The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  “How could I marry her? She’s a divorced woman.”

  The eyebrows of the never surprised Haven rose. “But Barnes is dead. He was killed in the war.”

  “I thought he was a minister!”

  “He signed up as an army chaplain and went down on a torpedoed troop ship in the Pacific. I may be a fool to tell you, but you were bound to find out eventually.”

  “Thank you, sir! Thank you very much.”

  For the second time that morning Thad now loomed in Natica’s doorway.

  “I’ve thought of a reason for you to break your rule of not dating a partner of Mr. Haven’s!”

  Her smile was quizzical, not unfriendly. “And what is that?”

  “I’m the only one of them who can properly ask you.”

  “Because you’re the only unmarried one?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “Everyone here knows everything about the partners. It’s our favorite luncheon topic. But I will break the rule. Because you said I was straight. I liked that. Why don’t you pick me up at my apartment at 900 Lex at seven? I can give you a drink before we go out.”

  He reflected that like George Haven she seemed resolved never to show surprise.

  23

  NATICA HAD never entertained a sentiment for a man such as she now began to feel for Thad. With both Tommy and Stephen there had been a distinct antagonism lurking in a corner of her heart even at times when they had been closest to her, like a mean little dog ready to rush out and snap. With Thad her attitude was much kinder; it was almost as if she were trying to protect him. But protect him from what? Certainly he was by far the strongest of the three men. There was an evenness, almost a serenity in his sustained good nature; he appeared always to expect the best of people, without in any way being unprepared to face the worst. What she supposed she really wanted to protect was not so much him as his vision of the world as a place that could be improved by good will and hard work, and if it couldn’t, well, that had to be God’s will. He lacked imagination—there was no denying that—but his undoubted intelligence, salted with unexpected irony and a usually gentle sense of humor, came near to making up for it. And his political conservatism was devoid of the smirking malice found in so many right wingers. Indeed he wore it as a kind of sports jacket which in another season he might well doff. Or at least which she could hope he would.

  That their relationship excluded other romantic interests for both and would lead, if to anything, to marriage, he took squarely for granted from the night of their first dinner together, after which, at the door of her apartment house, he had planted on her lips a single firm but proprietary kiss. He showed no need to demonstrate his masculinity; his large stillness and easy stance lent assurance that his wife would have nothing to complain about in that department. But she would have to wait, and if she couldn’t wait, was she really the girl for him? But she was the girl for him, a glint in his eye at once assured her. He had no interest in or concern with the changing sexual mores of the day, and he never referred to her two marriages. He clearly intended to regard himself as her one and only spouse.

  They went out together three nights a week; on the others he worked. They saw each other little now in the office, as the school case had been settled, the desegregationists having decided a better factual basis was needed for a Supreme Court argument, and Thad had reassigned her to another partner’s case.

  “I’d rather our friendship wasn’t mixed up with business,” he explained. “Do you agree?”

  “I don’t know that I agree. I certainly don’t mind.”

  But she thought he was going rather far in refusing to take her to his downtown club. If they lunched together, it had to be uptown in a French restaurant. Some men, she reflected, had very compartmented minds.

  In the brief time it takes for such things to be recognized, they began to be asked out as a couple by their friends. At a dinner party given by Tyler and Edith Bennett Thad was seated at their hostess’s right and Natica at the host’s, which she thought was going rather far.

  “We’re not engaged, you know,” she told Tyler.

  “Well, here’s hoping you will be. You couldn’t do better. That firm will be known as Sturges, Haven, Tillinghast & Dorr before you know it. And lawyers are making real money these days.”

  “So my poor old ship’s come in at last!”

  “Don’t knock it, Natica. I’d almost given you up. Turning down that settlement offer of Uncle Angus’s and then going into law. The big bar has no idea of sharing all that moola with you gals. Not for a good while yet, anyway. All you can expect is to draft wills and separation agreements.”

  “I thought I’d found that out. But then they switched me to Litigation.”

  “That was a special deal. I know all about that. And anyway, if you marry Thad, you’ll have to quit the firm.”

  “Why?”

  “They can’t have partners married to clerks. It’s against the natural order of things.”

  “Maybe I could come and work for you.”

  “You’re joking, but the offer’s still open. Except Thad would never let his wife work.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “He’s the old-fashioned type. It sticks out all over him. He’ll want you to stay home and have eight kids.”

  “As you did Edith!”

  “Did, is right. Now we have two she says she’s through. But I wouldn’t mind if she worked her ass off. Better than getting up at ten and spending the next two hours on the telephone trying to decide whether to lunch at the Veau d’Or or the Crémaillère!”

  Natica thought of asking Thad when he took her home that night if he really objected to working wives, but at the last moment she decided against it. Their friendship had become precious to her. She didn’t want anything to cause even a ripple in it—at least not yet.

  Aunt Ruth found him delightful; she was clearly holding her breath in fear that so desirable a match might not come off. Estelle Knight, who had fled from Averhill at her husband’s demise to settle, with all her Jacobean accouterments, in a large dark apartment on upper Madison Avenue, where it sometimes amused Natica to dine, was also charmed by him. There was a district atmosphere among the family and friends that Natica had done better than could have been anticipated. Her parents found Thad, except for his religion, the model of all they could want in a sonin-law. He talked with genuine interest to her father about fishing, a subject of considerable interest to himself, and condoled with her mother in all her fancied trials and tribulations.

