Her Infinite Variety (4 page)

And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She chose now to see in her friend Polly all that was meretricious in the "great world" that she—solely at her mother's instigation, she now insisted—had been so assiduously cultivating. Polly was mean, snobbish, crassly materialistic and a slave to the smallest rules of fashion. And her other friends were not much better. Clara resolved that her future would not lie among such women or the type of mates she could easily predict they would choose.

It was at this point in her life that she first became aware of Bobbie Lester as a singularly attractive young man. She had known him for a year as her father's assistant and had at first associated him too closely with her family to see him in a romantic light. But that rapidly passed as she turned her eyes to new horizons, and Bobbie, as if drawn by a magnet, had immediately responded to her new attention with a passionate and flattering ardor. The impact of this had shocked her into a new vision of the future, stripped of the tinsel goals of Polly and her crowd, a life shared with this handsome and noble-spirited youth in an idealistic academy devoted to training boys in how best to serve their community. She would aid and assist him in his tasks; she would even, she already suspected, make up for his perhaps too naive and trusting nature by cultivating the senior masters and trustees of the school and smoothing his way to an ultimate headmastership!

When her mother had rudely torn the tinted glasses from her deluded eyes and she had for the first time seen poor Bobbie, not in the flesh—for that was perhaps all she
had
seen—but in the full poverty of his simple and honest self, she had known she could never marry him. She had fled, cutting her college courses, to the oasis of a sympathetic godmother in Philadelphia and had remained in seclusion for a week until Bobbie had tracked her down and followed her. At her godmother's firm insistence she had at last consented to see him, and this scene, not quite as painful to her as she had feared, ensued:

"You fell for a girl who doesn't exist, Bobbie," she told him sadly, and it came over her that she was watching herself, as she would have an actress on the stage. "When you realize that, you will be cured of your infatuation. And far better off. Believe me."

"But how can you say that? How can you say that when you're right there before me, the girl I adore?" There were actually tears in his eyes, which didn't help his cause at all. "How can you be a different Clara from the one I love? The one I'll always love?"

"There's no way that I can make this easier for you. You'll just have to learn to take it. No is no, Bobbie. Talk to my mother. She might be able to explain it to you."

"Your mother deceived me. When I went to her after you left she led me to believe that everything would be all right. Was she just playing for time?"

"I don't know. But she wasn't deceiving
me.
"

And that was that.

***

Clara had met Trevor Hoyt at the end of his Yale senior year and of her junior at Vassar; in the fall and winter that followed he was working in his father's bank on Wall Street (he had opted, after all, to start there), and they were seeing each other every weekend, either on his visits to Poughkeepsie or hers to New York. He treated her with an easygoing, jocular, inoffensively possessive charm of manner; he talked about his being in love with her with just enough mild self-mockery not to alarm her into the idea that she was making any serious commitment. When he departed for the city or put her on a train to Vassar, he would embrace her with considerable fervor, but he did not press her for greater concessions, though she knew he had had a reputation for wildness in his sophomore year prior to an unexplained change of heart that had put him on a sounder track. As his mother had once unexpectedly put it to her: "We don't know quite what happened. Trevor suddenly grew up." That he was now a soberly directed and very ambitious young man nobody doubted. Clara at times was almost in awe of him.

It was now apparent that any social status she might have lost with Polly Milton's snotty little crowd had been wholly regained by being Trevor Hoyt's "best girl." Any lingering opprobrium for a tiresome parlor pink had vanished in the hard sunlight emitted by the House of Hoyt. Whatever it was that Clara had wanted to attain, whatever fantasy of belonging, of being in the right crowd, the
gratin,
the
société la plus fermée,
had now been achieved with a totality that made her wonder if it really existed as a state more desirable than—or even very different from—any other that she had or might have achieved. At any rate, a world once spurned was less contemptible when it smiled.

