The Dark Lady by Louis Auchincloss, Thomas Auchincloss Page B

affection for porcelains, ivory and gold. But when it came to a retention and pawing of pretty hands, a silly chuckling over silly female jokes, a walking aside with younger guests to garden limits and beyond, she began to see in the splendid Oriental who had courted her a sentimental Western burgher in fancy dress, like one of those Rembrandt models arrayed in a warlike finery that his countinghouse nose makes ridiculous. And then she would have moments of silent fury.
    Lionel and Peter were always more Irving's sons than hers. They were big noisy boys, friendly enough, without a shred of their father's distinction but with some of his shrewdness, who treated Clara with an affectionate but rather awed respect and never seemed to have much to say to her. They took Irving's side in everything, because he gave them lavish presents and wished to chastise little David, a mother's boy, when David was impudent to his father. But the last time that this occurred was when Clara first learned of it. Irving had announced at a Sunday lunch that he had lost his wristwatch, and David, aged twelve, had shrilly demanded to know if he had looked in the bed of Madame Vibert, a pretty French actress who was staying in the house and whose knee Irving at that very moment was squeezing under the table. Lionel and Peter had jumped on David that afternoon by the swimming pool, but Clara, hearing his yells, had hurried to the rescue. Alone with David she had tried to reason.
    "You must learn, my darling, that even if I love having a champion, it is sometimes better if we look the other way."
    "But, Mother, I
saw
Dad go into that lady's room!"
    "Your father, my love, is a very fine and good man, but he has a little weakness. You will understand it some day."
    "Never!"
    "I do not mean that you will share it, but that you will understand it. Now if you really want to help me—
really
—you will not notice what he does in that way."
    "Not
notice?
"
    "Not show you notice."
    She finally convinced the angry boy, and he gave her his word and kept it, but he was always sarcastic afterward in family discussions which touched on the subject of romance. In time David came to like and, a bit grudgingly, even to admire a father whose affection it was difficult to resist, but he remained Clara's champion at heart. What kept her from becoming too close to this intense, beautiful son was a species of timidity, or austerity, or perhaps even something akin to fear. She had never in her life surrendered herself to another human being, and there was a fire in David that might have singed her. She would kiss him on the forehead or the cheek, but she would never fondle him or hug him. She kept him under a slight restraint—as she might have a too demonstrative dog. Sometimes she wondered if David were not perhaps the adventure that she had been waiting for as a young woman. But if he were, what on earth could she do with him?
    Certainly, it was of David that she most constantly thought in the week after Irving moved out. David was coming down for the weekend from law school, and she would have to tell him then. Should she do it in such a way as to induce him to break altogether with his father? Something fierce and pounding in her head urged her to it. Was it not time, after years of equivocation, to strike, to be free, to take David with her? Had there not been a sick weakness in the passivity with which she had so long accepted a life that had offered little but disillusionment?
    On the afternoon when David was expected Clara had an unexpected caller at 68th Street. Had she ever imagined that Ivy Trask would have the nerve to present herself, she would have left word in the hall that she be denied. As it was, the maid who answered the door, recognizing in the brisk little caller an old family friend, ushered her at once upstairs.
    "I know you don't want to see me, Clara, but I have terms from Irving that you can't afford not to consider."
    "You don't really