The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  He was off to chapel after an early breakfast and in classes all morning. Then she joined him at lunch in the dining hall and shared the perfunctory chatter of the fourteen-year-olds at his third form table. In the afternoon he coached lower school football, and three evenings a week he had to preside over a study period from eight to nine. On weekends attendance at the varsity football game and the headmaster’s tea was virtually compulsory, and Sunday was taken up by midmorning and early evening chapel.

  As the academic community had little affiliation with the village of Averhill or the local countryside, and as the school housekeepers, trained nurses and secretaries were not considered the equals of the faculty, social life for the latter was largely confined to themselves. Mrs. Lockwood, who as everyone knew had been born a Lowell, like Lady Macbeth, tended to “keep her state,” allowing the leadership of the wives to pass to Mrs. Evans, whose husband was head of the English department, but the headmaster’s wife always invited a newcomer to call, and Natica in due course received her bid to the “residence,” the huge three-story bulge at the end of the longest and most rambling of the red-brick school buildings.

  Mrs. Lockwood’s “den” was crammed with red upholstered Victorian chairs and divans, and with papier-mâché tables and étagères bearing bibelots and framed portrait photographs. It was as if she were trying to preserve the tightly linked world of her kith and kin from the catastrophe of modernity in a kind of brocaded time capsule.

  “You were a Chauncey, I understand. There was an Ernest Chauncey in the class of ‘twenty-five who married my cousin Euphemia Higginson’s second daughter, Hetty.”

  But when Natica, versed in the branches of her family tree, proceeded to explain the exact degree of cousinship, she quickly perceived that Mrs. Lockwood was not attending. Information might proceed from behind the fine shell of that egotism, but not penetrate it. She was a small, plainly dressed woman, with a round, rather featureless face and curiously hard pale blue eyes, who smoked incessantly, a cigarette dangling from her lips as her darting hands worked at needlepoint.

  “I’m told you’re a great reader, Mrs. Barnes. Perhaps you have read some of Cousin Amy Lowell’s poems. They used to be considered rather too passionate to have been written by a respectable spinster, but then Cousin Amy was always a law unto herself. You’ve probably heard that she even smoked cigars. She started a school in poetry that was called imagism. There was an irreverent fellow—I think his name was Pound—who claimed to be the real founder and that hers was ‘Amygism.’ Dear me, how my poor mother used to laugh at that! She never quite approved of Cousin Amy. But then our branch never went in for the arts.”

  And this, Natica reflected, was the woman who had married a butcher’s son! Perhaps, like “Cousin Bessie Tudor,” as the Virgin Queen had been described by a legendary Back Bay dowager, she considered her state such as to warrant any match or none at all.

  They were joined by Mrs. Evans, known to the faculty as the camarera mayor of the headmaster’s wife, a large fair blond woman of imposing manner and hearty tones, who listened for twenty minutes with studied patience to Mrs. Lockwood’s soliloquies. When she rose to leave, she quite firmly took Natica with her.

  “It’s best not to tire her,” she explained when they were outside. “Dear Mrs. Lockwood has a minor heart ailment. Nothing to be really alarmed about, but we must be careful. No doubt you have received full instruction in the genealogies of the ‘hub.’”

  “She does seem to have them at her fingertips.”

  Mrs. Evans gave her a quick glance, as if to approve the moderation of her reply.

  “She is a woman of great stature. Her patience and courage with ill health has been an example to us all. And it cannot be too easy, having been born what she was, to adapt herself to the life of a boys’ school in the country.”

  Was this a second test? Natica smiled to herself as she gave a sturdy response: “I should think being the wife of the headmaster of Averhill would be good enough for a Bourbon!”

  Mrs. Evans’s laugh did not conceal her approval. “How amusingly you put it. And speaking of Bourbons, that reminds me. Would you care to join a little group of faculty wives that meets every other Thursday at my house to discuss a selected piece of French literature? We call it our Cercle Français.”

  Of course, Natica would be only too honored.

