The Lady of Situations (8 page)

But Mrs. Evans had had more than enough of her senior guest's reminiscences. "I think we had better get back to Racine. And, Edith, you can find out about your
jeunes filles
later from Mrs. Knight. Suppose you tell us
your
reaction to the tragedy we're here to discuss."

"Well, one thing that puzzled me, Marjorie," the physics teacher's wife confessed, "was all the emphasis on incest. I looked up the word in my dictionary, and it defined it as ... well, let's say making love, between two persons too closely related to marry legally. Now of course the heroine could not marry Hippolyte at all because she was already married to his father. But if she hadn't been, there would have been no impediment that I could see. I mean she and Hippolyte were not blood relations, were they?"

This provoked an animated discussion of many voices.

"But he was her stepson! Incest doesn't have to be between an actual mother and son, does it?"

"Of course it does. That's the whole point of it."

"Anyway, wasn't she guilty of
moral
incest?"

"Why was she guilty of anything? She didn't
do
anything, did she? After all, Hippolyte wouldn't even look at her."

"But she wanted to do plenty. Oh, didn't she!"

"You mean she
only
wanted to commit an act that would have been
only
moral incest. It seems to me that's getting pretty far away from any real sin."

"What I find unattractive is that Hippolyte was young enough to be her son."

"What makes you think that? She may have been only a couple of years older than him."

Mrs. Knight's voice rose above the babble. "When I saw the divine Sarah in the role, she must have been well in her fifties, if not more, and Hippolyte was played by a strapping youth. I feel all the anguish of an aging woman in the lines. Oh, how can you miss it?" She closed her eyes again tightly, as if evoking a memory too flaming to be hid. The room was silent with surprise and perhaps with awe. "No, that immortal verse speaks with a terrible clarity to those who have been through a certain ordeal. To those who know what it is to feel the passing of beauty in the beholder while it is at its most poignant in the beheld."

Mrs. Evans was plainly disgusted. "I think we are straying from our analysis of the play. I am going to ask Natica to give us her reaction. She, after all, was the one who proposed Racine."

"Well, I think, Marjorie, the reason we find the dramatic situation a bit confusing is that we are not Jansenists, as he was."

"Suppose you explain to us just what a Jansenist is, dear."

Natica supposed she was being warned not to "show off," but she had started and had to go on. "A Jansenist was a kind of French puritan. He believed that all men are saved or damned before they are born, and that there's nothing in the world we can do about it. Phèdre is damned because she loves her stepson, as it was always in the cards, at least in
hex
cards, that she would. It isn't in any way her fault; it's Venus's fault. And she knows this and knows that it's hideously unfair. That's her tragedy."

There was another outburst.

"Why, that's horrible!"

"How could anyone believe anything so awful? To be damned for something she couldn't help? What sort of a religion is that?"

"We might all be damned if it was just a question of
feeling.
"

"Ladies, ladies!" Mrs. Evans raised a silencing hand. "Natica had made an interesting point, but surely she is overlooking the central crisis of. the play. Phèdre falsely accuses Hippolyte of attempted rape, and for this his father has him killed. So she's really guilty of murder. That to me settles the question of damnation. If she's not damned, she's in for a long term in purgatory."

"But she never dreamed Thésée would go so far!" Natica protested, appalled by this oversimplification of her favorite drama. "You remember, her old nurse Oenone told her,
'Un père en punissant est toujours père.'
She has been tricked by circumstance into believing her husband is dead. She has been driven almost mad by frustration and humiliation. And she is on her way to tell Thésée the truth, at the risk of her own life, when she receives the body blow of learning that Hippolyte loves Aricie. She hasn't eaten or slept for days; she is half dead, and Oenone works on her fevered imagination..."

"I'm afraid someone else's imagination is a bit fevered," Mrs. Evans interrupted icily. "And, if you don't mind, Natica, I think it's time some of the other ladies had a chance to speak."

