The Lady of Situations (17 page)

Natica's gaze was now expressionless, except for what he thought he could make out as the smallest yellow glint in her eyes, and then he realized with a start that the reading was over and that he shouldn't be staring at her.

Outside, accompanying her back to her house, he felt compelled to reconstruct some kind of bridge to the renewed reality of Averhill.

"Mrs. Knight really got a kick out of reading that part, didn't she?"

"Shouldn't she have?"

"Oh, sure. But do you know something funny? When I called on her, I fancied she was playing the part of an old queen receiving a young courtier who might become a favorite. I guess it's pathetic, really."

"What is?"

"Oh, the idea of shutting herself up in a make-believe palace and dreaming of love while intoning inferior verse. But at least she hasn't lost all touch with reality. She doesn't pick Juliet to play. She picks a part her own age, and that of a woman who ruled her world, so she can adjust her fantasies closer to her facts."

"And what are her facts?"

"Well, you know. The painted wife of a superannuated Latin teacher sitting on a pile of unpublished and probably now unpublishable poetry."

"You could see
me
in much the same light!" came the unexpected and shockingly tart rejoinder. "I may not be painted or married to an old Latin teacher, but I'm certainly married to a teacher, and what do I have but
my
fantasies? Indeed, I'm worse off than Mrs. Knight, for she has money, and somebody actually wanted to publish her verse! It's easy enough for you to sneer at our little compensations. You're rich and can travel all over the world in the long vacations. You can teach the boys what you wish, and if anyone stops you, you're free to quit. And you can buy all the beautiful things you want, even if your family do go in for flashy cars!"

They had stopped walking and were facing each other. Indignation had given her a becoming glow.

"I can't bear to think I've hurt your feelings!" he cried.

She blinked with surprise at the violence of his outburst. Then she shrugged. "Oh, you haven't hurt them, really. It's more that you've aroused them."

"As if I could be superior about
you.
"

At this she simply turned to walk on.

"I can't stand it if you're not my friend!" he called recklessly after her.

She turned back and smiled. "Oh, I'm your friend." They had reached the little gate to the brick walk to her cottage. "I wouldn't have flared so if I hadn't been."

Walking back to the school, elated but spurning analysis of his elation, he passed the rear of the chapel and rounded the darkening campus on the way to his dormitory. Ahead of him he spied the short, thick, slowly progressing figure of the headmaster. Had Lockwood seen him part with Natica at her gate? Had he even spotted them coming down the lane from the Knights' house? And if he had?

He quickened his pace to catch up with his principal.

"Good evening, sir."

"Good evening, Stephen. And a very good evening it is."

"I've come from a cultural session. Mrs. Barnes and I were reading poetry at Mrs. Knight's."

Lockwood's brief glance seemed to evaluate the oddness of this abrupt confession. "And did you read some of Mrs. Knight's own verse?"

"Oh no, sir."

"Oh no, you exclaim? Well, I imagine that might not have provided unmitigated delight."

"I can't say, sir," Stephen replied in some confusion, anxious not to seem for a second time disloyal to his hostess. "I haven't seen more than one of them. No, we read a play of Maxwell Anderson's."

"Indeed." The tone made it clear that no further details were called for.

They walked on in silence until they reached the headmaster's house. Here Lockwood paused before entering.

"
Verbum sapienti,
my friend. I am aware that Mrs. Knight is an old acquaintance of your mother's and that some degree of social intercourse with her may be required. But before you embark on any regular course of meetings under her roof, please bear in mind that she is not disposed to be friendly either to myself or to the school. Her husband, on the other hand, I need hardly add, is one of the finest and most loyal of our masters. Good night, Stephen."

Stephen, alone again, wandered to the middle of the campus to stare up at the square Gothic tower of the chapel. On clear days it radiated a message of peace and serenity, with perhaps just a shade of smugness. But in the shrouded twilight it seemed to cast a sterner spell, to warn if not actually to reprove. It occurred to him that Averhill might be beautiful to him, that Averhill might be romantic to him, precisely because it evoked the sweet sins the chapel could never condone. Were the tower and the Palladian Schoolhouse and the rounded campus and the stocky, vigorous figure of the headmaster himself not just as essential to his vision of love as the winding river with its overhanging foliage and canoes on a holiday in early spring? But that vision had not initially been the love of women.

I
N HIS FIRST
two years at Averhill Stephen had not been much attached to the school. As a quiet, good-looking boy, adequately competent at sports, never in any kind of serious trouble and sufficiently quick with his fists if mocked, he was at least tolerated by the rowdier leaders of his form, and the masters considered him a good if rather passive student. But the springs of his enthusiasm had not been touched; he regarded school terms as periods to be got through, and he marked off each day on the little calendar on the bureau of his cubicle with a neat penciled cross before going to bed. It meant twenty-four hours less before vacation when he could return to Mother and Redwood, the beautiful old white mansion with the high columned porch that looked down a sloping lawn to the broad Hudson. For knowing his passion for her ancestral home, Angelica tried to arrange to be there and not in the city on his Christmas and spring holidays as well as all summer.

His homesickness was of the deep, brooding sort that did not go away, even after a vacation had demonstrated that home was not all it had appeared in his visions at school. Indeed it began to seem to him that his discontent at Averhill was creating a kind of idealized Redwood, where the deer leaping through the woods and the blue jays in the dappled sunlight and his mother in white reading in the marble pagoda near the edge of the mighty river had become figures in a painting of the Hudson River School, remote in time and pregnant of tears. And then the school, with its jangling of bells and continual announcements from daises, with its bustle of boys through varnished corridors, their vapid joking and coarse laughter and bawling of evangelical hymns in chapel, was only cacophony.

