Her Infinite Variety (3 page)

She saw that he was delighted to have his family identified with the great. The animosity only added to the compliment. "That sounds like Mother all right. Straight to the jaw!"

"But isn't it a pity that her talents didn't have a wider scope? We poor women can only dream of the top spots in life. While you, for example—nothing stands in your way. Your only trouble will be—if you go into your father's bank—that envious people will attribute the success you owe to your own abilities to the family tie."

Oh, she had all his interest now! "That's perfectly true, Mrs. Longcope. And I've had to do some serious thinking about it. I've wondered if I shouldn't at least start somewhere else."

"And then you could shift over when you've made your mark."

"Exactly!"

"Let me see your hand." She turned over what he promptly exhibited to her and pretended to read the palm, smiling at her little joke. "You will do very well. Madame Sosostris tells you so."

"If I survive this war that Herr Hitler seems to be threatening."

"You will. You have the look of a survivor. But tell me something. Would you object to your wife's having a career?"

He became at once wary. Was she sounding him out about Clara? "Not so much if any kids we had were older and away at school. And so long as she was home in the evenings and shared vacations with me and wasn't working all the time."

"In some dreary law office or accounting firm? I can't blame you. Maybe some time in the future we women may come to that, and then we'll be as dull as you men!" Here she smiled and gave his hand a pat. "Not you, my dear Mr. Hoyt—or Trevor, if I may call you that—for I see you're not the least bit dull. And I can talk to
you.
But if you're a friend of Clara's, I wish you'd talk some sense into her."

"You mean Clara wants a career?"

"She talks of going into advertising. Do you find that attractive? To spend her life hoodwinking people into thinking they can do something about their bad breath and body odor?"

"Phew! I do not!"

"It's not the way I used to dream of her future."

"How did you see it?" He was distinctly interested now.

"I saw her as a partner to some big man. Sharing his career. As an ambassadress, for example, in diamonds, receiving the notables at the top of a marble staircase. That's just a silly dream, I suppose."

His obvious disappointment amused her. "You never, I suppose, saw her as the wife of anything as lowly as a banker?"

"How could the wife of a banker be any kind of a partner to her husband? Would he put her behind the counter?"

"No, no, there'd be all kinds of ways!" She had not only destroyed any idea he might have nurtured that she had designs on him; she had probed him into actively promoting his own eligibility. "Look at my mother! She's invaluable to Dad. She entertains all the big depositors, organizes the firm parties, keeps the other wives happy, travels all over the world with him—"

"Stop!" She put her hands to her ears. "I take it back. Truly. A banker would do beautifully. But if you have
any
influence on my daughter, do try to persuade her not to become a vet or a dentist!"

She sent him back now to Clara, who, as she had been well aware, had all the time had her eye on them. Much later that night, when Clara came home from her date with Hoyt, she paused before her mother's open bedroom door. The latter was reading in bed.

"Did you have a pleasant evening, dear?" Violet asked.

"Mother, can I talk to you?"

"Of course, dear."

Clara came in and sat at the bottom of the bed. "You have this idea about my marrying a great man. I watched you making up to Trevor at tea. Is
he
your idea of a great man?"

"Not exactly. They're hard to come by. But he strikes me as a candidate. I think he may be a bigger banker them his father, more like his maternal grandfather."

"Oh, you've looked him up?"

"I didn't have to. I know about the family. Look, dear. These things are never sure. But it seems to me that the woman who marries Trevor Hoyt is going to have a much more interesting life than she who marries Bobbie Lester."

"Poor Bobbie. Let's leave him out of it. He's taken the whole thing badly enough as it is."

"He'll get over it. His beloved school will distract him."

"Don't gloat, Mother, or I may run back to him. Now, as to Trevor. How much does his money count in your appraisal?"

"Only as a form of insurance. If his career shouldn't pan out, then there will be lots of things that
you
can do with the money."

"Does it never occur to you that I might obtain all the things you seem to want for me—and assume that
I
want as well—on my own?"

