The Lady of Situations (11 page)

"But was it also necessary for your wife to get Mrs. Lockwood to hate me? What did she tell her? That the old man's been making passes at me? Or that I've been inviting them?"

"That was hardly necessary. The idea of the book was quite enough. Something shared by you and the headmaster in which nobody else had a part. Mrs. Lockwood is a very jealous, a very possessive woman."

"And she knows just when to throw her Lowells in the fat red face of the butcher's boy!"

She noted his wince. For all his realism, for all his diplomacy, it was cruelly painful for him to see his idol spattered. But she was remorseless now. "Of course, I see why I'm a threat to you all. You're in a conspiracy to keep the old man from wandering off the reservation."

"What do you mean?"

"I think you know exactly what I mean. You're all dreading the day when he may blow a fuse that will knock the school into a cocked hat. He was damn close to it when he wanted to interrogate and then fire those boys who had taken a drink on vacation. I'll bet you and Marjorie have weekly conferences with Mrs. Lockwood about how to keep him under control. And when you heard he was writing a book! That had to be the end, didn't it? God knows what the old boy would come up with that might scare away half the parents in New York and Boston!"

"And what has all that—even assuming there's any truth in it, which there isn't—have to do with you?"

"I was helping him, wasn't I? I was even the little baggage who had put the idea in his crazy old head, wasn't I? Oh, I had to be disposed of at any cost. Cost? There was no cost. A simple kick in the ass would take care of me."

She thought she could perceive that he was impressed. But he would never show it.

"Do I hear the would-be novelist at work?"

"Perhaps that is the only role you've left me."

"Will you allow me, at any rate, to say how sorry I am?"

"No, Roy, I won't. I'm going to say what I have to say no matter how much it hurts us both. You allow your wife the full rein of her bitchy temper. It's your fault that she gets away with it."

He took it well. He even nodded. "But what can I do?"

"You could leave her."

"Oh, Natica." He closed his eyes as at the hopelessness of explaining such things to her. "At any rate, I can console myself that my problem is not yours. Your Tommy is a fine guy and he loves you.

But she would not let him have even this. "My Tommy's an ass!" she hissed. "And you know it!"

***

Two days later, on a cloudy, cold, misty afternoon, Natica was circling the empty campus for exercise, for something to do, for an excuse to get out of the house. The boys were on the baseball diamonds or in the gymnasium, and the deserted chapel and Schoolhouse, the latter with no windows lit, seemed to question her intrusion. A boy, perhaps fifteen, was walking just ahead of her. When she caught up with him, for he was only strolling, she asked him if he was out for exercise.

"Oh, walking doesn't count as exercise," he replied. He was a tall, gawky youth with black hair that fell over his forehead and a rather winning air of candor.

"Doesn't count?"

"We have to do ninety minutes a day and fill out what are called exercise blanks. Mr. Ransome, he's the athletic director, you know, tours the campus in the afternoon to be sure boys aren't shirking. But I know his beat. When he comes out of the Schoolhouse, I can duck in there and read for the rest of the afternoon."

"What will you read?"

"Well, right now I'm reading
The Idylls of the King.
"

"Oh, what fun! I love
Guinevere.
But what about the exercise blank?"

"Oh, I fill it in with fibs. Lots of the guys do that."

She paused to look at him in surprise. "And you tell me that? A master's wife? How do you dare?"

"Oh, I've sat next to you at lunch. You don't remember, of course. But you remind me of my sister. You'd never téli."

"It's true, I never would. But I should think at least your English teacher would like your reading poetry."

"Oh, Mrs. Barnes, you know the system. Everything here falls into pigeonholes. We read poetry from ten-fifteen
A.M
. to eleven. They think there's gotta be something wrong with a guy who wants more than that."

"And is there something wrong with you?"

"I sure as hell hope so."

"Then you don't like Averhill?"

"Me? I hate it."

"Why don't you ask your parents to take you out?"

"Are you kidding? My old man's a trustee. Anyway, what the heck. In two years I'll be at Harvard, and then I can do anything."