  It was different with Thad’s mother. Going up to Boston to meet her was as close as Natica had come to announcing an engagement, and even this she had tempered with the excuse of a proposed visit to the Gardner Museum. Mrs. Sturges, tall and large like her son, but ampler of girth, was craggy-featured and plain of garb. Nowhere but in Boston could she have made a living as a dressmaker. Natica could easily divine from the deep reserve of her approach and the intensity of her carefully selected questions how miserably torn she was between her disapproval of a divorced Protestant and her passionate longing to see her only son married and the father of her grandchildren. She must have almost given him up as a confirmed bachelor. Might not the infidel be her last chance?

  Flying back to New York on Sunday afternoon Natica and Thad had their first serious talk about religion.

  “Would you expect your wife to become a Catholic?”

  “Only if she were a genuine convert. Of course I’d be very happy if she were that.”

  “And would you insist that she promise to raise the children in your faith?”

  “I’d tell her it would be very painful to me if they weren’t. I’d hope she’d always be open to persuasion. But I wouldn’t make it a condition, no.”

  “Would a priest marry you without the promise?”

  “I think so. If I assured him I’d do everything I could to convert you.”

  “Then if I were to marry you, I would in effec
t have given you my word. For I could never marry you to give you pain.”

  “I’d take my chances.”

  “And while we’re on the subject of conditions, would you object to your wife’s working?”

  “Not if she still could be a good mother. If my wife is the girl I’m thinking of, she’d never neglect her children.”

  They buckled their seatbelts at the landing announcement. “Oh, I don’t know. Some people say the girl you have in mind is a pretty tough cooky. I’ll bet your ma thinks so, anyway.”

  “Mother thought you were wonderful!”

  “That remark isn’t even trying to be a good lie!”

  She no longer had to see much of Mr. Haven in the office, but Thad talked about him a good deal. She tried to keep an open mind, but she couldn’t allow Thad’s attempt to portray his partner as a champion of the Bill of Rights.

  “Don’t you think there are some liberties that he’s too little concerned with? Do you remember that conference on the school brief when he remarked that having fought the bloodiest war in our history for the Negroes was enough to have done for them? For a hundred years, anyway?”

  Thad’s slightly impatient head-shake might have indicated some awareness of this imperfection in his idol. “Yes, I saw your look when he said that. Of course, he was not serious. You must remember he was raised in a far from reconstructed South. I think it’s actually remarkable how well he has overcome those ancient prejudices. You can tell by the bantering way he has of speaking of such topics that he doesn’t mean to be taken literally. But of course his words have a considerably less innocent look in print, which is why it’s one of my jobs to see they never creep into anything he writes.”

  Haven used to invite Thad down to his rambling shingle country house in Smithport for what he called a working weekend. He always managed to relieve these with a little golf, excellent meals and plentiful liquor. He was a childless widower and his household was run silently and efficiently by a gaunt, grim butler, Thorne, who shared Thad’s protective adoration of his master. On one of these weekends, when Natica was making a rare visit to her parents only a mile away, Thad persuaded her to join him and Haven for dinner, promising her the ordeal would be short, as the two men would have to work in the library afterwards. But when she arrived she saw at once from his puckered brow that the evening was not going to be as planned. Her host, more pink-faced than usual, hardly greeted her. He was silent and morose and drinking what was obviously not the first scotch of the evening.

  Thad took her aside and murmured the explanation. Haven had received a call from Washington that afternoon informing him that the Supreme Court on Monday would hand down an unfavorable ruling in one of his due process cases involving a state law restricting the rights of labor unions and that the majority opinion had been written by Hugo Black.

  The tirade in which Haven now indulged took the form of a monologue which lasted through the cocktail period and well into dinner. At length he became actually abusive.

  “What the hell, I ask you, is the point of wasting one’s heart and mind on brilliant arguments to a court that’s stacked with a bunch of rubber stamps who owe their robes to the late happy-go-lucky cripple who occupied the White House for such an unconscionable number of terms?”

  Thad now at last intervened. “Hugo Black, sir, was hardly Roosevelt’s rubber stamp. You mustn’t forget that when a man’s once on the court he’s free of any political pressure. Look at the other Roosevelt and his appointee, Holmes. Didn’t Teddy get so angry at one of his decisions that he said he could have made a better man out of a turnip?”

  “But Holmes, my dear fellow, had been Chief Justice of Massachusetts. This man Black was a police court judge!”

  “A man can learn a lot of law in a police court, sir. I’ve heard you say so yourself.”

  “As a part of his experience, yes. Not as the whole kit and kaboodle! No, Thaddeus, there’s no point trying to mitigate it. It’s just another example of the dirty role Lady Luck plays in our lives. I toil for decades and fool myself into thinking I may have made myself a niche in the glorious history of our Constitution only to see the highest honor go to a redneck from my own state!”

