Her Infinite Variety (7 page)

C
LARA WENT BACK
to work on
Style,
and her life refitted itself into the old pattern. There were, however, two significant differences. The first was that she had told Trevor very firmly that she didn't want another baby for at least two years—the period, she insisted, that she would need to learn what sort of an editor she was or wanted to be—and he had grumblingly but not too petulantly agreed to prolong the necessary preventative measures. He obviously thought she exaggerated the importance of what to him was the idle fantasy of a women's magazine, but she gave him credit for not saying so. His mother had taught him at least the manners of a greater respect for women than that harbored by many of his friends, and, besides, he and Clara were young, and there was plenty of time for the larger family that he liked to envision. So many of his contemporaries planned for a brood of two, a boy and a girl, and maybe, if the husband prospered, a darling little "afterthought" of either sex. Trevor, as was his wont, thought in larger terms: he wanted three boys and three girls!

The second difference was by far the greater. History had begun to break into all their lives. As the war in Europe intensified and Britain seemed in danger of crumbling, Americans began to gird themselves for what now seemed an inevitable engagement in the conflict. Trevor moved across town to the USS
Prairie State,
moored in the Hudson, to become that "ninety-day wonder," an ensign in the naval reserve. At the same time his father was called to Washington to become an assistant secretary of the army, and the senior Hoyts moved to a splendid colonial mansion in Georgetown. To a skeptical Clara it seemed that the clock of social progress had been turned back and that her family-in-law, and indeed Wall Street itself, were clad in the shining armor of a militant prestige. And surely her husband in his new blue uniform was a comely John Paul Jones.

The very day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Trevor was placed on active duty. In only a week's time he was dispatched to the Pacific to serve on a destroyer, and Clara had to adapt herself to a single life of indefinite duration. Her mother-in-law, now high in the administration of the Red Cross, was full of suggestions about war work, including one that might involve her moving with little Sandra to the Hoyts' house in Washington, but Clara, to the consternation of her in-laws, rejected them all.

"No, I have decided to stick to my job," she announced in a tone that Mrs. Hoyt was soon to recognize as final. "People are saying this war involves everyone—civilians as well as soldiers—but that's not so in America. Not yet, anyway. This is a war for the military and the munitions factories. And I daresay they can win it. But my job is to see that my magazine survives. If we all walk out on what we're doing to make a surplus of bandages, there won't be anything for the boys to come home to."

"It's nice to think they'll still have
Style
when it's all over," Mrs. Hoyt retorted.

Clara shrugged off the crack. She was experiencing a novel exhilaration at the prospect of her new freedom with its myriad opportunities. In the year that followed she initiated a series of articles dealing with the problems of women on the home front: how to make a tasty meal under rationing without resorting to the black market; what to tell your children about why their daddy is killing other men; how to dress smartly but still in keeping with the gravity of the times; how victory might threaten women's rights and what to do about it
now;
how to hate the enemy and be a Christian. She sought contributors among famous academicians, writers, and politicians. The circulation of
Style
increased.

When Trevor came home on his first leave after a year and a half in the Pacific, they had some difficult times together. The shock of combat and the forming of friendships with fellow officers in his squadron based on the shared experience of hardship and danger, rather than on pleasures sought in the company of school and college mates of similar background, had both hardened and softened him. Trevor's life had formerly been shaped around one consistent plan. He was to rise to prominence—maybe even to fame—in the world of finance without ever losing the dash, the polish or even the hedonism of that elegant compromise between an English lord and an American cowboy: the Yankee gentleman of old New York. Now he had questions and doubts about himself and his old life, and he was more inclined to be tolerant of others, but at the same time his belief that men could be dangerous animals that had to be dominated by strong leaders had been fortified. Clara's articles had simply disgusted him; after reading two of them he refused to look at another. She was irked.

"What are we supposed to do? We who stay home and read about battles?"

