Her Infinite Variety (10 page)

"Swallowed up? We'd be partners, that's all!"

"Partners in
your
life."

"Well, whose else do I have? Do you want me on
Style?
Look, Clara, that other side of you, whatever it is, has been growing all during this war. Before we get back together —
if
we get back together—I want you to consult a psychiatrist. I want you to find out if you
can
be the wife I need. And if you even want to be."

"I don't need to consult any doctor. I know what I want and don't want. I'm willing to face the future with you, Trevor, but I can't give you any guarantee of what I may become, nor do I ask any about you. We must take our chances in life, like anyone else."

"That's not going to be good enough for me."

"You're not like Margaret Fuller, then. You don't accept the universe."

"Who's Margaret Fuller?"

A waiter was hovering, awaiting their order, and Clara picked up the menu.

But she knew, as she debated between the quiche and eggs Benedict, that her marriage was over. She also knew that Trevor would waste precious little time in finding a new consort more suited to his purposes in life. And he would find one easily enough. He was not a person to make a second mistake. And neither, she devoutly hoped, was she.

V
IOLET LONGCOPE'S RECEIPT
of the knowledge of her daughter's separation and impending divorce, after the Japanese surrender had seemed to offer hope for a new world, had been the final stroke in a series of misfortunes. Irving's retirement to a little cottage on the outskirts of New Haven had deprived her of most of the amenities of university life, and the heart attack that had so predictably followed his first year of enforced idleness had soured his temper and sharpened his irritability. And then her son, Brian, now teaching biology at Yale, exempted from military service because of bad eyesight, had taken up with a waitress at the Taft Hotel and was talking seriously of marriage. If she wasn't even to have Clara's brilliant life to share, however vicariously, what life remained for her?

Clara had summoned her to New York and given her the wretched news over lunch. Always that fatal midday meal! If one planned a murder it would have to be over lunch. Clara was very brief; she wished, she said, to confine herself to the bare facts, and these she laid, so to speak, on the table between their unfinished Dubonnet and their prematurely served vichyssoise.

"What madness!" Violet exclaimed.

Clara's headshake was firm. "Mother, please, it's
my
life."

"But it wasn't given you to make hash of! Well, anyway, let's look into it. Under the circumstances, what sort of settlement can you expect?"

"I don't need a settlement. I have my salary. Which, incidentally, I expect to go up."

"Until it reaches your father-in-law's? It must be some magazine,
Style.
And what about Sandra? Her clothes and nurse and school bills?"

"Oh, Trevor will take care of all that. There'll be no trouble about Sandra. She'll live with me and go to Trevor on weekends and a month in summer and major holidays. We're entirely agreed about Sandra. She mustn't be hurt."

"Except by the divorce. I see it's all very civilized. Very civilized and damnable."

"Mother, dear, you don't seem to be able to get it into your head that we're living in a different world. And, really, it shouldn't be that hard for you to face. Plenty of your contemporaries have gotten divorces."

"Yes, but that was usually because of their middle-aged husbands who lost their heads over dizzy blondes. And they were usually made to pay through the nose for their folly. But you are proposing to take nothing from a husband who, I take it, has been willing to overlook
your
indiscretion—"

"I don't consider it an indiscretion," Clara interrupted.

"Well, whatever it was." Violet paused, stultified with her sense of hopelessness. When she spoke it was almost in a wail. "When I
think
of the hand you were dealt! How could you bid anything less than a grand slam?"

"Mother, I know it's hard for you to understand. You see the Hoyts as they were in the nineteen twenties and thirties, in charge of the whole social scene: the schools, the dances, the clubs. Or even earlier, in your girlhood, at school, when Miss Charlotte Kane was the daughter of a Morgan partner, a kind of royalty, living in a pompous Beaux Arts house with twenty in help."

"Charlotte Hoyt, my dear, is not all that different today."

"No, but those people have lost their monopoly, don't you see? They still have money, but so do so many others—very different types, too. They no longer rule the roost. They don't
count
the way they did."

"But they still count."

"To you, dear. Not to me."