  Natica was interested to learn of such an ambition from the man who professed to value the uttered word as the sole important joy of life. “Would you like to have been on the court, Mr. Haven?”

  He looked at her as though he had just been made aware of her presence. “Young lady,” he said solemnly, “it was the great ambition of my life. And do you know what the great irony of my life was? I was offered the court once and turned it down.”

  “You turned it down!”

  He nodded gravely. “I did. I thought I was too young at the time and that the chance would surely come again. And I needed the income from my practice, as I had run up debts in the badly paid years of my public life. So there you are. I actually said no to President Harding.” Here he grunted. “And he lost the chance to do the one good deed of his administration.”

  “The appointment may still come,” said Thad consolingly.

  “Are you out of your mind? Truman would rather put an illiterate Nigra on the court than a Wall Street lawyer. Besides, I’m too old. Much too old. The accent is all on youth today.”

  “Well, even if the appointment never comes, you’ll have played a greater role as a single advocate before the court than you would have as one of nine judges sitting on it. That will be your great part in history, sir, the saving of the Constitution!”

  Natica regarded with dismay the earnest countenance of the man she was thinking of marrying. Was it possible that he could be such a toady? And wasn’t it worse if he was sincere? Deliberately now she hoisted her pennant of dissent.

  “In my opinion, Mr. Haven, Hugo Black will go down in history as one of the court’s great justices.”

  Thad gave a little gasp, but it struck her oddly that it might have been feigned. Could it be that her cool defiance of the old boy amused him? Oh, if that were only true!

  Haven was shocked into a more temperate reaction. “Do you think so? Thad had told me you were of the liberal persuasion. Though he claims it doesn’t affect the quality of your work in representing the saner sort.”

  “A lawyer should be able to step into any client’s shoes, isn’t that so, sir?” she demanded.

  Thad lumbered heavily to her aid. “May I remind you, sir, that you argued in the Sterne case that the death penalty was a cruel and inhuman punishment and, five years later, in an amicus brief you urged it for a kidnapper.”

  Haven grunted, not much liking the reminder. “It’s true that in trial work there are inconsistencies. At the appellate level you will find more uniformity in my briefs. I wouldn’t take a case where I had to argue the constitutionality of a New Deal statute.”

  Natica’s indignation had been heightened by Thad’s temporizing effort. “Then I take it, Mr. Haven, you’re in favor of continued segregation in the South, entirely aside from the question of states’ rights?”

  “Entirely. It’s the only way for the two races to live together in peace and harmony.”

  “You mean with one on top and one on the bottom? Why isn’t that a revival of slavery?”

  Haven hit the table with his fist. “We’re not Nazis, damn it all! We treat the Negroes differently for their own good. That’s something you Northerners can never understand.”

  Natica paused to consider her answer to this. She glanced at Thad and wondered if his eyes were pleading for restraint. But his eyes were enigmatic. He might have been watching her with as much curiosity as fear. Was she idiotically risking her future? But then a sudden memory tore like a rocket across the murky sky of the past. She was sitting in Dr. Lockwood’s study puffing a cigarette in his infinitely disapproving presence. Yes, yes! These hateful old men had to be resisted at any cost! Any at all!

  “You say we Northerners cannot understand, Mr. Haven. Perhaps that’s because it’s so difficult to understa
nd. You say you’re not Nazis. But I think I’d rather have been a Jew under Hitler than a Negro in the postbellum South.”

  “Oh, come now, Natica,” Thad protested, now genuinely aroused. “Nothing in the South could compare with the gas chambers!”

  “I’m not so sure of that. Let me put these alternatives to you. Which of the following two lives would you prefer?” She paused again to arrange her conditions. “Let me see. All right, I think I have it. The first I offer you is that of a black farmer in the South, say in the early nineteen hundreds. I’ll be very fair. I’ll give you a kind overseer, a pleasant cottage and a loving family. You’ll even be surrounded by children and grandchildren when you die in your eighties. But you’ll be illiterate. You will have been forcibly kept in a state of ignorance. And now for my other life. You’ll be a Jewish doctor in Berlin, at the height of your career just before Hitler. You will have discovered a cure for some kind of cancer and be a candidate for a Nobel Prize. But you will die with your wife and children at the age of forty in a gas chamber. Which life do you choose?”

  Haven, intrigued in spite of himself, breathed a bit heavily. “One is deprived of life, the other of books. Is that the gist of it?”

  “That’s it. Which is the crueler fate?”

  “Obviously, you want me to say the Negro’s. But his fate would only be cruel if he were a white man. Your choice is not a fair one.”

  Haven turned now to Thorne, who was removing the dessert plates, to tell him they would have coffee in the library. “Except I won’t have any. I’m tired and I’m going straight to bed. No work tonight! I suggest, Thad, that you take my pretty cross-examiner to some night spot. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  At a roadhouse on the Jericho Turnpike, a half hour later, Natica sipped her whiskey and contemplated her companion’s enigmatic expression. He had said nothing in the car about her conduct at dinner, yet he did not seem in the least resentful. It had probably never even crossed his mind that there could ever occur such a thing as his having to choose between her and his partner.