Her Infinite Variety (14 page)

"Well, don't wait too long."

"Forgive me, my dear, but I thought you had implied that in your own case you might not have waited long enough."

"Ah, but that was in my case. Yours is a very different one. You may be on your way to proving that a great lady can still be a great man."

"Oh, Polly, what guff."

"But great as you are, you're still, I gather, dependent on this Eric. And he may be getting, at
his
age (never forget
that!
) too used to your idea of the perfect friendship. There's nothing in friendship between a man and a woman. There never has been."

"You've been too long in Gay Paree. It may be time you came home. There've been a lot of changes here."

"But perhaps not as many as you think."

"So it's your idea I must lure him to my couch?"

"Just don't stand in his way."

Clara gave her friend's advice a good deal more consideration than she admitted to her. She made no marked alteration in her behavior with Eric except to make no further references to the nature of their relationship. She had been inclined to congratulate him and herself on having worked out a uniquely satisfactory partnership between the sexes. Now she was silent about this. But she knew she was dealing with an extremely subtle and observant man. It was not long before she made out that he had flared the difference.

When he decided that the time had come to change their course, he did so in the simplest possible way. He asked her to a late lunch with him alone at their usual table on a Friday and ordered a bottle of wine, which was unusual as they typically contented themselves with a single cocktail. Just before the postprandial coffee he invited her to take the afternoon off and go with him to his apartment.

"I've given the staff the day off," he added quietly.

"Because you assumed I'd come?"

"I assumed nothing, my dear. I deduced it from a slight variation in your manner to me. Was I wrong?"

"No. I guess you rarely are."

"Then our feelings are mutual. I don't think we're going to have anything to regret."

She wondered a moment if she should ask him to define his feelings. But no, she decided, it was better this way. There was something arousing, something erogenous, in his very restraint. Suddenly she laughed.

"You know how you make me feel? Shy, almost virginal. Isn't it funny? I'm suddenly shivering like a little girl at the exciting things I'm about to be taught!"

"It may be something like that for me, too."

"You! With all your experience!"

"But what does that amount to?"

That afternoon she discovered that he was right. She knew that it was a new experience for her, and she suspected that it was one for him. Their lovemaking was gentler than what she had experienced with her husband or Rory or with either of the two men who had briefly diverted her in the more recent past, and yet it was something more intense, too. She found there was a good deal that she could do to enhance Eric's pleasure, and this filled her with a strange new tenderness, faintly filial in nature. Afterwards, when they sat silently on a sofa and listened to Saint-Saens's organ symphony, she wondered if she could not classify her emotion, not simply as love, but as first love.

On Monday morning she went before Eric arrived to Annie Hally's office and told her what had happened. The secretary turned scarlet with embarrassment and could hardly choke out a comment, but she was overwhelmed by the compliment of so intimate a disclosure and she changed in a minute from Clara's ally to Clara's slave.

Her mother's reaction was a good deal less enthusiastic. Her father had suffered a second heart attack, which had clouded his memory and confined him to a wheelchair in the retirement home in New Haven to which they had had to move, so there was no need to take him into her confidence, but Clara knew how large a role she played in her mother's imagination and daily fantasies, and she thought it only kind to keep her up to date with her daughter's goings-on. She did so at a lunch on one of Violet's shopping days in the city.

"But, darling, an affair, that's fine, as far as it goes, but it can't go far. You can't live openly with the man."

"Why not?"

"It would be a scandal!"

"Oh, not these days. The young all do it. But I agree that I couldn't share an apartment with Eric. Not that in his world pretty much anything doesn't go, but certain appearances are still kept up. His friends, and some of mine, too, don't like things thrown in their faces. But it's perfectly acceptable for he and I to be a known thing and for us to be asked out together like a married couple."

"Isn't that already the case?"

"I guess it is. As a matter of fact, Eric and I are probably the only ones who didn't know we've been having an affair."

