Her Infinite Variety (13 page)

He used to imagine that the war in Europe would either be his end or his proving ground and that he could only wait to find out which, but the armistice in 1918 while he was still a sophomore removed this solution. On graduation from Yale he was planning the postponement of any life decision by a prolonged trip around the globe when the same Yale critic of his verses, now more maturely aware of what the Tyler fortune might do for letters, suggested that Eric found an avant-garde literary magazine with them both as editors.

Eric did so, and his life changed.

The future novelist, fortunately, was brilliant, and he attracted some brilliant young writers. Eric's small but expensively printed periodical soon drew the attention of the literary world. Eric was pleased, but he always reminded himself that his success lay in promoting the talent of others. Yet wasn't that a talent in itself? Certainly, but it was a talent that needed the constant backing of wealth. Well, that he had and presumably would continue to have! The vital role of the money in his life he vowed never to understate.

His father saw the enterprise as the first step to empire; he became almost enthusiastic. "Maybe you
will
reverse the old formula, my boy! Maybe you'll become a bigger tycoon than your old man."

Augustus in his last years opened his coffers to Eric; the latter could buy anything he wanted, and he did: a stumbling fashion magazine that needed reorganization, a theatrical review, a literary quarterly, a liberal evening newspaper, a sports journal. Augustus began to take a new interest in life; he told people that the Tylers were like the Medici: he was Cosimo, Pater Patriae, and Eric was Lorenzo il Magnifico! He died almost happy. His boy had proved him wrong!

He left the bulk of his fortune to Eric after a substantial legacy to his brusque, stout, sports-loving daughter, Elmina, who had idolized him, probably because she was so obviously the less favored. Eric was now in a position to piece together a little empire of paper, and he did so, deriving both amusement and edification by adopting a variety of sometimes jibing causes. It bothered some of his editors, for example, that he should own a deeply conservative organ of the extreme right in arts and letters and a radical poetry quarterly that was constantly assailed as pornographic. But Eric's prime concern was interesting himself. He was acutely aware of just what his intellectual friends thought of him; he knew some despised him as a rich dabbler and that others suspected him of being a sinister agent of capitalist—or was it communist?—forces. Yet all treated him to constant and shameful demonstrations of flattery. He could trust none of them. But he had learned to conceal his distrust under a veneer of charm. He wondered at times if the effect of flattery was not to make one flatter oneself; was it that which made him hope that the underlying motive that justified everything he did was the quest for truth?

Because he never believed in the sincerity of his new friends and allies, because he could not assess their interest in himself as anything but their need to pick his pocket, he tended, like many of the very rich, to confine much of his social life to his economic peers. He knew that it could be a fallacy to credit these with disinterestedness—sometimes they simply craved the security and consolation of abutting moneybags—but at least they weren't always contrasting his wealth to their own poverty, and they joined him enthusiastically in the expensive sports in which he increasingly indulged: polo and court tennis. If he was as cynical as his father, at least he didn't show the rough edges. He could afford to be easygoing and agreeable so long as his life contained all the beautiful things that he desired: pictures, horses, houses and words.

It was in his quest for beauty, however, that he made his one disastrous mistake. Lucile Morris was a tall, statuesque beauty, an Astarte, with a proud manner and a small mind, the daughter of old Knickerbocker Morrises who had made their peace with new wealth. When Eric first met her, she struck him as precisely the kind of woman whom he had been destined by all the paternal predictions to marry. He was forewarned. And it was also evident from her aloofness and casual treatment of him that the propriety of his southern genealogy was obscured by the New York blinders so firmly attached to her beautiful eyes and that to her narrow social sense he was just another tycoon's son whom her father's financial plight required her to entertain. But what he had never anticipated was that such a woman could so rapidly and effortlessly enslave his senses.

