But he seemed to have lost his choice in the matter. The image of Natica Barnes was constantly in his mind. At lunch in the dining hall when she was sitting by Tommy at a neighboring table, he would try not to be too obviously glancing her way. He noted that the sixth formers at his own table were equally aware of her, and he could recall from his school days the kind of lewd comments that were being whispered. Of course she had little competition from the other wives, on the whole a dowdy lot, or from the waitresses, all of middle age or elderly (Lockwood notoriously vetoed the employment of any female who might arouse the lust of his boys), but even among her peers Natica would, Stephen felt sure, have made a neat, trim, lively and shapely impression. Poor Annette seemed old and faded in his suddenly disloyal memory. Why on earth had she married a clod like Barnes?
“How would you like to bang her?”
Stephen almost started to hear the question, from one boy to another, several seats down the table. But he restrained the impulse to reprove them when he saw they had been watching him watch her and that the question, ostensibly private, had really been mockingly aimed at himself. He pretended not to have heard.
It was the custom for the masters and their wives to enter the dining hall ahead of the student body and take their positions at their tables while the boys filed in. One day, to Stephen’s surprise and quickly guarded excitement, Natica walked over to stand behind the chair on his right.
“I don’t see why the poor bachelor masters shouldn’t have a hostess every now and then. I’ve told Tommy I’m going to sit here today. If you don’t mind, that is.”
“The boys will be delighted.”
“Only the boys?”
“They will be only delighted. I will be enchanted.”
The headmaster’s table was on a dais in a large bay. When Lockwood had completed his thundered grace and taken his seat with the rest of the assembly, Stephen fancied that the eye that had briefly swept that crowded chamber had taken in Mrs. Barnes’s altered seat.
The sixth formers around him were effusive in their welcome of her. Their talk fell on the subject of the mother of a first former who had had the brass to ask the headmaster himself to take her on a tour of the school pantry and kitchen to check on their cleanliness. Natica asked what his response had been.
“Oh, he agreed to be her guide,” one boy replied. “He said he’d always wanted to see the kitchen!”
“That sounds like him,” she noted. “Only of course it wasn’t true. I’m sure he knows every pot and pan. But I’m glad one mother at least stood up to him. The poor parents come up here to find their sons completely free from their control. They have to shed their authority like tourists taking off their shoes in a mosque.”
“Sometimes their sons even assume it over them,” another boy offered. “I heard Dicky Daniels asking that obese mother of his if she couldn’t manage to look a little thinner when she went to talk to Dr. Lockwood.”
“Oh, poor woman!” Natica exclaimed with a fine show of dismay. “And did she comply? Did she manage to suck it in?”
There was general laughter. Then Giles Woodward, of the Donne plumbing theory, took a determined conversational lead.
“But it’s not only the headmaster’s stern stare that the poor parents are subjected to. The whole school feels free to inspect them as if they were slaves at auction in the old South. Hadley Clark, coming out of chapel with his mother last Sunday, had the humiliation of hearing the shortness of her legs discussed by a bunch of fifth formers.”
“But you boys are terrible! Stephen, tell them how terrible they are. Didn’t young Clark resent the remarks?”
“He’s only a third former, Mrs. Barnes.”
“He wouldn’t have left the place in one piece.”
“Shall we tell Mrs. Barnes what we did to that snotty Eustis kid who got so hot at our calling his old man a crook?”
“You didn’t!”
“But he was a crook, Mrs. Barnes. We read about it in the Times. He only got off by pleading the statute of limitations.”
“Even so, poor boy, you shouldn’t have thrown it in his face.”
But her tone showed that she was with them, and Stephen had a happy sense of the unity of their little group. He even recognized, with a pang of envy, what a pleasant thing it might be to have such a wife at school.
As he and Natica walked out of the hall together she observed: “Children are often ashamed of their parents. I know I was of mine. And I was even more ashamed of being ashamed! But you couldn’t have felt anything like that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, because the Hills are such a famous family. And Mrs. Knight tells me your mother’s a great beauty.”
