The Dark Lady (8 page)

"And that's all?"

"That's all. The family are saved. Teissier is strong enough to drive off the other vultures."

"So Marie really likes him?"

"Oh, no, not at all."

"Not even a tiny bit?"

"He absolutely repels her. That's the point. She does the only thing she
can
so. It's a terrific play."

Elesina reflected. "Because it's true? Or because it was true back then? But is it true today? Would a girl like Marie have to marry a vulture?"

"Hardly. Today a girl could support herself. You know that. But there are still such problems.
And
such remedies. Becque is not as far back as the Dark Ages. Besides, it's a wonderful part. Marie is cold, still, even a trifle grim."

"Is that how you see me?"

"Don't be coy, dear. That is how an actress of your stature would play her. And yet at the same time convey a sense of the ache and passion within."

"Does Marie have a lover she gives up for the vulture?"

"No, she has nothing. Nothing, that is, but a whole inner life throbbing with thwarted emotion. That is why it is such a rich part. I see Marie in mourning, in simple black, very pale, businesslike, tense, allowing the family sympathy to be lavished on her giddy younger sister, not caring if people think she's giving up nothing because they find her cold, yet all the while feeling a burning pain at the senseless cruelty of the world, at the bleak smothering of her natural ardor..."

"Why, Irving, you should have been an actor yourself!"

"Oh, my dear, as a young man, I had many ambitions. I wanted to be an opera singer. A pianist. A poet. My father was a clever man as well as a humane one. He humored me in all my dreams. And when I began to realize the paucity of my histrionic and artistic talents, he eased me into the ancient compromise of law. I believe that all the while he knew that I would one day come back to his banking business."

"But you don't regret that, do you? Aren't you happy, being rich and important, buying beautiful things and..."

"Trying to buy beautiful people?" he interrupted with a chuckle. "Is that where you come out, Elesina?"

"We'll get to that later. Answer my question first. Do you regret your banking career?"

"Yes and no." Irving took a sip of white wine, almost as if it were a medicine. Certainly he was not a drinker. He coughed and fixed his eyes glassily at a point across the room. "I once told a young man in our office that the person whose career I most coveted was Judge Learned B. Hand, my old Harvard Law School classmate. He is now the great legal philosopher of the second federal circuit, and would have been, but for our New Deal president—you needn't rise—the greatest luminary of the Supreme Court today. Well, it so happened, unbeknownst to me, that this same young man was related to the judge, and the next time he dined there, he was careful to relay my compliment. "B" Hand pounded angrily on the table and roared out: 'Irving Stein envies me my career, does he? Did he tell you that, as he strutted before his Rembrandts? Or as he sank, knee-deep, in Persian carpet? Well, go back to Irving Stein and tell the old robber I'd give my career for a paltry one of his millions!'"

Irving hit the table as he simulated the angry, self-dramatizing jurist. Elesina smiled. "I like that," she said. "I think I'd like Judge Hand."

"Of course, he didn't mean it. At least not all of it. It goes to show that only a fool is satisfied that he's led just the life he should have led. How do we know? As you say, I've been able to buy beautiful things, and that is a solace. And now I can produce a beautiful play. That is another."

"But you need solace?"

"Who doesn't? I hate
not
having done so many things. And I hate growing old."

"Oh, Irving, you're not really..."

"Don't say it, dear." He put his hand over hers, and gave it a squeeze. But it was a friendly, almost fraternal squeeze. The acceptance of it committed her to nothing. "Let us think about the part. Does it attract you?"

"I don't know." She paused. "Of course, I'm immensely flattered that you think I can do it. Obviously, it's a very difficult one."

"It's a challenge. But you deserve a challenge."

"Is it just a challenge?" She was a bit ashamed of the arch that she felt it was now time for her eyebrows to assume.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, isn't it taken for granted, in sophisticated circles, that wealthy bankers don't invest in plays for actresses without a certain recompense in mind?"

