Her Infinite Variety (8 page)

Rory and she after their first week had exposed to each other most of the grievances of their childhood and formative years. He had told her of his long affair with a married woman and his shorter ones with two divorcées, and how messily they all had ended, and she had been candid about the events that had led up to her marriage to Trevor. They were both ready now for something more.

The first time they copulated in his apartment—and she was very definite that that verb described what they had done better than "sleeping together" or "making love"—it had been without any previous discussion or even foreplay. He had simply opened the door of his bedroom after the second of their after-dinner drinks, and she had walked in, he following. He had even switched off the light, as if to emphasize their inarticulation and isolate the fact, and they had undressed in the semidarkness.

She had only one other man's performance to compare his with, and indeed it was very much the same. There was, however, one interesting and pleasurable difference, at least as far as she was concerned: it was she who was giving, not simply he who was taking. If she had felt with Trevor that he was perhaps too much the male, she knew that with Rory, despite all his rather brandished intellectual superiority, the female in bed with him was an equal partner. And yet she loved Rory less than she loved—or had loved—Trevor. Yes, she could feel that even in orgasm! For really, did she love any man at all? Or did she love them all? Was she a monster? Or had she simply discovered a secret of life carefully concealed from the masses? Poor things, if they didn't have love, what did they have? Love was like the heaven the church in the old days had offered to the poor to keep them from rioting.

She laughed aloud as she lay beside him afterwards.

"Was it just because I've been overseas?" he asked. "Do you feel you owe it to the boys who've been 'over there'?"

"Believe it or not, you're the first." She reached for her clothes and rose from the bed. "And I want a drink."

Dressed again, they faced each other, glasses in hand, across the coffee table in his living room.

"So I'm really only your second guy? Second in the war, anyway?"

"My second ever. I was a virgin when I married—the way you Irish men like your brides—or used to, at least. You have the honor of being my first marital infidelity."

His frown seemed to correct the lightness of her tone. "A dubious honor, I'm afraid. To have seduced an honest spouse."

"Do you really worry about that? I thought you told me you'd put all that Catholic business behind you."

"The dogma I have. But the sins have a way of sticking. And the guilt. Oh, we're great on guilt."

"Hellfire still crackles?"

"It's the last to go out."

"Well, put your mind at rest. You did
not
seduce me. If anything, it was the other way around. I did nothing I didn't want to do. And nothing I'm not willing to do again."

"Then we can enjoy our little fling for the rest of my leave?"

"I like the way you put a limit on it. Do you think I'm the type to cling?"

He gazed at her now almost regretfully. "No, I guess you're not that. What about Trevor?"

"What about him?"

"Have you no thoughts about cheating on him?"

"Thoughts? I don't think that's quite the word for them. Let's put it that he hasn't been here for me. Not today anyway."

"You've ceased to love each other?"

"How inquisitive you are. Men can never leave well enough alone. Maybe we have in a way ceased to love each other. Maybe in a way we never really did. But that's all
now,
because he isn't here. When he comes home things may be different."

"And you'll want that?"

"I hope so."

"Then we must be very discreet."

"Isn't that always wise? Which means I should be getting home." She glanced at her watch. "Oh, definitely. But I'll just finish this drink first. Provided we don't talk about Trevor. You, dear boy, will always occupy a special place in my heart as my second man. I think the second man may play a very important part in a woman's life. He opens things up."

"You mean because he shows her what she's been missing?"

"Don't be vain! That's not what I meant at all. He opens her up to herself."

"And lets her see there may be higher peaks to climb?"

"First you're vain. Now you're vulgar. But I should be grateful, anyway, that you haven't prated about love."

"No, dear," he admitted ruefully. "I haven't prated about love."