“But I used to be terribly embarrassed by the ostentatious way they arrived at school when I was a boy here.”
“How do you mean?”
He noted her attention and played up to it. “Well, there was one particularly awful Sunday that I remember when Dad and Mother arrived in two cars, just after chapel, while the whole school was coming out and could see them, right there by the Cabot Gate. Dad was driving one of my sisters in a big yellow Hispano touring car, and Mother, who didn’t like to be blown, was in a green Rolls limousine with my other sister. You never saw such a circus.”
“I’ll bet the boys loved it!”
“Maybe. But I wanted to curl up and die.”
“It would have been the happiest moment in my life!” she exclaimed in a tone of real conviction. But then she added more soberly: “Which is nothing to be proud of, believe me.” And she left him to join her husband.
***
The invitation from Mrs. Knight was written in a large purple hand on a stiff card with a gold border and an eagle crest.
If you could spare an hour on Sunday at four we might read Maxwell Anderson’s delectable drama Elizabeth the Queen. Dear Natica Barnes can join us at that time, and I dare to foretell that we shall prove a congenial threesome. Perhaps we shall not rise to the empyrean heights of the incomparable Lunts, but we can but do our best.
It seemed a most un-Averhillian way of passing even a Sunday afternoon, but Stephen knew at once that nothing would keep him from accepting the invitation.
At the appointed day and hour he found Natica ahead of him. She and Mrs. Knight were in the midst of an earnest discussion of who was to read which part.
“No, no, Elizabeth is just the part for you,” Natica was insisting. “So full of twists and turns and shades of mood. You must read it all. And Stephen, of course, will be Essex. I’ll read the other parts. I’ve penciled the cuts in the three copies you’ve so generously provided.”
“But, my dear, I want you to read the main role—or at least part of it.”
“No, I have it all worked out.” Natica was very definite. “And our reading should take no more than an hour. Stephen, I’m sure, will have to get back to school. So let’s start right away with the scene where the council members trick Essex into accepting command of the fatal Irish expedition.”
As the reading progressed Stephen found himself strangely drawn into the playwright’s version of a romantic past. The close atmosphere of the dark Tudor parlor, the scent of incense and his hostess’s throaty utterance of her lines seemed to turn the house itself into a stage without an auditorium, while the hovering school and campus beyond, even the great gray chapel itself, receded into shadows. He tried to bring himself back to a semblance of reality by putting more force into his reading. He wanted to emphasize that if Essex’s life would be short, it would still be brilliant. He might be doomed in the end by the false old monarch, but he would make a splendid finish, young and brave, bowing his head to the block and flashing out his scarlet-sleeved arms to signal his readiness for the axe. He glanced at Natica. Was she having fun?
He couldn’t tell. Only when she read the part of Penelope, the queen’s lady in waiting who was also in love with the hero, was there any emotion in her voice, but then her tones rang ou
t loud and clear. He wanted to fancy himself as the man whose love she disputed with her mistress. But the fancy was suddenly stifled in the heavy atmosphere of the chamber; he heard his own voice weaken and pause. He had to clear his throat; Mrs. Knight offered him a glass of water. When, on his quick refusal, she resumed her role, now almost crooning in her ecstasy, he wondered if he could even breathe the air that seemed to intoxicate the older woman and at least invigorate the younger. It was as if everything that was female in the predominantly male world of Averhill had fled or even been chased from a hostile campus to be boxed up between Estelle Knight’s dark panels where it would defiantly throb and expand until it exploded, shivering the red brick and white columns of the beautiful circle and shaking the square Gothic tower of the chapel to its very foundations.
But when Natica happened to glance up from her book at him and smile, it was as if the whole gaudy chamber, the wig and the incense, had fallen away, and youth and truth were there alone.
“‘Give me the ring, give me the ring!’” shrilled Mrs. Knight in the old queen’s final vain plea to her stubborn favorite to invoke her mercy.
