Her Infinite Variety (5 page)

"I am much honored," she observed, pointing to the canvas as Mrs. Hoyt bustled in.

"Well, Elena rather objected to being relegated to the dining room, but I told her we must all take our turns over the fireplace in here. Besides, you're the prettiest member of the family."

"I hope you didn't tell her that."

"Of course I told her." And of course she had. "I also told her she was going to have to watch her hip line or else watch her husband. She may not have inherited my looks, lucky child, but she's inherited some of my vulnerability to calories."

"Oh, Elena has a fine figure, Mrs. Hoyt! And she'll never have to worry about Phil. I've never seen a more devoted husband."

"But a widening
derrière
can be a tough test for devotion. Don't think
I
don't know. Which, by the way, my dear, reminds me of something I meant to speak to you about. Hamilton—your revered father-in-law—has been seeing rather too much of Mrs. Atkins lately. I don't want you or Elena or Maribel to have her for dinner or even for cocktails."

"Mrs. Atkins? Do I even know her?"

"You will. Hamilton is bound to introduce you. He has a mania for bringing his lady friends together with his family. God knows why. He's rather slowed down in that department in the last couple of years—since you and Trevor were married—so I haven't had to speak to you about it. I've always put up with his little goings-on—I'm enured to them. But when he becomes too obvious, I put my foot down. I let it be known that the family is off limits. That usually does the trick. He'll do anything for a peaceful interior."

"Mrs. Hoyt, you're wonderfull You really are."

"Nonsense, my dear. I'm simply practical. Now, as to this job on
Style,
I'm all for it."

"I'm so glad."

"It should teach you all kinds of things that women brought up as we were are not apt to learn. How the world outside society, for example, looks at society. And whether their picture of us is quite as inaccurate as we like to think. They are inclined to see us as snobbish and cliquish and overly concerned with dress and table manners and all manner of trivia. Maybe we are. Or at least more than we care to contemplate."

"Well, you're certainly not."

"But I sometimes think I go too far the other way. Maybe I'd have done better had I worked on something like
Style
as a young woman. Instead of scorning it, had I learned to analyse just what the fashionable life is made up of. Just what a dress or a hat or a table setting or a hairdo
can
be. If you really
know
something, maybe it's less apt to swell out of proportion."

Clara thought of her friend Polly's passion for detail. "If it doesn't enfold and smother you."

"Oh, don't worry. You can handle it. There may be great things in store for you, my dear."

"What things?"

"I'm not a fortune teller, but nice things, I'm sure. In the meantime you must content yourself with being our pride and joy."

Clara was not entirely easy as she walked back to the gatehouse. Had she been insidiously manipulated? It was all very well to be called someone's "pride and joy," but who was responsible for this work of art? The society that had clasped her so tightly to its bosom might also be squeezing the last drop of juice out of her. And what was that juice but the soul of Clarabel Longcope Hoyt?

I
T WAS POLLY
who suggested to Clara that she compose an article on the subject of the gatehouse, which the Hoyts had allowed her to remodel. Clara had, in her first half year at
Style,
already enjoyed a small flurry of success with a piece on the debutante ball, now swollen beyond recognition from the old-fashioned tea party to introduce one's grown daughter to the tight little world of one's closest friends and relations, to a supper dance of a thousand guests under a marquee, and another article on society's switch of summer preference from the lake to the ocean. She had developed her own wit and style, and Evelyn Byrd, the editor in chief, had taken her twice out to lunch. She was, as Polly put it,
lancée.

"We've been a bit heavy lately on great houses and gardens," Polly now pointed out. "I think our readers would like something on how these estates can be converted to the needs of the next generation. To something smaller, of course, but smarter. Less grand but also less pompous. Your mother-in-law, so to speak, in ballet slippers."

"What a picture! But yes, I think I see it."

Polly's job had matured her. As an assistant society editor, her scope was sufficiently vague to allow her to stick a fanciful finger into other departments, and she had shown a creative imagination that her former preoccupation with the minutiae of social observances had hidden. That Clara was married while Polly was still single—and married so well—had reversed their old positions. The Miltons' Hispano Suiza was barely a memory now.

