The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  At Yale he had cherished the notion of returning to Averhill after graduation as a teacher of English. He had undergone a religious phase at the age of sixteen, and like many boys at the school, he had fallen under the spell of the headmaster’s inspiring sermons. Rufus Lockwood knew how to hold a disciple once obtained. He made no secret of his favorites, and the personality that could be so corrosive to the uninitiated exuded a compelling charm for the inner circle. When on one of his many visits back to the school in his Yale years Stephen confided in Dr. Lockwood his ambition to become a teacher, he was at once taken up.

  “Indeed, dear boy, there is no nobler calling, and I deem you in every way fitted for it. Why should you look further than your beloved alma mater for a situation? I think you have a good understanding of what Averhill is and what I want it to be, and you would help me to close that gap.”

  But Stephen had run into an unexpected opposition. Angus Hill, a trustee of the school, was one of those who were inclined to look a bit askance at the protean headmaster.

  “He may be a great man, but there’s a shrewd practical side to his spiritual nature. I shouldn’t be surprised if your post at Averhill would cost me a hundred G’s.”

  And when Stephen under closer examination was obliged to admit that Lockwood had suggested that he might teach a course in art as well as English and that his family might see fit to endow a small gallery with a permanent collection of American paintings, his father simply chuckled.

  The project was not abandoned, but Stephen had agreed to postpone it for a year and to consider working in the interim for the bank that had custody of the Hill securities.

  His temporary idleness, however, was to bear more exotic fruit than a job in a trust company. He had never experienced a great passion—certainly a requisite to any romantic nature—and he came to believe for a time that he had found it.

  Angelica Hill was doing over her living room, and she had engaged the services of a popular French decorator. Madame Annette Godron had come to New York a few years before to establish an American branch of the business she and her husband had founded in Paris, but which their domestic discord had made her feel would be better managed with an ocean between them. She had so many and such interesting ideas for the palazzo, for which her admiration seemed boundless, that Angelica, who found her charming, had greatly expanded her plans for redecoration, inviting her advisor after each morning visit to stay for lunch. Stephen, who rarely left the house before the afternoon, was apt to join them at table and soon came under the Godron spell.

  She had something in her air of the smart Parisienne of the 1920s, with bobbed dark hair and a look, in calm hazel eyes, of self-assured inquiry, and she was always dressed, at least for business, in simple black. She made no effort to disguise her age; she seemed to affirm that a woman at forty-plus was where she should be. There appeared to lurk behind her quiet briskness, her unvarying equanimity of temper, an acceptance of more things and people than might have been expected of a Gallic businesswoman. And she was certainly the best listener Stephen had ever talked to.

  When his mother went upstairs after lunch for her short daily nap he would talk with Annette over coffee until she had to insist on returning to her office. Missing his old Yale friends, bored with his kin and hungry for sympathy, he chattered with unabashed egotism about himself and his problems. Her total attention freed him of all semblance of shame.

  She saw no reason that he should not take a post at Averhill if one were available. “Of course, you’re never going to make any money at it, but then you don’t need money. We Europeans don’t understand why rich Americans so often want to be richer.”

  “Rich Frenchmen aren’t like that?”

  “Some, of course. But it’s considered a bourgeois attitude.”

  “But I am bourgeois.”

  “So am I, bien entendu. What I mean is that in France the bourgeois attitude is not necessarily the dominant one. We don’t have to bow to it, the way you seem to here.”

  “Father keeps saying it’s a mistake, after only four years at college, to go right back to the school where I’ve already spent six. He thinks I should give a year to learning how to handle the family money.”

  “But you’re not doing that, are you? You’re sitting at home talking to your mother’s decorator.”

  “That’s just because I’ve persuaded him to let me put things off for a bit.”

  “Would he mind so terribly if you told him you were going to Averhill now? I’ve noticed that American children have a way of imagining their parents care more about their decisions than perhaps they do.”

  “He’d be hurt. And then remember he’s a trustee of the school.”

  “And your mother, I suppose, always agrees with him? At least where a son is concerned?”

  “Not necessarily. Oh, Annette, she listens to you. Would you talk to her?”

  She considered this, but then shook her head. “No. Because your father’s not really being unreasonable. What’s a year?”

  “An eternity. When you’re as bored as I am.”

  “Let me tell you something, Stephen Hill.” For a moment she was almost grave. “Young men in Goethe’s time liked to affect melancholy, even despair. But with most of them it was a mask. Basically they were happy, or at least happier than they knew. But you are not a man to play that game. You would be really unhappy. And that is never safe. Now I must be off to work.”

  His mother had a box at the opera, where she went two or three times a week, issuing standing invitations to certain old friends and relations to propose themselves for performances of their choice, and soon Annette was a regular guest, slipping silently into the back of the box shortly after the opening curtain. Stephen, watching her immobile profile in the dimness, felt sure that the music merely provided a tranquil background for her thoughts.

  “Oh yes,” she confessed when he taxed her with this. “What are those silly plots to me? I love to sit in the darkness and let the music carry me back, way, way back.”

  “To happier times?”