"Lucky you!" she exclaimed wistfully.

When she left him to dart into the Schoolhouse, she reflected bitterly that in two more years he would be out, at least on parole. But she? And then, with a wonderful, surging excitement she felt again the throbbing hope that had been initiated by Roy Evans's remark about her novel writing, and she clenched her fists and wanted to cry out aloud.

For there
was
a novel in the story of the captive headmaster in his prison of red brick and white columns, surrounded by a green graveyard of buried faiths and hopes. Oh, how she might do it! And she would cross every'
t
and dot every
I,
too, why not? Was it not her prerogative after the way she had been treated? Dickens and Charlotte Bronte had done the same to their schools. Averhill owed it to her!

And Tommy? What would such a book do to Tommy's career at Averhill? Well, that was a chance she would have to take. Perhaps she would become so famous that other schools would be glad to employ him just to get her on their campus.

But that night, when he gently suggested that now she was no longer working for Dr. Lockwood she might have time to have a baby, she almost screamed at him.

M
Y NIECE
Natica and I have always had a close but slightly prickly relationship. The crises that I have seen her undergo may seem pale in contrast with the explosions of young people in this decade of the sixties, but they were nonetheless searing to her. After all, standards are never the same; people were willing to die at the stake in the Reformation for beliefs that seem the merest piffle to us today. And I suppose that Natica's frustrations must be viewed in relation to the fewer alternatives that were open to women before World War II. My trouble with her was that as an educator I was much more aware than she of the alternatives that
were
available: women were indeed going to law and medical schools in the thirties. It took more grit to make the grade than it would later, but grit I expected of my niece. Natica, on the other hand, considered me an old maid who was basically sympathetic to an establishment that had downgraded me for not becoming a wife and mother. She was never quite fair to me, but I still loved her. She had such a terrible capacity for unhappiness, even though it was balanced by surprising recoveries.

It was in the early fall of 1937 that Tommy Barnes telephoned me to ask if I could possibly come up to Averhill for the weekend. Natica was undergoing what he described as a "mild nervous breakdown" over the rejection of her novel by a New York publishing house. The refusal of the book had been sufficiently definite to cause her to lose all heart and give up the idea of submitting it elsewhere. She was, as he put it, "in a funk." I agreed, of course, to go up. My sister and brother-in-law would have been no good in such a crisis. They would have simply told her to buck up and pull herself together.

I had read the book, which Natica had sent me. It was not really a book, but rather the first hundred pages of one, with an outline of the projected balance. Its rejection had come as little surprise to me, and considerable relief, though I should have thought it might have been accompanied by an invitation to submit a second work. Natica's straight, stabbing style had a certain blunt effectiveness, but it was raw, terribly raw, with no redeeming subtleties or ambiguities. And it was obvious that she was drawing her characters from life; their idiosyncrasies were underlined even where they seemed to have no relation to the theme of the novel. It was, in short, an album of crude snapshots rather than a portrait gallery. Even had the proposed book had the requisite literary quality, a publisher might well have been apprehensive of a libel suit. Certainly it would have been the end of Tommy's career at Averhill. Natica had not shown him the manuscript, writing me that she had no intention of crossing
that
bridge until she had to.

Tommy met me at the train; he was very solicitous about my bag and almost lifted me into his car.

"I'll never forget your kindness in coming up, Aunt Ruth. I haven't been able to do a thing with Natica. She hardly says a word to me. Oh, it's not that she's disagreeable or bad-tempered. But she seems to be in a completely passive mood, almost a daze. It's as if I wasn't there."

And indeed I found his wife in the grip of an uncharacteristic lassitude. But it was soon apparent that this was largely caused by her husband's presence. After a lunch of sandwiches in which very little but family news was discussed she and I took a walk through the woods to the river, and she became much more animated. I asked her exactly what the editor had said about her manuscript.