Clara went right to work on Polly's idea and motored one of the magazine's top photographers down to Long Island to take pictures of the interior of the gatehouse. He became highly enthusiastic about the project and snapped the big house and the gardens as well. It was while he was doing the latter that he was observed by the head gardener, who reported the fact to Mr. Hoyt. Clara had spoken of her article to her husband, who had manifested no objection, and she had not seen fit to seek the permission of his parents. That weekend, while Trevor was on the golf course and she was spending a morning sorting out the photographer's proofs, Mr. Hoyt walked down the drive to call on her.

"What is your project, my dear?" he asked her, picking up one of the proofs from the porch table. "Are you designing a Christmas card? This would make a fine one for Charlotte and me." He exhibited a shot of the front facade of his house.

"Well, you can have it, of course. But my project is something better than that." And here she explained to him the nature of her article.

His long gray countenance at once took on a grayer look. "You mean that these pictures would appear in a newspaper?"

"Not in a newspaper. In a magazine. In
Style.
Surely you know about
Style.
It's where I work."

"A women's periodical? No, I don't know it. I read
Fortune
and
Forbes,
but that's about it. And I'm afraid I cannot allow any pictures of this place to be published."

"Oh, Mr. Hoyt! Why not?"

"There are several reasons, but one should suffice. There is enough discontent already in the country over what radicals call economic injustices without inflaming public jealousy further with pictures of large Long Island estates. I am sorry, but I cannot allow it."

"But, Mr. Hoyt, it's a matter of my career!"

"Well, I'm afraid, my dear, that you will have to adjust your career to the exigencies of the family business. You can hardly expect to raise your daughter, Sandra, and the little brother or sister we all hope you and Trevor will soon give her on an editor's salary. Of course, if your employers have gone to any expense in this matter, I'll be glad to make them whole."

"Oh, it's not that." Clara paused, appalled at this sudden blockage of what she had been beginning to hope would be a breakthrough in her career at
Style.
She had been conceiving all kinds of sociological undertones in her piece; the reconstructed gatehouse would become the symbol of a much deeper conversion of the old principles of laissez-faire. It suddenly seemed to her that her father-in-law constituted an obstruction that had to be cleared away now or never.

"Oh, please make an exception for me, Mr. Hoyt!" she pleaded. And then she could only gasp when she heard herself add: "I'll ask Mrs. Atkins for dinner!" The laugh that she managed to utter was meant to be disarming.

It was not, and she knew at once that she had made the mistake of her life. One could
do
such things; one could never mention them. As she watched the expression of faint surprise that she had evoked on Mr. Hoyt's disciplined features fade into the blank wall that would define permanently the barrier between them—a barrier that had existed from the beginning had she only cared to look—she realized that she had been fool enough to think she could act without the only weapons, charm and subtlety, that a woman could use against Hamilton Hoyt.

"You may ask whom you wish to dinner, Clara" was his cool response. "It is hardly my function to suggest additions to your guest list."

Clara saw no need to mention her gaffe to Trevor when he came home. She was sure his father never would. He showed no great surprise on learning of the paternal veto of her project, nor did he find it of much importance. He pointed out that their friends the Clarksons in nearby Locust Valley were converting a windmill into a weekend getaway and might be glad (since he was in advertising) to be the subject of a piece in
Style.
And when Clara informed him that she was thinking anyway of quitting the magazine, he immediately exclaimed that he hoped she was clearing her calendar for a second baby! She offered neither encouragement nor confirmation of this hope.

Polly on the other hand was much distressed at the idea of losing her fellow worker. Over lunch the following Monday she protested vigorously.

"You don't have to leave over a little thing like a cancelled article! That happens all the time. Mrs. Byrd will understand."

"It's not that. I'm not so petty. It's rather that I've just been made to realize how extremely unimportant I am. Only a bit of fluff, really. A minor if decorative part of the decor of the lives of the Hoyts. I think I need some time to think it over. To find out just where I'm going."

