Her Infinite Variety (12 page)

"In what way, dear?"

"Well, supposing for a year I was to spend the weeks with him in the country and the weekends with you here? Would that be possible?"

Oh, she had all her mother's attention now! And it made her tremble.

"What about school?"

"Maria—that's Aunt Elena's daughter, you know—says I could easily transfer to Greenvale."

"And is that something you want to do?"

"I think I might like to try it, yes."

"Then I'm afraid you must put it out of your mind. This is your home, my dear, and this is where you belong."

Sandra was conscious of her heart beating rapidly. Something stifled inside of her seemed about to erupt. "But suppose it was the best thing for me? Suppose the country and all my cousins and the things we do there were better for me than being in the city? Maria is always saying that!"

"Who else says that? Does Daddy say that?"

Sandra was taken aback. There was a suddenly sharp note in her mother's tone. "Oh, no."

"Does Rosie say that?"

"No, but I think she may think it."

"Well, regardless of who thinks what, my dear, you will have to reconcile yourself to going on as you've been going. You are
my
child and
my
responsibility, and you Eire going to have to put up with my decisions, even if they are not the ones Maria and your stepmother agree with."

"Even if they're the wrong ones?"

"Even so, I'm afraid."

"And even if I love Rosie more than I do you!" Sandra cried in a near shout.

"Even then."

Sandra stared with something like terror at her mother's unflinching gaze. "Oh, Mummie, forgive me!" she moaned, bowing her head down to the table surface.

"Why don't you go to your room, dear, and lie down until you feel calmer? I know this business of living in two places is emotionally confusing, and I think you're really coping with it well, on the whole. Miss Price is off tonight, but after a bit I'll come in and go over your homework to see that you're ready for school tomorrow."

The girl who rose and slowly trailed out of the dining room was a thoroughly defeated one.

E
RIC TYLER
had been perfectly aware of Clara's little ploy in exposing to him Evelyn Byrd's bibulous condition. It neither surprised nor shocked him. He had been too long in the publishing world not to know the ruthlessness of its competition. And women, of course, had to be even sharper than men to make up for the disadvantage of their status. Clara, whose career he had been watching with considerable interest, knew how to use her beauty and her poise as well as her fine intellect to move ahead of others, and she was also, he had noted with approval, acute enough to see just when her social position could be a liability as well as, in other cases, a distinct asset. With truculent or indurated liberals, for example, or with the kind of chip-on-the-shoulder, socially insecure reverse snobs who would find an intended putdown in any mention of a famous name, she would never allude to a Hoyt connection, a private school or a charity ball. With those, on the other hand, who liked to find in her an opening door at least to dirt about people who featured in the gossip columns, she would supply amusing and scandalous anecdotes, and even, on craftily selected occasions, a rare introduction. The more he learned about her, the more he began to see her as one of the coming "marshals" in what he liked to think of as his little Napoleonic empire.

He had never been a man to underestimate women. His own marriage, a long struggle ending in a draw, had taught him a good deal. He and the proud beautiful Lucile now lived in large separate abodes in town and country, but dined together on regular occasions and gave joint parties on holidays for their two children and the latters' friends. He well remembered, as the flotilla commander of a group of amphibious vessels in the English Channel in 1944 taking German prisoners of war to Britain, how the men had filed docilely on board, accepting defeat after years of battle and glad to be out of it, but how the women, usually nurses, had to be dragged onto the ships shrieking "Heil Hitler!" He knew which was the stronger sex.

Eric had a regular table for lunch at the Colony Restaurant, where he would be joined by the various editors of his periodicals summoned in rotation at the discretion of his all-knowing and affectionately tyrannical elderly secretary, Annie Hally. Clara was on the list, and she had added notably to the conviviality of the noon meals. One day he told Mrs. Hally that he wanted to lunch alone with her.

"Keep your eyes open," she warned him. "She's a sharpie, that girl."

"You think she'll take me, Annie?"

"For whatever you've got!"

"Not while I have
you
to guard me."

"Does that mean you want me at the lunch?"

"No! Isn't it enough that you boss me in the office?"