  When she walked to the river the next day with Alice Ransome, one of the more congenial of the younger wives, she found her only sourly impressed with Mrs. Evans’s invitation.

  “Oh, if you’re in Marjories precious cercle already, you won’t be hanging around with the likes of me.”

  “You mean she wouldn’t ask you to join?”

  “The wife of the athletic director? Dream on, my dear.”

  “Then I don’t know if I care to go myself.”

  “Oh, go, by all means, if only to tell me about it.”

  Alice was a tall, broad-shouldered woman of thirty whose figure might have been impressive had she not stooped to look smaller. Her bobbed straw-colored hair made a poor frame for a large nose and fallen chin.

  “Is the cercle then so coveted?”

  “What else is there to covet?”

  Natica thought this might be a good point. She preferred Alice to Mrs. Evans, but poor Alice was not in any position to provide amusement. When “Marjorie,” as she was now privileged to call the latter, informed her that the newest member always selected the topic for her first meeting, she chose Phèdre.

  “Well, that’s just fine. I was sure you’d give us tone. Watch out, Mr. Racine, here we come!”

  ***

  Mrs. Evans’s living room was on the bare side; the walls were painted yellow and the chairs and sofa draped in a dull brown. A small breakfront displayed indifferent plates on teakwood stands. The sentimental watercolor of an Evans daughter hung over the mantel. An open door revealed Mr. Evans’s library, more invitingly crammed with books and framed old maps, but Mrs. Evans closed it when the seven ladies were assembled, and the sighing heavy Irish maid toted in the big tray with tea things. Greetings and inquiries as to health were conducted in hesitant and painfully articulated French, but the main discussion, led by the hostess, was not.

  “I’m going to start by admitting that I’ve only seen one play at the Comédie Française, and that was Le Monde ou l’on S’ennuie. The title seemed appropriate.” Here she paused for laughs and received a couple. “I don’t doubt that Phèdre is a great play. But I must say—and call me if you will a spoiled American who pines for derring-do—that five acts of Alexandrine verse where the only bit of action is a sword pulled out of its scabbard—never of course used—is what our German friends (if we have any in these Nazi days) call landweilig.”

  “Ah, but, Marjorie, if you had seen the divine Sarah in her greatest role, as I was blessed to in my salad days, you would have had your fill of excitement.” Mrs. Knight, wife of the senior Latin teacher, rarely appeared on campus, having somehow exempted herself from the jurisdiction of the headmaster. She was the oldest of the faculty wives, in her middle or even late sixties, and had a long, haggard face, heavily made up, and brooding dark eyes over blue shadow. The added touches of her richly dyed auburn hair and huge amber beads made her seem like a retired actress. She was, on the contrary, a New York heiress who lived away from the school in a big dark Tudor house of her own purchasing and wrote poetry that she was too “free-spirited” to publish.

  “You mean Sarah Bernhardt?” gasped Mrs. Greenwald, the wide-eyed, constantly astonished wife of the physics teacher. “You actually saw Sarah Bernhardt, Estelle?”

  “Bless you, my dear, I saw her many times. Why, she even came to my aunt’s house in Paris and heard me recite a poem. Yes, me, poor, scared-to-death little Estelle Tyler! Oh, I almost expired when I heard my mother, who would stop at nothing, ask cette chère Madame Sarah if she would be so gracieuse as to écouter la petite. And then suddenly there I was, standing up before them all, declaimin
g ‘Le Sommeil du Condor.’” Mrs. Knight closed her eyes and clasped her hands. “Oh, why didn’t I perish, like Pheidippides, at that summit of joy? For next I heard the famous voix d’or actually asking me to her home for a lesson in diction! But bien entendu, that was not a milieu for a jeune fille, and dear Papa put his foot firmly down. Who knows what histrionic career he may have nipped in the bud?”

  “Why couldn’t a jeune fille go there?” Mrs. Greenwald, in all sincerity, wanted to know.