Irving nodded, his lips pursed, grave. "I'm glad you made the point. Of course, what I'm doing would bear that look to the world. But I promise you, Elesina, that I shall never expect anything that is not accorded of your own free will and inclination. I make no secret of the fact that I am attracted to you. How could that not be? You are young and beautiful, and I am still a man. But what of it? I was never one to buy love, nor do I esteem you so little as to suppose that you would sell it. Let there be an end to such talk between us. You and I are friends. The best of friends. Why not? If our relationship should ever change, it would be only because
you
wished it to. And as that is hardly likely, you can put the matter out of your mind. Why should we care what other people say?"

"Well, I don't, certainly, but then I'm free."

"And so am I, where my friends are concerned. Mrs. Stein does not trouble herself with such matters."

Elesina hardly believed this, but then she hardly cared what Clara Stein thought of her husband's friendships. She suspected that Irving's seeming candor might be part of a scheme to seduce her through her gratitude on some night when she had drunk too much. But what if it were? Could she not handle herself? And so long as she purported to take him at his word, how could he possibly complain?

"Well, then, it's a bargain," she agreed with a sealing smile. "I'll read the play this afternoon."

During the rehearsal and short run of
The Vultures
Elesina was happier than she had ever been before. The play was too bleak to be popular, but the notices were good, and her performance as Marie Vigneron established her, in the eyes of professionals, as at least a contender for high rank. As one critic said:

Miss Dart puts one in mind of some abandoned princess on a reef about to be engulfed by a rising tide. There is nothing in the closing waters of which she has the least dread; they will simply free her from the scurrying, malignant crustacean life about her. She makes one feel that her real tragedy is not her abandonment, but her rescue.

The role gave Elesina her first sense of creative accomplishment. Her Hedda Gabler she had modeled from Nazimova's, but she had never seen
The Vultures
performed. There she was, on the boards, Marie Vigneron, something independent of Elesina Dart, something that had not existed before, a tiny piece of reality, something "done." Oh, yes, she saw all the things of her own that she had put into it: her self-pity, her identification of her failures with Marie's plight, her half-bitter, half-amused dependence on Irving. And she never fooled herself that there was anything in common between the heroic Marie and the self-indulgent Elesina. But none of this made any difference. Was not everything grist to an artist's mill?
King Lear
could have been made up out of Shakespeare's vanity;
Hamlet,
out of his resentment. Art was a process of conversion, a machine that could turn even garbage into something clean and glistening. Had Irving seen this? Had he seen that Marie was the image of her own ego touched up?

She lunched with him now twice a week. He was willing to leave his office at her least suggestion. Walking down the street to their rendezvous, she would enjoy a pleasant sense of power when she saw the big blue Isotta pull up beside the restaurant and Irving leaning forward to wave at her. She had learned to savor the sweep of his conversation and the breadth of his ideas. She was merely amused now by the persistent little vanity that provided a plaintive chorus to larger themes. She had become humbler with her own small success, humble enough, anyway, to recognize that the friendship of Irving Stein might turn out to be the most interesting thing that had ever happened to her.

Sometimes they would spend an afternoon in galleries, for he maintained his relentless pursuit of beautiful objects. They would pass into the back chamber where the tactful proprietor would leave the great collector and his friend alone to contemplate a selected number of rarities. Irving would sit silent before a canvas or a statue for as many as fifteen minutes at a time, and Elesina loved the peace of such periods. It seemed to her that she was witnessing a kind of draining, as if whatever was finest in the masterpiece were somehow passing into the silent, crouching acquisitor. She began to see what Irving meant when he said that art was only communication, that if the recipient could take in the beauty in its totality, he might become the equal of the creator.

On an afternoon of particular peace and pleasureableness Elesina sat with Irving in a mauve-curtained show room before five French eighteenth-century paintings: two Bouchers, a Fragonard, a Greuze and a Charpentier. The sexuality of the scenes was intense: alabaster nymphs with large exposed thighs and breasts clutched ineffectively at silken undergarments to excite or frustrate peeking gallants; a wife in nightdress sent a flying kiss to a departing husband as a lover concealed behind her bed clutched her free hand in anticipation; a naked girl on a red couch contemplated her painted cheeks in a mirror held in one hand while the other fingered her crotch; a panting Leda submitted to the violent attentions of a huge lusting swan against the background of a riverbank which provided an audience of leering flowers.

