The Lady of Situations (29 page)

"No, no, I'll go with you, of course."

The search, interrupted by her arrival, now started. The women spread out along the bank of the river, leaving the woods, where it was considered more likely that Stephen would have roamed with his gun, to the men. There were little tufts of bushes into which they poked vaguely with sticks. Some wandered to the edge of the water and peered apprehensively down. As they became scattered and diminished to Natica's vision, they seemed listless and pale, like figures in a classical landscape by Puvis de Chavannes. Her sense of unreality became giddying.

She tried to bring the river and the willow trees and the great white house into focus by concentrating on the image of Stephen lying dead, face down on the ground. And then, as it became clear to her mind, she stopped in her tracks and closed her eyes. Dear God, did she
want
it that way? Did she want it to be over at any cost? Was she as much of a horror as Giles supposed?

No, she reassured herself as she beheld the landscape again, she was like others, only she had the capacity of separating her myth, the myth by which man lives and has his civilized being, from the fact, which is always there. If Stephen were dead, his family would assume he had taken his life over shame at what he had done with Giles. Oh, yes, they would find that a quite sufficient motive! And would they not be sympathetic over his double abandonment of her and make her a settlement?

Natica! she whispered hoarsely. Surely one had better hang on to
some
myths.

To get away from her thoughts she turned to look for Angelica, who was nowhere in sight. She went back towards the house and saw her at last entering the box garden with the topiary. She knew it contained a circle of tall hedge with a hollow in the center. Hurrying after her, she saw her suddenly push through the hedge, and she anticipated the scream that would follow so vividly that when it came it seemed to come from her own throat.

A
T
S
TEPHEN'S
service at Saint James' on Madison Avenue I sat with my sister, Kitty, and Harry in the fourth pew, the first three being reserved for Hills. The church was almost full; the large family connection explained that. The organ played the Chopin funeral march, repeating the sad little melody of the second movement almost unbearably. I tried not to stare when the immediate survivors filed in from a side door just before the service began. There is always something of the cast taking their places on the stage in this, and curiosity as to how they manifest their sorrow is only natural. Angus Hill looked exactly as always, impenetrably correct, and his daughters, their heads bowed in obvious self-consciousness, walked in rather too fast. Angelica's loveliness was concealed by a veil; she clung tightly to the arm of her son-in-law, who looked stout and reddish in the pride of his support. Last came Natica, in black, of course, but with her face unveiled. Calmly, perhaps even a bit defiantly, she surveyed the seated congregation.

"Why must she look so
hard?
" Kitty hissed to me with something like anguish. "Why couldn't she have worn a veil?"

I could think of nothing to say in answer but a silly old adage of our grandmother Felton. But it had a nice touch of Old New York. "Do you remember what Granny used to tell us?" I whispered back to her. "That the two things people never approved of was the way you spent your money and buried your dead?"

I was grateful for the impersonality of the Episcopalian service and the beautiful words of the King James Version. A statement by a relative or friend would have been objectionable; a eulogy impossible. But I could not help thinking that poor Stephen had little need for the "many mansions" in his Father's house.

When it was over I managed to lose Kitty in the crowded aisle; I could not bear any more of her moralizing. Outside on the avenue I had to pause, as the family were getting into the black limousines that would transport them to the private interment at Redwood.

And then suddenly there was Natica, at my side.

"I want you to walk in the park with me."

"But, Natica, dear, aren't you going to the interment?"

"No. It's all arranged that I don't have to. Come on, before Mother spies us. I saw you were sitting with her."

"Dearie, are you quite sure you know what you're doing?"

"Perfectly. Auntie, you can't argue with me today."

She put her arm under mine, and we walked the two blocks to the Seventy-second Street entrance to the park. Neither of us spoke until we were seated on a bench overlooking the boat pond where serious men soberly sailed their elaborate model craft.

"The first thing I want to tell you is how Stephen's depression started."

