The Lady of Situations (16 page)

"God doesn't have to explain. I believe there was something said about the trustees finding Wilbur too classical, but we all know that Rufus Lockwood dominates his board. No, my friend, he never had any intention of making Wilbur senior master. He simply didn't want to lose a good Latin teacher. What was it to him that by the time he made his appointment of Evans, Wilbur was too old to be considered for another headmastership? The accent had swung to youth."

"How shocking!"

"The only really shocking thing was that Wilbur and I had been naive enough to believe him. But the whole wretched business filled me with such a sickness of heart that I lost all desire to show my poems to a world in which such a man as Lockwood was esteemed and admired."

Stephen decided that he had better not comment on this. She had talked freely to him; she might talk with equal freedom to others. He had not enjoyed hearing her story, but after all, had it come as a complete surprise? Even as a sixth former he had taught himself to excuse certain of the headmaster's highhanded acts as the fruit of a noble passion to place his school above all other interests.

"Would it be asking too much to have you read one of your poems?"

It was a happy notion. Rufus Lockwood and his opportunism vanished away as Estelle at once opened the little blue volume.

"I shan't try your patience. I'll read you the shortest one in the book! What I call a
chinoiserie.
But promise you won't laugh."

He held up a hand in affirmation, and she turned the leaves.

"Ah, here it is." She cleared her throat. "It's called 'On Watching a Child at Breakfast.'"

"It must be very nice to feel
Ecstasy
About oatmeal."

The oddest thing about her performance was that it gave a certain validity to the silly jingle. Reciting the first line, she leaned down as if addressing a child and spoke with the saccharine condescension of a fatuous adult. Then she threw back her head, closed her eyes and almost cried out the word "ecstasy."

"That has always been one of my favorites, Estelle."

Stephen turned to face Wilbur Knight in the doorway. Grave, gray, with chiseled features, a rigid posture and a beautiful tweed sports jacket which he wore like a morning coat, the head of the classics department seemed the symbol of all that was needed in a rational world to keep his wife's exuberance in check.

"Mrs. Knight has been entertaining me so well, sir, that I've overstayed my leave. I really must get back to my dorm before supper."

"Well now you know the way, as the saying is!" his hostess exclaimed. "If you like reading poetry, how would you care to come in some afternoon and read with me and Natica Barnes? I find her uncommonly intelligent, a real oasis in this academic dryness."

"I'd love to, but you know what my schedule is. I'll certainly try."

Wilbur Knight attended him to the hall, and Stephen felt that he must cut a sorry figure in the older man's eyes, listening to an old woman read her silly verse on a beautiful afternoon when all youth should be out-of-doors. But Knight's words expressed no such reaction.

"It was kind of you to call on my wife, Stephen. She has few amusements, I fear. I'm sure that reading poetry aloud with a bunch of women is not your idea of an afternoon sport, but if you ever have a free hour to spare her, I should much appreciate it."

Walking hurriedly back to school in the darkening air, Stephen decided that the old Latin teacher was very likely the saint his wife deemed him.

S
TEPHEN WAS
able to discount much of Mrs. Knight's grievance against the headmaster as the exaggeration of a perfervid imagination, but he had more trouble reconciling Natica Barnes's cool assessment of Lockwood with his own high admiration of the man. She had been willing to exempt the boys from the ill effects of what she had called Lockwood's despotic regime, but only because their subjection to it was of limited term. But wasn't that term the most impressionable part of their lives? Hadn't it been of his own?

He had chosen to see Lockwood as a kind of craggy creative genius, forgivably indifferent, even callous in his treatment of lesser beings who stumbled between him and his goals. He had conceived of him as a man whose passionate sense of divine light and fierce need to convey some rays of it to his boys made any idea of ordinary human rights on his campus seem secondary or even irrelevant. And his impression of the headmaster's idealism had bathed the school in a romantic light that had persisted even after his college years had considerably dulled his religious faith. Indeed it was this that had really motivated his return to the school.