Natica’s gaze was now expressionless, except for what he thought he could make out as the smallest yellow glint in her eyes, and then he realized with a start that the reading was over and that he shouldn’t be staring at her.
Outside, accompanying her back to her house, he felt compelled to reconstruct some kind of bridge to the renewed reality of Averhill.
“Mrs. Knight really got a kick out of reading that part, didn’t she?”
“Shouldn’t she have?”
“Oh, sure. But do you know something funny? When I called on her, I fancied she was playing the part of an old queen receiving a young courtier who might become a favorite. I guess it’s pathetic, really.”
“What is?”
“Oh, the idea of shutting herself up in a make-believe palace and dreaming of love while intoning inferior verse. But at least she hasn’t lost all touch with reality. She doesn’t pick Juliet to play. She picks a part her own age, and that of a woman who ruled her world, so she can adjust her fantasies closer to her facts.”
“And what are her facts?”
“Well, you know. The painted wife of a superannuated Latin teacher sitting on a pile of unpublished and probably now unpublishable poetry.”
“You could see me in much the same light!” came the unexpected and shockingly tart rejoinder. “I may not be painted or married to an old Latin teacher, but I’m certainly married to a teacher, and what do I have but my fantasies? Indeed, I’m worse off than Mrs. Knight, for she has money, and somebody actually wanted to publish her verse! It’s easy enough for you to sneer at our little compensations. You’re rich and can travel all over the world in the long vacations. You can teach the boys what you wish, and if anyone stops you, you’re free to quit. And you can buy all the beautiful things you want, even if your family do go in for flashy cars!”
They had stopped walking and were facing each other. Indignation had given her a becoming glow.
“I can’t bear to think I’ve hurt your feelings!” he cried.
She blinked with surprise at the violence of his outburst. Then she shrugged. “Oh, you haven’t hurt them, really. It’s more that you’ve aroused them.”
“As if I could be superior about you.”
At this she simply turned to walk on.
“I can’t stand it if you’re not my friend!” he called recklessly after her.
She turned back and smiled. “Oh, I’m your friend.” They had reached the little gate to the brick walk to her cottage. “I wouldn’t have flared so if I hadn’t been.”
Walking back to the school, elated but spurning analysis of his elation, he passed the rear of the chapel and rounded the darkening campus on the way to his dormitory. Ahead of him he spied the short, thick, slowly progressing figure of the headmaster. Had Lockwood seen him part with Natica at her gate? Had he even spotted them coming down the lane from the Knights’ house? And if he had?
He quickened his pace to catch up with his principal.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening, Stephen. And a very good evening it is.”
“I’ve come from a cultural session. Mrs. Barnes and I were reading poetry at Mrs. Knight’s.”
Lockwood’s brief glance seemed to evaluate the oddness of this abrupt confession. “And did you read some of Mrs. Knight’s own verse?”
“Oh no, sir.”
“Oh no, you exclaim? Well, I imagine that might not have provided unmitigated delight.”
“I can’t say, sir,” Stephen replied in some confusion, anxious not to seem for a second time disloyal to his hostess. “I haven’t seen more than one of them. No, we read a play of Maxwell Anderson’s.”
“Indeed.” The tone made it clear that no further details were called for.
They walked on in silence until they reached the headmaster’s house. Here Lockwood paused before entering.
“Verbum sapienti, my friend. I am aware that Mrs. Knight is an old acquaintance of your mother’s and that some degree of social intercourse with her may be required. But before you embark on any regular course of meetings under her roof, please bear in mind that she is not disposed to be friendly either to myself or to the school. Her husband, on the other hand, I need hardly add, is one of the finest and most loyal of our masters. Good night, Stephen.”
