The Dark Lady

by Louis Auchincloss

  When Ivy was received by the attorney in his office, she asked if David Stein could be assigned to her.

  "David is in litigation," Mr. Schurman demurred. "I should like you to go to Mr. Devlin, our partner in charge of estates."

  "Mine is a very simple will. I'm sure it could be handled by a novice. I'd like to think that David was in charge of my small affairs."

  So it was that she found herself, fifteen minutes later, facing David across a small desk as, smiling a bit grimly, she fabricated a long list of trivial bequests. Behind him was the single window of the narrow, whitewashed office which looked out, rather dramatically, on the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral. David was courteous, friendly, even charming. He wrote down on a yellow legal pad, in his careful round handwriting, the names of Ivy's numerous legatees.

  "I think I'm going to change my mind again about the mother-of-pearl lavaliere," she said, watching him carefully for the least hint of impatience. "Harriet Tremaine would like it, I know, but it belonged to Aunt Bessie Troop, who was only her aunt by marriage. I think I should leave it to Prudence Weston, who, of course, was Aunt Bessie's own niece."

  "Very well." David drew a thick, neat line slowly through an earlier note. "Does Prudence Weston have a middle name?"

  "Two. Charity Augusta. And come to think of it, I don't think the amethyst bracelet should go to Emily Trask. She always loses things. She lost Grandma's amber necklace, though some think she hocked it."

  "Do you suppose, Ivy, that these gifts could be covered in a memorandum? It's much easier to alter than a will if you should change your mind about any of these bequests."

  "But would a memorandum be binding?"

  "No, but I'm sure your residuary legatee would honor it."

  "How do you know that? We haven't got to my residuary legatee yet."

  "No, but I'm sure you wouldn't leave your residuary estate to a person who couldn't be trusted."

  "And, anyway, why would my residuary legatee care for my junky jewelry? Is that what you mean? I don't suppose the lot of it's worth five hundred bucks."

  "I didn't mean that at all, Ivy." His face expressed a proper concern at such an imputation.

  "Oh, I know you didn't, dear boy! I was testing you. To see if you could put up with the garrulity of an old maid fussing over buttons and thimbles. And you can! You'd be a wonderful estates lawyer, honey. Let's reduce my silly will to a simple sentence. Everything I own to the person I love best in the world." She paused, waiting.

  "And who is that?"

  "Can't you guess?"

  "Me, I suppose."

  "Conceited ass! Elesina, of course."

  David looked at her pensively. Then he studied his pencil point. "Don't you think my father will adequately provide for Elesina?"

  "Who knows? If he does, your family will probably contest it."

  "You think we're so greedy?"

  "I don't think you are."

  Their eyes met, but he looked away. "Thanks."

  "You'd be on Elesina's side, wouldn't you, David?"

  He moved his shoulders impatiently. "I don't know about sides. But so long as I have any money, Elesina can count on it."

  "David, look at me. I know how you and Elesina feel about each other."

  David's brow was puckered, and his staring eyes expressed something between fascination and repulsion. "What do you know about it?"

  "I know she loves you."

  "Loves me!"

  "Yes. And that is why I came here today. Not for the stupid will, though you'll have to draw one up because I told Mr. Schurman about it. I want you and Elesina to be able to meet in town."

  Ah, now his eyes were everything she had greedily anticipated! "Does Elesina know you're here?"

  "Elesina has agreed to nothing."

  "I see."

  "I want to draw up a plan. And present it to her. Do you wish to know what that plan is?"

  "I think I'd like to talk to Elesina myself."

  "Look here, David. This thing will be done my way or not at all. Now do you want to know what my plan is?"

  His answer was barely audible. "Yes."

  "Elesina and I will take a course at NYU in the history of art. I have already arranged it. Your father thinks it will help us with the collection. The course will be on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at eleven. We will attend the lectures and then lunch at my apartment in the Althorpe before going back to Rye. Except I shall not go to the apartment."