Certainly the Hoyts themselves welcomed her, almost too warmly. They evidently wanted to get their boy settled, and wasn't the lovely Miss Longcope with her bright eyes and bright mind and unimpeachable academic background just what the doctor ordered? They had no need of a dowry; money dripped from every branch of the family tree. Mr. Hoyt, as gray and gaunt and thin and silently authoritative as a great banker should be, though with a spicy reputation for marital infidelity, paid her the small, faintly smiling attention that Trevor's older sisters seemed to regard as a flattering departure from his usual reserve. They, Elena and Maribel, one wed to an aide of Mr. Hoyt and the other to a young partner in the bank's counsel, were big bony handsome women, strongly resembling their brother, with blunt but friendly manners. The Hoyt genes must have been strong, for none of the three children favored their mother, who was round and square-faced and inclined to be dumpy. Charlotte Hoyt, however, made up for her looks in the creative energy with which she dominated her family and household in all matters save those rare ones where a decisive and unappealable paternal veto was imposed.

Clara felt that Mrs. Hoyt approved of her but only after a very shrewd appraisal. She knew that Trevor's mother had listened to her talking even when she hadn't appeared to, as this remark of hers revealed:

"I enjoy so hearing you and Trevor discuss things with each other. It's not like other boys and girls at all! You really listen to each other. You actually communicate!"

But did they? Clara was beginning to wonder about that. It was not that Trevor lacked interest in herself or any keenness of observation. He would even on occasion show surprisingly detailed knowledge on subjects that she would have thought beneath or beyond his interests: obscure points of family genealogy, quaint historical incidents, famous scandals, exotic scenes from old movies. And he wanted to know all kinds of things about her own life: her courses at Vassar, her plans for the future, her politics, her interest in advertising. But there still seemed a curious lack of intimacy between them. Was it that he was like a director trying her out for a role? That he wasn't really interested in Clarabel Longcope, but only in a future Mrs. Trevor Hoyt? And that he was beginning to be satisfied that he was now in possession of all her secrets, or at least of all that he had need of?

But wasn't this what every woman suspected—if she wasn't an utter fool or unless he was—in the man who was courting her? Didn't he have every right to find out just what he was getting into? Wasn't she simply encountering an essential in the basic relationship of every man and woman? And might not an ultimate failure of intimacy be precisely the eternal difference between the sexes? Mightn't it even be love? Why else did she want to batter herself against the wall of his impenetrable armor, to press her soft body against his hard one? What else did any woman want? Why just that, of course.

On the weekend when she came home to tell her parents that she and Trevor were engaged, she embraced her mother and then whispered in her ear, so that her father wouldn't hear: "Now you can chant your
Nunc Dimittis!
"

T
HE PASSAGE
of two years found Mrs. Trevor Hoyt very comfortably settled in what she liked to think of as the elegant
boîte
of a tiny duplex on Park Avenue and the weekend mistress of the tastefully redecorated red brick gatehouse of her parents-in-law's Georgian mansion on Long Island's north shore. A year-old daughter, Sandra, was well cared for by a full-time nurse, and, as a cook-housekeeper did all the rest, Clara found that she had time on her hands.

It was Polly Milton, now an assistant society editor of
Style Magazine,
who suggested that she join the staff there.

"There's a slot open working for the features editor, and I think you might find yourself the round peg."

Clara was tempted. A women's magazine had not been what she had dreamed of in her Vassar years, but no doors had been opened to her in her Hoyt world but those of charitable causes which her mother-in-law was indeed only too willing to fling wide. But these she had stubbornly resisted. They were all too much of what was expected of the wife of a rising young banker. Neither of her sisters-in-law would have considered working on
Style.
It would have been deemed "tacky" or "fancy-pants" by people who hunted with the Westbury hounds on weekends or watched polo.

"Of course, I'll have to talk to Trevor."

When she brought it up that night over a cocktail, he gave it his immediate and full attention. He asked some probing questions about the nature of the job.

