The Dark Lady Read Free

seen her Hedda Gabler at the Columbus Circle Repertory, you wouldn't have to ask."
    "Columbus Circle? Can't she do better than that?"
    "Oh, I hope she will. Elesina has had her problems."
    "Men?"
    Ivy's glare was snubbing. "There always has to be that, doesn't there? Yes, I'm afraid she's been a bad picker. Bill Nolte was a total nonentity. And Ted Everett was putty in the hands of his old fascist father."
    "Those were her husbands?"
    "Both now shed. I trust there'll be no others for a while."
    "Not while Ivy, the dragon, is on watch. Are there babies?"
    "One little girl, who lives with Everett. He's poisoned the child's mind against Elesina." Ivy put down her soup spoon to be able to turn to David for full emphasis. "My poor friend has nothing to show for either of her marriages."
    "You mean no alimony?"
    "Nothing!"
    David chuckled. "Forgive me if I point out, Ivy dear, that in that case your protégée must have been on the wrong side in two divorces. And that in itself tells me something about the divine Elesina."
    "You're a brute, like all your sex! No wonder Elesina is so bitter. Look, the table's changing. Talk to the lucky lady on your right."
    Ivy, left in silence, compared the occupants of the great formal blue chamber with the handsomer, haughtier ladies and gentlemen who condescended to them from the walls, subjects of the art of Lawrence, Romney and West, in scarlet uniforms and billowing dresses, against Palladian backgrounds or hunt picnics or fashionable malls. But her pleasure in this, an old game, was spoiled by the recollection of her talk with Clara. It was curious how penetrating Clara's vision could be. A hundred women could come to her house and receive the tactile, breathy attentions of the Judge without causing the lift of one of her long penciled eyebrows, but she could flare at the least change of his tone of voice, even from the other end of the long table, when a special impression had been made. Oh, yes, Clara, for all her airs, for all her cultivation of Greek poetry and early American hymns, could be a woman and a cat! Ivy watched her critically as she chatted with Al Schurman. Did she and Irving still make love? Then she shifted her gaze to Elesina, and in doing so it crossed David's broad shoulders and half-averted profile. Now she mated David with Elesina. They were Paris and Helen on the ship, flying from Menelaus. Unashamedly on deck, oblivious of the sailors as they would have been of dogs, naked, they copulated, his hair long and blond, mixed with hers, long and black...
    "Irving seems to admire Miss Dart," Fred Pemberton, the Shakespearean scholar, observed to Ivy with a throaty chuckle. "The lofty Clara may yet deign to pucker her noble brow..."

2
    Elesina was seated on Irving Stein's left and Pat Schurman on his right, but as Elesina and her host occupied the two chairs at the end of the long table she was given the appearance of being guest of honor. The obvious interest of the table in this striking new member of their group, this repertory actress with an obscure reputation for disaster, was gratifying, but Elesina was still irked that dinner had interrupted her quest of a second cocktail. Why did one never get enough to drink in Jewish houses? She noted sourly that there was only a single wineglass at each place. And these people had millions! Suddenly she was restless, oddly elated by her own bad humor.
    "It was so good of Ivy to bring you into our lives, Miss Dart." Irving Stein's full, warm handclasp enveloped the fingers of her right hand under the table. "We hope you will become a regular visitor to Broadlawns. I could tell by the way you studied my little Bibiena that you have the eye of a connoisseur. That is what we care about." The voice, soft and low, dropped to a rumbling whisper. "Tonight, however, is not typical. The Schurmans are family. Very fine people, of course, but with no eyes or ears for the things we love. Pat's idea of celestial bliss is to watch her boys