  "I see." His voice was still a whisper. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were intent on the yellow memorandum.

  "I suppose you can give up your lunch hour three times a week." Ivy decided that the moment had come to relieve the atmosphere. "There'll be something in the icebox in my apartment." She uttered a sharp little laugh. "Fred Pemberton would say I'm like that character in Troilus and Cressida. Is it Pandarus? But people in your and Elesina's situation need help. I love her, and I know she's unhappy. I want that girl to have something out of life. And if it's David Stein the poor creature wants, then it's David Stein she'll get!"

  Ivy had let emotion blot out the cynicism in her voice. The effect on David was immediate. His eyes were moist. He jumped up and went over to hug her.

  "Ivy, you old darling! You're not Pandarus. You're Juliet's nurse!"

  "That's better." She released herself firmly from his embrace and then stared at him with sudden fierceness. "But you'll have to promise me one thing, David."

  "Anything!"

  "You must promise to be ruled by me in this matter. It is going to be set up so that no human being but you and I and Elesina ever knows. Is that perfectly understood?"

  For a moment he wavered. "I hate subterfuge."

  "David Stein, if you don't give me your word, I walk out of this office, and you shan't see me again. Now! Do you promise?" Still he paused. "No answer? Is that what young men call love today?"

  "I promise you, Ivy."

  "Very well." She studied him severely for a moment, assessing the possibility of default. "If you expose her, David, if you cause a scandal, I really believe that I will kill you."

  His laugh had a note of surprise. "Why, Ivy, I thought you liked me!"

  "I love you, dear boy," she said grimly. "I always have. But Elesina is different. Elesina is my child. Elesina is my life!"

  10

  Elesina had never had an affair so exclusively physical. She and David now met only in Ivy's apartment, and there was time in their brief appointments for little else. David no longer came to Broadlawns, for reasons which they never discussed. Indeed, it was their tacit understanding, at least in the first weeks, never to mention his father at all. Elesina liked to think of her hours at the Althorpe as an enchanted existence having no relation to the actuality of Rye. Stepping out of the old grilled elevator and walking down the dark corridor to Ivy's door, she would feel like a nymph loved by a god or demigod in a legend. Or she might think of David's ivory-skinned, muscular body as a Greek statue come to life in a deserted studio for her alone. Their first encounter was quick and feverish. Not until the second or even third had they achieved the kind of union that she had read about and never really believed existed.

  And yet she sometimes wondered, paradoxically, if their relationship were not more spiritual than any she had experienced. She was like Psyche, loved in the dark by a stranger. The affair was freed of the vulgarity of jealousy, of curiosity, of distraction. Orgasm with David was like the raising of a communion cup before an altar that knew no sacrament but love. There was no guilt, no adultery, no incest, no divorce, no settlements, no law, no Hitler in Ivy's darkened bedroom with this never tiring lover in her arms. God, if she could only die there! Or had she died there?

  In time they began to talk before parting. She would put on a kimono and make herself a drink or nibble at a piece of fruit. David, at her request, remained naked. He would puff at a cigarette, unusual for him. He would never drink or eat.

  "How can you come here so regularl
y?" she asked him. "I thought law firms were so demanding of their clerks."

  "They are."

  "Doesn't Mr. Schurman sometimes ask for you at this time?"

  "He does."

  "And what do you say?"

  "I tell him I have an engagement which can't be broken. Which is no more than the truth."

  "Does he accept that?"

  "What can he do? I am perfectly willing to work at night or all weekend, and I frequently do. I even like it. Social life no longer interests me, and writing briefs keeps me from daydreaming about you."

  "Darling. That's all I do at Broadlawns now. Daydream. But what would you do if Mr. Schurman absolutely insisted that you had to lunch with him and the firm's most important client next Friday?"

  "I'd refuse."

  "Even if he threatened to fire you?"

  "Absolutely."

  "But then he'd know you had a girl!"

  "He wouldn't know who."