"Nothing at all! Stay home and look as beautiful as you do right now, my dear! War is nothing but blood. There's no point even talking about anything but blood. If you have to be in it, you're bloody. If you're lucky enough to be out of it, you should keep yourself as unbloody as possible."

"So I should be nothing but a doll, is that it, Trevor? A doll who waits simperingly for her man to return?"

"Ah, but if you only
knew
what that means to the man!" he exclaimed, closing his eyes as he uttered a little groan.

As a kind of therapy she wrote a piece called "How to Deal with a Spouse Turned Hero" and insisted on reading it aloud to him. He was amused at some of her humorous sallies, and it made things better between them on the last week of his leave, most of which she wisely shared with little Sandra, who was enchanted with her restored daddy with his broad smiles and broad jokes and battle ribbons. It never occurred to Trevor that Clara would publish the essay, which she did shortly after his return to the Pacific. It proved one of her most popular pieces.

Clara could hardly admit, even to herself, that she felt a faint relief when Trevor departed; she tried to encapsulate it in her relief at being able to redevote all of her energy to her work. She was now the second editor of the magazine, directly under Mrs. Byrd, indeed at times almost substituting for her, a kind of
éminence grise.
Even the Hoyts were impressed, though there was considerable disapproval of her failure to add to her family (Trevor had evidently told them about the delay) and also a good deal of shock over the "husband-hero" article when it appeared, though Trevor's sisters defended it as a contribution to the war effort transcending an overvalued privacy. Anyway, Clarabel Hoyt's was a name that was beginning to be known.

When Rory O'Connor, now himself a near celebrity for his brilliant on-the-site reporting of the invasions of Guadalcanal and Tarawa, came through New York on his way to a new assignment in the European theatre of operations, he called Clara at her office, and she agreed at once to meet him for lunch at the St. Regis. She found him his old sardonic self, only quieter, more subdued, looking thinner and a little gray and older, yet, curiously, even more attractive. He was still very much in command of himself, but as with Trevor, and presumably with thousands of other men, the world had proved itself a tougher nut to crack than it had seemed in his old campaign days.

Clara entered at once into a discussion of his newspaper pieces, which she had read with interest. "They're vivid, of course. They're quite wonderful, really. But they show, to me anyway, a new side of Rory O'Connor. You were never so gung ho about anything before. You were like Talleyrand:
Surtout, point de zèle.
You were much more anti than pro. You were fighting for the poor, but what you really wanted was to pull down the rich. And now I seem to see the Stars and Stripes waving over your prose!"

"And you don't like that?"

"I'm sure it's reader-effective."

"But you think it's like Old Glory being rippled by a concealed fan in the ballroom of the Waldorf while our national anthem is sung?"

"Well,
you
put it that way. I didn't."

"But it's what you meant." He smiled ruefully. "Yes, we were fooled, all of us idealistic dreamers, pacifists, would-be conscientious objectors, protesters against billions for armaments. We hadn't anticipated that the next war would be a kind of crusade against Antichrist. And maybe we'll be fooled again. Maybe victory will have a nasty twist. Maybe we'll find ourselves back in the grip of a relentless plutocracy as in the Grant era after the Civil War."

"Well, if that's going to be the case, we'd better be part of it. I'd rather be on top than be trod on. It also gives us a better chance to change things, if that's what we want."

He sighed, perhaps at all she took for granted. "I envy you your detachment, Clara."

"You don't at all! You think I'm shallow and cold-hearted. But what else can I be? I'm not a soldier. And don't think I can't understand your point of view. You come home from battles where men's faces and limbs are being blown off to find me using your war to enhance my career."

"You call it
my
war. Isn't it yours?"

"Of course it isn't. Has anyone handed me a gun and told me to invade Japan? Do you want me to be an armchair general, screaming for bigger battles and quicker victories?"