When Violet arrived home that evening, she found Brian visiting his father in the latter's small book-lined study. Brian was short but stocky, with short black hair, crew cut, a popular lecturer with undergraduates, now absorbed in writing a monograph on the paramecium
Woodruffi
, named for a former Yale biologist. Violet found herself wondering, as he rose to kiss her, if she had concentrated on him as she had on his sister, whether he mightn't have repaid her better than Clara had. But no, she concluded, as she drew away from him and sank wearily into a chair, he had from the beginning been too free from family ties even to resent her obvious favoritism with respect to his sibling. He had always been the scientist.

"I suppose you two are deep in the psychology of the unicellular," she remarked.

"No, Mother, we're gossiping, if you can believe it. Clara called Dad after you left this morning and told him what your lunch was going to be all about. Frankly, if she and Trevor are really set on splitting up, I'm going to try to see the good side of it."

"Oh? And what is that?"

"I think she's been kept down by the Hoyts. I think on her own she may really fly."

"Perhaps that's what I'm afraid of."

"It was you who got her into all this, Violet!" Irving's tone was shrill and raspy. "Nothing would satisfy you but to have your little girl play the great lady! You talked her out of a fine match with a fine young man. Well, I hope you're satisfied with your accomplishment!"

Violet had too long discounted her husband's moods for his opinions to matter to her. But suddenly, on top of everything else, his reproof seemed a final stone in her face. She bowed her head and started to weep.

And then Brian came over to put his arm around her with unexpected and undeserved tenderness.

"Poor Mother. Don't take it so hard. And if you're really so keen on patching things up between Clara and Trevor, why don't you go and see your old school pal, Mrs. Hoyt? Dad said that when he began accusing Trevor of ditching her, Clara interrupted him to say the divorce was really her idea. If that's the case, maybe his mother could be a peacemaker. Isn't she supposed to tell them all where to get off?"

Violet looked at him in astonishment. It was really not a bad idea.

***

Charlotte Hoyt was in the process of reopening her stately Palladian villa on East Seventieth Street in anticipation of the early return of the Hoyts from Washington. When Violet entered the living room, whose furnishings were still covered in white cloth, she found her daughter's mother-in-law discussing plans with her caretaker.

"Bring Mrs. Longcope and me something to drink and those sandwiches I ordered, Sam," she told the dim little bald old man, "and we'll have our lunch up here."

Violet could not trace the smallest sign of resentment or hostility on the chunky features of her so matter-of-fact hostess. It was surely one of the great advantages of wealth and position—if one had the sense and wit to use them—that minor disasters could be reduced to mere inconveniences. Was a son's marriage smashed? Money would pay for a new one. A rich divorced man was quite as marriageable as a rich bachelor, and a broken heart was patchable when so many were eager to patch it. And how many hearts were broken, anyway?

"Of course, I've come to see if there isn't some way that we can get our children together again," Violet began, when the caretaker had departed. "And bring them to their senses. I don't know how much influence I have with my Clara, but I know what a strong voice you have in your own family, and I wondered—"

"Stop, Violet!" Charlotte exclaimed, holding up a hand. "Stop right now, my dear. For let me tell you candidly right now that, even if I had the influence over my children that you imply, I should hesitate in this instance to use it as you suggest."

"You think that Clara's fault was so great?"

"Not at all. If that were the only hurdle, I think we could jump it. This war has taken a heavy toll on our moral senses, and a lot of things have happened that had better now be swept under the rug. No, my trouble is that I'm afraid that Trevor's and Clara's marriage has come apart at the seams. It's not only that they have ceased to be in love with each other; that might not be a hopeless objection to a reconciliation. But, much worse, they have ceased to have any goals or interests in common. Clara is all for her job now: new friends, new enthusiasms, a whole new world. And Trevor doesn't care for that world; he has a big enough one of his own. They're thoroughly incompatible. Surely you must see that."

"But with a little effort, a little compromise, on both sides?"

"That is what I originally hoped for, especially from Clara. I saw from the beginning that she had a strong will of her own, but I thought she might exercise it in a way that would push her and Trevor together as a team. But now she's got the bit in her teeth and she's going her own way. God bless her—I hope she goes far!"