***

Rory was summoned to his next post in London a week ahead of schedule, and he and Clara had time for only two more sexual encounters. Thinking rather luxuriously back on them after he had gone, she enjoyed a new sense of being answerable only to herself. She even began to wonder if she had not slipped into a kind of solecism: that the world was only what Clarabel Hoyt perceived and felt, and that its morality and rules of conduct were purely of her own devising. If she was herself something of a work of art, she was also the artist. And what was sin then but a part of the backdrop against which she performed, acted, danced—yes, danced—like Salome before Herod? And the moment of ecstasy would be that when she pressed her lips against those of the severed head of the Baptist!

But the fantasies of her operatic mind came to a close as abruptly and hideously as the clap of the shields of Herod's guard that struck down the infatuated princess. Rory, covering the first-wave Normandy landings, was killed on Omaha Beach. Clara learned about it from her morning edition of the
New York Times
as she sat with Sandra at the breakfast table. There had been no cable or phone call. How could there have been?

"Mummie, what is it? You look so funny!"

"It's nothing, dear. Go and get ready for school."

Alone, she began rapidly to take in how alone she really was. Could there be an actual loss, a tragic grief, if nobody knew? Was there true sorrow without sympathy, without clasped hands, moist glances, murmured banalities? Could there be noise in a forest when a tree fell if no ear was near? But then she jumped suddenly to her feet and gasped as a wrenching spasm of pain tore at her chest. Ah, she
was
human. She did feel. It was almost a relief.

But then she was Clara again, ruefully aware that she was deprived of the dignity of a great war loss if nobody knew what she was bearing. Could she defy convention and wear mourning? But no. The last thing she wanted was to be ridiculous. She had wanted to be herself. Well, she would
be
herself. And there was no time to lose.

At the office she managed to be the usual efficient Clara, or at least to assume her appearance. Polly, of course, came in to discuss the news.

"Isn't it awful about Rory O'Connor! Have you seen him at all in the past years?"

"Oh, yes. I saw him here in town two months ago."

"Really? He was a wonderful man, I suppose."

"Oh, wonderful. This war is turning very costly. Look, dear, do you have the proofs of that day care piece?"

Somehow she got through the next few hours. But the great and totally unexpected test came when she got home. She found Trevor's sister Maribel Harper helping Sandra with a picture puzzle, or rather putting up a poor show of helping her. Maribel had obviously called with something else in mind, and she followed Clara immediately into the living room when the latter suggested a drink.

Trevor's older sister was tall and skinny with brown good looks and an air of chic which she seemed to rather wish to subdue in favor of a north shore athletic look. She was usually amiable and always intelligent, but she was culturally uneducated and intellectually lazy. She enjoyed an easy popularity in a group made up of people like herself. Clara had always found her easy to get on with, though there was a considerable mutual indifference.

"I must say, you're taking it awfully well," Maribel said suddenly as Clara handed her her drink and took a much-needed sip of her own.

"Taking what well?"

"O'Connor's tragic death."

Clara decided at once not to fence with her. "What are you implying? Rory's death is a tragedy, of course. He was on his way to becoming a great man. How else should I take it but well? You know, of course, that I worked for him in his campaign for Congress."

"I know more than that." Yet Maribel's tone was not unpleasant. It was almost matter-of-fact. "My friend Aggie Higginson lives in O'Connor's building. They share a cleaning woman. She's a frightful old gossip and told Aggie about you and O'Connor."

"So she knows I went there. So what?"

"Oh, she knows more than that. You know how they pry. She found things."

"I don't think I care to know what that woman found, Maribel."

"So you deny it? You and he weren't lovers?"

Clara paused to consider the situation. She didn't even mind the fact that her delay might be giving her away. She knew that she could prove her case, so to speak, in court. The wretched cleaning woman could have
seen
nothing. But did she really want to fool anybody? That was the point.
Did
she?

"I deny nothing," she said at last. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Isn't it more a question of what
you're
going to do about it?"

"What can I possibly do? Poor Rory is dead."

"Well, Mummie said—"

"Oh, so you've told your mother?"