Could he now afford to have much to do with a woman whose radically different opinion, if accepted by him, would strip Averhill and his own life of a juice so apparently essential to his imagination?

But he seemed to have lost his choice in the matter. The image of Natica Barnes was constantly in his mind. At lunch in the dining hall when she was sitting by Tommy at a neighboring table, he would try not to be too obviously glancing her way. He noted that the sixth formers at his own table were equally aware of her, and he could recall from his school days the kind of lewd comments that were being whispered. Of course she had little competition from the other wives, on the whole a dowdy lot, or from the waitresses, all of middle age or elderly (Lockwood notoriously vetoed the employment of any female who might arouse the lust of his boys), but even among her peers Natica would, Stephen felt sure, have made a neat, trim, lively and shapely impression. Poor Annette seemed old and faded in his suddenly disloyal memory. Why on earth had she married a clod like Barnes?

"How would you like to bang her?"

Stephen almost started to hear the question, from one boy to another, several seats down the table. But he restrained the impulse to reprove them when he saw they had been watching him watch her and that the question, ostensibly private, had really been mockingly aimed at himself. He pretended not to have heard.

It was the custom for the masters and their wives to enter the dining hall ahead of the student body and take their positions at their tables while the boys filed in. One day, to Stephen's surprise and quickly guarded excitement, Natica walked over to stand behind the chair on his right.

"I don't see why the poor bachelor masters shouldn't have a hostess every now and then. I've told Tommy I'm going to sit here today. If you don't mind, that is."

"The boys will be delighted."

"Only the boys?"

"They will be only delighted. I will be enchanted."

The headmaster's table was on a dais in a large bay. When Lockwood had completed his thundered grace and taken his seat with the rest of the assembly, Stephen fancied that the eye that had briefly swept that crowded chamber had taken in Mrs. Barnes's altered seat.

The sixth formers around him were effusive in their welcome of her. Their talk fell on the subject of the mother of a first former who had had the brass to ask the headmaster himself to take her on a tour of the school pantry and kitchen to check on their cleanliness. Natica asked what his response had been.

"Oh, he agreed to be her guide," one boy replied. "He said he'd always wanted to see the kitchen!"

"That sounds like him," she noted. "Only of course it wasn't true. I'm sure he knows every pot and pan. But I'm glad one mother at least stood up to him. The poor parents come up here to find their sons completely free from their control. They have to shed their authority like tourists taking off their shoes in a mosque."

"Sometimes their sons even assume it over
them,
" another boy offered. "I heard Dicky Daniels asking that obese mother of his if she couldn't manage to look a little thinner when she went to talk to Dr. Lockwood."

"Oh, poor woman!" Natica exclaimed with a fine show of dismay. "And did she comply? Did she manage to suck it in?"

There was general laughter. Then Giles Woodward, of the Donne plumbing theory, took a determined conversational lead.

"But it's not only the headmaster's stern stare that the poor parents are subjected to. The whole school feels free to inspect them as if they were slaves at auction in the old South. Hadley Clark, coming out of chapel with his mother last Sunday, had the humiliation of hearing the shortness of her legs discussed by a bunch of fifth formers."

"But you boys are terrible! Stephen, tell them how terrible they are. Didn't young Clark resent the remarks?"

"He's only a third former, Mrs. Barnes."

"He wouldn't have left the place in one piece."

"Shall we tell Mrs. Barnes what we did to that snotty Eustis kid who got so hot at our calling his old man a crook?"

"You didn't!"

"But he
was
a crook, Mrs. Barnes. We read about it in the
Times.
He only got off by pleading the statute of limitations."

"Even so, poor boy, you shouldn't have thrown it in his face."

But her tone showed that she was with them, and Stephen had a happy sense of the unity of their little group. He even recognized, with a pang of envy, what a pleasant thing it might be to have such a wife at school.

As he and Natica walked out of the hall together she observed: "Children are often ashamed of their parents. I know I was of mine. And I was even more ashamed of being ashamed! But
you
couldn't have felt anything like that."