"But, darling child, why can't you be like other people? Why doesn't Eric get a divorce and marry you?"

"It would be terribly expensive. His wife is a very grasping woman."

"But surely he's rich enough for that!"

"Maybe, but he hates to hurt her. I think he feels guilty about having married her at all."

"Hurt
her!
What about hurting
you?
"

"Well, that's the real point, isn't it?
Me.
I'm not even sure that I'd marry Eric Tyler if he was free."

"Oh, Clara. How like you!"

"Exactly. How like me. And I intend to keep right on being like me."

Clara had further reason to feel herself a chapter unto herself, enclosed between two generations, when she tried to determine how her daughter, Sandra, felt about her frequent visits to Eric.

Sandra, now thirteen, was a dark-haired sober young lady—a lady rather than a girl—with a deeply gazing dark stare, who stood at the top of her class at the Chapin School and was possessed of a formidable memory. She treated her mother with a polite but faintly factitious affection, subject to rare but violent bursts of temper. She still went for weekends to her father on Long Island and never spoke of either parent to the other. That she judged them both, Clara was sure, and she doubted that that judgment was tempered with more than a modicum of mercy. The child was almost impenetrable.

"Is Mr. Tyler going to be my stepfather?" she asked her mother suddenly one morning at breakfast.

"Has someone suggested to you that he might be?"

"Oh, yes."

Clara didn't have to ask who. It was Monday morning, and the girl had returned the night before from the weekend visit. "Would you like him to be?"

"Well, it makes him easier to explain to people. Lots of girls in my class have stepfathers. It's a very usual thing."

"Can't you just tell people he's a friend?"

"But he's not my friend, Mummie. He's as old as some of the girls' grandfathers."

"Maybe you should call him Pops."

"I think I'm going to go on calling him Mr. Tyler."

And that was all Sandra had to say on the subject.

Clara had an easier time with Eric's daughter, Lisa, who was twenty-two, already litigating her first divorce and anxious to show her modernity by treating Clara with the same casual and faintly impudent familiarity that she had used with her father's other lady friends. Clara smoothly but firmly put their relationship on a more formal basis.

"I realize that I'm closer to your age than to your father's," she told her, "and God knows I'm not interested in being a mother figure. You've got one already, and I'm sure she's more than enough. But you must understand that, misguided though I may be, I believe I'm playing a very different role in your father's life than any of his old girl friends. Why don't you treat me as his executive officer and forget about
l'amour?
"

"Shall I call you sir?"

"It might be an excellent start!"

Lisa took this docilely enough. She needed an intermediary with her father, who was inclined to be disgusted at the mess she made of her life and financial affairs, and her mother had almost given her up. She was pretty in a rather banal blond fashion and had amiable manners, and she prided herself on her down-to-earth "what's your racket?" manner. She had convinced herself that she was superior to the older forms of snobbery and was sublimely unaware that her rebellion had been against social attitudes long superseded and that her laziness and impatience made her an easy prey to the new and subtler methods of fortune hunters and social climbers posing as egalitarians. Clara tried, with only mild success, to open her eyes to the fact that her closest pals were obvious sycophants.

Eric smiled at her efforts. He was not sanguine. "The only thing that can be done for Lisa has been done," he assured her. "I've tied up her money in an iron trust. The capital can't be invaded even for an operation to save her life. So her follies are at least restricted to her income."

Tony, Lisa's senior by two years, was a very different matter. He was a smaller and slighter version of his father with only a modest share of the latter's good looks and none of the charm. Possessed of a sharp but too literal mind, and endowed with a minimum of imagination, he distrusted his father's aristocratic disdain of public opinion and could not see any point in having publications if they did not reach the largest possible circulation. His job in the family business was to run a highly conservative but popular news magazine. Clara had no difficulty in picking up his concealed but deep distrust of her: it was only too evident that he regarded her influence on his father as just the sort that he least needed. She hardly needed Annie Hally's warning about him.

