The Dark Lady (25 page)

"They don't know?"

"Oh, they must. Eliot would never conceal anything. He's too proud. I only meant that he won't mix his worlds. And when I say he's ashamed of being like us, it's not for snobbish reasons. He's ashamed, deep down. Under all that atheism lurks a Calvinist heart. He thinks it's sin!"

Giles found this rather intriguing; he looked at the professor now with more interest. "But what will I talk to him about? I don't know anything about law or politics."

"Talk to him about his book."

"What book?"

"
The War Letters of David Stein.
It's having quite a vogue these days." He moved Giles toward the group.

"But I haven't read it!"

"What difference does that make, silly? Tell him you found it
divine.
"

"Give me a clue then. What's it about?"

"The mysterious lady who betrayed David Stein."

"And who was David Stein?"

But already Giles was being introduced. Clarkson looked at him hard for a moment and then glanced down at his glass.

"I guess I need a refill. How about you, Bennett?" And placing a hand on Giles's shoulder he maneuvered him toward the bar. Giles was rather shocked by his abruptness.

"Oh, I mustn't take you away from your friends."

"I didn't come here to talk about why we dropped the A-bomb," Clarkson said impatiently. "I came here to relax. Phil tells me you're the only person he's ever known who's really learned the art of living from day to day."

"How else can one live?"

"As many other ways as there are people in this room!"

With refilled drinks they moved to a window seat that overlooked the garden at Turtle Bay. It was a warm, pleasant spring night. But Clarkson seemed moody. He stared out the window in silence. Giles decided that he had to say something.

"I hear you've written the most divine book. Everybody's reading it."

"I didn't write it. I edited it."

"Oh, you mean David Stein was a real person?"

"Why do you talk about books you haven't read? Does
The War Letters of David Stein
sound like the title of a novel?"

"Yes! But then I guess everything sounds to me like the title of a novel."

"I don't write novels. Or read them. There are too many grim facts in this world for me to bother with fantasies."

"Really? I'm just the opposite. I hate facts."

Clarkson at this seemed to relax. He almost smiled. "You and Justice Holmes."

"He hated them, too?"

"Brandeis used to give him statistical reports on labor to improve his mind in the summer recess. But Holmes would have none of it. He reached for his Plato instead. And he was right, too! But why do I tell you this? You probably never heard of Brandeis."

"I may not be one of your brilliant law students, Professor Clarkson, but I'm not a complete ignoramus. Brandeis is a college in Boston."

Clarkson laughed good-naturedly and took a gulp of his drink. "Tell me about yourself, young man. What do you do besides go to parties like this?"

"I go to the theater. And to art galleries. And I love ballet."

"But what do you
do?
"

"I guess I don't really do anything much."

Giles hated to talk about himself, and besides there was not much to tell. He liked to discover private things about the other person. He returned now to the subject of books, having heard that no author could resist this topic for long. Soon enough, indeed, Clarkson was talking about the little volume of war letters which had been so unexpected a best seller.

"Nobody was more surprised than myself," he confessed. "I thought people were sick of war books."

"And so they are. But yours isn't just a war book, is it? Wasn't your David Stein in love with a mysterious lady who treated him cruelly?"

"Mysterious only in the sense that the reader doesn't know who she is. Clarissa is an obvious alias."

"Has nobody guessed her identity?"

"Not so far as I've heard."

"But you know?"

"Of course, I know, dummy." But there was a note of friendliness in the gruff voice. "How could I not know? The letters were written to me."

"And she's still alive, this Clarissa?"

"You may assume so. It was only a dozen or thirteen years ago.
She
wasn't at Dunkirk." Clarkson smiled a bit grimly. "No, you can be sure she wasn't anywhere that bombs were flying."

"Ah, that gives me a hint."

Clarkson looked surprised. "As to who she is?'

"No. As to
what
she is. I'll bet you one thing. Her name's not Clarissa."

"But I told you it wasn't!"

"I mean it's not even a woman's name. What is the male for Clarissa? How about Clarry?"

