The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  His voice trembled when he read the famous lines of the villain: “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.”

  When he walked with her afterwards to her cottage, he was talking a bit wildly.

  “You read that so beautifully! I couldn’t help but think of you as somehow imprisoned in all of this.” With an indignant sweep of his arm he sought to encompass the chapel they were passing and the green circle beyond it. “And of Lockwood himself as the grim cardinal brother.”

  “Dear me, I must really have carried you away. Elizabeth Bergner had better look to her laurels. But what could his eminence, Cardinal Lockwood, hold against me? My marriage to poor Tommy?”

  “Not that at all. Not that at all.”

  She paused. “What are you trying to tell me, Stephen?”

  “I’m afraid if I answer that, you might give up the readings.”

  “Is that your way of making me do so?”

  “Promise me you won’t, Natica! Promise me you won’t do that to me!

  He had risked everything now. If she didn’t give them up, she would have permitted him to hope.

  She hedged. “Maybe it would be better if we added a few others to the meetings. That would make them less intimate, don’t you think? Anyway, here we are. Good night, Stephen.”

  The Christmas holidays were upon them; he would not see her again until January. Back in New York he was inclined to be restless and bored with his family, but the engagement of his sister Janine to Abel Lockhart, the affable (too affable, Stephen thought) and rather stickily conventional heir to a Chicago stockyard fortune, absorbed all the attention of the Hills, and Stephen’s moods went unnoticed.

  His mother was concerned about a hint of doubt that Janine had let fall as to the wisdom of her choice.

  “Abel is a dear, of course, but nobody would accuse him of being a great catch if it weren’t for his money,” she confided in her son. “He snores in the back of the box at the opera, and I doubt if he’s read a novel since Treasure Island. If indeed he even read that. He does everything Janine wants and agrees with everything she says…”

  “Which makes him not only a dunce but the perfect husband for her.”

  “I don’t suppose it really matters, if he’s going to hunt and fish all his life,” Angelica continued pensively. “But the poor girl is worried that she may be getting married just to be married.”

  “What better reason?”

  “Oh, hush. You’re always so superior where your sisters are concerned.”

  “It hardly makes me very lofty.”

  “She was actually thinking of breaking it off the other day when Mrs. Lockhart, who’s just as sweet as she can be but dreadfully common, arrived with a trunk—a whole trunk, mind you—of the most expensive linen in the world, all hopelessly monogrammed JHL.”

  “Ah well, now she’s stuck.”

  “She can’t throw her life away just because of some table covers and napkins!”

  “Don’t you see, Ma, it’s providential? All Janine needs is to have her mind made up. She and Abel will rub along very well together.”

  “You’re being horrid.”

  But in all seriousness he felt that he was right about his elder sister. When he returned to Averhill in January the wedding had been set for June.

  Natica was not at lunch in the school dining hall on the first day of term; Tommy answered Stephen’s inquiry with the news that she had gone to her parents in Long Island. Her mother, it appeared, had had a mild heart attack. Stephen attempted to stifle the unreasonable feeling that she should have told him. But a week later she was at her usual place at Tommy’s table, and he went up to her before grace. Yes, her mother was much better, thank you. He looked around. Tommy had not yet made his appearance.

  “Shall we be reading again?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. Mrs. Knight will be after you. We’re going to continue to concentrate on Webster. The White Devil. And a week from Saturday I’m going into Boston for a matinée of The Duchess. I have my ticket!” She held up her purse as if the repository of so sacred a means of admission was not to be allowed out of her sight.

  “Tommy’s not going?”

  “Of course not. He’s coaching hockey or doing something much more important like that.”

  “If I get two tickets, will you sit with me?”

  “Heavens, no.” Her eyes rolled in mock fear to the stolid figure of Marjorie Evans, two tables away. “The sacred cercle may all be there.”

  “Will you dine with me afterwards?”

  Her acceptance was agreeably prompt. “On condition that you take me somewhere where we shan’t run into them.”

  He nodded. He had already thought of a seafood place near the Navy Yard where it would be almost inconceivable to meet Marjorie Evans. Yet it only looked rough; it was actually very good and very expensive.

  Mrs. Knight called him that evening to invite him to a reading the following Sunday, but when he arrived at the appointed time he found her alone, standing rather dramatically erect in the center of her living room.

  “Once again the great Lockwood has thrust his blackjack into my prison! At the least sign of life from my cell he tries to thrash me senseless. Ah, but I’m not dead yet!”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Read this!” And she handed him a note from Natica.

  My poor, dear Estelle, our harmless little sessions have been pronounced treason by the most High! Lockwood spoke to Tommy last night and told him that his professional advancement would not be accelerated by his wife’s visitations to a house where the headmaster and school were known to be held in open contempt! Tommy and I had a terrible scene when he asked me not to come to you on Sunday, and I only agreed when he consented to my going to my matinée (I had not told him I had a ticket), and to my spending the night in your apartment in Boston, so long as I didn’t tell anyone!

  Stephen did not at first realize how odd his response must have sounded. “I didn’t know you had an apartment in Boston.”

  “It’s really hardly that. A simple pied-à-terre. My refuge from Philistia.”