"Didn't I have to?" Of course, any Hoyt daughter would. "But nobody else. Really, Clara, nobody else knows."

"Except all the people your friend Aggie has told."

Maribel appeared not to have considered this. "Oh, do you suppose she has?" Clara nodded resignedly. "Well, anyway, Mummie wants to know if we can put this all in the past. She telephoned me this morning when she read the news. She hopes that when Trevor comes home things will go back to the way they were before."

Trevor was in London, having been given shore duty, after three years at sea, as a naval liaison officer at General Eisenhower's headquarters. He was now a lieutenant commander; the assignment, an important one, had been procured by his father.

"Trevor and I will have to decide that when we meet again. I take it there will be no way of keeping the cleaning lady's glad tidings from his no doubt curious ears."

"Mummie thinks it's so much better that Mr. O'Connor died a hero's death. It puts a different color on things."

Clara laughed. She had not thought that she would laugh that day. "How like your mother! She's a great one at cleaning us up. Oh, yes, I see it! If I'd had a walk out with some greasy civilian, some draft dodger or war profiteer, while Trevor was fighting on the briny deep, that would be beyond redemption. Of course! But with my lover dying a hero on the beaches of Normandy while my husband is safe and sound in London and, who knows, perhaps having an affair with a lovely lady of title, that puts a different slant on things, doesn't it?"

"Clara, do you know I'm sometimes actually afraid of you? You react so differently from the way other people do."

"Well, spades are spades, my dear, no matter what we call them. And I am certainly not going to call them anything else. Whatever I've done, I'll live with!"

"Do you think Trevor
is
having an affair with a lady of title?"

"Let's hope for the title, anyway. But no, Maribel, I have no reason to suspect any such thing, except that he's a very attractive man who's been away from the sex for a long time. How's Bert doing?"

Bert Harper was a naval intelligence officer stationed in the Canal Zone. Maribel's features immediately darkened.

"You may well ask," she muttered.

T
REVOR HOYT
in London learned of his wife's affair from a letter of his mother's. Mrs. Hoyt was reserved in her statement; she confined herself to the facts and for once offered no judgment.

"Your father and I decided there was too much danger of your hearing about it from others, and it was better that you should have it straight from us. That the sorry business is over is the one good thing about the wretched O'Connor's death. Maribel is of the opinion that there's no present danger of Clara's taking up with anybody else. O'Connor, after all, was not some casual acquaintance picked up at a cocktail party; we know, of course, that he and Clara had been good friends before the war. I think, dear son, that we've all been living through very trying times, and some of us may have tumbled into strange experiences and relationships that would never have been our lot before. If you can find it in your heart to forgive this folly in your up-to-now admirable spouse, you and she may yet find happiness in the peace that seems at last to be on its way."

Trevor read the letter in his office and rose immediately to quit the building and walk briskly several times around Grosvenor Square. His seemingly cool stride belied the wrath that seethed within him. But on his third circumnavigation of the park his anger began to be qualified by an almost querulous indignation. How
could
she? How could she do this to him just
now
, when everything had been going just right in his life, when the Allied armies were pushing on to Berlin, when his own liaison work with some of the army great, including on one occasion Eisenhower himself, had been well received, when it now looked as if it might be a mere matter of months before he was back at his bank, with new friends in high places and a silver star on his chest? Oh, and then he would be more than his father's chosen successor; he would be at once his right hand and his guide!

For his time in England, amid all the brass and braid, with the scent of victory in the air and the excitement of attending military conferences at which the fabled prime minister was actually present, had done much to eclipse the Pacific years and the strain of living in a tense and tedious present with a future at the mercy of fire and water. Battle-scarred but reviving London had some of the taste and tang of his old life in Wall Street where tomorrow might always be better than today. And when Hitler's gang had been caught and hanged, had it not been in the cards that the ex—lieutenant commander and his beautiful brilliant bride would have the world at their feet?