The Lady of Situations Page 5

  “Natica!” exclaimed her mother. “Mr. Barnes, I apologize for my daughter.”

  “Please don’t, Mrs. Chauncey. I see just what she means. It’s very clever, really. Your daughter knows how to make her point. But I shan’t give up trying to persuade her of the beautiful lovability of Jesus.”

  Natica could see that his technique as a priest was to disarm his audience with candor, to insist that he was just an ordinary guy who was nonetheless overwhelmed to the point of hyperbole (as you, listening to him, would be too, if you’d only let yourself go) by the simple overwhelmingness of Christ. But “you” were not to be put off by that; he was still a regular fellow.

  “When you spoke this morning about…” She paused.

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind. I’m sorry. I think you’ve already answered it.”

  She had been about to ask him about the blasted fig tree, but now she thought better of it. How many men had tried to make themselves as agreeable to her as he?

  He had certainly succeeded in making himself agreeable to Kitty, who remarked after his departure: “I don’t see why you had to be so disputatious with that perfectly charming man.”

  “Was I really so bad?”

  “Well, you weren’t good, my dear. But you’ll have a chance to make it up. He asked me when he could call on us, and I told him he’d be welcome any day. He had his eye on you, Natica. Don’t think a mother can’t tell!”

  “But, Mother, he’s a holy man.”

  “Enough of your sarcasm. He’s as male as he’s holy, and Mr. Eliot told me, before he went off to Jerusalem, that one of Barnes’s reasons for taking this parish was that he never meets any marriageable girls up at Averhill. Nothing but faculty wives and cleaning women!”

  “And the cleaning women are all over fifty. I’ve seen them! So Mr. Barnes has come to ‘wive it wealthily’ in Smithport. Well, he’s come to the right place if not the right house.”

  “The summer girls are too snooty to look at a minister. And most of them are away now, anyway.”

  “So this is the poor girl’s chance?”

  “I know you want to cast me in the role of a matchmaking old busybody, but I won’t have it. I don’t care what you do about Mr. Barnes. But I think it’s only intelligent at least to recognize that he’s a man of integrity and character who may well be a headmaster one day.”

  “Or even a bishop. There’s not much competition in the church these days, one hears.”

  “All right, dear. Have it your way. I’m sure you’d be happier with some communist teacher at Columbia plotting to blow up Smithport.”

  “Oh, Mother!” In a rare gesture Natica rose to kiss her battered parent. “I promise I’ll give you and Dad fair warning before we light the fuse. And thank you for asking Mr. Barnes for lunch. I definitely think I’m going to see him again.”

  He asked her to have dinner with him at a fish place in the village the very next day. Slipping into the seat opposite him in the booth where he was waiting, she ordered the fillet of sole, which she knew to be the cheapest item on the menu without glancing at it. She did so briskly, in the manner of a woman who knows her own mind and wants to get on to the serious business of conversation. She expressed an eagerness to know all about Averhill.

  “When I was there, I couldn’t help putting myself in the shoes of a boy whose family had been wiped out by the depression, like my own. There are such, I suppose?”

  “Oh, my yes.”

  “Don’t they find it hard, living with other boys who have so much more money to spend?”

  “Not nearly as hard as you might think. Because being poor doesn’t show much at school. We don’t allow the boys to keep any cash. All they get is an allowance of twenty-five cents a week, and a nickel of that goes in the plate at chapel, leaving twenty cents to be spent in the village where they can only go on Saturday afternoon. Everything on the campus is theoretically available to everyone.”

  “I see. It’s a kind of communism. But I remember the Parents’ House. All those mothers in mink arriving in limousines.”

  “Oh, the world creeps in. You can’t keep it out altogether. And some of the boys wear expensive suits and ties. Fortunately my sex doesn’t go in for clothes the way yours does. In a girls’ school they have to wear uniforms. It’s a funny system, but it works. What outsiders find it almost impossible to believe is that there’s no snobbishness inside Averhill.”