He was pleased that Clara did not try to make any vain point with him by being five or ten minutes late—though she had been told that they would be lunching
à deux.
She was at the table when he arrived and had already ordered herself a cocktail. For several minutes they discussed the Alger Hiss case, which was ending its second trial. Eric, as was his wont, took a balanced view.

"He may be guilty. Indeed, I rather lean to that. It's all very well to say that he was Holmes's law clerk and that Chambers is a communist meatball, but Hiss's story about how they met doesn't add up."

Clara conceded this. "But wouldn't it be better for all of us—and the country at large—if Hiss
were
innocent? If he's convicted, these crazy witch-hunts may get out of hand."

"Would you distort the facts to save him?"

"If I could do it with nobody knowing? Certainly I would!"

"Then the truth means nothing to you?"

"I'd be Pilate. What is truth? The
real
truth is that men like Hiss may have been guilty of youthful indiscretions, but they're no great risk today. All kinds of people flirted with communism in the Depression. You know
that,
Eric."

"So your 'real' truth, as you call it, is that the whole communist scare is a red herring?"

"Well, isn't it? And isn't the job of a great editor to be on the side of the real truth?"

"My trouble is that I have an old-fashioned fondness for facts."

"But you live in a world where they hardly matter. Where the issues are all!"

He regarded her glowing countenance with amusement. "And you believe that an editor, by proclaiming a truth, real or imagined, can have any significant influence on the march of events?"

"Of course I do."

"You don't believe, with Tolstoy, that we're all swept helplessly along in the turbulent river of history? That even Napoleon was like a man inside a carriage pulling at stray straps and thinking he was making it move?"

"No. I believe that Napoleon changed the history of Europe. And not for the better, either."

"But I, I gather you are telling me, should not be like him. I should be using such editorial powers as I possess for the betterment of mankind?"

"Why not? What else are you here for but to try to make things a little better? Or at least to keep them from getting much worse."

Eric was startled at the clarity of his realization that he was getting too interested in this woman. She emanated a power that was distinctly stronger than any needed to run a fashion magazine. What was it? She had a mind, certainly, but was it an interesting one? A speculative, imaginative intellect? He was not at all sure.

He decided to probe.

"Surely what you demand of me as an editor must be, at least to some degree, true of yourself?"

"Oh, yes. As you imply, it's a matter of degree."

"And was it to put yourself in a better position to improve the world, or at least to keep it from worsening, that you so neatly revealed Evelyn Byrd's little weakness to me?"

Clara was wonderful. Not the faintest blush obscured the fairness of her countenance. Her eyes widened slightly, and the hint of a nod acknowledged the justice of his observation. Her tone, when she answered, was almost matter-of-fact.

"Your discovery of Evelyn's little weakness was only a matter of time. If you had not been, as I suspect, already aware of it. If you were going to sack her, as it was inevitable that you should, you were going to need a clear episode, and I furnished you with one. It still seems to me that I handled the situation in the way that was quickest and least cruel to all concerned. And hasn't it worked out that way? The shock sent Evelyn to AA, which was where she belonged, and
Style
is now in more competent hands."

"And Eric Tyler has been successfully manipulated. Shall I continue to be?"

She smiled. "Men don't much care for manipulative women—is that what you're telling me? Well, you needn't fear me. I'm more concerned with getting behind you than getting around you. I'm happy to be on your team."

"Then I won't have to be on my guard? My secretary thinks I should be."

"The dragon? That's what we call her, you know. Of course, she thinks every woman in your organization is trying to marry you. Half of them probably are."

"But surely they must know I'm not available. It must have got around that I have an extremely retentive consort."

"Do you think that would stop anybody? It would only add zest to the game. But Mrs. Tyler and the dragon need fear me not. I had a rich husband and I let him go. I'm not breaking my neck to find another."

It struck him, and not altogether pleasantly, that he might be letting her slam the door too hard on the possibility of other relationships. Looking at the hand with the long tapering fingers that she had rested on the table, he was seized by a sudden urge to place his own on top of it. He resisted the urge.

"I suppose word has got around the journals that my wife and I lead rather separate lives."