For the first time I learned the story of the averted abortion and of Stephen's later discovery of a possible other paternity. In a low and level tone she simply presented the facts, without ascribing motives and without describing emotions, except for Stephen's passionate resentment.

"And do his family know all this?" I asked when she seemed to have finished.

"I told his mother the whole thing. I didn't know whether it would make it better or worse for her to minimize the role Giles had played and magnify my own. But I decided that I had taken enough decisions on my own and that I had better stop playing God. And to be utterly frank, as I am now trying to be, I had come to realize that my withholding the full story from her was motivated by my desire to retain her friendship. And I saw that was gone, in any event."

"Why? I saw her take your hand before coming down the aisle. It seemed to me a most affectionate gesture."

"Oh, she's capable of that, of course. But there's a limit in the long run to how different a stand she can take from her husband's. And he is adamant. It doesn't matter to him whether Stephen killed himself because I tricked him into marriage or because of shame over the thing with Giles. It's all part of the same thing. I corrupted him and he went to hell."

"Surely he doesn't tell you that!"

"He doesn't tell me anything. He won't even speak to me."

"But I feel sure Mrs. Hill doesn't judge you so harshly."

"She doesn't judge me at all. She doesn't judge people. She's too wise. I don't think she really likes me very much, or that she ever did. She was nice to me—oh, wonderfully nice—but that was all for Stephen's sake. And then she knows what I've been through. She knows I've tried."

"And surely she knows you loved Stephen!"

Natica's expression was patient. "She knows the facts. She doesn't need deductions or inferences. She was poor herself once. And she made her way. That's a bond."

Even with my sympathy for her I couldn't help a momentary return to my old role of censor. How she pushed one into it! "You mean the bond of getting ahead in the world?"

"More than that, I guess. The bond of being women."

I was taken aback by its seemingly exclusivity. "Don't you and I share that bond?"

"To a lesser extent. You compromise. You tend to believe in the system. Oh, you have your moments of outrage, I grant."

"Well, I suppose one has to be practical. You've never struck me, my dear, as exactly having your head in the clouds."

"I've been what I
thought
was practical. But where has it got me? Two failed marriages, no child, no career and no money."

"No money?"

"Not a penny. I had an instructive talk with Tyler Bennett yesterday. Trust him to give it to you straight. Stephen's been living over his income for years. His estate is insolvent. And his big trust, in default of issue, goes to his two sisters."

"But surely they'll waive that! Two women as rich as they are."

"They couldn't, even assuming they wanted to. And that's a rash assumption in the Hill family. The principal is simply added to their own trusts, which they can't touch."

"You don't surely mean to tell me that Angus Hill will let his daughter-in-law starve!"

"No, Tyler tells me that his uncle is prepared to make me some sort of allowance. Until I die or remarry and so long as I bring no further disgrace to the family. But I have my own pride. Or at least I think it's time I developed some. I can't take money from a man who feels about me the way he feels. And for whose total lack of the smallest trait of anything like imagination I have nothing but contempt!"

"What about his wife, then?"

"Ah, that's different, of course. And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about. I've made up my mind in the last two days that I want a career of my own. Something better than pushing best sellers and whodunits to Park Avenue dowagers. I want to be a lawyer, Auntie."

I almost clapped my hands. "It's what I've always thought you could be!"

"It would be getting on with my life. And putting the past firmly behind. Perhaps there are things I should atone for, but I've always thought atonement smacked of self-pity. It will take time, of course. I'll have to make up for the college credits I gave up when I married Tommy. But I think the whole thing can be done at NYU in something like four years. And I thought I'd ask Mrs. Hill to stake me to it."

"It's the least she can do!"

"And the most I'd ever ask. I shall expect to pay the money back in time."

"She'd never take it."

"No, but I'd like to be able to offer it."

"Well, all I can say is that I admire you." I had a vision of Portia mesmerizing the Venetian court with her silver-toned defense of Antonio. Silly old soppy aunt that I was, with tears in my eyes! "When I think of all that's happened to you! And all that is happening to our poor old world." We were living through the fall of France. Civilization itself seemed to reel.