For a moment Clarkson looked actually shocked. Then he shook his head emphatically. "No, no. David wasn't that way at all. Even if he was a friend of mine."

"But you spoke of Clarissa avoiding bombs. Why should that be reprehensible in a woman? I assumed this was a man who had not only treated David badly, but who had shirked the draft."

Clarkson considered this for a moment. "That, I admit, is reasonably deduced. But it's still wrong. I meant that Elesina—Clarissa, I should say—was the kind of person who is always at the head table, or on the grandstand, or wherever the prizes are being given out. She is immune to the ugliness of life."

"Elesina. What a curious name. It shouldn't take me long to run her down."

Clarkson smiled ruefully, recognizing his slip. "Would a dinner at Twenty-One buy your silence?"

"No. My respect for you will do that. But I should love to dine with you just the same. At Twenty-One or at some place less expensive. I should be honored if you would tell me the story of David Stein."

Clarkson's friendly expression dissolved again to a mask, but his voice almost shook. "I think I shall like to do that, Giles. I shall like it very much."

Thus it began. In two weeks' time Giles had moved into Eliot's apartment in the Village. In three, he was working for Sam Gorman on
Tone
magazine. The job was arranged by Eliot, an old friend of Sam's. It struck Giles as rather odd that a man as austere as Eliot should be on such intimate terms with a merry, gossip-loving old queen like Sam, but he found that the relationship went back to the David Stein days, and everything that originated
there
was sacred.

It was never a happy affair. When Giles's initial pride at occupying so much of the attention and affection of this strange, interesting man began to subside, he was surprised to discover that he was actually bored. Eliot's friends, teachers, law students, radical writers, finding Giles ignorant in all subjects which interested them, ignored him. He was made to feel like a pretty creature to be winked at or chucked under the chin and then forgotten. If Eliot's friends had no disapproval of his relations with Eliot, they also had little interest in them. On the other hand, Eliot's old world, his school and college mates and the great host of his relations, was firmly closed to Giles. If Eliot did not conceal his sexual tastes, neither did he flaunt them. For nothing on earth would he have taken Giles to dine with his old mother, or with his aunts or cousins. There were certain things, he would say, that didn't mix. And he would make matters worse, when he was going out to such haunts, by leaving lists of suggested evening reading. He never quite abandoned the idea that Giles could be educated.

In the meanwhile, however, Giles was obtaining success at
Tone.
He had an eye for knickknacks, for tricky gadgets, for catchy designs, for all kinds of new household ideas; he was the perfect assistant to Sam. He went to fashion shows, to department store openings, to commercial previews, and he wrote up his discoveries and recommendations in a spicy style that soon made his column popular. Sam took a great fancy to him and asked him to all his parties. This was the cause of the first major falling-out with Eliot.

"I've gotten rather fond of Sam through the years," Eliot told Giles, "but I cannot abide his chattering parties of society hags and fashionable faggots. Spare me!"

"I mean to spare you, Eliot. There's no reason you should go. But the people at Sam's parties are just the ones I want to meet. They're my kind of people. You've got your brain trusts. You must let me have my feather trusts, as I suppose you call them."

Well, of course, there was nothing Eliot could say to this. It was too manifestly reasonable. And they both knew that what was really behind Eliot's reluctance to let Giles go to Sam's was his fear that he would be seduced. And, of course, Giles did find lovers there. He tried to keep this concealed, but the gossip in his world was fierce. There were scenes, terrible scenes, followed by days of moody silence on Eliot's part. Silence would at last give way to lectures.

"What you can't see, Giles, is that your whole life on
Tone,
that whole world, in fact, is going to limit you hopelessly. I know I was responsible for getting you into it, but I thought it was just a temporary job. People like Sam and Ivy Trask only play at life. They decorate it, pulling up a corner here and pushing one down there, patting things. I want to send you back to school. I want you to start thinking."

"Look, Eliot. You've got to accept me for what I am. Because I'm going to continue that way. I want to enjoy my life!"

"But you're too young to know what you are! You're too young even to be sure that you're homosexual. You may be off on the wrong track altogether. Nature may have intended you for an intellectual, a lawyer..."