"Oh, the lady I talked to, a Miss Sims, was very frank. I suppose she meant to be helpful. But she said that it wasn't really fiction at all. That I was too angry. That I had better let some time go by and simmer down. She even pulled the old Wordsworth line about ^motion recollected in tranquillity."

"Even if it's an old line, mightn't it still be a good one?"

"But the point is that I write the only way I can, Aunt Ruth! I seethe until I boil over. And what comes out of the pot on the stove is my writing. If that's not fiction, I can't write fiction."

"Then maybe you should try your hand at nonfiction."

"About what?"

"I guess that has to be your idea."

"But I don't know anything! I'm not a scholar, or even an observer of current events. I haven't been anywhere or done anything with my life. I'm like a Bronte sister without the moors and without the genius. If I can't make up my own kind of weird stories, I have no function. Can't you see that?"

"I don't see it at all. I know it's frustrating to be told to count your blessings, but it can be a healthy exercise. You have youth, health, an attractive personality and a first class mind. Don't tell me there's no future for you simply because one publisher chose not to publish one book."

"But I've made a false start, and I don't see how to correct it."

"A false start?"

"My marriage, for one."

I'm afraid my first reaction was one of exasperation. It had been obvious to me from the beginning that she had not really been in love with poor Tommy, and now it seemed unjust that he should be condemned for lacking qualities she had never expected of him.

"Tommy is a good man. He hasn't a mean streak in his body, and he adores you. You can still make something of your marriage, Natica."

"Listen to me, Aunt Ruth." She stopped walking and, taking me by the elbow, made me turn to face her. "I want to tell you something about Tommy. I want to tell you how it occurred to him to to offer me a consolation for my disappointment. He invited me into the little study in the back of our apartment which he has converted into a kind of male sanctum, complete with pipe rack, sporting prints and a roll-top desk he found in school storage. It is here that he retires, with his old red robe and Indian moccasins, when he wants to write a chapter of his 'Talks to Boys.' Oh, you didn't know that Tommy was also writing a book, did you? Well, he is, and he has a sublime confidence that literature will somehow grow out of the right setting. If he can only lounge before his desk, in the proper Hemingway pose, puff at his pipe and gaze soulfully out the window..."

"Natica, what are you driving at?" I was determined to interrupt this remorseless shredding of her spouse.

"Simply that I had been invited to his den to be told that I need not so bitterly regret something that was essentially beyond the capacities of my sex."

"Do you mean novel writing?" I felt myself immediately sliding over to her side. "He's never heard of Jane Austen, I suppose. Or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf?"

"Well, he might admit them to the lower slopes of Parnassus, but never anywhere near the peak. Oh, he put it very gently. He twinkled and chewed his pipe and asked me not to take what he was going to say personally. But did a woman—any woman, he put it—have the 'blood congested genital drive which energizes a great style'?"

I stared. "That doesn't sound like him. Where did he get that from?"

"Oh, he got it from Hoy Evans, I'm sure. Roy is an aficionado of the great Hemingway. He's the ball-less teacher of virility in literature to little boys."

I walked on now, and she followed. For several minutes neither of us said a word. Nothing she could have told me about Tommy—no infidelity, or even battery—could have more convinced me of the hopelessness of that marriage. But what could I tell her?

"Whatever you do, Natica, don't do it in a hurry. You have time. There are many ways of working out a difficult marriage."

"What experience do you speak from, Aunt Ruth? But at least you haven't urged me to have a baby."

No, I certainly hadn't. I thought she was in no mood to have a baby. We now proceeded to discuss, in an almost normal fashion, the cottage that the school was at last providing for the Barneses, enabling them to move from the restricted quarters of the "Pest House." I was astonished at the abruptness of her change of mood. Had she simply wanted the satisfaction of revealing to someone outside the Averhill faculty the full fatuousness of Tommy's attitude? And now that she had classified him forever, stuck a pin right through the round body between the butterfly wings that no longer deceived anyone, and slammed shut the glass case of her collection of Averhillian entomology, was she temporarily relieved of the duty to analyze and could her mind move on to other distractions?