The Lady of Situations (10 page)

The long look that he gave her now suggested something between the gratification of a boy and a humility quite uncharacteristic of the formidable headmaster she had known for six months. "Do you know something, Natica? I might just try it. I really might."

O
NE MORNING
at her desk Natica overheard a livelier than usual argument between the headmaster and Roy Evans. The spring vacation was just over, leaving reports that some Averhill boys had been seen drinking at parties in New York and in the Boston area. Lockwood was much aroused.

"We have to act promptly and decisively, Roy. This idea that when a boy is away from school in the holidays he is beyond our jurisdiction is a repudiation of our whole mission. What sort of a travesty of the Christian moral imperative do we present if a boy can swear and smoke and drink—and perhaps worse, for aught I know—the moment he's off the campus?"

"Your principles are perfectly understood, sir. They've never been publicly challenged by any parents that I know of." Roy's tone, as always, was low-keyed and reasonable. "What we are faced with now is
rumors
of breaches of the school code. We both know that breaches, particularly in the holidays, are inevitable. Many parents serve cocktails every night as a matter of course. It is not unusual, I am told, for them occasionally to allow a seventeen-year-old to have a drink with them. If you have solid evidence of a boy's being inebriated at a party, then you might have a talk with him."

"A talk! It would be a question of suspension, if not outright expulsion!"

"Might that not seem excessive to parents in whose supposed control he was when it happened?"

"To them, perhaps. If they are derelict in their duty should I be in mine?"

"What, at any rate, do we really have to go on? Mrs. Amory Dillon has written to the headmasters of two other schools besides ours to complain of the behavior of certain boys at a party she gave for her daughter in Manchester. One of these was an Averhill sixth former."

"Jackson Bates, exactly."

"But when I telephoned to Mrs. Dillon, she admitted that he had been the least offensive of the group. He had simply tumbled down a stairway."

"He was drunk, sir!"

"He has a boy's light head, and had had one drink. I've talked to him. It won't happen again."

"You've talked to him! Drunk and disorderly, disgracing the name of the school, and you've talked to him! Well, let me tell you something else, Roy Evans. I too have talked to Mrs. Dillon, and I have obtained a list of all her guests at that party. It contains the names of no fewer than twelve Averhill students. She had only complained about those who were intoxicated, but she freely admitted that most if not all the young people present had had something to drink."

"Provided by her."

"Of course, provided by her! I'm not defending the wretched woman. I'm interested only in what our boys did."

"And how do you propose to find out which boy drank what?"

"By asking them, of course! By calling them in, one by one, and asking each precisely what he had imbibed. Do you suggest they will lie to me, if I put them on their word of honor?"

"But, sir, you will be asking them to incriminate themselves!"

"This is not a courthouse, Evans. It's a Christian academy."

"It will be perceived as an inquisition."

The headmaster's sigh was windy. "I sometimes wonder, Roy, if anyone believes in any of the things that I do. We appear to exist in a howling desert of hypocrisy."

"If you will excuse me, sir, I have a class on the hour."

Evans, Natica noted, always knew exactly when to drop an argument. When the headmaster took refuge in exclamatory generalities, his junior took it as a signal that the point was not to be labored. Lockwood was usually too shrewd and too practical to do more than rock his own boat. But Natica was increasingly aware that Evans and other senior faculty members apprehended that they might be living on the edge of a smouldering crater. Lockwood at times seemed almost to be reaching for an issue where he would be able to throw down the gauntlet at a society that accepted him as a god only so long as he behaved as gods should. He was bored—that was really it—so bored that he might be yearning for a catastrophe that would bring down the temple around his gory locks. Was there any role left for him sufficiently dramatic but that of Thomas Cranmer thrusting his recanting hand into the flames before they could reach his martyr's body?

The
Boston Globe
had been running the salacious story of an Averhill graduate divorcing his younger wife for adultery, and Lockwood, unexpectedly entering Natica's office, caught her reading it. He snatched the paper from her.

"That's not fit reading for a young lady!"