  “Because they’re all from the same class?”

  He preferred another term. “All from the same background. In the same way there’s no anti-Semitism.”

  “Because there are no Jews?” There was a note of irony in her tone.

  He didn’t get it. “Exactly. It’s a kind of ethnic vacuum.”

  “And what happens when they graduate? Do they carry these fine Christian principles with them through life?”

  He smiled, but it was not a smile that conceded much. “We do our best, we really do. And you know what Browning wrote: ‘But a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’”

  Natica’s conception of Averhill had been as a symbol of power, glittering, even admirable in its aloofness and pride. She had not understood that its board of trustees had deemed it politic or maybe necessary to cover it with wrappings quite so idealistic. And now she saw that this earnest man was precisely what they needed. He believed it all. He really did!

  Well, why not? she asked herself, as she drank her wine and leaned back in her seat. What had her life really taught her but that cynicism got one nowhere?

  He went on to talk at considerable length about the school, which was obviously his passionate, perhaps his only real interest. It did not seem to occur to him that their conversation was one-sided, though he did ask her some questions about her courses at Barnard which he found a bit deficient in American literature. She felt an immediate conviction that Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn were his favorite novels and decided it was not the moment to express her own preference for Henry James. Her mother had probably been right that he was looking for a wife, one who would fit in with faculty at Averhill. Of course, he would have to fall in love—his sincerity would require no less a state—but he would have no trouble with that once he had found the girl who qualified.

  By the time he had driven her home he had become very friendly indeed, and she wondered if he would kiss her. She hoped he would. But instead he said:

  “Will you go out with me again, Natica? I mean real soon? I think I should warn you that I’m beginning to like you very much.”

  “And I like you, Tom,” she replied in a firm, no-nonsense tone and walked to her front door without turning back.

  Two nights later they went out again to the same restaurant, and he told her about his life. His background was modest. His father was an Episcopal minister in Burlington, Vermont, where Tom and his only sibling, a brother, had gone to school and college. Both had graduated from the seminary in Cambridge and the brother was now a missionary in Nigeria. Tom had gone straight to Averhill where he had been teaching sacred studies and history and assisting the headmaster in chapel for five years. He admired Dr. Lockwood immensely and, of course, did not say anything about the possibility of succeeding him, but Natica knew that the post required a clergyman and Tom did mention that the rector would probably not retire for another decade. At forty, with fifteen years’ experience at the school, would he not be just the man to whom the trustees would naturally turn?

  He told her nothing about other girls in his life, but this time, when he took her home, he parked down the road and they necked vigorously for half an hour. Yet he was evidently a very disciplined man, for he made no move to go further, and she was very hot and flushed and unsatisfied when she went to bed.

  Tom was handsomer, it seemed to her, when she wasn’t looking at him. Absent, or viewed from a distance in the pulpit, he could suggest an English poet of the Georgian or pre-World War era, a kind of Rupert Brooke, whose love of beautiful w
ords in no way implied a bohemian point of view or precluded a passionate patriotism. But close to him, she couldn’t but note that his large brown eyes were too close together, his lips too thick, his oblong chin somehow suggestive more of stubbornness than of strength of character, though it didn’t necessarily deny the latter. He seemed all sincerity and openness; his frank friendly stare and self-deprecating smile or chuckle appeared to be telling her, apropos of his particular enthusiasms, that if he liked grand opera he had no objection to her preferring chamber music, if he believed in private church schools it was not to knock public education, or if he believed in God, he was sure that the Almighty would forgive her agnosticism. Tom, in short, seemed anxious to assure her that his world was only one of many, but did he really believe it?

  But, more importantly, did she really care whether he did? Her languid mood in that slow hot summer seemed not to change. There was something easy and comfortable, in their steady dating of the following days, about the assured flow of his respectable opinions. She allowed herself lazily and rather luxuriously to bask on the sunny beach of an existence where nothing was expected of her but to let this positive and gentle man take the lead in everything.