Mrs. Byrd accepted her resignation gracefully, believing it was for family reasons, and expressed the hope that Clara would return to the job in due time, and Clara resumed the idle life of the young society matron. But she now observed the world in which she lightly moved with a journalist's eye. She had seen what it had tried to make of her. What in turn might she make of it? What would she be in another twenty-five years, as Mrs. Trevor Hoyt? She turned her scrutinizing gaze on her mother-in-law and on the latter's friends and began to make notes in a journal.

"They are apt to be large and largely outspoken, a bit on the bossy side, realistic, down-to-earth (as they conceive earth), good-humored, even hearty, more interested in each other than in men (who consist largely of husbands and sons). Many of them, indeed, seem almost to have forgotten that they
are
women, disdaining what they term feminine wiles and allures, and they wear their often splendid jewels more like adorned heathen idols than enticing females. I heard Mrs. Hoyt, confronted with the luscious rump of a Renoir nude at a benefit art show, announce laughingly to a group that included her husband: 'This is more Hamilton's department than mine!' These women are widely supposed to rule a society that is sometimes dubbed a matriarchy. But do they really? Even when the money is their own—and it very often is—they never use its power in business or politics. They hardly know a stock from a bond. All that is left to the men who are glad to hand over to them the home—and all that that name implies—in return. Mrs. Hoyt's birth and fortune were invaluable aids in her husband's rise; when he had them he had all he really needed of her."

Clara also revived her interest in the social forces that were changing the old financial hierarchies. She had always been in favor of the economic revolution that had started in 1933, and now she began to wonder if, thanks to her peculiar vantage point, she was not seeing deeper into its essentially American nature than the radical left. It was not, as she made it out, that the poor were seeking, as in communist revolts, to bring down the rich and seize their wealth. It was more that they wanted the rich to move over; they wanted to be rich themselves.

The Republican congressman from the Manhattan district where she lived, for example, was being challenged by a young liberal journalist who was the grandson of an Irish political judge who had made but then lost a fortune. Clara liked everything she read about Rory O'Connor, who, like herself, seemed to want everything in the world, from liberal rags to newspaper riches.

It was the always unexpectedly useful Polly who brought her together with this much-discussed Democratic candidate.

"Mrs. Byrd's giving a cocktail do this evening, and he's supposed to stop by for a few minutes to talk to me. It's not a party for him, but we're doing a piece on him, and it was the only time he had. He'll be late—they always are—and with few people left, when I'm through with him, you'll have your chance."

It worked out as Polly had said. By half past seven when O'Connor at last made his appearance, Mrs. Byrd's living room was almost empty, and the hostess herself had gone on to a dinner party. Clara, lingering, had plenty of time to observe the object of her curiosity as he was being interviewed in a corner by Polly.

She could see at once that his eyes were his great point; they were large, dark and deeply set—and surprisingly gentle. Surprisingly, because his short, tight, muscular torso, his high brow and square chin, his closely cropped black curly hair, seemed to betoken a masculinity that bordered on the aggressive. And indeed the silent stare with which he greeted her when Polly, concluding her own business, signaled Clara to come over, was hardly encouraging.

Taking the seat that Polly now vacated to get him a drink, Clara murmured a conventional compliment about his "vigorous and inspiring" campaign.

"Would you care to make a contribution, Mrs. Hoyt?" was his rather flat rejoinder.

"Yes, of course, but I'm afraid it will have to be a very small one. My husband holds the purse strings, and he's of a different political persuasion."

"I'm aware of that. One doesn't go into politics in this district without knowing about the Hoyts and the Bank of Commerce. We must wait until you're a widow, Mrs. Hoyt, before we can expect your largesse, and that, presumably, will not be before November."

Clara didn't mind his rudeness at all. A bland acceptance of bad manners might be the first step in getting around such a man. "Is money the only way one can help in a campaign? Can't one stamp letters or ring doorbells?"