"There are few surprises for young ladies these days, sir. And I'll thank you to give me back my paper."

"Take the filthy rag!" He tossed it on her desk and retreated moodily to his own office. When she came in later, in response to his ring, and took her seat before him, notebook in hand, he had the brooding, faraway stare that foretokened an entry for "the book."

"It may interest you to know that the defendant in that sordid case struck me initially as a fine young woman. Another example of how hard it is to find 'the mind's construction in the face.' I had not, however, like King Duncan, built 'an absolute trust' on her. Well, well. Let us see what profit we may derive from an earlier case."

And touching and retouching his fingertips together slowly, as if to keep pace with his reflections, he proceeded, as always in these sessions, to dictate as if he were reading aloud.

"John Winthrop, the first governor of our Bay Colony, records in his journal that one James Britton and one Mary Latham, the latter a young woman of only eighteen years, were hanged for adultery. They had been duly condemned by a court on which he presumably sat. Winthrop sets forth the bare facts: how the woman had been wed to an 'ancient man' who had neither honesty nor 'ability,' and how she had proved very penitent and aware of the foulness of her sin, and how the man, very much cast down, had petitioned for his life. Some of the magistrates questioned whether adultery was death by God's law, but the sentence was carried out, and Winthrop concludes his entry with the expression of a pious hope that Mary Latham will prove a good example to other young women of the colony."

Lockwood's long, silent stare did not seem to focus on his secretary.

"We are appalled today," he concluded, "in reading Winthrop's words. How could a man, who seems in many of the passages of his journal a person quite as compassionate as ourselves, record so complacently so savage a punishment for so common a crime? And yet there is a fascination, almost an awe, in contemplating a community which set its moral tone so high, a community which did not blink at the stain of original sin, a community which kept its eyes fixed on the stern dictates of the Almighty and did not seek its salvation in the modern bathos of exalting love, love, love."

He now abruptly changed his tone, in a way he had, as if an invisible director on a fancied set had called "Cut." "I believe that you and Tommy are dining with us tonight." It had indeed been a rare honor, to meet the visiting headmaster of Saint Andrew's School. "After dinner I shall take Dr. Cotton to my study for a short conference. Please speak to Mr. Roy Evans and ask the gentleman not to linger too long over their cigars. That is something my wife particularly objects to."

Natica was to wonder afterwards if the very satisfaction she had felt that night before dinner in Mrs. Lockwood's cluttered Victorian parlor, looking, she had hoped, at her very best in blue silk with a red scarf, and imagining herself a smoothly functioning cog in the well-oiled machinery of this male institution, might have been the act of female
hubris
that precipitated her expulsion from the works. Yet the only mistake that she could see she had made was to have delivered her message to Marjorie instead of to Roy.

"The headmaster hopes that Roy will speed the gentlemen with their coffee and cigars after dinner. He is going to be closeted with Dr. Cotton, and Mrs. Lockwood doesn't care to be left too long with the ladies."

Marjorie Evans's cold gray eyes seemed to aim her big marble nose dangerously at her interlocutor. "I think my husband and I can handle ourselves socially without
your
help, Mrs. Barnes."

"I never questioned it. I was only doing what Dr. Lockwood asked me to do."

"Did he ask you to speak to
me?
"

"No, I don't suppose he did. But he wanted the message conveyed to your husband."

"Then convey it, Mrs. Barnes. You're taking everything else on your shoulders these days."

Natica, left alone, contemplating one of her hostess's elaborately carved Belter chairs, was possessed of the sudden image of a knife slitting its tightly packed pink upholstery to reveal an ugly cavern of angry broken springs and ominously stained cotton.

She moved over to join the respectful female group around the chair where Mrs. Lockwood, a cigarette dangling from her thin lips, was chatting as she plied her needlepoint. Was it Natica's imagination that made her fancy that the headmaster's wife deliberately failed to notice the two perfunctory comments that she added to the perfunctory talk?

At the dinner table, where ten were seated, there was a dispute between the host and hostess across the board that drew a strained silence from the guests. Natica had heard of these disputes but had never witnessed one. They were rare and were supposed always to result in a total victory for the wife.