"Why do you say that?"

"Oh, because the Hills are such a famous family. And Mrs. Knight tells me your mother's a great beauty."

"But I used to be terribly embarrassed by the ostentatious way they arrived at school when I was a boy here."

"How do you mean?"

He noted her attention and played up to it. "Well, there was one particularly awful Sunday that I remember when Dad and Mother arrived in
two
cars, just after chapel, while the whole school was coming out and could see them, right there by the Cabot Gate. Dad was driving one of my sisters in a big yellow Hispano touring car, and Mother, who didn't like to be blown, was in a green Rolls limousine with my other sister. You never saw such a circus."

"I'll bet the boys loved it!"

"Maybe. But I wanted to curl up and die."

"It would have been the happiest moment in my life!" she exclaimed in a tone of real conviction. But then she added more soberly: "Which is nothing to be proud of, believe me." And she left him to join her husband.

***

The invitation from Mrs. Knight was written in a large purple hand on a stiff card with a gold border and an eagle crest.

If you could spare an hour on Sunday at four we might read Maxwell Anderson's delectable drama
Elizabeth the Queen.
Dear Natica Barnes can join us at that time, and I dare to foretell that we shall prove a congenial threesome. Perhaps we shall not rise to the empyrean heights of the incomparable Lunts, but we can but do our best.

It seemed a most un-Averhillian way of passing even a Sunday afternoon, but Stephen knew at once that nothing would keep him from accepting the invitation.

At the appointed day and hour he found Natica ahead of him. She and Mrs. Knight were in the midst of an earnest discussion of who was to read which part.

"No, no, Elizabeth is just the part for you," Natica was insisting. "So full of twists and turns and shades of mood. You must read it all. And Stephen, of course, will be Essex. I'll read the other parts. I've penciled the cuts in the three copies you've so generously provided."

"But, my dear, I want
you
to read the main role—or at least part of it."

"No, I have it all worked out." Natica was very definite. "And our reading should take no more than an hour. Stephen, I'm sure, will have to get back to school. So let's start right away with the scene where the council members trick Essex into accepting command of the fatal Irish expedition."

As the reading progressed Stephen found himself strangely drawn into the playwright's version of a romantic past. The close atmosphere of the dark Tudor parlor, the scent of incense and his hostess's throaty utterance of her lines seemed to turn the house itself into a stage without an auditorium, while the hovering school and campus beyond, even the great gray chapel itself, receded into shadows. He tried to bring himself back to a semblance of reality by putting more force into his reading. He wanted to emphasize that if Essex's life would be short, it would still be brilliant. He might be doomed in the end by the false old monarch, but he would make a splendid finish, young and brave, bowing his head to the block and flashing out his scarlet-sleeved arms to signal his readiness for the axe. He glanced at Natica. Was she having fun?

He couldn't tell. Only when she read the part of Penelope, the queen's lady in waiting who was also in love with the hero, was there any emotion in her voice, but then her tones rang out loud and clear. He wanted to fancy himself as the man whose love she disputed with her mistress. But the fancy was suddenly stifled in the heavy atmosphere of the chamber; he heard his own voice weaken and pause. He had to clear his throat; Mrs. Knight offered him a glass of water. When, on his quick refusal, she resumed her role, now almost crooning in her ecstasy, he wondered if he could even breathe the air that seemed to intoxicate the older woman and at least invigorate the younger. It was as if everything that was female in the predominantly male world of Averhill had fled or even been chased from a hostile campus to be boxed up between Estelle Knight's dark panels where it would defiantly throb and expand until it exploded, shivering the red brick and white columns of the beautiful circle and shaking the square Gothic tower of the chapel to its very foundations.

But when Natica happened to glance up from her book at him and smile, it was as if the whole gaudy chamber, the wig and the incense, had fallen away, and youth and truth were there alone.

"'Give me the ring, give me the ring!'" shrilled Mrs. Knight in the old queen's final vain plea to her stubborn favorite to invoke her mercy.