The Dark Lady

by Louis Auchincloss

  "I confess I have always been something of a medievalist," Irving observed. "Like Henry Adams, I am inclined to Mariolatry."

  "Ah, one can see that in the divine Clara," Gorman exclaimed impertinently. "You have enshrined her at Broadlawns. It is your Chartres!"

  Ivy was a bit uneasy at this, though Irving appeared to take it as a compliment. She decided it was time to move her guests in to dinner, where she placed Irving, to his barely contained displeasure, at the opposite end of the table from Elesina. Her plan cost her his cooperation during the meal, for he remained for the most part rather sullenly silent, but she knew that she could count on Fred Pemberton to keep things going, and her reward came later when they returned to the living room and Irving pressed angrily close behind her.

  "I trust I shall be allowed two words with Miss Dart before I go home?"

  Ivy stared with affected surprise. "Why, Irving, you old darling, of course! What can I have been thinking of?"

  At midnight, when the guests were gone, Elesina, glass in hand, stared moodily into the dying fire.

  Ivy, back from locking the front door, asked: "Well?"

  "I feel like a whore. And what do you think that makes you?"

  "Our customers didn't pay anything. We must be novices in the business."

  "Novices! Everything went just as you planned. I shall have no trouble raising the money for the play. No trouble, that is, other than we anticipated."

  "And what did we anticipate?"

  Elesina turned now to look at her scornfully. "I shall have to sleep with him, of course."

  "Did he say so?"

  "What do you take him for? He's a gentleman. But we know what these understandings are."

  "The madam doesn't."

  "Oh, Ivy, stop being funny."

  Ivy came over to take an opposite seat by the fire. "All right, I'll be serious. If you become Irving Stein's mistress, I shall never have anything to do with you again."

  Elesina seemed only mildly surprised. "You wish me to lead him on?"

  "Certainly not. I want you to be perfectly direct and perfectly honest. I want you to marry him." Elesina continued to contemplate the embers. "Fred Pemberton is not altogether the ass he seems. He has some shrewd insights. We women have been unjustly treated. Oh, I'm not talking about the political side," she added as she saw Elesina's shrug. "I'm no militant. I can make do with things as they are. But men have to be jockeyed a bit. There is no reason why Irving should not make up for what his sex has done to you. Particularly when he will find a new life and a new happiness in doing so."

  "What about Clara?"

  "You find me disloyal?"

  "I find you ... interesting."

  "Clara has had quite enough out of life. She has had a lot more than she needs or even wants. She doesn't care for Irving physically anymore. I doubt she ever did. It's only right that she should give him up to a younger woman. She will have money, and the devotion of children and grandchildren. She should not complain."

  "Ivy Trask, you're a very wicked woman!" Elesina exclaimed with a sudden laugh. "I see now I was right to be afraid of you from the start."

  "I take the world as I find it," Ivy retorted. "I have had to maneuver and scheme for every bone that's been flung at me in the yard. Clara has only had to sit on her ass and receive the bounties of the world. It's all very well for her to hold up her moral titles and cry: 'Hands off!' But the only laws I obey are the laws of the land. I never subscribed to any others. I never benefited from any others. So let Clara watch out! There is no law against divorce."

  Elesina said nothing more, and Ivy, who always knew when to stop, rose and bade her good night.

  5

  When Elesina was sixteen, she played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It was the custom of Miss Dixon's Classes, as her school was named, to produce one Shakespeare play a winter, and the dramatics coach had assumed that Elesina Dart, who had made such a hit the year before as Juliet, would seek the role of Portia. Great had been the astonishment in Miss Dixon's "green room" when Elesina had not only insisted on the role of the Jew, but had performed it with such fire and spitting venom that some of the mothers had complained about the choice of play. Where on earth had Elesina Dart, so admirably reared, learned to impersonate an oleaginous Hebrew moneylender? Surely not from anyone in the guarded circle of Mr. and Mrs. Amos Dart.

  Mrs. Dart made no secret of her distaste, either for her daughter's role or for her success in it.

  "I don't approve of girls acting in any case," she remarked to Elesina after briefly watching the closing minutes of a rehearsal. "And I certainly don't approve of the attitudinizing required by a character part. It brings out the worst social characteristics. Don't forget, my dear: the greatest clown on the stage can be the biggest bore at a dinner party."

  But the value of her role to Elesina was precisely that it taught her for the first time to question her mother's social judgments and to wonder if she wanted a life whose supreme sacrament was the evening meal. Until then her parents had seemed so strong, so well attired, so correct of speech and coordinated of movement, so in control of their bodies and tempers, whether on the golf course or at the bridge table, like improbable aristocrats in luxury advertisements, that she had been forced to assume the existence of some kind of true faith behind such impressive orthodoxy. But now she began to wonder if it were not all a front. She began to question the rule at home and the rule at school. Shylock became her protest against three hundred incipient female anti-Semites clad in the bulging green bloomers, plain green blouses, black cotton stockings and low-heeled shoes which Miss Dixon required as the uniform necessary to mortify the vanity of her sex in preparation for a lifetime devoted to its gratification.