"Oh, I've thought it over carefully. Women are going into all sorts of things now they didn't used to go into. But it's the top I'm talking about. The top jobs, except in the arts and fashion, are all tightly held by men. Maybe in the future that will change, maybe you were born a bit too early. But in a world ruled by males, a natural female leader like yourself had better pick a natural male leader."

"And that's what you think Trevor is."

"I think it's what he may be."

"So I should marry him?"

"Or someone like him."

"Marriage is the only ticket?"

"Well, it still gets you in."

"What about love? Or don't you think it counts?"

"Of course it counts. But I shouldn't think it would be so hard to love a man like Trevor Hoyt. He's obviously stuck on you, and that's half the battle."

"Yes," Clara agreed, in a more reflective tone, "there's some truth in that. It's pleasant to be loved. Unless you actually hate the person who loves you. And I certainly don't hate Trevor."

"It must be rather fun, too, to beat out all the other girls who are chasing after him."

Clara rose from the bed at this. "Do you know something, Mother?"

"I know that means you're about to say something unpleasant."

"I sometimes think you're rotten to the core." Clara's tone was as smooth as if she were uttering a compliment. "But I'm in no position to make anything of it. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not a piece of fruit from the same tree."

"Well, as I always say, you've only one life, my girl, and the great thing is not to throw it away, as so many do. Don't ask of your nature more than it can reasonably give. That's the way the biggest mistakes are made. Will you put out the lights downstairs when you go to bed?"

"I'll put out
all
the lights!" Clara exclaimed with a rather nasty chuckle as she closed her mother's door behind her.

C
LARA WAS TO WONDER
in later years why in her middle teens she had been so concerned with her ability to fit in with the girls in her class at Saint Timothy's, that is with those of them who came from notable New York and Boston families and their boy friends whom she met on summer visits. She was at all times perfectly conscious of her own good looks and easy competence in sports and studies, and, after all, to be the daughter of a Yale college master, even to the snootiest denizen of Park Avenue or Beacon Street, was not a thing to be despised. She eventually decided that it must be the common lot of children to be forever looking up and never down Jacob's ladder, and for even the most privileged to feel bereft of every blessing in the presence of those possessed of even a minor social advantage. Yet still, in her own case, there was another factor. She wanted more things than her friends did. She wanted indeed everything that the world might not give her.

They were not all bad things, by any means. Clara had her dreams of being a Florence Nightingale, the angel of the army hospital at Scutari. She could even feel exaltation at the picture of Joan of Arc amid the licking flames at Rouen. In Mount Desert Island in Maine, where her family had a camp in the woods, she would visit her friend Polly Milton in fashionable Bar Harbor, and one day in the village, when Polly and her mother were seeing a doctor and Clara was waiting in the back of the car, a crowd of children, attracted by the tall yellow shining Hispano Suiza, crowded around it to peer in the windows. They were a fairly ragged lot—the time was the pit of the Great Depression—and they pointed fingers at Clara and jeered at her. Then the chauffeur got out of the car and shooed them away. That was all.

But it made an impression on Clara. She fully realized both the attraction and the protection of the big car. It was agreeable to be safe inside, to be able to roll away to a comfortable shingle mansion on the Shore Path and enjoy an uninterrupted view of the glittering Atlantic. But it might be equally agreeable to step out of the vehicle, to show sympathy to the ragamuffins, to win them with her graciousness, her loveliness, perhaps even to take them for a ride in the big car or buy them presents in the village. Clara conceived the joys of liberalism, a liberalism showered from a benign heaven on the poor and lowly beneath.

At school she found a focus for her energies in espousing the economic principles of the New Deal. A majority of the girls, coming from right-wing Republican families, had been oriented to an abomination of the president, whom they complacently described as a traitor to his class. But it was early apparent to Clara that those in favor of this "social revolution" included not only the great majority of the nation, but the more perceptive members of the school faculty, some of the brighter students and her own father, a grumbling but essentially loyal Democrat. It also gave her the opportunity to take a striking if unpopular position in school debates and dining hall discussions. Her high clear voice, her shaking blond head, her querying gray-blue eyes and sweeping gestures added up to a picture that her classmates were not apt to forget.