"It sounds okay to me," he said at last. "And I agree that you ought to do something with that fine mental instrument of yours. Let's see what Mother says."

This was to be expected. It was not subservience; it was rank. Sometimes only her husband needed to be consulted; at others he and his mother; on rare ones Mr. Hoyt as well. Clara had so far had little trouble with the hierarchy, but she was aware that the time might come.

Marriage and the birth of little Sandra had not freed her from her earlier suspicion that she and Trevor lacked a true meeting of the minds. He had an even disposition and rarely lost his temper—never over trifles—and he showed a companionable interest in what she did with her days. He was generous with money, a dutiful host when they entertained, and his gallantry of manner with the more attractive female guests never exceeded what was expected in north shore society. But when she observed him with a group of men, as at a cocktail party when the men would cluster to discuss some political or sports event, or on a summer's night when the ladies were still secluded in the drawing room after dinner but could hear their husbands on the terrace through the open french windows, and heard his laugh, warm and resonant, rise above the others, she knew that he was at his ease in a way that he never was with her. Was she lacking in proper spousal sympathy, or was this something that was true of men in general? A simple fact that was idle to worry about?

She thought of her father and how obviously his happiest moments were at his fishing camp with other men, but then her parents' marriage didn't really count in this as it had never been a happy one. She loved her brother, and he her, yet she knew she often bored him, but he didn't count either, for everything but science bored him. She tried to discuss it with her friend Polly, who immediately asked her if something had gone wrong in the "bed department," and when reassured about this, blandly dismissed the subject with a "Men don't care about the things we care about."

Clara turned over in her mind the subject of bed.
Was
that the main point of a marriage? And if so, was hers such a success? Trevor, at any rate, had no complaints about the way she received his love, and she, despite the limitation of her erotic experience to him alone, suspected that his performance would be the envy of most of the wives of their group. He took sex very seriously indeed; he liked a variety of positions and showed a considerable past history in his dexterity, and he was always considerate and helpful in bringing her to satisfaction. And yet was it just her inexperience and romantic slushiness that made her feel, when he stripped in the bathroom and strode across their chamber, showing his fine nude figure, to join her naked in bed, that he was visiting a woman other than the lady of the downstairs drawing room, other than Mrs. Trevor Hoyt? A woman who was his beautiful mistress? And a beloved mistress, too. Oh, yes, surely, for that night, anyway. And tomorrow night. Perhaps for any number of nights. But what of the days?

Her mother-in-law had tried to help about these. She did not overly interfere, but she was always full of suggestions if asked. She exuded the air of the born aristocrat who has never looked to anything but inherited right to support her rule. She was beneficent and good-tempered, but that, Clara felt, was because rebellion, or even the thought of it, never existed in her domain. Her two daughters, like Clara, lived near her, both in town and country, and basked obediently in the sunshine of her good will. She gave every appearance of being wholeheartedly devoted to Clara as the wife of the heir, and why not? Had she not raised her son to pick just such a girl as his consort?

The day that Clara walked over to the "big house" to consult her mother-in-law about the job on
Style
was a Saturday, and all the Hoyts were in the country. Close though the family was, there was no promiscuous dropping in; visits always had to be announced, and Clara, knowing Mrs. Hoyt's busy schedule, was not surprised to be kept waiting a good ten minutes in the big formal drawing room that looked out over a wide terrace to a lawn watered by twirling sprinklers. The high-ceilinged chamber, with its fine English eighteenth-century furniture and large family portraits, just escaped, as did the square Georgian mansion itself, being pompous, but charm and grace also eluded it. Charlotte Hoyt had built and decorated as she dressed and did her hair: appropriately for her station in life. Conventionality in nonessentials left the mind clear for bigger things. And what were they, Clara mused, as she noted, with a mild surprise, that her own portrait, recently done, had taken the place of honor over the mantel at the expense of one of her sisters-in-law?