  But Elesina dwelt only passingly on the ethnic aspects of the play. It was in Shylock's passion that she found her balm for the sore inflicted on her soul by the aridity of her world. As she scuffled about the stage, clutching her cloak around her neck and snarling at Antonio, she had a gleeful sense of corrected vision, of being able, in the few short hours devoted to a rehearsal for what would be the mere two of performance, to glimpse a greater reality of hate, of indignation and of joy, pure joy, at creating a little nugget of beauty out of the spit and sediment of her inheritance. For the trouble with all the world, she could see now, was just that it was not a stage, or even a decent replica of one. The most one could do with it, if one had any gift at all, was to turn it into an audience.

  Amos and Linda Dart were the kind of doves whose lifelong satisfaction was to perch and coo on the tiptop rung of the social ladder. They differed from more ordinary social aspirants in that they never felt the smallest urge to impress others with their achievement. One could have taken a cruise around the world with the Darts without hearing them once drop the name of Grace Vanderbilt or Mona Williams. Nor had they anything in common with those little brothers of the rich who, constantly in debt, cadge loans and scant tips. Their income from a modest Dart trust, however exiguous for their milieu, was never overspent. They had just enough, with careful planning, to equip themselves smartly, to keep a little jewel of an apartment in Manhattan, to send Billy and Elesina to private schools and to travel in first-class accommodations to the various country houses where their presence was regularly sought.

  In summertime the Darts often enjoyed the loan of an unoccupied villa by the sea or of a comfortable gatehouse, but they were always careful not to place themselves too much under even moral obligations, and any benefactor was apt to regard himself more in their debt than they in his. "Think of my luck," he would exclaim to friends. "Amos and Linda are going to be in Far Hills all of August in our guest cottage!" For the Darts not only played games with skill and perfect sportsmanship, they talked well; they were never sick, late, drunk or ill tempered, and they could be counted on to be charming even to poor relatives. It was also a source of gratification that they were happily married and much in love, which not only removed them from the suspicious pro
bings of jealous spouses, but gave them a rather stylish little air of independence from the social pattern in which they were otherwise so deeply enmeshed. Only a stupid observer could have failed to see that Amos and Linda would have given up anything for a dinner party but each other.

  Amos as a husband was more led than leading, not because he was weak, but because Linda had the clearer eye, the sharper mind. He in turn had the greater sex appeal, being gentle and affable, with sunny blue eyes and curly hair, while her Grecian nose and erect posture suggested an armature under her handsome figure. Had Linda's motto, "Nothing in excess," been applied to her domestic life, her children might have grown up in the pattern of their parents, but nature betrayed her to a single exaggeration: a passion for her sullen, delicate, brooding, dark-eyed son. She did not neglect Elesina; no mother could have been more correct in her attentions, but the girl was never under the smallest illusion that Billy was not the favorite child.

  Obviously, it was up to Amos to correct this imbalance of family emotion by making a particular thing of his relationship with his daughter, and being a gentleman he did what was expected, but Elesina from childhood had a suspicion, murky at first, clearing later and at length bathed in laughter, that both were playing parts. When she flung her arms about his neck and cried: "Oh, Papa, my beloved Papa, swear you'll never leave me!" and he cried back: "Liebchen, I'll shoot the man who tries to take you from me!" they would smile broadly enough at the benignity of their performance, but behind that smile there was always, at least on her part, the suspicion of tears, tears that their reality was not what they played, could not be what they played, because reality could never be art, because truth could never be more than the mirror of aspiration.

  In the two years that followed her success in The Merchant Elesina became even less emotionally involved with her family. She was occupied now in a love affair with herself, intoxicated with the discovery of her own dark beauty. She would spend hours before her mirror, making herself up, doing her hair in different ways, posing as Nazimova, as Pola Negri, as Natasha Rambova. She formed passionate, brief attachments to girls in her class; she wrote a whole novel about a debutante who was abducted by a bootlegger; she was even suspended from Miss Dixon's Classes for smoking. Only her mother's threat to send her to a strict boarding school in the South induced her to come back to graduate. Her classmates voted her most likely to succeed—in all matters not pertaining to domesticity.

  But all of this mattered little enough; the time had come for boys. Linda Dart had to give up some of her own social activities to supervise and chaperone her giddy daughter through the fever of her debutante year, and that Elesina was still a virgin when she eloped with Bill Nolte a month before her coming-out party was attributable entirely to the indefatigable maternal endeavors. But the elopement was to cost Elesina more than she had reckoned. It was to cost her a large portion of her mother's interest and care. From now on she was on her own. Linda, to be sure, was available for consultation, for advice, but Elesina had heard the splash of washed hands. Bitterly in her mind she accused her mother of having objected more to her elopement than to her marriage. Had it not mortally offended Linda's very grandest friend, Mrs. Emory, whose ball in Elesina's honor, the product of the subtlest Dart planning, had had to be called off after the invitations were out?

