The Lady of Situations (23 page)

"But it's all new to me. Can't you see that?"

"So are your family to me."

"My family, except for Aunt Ruth, could never be new to anyone. That's not snobbishness or superiority on my part. It's simply gospel truth. Just wait. You'll see for yourself, all in good time. But let's not anticipate it."

She resolved that one of the first things she would do on their return to New York would be to go down to the Standard Oil Building on lower Broadway and see for herself the gray entrance lobby where the names of the original partners were carved on medallions in the archways: Rockefeller, Pratt, Harkness, Jennings, Archbold, Flagler, Brewster, Bostwick, Hill. She had learned them all, like the kings of England.

And Stephen's seeming at times a stranger had its romantic side. It was intensified by her being alone with him in a strange land. They had left Reno immediately after their marriage and had taken the
Yankee Clipper
from New York to Europe without pausing to meet either family. They had agreed to postpone all resumptions of old connections until their return from a two-month honeymoon, with the sole exception of Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who would be making their bi-annual visit to the French capital and on whom they could hardly not call. Natica was seeking to associate the great new sights—the cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres and the lofty monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel—with her new husband and the new life on which she was embarking. She was determined that everything about it should be beautiful and elevating. It seemed at moments as if she had died and come to life in a new and enchanting existence where it should be as much a pleasure as a duty to learn the new standards of what was brave and virtuous and what was not. The French newspaper headlines of threatened war were like the distant ringing of an alarm clock to one still asleep. She had no time for the irrelevance of Hitler.

Best of all was Chartres, where they stayed a full two weeks, reading Henry Adams and roaming the peerless church. Stephen tired of it before she; he rented a bicycle and got his exercise pedaling across the countryside. But her appetite for stained glass and saints in niches and soaring buttresses seemed inexhaustible. She could not have enough of the cathedral. Sometimes she joined tours and sometimes hired a guide of her own, but at length she preferred to sit and walk by herself, letting the vast blue coolness penetrate her until she felt almost a part of it.

"I'm like Henry Adams!" she exclaimed one night at dinner. "I'm in love with the past. With the twelfth century, anyway. With a world that worshiped the Virgin. Like Adams I have no use for our terrible modem world."

Stephen was studying the wine list. It was something he was beginning to take seriously. "But Adams didn't believe in the Virgin. She was just a myth. And she was just as much a myth in the twelfth century as in our own."

"But she was a force. A great force. She built all the finest cathedrals in France!"

"That was the force generated by her myth. It doesn't make her any more real. How about a Pouilly-Fume?"

"But maybe what Adams believed was that the force of the illusion actually created the Virgin. Or recreated her! Why not? You remember that little poem he left when he died, 'The Virgin and the Dynamo'? I think he actually believed that he had become a part of his ancestors' Norman past. 'When Ave Maris Stella first was sung, I helped to sing it there with Saint Bernard.'"

"What wine do you want?"

"Anything you say. The Pouilly will be fine."

"One and a half bottles? One is too little; two too much."

"Oh, one is plenty. I only want a drop. And Stephen?"

"Yes, dear?"

"If it's a boy, can we call it Bernard?"

"What a ridiculous idea! What's come over you tonight?"

"Please, Stephen I really mean it."

They argued about it through the first course of dinner, but he dropped the subject when she became excited. He was always afraid of doing anything that might adversely affect her condition.

She was surprised in the next two days at the tenacity of her new superstition. She had suddenly taken to heart the concept of bracketing her unborn child with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. If it should be a girl, it would be Bernadine. She had become so intrigued with her own theory about Henry Adams that, having like him no faith, she had begun to take seriously the idea that she might create one by a sufficiently imaginative reconstruction of the past. Might not the invocation of Saint Bernard in some fashion atone for the sorry state of not knowing which of two men was the father of the new life within her?