"Keep an eye on Tony. He thinks we're all fools, even his old man, and can't wait for the day when everything here will be his."

"And then what will he do with it?"

"Who knows? If we've gone communist, he'll wear a red shirt, and if we've gone fascist he'll wear a black one."

"But surely Eric knows what his only son is like."

"Tony is his father's blind spot. He's really devoted to that young man."

"And that's not an affection that Tony returns?"

"Tony's a cold fish."

Clara had many opportunities to study Eric's son. He occupied an office on the same floor and sometimes joined the paternal table at lunch. And he talked a lot. She thought she could make out, behind his highly honed sharpness and his neat punctilious appearance, a smug conviction that he could pick up whatever was essential in any public reaction to a new event or a new idea. The danger was, as Annie Hally had predicted, that he seemed to believe that whatever that reaction was, the press should go along with it. Because it
was.
And what was had to be true. Tony must have felt that there was some kind of virtue in the acceptance, by a son of privilege, of the overturning of old-caste values in a new world of equals. But didn't he also accept—mightn't so prim a fellow even favor—a future that would veer to the right (as the political trend now indeed seemed to point), that would resuscitate laissez-faire, cut taxes and welfare and even cater to bigoted religious sects? Did he not see his father's empire as too small and diversified?
He
would be a Hearst!

But how did his father see him? That had to be the point. Well, Eric certainly loved him. Of that Clara had no doubt. Tony indeed might have been the only human Eric had loved—at least until she had come along. She wondered if she could see in such paternal devotion a sense that Tony might be the proper heir of his grandfather Tyler, that he was a realist, a true man, not plagued by nagging doubts, a competent manager who could handle the people's sources of information the way the people wanted them handled and not make an intellectual parlor game of them.

Then wasn't it her job, not only for her own sake but even more basically for Eric's, to remove the bandage from his eyes? She didn't fool herself. If she were going to do it, she would have to hit and to hit hard.

It was not going to be easy, either, to find an occasion, as Tony insisted on consulting his father on business matters alone, but Annie Hally's information that he was now bad-mouthing her to the staff and her own conviction that he was trying to undermine her with his father (the sort of thing that Eric would never tell her) induced her to keep a sharp lookout. The occasion at last presented itself on a rare day at noon when the three of them found themselves alone at the luncheon table and Eric happened to ask his son about the proposed renewal of a horoscope column in Tony's news magazine.

"Can I talk to you about that later, Dad?"

"No, why not here? I'm glad to get Clara's input."

Tony glanced with muffled hostility at the proposed adviser. "It's a very popular column, as we all know."

"But we all also know it's hogwash," Clara retorted. "I think it's a disgrace to the Tyler name."

Tony's lips tightened, and his eyes roved from her to his father. "If we kill it, it may cost us a lot of subscribers."

"So what?" Clara challenged him. "What's the point of promoting trash if you don't have to? What's the point of having money if you're going to spend it lowering the already abysmally low standard of American journalism?
We might as well shut up shop and sit on a sunny beach in Florida!"

"I think it's Daddy's shop, if you don't mind my saying so. And it's up to him to shut it or not. But I hazard a guess that he believes with me that if you have a message to get across to the public, you have to have a popular organ to deliver it."

"And what, pray, is the message that you and your father are trying to get across in
your
journal? Forgive me if I haven't got it. Perhaps it was too sandwiched in between the horoscopes and your growing emphasis on violent crimes."

Tony had turned a bright pink. He faced his father. "Surely we stand for truth in reporting the news, Dad!"

But Clara was relentless. "Aren't you begging the question?"

Eric had been smiling as he watched them, for all the world, as Clara reflected in sudden irritation, as if he had been watching two cocks in a ring! Now he intervened. "I think you're being a bit hard on Tony, my dear. You have to have something you can sell if you're in the business at all."