  It was agreed that she should always be the first to go. Sometimes when she was dressed, combed, made up and ready to leave, he would embrace her, still naked, and then undress her, all over again, to make love once more. She began to sense that she was losing her dominance in the relationship. She also began to realize how far from satisfied he was with the status quo.

  At last he started to discuss the future, a subject which she detested and feared.

  "But how long can we go on this way?" he demanded. "How long can you stand it? How long can I?"

  "But I want it to go on forever!"

  "This deception? What will it do to us? I sometimes think there must be a portrait of me somewhere, like Dorian Gray's—perhaps the one Mother has of me in the velvet suit—that gets uglier every day."

  "Oh, darling, what rot! And how like a man to have to spoil things. What we're doing isn't hurting anybody."

  "Except us."

  "Anyway, your poor father isn't going to last forever..."

  She stopped, realizing his immediate horror. He had turned quite white, and he rose quickly to put a towel around his loins.

  "It seems so dishonorable," he said in a tight voice. "To wait. To make love and wait."

  "But, David, what else can we do?"

  "We could tell him."

  "Do you want to kill him?"

  "Dad is a kind of great man in his way. He might take it all better than you think. And it would be so honest. Oh, Elesina! To think what it would be like to have you all to myself, all the time! Oh, of course, there would be shrieks and screams and horrors. It would be the worst scandal anyone had heard of in years. But it would die down eventually. People get used to anything in time. And we wouldn't stay here. We'd go away, far away, until it all blew over. Mother might go back to Dad, and everything would be basically the same as if I had proposed to you that Saturday night I met you at Broadlawns. Why the hell didn't I?"

  Elesina felt giddy. In the car going back to Rye, sitting silently by Ivy, her mind tore backward and forward, peeking into this possibility, tearing lids off others. Was it not perfectly possible? Why should she mind scandal? Had she minded Ted Everett's divorcing her and naming Max Allerton as corespondent? And as for David ... well, hadn't he proposed it? He had money, some money anyway. They could live in Paris or Rome until things quieted down. They could have a baby. David wanted one, she knew. It might make up to him for having to leave his job and go abroad.

  "I think you'd better tell me," Ivy said at last, reaching forward to run her finger up the glass between them and the chauffeur to be sure that it was closed.

  "Tell you what?"

  "What's on your mind. Whatever it is you're hatching. I think I can guess. You and a certain party are finding life too restricted. You want to go off on a weekend together. I've been expecting that. I don't say it's impossible. But give me time. It'll take some working out."

  "I guess he wants more than that, Ivy." And she told her of David's plan.

  "What do you think you'd live on?" Ivy demanded at once.

  "Me? It's not my idea."

  "You wouldn't have told me if you weren't flirting with it. I suppose you'll tell me David has money of his own. But I'm sure it's peanuts compared to the expectations he'd be ruining. Not to speak of yours! Of course, neither of you would ever see another penny of Irving's money. And what would your life be? Do you think he could stay in New York, the boy who'd run off with his own stepmother? With all those shrieking Steins and Clarksons?"

  "New York's not the whole world."

  "The place where you can't live is always the whole world! At least it is for a man. But all right. So David will be gallant. So you'll live in some European watering place, where nobody will care. But David will be bored. Read Anna Karenina! And he's one of those boyish types who won't lose his youth until he's sixty. It'll be a long time to watch over him, Elesina!"

  "Oh, Ivy, don't be vile."

  "I'm being practical, dearest, and you know it. You have done pretty well under my guidance. Admit it. You have a fine husband, a great fortune, a social position and a pretty blue-eyed lover. But you could lose it all with one slip."

  "What do I do, Ivy? David's the one who's rocking the boat, not I."

  "If you can't induce David to keep his shirt on—no, I won't say that, for I suppose you like him to take it off!" Here Ivy indulged in one of her outrageous high cackles. "Well, then, you're not the siren I took you for. Have you no tears? Can you make no scenes?"

  "I've always detested that sort of woman so."