She did not think she was becoming irrational. She was confident that even the unreality of her honeymoon abroad and her isolation from old sights and familiar faces had not shaken her basic common sense. She knew that her fantasy about Saint Bernard might be the result of too many hours of brooding in a dim religious light filtered through the most beautiful stained glass in the world. But still, if she
chose
not to scorn it or debase it? If she chose to build on it? What but her own will power had brought her the few things she had valued in her life? And she certainly needed something like faith now.

She had not at first doubted that Stephen was the cause of her pregnancy. Their lovemaking had been a source of mutual satisfaction far more intense than anything she had experienced with Tommy, and she had taken no precautions, though why, she was still not sure. Her mood at the time had been reckless, defiant—perhaps even, so far as her reputation was concerned, a touch suicidal. With Tommy she had always used a contraceptive, and besides, she had discontinued sexual relations with him after the start of her affair with Stephen, pleading a bad case of cystitis.

But there had been one exception. The morning following her second meeting with Stephen in Estelle Knight's flat, the headmaster had grumbled to Tommy, while they were robing for Sunday chapel, about masters leaving the campus overnight for matters that could be as well accomplished in the neighborhood and had cited Stephen's trip to a Boston dentist of the day before. Tommy, who had apparently been secretly resentful of his wife's friendship with the new master and suspicious of their poetry readings, had instantly connected Stephen's disappearance with her decision to stay that night in Boston and had confronted her on her return with angry inquiries. She had taken a very high tone and denied seeing Stephen at all, but for once she had been unable to appease him, and she had at last found it politic to convince him of her innocence, or at least to stun him into a kind of acceptance, by making violent love to him on the spot. For further assurance of her supposed passion she had dispensed with a contraceptive. It had worked, for Tommy had been naive enough to suppose that no "lady," in less than twenty-four hours, could have gone from the arms of one bare man to those of another.

When she had discovered her pregnancy, she had refused at first even to consider that this single act of appeasement could have been its origin. It had not only not been repeated, but she had reduced Tommy to a state of contrition by complaining that his strong activity on that occasion had worsened her cystitis. And when she counted the number of times that she had achieved orgasm with Stephen on their three prolonged encounters, it seemed absurd to seek elsewhere for an impregnator. But the doubt so roughly smothered soon enough made its struggle felt, and she began to be haunted by the image of a growing boy, growing each year into a more ominous likeness of the wretched Tommy, until she would read suspicion in every eye that fell upon the fancied child. In vain she told herself that such striking resemblances were very rare and that one could always simply refuse to recognize them, and even if the matter should turn out as bad as her fantasy painted, could she not always explain to Stephen how it had happened?

Yes. But not why she had lied to him.

Well then, she asked herself irritably, what could he
do
about it? But she was not sure what this new Stephen, so different from the malleable youth at Averhill, would do. And men could be such idiots about these things.

She was distracted from this concern, however, by a cable from Stephen's father's office in New York announcing that his parents would arrive from London at the Crillon the following Monday and would expect them to call the next afternoon at six.

***

Mr. Hill met them in the lobby, a small dry balding presence garbed in a black suit that seemed to defy the Paris spring. His matter-of-fact air was devoid of either welcome or reproof. Nobody watching him greet Natica would have dreamed that he was meeting a daughter-in-law for the first time. He might have been a bank manager greeting a new but not very important client.

"Mrs. Hill wishes to see you alone, so you're to go right up to her suite. I'm to take Stephen for a stroll in the public gardens."

Stephen kissed her before following his father, who had already turned to the front door.

"Don't be afraid. She won't eat you."

She found his mother even more beautiful than she had expected, against the happy setting of her Louis XV salon with its green panels and Boucher prints and pink marble mantel with gilded candelabra. Mrs. Hill, serenely reclining on a chaise longue in a pink dressing gown with wonderful lace (there was the excuse of some minor indisposition), seemed as much at ease in the century of the Pompadour as the famed royal mistress herself smiling down at her from an oval portrait, but there was still a distinct Yankee note of holding off from such frippery in the figure that was ample without being stout, in the face that was lineless without (one felt somehow sure) ever having been lifted and in those clear, penetrating blue eyes. She had even brought some of her own things to claim the room from its too exclusive adhesion to its own era. Natica took in the large silver-framed portrait photographs of her daughters, one in bridal dress, and a snapshot of Stephen's father, looking oddly jaunty in a white flannel suit and a Panama.