"The Frenchwoman of that era was your sex at its most superb," Irving commented placidly. "Woman was at her most feminine: every chateau, every piece of furniture or porcelain, every medallion, every bit of drapery, every fan, every loop and tassel bespoke the charming, the worshiped female. Not for those girls was the law degree, the medical career. Ah, no! They knew that the way to power was to be irresistible to men. And the century was theirs! Marie Antoinette, Sophie Arnould, the Du Barry, Catherine of Russia. It is hard to point to a statesman except Frederick of Prussia—and he liked the boys—who was not under petticoat influence."

"Until we come to America."

"Exactly. Martha Washington. What aridity! What puritanism! That was a man's world, of business and of politics. And in the nineteenth century men reduced it to business alone. What could the poor women do but strut around in diamonds and Irish lace and give balls? Compare the Mrs. Astor with Madame de Pompadour!"

Elesina was filled with a sense of ease and laughter. Laughter at herself and laughter at him. How beautifully he had planned it all! The champagne that she had drunk at lunch made her pleasantly drowsy; the pink and white flesh tints in the sexy French scenes titillated her. There were no nude males in any of the canvases to offer an unlovely contrast to Irving's own plump figure or gray hairs. The lusting swan was all there was to suggest the copulating male. Nothing in Irving's words or his demeanor betrayed the amorous old man, the ludicrous Pantaloon of comedy. He preserved his dignity, nay, he preserved his superiority—the superiority of his greater years and experience and wealth, of his venerable old bull maleness—without the least remission. He was like some eminent doctor, the last authority in his field, whose diagnosis she had sought and for an appointment with whom she had waited anxious hours in a crowded anteroom. Now she was in his office, the holy of holies; she had stripped off her last stitch behind a scanty curtain at his gruff instruction and was about to step forth, shivering, to expose herself to his grave contemplation.

"And where does that leave the poor twentieth-century female?" she demanded.

"With everything before her. There is nothing women did in the past they cannot do in the present."

"Oh, pooh, Irving, you know that isn't so. You speak of women giving men an ideal. What woman ever gave you yours? Your ideal was to create a temple of beauty at Broadlawns, and you've done it. You could have done it as a bachelor."

"No, my dear, I needed a priestess for the shrine."

"And that was Clara?"

"Certainly. Clara played an immense role in the conception of Broadlawns."

Elesina noted the use of the past participle. It was as near as he would come to denying the continuing function of Clara. Really, he was almost too tactful. She closed her eyes in sudden giddiness, and she was back in the doctor's chamber, now lying on the examining table. In her fantasy she raised her knees, and his clinical fingers deftly searched.

"Irving!" she exclaimed in a rasping tone as she opened her eyes. "Do you have any place that we could go? I loathe hotels." He reached at once to take her hand, but she drew it quickly back. "Please, no preliminaries. But we'd better go now. I might change my mind."

"I don't think you're going to regret this." She rose, and he helped her into her coat. "I have a house in the West Fifties. It's empty, but furnished. They clean it every morning. I use it to store things I haven't room for at home. It's a bit heterogeneous but entirely comfortable."

After that he had the sense to be silent until they arrived at his house. It was in a huge Louix XIV canopied bed, in a chamber filled with baroque armoires and tapestried bergères, with the fading winter sunlight filtered through silk curtains, that Elesina tested the identity of her fantasy doctor with Irving Stein. Like all her other experiments it had its elements of disappointment. But it was not as bad as she had feared it might be in the renewed sobriety of the taxi ride from the art gallery.

Irving Stein sat in his office, thirty floors above Broad Street, turning the illuminated pages of a fourteenth-century book of hours, made for a king's brother. No matter what his perturbation of mind, he could usually find consolation in the primitive figures of saints in golden orbs, equally at peace whether feeding birds on tiny emerald lawns under fairy-castle towers or lying prone on flaming braziers. "Everything can be made to fit," he would say, "if only one sees the whole."