  “Why happier? Do you think the past is always happier?”

  “Mine was.”

  “‘Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colors off.’”

  “I will if you’ll agree to go to a nightclub with me after this.”

  “What a charming idea! I should love to.”

  But in bidding good night to his mother he said only that he was seeing Annette home. He feared she would find it ridiculous that he should be having a “date” (if she could have brought herself to use the word) with a woman so much older.

  There was, however, no such feeling reflected in any eyes that he could see at the nightclub to which he took her. Annette did not so much seem young as ageless. She was amusing and amused; she frankly delighted in the loud music and the smartly dressed people. Two couples, passing their table, stopped to greet her, and she introduced Stephen as if it were the most natural thing in the world that they should be together. And when he took her home afterwards, she took leave of him at her doorway with a firm and friendly handshake.

  But it was different, at least for him, after that. He wanted to be with her more now, and away from his family. He took her out to dinner at French restaurants, the most expensive in town, and she “paid for her meal,” as she gaily put it, by instructing him in what to order, even giving him little lectures about Gallic cooking which she took very seriously, as indeed she proved when she cooked a meal for him at her apartment.

  “What do you really think of our friendship?” he asked her that night.

  “I think it’s very nice.”

  “And what do you think Mother would think of it?”

  “I don’t think. I know. She highly approves. She seems to think I’m good for you.”

  He was immediately incensed. “The sophisticated Parisienne making a gentleman out of a hayseed?”

  “You Americans have such a rage for definitions, for putting things in cubbyholes. Can’t y
ou and I simply enjoy ourselves?”

  What he had never imagined was that love could grow out of such calm. He had always associated it with the usual images of motion, wind in trees, breakers along the coast. But Annette gave him a new sense of the pleasure of being himself at a particular moment, without any need of a morrow. The fact that she was intently and efficiently busy most of the time when away from him did not impinge on the serenity of her demeanor when present. Indeed, it might have helped to create it.

  And when their relationship deepened at last, that too seemed to come easily. One night at her apartment, where they had repaired for a drink after the theatre, she simply said, as he rose to leave:

  “You know, you can stay if you like.”

  “I can?”

  “Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t care to. It won’t make the least difference in our friendship.”

  Looking at her intently, he felt that she really meant this. “But what will your doorman say when he sees me leave in the morning?”

  “He’ll say I have a handsome young lover and that I’m a lucky old bag!”

  ***

  Their affair was carried on in Annette’s little box of an apartment at noontimes. The dusky old Italian prints of ruins, the gilded baroque columns by the fireplace, the strips of crimson brocade, the spindly Venetian chairs, all tightly fitted-in accumulations of years of auction haunting, seemed in their lovely deadness to intensify the emotion enacted before them. Stephen had been in love off and on with many girls, met at parties and in summer communities, but he had not before had an affair; his infrequent physical encounters (and that seemed now just the word for them) had been in brothels. He had had to wait for an idle and jobless existence in Manhattan, where he had nothing to do with his mornings but read novels and with his afternoons but play squash or roam the park, to find the fulfilling experience. In the evenings now he was perfectly content to dine with his family, forgoing all carping criticisms, on nights when Annette’s presence was required at the social gatherings of her demanding clients.

  She was less passionate than he. Indeed he wondered, in occasional fits of exasperation, if she was passionate at all. She enjoyed their lovemaking, but when it was over, it was over. As he lay on the bed afterwards, smoking and languidly watching her dress, seated before the triple mirror on her bureau, he had the feeling that she was preparing to resume her place in the “real” world. And when, ready to leave, she would move briskly over to give him, still sprawled on her sheets, a quick peck on the forehead, she might have been a benign mother falcon leaving her flightless young in the nest while she departed in search of provender.

  When he accosted her with this, she took it seriously enough to turn back from the door and seat herself on the bedside.

  “Some of us have to work, you know. We can’t all spend our days as you do.” She patted his bare stomach. “Go now and play squash with your marker at the Racquet Club. This marker has to hang Mrs. Paine’s curtains.”

  He caught her hand. “You don’t have to hang any old curtains. You can be as idle as I am.”

  “You mean you’ll ‘keep’ me? Merci du compliment! I’m not quite there yet.”

  “No, no, no, don’t be ridiculous. I mean as my wife. It’s only up to you.”

  She cocked her head as if to consider a curious proposition. “Aren’t you forgetting that I am married?”

  “But you’re separated! You could get a divorce.”

  “I’m also a Catholic. We don’t divorce. And besides, I’m old enough to be your mother.”

  He seized her other hand. “I don’t care! Oh, I know you think I’m feckless and irresponsible, but I’m not, fundamentally. We could get married and live at Averhill.” He paused. Even at such a moment it struck him that Annette was unthinkable at Averhill. “Or if you didn’t like the school, you could have an office in Boston and carry on your business there. It’s only an hour away. And I have plenty of money to set you up there. It’s all in trust, but the income’s mine!”

  Only she could have freed one hand and looked at her watch at such a time without being insulting. “My appointment with Mrs. Paine is at two-thirty. I really must go. If you care for me, dear Stephen—and you arc a very dear Stephen—you won’t talk to me about marriage again. It would not only be absurd. It would be grotesque. Now be a good boy and let me go.”