Mrs. Hill did not rise but sat up and reached out her arms to embrace her visitor. Not a word was spoken but Natica felt herself hugged.

"There now," her mother-in-law murmured as she released her and patted the seat of the chair beside her. "Sit down and let us have a good talk. You're even prettier than I've been told, my dear. I wanted to see you first alone because it's the women of the family who really get things done, don't you agree? Our minds are not always cluttered up with what we
should
be doing or thinking. Men are always striking attitudes."

"I confess I was afraid you might have struck one about me."

"Well you and I must understand each other. Of course, I didn't like the circumstances that led up to your and Stephen's marriage. How could I? I was brought up with very strict ideas of the sacredness of the marriage vow. But we live in a different world now, and I am willing to start fresh with you as Stephen's wife. What went before is not going to be any concern of mine. I'm simply going to love you."

After a brief silence Natica found herself sobbing. She did not even try to conceal or explain it. She simply knew at once that she loved this woman as she had never loved a human being before. What was wonderful was that Mrs. Hill seemed to find her reaction entirely natural.

"That's all right, dear. You can always weep with me. I can imagine that you must have been through a good deal of hell. But I trust that you and I will do some laughing, too."

"Oh, Mrs. Hill, if you
knew
what your kindness meant!"

"You see that I'm on your side. Not everyone has been, I'm sure. But that's over now. You will find that Stephen's sisters will be very welcoming. My husband may take a bit longer, but he'll come around in the end. Don't try too hard with him, that's all. Just be natural. The person we're going to have the hardest time with is Stephen himself. Now don't misunderstand me. I don't mean because of you. As a matter of fact, I can very well imagine that you may be just the wife he needed. But it's going to take him some time to accept the fact that a teaching career is out of the question, at least for a while."

"Oh, I know! It haunts me."

"The great thing will be to see that he's occupied. All the Hill financial interests—that is, of my husband and of his sister and brothers—are handled by Bennett & Son. George Bennett is Mr. Hill's brother-in-law and the 'Son,' who is considered the real genius of the firm, is his nephew Tyler. I know Stephen doesn't like Tyler, but I think it might be good for him to work with him for a while and learn how to handle money."

Even in her excited state Natica was struck by the name. "Would that be the Tyler Bennett who married Edith DeVoe?"

"Yes. Is she a friend of yours?"

"I tutored her once."

"Well, I'm sure she was the better for that. Maybe she and you can make Tyler a bit more palatable to Stephen. I suspect it's just jealousy on Stephen's part. The family are always going on about how brilliant Tyler is. But now to more important matters. I want to buy you and Stephen a nice apartment in New York."

"Oh, we won't need anything elaborate."

"Nonsense, my dear. You'll need something charming. Oh, don't think I don't know how you feel. When I first married Mr. Hill I was very worried about the money. As Stephen has probably told you, my family, the Kips, were poor as church mice. Proud as you like, I grant, but still poor. I shall never forget what my sister-in-law Grace, who had married my husband's older brother, told me: 'Don't worry about the money. Just concentrate on making yourself entirely comfortable.' Well, I did just that."

Natica was silent for a moment before she spoke. "Mrs. Hill, I think I am going to do in every particular exactly what you tell me."

"Well, that may be a bit excessive. But for a few months, anyway, I think I may be of some assistance."

"Indispensable."

Natica rose now and walked to the window and stood looking down on the crowded white splendor of the Place de la Concorde. She did not feel that she had to explain her sudden detachment from their conversation. Mrs. Hill, she was sure, would sympathize with her need to take in the full wonder of her welcome. But what she suddenly could not bear was that this woman, whose friendship, whose possible love, seemed everything in the world that she had imagined to make her life worth living, would be barred from her forever if she were to learn that the adored Stephen's wife was not bearing Stephen's child.