Her Infinite Variety (18 page)

Clara walked up Fifth Avenue after her lunch on her way back to Eric's, determined to dispel her irritation with her friend and to justify to herself her claim to the title of realist. Was she indeed putting the fairest and finest face that she could over her resolution to marry a man she didn't love? But stop right there, she warned herself. What did she mean by not loving him? Had she not loved him before the Senate fiasco? And wasn't love still love when it faded with time? Didn't all love do that? Didn't she like him, as much as she liked anyone in the world? Wasn't that perhaps the way Clara Hoyt loved; might it not be all the love she had in her? People talked such guff about love. The real point was that Eric needed her and was going to need her more, and that she was willing and able to supply his needs. What did people want for a nickel? A nickel? But she was talking about a fortune!

And now a horrid thought struck her, and so sharply, too, that she turned her steps into Central Park and sat down on the first bench on the path. Ah, yes, Clara, she now told herself sharply, but isn't your resolution, and your good will, as well, founded on your inner suspicion that the period of their testing may not be too prolonged? That Eric may die? The pain of this was a stabbing one, and she jumped up to relieve it and resume her walk. There had to be a truce to so much introspection! Had she created herself? Was she responsible for the stream of her own consciousness? Or of her unconsciousness? Life had to go on.

She was relieved to find Eric out of his wheelchair and even nattily dressed. He seemed suddenly almost his old self again when he suggested a game of backgammon, and they settled themselves before the board. But when she had won the first play and had placed her cup with the dice upside down on the table she did not pick it up.

"Wait," she said firmly. "I want to talk first about our marriage."

"Fine."

"I've said I'll always be square with you, and I will be. But I must protect you and myself from further demands from your grasping family. Some might say, by out-grasping them. Very well. I'll do just that. I agree to marry you and to look after you for the rest of your life or of my own, whichever is the shorter—"

"But, Clara dear, I've never asked for any such thing!"

"I know that. But in view of what I'm asking I want you to know what I'm offering."

"You mean as a quid pro quo?"

"You might put it that way, if you like."

"Ah, my dear, as to what
I
like!"

"Anyway, here it is. I want you to give a quarter of your estate now to your foundation." She paused. "And put all the rest in an irrevocable trust, with income to yourself for life. Plus a power, of course, to invade the principal for emergencies."

Eric was following her carefully now. "For emergencies?"

"Oh, you know, health, mental incompetence and so on. In the discretion of the trustees. With an income as large as yours it's a power that would probably never be exercised."

"I see. And on my death?"

"On your death half the principal-of the trust would go to your foundation. The other half would be held in further trust and the income paid to your widow for her life."

"That presumably would be you."

"Well, you can't imagine that I've planned all this for Lucile, can you?"

"Hardly. And on my widow's demise?"

"The principal would go to your foundation. Thus everything you have would end up eventually in
your
foundation. Because there would be no estate tax, thanks to the marital deduction."

"Very clever, indeed. You've been talking to a lawyer?"

"No, but I've read some of those bank pamphlets."

"Then you must have learned that to qualify for the deduction I must give you the power to appoint the principal of your trust by will to anyone you like."

"And cut out the foundation?"

"Just so. My widow, for example, might be tempted to exercise the power in favor of her child by a previous marriage."

Clara looked at him carefully. He was smiling; he was playing with her, but he was also serious. "You mean I might leave it all to Sandra? She'll have plenty of Hoyt money, and besides, she's already very anti—big fortune. But I'd be willing to give you my word that the power would never be exercised. I assume that would be enough?"

"You assume correctly." His nod seemed decisive. "And I think the plan is a good one. The only thing I can think of adding at the moment is that I want to make you chairman of the trustees of my foundation."

"Oh, Eric,
you
must be that!"

"I shall sit on the board, yes. But I want you to be chairman. After all, you will be, one day, and you may as well start now." At this his expression grew grave. "There is, however, one question that I want to put to you before I call in Van Alstine. Tell me truly, Clara, do you still love me?" Then he shook his head, as if impatiently. "No, let me change that. Do you love me?"