  “A good boy!”

  But she had slipped from his grasp and was gone. He could hardly rush after her naked to the elevator corridor. He could only get dressed and call the Racquet Club to cancel his squash lesson. He would walk in the park and consider what to do next. For a while he was too excited to orient his thoughts, but when he reached the reservoir he became calmer. What had happened to him was clear enough: he had taken the simple, decisive step to true manhood. He had reached out at last to take a firm hold of his hitherto limp and listless destiny and yank it roughly into shape. Annette was everything he had always needed. How he saw it now! She would arm him to face his father and turn the nebulous dream of teaching at Averhill into a shining reality. Now that he properly considered it, she would be far from unthinkable in the school. She would have an office in Boston, of course, but she might have to go to it only three or four times a week. She could redo houses in the wealthy suburban neighborhood. She might even redecorate some of Averhill’s buildings! They could do with her touch. And mightn’t she even teach a course in French literature? Other schools had women teachers. Why not?

  He resolved now to go home and have it out with his mother. She had unexpected tolerances as well as unexpected rigidities; one could never be quite sure where she would come out. And then he was convinced that she loved him better than anyone else in the world, including his father. She would want him to be happy. He did not know how much she knew about him and Annette, but the recent silence of his whole family on that subject was surely an indication that they were watching and waiting for something.

  He found her at tea with two ladies, and he had to wait until they left. But she saw at once that he had something on his mind, and as soon as they were alone she suggested:

  “Why don’t you get us a cocktail, darling, and tell me all about it?”

  “I think, if you don’t mind, I’d rather talk to you first. It’s about Annette. You know I’ve been seeing a lot of her.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “She says you approve.”

  “Why not? I’m devoted to Annette, and I have total confidence in her.”

  He winced. “Confidence that she won’t try to marry me, is that it? Your confidence was justified. She turned me down flat. But I am determined to prevail upon her to change her mind.”

  Angelica rose with a sudden start and took hurried steps over to him. When he jumped up, she threw her arms around him and drew him to her in that strong silky clasp that had always annihilated his filial resistance.

  “Oh, my darling boy, I know how hard this is on you now, but believe me, Annette is right. It would never work out.”

  He found that his shoulders were actually shaking with resentment. For the first time in his life he jerked himself almost brutally free from her embrace.

  “I thought you at least would understand. You’ve always held yourself out as a romantic.”

  “But, dear child, is this really so romantic?”

  “Because of our ages?”

  “Well, that’s the big thing, isn’t it? You and she couldn’t have a family.”

  “What makes you so sure of that? Women older than Annette have had babies.”

  “But not after a certain thing has happened.”

  “And what makes you think it’s happened to her?”

  “Because she’s told me. Annette, you will remember, is my friend, too. I’d go along with almost anything that would make you happy, my child, but not something that would mean you could never have children.”

  He read in the new gleam of resolution in those usually gentle eyes that his case was lost. She and An
nette were bound as allies in a bond he could never hope to breach. In a sudden seizure of anger and bitterness he wondered if the bond was between them as women or as old women. Was he only a silly, frustrated boy?

  “It’s the old French story, I suppose. The mama who wants her baby initiated in the rites of love by an experienced woman. My God, did you even pay her?”

  “You are not only being perfectly disgusting. You’re being insolent. Will you please go to your own room. I have nothing more to say to you.”

  “Mother, listen…”

  “Go, Stephen! Go at once.”

  Alone in his study everything seemed to be draining out of him in a horrid mess of love and hate. Of course it was all over between him and Annette. He could no more have made love to her now than to his mother. Annette herself would have recognized this; she must have known that his mother would tell him about her menopause. “To make men pause!” he cried jeeringly aloud. Why had she told Angelica except to provide her with a way of bringing the affair to a close?

  His mind was now a feverish arena of imagined and remembered things. The vision of Annette’s breasts blurred with that of his mother’s, peeked at when he was a boy hiding in her bedroom, as she emerged from her bathroom with her robe parted. He shut his eyes in pain, trying to separate the thought of flesh untouchable from that of flesh touched. And suddenly an ancient but always persistent fantasy of his swept over the disordered landscape of his mind, though in a grotesquely altered form. He had imagined himself as Paris of Troy coming to judge the beauty of the three rival goddesses, boldly smiling, daringly impertinent, insisting that they strip to the skin for his better contemplation of their parts. But as they ambled before him now in wanton naked majesty, their Rubenesque bosoms and thighs and abdomens seemed wrinkled and saggy, and, then, when they appeared ready to close in on their judge, hot and panting in their eagerness to persuade him to give each the award, he feared he would be stifled in their ancient flesh and took to his heels.

  He came down to dinner only because he could not bear to be alone with himself any longer. His mother was upstairs; she had pleaded a headache and would have her meal on a tray. His father and both sisters were at the table. It was a family party—a sufficiently rare event. Had the girls been summoned to their mother’s chamber and told in no event to go out that night?