Natica, deeply mortified, did not open her mouth again during the discussion. Even when a question was directed to her, as one or two were, by women obviously trying to make up for their hostess's rudeness, she simply indicated, with a slight smile and self-deprecating shrug, that she had used up her small store of criticism. But that night she exploded to Tommy.

"Do we really have to stay in this school? Wouldn't you like to have a parish of your own? Or even be a missionary like your brother? I'd rather face the cannibals than Marjorie Evans and her sacred
cercle!
"

He tried to pass it off as momentary pique on her part, but when she insisted that she was serious, he got up and took her in his arms and whispered what it was that she, and he too, basically needed. She pulled at once away from him.

"But we agreed we wouldn't even think about a baby for a year!"

"But there's no law that says we can't change our mind, is there?"

"Oh, Tommy, I
can't
get into that before I know where I am. Don't make me feel trapped!"

He at once relented, and when they went to bed he made love to her, but with the usual precautions. Making love would always be his answer to her problems; she was beginning to understand that. Oh, she liked it well enough, but she was wondering already why he had to do it every time in exactly the same way and why he was so confident that he never failed to confer an ecstasy upon her. After only two months of marriage she was simulating orgasms.

That night she slept fitfully, and her dreams were confused with her waking fantasies. It seemed to her that she was a soul alone, clad in a long white robe, as she envisioned Phèdre at the Française, isolated from the others, some jeering, some passively sympathetic, all peering, set apart by the bleak fact of her damnation. Then she fled across the boards and into the darkness of the wings, flitting as in a ballet, but in the coolness of shadows and by the trickle of streams she found no consolation in the frantic and ineffective devotion of her equally damned old nurse. She might hide herself away from the harshness of daylight and the people who found an inert contentedness in the little niches of the exposed rocky slopes outside, but in the end that daylight would penetrate even to her blackness and shrivel her into a little heap of dry bones.

When she fell at last into a deep sleep it was almost morning, and she awakened late. Tommy had gone to school, but he had left her a note:

I didn't think last night was the time to tell you, but poor Miss Stringham's complaint has been diagnosed as cancer. Mr. Lockwood has asked me if you would consider taking her position. Think it over. It might give you just the interest and distraction you need at the moment.

Natica clasped the note to her breast. God bless Tommy, after all! Miss Stringham was the headmaster's secretary.

T
HE HEADMASTER'S
office in the "Schoolhouse," as the main classroom building was known, was across the corridor from the principal assembly hall, and when the door was open the roar and rush of boys changing classrooms on the hour was deafening. But when it was closed the large chamber was almost soundproof, and Natica enjoyed the sense of sitting in the eye of the whirlpool of this strange male educational process. From the two French windows she had a sweeping view of the whole circle of the ever active campus, muted like a film with a dead soundtrack. Her own little room adjoining was windowless and bare except for the typewriter desk and file cabinets and a large stained photograph of the Roman Forum, but the door to Lockwood's office was always open except when he had private visitations, and she could see across her machine to the great eighteenth-century French boule table covered with gold and silver mementos which he used for a desk and the Sargent portrait behind it of his clerical predecessor.

Her duties required her to be at the office immediately after morning chapel and to remain there until lunchtime. In the afternoons she could work at home if she preferred, typing dictated letters and reports, and on weekends she was subject to call at the headmaster's study in his residence whenever he needed her. Having typed since her fourteenth year and having taken courses in shorthand during her Barnard summer, she expected to be adequately equipped for the job, and she could only hope that her new boss would be less exacting with women than he was reputed to be with men. It was encouraging that rumor had him trembling, like the first duke of Marlborough, before a wife who could be something of a shrew.

On her first morning he greeted her as perfunctorily as if she had been working for him a year, and launched immediately into the dictation of three letters to parents. He spoke slowly, with perfect articulation and without a single change or interjection, as if he had been reciting a prepared piece. But she knew he was testing her.