  "Well, borrow a leaf from their notebook just this once. Or skip one or two rendezvous at the Althorpe. I watched him coming in the other day. If ever I saw an eager young man..."

  "Oh, Ivy, shut up!"

  They were turning in the gates of Broadlawns. Elesina had always loved the gliding sound of the big car as it moved over the smooth blue gravel. Now she rested back in her seat and shivered. Was it greedy to take everything that life offered, even when life seemed to press it on one? She had not yet gone wrong following Ivy. Was it not simple good sense to keep on with a winning streak? Then she thought of the pain in David's eyes, and her own became moist.

  11

  Irving Stein had now accepted the fact that he was not going to recover. He was suffering multiple small heart attacks, coming at the rate of two a week, and it was fairly certain that a larger and more decisive one could not be far away. He rarely left his wheelchair except to go to his bed, and he found himself in a state of mild, but permanent exhaustion. Yet he was surprised at his own passivity. "This was bound to come one day," a small voice kept telling him. "Now it has come. That's all."

  "Isn't it sad?" he would say aloud at times, even when his nurse was in the room. "But I've had a good life," he would always add. It was a longer life, too, he never failed to remind himself, than most human beings had enjoyed—certainly a better one. A good life and a not too uncomfortable death—how much more could one ask?

  Elesina was wonderful. She had given up asking people to Broadlawns and hardly left his side now except for the trips to New York to attend her course. She would read aloud to him and listen to his reminiscences; she used Ivy Trask to collect all the gossip from the big city that might amuse him. Only once, when she brushed aside a reference to his own impending demise with some banality about his "living to bury us all," did he reproach her.

  "My dear girl, let it be understood once and for all that I want to discuss it. Death is an interesting topic, and, besides, we have much to prepare for. I had thought I was going to have time to set up our foundation, but I may have to leave that to you. My idea is that it be arranged so that you may occupy Broadlawns and keep the collection for your lifetime. Jacob Schurman will tell you just how to do it. You must consult Jacob in everything."

  When Jacob Schurman came out to discuss a new will, however, Irving asked Elesina to leave them alone.

  The lawyer was a small man, potbellied, with a round bald head, large snapping black eyes and an aquiline nose. His good
humor, his quick wit, even his merriment were fragile guards of a temper always ready to erupt over the hissing bubbles of his impatience. He was very nervous and always had to be handling something. In his office he would move objects of gold and glass to and fro over the broad surface of his desk. Sitting now in the armchair by Irving's couch, he yanked at his watchchain and placed and replaced the pince-nez on the thin ridge of his nose.

  What Irving now had to say did not contribute to his calm. "I'm going to shock you, Jacob. I propose to leave my entire estate to Elesina."

  "In trust, of course."

  "No, outright. To deal properly with the collection she must have full control."

  "And Clara, the children, the grandchildren? We'll just forget about them? Poof? Like that?"

  "Now listen to me, Jacob. You know what I've done for Clara and the boys. Together they have as much as I have."

  "I question that!"

  "Leaving out the collection, they have."

  "And why should we leave out the collection?"

  "Because I don't regard it as money. If I die before it's set up in a foundation, I want Elesina to take care of it. So she's the one who's going to need my money. Peter and Lionel have large earned income in addition to their capital, and David's going to be a successful lawyer. As for Clara, she can't spend her income now."

  The throb in Jacob's voice showed the depth of his outrage. "And what guarantee will you have that Elesina will carry out your wishes? That she won't cart the whole collection, lock, stock and barrel, down to Parke-Bernet and put it on the block?"

  "I trust her. Obviously, you don't. But I'm the client."

  "Even trusting her, suppose she dies right after you? What becomes of the collection then? It all goes to her daughter, I suppose."

  "I've thought of that. I shall ask Elesina to sign a new will when I sign mine, leaving three quarters of what I've left her to my sons. But so long as she lives, I want her to feel at liberty to dispose of the property as she sees fit."