Lockwood had perhaps unwisely chosen this evening to discuss the book that he "and Mrs. Barnes," as he facetiously put it, were engaged in composing.

"It will probably never be finished. I cannot seem to become enough of a literary carpenter to put together the box that would contain the impact of the school on the world and vice versa. I should have to be an historian, even a statistician, a biographer, an autobiographer (oh, yes), a novelist (for some things would never be believed) and even a poet!"

"Leave novels to women, Rufus," his wife retorted dryly. "It's their province."

"My dear!" His eyes rolled. "Do you thus dispose of Tolstoy, of Balzac, of Dickens?"

"I'm talking about Americans. Or perhaps I should say New Englanders. We are New Englanders, are we not? Our men are at their best when they are serious, when they write essays or history, like Prescott or Great-Uncle Francis Parkman."

"And Hawthorne?"

"You will remember that Mr. Emerson deplored Hawthorne's novels, though he admired the man. And Henry Adams knew what he was doing when he published those two novels anonymously."

Somebody brought up the name of William Dean Howells, but Mrs. Lockwood rejected him as a Middle Westerner who had settled in Boston and then (worse) abandoned it for New York. The headmaster, uneasy at the curious warp of mind that his wife was revealing, tried to mollify her with a compliment, saying that in eschewing fiction he would at least be within the tradition of the Lowell family, who had written every kind of prose and poetry
but
that.

Natica suggested that Amy Lowell's prose poems were almost short stories.

Mrs. Lockwood, without looking at her, remarked sharply to the table: "If Mrs. Barnes had listened to the discussion, she would have heard me say that fiction should be left to women."

"And Amy was barely that," Lockwood murmured to the lady on his left. Unfortunately for him, in the embarrassed silence that had followed his wife's pointed rudeness to Natica, the remark carried to her ears.

"I'll thank you not to make unpleasant remarks about my relatives, Rufus Lockwood. They've been kind enough to
you.
"

What impressed Natica at this awkward moment was the completeness of the headmaster's rout. He muttered an apology and confined his conversation for the rest of the meal to his immediate neighbors. His wife knew just where and when to implant her deadly dart. No doubt she had had ample practice.

Walking home afterwards with Tommy, she found him upset and bewildered.

"What in God's name have you done to Mrs. Lockwood?" he wanted to know.

"You mean, don't you, what has Mrs. Lockwood done to me?"

"Darling, she
is
the headmistress. Or at least the headmaster's wife."

"And that gives her the right to have the manners of a pig? Whose side are you on, anyway?"

Tommy paused to stare at her in astonishment through the darkness. Never before had she shown herself so tart. "I thought I was on your side. But I thought on our side we could work out together our life at Averhill."

"I didn't reproach
you
for not telling Mrs. Lockwood that her manners were foul. Let us leave it, please, at that."

"But Natica, my darling..."

"Let us leave it at that!"

It came as little surprise to Natica that on the following day, which was Sunday, Roy Evans called at the apartment with a very grave countenance. Tommy was at chapel, preparing for the morning service.

"This is a tough one, Natica. But I may as well get on with it. The headmaster does not want you to go to your office tomorrow. He's got a Miss Thurmond coming up from the village to try out as his new secretary."

"He wanted
you
to say that for him?"

"That's it."

"He didn't have the guts to do it himself?"

"Great men can keep their guts for the occasions when other men's won't serve. This is not one of those."

"I see. Is there anything else?"

"He wants you to know that your dismissal has nothing to do with any fault on your part. You have done, he asks me to tell you, an excellent job. But he feels that using a faculty wife for your post has aroused jealousies among the other wives."

"Which ones? Or should I say, which one?"

Roy's studied impassiveness admitted her accusation.

"How have I hurt Marjorie?" she demanded angrily. "Have I taken anything from her she didn't already have?"

"A school is like an Indian tribe, Natica. People resent the new favorite of the chief. It has nothing to do with the fact that they didn't have a chance of becoming the favorite themselves."