"And a wife and three darling children in a white cottage with a green lawn in Plandome. No, Eliot, I know what I am."

Giles spoke with greater assurance now that he knew about Eliot's own past. He had learned all about his passionate friendship for David Stein and his absurd marriage to an alcoholic. He saw in the seventeen years that separated their birthdays the division between the old-fashioned and the modern homosexual. Eliot was ridden with guilt and doubt. There was always a part of him that agreed with the contemners of pederasty. He saw his life as an obscene tragedy and himself as a kind of Hamlet in drag. Giles was very clear that he wanted no part of such dramatics in his own life. He was perfectly willing to take advice in many things, but not in the question of sex. That had been answered once and for all in Pennsylvania.

Most of the young men he knew would have abandoned Eliot without a qualm, but Giles had a kinder heart. He had no wish to drive his friend to desperation. It was Sam who intervened at last.

"I've got an apartment for you, Giles. It's on top of a brownstone, a sort of studio. You can move in right away, and I suggest you do. Don't worry about Eliot. I'll take it on myself to break the news. He will be upset, but he will get over it. It's not the first time it's happened. I appreciate your wanting to let him down easily, but there's no easy way of doing these things."

Giles moved out, and everything occurred as Sam had predicted. Eliot wrote Giles a long, bitter letter and then accepted the situation. What else could he do? He was not a man to commit murder. Giles, who immediately before the separation had thought that he would have everything that his heart could desire if he could simply be free of Eliot with a good conscience, now discovered how quickly one could adapt oneself to good fortune. It even seemed a bit flat to be having no further arguments with the sardonic professor.

Sam, however, had another "patron" in mind. Giles met Julius Schell at one of the "respectable" Gorman parties. Schell was a rich, elegant bachelor of fifty, the grandson and namesake of a famous but unscrupulous manipulator of railroad securities. Everything, according to Sam, that Schell undertook he did well. He was an astute manager of family investments, a conscientious fiduciary of charitable and cultural institutions, an excellent bridge player and equestrian, and he had recently completed a successful term in the Assembly in Albany. His diminutive figure, plump but muscular, was always enveloped in the finest tweeds. His face was round, his skin smooth, his thick curly hair a rich chestnut. His lips were thin, his eyes bland, searching, suspicious, reproachful.

In the following month Schell came to two other gatherings at Sam's at which he talked only to Giles.

"Julius obviously likes you," Sam told Giles. "If he takes a real fancy to you, there's nothing he won't do. But remember: be careful. Julius is a public figure. He's planning to run for Congress. There can never be a whiff of scandal to his name."

"And why should I cause scandal?"

"I wonder. But the question shouldn't come up. You won't have to
do
anything with Julius. And just so long as you keep anything you do with anyone else concealed, all will be well and good. Julius may ask for little else, but he does ask for total devotion. Or the appearance of it."

"But what, my dear Sam, is there in it for
me?
"

"Don't be naive, darling. Julius is a very important man. He knows all the great people. And like his wealth, his ambition has no limit. His 'secretary,' shall we put it, might be a young man to be reckoned with."

"Would I have to leave
Tone
to become his secretary?"

"I like to think that nobody ever leaves
Tone.
Our alumni move onward and upward, but they always remember us. Look at Ivy Trask."

Giles laughed. "So we rule the world?"

"We set the tone, anyway. It may be the same thing."

Julius Schell, indeed, seemed to require very little in return for the handsome gifts which he now lavished on Giles. There was a gratifying succession of jeweled cuff links, old master drawings, tricky gold gadgets and the finest ties and shirts. When Giles dined at Julius' handsome Georgian town house on East 80th Street, the chauffeur called for him and took him home, as was also the case when he went for the weekend at the Gothic castle in Rye which Julius inhabited with a widowed sister. All that Julius required was a first refusal on Giles's evenings. If he wished to take Giles to the opera or to the theater or to dinner with friends, he expected Giles to be free. If Giles were not, there would be no reproach, only the slightest arch of those silky eyebrows.