boys who probably believed they were fighting for a good cause and may never have even heard of the Nazi concentration camps. No, it was not blood lust. It was simply that it was good at last to be shooting, to be
doing
something about evil.

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.

G
ILES
B
ENNETT
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 had 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."