And her mother approved. "The great thing is not to be ordinary," she would say. Violet Longcope would not let herself be dragged into any prolonged discussion of the virtues or vices of New Deal legislation; she seemed to think that one should choose one's party affiliation as one would a hat or a dress to best suit one's particular appearance, and nobody knew for sure what lever she would pull down behind the green curtain of the voting booth. But Clara, who had learned, like so many daughters, to discount her father's violent masculine opinions in political matters, paid closer attention to her mother's, even when she couldn't quite make out where they would take her. She always felt that her mother had ulterior and perhaps convincing (if one only knew them) reasons for her sardonic attitudes towards matters that to others seemed life or death. And Violet, as her daughter was well aware, shared all of Clara's ambition for herself.

As the Depression lifted and the New Deal waxed into near respectability, at least among the more moderate Republicans, Clara found it needful to her image to move further left, and by the end of her freshman year at Vassar she had developed the reputation of being something of a radical. Some of the men she dated found it amusing, even provocative; others very definitely did not. And most of her girl friends felt she was going too far.

At least a temporary check was given to her leftward drift by a summer visit to the same house where she had experienced the incident of the impudent children and the Hispano Suiza: that of her friend Polly Milton. At a lunch party given by Polly's parents for a retired Supreme Court justice, venerable and idolized by the right, the conversation unhappily fell on a recent case in which our highest tribunal had startled the nation by upholding rather than invalidating a law particularly obnoxious to business interests. The vote had been five to four.

"Of course, now that the squire of the Hudson has finally succeeded in getting a majority on the Court that Congress wouldn't allow him to pack, we can expect him to bend our poor Constitution to his mighty will."

This gruff announcement from the old jurist was received by the table with respectful if silent acquiescence until Clara spoke up.

"But mightn't that also be the will of the American people?"

The judge glared down the table as if to hold his interlocutor in contempt. "Nobody's will, young lady, should affect the interpretation of our Constitution. When that ceases to be the case, our liberties and rights are in the garbage can!"

"But we're taught at college, judge, that the Constitution has often been construed to support the prevailing economic theory of the day."

"Humf! By some young red, I suppose."

"I think I even read it in a column of Walter Lippmann's."

His honor was not impressed. "No doubt you and your professors would like to tear up the Constitution altogether. Why let an old document drafted by Colonials stand in the way of any starry-eyed young radical who thinks he can legislate a new heaven? Would that suit you, Miss What's-your-name?"

"Longcope," Clara retorted coolly. "No, I think the Constitution, like the House of Lords in England, may have a useful function in acting as a temporary break to legislation that may have been too hastily passed. But necessary social measures should not be held up indefinitely by the economic creed of nine old men."

"You would prefer nine young women, I suppose."

"I think, on the whole, I would."

"Now, now," interposed a nervous Mrs. Milton, "as my revered father, the bishop, used to say when the conversation at table waxed too hot: 'We will now discuss the recent excavations in Crete!' And I might remind you, Clara, of the old saying: 'In society we pass lightly over topics.'"

After which Mrs. Milton turned all her attention to the ruffled judge to try to divert him with inquiries about his cherished garden, which bordered on her own.

Clara, for perhaps the first time in her life, felt the steely chill of unanimous disapproval. The dozen persons at the Miltons' dining room table reacted with silent shock and tightened lips to the brash young woman's impertinence to a revered and venerable figure. Even her friend Polly, cat-faced and raven-haired, of a chameleon disposition, sided with the table, and on their return to Vassar in the fall spread the word that Clara was allowing her radical theories to make a fool of herself and was no longer a reliable guest in one's parents' house. It was not that Clara was in any way ostracized, even by girls of the most unreconstructed Wall Street background, but she had lost the sparkle of a fresh and idealistic figure; she was being laughed at. There were even those who hinted that she was becoming something of a crank.