  Nolte was a cipher. In later years Elesina found it difficult to recall even what he had looked like. He was one of those pretty boys who went to every party and knew every debutante without having any clearly identifiable family or even friends. In fact, he had attended Columbia and was a customers' man in a small brokerage house. He was also endowed with a dull but respectable widowed mother who lived in Orange, New Jersey, and who detested Elesina on sight. With marriage Nolte rushed to domestic dullness as if it were a heaven of limited seats and lost his looks, as it seemed, overnight. Who was this chubby, pompous little bore to whom Elesina now found herself bound? In less than a year she was home again.

  Alas, it was not the same home. Amos had cancer, and in the bleak months that were left to him his despairing wife had little time for her troublesome daughter. Elesina turned to the stage and obtained two walk-on parts. Then she had a break. A season in summer stock in Westchester resulted in a Broadway role that she was uniquely fitted to play: the bored heiress who yearns for a "real" experience and becomes the willing tool of a cynical but charming jewel robber. The play was trash, but Percy Hammond noted in his review: "Miss Dart brings to her part the authenticity of a lady and the sansgêne of a flapper—a fine job of balance. One wonders where she will go from here."

  The good luck of this part was largely canceled by its bringing Elesina into the orbit of Ted Everett, who played her brother in the play. He was the son of a Wall Street banker, and his real reason for being on the stage was to irritate his father, though he fancied that his loud, shrill voice and morbid temperament might one day make him a distinguished Hamlet. He was good looking, in a weak, blond, attenuated way, and he made an excellent first impression when he wished to, knowing how to endow his interlocutor with the flattering conviction that he was one of the few who were capable of responding to Ted Everett's intense vibrations. Elesina, like many who fancy that they wish to escape from society, was enchanted to discover a fellow refugee in her new milieu, and soon she and Ted were having supper together every night after the show, drinking whiskey and exchanging horror stories about their families. Ted was amusing, until one realized that his only true interest was in himself and his imagined grievances, but Elesina did not know this until after they had gone down to that lavender chamber in City Hall and exchanged their vows. The very next morning Ted made a terrible scene because the newspaper item about their union described Elesina as a rising actress and himself as merely the son of Lawson Everett.

  The marriage, like Ted's acting career, seemed to draw its principal support from paternal disapproval. Mr. Everett, a Southern Baptist who did not recognize divorce and would not countenance actresses, refused even to meet Elesina, which gave Ted a saturnine satisfaction. But what little chance of happiness the young couple might have had was eliminated by Ted's failure, when the run of their play was over, to find another part. He expected that Elesina would share his idleness so long as their bit of money lasted, but she was offered a role in a new comedy and accepted it. Only then did she discover the full depths of her husband's egotism. For ten days he did not address a single word to her. Then she received a telephone call from his father asking her to come downtown to lunch.

  "Everything that my son Theodore does is designed to thwart me," this large bland disciplined man of money explained to her over an omelette and a glass of claret. "His marriage to a divorced actress is merely the most recent example of this. Don't take offense, my dear. You're too intelligent. Face the fact that you've married a weakling, and leave him to me. When he is finally convinced that he cannot anger me, he will become manageable, and I may be able to make something at least respectable of him. But while he is married to you and fooling about theaters, I can't do a thing. Give him up. I cannot believe that your emotions are deeply involved. Give him up, and I'll make it worth your while."

  "Why do you assume he'll come back to you if I give him up?"

  "Because he has no place else to go. After all, you're paying the rent now. You see, I'm well informed."

  "But do you really want him to come back?"

  "I want to do my duty. There's nothing you can do for him. There's something I might."

  "Poor Ted." Elesina reflected for a moment. "The trouble is that I'm pregnant. I'm afraid we'll have to go on with what we've started."

  It was like Elesina to be able to take in the little scene as it was being enacted. She saw just what would have been wrong with it on the stage: none of the three persons involved really cared about either of the others. It wouldn't play. Nor did it, in the ensuing two years. Little Ruth was born; Ted took minor jobs in advertising, in publishing, in radio; he and Elesina gave
periodic drinking parties for a motley group of actors, writers and publicists whose common denominator was a disposition to failure. For Ted had an instinct which always recognized in others his own particular weakness. Only Elesina, of all his group, seemed bound for better things, and even her career seemed to have reached its top when she joined the Columbus Circle Repertory, an institution as applauded by the liberal press as it was neglected by the general public.

  Nor had life been kind to the Darts. Amos Dart was dead, and Elesina's brother, Billy, had become an interior decorator in partnership with the man who was his lover. Linda Dart's passion for her son did not survive his choice of a career and mate. She passed through what was to her a tunnel of the blackest humiliation and emerged as contained and uncomplaining as before, but colder and even more reserved. She lunched with her two children now at regular intervals, and she was always civil, amusing, interested, but both knew that they had disappointed her beyond the possibility of redemption. Linda now devoted all of her time to her rich friends, and she found herself in greater demand than ever. Her arrival in a drawing room, erect, cheerful, crisply neat, with the right greeting for everyone and the latest gossip strained through a sieve of worldly wisdom, gave a cachet to a party. The astute climber would know that he had arrived when he heard his neighbor say: "Ah, there's Linda Dart. I always know I'm in for a good evening when I see her. Would you believe she's sixty-five?"