Stephen, alone again, wandered to the middle of the campus to stare up at the square Gothic tower of the chapel. On clear days it radiated a message of peace and serenity, with perhaps just a shade of smugness. But in the shrouded twilight it seemed to cast a sterner spell, to warn if not actually to reprove. It occurred to him that Averhill might be beautiful to him, that Averhill might be romantic to him, precisely because it evoked the sweet sins the chapel could never condone. Were the tower and the Palladian Schoolhouse and the rounded campus and the stocky, vigorous figure of the headmaster himself not just as essential to his vision of love as the winding river with its overhanging foliage and canoes on a holiday in early spring? But that vision had not initially been the love of women.
12
IN HIS FIRST two years at Averhill Stephen had not been much attached to the school. As a quiet, good-looking boy, adequately competent at sports, never in any kind of serious trouble and sufficiently quick with his fists if mocked, he was at least tolerated by the rowdier leaders of his form, and the masters considered him a good if rather passive student. But the springs of his enthusiasm had not been touched; he regarded school terms as periods to be got through, and he marked off each day on the little calendar on the bureau of his cubicle with a neat penciled cross before going to bed. It meant twenty-four hours less before vacation when he could return to Mother and Redwood, the beautiful old white mansion with the high columned porch that looked down a sloping lawn to the broad Hudson. For knowing his passion for her ancestral home, Angelica tried to arrange to be there and not in the city on his Christmas and spring holidays as well as all summer.
His homesickness was of the deep, brooding sort that did not go away, even after a vacation had demonstrated that home was not all it had appeared in his visions at school. Indeed it began to seem to him that his discontent at Averhill was creating a kind of idealized Redwood, where the deer leaping through the woods and the blue jays in the dappled sunlight and his mother in white reading in the marble pagoda near the edge of the mighty river had become figures in a painting of the Hudson River School, remote in time and pregnant of tears. And then the school, with its jangling of bells and continual announcements from daises, with its bustle of boys through varnished corridors, their vapid joking and coarse laughter and bawling of evangelical hymns in chapel, was only cacophony.
But in the spring of his second year at Averhill something happened that marked the beginning of a change in his attitude. His old Irish nursemaid, Ellen, beloved by the family, who had been kept on at Redwood in the factitious pos
t of seamstress after the children had outgrown their need of her, died of a sudden stroke, which, as Angelica explained in her letter, was perhaps in the nature of a blessing. But to Stephen it came as a catastrophe. On his last vacation, preoccupied with his bird list and boating on the river, he had paid scant attention to the poor old woman, who, though she adored him and he her, had grown tediously garrulous and forgetful. Now she was translated into the symbol of all he had lost, of his unrecoverable childhood, nor could he ever make up to her for his unkindness by hugging her until she had to push him away to catch her breath. He knew, right there in the mail room where he had read the letter, that he was going to break down and weep unbearably, and to avoid the disgrace of being witnessed he rushed upstairs to his empty dormitory and threw himself on his bed to sob.
The sleeping quarters, however, were out of bounds in daytime, and the dormitory master, Mr. Coster, working in his adjoining study, heard him and walked down the aisle to his cubicle.
“What is wrong, Stephen?” he asked in a tone of simple kindness, devoid of any hint of reproach.
Stephen jumped up to explain his loss in a burst of jumbled words. But Mr. Coster, a grave, silent man of some thirty years with beautiful silky premature gray hair and soft eyes that bespoke a constant guarded sympathy that their owner never seemed to expect to be asked for, who taught English as precisely as if it were mathematics and who was known as a strict but utterly just disciplinarian, did not appear to find that Stephen’s grief for an old servant was out of proportion. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and led him into his study where they both sat down.
“I’m glad you feel the way you do for poor old Ellen,” he said gently, after Stephen had told him more about her. “And I’m glad she didn’t suffer. Your tears are a tribute to her. Don’t be ashamed of them. That would be to be ashamed of love. We’re much too stiff upper lip at Averhill. Love is what living is all about. And you shouldn’t worry too much about having neglected Ellen lately. The dead don’t judge us by our last acts. They have the whole picture. She knows that you love her.”
The Lady of Situations Page 13