When she came back with the letters typed he read all three carefully before saying a word.

"I think we shall get on together, Mrs. Barnes."

His use of the formal address signified the change in her status.

"I hope so, sir."

"Have you been a secretary before?"

"I've had some experience," she fibbed.

"In my letter to Mrs. Kingsford about her son, Jimmy, it occurs to me that I may have been too harsh. I suppose an adoring mother might object to the application of the term egotist' to her son."

"Would 'individualist' be better?"

"But that might be construed as a compliment!"

"How about saying he has an individuality too pronounced for his years?"

"Excellent! Write the letter over that way."

It was not more than a week before she was allowed herself to compose the routine correspondence: the letters of congratulation and condolence to the more distantly connected, the answers to simple inquiries, the replies to graduates who wrote giving news of their careers. And more and more now when he was dictating, he would pause to ask her to suggest an alternate word or phrase. But she was careful never to volunteer one.

"You have a sense of style," he told her after she had worked for him a month. "Have you done any writing yourself?"

"Oh, I've scribbled a bit. Nothing too serious."

"I suppose every woman believes she has a novel in her."

She hesitated. Was this the moment for a bolder note? Was he challenging her? "Maybe that's the only way we women have to live."

"You mean if one lives, one doesn't have to write?" Those small red eyes seemed to bore into her. "What does Tommy think of your writing?"

"I doubt he even knows about it. There isn't, you see, anything much to know."

He grunted. "You're smarter than Tommy."

"I trust, sir, that doesn't mean you think little of my poor husband's intellect."

"No, it doesn't mean that at all. He had the sense to marry you, didn't he?"

She had no desire to write fiction at this point; she would be too busy gathering material out of which it might be made. For what was she but a spy in the holy of holies of a male society? Wasn't it on the playing fields of Averhill that the battles of Wall Street were won? And then, too, she highly enjoyed her new position. She was somebody, even if a small somebody, on the campus now. When she saw other faculty wives wending their dreary way to and from chapel, or to and from the dining hall, she felt in contrast as if she were on a bobbing horse on a merry-go-round. It was all she could do to keep from waving gaily at them and crying out what a good time she was having. The headmaster being everything at Averhill, even his secretary was envied, as the valet who emptied the chamber pot of Louis XIV was envied by the greatest peers of France.

Lockwood sometimes sent her as his messenger to faculty members with instructions about a change in schedule or the need of filling in for a sick or absent master. She was always careful never to allow the smallest note of authority to creep into the mild matterof-factness of her chosen tone. Indeed, one young master laughed in her face, exclaiming:

"When I think of the difference between how that order must have been given and how it is transmitted! But don't think we don't appreciate it, Natica. We need a velvet glove for that iron hand."

Tommy did not know quite what to make of the change in their lives. He appreciated his own enhanced importance on campus as husband of one who enjoyed the headmaster's confidence, but he was chagrined by the substitution of Lockwood for himself as the primary object of his wife's preoccupation. And even a milder husband would have scarcely relished his spouse's superior knowledge of school affairs.

"I wouldn't count too much on Sandy Rowe as assistant coach for the junior thirds."

"What makes you say that, dear?"

"Between you and me I doubt the old man will renew his contract, come spring. He's made some inquiries about a replacement."

"Natica, should you be telling me that?"

"Don't you want to know?"

"Oh, I suppose so. But it seems kind of sneaky."

"Should husbands and wives have secrets from each other?"

"Perhaps not. Only..."

"We have your career to think of. If I keep my eyes and ears open, I may be able to help you quite a bit. Suppose another headmaster wants you on his faculty in a better position than you have here. It's etiquette for him to channel his offer through your headmaster. Well, sometimes those offers get stuck to Lockwood's desk. He writes back that he's sorry, but so-and-so is just too happy at Averhill to think of leaving."

"Oh, Natica, he wouldn't do that!"