  One Sunday morning, listening to his sermon in church and glancing from his spotless surplice to the gray harbor and seagulls through the open pane of the stained glass window by her pew, she found herself envisioning a visit to the rectory after the service to discuss the day’s homily which would draw them into a deeper relation. She imagined him pausing in his too prosy explication, suddenly inarticulate, half choked; she felt his hands around her and then under her skirt; she heard his desperate, mumbled apology, and then suddenly it was too much for both of them. They were on the couch amid a flurry of skirt and panties and black robe and surplice and nakednesses, and she experienced with a sigh of relief, echoed by his own, the hard rhythm of his thrusts.

  “What were you thinking about during the sermon?” her mother asked as they came out of church. “You seemed a million miles away.”

  “I was thinking I’d better marry Tom,” Natica replied flatly.

  5

  WHEN NATICA came to Averhill the following September as the wife of the assistant chaplain, she found herself a smaller cog in its academic wheelworks than she had anticipated. This was not because of her exiguous living quarters. At such short notice the school could not be expected to provide a cottage for a new faculty bride, and she rather liked the little apartment improvised in the abandoned “Pest House,” a one-story bungalow just off campus where boys with contagious illnesses had been confined before the erection of the new infirmary, although the windows of the latter were so close to her own that she had to keep the shades drawn. Nor was it because her husband cut a lesser figure at school than might have been expected from his confident talk. Tom was indubitably popular with masters and boys alike, and there was no mistaking the warmth of the welcome extended to his spouse. Nor was it even in the lowly position of wives in an institution dedicated to the proposition that the female of the species was at best a nonentity, at worst a dangerous threat, in the educational process of the young male.

  No, Natica, having made the initial discovery of her own insignificance, soon made a second: that this insignificance was shared by all. Or all but one. The headmaster was everything at Averhill. The Reverend Rufus Lockwood had come there four decades before, at a time when the school was smaller and poorer, not only in endowment but in qualified teachers, and he had brought to the solution of its problems an ambition as great and a mind as tough as his birth had been humble and his looks unprepossessing. He had managed to persuade a desperate but prescient chairman of the trustees to sweep away an incompetent administration and give him a free hand, and he had proceeded to turn Averhill into one of the finest and best-endowed preparatory schools in New England. Now he reigned supreme over board, faculty, parents and student body. His all-encompassing vision took in everything, from the Almighty and his angels brooding in the sky over that favored campus to the condition of the tin wash basins hanging over the green soapstone sinks in the long lavatories where the boys had to take cold showers every morning at 6:45.

  Natica at her first interview with him felt as if she were being examined for a job. He was a short square man of craggy features, with a bulbous, blue-veined nose and small staring reddish eyes, who wore his thick gray hair in a Teutonic crew cut.

  “Your father, Thomas tells me, is a graduate of Saint Paul’s, so you presumably have some acquaintance with our church schools?”

  “Only through his reminiscences, sir.”

  “Your brothers did not attend?”

  “No, they went to public school in Smithport on Long Island. My parents couldn’t afford the tuition.”

  “Ah, yes, that is hard. I wonder that scholarships could not have been arranged. But that is beside the point. Thomas tells me also that you once came here for a Halloween ball. With Grant DeVoe, I believe?”

  “That is so, sir.”

  Those small eyes penetrated her. “Were you by any chance the young lady who smoked in my study?” The tone was mellifluous, but the air was tainted with danger.

  Of course, she had a lie ready. The Lockwood memory was famous.

  “It was I.”

  “And may I inquire if you are still addicted to the weed?”

  “That was my last cigarette, sir.”

  “Oh? And dare I attribute to my (I trust silent) disapprobation so beneficent a result?”

  “It was you who cured me.”

  His broad smile now welcomed her to Averhill. But after a brief reflection he sighed. “I’m afraid Grant is not doing very well at Harvard.” The great brow darkened. “He is a most unsettled young man. A pity. A pity.”

  “I haven’t seen him for the last two years.”