"I don't see how far she'll go on a fashion editor's pay."

Charlotte blinked in surprise. "Well, I certainly give your daughter credit for not trying to hold my son up in one of those seamy alimony suits, but I hadn't thought she was reduced to what she earned on her magazine."

"What else will she get?"

"It's not what she gets, my dear; it's what she keeps. When they were married I put a considerable sum in their joint names. Trevor tells me they've agreed to split that between them. But even half of it should make her quite comfortable."

Violet concealed her surprise. Clara had not mentioned this, and she had assumed that the whole had reverted to her husband. Half was still a hefty sum, but the whole would go far to ameliorate Clara's position in the world. Violet held her breath as her mind raced. Surely Charlotte must have known that even if the family fortune was still firmly held by the older generation and immune to a daughter-in-law's grabs, the Hoyts were getting off cheaply. A nasty lawsuit could be embarrassing to ultrarespectable bankers.

"Couldn't Trevor let her have the whole of that sum?" she asked at last.

"Why should he? It seems to me that, under all the circumstances, he's being adequately generous."

"How about this, Charlotte? Suppose they both put that money in trust for Clara's life, with income to her and the principal on her death to Sandra?"

Charlotte's immediate expressionlessness was evidence that this proposition was receiving her serious consideration. "How about on Clara's death or remarriage? I know my husband would object to any family money finding its way into the pockets of a stranger spouse."

"Fair enough."

"Well, I'll see what I can do. Though it may make something of an heiress of my granddaughter before we find her quite ready."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because the lovely Clara won't stay unmarried for long."

"Neither will your handsome and brilliant son."

Charlotte smiled, with a touch of smugness. Almost untouchable by flattery herself, she yet yielded to the pleasure of hearing any compliment to her sole male heir. "There's something in what you say there. I shouldn't be talking out of school, but you and I are such old friends that I don't mind telling you that he's already seeing a good deal of Rosie Felton."

"And who is she? Some young lovely, I suppose."

"She was Rosie Cabot. From Boston, of course. She always had a crush on Trevor, but when he married your Clara she tried to console herself with a very dear but rather dull young man called Ed Felton, who went down with his destroyer when it was sunk off the Solomons. She has a bit overdone the mourning part, but those, we know, are the first to recover. I don't think she's ever really been out of love with Trevor, and now they seem to be getting on very well. Those Back Bay blue bloods are very skillful in seeming modern when they haven't basically changed at all. Oh, for Trevor she's just perfect!"

Violet made no comment. She was sure that Charlotte was correct, and that this woman was the right match for her son: outwardly submissive, inwardly strong, and totally reconciled to every tenet of the Hoyt creed. But never mind. She had still been able to do something for Clara. She had doubled her income!

P
OLLY MILTON
, three years after the war ended, found herself at the age of thirty with a good job on
Style
but still unmarried. She had a steady beau, Stuart Madison, a very serious and dedicated young diplomat, a friend ever since the old Bar Harbor days when the Madisons and Miltons had been neighbors on the Shore Path, but he was
en poste
in the Republic of Panama and not due home for a year. Stuart fully intended to stay permanently with the foreign service, which he felt was the highest of careers; it had never even crossed his mind, for example, during the war, that he had any possible obligation to offer his young and healthy body to the armed services. Neither he nor Polly had more than a pittance of inherited money, but she thought she could make up for this in the skills she had learned on
Style
in cuisine and entertainment. Such things might retain their utility, even in a postwar world.

Her own loss of any share in the Milton fortune had done much to change her life and character. Just after her graduation from Vassar her parents had undergone a bitterly litigated divorce caused by her father's infatuation with a young secretary whom he had subsequently married. Polly, who had taken without hesitation the side of a mother who had seemed palpably wronged, had renounced all further contact with him. She had done this without a thought to the financial consequences to herself, taking it for granted that any girl of her parentage and background would be looked after by the family lawyers. But when her father died, leaving the secretary as his sole residuary legatee, and her mother's improvident second spouse had lost most of her divorce settlement, Polly had had to face the chilling prospect of depending on her own talents to support herself.