  But Mrs. Evans had had more than enough of her senior guest’s reminiscences. “I think we had better get back to Racine. And, Edith, you can find out about your jeunes filles later from Mrs. Knight. Suppose you tell us your reaction to the tragedy we’re here to discuss.”

  “Well, one thing that puzzled me, Marjorie,” the physics teacher’s wife confessed, “was all the emphasis on incest. I looked up the word in my dictionary, and it defined it as … well, let’s say making love, between two persons too closely related to marry legally. Now of course the heroine could not marry Hippolyte at all because she was already married to his father. But if she hadn’t been, there would have been no impediment that I could see. I mean she and Hippolyte were not blood relations, were they?”

  This provoked an animated discussion of many voices.

  “But he was her stepson! Incest doesn’t have to be between an actual mother and son, does it?”

  “Of course it does. That’s the whole point of it.”

  “Anyway, wasn’t she guilty of moral incest?”

  “Why was she guilty of anything? She didn’t do anything, did she? After all, Hippolyte wouldn’t even look at her.”

  “But she wanted to do plenty. Oh, didn’t she!”

  “You mean she only wanted to commit an act that would have been only moral incest. It seems to me that’s getting pretty far away from any real sin.”

  “What I find unattractive is that Hippolyte was young enough to be her son.”

  “What makes you think that? She may have been only a couple of years older than him.”

  Mrs. Knight’s voice rose above the babble. “When I saw the divine Sarah in the role, she must have been well in her fifties, if not more, and Hippolyte was played by a strapping youth. I feel all the anguish of an aging woman in the lines. Oh, how can you miss it?” She closed her eyes again tightly, as if evoking a memory too flaming to be hid. The room was silent with surprise and perhaps with awe. “No, that immortal verse speaks with a terrible clarity to those who have been through a certain ordeal. To those who know what it is to feel the passing of beauty in the beholder while it is at its most poignant in the beheld.”

  Mrs. Evans was plainly disgusted. “I think we are straying from our analysis of the play. I am going to ask Natica to give us her reaction. She, after all, was the one who proposed Racine.”

  “Well, I think, Marjorie, the reason we find the dramatic situation a bit confusing is that we are not Jansenists, as he was.”

  “Suppose you explain to us just what a Jansenist is, dear.”

  Natica supposed she was being warned not to “show off,” but she had started and had to go on. “A Jansenist was a kind of French puritan. He believed that all men are saved or damned before they are born, and that there’s nothing in the world we can do about it. Phèdre is damned because she loves her stepson, as it was always in the cards, at least in hex cards, that she would. It isn’t in any way her fault; it’s Venus’s fault. And she knows this and knows that it’s hideously unfair. That’s her tragedy.”

  There was another outburst.

  “Why, that’s horrible!”

  “How could anyone believe anything so awful? To be damned for something she couldn’t help? What sort of a religion is that?”

  “We might all be damned if it was just a question of feeling.”

  “Ladies, ladies!” Mrs. Evans raised a silencing hand. “Natica had made an interesting point, but surely she is overlooking the central crisis of. the play. Phèdre falsely accuses Hippolyte of attempted rape, and for this his father has him killed. So she’s really guilty of murder. That to me settles the question of damnation. If she’s not damned, she’s in for a long term in purgatory.”

  “But she never dreamed Thésée would go so far!” Natica protested, appalled by this oversimplification of her favorite drama. “You remember, her old nurse Oenone told her, ‘Un père en punissant est toujours père.’ She has been tricked by circumstance into believing her husband is dead. She has been driven almost mad by frustration and humiliation. And she is on her way to tell Thésée the truth, at the risk of her own life, when she receives the body blow of learning that Hippolyte loves Aricie. She hasn’t eaten or slept for days; she is half dead, and Oenone works on her fevered imagination…”

  “I’m afraid someone else’s imagination is a bit fevered,” Mrs. Evans interrupted icily. “And, if you don’t mind, Natica, I think it’s time some of the other ladies had a chance to speak.”

