The Lady of Situations (12 page)

"Can I see your new home?" I asked.

"We can go there right now."

We turned back to the school. The cottage, vacated by the widow of a retired master who had recently died, was a pretty white farmhouse, square, with green shutters and a tiny garden in back. Before we had inspected the last of the freshly painted, empty chambers I had promised her all of the furniture of my parents that I had kept for years in storage. It seemed the least that I could do. But I couldn't help wondering if Natica hadn't planned it that way. I hoped, anyway, that she had. It might have indicated that she still contemplated a future as Mrs. Thomas Barnes.

S
TEPHEN
H
ILL
had romantic good looks, with very pale skin and lustrous raven hair, and with moist brown eyes that offered more sympathy than anyone, including himself, could hope to deliver. He was like a youth in an old miniature, in a vitrine with others of beautiful dead young people, discovered on a visit to a boarded-up, mouldering mansion. Yet Stephen considered himself as only potentially romantic; he feared that in some ways he was as precise and literal as his father. The latter was indeed well known for these qualities. In Redwood, the old Kip manor house on the Hudson, inherited by his wife but greatly added to and embellished by himself, Angus Hill would sit silently through the stately service of his dinner, raising his head only at the sound of a distant whistle and commenting, after a glance at his gold pocket watch: "The six-oh-seven to Albany is two minutes late."

Stephen supposed that his father loved him as he more obviously loved his two older sisters; there was nothing anyway to induce him to disbelieve it. Angus Hill was a small, slight, bald gentleman of sober dress, of rare chuckles, mild criticisms and occasional fits of appalling wrath. His mission in life seemed more that of a spouse than a father: to provide the brilliant settings for the radiantly beautiful wife who so gratifyingly favored him. Stephen had read his Veblen and knew that the American tycoon was supposed to hold out to the world a handsome consort, complete with diamonds and a palatial abode, as proof positive of his wealth, his might, his virility. But his father, who had acquired all his means by simple inheritance, seemed rather to hide behind his mother, deferring to her physical and genealogical superiority, to the extent (except for his occasional temper tantrums) of almost blotting himself out.

Yet Stephen, without jealousy, or at least without an awareness of it, regarded these paternal qualities, which he reluctantly recognized in himself, as the appropriate uniform for the adorers of Angelica Hill. For her loveliness was in itself quite enough for any one family; it had to be sufficient function for the rest of them, including his sisters, thin and darkly pretty, though not so much so as to compete with their mama, to perform as acolytes at the maternal altar. And this despite the fact that the quality of Angelica's looks was largely in the aura they shed, in the glowing pink pearl of her skin, the wide serenity of her sky blue eyes, the abundant crown of her high-piled, finely gray hair. In a mere photograph one saw a stylish lady of late middle age, tending the least bit to the stocky, with a lineless heart-shaped face and a beautifully chiseled nose and chin. It took a portraitist in the tradition of Sargent to bring out the glow, the enchanting sense of personal solicitude, the unfailing kindness sometimes in conflict with an inherited puritanism. Angelica was loving but stubborn, full of small superstitions and amiable obsessions, a bit stupid in generalities but shrewd in particulars, and at all times perfectly aware of the absolute power she wielded over her loved ones. She could afford to ignore their constant, exasperated cries of "Oh, Mother!"

Stephen himself was the most vociferous. It agonized him when he saw her sink an indulging spoon into the plate of ice cream she had sworn off the day before, or light the cigarette from which she had pledged abstention, or even reach for the second cocktail in defiance of her resolution to limit herself to one. If he was an acolyte, he was certainly an angry one, constantly officious in his self-imposed duties of preserving the beauty, health and total sobriety of his idol. Angelica simply laughed at him, blithefully repeating both her resolutions and her defections, and quelling him when he had gone too far with a mild: "Darling! Remember that I am, after all, your mother." As if he needed to be reminded!

There had always been friends who had told him that it could not have been an easy thing to be the only son of Angus and Angelica, that the burden of their rather august and ceremonious existence must have at times weighed heavily on his shoulders. Yet Stephen was quite aware that they never expected anything of him but that he should accept the good things of life as complacently as they did themselves. His father had always been the first to admit that he himself had done nothing with his life but preserve his inheritance and serve on a few charitable boards. And his mother simply wanted him to marry a nice girl.

Never in his life had Stephen fretted so much about his parents as in the fall of 1937 when he returned from a summer tour of European capitals taken with three Yale friends, all like himself newly graduated, to settle down in the tall, pink Florentine palazzo with its small L-shaped courtyard and potted plants that an imaginative urban architect had constructed for Stephen's parents in East Ninetieth Street at the time of their marriage. He had originally planned to rent an apartment of his own, but as the palazzo offered him a whole floor to himself, and as his job prospects were still uncertain, it seemed the indicated temporary residence. For ten years, six at Averhill and four at Yale, he had lived at home only on vacations, and he had not been prepared for the problems that the uninterrupted proximity of his parents and two older sisters would bring.

What was really wrong, he decided reluctantly, was largely his own fault. Living at home, he could no longer see himself as at least romantically superior to his family. At school and college he had written sonnets and prose poems and reveled in English poetry, and it had been easy enough to feel himself considered a youth of great promise by friends who asked only that the compliment be returned. But without his claque, without a job or even a regular schedule, he hardly seemed as different from his mother and sisters, with their silly parties arnd routine charity committee meetings, or his father, with his endless talk of accounts and investments, as was imperative to his more aspiring soul. This made him a constantly critical companion. His sisters responded to his describing their committee work as purely formal and banal with tart demands that he identify a single disadvantaged person he had ever assisted, and his father, whom he criticized much more guardedly, suggesting that it was the class of capitalists and not the individual who might have been wanting in public spirit, muttered that it was a pity to have provided a son with so expensive an education only to have him turn out a Bolshevik. And his mother ... well, she was, as always, lovely, adorable and impossible.

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.