  The headmaster at this rose almost to gallantry. “No doubt he has suffered from the loss of a good influence. His loss, anyway, is Thomas’s gain. I’m sure Thomas has told you that we expect our faculty wives to be present at lunch at the school and sit at their husbands’ tables. And also, of course, to attend Sunday morning services at chapel. I like my masters to be on or near the campus at all times. Naturally I do not presume to control your comings and goings, but I expect each master to inform me when he plans to be away from school overnight and why.”

  “Oh, Tom has made those things very clear, sir.” She decided that she might now venture a smile. “You’ll have no trouble with me, I trust.”

  He came as close as she supposed he knew how to beaming. “Oh, I’m certain not, my dear. And let me assure you how happy I am that Thomas has picked so charming a bride. I shall call you Natica, if I may. I like to think of my faculty as one big and, I hope, happy family.”

  Natica learned a good deal about the headmaster in a very short time. The “family,” particularly the faculty wives, discussed him almost compulsively, and it was soon evident that her husband’s worshipful attitude was by no means shared by all. Dr. Lockwood was controversial in the strongest sense of that word. He excited fierce loyalty and equally fierce hostility.

  All were agreed that he was a dictator. His harsh voice, reverberating down the long school corridors, exacted immediate obedience from boys and masters alike. Yet that same instrument, heard from the pulpit, was capable of extraordinary modulations. It could soar in almost musical notes of sweet piety; it could suggest a faith as simple as it was deeply compelling. For the headmaster appeared to see no inconsistency between the strict disciplinarian of the campus and the loving comforter of the chapel. Heaven hovered in the air over the buildings of Averhill; the school life was a plain of laborious preparation for an ultimate blessed union with a divinity who was supposed as well to be a living presence in the hearts of the faculty and student body, particularly the latter, at every minute of the day.

  To the boys Rufus Lockwood was for the most part a headmaster: a thing to be obeyed, a presence to be avoided as much as possible, a loud and
usually disagreeable noise, part of the donnée of Latin texts and parents and arbitrary rules of conduct that had to be accepted. A few—a dedicated and devoted few, it was true—were deeply impressed by his faith and brilliant sermons, but these “converts” had little effect on the majority. Among the faculty and graduates, Natica gathered, there was a split of opinion between those whose admiration of Lockwood as an administrator and fund raiser was unqualified and those who wished that his undoubted virtues were less tarnished by snobbishness and autocracy.

  For Lockwood, atypically among New England church school headmasters, had been lowly born—his father had been a butcher in Worcester—and his struggle up the social ladder, aided by his cloth and ultimately crowned by his marriage to a Lowell, had not inspired him with any lack of reverence for the goals attained. Lockwood distressed many with his almost hand-rubbing appreciation of old names and large fortunes.

  When Natica mentioned this to Tom, however, he spoke to her sharply for the first time.

  “Dr. Lockwood has had to raise immense sums for the school. Where was he to get it but from rich graduates and parents? And they don’t open their checkbooks for people who don’t know how to talk to them. I hope you’re not gossiping with faculty wives, Natica. That’s a poor way to begin.”

  “I like to know what I’m getting into, that’s all,” she replied sulkily.

  The penetration of the headmaster’s personality, even into Natica’s more private moments, was blunt. She and Tommy were frequently awakened by his early morning rings.

  “Good morning, Natica. I want to talk to Thomas about changing the hymn for morning chapel.”

  And sometimes her day would end in the same way, the jangle of his call startling her out of the deep sleep into which she had just fallen or interrupting the climax of their lovemaking.

  “I want to ask Thomas about his changes in the third form sacred studies schedule.”

  She and Tommy seemed never to be alone together, which gave an eerie intensification to her feeling that she had married a man who was essentially a stranger. This feeling was not diluted by her awareness that it was not shared by her loving but too satisfied spouse. Why was Tommy so sure he had got exactly what he had bargained for? And what, for that matter, had he bargained for?