"I suppose we'll get into the war now," she replied with a shrug. "I can't see it as my affair. Men made the rotten peace that caused this war. Men can win it, as I'm sure they will. But it's time I did something of my very own."

"I wonder if you'd consider letting me pay for your new education," I suggested with some difference now. "I have my savings and something besides. I had planned to leave it to my school's scholarship fund, never dreaming that you'd need it, but now it would give me the greatest pleasure—"

"Oh, I'm sure it would, dearest Auntie!" Natica exclaimed, with her first show of emotion. She leaned over to give me a kiss. "But I really think Mrs. Hill would like to do it. I honestly believe it would be unkind to deprive her of that pleasure."

S
OMEBODY HAD SAID
of the renowned constitutional lawyer George Haven that he was the rare case of a great man without the facial features of such, which at once invited the query as to whether he really was one. His long oval countenance was bland, smooth, seemingly incapable of registering any strong emotion. His brow was high and fine; his hair long and thick and quite as silvery as his voice; his eyes small and pink-gray, usually expressing an amused resignation at the follies of the world, qualified by a mild irritation at their inevitability. His tall, trim figure, which Thaddeus Sturges always tended to picture as garbed in a morning coat and striped pants, suggested a constant readiness to appear before some high tribunal, but a lightly loosened tie, an occasional shirt button undone, like the ever relit pipe before his attentively focused eyes, struck a note of indefinite ease under an easily doffed formality, a need to get down to basics, a hint that behind closed doors, or in a pool room, or even out in a village square with pigeons before some columned courthouse, occurred the basic male confidences that were the necessary complement to the clarion oratory. Was George Haven the type of grand old lawyer of the grand old South, or was he playing the part—or was playing the part not precisely what those grand old lawyers did?

Thaddeus knew that these questions were sometimes asked by the more sarcastic clerks of Haven, Tillinghast & Dorr, of 70 Wall Street, but he attributed them to the envy that greatness engenders in small minds. There had been no wavering in his own total dedication to the senior partner ever since his first interview with the latter in 1936.

He had had the good fortune, immediately upon coming to work, to be assigned to the great man's litigating team, and Mr. Haven had asked him to get a certain document from the office safe. When he had returned empty-handed after a frantic search, his new boss had simply inquired if he had looked
under
the safe.

"I see you're new here, Mr. Sturges. Or may I call you Thaddeus? But doesn't that sound too biblical? How about Thad? All right? Well then, Thad, you always have to look on the floor because there's a hole in the back of that safe that some of the papers slip through."

And Thad (for Thad he was to be thenceforth, though he had hitherto been known as Ted) knew at once that this was both the firm and the man for whom he wanted to work.

His background had been a confusing one. His father had been a Boston Sturges, but of an impecunious branch, who had compounded this disadvantage by marrying a dressmaker, and an Irish Catholic, to boot. Thaddeus senior had died young and alcoholic, leaving his only child to be reared by a proud and intrepid mother, who had put him through private school and Harvard College on the earnings of her small but reputable shop. Thad had acknowledged his obligation by his adoration of her and by his passionate embracement of the faith that had sustained her in her lonely and industrious existence. She had hoped he would become a priest, even after he had grown into a rangy, sandy-haired six-footer and played on the Harvard football team. And he had even considered obliging her until his shame over an adulterous affair with one of her clients had convinced him (and her) that he was unfit for holy orders. Thereafter he had thrown all his energies into his courses at Harvard Law and obtained an editorship of the
Review
which had brought him an offer from the Haven firm. He had wanted to turn it down and stay in Boston to be a comfort to his mother, but she had insisted that New York provided the greater opportunity. And thus it was that he had come down to Manhattan, a very serious and literal young man, with a shame of lust doubly inherited from puritans and Irish, whose quizzical and guarded gaze seemed to express the hope, but by no means the expectation, that the world was going to be as straight with him as he certainly intended to be with it. And in George Haven he found the father figure he had always missed.