For he found himself obsessed with a fierce determination to impress his image upon her. He was always cordially enough received by her parents, but she herself, even as his visits proliferated, seemed resigned, like a dutiful princess of imperial Rome, to adapt herself to the matrimonial exigencies of her family, even if they required a barbarian. Did she actually make him feel that there might be some crazy justification for his fantasy of himself as an Attila casting lustful eyes at the proud daughter of the degenerate Caesars? Or was it simply some basic instinct in her, coming down from jungle forebears, that made her do precisely what whetted his appetite the most? Certainly she was not coached in this by her mother, whose ill-disguised terror of seeing this great catch get away was almost comic.

And had he ever really thought he could make an impression on her? Or had he simply wanted to possess and crush the beautiful unresponding creature? Had his marriage been a kind of rape? Had he bound himself to an illusion? At any rate in the end he had found himself tied to a woman with whom he did not share a single important interest. His journals and his magazines, his theories and his intellectual quests, were to her only the kind of idle things a man got into if he didn't go "downtown." She was more interested in his polo, for that at least she liked to watch.

Not that they fought. They really didn't care enough about each other to fight. Lucile was entirely self-possessed; she was calm and cool in the daytime and calm and cool at night. Their two children, Tony and Lisa, were born in the first three years of their marriage; after that they did not share a bedroom. He had affairs to which she paid scant but disdainful attention; she, so far as anyone knew, had none. She seemed adequately content with the splendid separate households that they maintained in the city and on Long Island; he sometimes appeared at her parties and she at his. Her good looks became a bit hard, but she was probably as happy as her cold temperament allowed her to be. She always believed that she was right.

None of Eric's affairs had been either very deep or long lasting. Most had been with the wives of friends in Long Island north shore society; the husbands bore him little grudge as they played the same game themselves. But now, more than twenty years after his marriage, he had a foreboding that something different was in store for him. He suspected that the remarkable blond editor of
Style
was about to take over an important role in his life and that she knew it.

She was certainly nothing that his father had predicted. She had no part in the latter's arcane prophecies of what would happen to the makers and heirs of fortunes in the cycles of relentless economic history. He began to think of her as cutting the woven rope of the Norns with the silver knife of free will. But whatever she was up to, she would be amusing to watch.

I
T WAS ONLY A YEAR
after their first lunch alone that Eric relieved Clara of her editorship of
Style
and installed her in his Madison Avenue offices as the senior vice-president of Tyler Publications. She was now his right-hand man in the management of his enterprises. This had come about as the result of many further lunches and the establishment between them of a kind of partnership in the development of a philosophy that would lend some coherence to the olio of his journals and magazines. But despite the fact that they now dined together frequently and that she appeared at all his parties and he at hers, he had made no move towards a more intimate relationship. He seemed to regard their bond as something unique and presumably valuable in his life, something that might even be spoiled by any alteration. And she wondered if she didn't feel the same way.

Right after her move into the big airy office just down a corridor from his, with the splendid view across the East River to the blue and gray expanses of Queens, she had decided to tackle the formidable Annie Hally. She marched into the older lady's little room, closed the door behind her and seated herself firmly on the one extra chair.

"I'll be plain. I know you haven't wanted me here, but things will be a lot easier for both of us if we agree to work together. Let me state flatly at the outset that I have no wish to rule the roost here or to marry your boss."

"But, Mrs. Hoyt, I can't imagine who gave you the idea that I ever thought any such thing!"

"Oh, yes you can. Everyone knows everything around here. I haven't spent years in this business for nothing. But the point is that I, like you, have what's best for Eric Tyler in mind. Can we have a pact?"

Annie at this point had pulled herself together and now hugged to her chest both her dignity and her suspicions. "I don't suppose I'd last very long around here if we didn't, would I?"

"No, I'm not like that. You'll find I'm not like that at all. You have nothing to fear from me, pact or no pact. But it would be easier and simpler if we worked together."