  “And will you be spending Saturday night there with Natica?”

  “I was, but I can’t now. My daughter Trudy and her husband are coming for the weekend, and they would take it very ill if I hightailed it into Boston. So Natica will be quite alone in the flat. Unless you’ll be good enough to keep her company. There’s a small maid’s room where you could be perfectly comfortable. There’s really no reason you shouldn’t, you know. It would all be perfectly proper, and anyway, nobody need know.”

  Stephen stared at her, almost in awe. “And will you tell her that?”

  “That I’ve asked you? Well, I could hardly have you breaking in on her, could I? But don’t worry. We’ve already talked on the telephone. She hasn’t the least objection to your staying there. So even if I must miss my reading, I’ll have the satisfaction of thinking of you two enjoying a wonderful matinée and talking it over afterwards in my little flat.”

  Mrs. Knight, despite the absence of Natica, still insisted on reading aloud several scenes from The White Devil. Of course she read, exuberantly, Vittoria’s lines. It took a great effort for him to concentrate on his cues.

  ***

  His only colloquy with Natica before the day of the matinee had been a brief one after a school lunch in which they had agreed to go in separate taxis from the theatre to his waterside restaurant.

  He arrived first and picked the most secluded booth. He then ordered two martinis, as she had told him to. When she came in she walked directly to the booth as if knowing which he would have chosen. Sitting down, she pulled off her beret and fluffed up her hair. When the drinks came she took up her glass eagerly and swallowed a gulp.

  “There!” she exclaimed with a sigh of satisfaction. “I love this. I’m free, if only for a night.”

  “What do you love? The cocktail? Or being away from school? Do I dare hope you might love—just a litt
le bit, anyway—being with me?”

  She laughed, without even a trace of constraint. “Don’t be coy, Stephen. Love would only complicate our friendship.”

  “Is that all it’s going to be—a friendship?”

  “What is that French phrase? An amitié amoureuse? Why don’t we call it that?”

  “Except…” He paused to take a good gulp of his cocktail. “Except I thought that phrase meant a platonic relationship.”

  “Possibly. But don’t forget, it’s a French phrase.”

  “You mean there’s still hope?”

  “Look, my dear, do we have to dot every I?” She took in the eagerness of his expression and gave it up. “Yes, I guess we do. Very well. Are we going to spend the night in Estelle’s flat in the way the dear old pander intended? We are. There. Now are you satisfied? Can we enjoy our dinner?”

  “Why don’t we go there now?”

  “You mean to get it over with?”

  “No, no, no. To have it sooner. We could dine later. And then go back to the flat for more.”

  “Dear me, how carnal the man is. But no. I mean to have another cocktail and then a very good dinner. I want to savor this whole free day. I want to enjoy every minute of it. Who is to say which is the best? I won’t be hurried. I’m younger than you, but I’ve had a harder life. I’ve learned that the greatest joy may be anticipation.”

  “I’ll try not to be a disappointment,” he retorted wryly.

  “Then start now” was her inexorable reply. And she proceeded to discuss Elizabeth Bergner’s rendition of the role of the duchess.

  “It’s of such a searing simplicity. Her love may be innocent and lawful, yet if she gives in to it she will surely die. So she gives in and dies. Without a word of fear, a syllable of protest. So Elizabethan—or Jacobean, I suppose I should say. They knew that life was abominable, but that it contained a few things that made it worth the candle— if you had the will to die for them.”

  “Is that how you see life?”

  “Oh, no. Ours is a different era. We live rationally. By rules. We take only carefully measured risks. You may say the duchess concealed her pregnancies as well as her marriage, but she knew all along she would never get away with it. At least that is how Miss Bergner interprets her. Take us tonight. If Tommy should learn of it, he would be horribly hurt. I don’t want that to happen. Yet it might. That’s the chance I take. But if I knew he was going to find out, I wouldn’t be here. Which is the difference.”

  “I’m like the duchess. I’d take any risk.”

  “But you have nothing to lose.”

  “How about my job?”

  “Oh, your father could buy you a new school.”

  He adapted himself to her mood. He listened to the story of her marriage, and he told her about his affair with Annette. She showed a certain interest in it, but not so much as a trace of jealousy.

  They found Mrs. Knight’s four-room flat a crowded replica of her Tudor mansion.

  “Give me ten minutes and then come in,” she told him at the door to the master bedroom.

  ***

  Yet it was the first time that he had encountered passion in a woman. Natica in bed lost all her detachment; she clung to him fiercely, greedily, with a kind of desperation. He had preferred to think of the act of love as the union of two equal partners. But that night it was as if she were trying to lose herself in him. In the very intensity of his satisfaction he could still find a little corner of his consciousness in which he wondered if he really existed for her except as a means of self-annihilation. She was as unlike Annette as it was possible to imagine.

  Then he heard her voice in the dark, once more detached. “The trouble with this is that we’re going to want to repeat it.”

  “Like right now,” he replied, and they did.

  But this time he had a different fantasy. Was it really her own annihilation that she sought? And he tried to ward off the intruding image of certain female insects…

  “I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking,” she said with a sudden dry laugh. “That I should be more demure. Well, maybe I’ll learn. Believe it or not, this is my first adultery.”