"No, no, you're right. War belongs to those from whom sacrifice is demanded. It may even prove a boon to the others, and you and I are the others, Clara. For don't think I'm in any way superior to you. Far from it. I am the one who's really enhancing my career. Making a name for myself out of other men's blood and guts!"

"Well, be proud of it, then! And remember the James family in the Civil War. William and Henry ducked the draft and became famous writers, while their two fighting brothers were badly wounded and led wretched postwar lives!"

"I haven't ducked any draft, Clara."

"Oh, I know, you were exempted. And rightly, too. But my point's the same.
We
are the lucky ones. Well, let's not knock our luck."

"You beg the question."

Clara looked at him more critically now. "You
do
think I'm terrible, don't you? You think I ought to be emptying chamber pots in some army hospital."

"You've got me entirely wrong. Indeed, I think I find your sanity distinctly refreshing. It may be a sign that the world has not gone completely mad."

"Oh, you might find there are a great many people like me.
If
they were all as frank."

Clara had to return to her office right after their lunch, but, not altogether to her surprise, he suggested that they have dinner together that same night, and she accepted, making rather falsely light of this double date by adding:
"I did have something, but I'll get out of it. We're supposed to do that, aren't we, when it's a question of entertaining the boys from overseas?" At dinner he talked to her long and seriously about what he had seen in his Pacific invasions. He was graphic, at times sombre, at times amusing, always interesting, always intense. He assumed that she wanted to listen, and he was quite right. It might have been significant that he asked only one or two perfunctory questions about Trevor and his destroyer, but when he took her home to her apartment building there was no suggestion that he expected to be asked up and certainly no untoward demonstrations in the taxicab.

But he telephoned her the next morning before she had left for the office to ask her for dinner that night, and again she accepted. It was now flatteringly evident that during his three weeks leave in the city, resettled in his old apartment, he wanted to see her—and only her—every night. His days, he told her, were spent roaming the streets and Central Park with occasional visits to museums. He had no wish to look up old friends. She sensed that she was filling a new need in him; he seemed to be clinging to her, like a spar in a troubled sea, as if her very detachment from the agony of war was a kind of reassurance that there was still a reality like the supposed reality he had left behind after Pearl Harbor. Would
that
be her substitute for military service: to have brought a temporary consolation to a despondent war correspondent? And how far should she carry it? But it was abundantly clear to a mind that was beginning to be very clear about many things that she was thoroughly intrigued by the experience.

Her mother, in town for the day on a trip from New Haven, dropped into her office to be taken to lunch.

"You're looking entirely too beautiful for the lonely wife of a sailor! What are you up to, my dear?"

"Oh, I'm sleeping with the entire Atlantic fleet. Isn't that my naval duty?"

"Lucky navy." Violet took in her daughter's freshness of complexion with an appreciative but not wholly unsuspicious glance. "I wonder if Trevor hadn't better get another leave pretty soon."

"Don't be an old bawd, Mother!" Clara checked herself. It didn't ring quite right. "Trevor has nothing to worry about. I put on my beauty in the morning for
Style
and for
Style
alone."

***

She supposed that she and Rory would come to the point before he left for Europe. Her previsions of the experience were not stained with anxiety. Perhaps the very fact that she was not carried away by any sweep of passion enabled her to isolate the prospect of an affair from the cloying associations of her husband and child. This would be something that was hers and hers alone, a gratification of senses inert now for months, a seizure of her own rights and her own life, however temporary. The very reality of it was implicit in its being the
one
thing about her life in wartime that could
not
qualify as the subject of an article in
Style.

And if conscience should awaken, could she not ask herself whom was she hurting? Trevor need never know. And as for Rory, he was a man who could make and live with his own decisions. Besides, did she not suspect that what he felt for her was more of an infatuation arising out of the miasma of Armageddon than any lasting love? He would settle down one day with a demure little Irish virgin who would boss his head off. They all did. And as far as the Hoyts and their family traditions were concerned, well, look at what Trevor's father so scandalously pulled off!