The secretary was clearly taken aback now. It was evident that she was wondering if she could have misjudged this younger woman sitting so boldly and confidently before her. "I don't know what you mean by a pact. I should certainly like to cooperate with you in everything that concerns Mr. Tyler's best interests."

"Good. Then we're agreed. And I can explain to you now with complete candor just what my relations with Mr. Tyler are. We are good friends and business associates, and that is
all
But if in the future that relationship should turn to one more distant—or even one
less
distant—I give you my word that I will let you know."

Annie's instant flush showed her deep embarrassment at this. "I have no wish to intrude on anyone's private life, Mrs. Hoyt."

"I'm sure of that. But nonetheless I shall keep you informed."

With Annie won over, the rest of the office had rapidly followed suit.

***

Polly Milton had married her diplomat, Stuart Madison, and for the past two years had been living in Paris whither he had been transferred from Panama to be third secretary at the embassy. Clara would have thought it the perfect site for Polly, whose French was fluent, whose skills as a hostess were proficient and whose understanding of Gallic guests was acute. Yet it was not an exuberant Polly who lunched with her on a brief visit to New York for a family funeral. Her old friend seemed to have learned to view the world with a steady but unrelenting eye.

"Stuart is never going to be an ambassador," she told Clara flatly. "He's too old school, and the poor hounded State Department is anxious to show a new look. The great thing now is for a diplomat to be popular where he is sent, even if it's with horrid fascist types. We don't seem to agree with Bismarck, who said he didn't deem it a virtue in his legates to be loved in the nation to which they were accredited.
Why
were they loved, he wanted to know. What had they given away?"

"But, Polly, that should be a feather in
your
cap. You must be popular in Paris society."

"I am! But the ironic thing is that just those talents that make one popular in an old society strike the moderns as undemocratic, snobbish and fancy-pants. The upper echelons value me, all right. The ambassador calls me to act as his hostess whenever his ailing wife is too ailing—but that isn't what they admire or talk up. And I believe that Stuart is actually jealous of my success. Perhaps not even consciously. But I shouldn't be surprised if that was behind his application for a hardship post. I wouldn't be able to outshine him giving that perfect little dinner party in a mud hut."

"I wonder if you wouldn't. But will you really be sent to some jungle or iceberg?"

"No, I think I've taken care of that. A little, well-placed whimper to our ambassador. He doesn't want to lose me. But never mind all that. Your career is what I want to hear about. I gather you're really going places. Your fame has crossed the Atlantic. Someone put it to me that you were making liberalism chic."

"Of course, that someone meant it sardonically," Clara retorted after a moment's reflection. "But I wonder if I don't rather like it. Perhaps attractive would be a better word than chic. We used to associate liberalism with shorthaired mannish women and ranting, unshaven men. And the beautiful people who did the little things well were accused of not being able to do the big things at all. But, damn it all, Polly, you and I
do
do the big things well! And if I can put the left wing in black ties and ball gowns, so to speak, maybe liberalism will actually be the better for it!"

"Watch out they don't call you a parlor pink."

"That's the danger, of course. You've got to have charm and a sense of humor, and you mustn't be silly. I'll send you an interview I've just done with Senator Jack Kennedy. I miss my guess if he's not one of those surfing on the wave of the future."

"Even with that terrible father?"

"Oh, we can blot him out. Or feature him as an old dear of a survivor of a lawless age. Cuddly because his fangs have been drawn. The press can do anything, you know. And I'm pushing Eric to buy a TV station."

"Tell me about Eric. Are you and he an item?"

"No, dear, we're not."

"Then what are you?"

"You may well ask. I'm not at all sure that I know."

"Well, do you...? How shall I put it, in this new day and age? As we used to say, do you fancy him?"

Clara debated this. "Oh, yes, I think so. And yet, it's funny. I'm in no hurry. I find things rather pleasant and restful just the way they are."

"And of course, he's older."

"By seventeen years. But that's not in it. Maybe that's what really suits me. Maybe it's what I've always needed in a man."