  How could a woman’s moods change so fast? He found her utterly bewildering.

  In the morning she refused to let him drive her back to school in his car. She had come by train; she would return the same way. She departed without even discussing a second rendezvous.

  When he arrived at his dormitory just before morning chapel service, he found Giles Woodward sitting at his desk.

  “Where have you been, sir? Dr. Lockwood called to ask if you could take Mr. Evans’s English Three tomorrow. He has the grippe. I told him what you told me, that you’d gone to New York at your father’s request. He said to call you there, and I did. But the butler said you weren’t there. That you weren’t even expected!”

  “I hope you didn’t tell the headmaster that.”

  “No, sir! I told him you’d gone out with your parents and that I’d left the message.”

  “Good boy! I’ll call him now and tell him I took the early train from New York.”

  “He’ll be at chapel by now. You can tell him after the service. But sir…” Giles actually put the arm of comradeship around the young master’s shoulders. “Do be careful, will you?”

  14

  HE AND Natica met in secret twice more. The first time was in her house. Tommy was away for the weekend as visiting preacher at a school in Pennsylvania, and she slipped a note into Stephen’s mailbox in the Schoolhouse to inform him that she would be home all Saturday afternoon and that he might come (if, of course, he wished) at any time he was “reasonably assured” he wouldn’t be noticed. He did not like the idea of betraying poor Tommy in his own bedroom, but he came. Natica was as passionate as on their first occasion, but showed the same quick return to her more characteristic phlegm.

  “You’d better go now. Use the back door. The hedge will protect you to the road, and then you’ll look as if you’d been hiking to the village.”

  He dressed, as fast as he could, before trying a parting appeal. “Can’t you say something nice, Natica?”

  “What do you want me to say? That I needed that badly? Well, I can promise you I did.”

  “Just that? Not me?” He was suddenly irate. “Would someone else have done as well?”

  “Oh, don’t be a fool. You were great, and you know it. Don’t fish for compliments.”

  The second time was again in Boston and in Mrs. Knight’s flat, to which Natica had been given a key. His excuse for driving to town on a weekday afternoon was an ostensible dentist appointment; hers, a luncheon with an old school friend. This time they had an hour to lie in bed afterwards and talk. She spoke musingly of the possibility that she would leave Tommy one day, but she didn’t indicate any connection between this and their affair.

  “I think I owe it to Tommy to wait until he’s sufficiently established so it won’t ruin his career. Suppose, for example, he became the popular head of some smaller school. He’s not up to Averhill, of course, but I can see him doing quite nicely at one of those minor academies in Connecticut where they take rich boys who aren’t bright enough for Groton or Saint Paul’s. I could pretend I had sinus or something that made the cold winters impossible and disappear, presumably to a warmer clime, for long periods at a time. And eventually I wouldn’t come back at all. I doubt people would even notice, do you?”

  But he wasn’t going to put his mind on that. “Would I figure at all in your plans?”

  “The last thing you need is a divorcée in your life. Believe me, I’m taking as good care of your career as I am of Tommy’s.”

  “But what am I to you, Natica?”

  She had been gazing at the ceiling as she smoked. Now she turned, propping herself on an elbow, to contemplate him with a kind of affectionate curiosity. “I think that you, my beautiful man, are not quite real. You’re like Cupid visiting Psyche in the dark, except I’m allowed to turn on the li
ght and look at you. So long as I don’t tell anyone, that is. And I think that’s just the way you and I had better leave it. I’ve wronged one man, and I don’t want to wrong another. No, I mean it, Stephen!” She pressed a hand to his lips to still his protest. “And now I really must get dressed and catch my train. Tommy is going to meet me at the station.”

  Stephen in the next days was uncomfortably aware of the beginnings of a reaction on his part that he hated to recognize as relief. But relief at what? He had no desire to give up the affair or even to contemplate an Averhill without Natica. No, it was more likely simply relief that nothing more would be expected of him than what he was only too willing to provide. Natica, in other words, was permitting him to have his cake and eat it, to be an idealistic teacher at a church school and have a passionate mistress on the side. What was it about him that made first Annette and now Natica so determined to let him off the hook? Why were they so keen on protecting him? He did not quite relish Natica’s calling him, as did his mother, her “beautiful boy.”

  Yet it certainly simplified life at school to regard the affair in Natica’s fashion as something not quite real. His classroom teaching was going very well at last; his dormitory ran almost without problems. And he was beginning to feel that he was having some success in establishing himself as a liaison between the faculty and the sixth form; the headmaster himself had commented on it. Making love to Natica was far less distracting to his academic duties than always dreaming about it; his life fell into two separate compartments which perhaps did not have to conflict so long as one contained elements of fantasy. Indeed, when he saw Natica, so trim and cool and neat, taking her place at Tommy’s table at lunchtime, it seemed hardly possible that she could have been naked in his arms the week before. Did her peremptory nod of recognition not almost deny it? Their lovemaking in his memory seemed to take on more the aspect of guilty thoughts than of guilty deeds, and what man could blame himself for the former?