"Of course, I love you."

"Could you repeat that, leaving out the 'of course'?"

"I love you, Eric."

He gave a little clap with his hands. "The deed of gift to the foundation and the trust will be drawn up this week. They shouldn't take long. I could draft them myself, if necessary. And we can be married as soon as Lucile's decree comes through. I had said that we'd need a doctor's okay, but the way I'm feeling now I have no doubt that we'll get it! Shall we go on with our game?"

Clara lifted her cup. It was absurd; it was even ironic; worse than both, it was grotesque. She had rolled double sixes!

In the days that followed she was haunted by the thought that she had lied to him for the first and only time. But was it really a lie? She kept reassuring herself with the arguments she had used on the bench in Central Park. Was it a lie to deny a purely subjective state of mind? Was it wrong to hoist the banner of the state of mind one
wanted,
to have, the state of mind that one was determined to live by and up to? What
business
was it of anyone else's, even of the man one was going to marry? None!

O
N THE DAY AFTER LUCILE TYLER
received her decree in Reno, Eric and Clara were married in the office of Peter Van Alstine by a judge of the New York Court of Appeals, an old friend and college classmate of the groom. Sandra did not attend but not because she disapproved. She accepted Eric as a stepfather with the same mild but faintly enigmatic good manners with which she had accepted him as her mother's companion. "I'll see you when you get home" was all she said.

Eric owned a small ranch near Phoenix, Arizona, and in view of the state of his health Clara had decided that they would pass a quiet and solitary honeymoon there. Eric slept during most of the flight out on a chartered plane while she skimmed over some applications to the Tyler Foundation, which already, due to the rapidly spreading news of his recent major grant, were beginning to pour in.

She had thought they might discuss one of the more interesting of these at the ranch, but Eric was too tired to do much more than sit in an armchair on the terrace and bask in the winter sun. His mood was subdued but amiable and apparently content; sometimes, when she was sitting by him reading, he would reach over to take her hand and hold it for a moment in silence.

One day at noontime he asked her surprisingly: "Isn't it odd how peaceful it is here?"

"Why should it be odd?"

"Because the desert is so full of hostility. Haven't you noticed? Everything is ready to bite or prick you. Yet the overall effect is curiously benign. I was thinking it's not unlike death. Life is full of pricks and bites, and yet beyond them all—or really perhaps around them all,
in
them all—is peace."

"I had hoped you would find your life, at least on our honeymoon, less threatened."

"Well, you've certainly done everything you could to make it less so, my dear. And anyway, let's hope that nothing as intrusive as death, whenever and however it occurs, will interrupt our honeymoon. Everyone would suppose it had come from too much ardor for my weakened frame. Whereas, alas, the very opposite is true."

"Never fear. There'll be plenty of time for ardor when you're well again."

"And in the meantime, if you spot a handsome cowboy, trust me to look the other way."

"If you keep talking like that, I'll do it in front of you!"

"Ah, how true! You always said I was a voyeur."

The houseboy interrupted their persiflage with Eric's one permitted drink and Clara's gin fizz. "Tell me," she said when the boy had gone, "what has been pricking you. For I don't suppose it's just the scorpions and cacti that have brought on this mood."

"To tell you the truth, I've been a bit worried about Tony. Lisa's settlement was in trust, of course, but his was outright."

Clara scowled into her glass. Would they never be free of the wretched Tony? "Well, he wanted it that way, didn't he?"

"Very much so. Too much so. That's just the point. That may be why I should have protected him."

"Against what? Wine, women and song? They're hardly Tony's problem."

"No, against himself. That right-wing sheet of his has got itself into bad trouble with libel suits, and he's been pouring money into it. Big money, I'm afraid."

"Well, isn't that his lookout? If worst comes to worse, he can always look to his mother."