She met his eyes now with a frankly inquiring stare. "What am I supposed to deduce from
that
remark?"

"Simply that in the beginning of my friendship with a brilliant and beautiful woman I do not care to see our relationship doomed in perpetuity to business."

"Oh, I think we can leave the future to take care of itself," she said easily. "We're free, white and something more than twenty-one. But I'll tell you one respect in which I differ from many of my sex. I will always be perfectly frank with you. You will always know exactly what I'm up to."

"Those are brave words. From a lovely lady."

"You will find that they are true ones."

And he decided that he was going to believe her. Or at least to try to believe her.

***

Augustus Tyler, Eric's father, had been over forty when Eric was born in 1900, so that he belonged to a generation hatched in the Civil War and bearing lifelong, bitter traditions from the conflict that had enshrouded their infancy. As a child he had received the blessing of his grandfather's cousin, ex-president John Tyler, then a member of the Confederate legislature, and he had grown up in Richmond to become an unreconstructed Virginia gentleman who believed that the Yankee victory had turned a once proud and noble nation over to a swarm of unscrupulous and uncultivated profiteers. But where Augustus Tyler had differed from so many of his University of Virginia classmates was that he had seen that his best chance of survival was to beat the pirates of the Gilded Age at their own game. He had moved to New York and pushed his way into the railroad business and made a fortune in Union Pacific before it was taken over by Jay Gould. He never, however, changed his attitude towards either his rivals or his associates; a proud, fierce and dominating man, he refused to have social relations with any whom he regarded as of inferior class. He built himself a stone castle on Fifth Avenue and walled himself up in it like a lonely Fafner.

For his wife, a lovely Richmond belle who might have brightened life in the castle and even reconciled her husband to the more attractive elements of New York society, had died giving birth to their second child, a daughter. Augustus had been for a long period too plunged in black grief to give the proper attention to his infants—besides which he had some choked resentment of the child who had cost him her mother's life—and they were left to the care of competent servants. In time, though, he could not help but grow interested in the bright and charming boy that Eric was becoming, and this interest waxed at last into love. Yet Augustus could never quite rid himself of the uneasy feeling that this youth had been born out of time and place: that he should have been a southern planter of antebellum days and that the problems he would face in a material Yankee world were virtually insoluble. Unfortunately, he could not help sharing his gloomy forebodings with the lad. Eric invited confidences almost irresistibly.

"Old aristocracies that were rooted in the soil," he used to tell young Eric, "had some degree of stability. For better or worse they lasted for generations. But once a family is rooted in commerce it is ruled by money. The same pattern repeats itself over and over. A tycoon makes a fortune but doesn't basically know what to do with it. Or much care. The making is all. His heirs will have taste and good manners. They will buy pretty things and even contribute to pretty causes. They will dispose of Daddy's ugly mansion and erect Palladian villas. But the grandchildren or great-grandchildren will let the whole thing go to pot. Some families, like the Astors, can stretch it out a bit by exercising a kind of primogeniture, but the end is always the same. You can't beat the money. It will get you, one way or another, at last."

"Then, Father, don't leave me any."

"No, no, you can't evade your destiny that easily. If I disinherited you, you'd end by hating me every time a bill came in. No, you must take your chances like everyone else, my boy. And who knows? You may be the exception that proves my rule."

Eric's youth slipped smoothly past. Possessed of charm, intelligence and the kind of glowing good looks that attract others without arousing envy, of an easy manner and gentle disposition, openhanded with the large allowance that his father freely gave him, he was popular wherever he went. At Saint Paul's School in New Hampshire he became a monitor, an editor of the paper and a near champion in the minor sports of tennis and squash; at Yale he was Phi Beta Kappa, class poet and a member of the senior society, Scroll & Key. But he had a constant feeling that it all came too easily. A harsh fellow editor of the
Yale Literary Magazine,
one who later became a famed novelist, told him that his verse was "too sweetly Tennysonian," and Eric not only agreed but incurred the man's contempt by agreeing. What was the good of his gifts in a world where business was the primary reality? And what need did he have of any gift in a business world that his father had already conquered for him?