  Natica, deeply mortified, did not open her mouth again during the discussion. Even when a question was directed to her, as one or two were, by women obviously trying to make up for their hostess’s rudeness, she simply indicated, with a slight smile and self-deprecating shrug, that she had used up her small store of criticism. But that night she exploded to Tommy.

  “Do we really have to stay in this school? Wouldn’t you like to have a parish of your own? Or even be a missionary like your brother? I’d rather face the cannibals than Marjorie Evans and her sacred cercle!”

  He tried to pass it off as momentary pique on her part, but when she insisted that she was serious, he got up and took her in his arms and whispered what it was that she, and he too, basically needed. She pulled at once away from him.

  “But we agreed we wouldn’t even think about a baby for a year!”

  “But there’s no law that says we can’t change our mind, is there?”

  “Oh, Tommy, I can’t get into that before I know where I am. Don’t make me feel trapped!”

  He at once relented, and when they went to bed he made love to her, but with the usual precautions. Making love would always be his answer to her problems; she was beginning to understand that. Oh, she liked it well enough, but she was wondering already why he had to do it every time in exactly the same way and why he was so confident that he never failed to confer an ecstasy upon her. After only two months of marriage she was simulating orgasms.

  That night she slept fitfully, and her dreams were confused with her waking fantasies. It seemed to her that she was a soul alone, clad in a long white robe, as she envisioned Phèdre at the Française, isolated from the others, some jeering, some passively sympathetic, all peering, set apart by the bleak fact of her damnation. Then she fled across the boards and into the darkness of the wings, flitting as in a ballet, but in the coolness of shadows and by the trickle of streams she found no consolation in the frantic and ineffective devotion of her equally damned old nurse. She might hide herself away from the harshness of daylight and the people who found an inert contentedness in the little niches of the exposed rocky slopes outside, but in the end that daylight would penetrate even to her blackness and shrivel her into a little heap of dry bones.

  When she fell at last into a deep sleep it was almost morning, and she awakened late. Tommy had gone to school, but he had left her a note:

  I didn’t think last night was the time to tell you, but poor Miss Stringham’s complaint has been diagnosed as cancer. Mr. Lockwood has asked me if you would consider taking her position. Think it over. It might give you just the interest and distraction you need at the moment.

  Natica clasped the note to her breast. God bless Tommy, after all! Miss Stringham was the headmaster’s secretary.

  6

  THE HEADMASTER’S office in the “Schoolhouse,” as the main classroom building was known, was across the corridor from the principal assembly hall, and when the door was open the roar and rush of boys changing classrooms on the hour was deafening.
But when it was closed the large chamber was almost soundproof, and Natica enjoyed the sense of sitting in the eye of the whirlpool of this strange male educational process. From the two French windows she had a sweeping view of the whole circle of the ever active campus, muted like a film with a dead soundtrack. Her own little room adjoining was windowless and bare except for the typewriter desk and file cabinets and a large stained photograph of the Roman Forum, but the door to Lockwood’s office was always open except when he had private visitations, and she could see across her machine to the great eighteenth-century French boule table covered with gold and silver mementos which he used for a desk and the Sargent portrait behind it of his clerical predecessor.

  Her duties required her to be at the office immediately after morning chapel and to remain there until lunchtime. In the afternoons she could work at home if she preferred, typing dictated letters and reports, and on weekends she was subject to call at the headmaster’s study in his residence whenever he needed her. Having typed since her fourteenth year and having taken courses in shorthand during her Barnard summer, she expected to be adequately equipped for the job, and she could only hope that her new boss would be less exacting with women than he was reputed to be with men. It was encouraging that rumor had him trembling, like the first duke of Marlborough, before a wife who could be something of a shrew.

  On her first morning he greeted her as perfunctorily as if she had been working for him a year, and launched immediately into the dictation of three letters to parents. He spoke slowly, with perfect articulation and without a single change or interjection, as if he had been reciting a prepared piece. But she knew he was testing her.

  When she came back with the letters typed he read all three carefully before saying a word.