"Lucile considers herself allergic to giving. Though how she knows it, we can't guess. She's never tried."

"Anyway it's out of your hands, and thank heaven for that. If Tony needs protection against himself, you need it against
him!
And your trust is it."

"I still have the income."

Clara could not restrain her impatience now. "Yes, and if you want to give it all to him, go ahead and do so! But don't tell me about it!"

"I'm sorry, my dear. Please don't get so upset. I have no idea of giving all my income to Tony, or even any considerable slice of it. But there is one thing you could do for me. It troubles me to think how Tony will feel when I go to my reward, or my punishment, whichever it may be, and he finds that he has no share of my estate."

"But he knows that, Eric! He waived all that!"

"He might think that I'd held back some share, however slight, to bequeath to him. My only son! How humiliating for him to read in the newspapers that he's been disinherited! For they'll never mention what I've already given him."

"And what am I expected to do about that? For my share is all in trust, too, you know."

"You can put him on the board of the foundation. And tell him it was my last wish. That will be something, at least. A Tyler son on the Tyler Foundation. It will give him a kind of status. And show him that I still cared."

"Oh, Eric!" she wailed.

"Promise me just that."

After a long pause, she nodded, her eyes angrily closed. "Very well. I promise."

"Thank you, my love."

***

Eric's second stroke felled him soon after their arrival back in New York. He was taken to the hospital, where he lingered for two days in a coma. And on the third the new Mrs. Tyler became his widow.

Clara went through the motions of arranging and attending his large funeral in what struck her as a kind of trance. The relatives, even his children, behaved to her with a hushed formality that required few words and few reactions. His old secretary, stricken but controlled, took most of the details of the service off her hands, and the old butler handled the big buffet lunch that followed it at Eric's apartment with his habitual skill. It seemed to Clara that the etiquette of death provided a blessedly civilized interlude between the end of one life and the resumption of another. Sorrow, expectations, hope and even remorse could wait, relegated to the corners of the dark room whose very emptiness offered her a kind of relief. Even her mother, even Polly, did little more than silently hug her.

It was on the second morning after the funeral, having breakfast with Sandra, that Clara first felt reality peeping into that vacant chamber of her fantasy. Sandra was now sixteen, with lovely dark hair and a pale, handsome, thoughtful countenance. She was never going to rival her mother in looks, Clara fully realized, but she would do well enough in the soberer role for which she was fitted. Mother and daughter had never been intimate, but their quarrels, however sharp, had been soon patched up. It was as if each faced an inward sense that they had to get on together.

Clara wondered now if the girl hated her. She had always followed a rigid rule of never openly cultivating Sandra's affection, never trying to break her down by a flurry of hugs or kisses, or even by a display of maternal sobs. What would come must come of its own.

"Do you want me to wear a mourning band on my sleeve when I go to school?" Sandra asked. "Some girls do."

"Do you want to?"

"Well, most girls don't, usually. But I will if you want me to."

"Thank you, dear, but no, I don't want you to at all. I doubt if I'll even wear black myself, except maybe for a week or so. One of the purposes of mourning attire was that it was supposed to stop people who didn't know from asking embarrassing questions, but everyone I know is well aware that Eric is dead. And for you, it isn't as if he had been your father. Do you think you'll miss him?"

"Oh, yes. He was always so nice to me. And bought me so many lovely things, though I know you shouldn't count that in caring for a person. But I suppose one does, doesn't one?"

"Oh, one can't help but count it! And think of all the lovely things he bought
me.
"

"Will
you
miss him, Mother?"

Clara tried not to look startled. The question was important. Was the girl challenging her at last? Challenging her openly for the first time?

"What makes you think I wouldn't, darling?"

"Oh, simply that you live so much in the present. Daddy says you live more in the present than anyone he's ever known."

Ah, she was deep, the girl! Deep enough to disguise any hostility behind the veil of polite discussion.

"Well, it's the most practical place to live, isn't it? What else did Daddy say about me?"