But in the spring of his second year at Averhill something happened that marked the beginning of a change in his attitude. His old Irish nursemaid, Ellen, beloved by the family, who had been kept on at Redwood in the factitious post of seamstress after the children had outgrown their need of her, died of a sudden stroke, which, as Angelica explained in her letter, was perhaps in the nature of a blessing. But to Stephen it came as a catastrophe. On his last vacation, preoccupied with his bird list and boating on the river, he had paid scant attention to the poor old woman, who, though she adored him and he her, had grown tediously garrulous and forgetful. Now she was translated into the symbol of all he had lost, of his unrecoverable childhood, nor could he ever make up to her for his unkindness by hugging her until she had to push him away to catch her breath. He knew, right there in the mail room where he had read the letter, that he was going to break down and weep unbearably, and to avoid the disgrace of being witnessed he rushed upstairs to his empty dormitory and threw himself on his bed to sob.

The sleeping quarters, however, were out of bounds in daytime, and the dormitory master, Mr. Coster, working in his adjoining study, heard him and walked down the aisle to his cubicle.

"What is wrong, Stephen?" he asked in a tone of simple kindness, devoid of any hint of reproach.

Stephen jumped up to explain his loss in a burst of jumbled words. But Mr. Coster, a grave, silent man of some thirty years with beautiful silky premature gray hair and soft eyes that bespoke a constant guarded sympathy that their owner never seemed to expect to be asked for, who taught English as precisely as if it were mathematics and who was known as a strict but utterly just disciplinarian, did not appear to find that Stephen's grief for an old servant was out of proportion. He put an arm around the boy's shoulders and led him into his study where they both sat down.

"I'm glad you feel the way you do for poor old Ellen," he said gently, after Stephen had told him more about her. "And I'm glad she didn't suffer. Your tears are a tribute to her. Don't be ashamed of them. That would be to be ashamed of love. We're much too stiff upper lip at Averhill. Love is what living is all about. And you shouldn't worry too much about having neglected Ellen lately. The dead don't judge us by our last acts. They have the whole picture. She knows that you love her."

Never before had an adult talked to Stephen with anything like this sympathy. Oh, there was Angelica, of course, but she wasn't an adult. She was ... well, she was Mother. His father had always been embarrassed by the least show of emotion, and the family friends had treated him as a child. But now a world opened before him in which the categories of age, of teacher-student, even of disciplinarian and law breaker (for what was Stephen doing in the dormitory in the daytime?), fell away, and he and Mr. Coster were simply two human beings who could talk about life and even love. When Stephen left, the dormitory master actually gave him a small hug of reassurance.

The categories soon enough reestablished themselves, nor was Stephen so unwise as to take the least advantage of his brief moment of intimacy with Mr. Coster. The latter was once more his friendly, mildly sarcastic, essentially formal self; he treated Stephen as before, as he treated the other boys, with the unvarying courtesy that he must have felt was the due of every student not actually misbehaving. Stephen showed his gratitude by asking him to be his counsellor for the following fall: each third former was entitled to ask for one. He also took the stories and poems that he was now beginning to write to his new mentor, who gave him good advice, mostly in the matter of restraining the growing exuberance of his language.

For Stephen's heart was becoming exuberant. Homesickness faded, and the red-brick school buildings and the gray chapel began to take on for him some of the charm of Redwood. He found friends now among his formmates and took pleasure in sports, particularly rowing on the river. His grades shot up, and he won the third form debating prize for his affirmative argument on the topic: "Resolved: that we should join the League of Nations." And now even God came to permeate the campus through the homilies of the headmaster.

In fourth form year, aged fifteen, he elected to join the church and attended Dr. Lockwood's pre-confirmation classes, often staying afterwards to ask the great man questions. The headmaster's obvious sincerity as a proselytizer diminished the awe of his presence, and Stephen found himself bold enough to offer even probing inquiries. Did the sanctity of the Communion service prevent the passing of dangerous germs via the sacred chalice? "Well, I always give it a good rub with my cloth after each person's sip." Wasn't the prospect of eternal life more frightening than consoling? "Only because we cannot imagine what it will be like to have the concept of time extinguished." Had true Christians not been guilty of burning heretics? "Misguided priests are always with us." Why did Christ descend into hell? "He may have wished to give hope even to the hopeless."

The early spring of Stephen's fourth form year was a damp and misty one. On a Sunday morning when he rose at six to attend Communion and walked to chapel with his best friend, Charlie LeBrun, he felt the soft moist air like silk on his cheeks.

"Mr. Coster says that Browning is bumptious," he exclaimed to his companion. "But don't you feel today that God
is
in his heaven and all's right with the world?"

Charlie was a small but muscular and very blond boy who admired Stephen but did not share his flights of fancy. "It might be righter if I could think of a topic for my essay in current events."

"Oh, to hell with current events.
These
are the current events all around us; the sky, the elms, the birds!" Stephen gesticulated enthusiastically. "Let's go canoeing this afternoon. It should be glorious."

"No, I've got to work on my essay," Charlie retorted glumly. "I'll have to think of something."

"I'll help you with that after chapel."

"Will you really, Steve?"

"If you'll go canoeing with me."

And during the service in the green and yellow light filtered through the stained glass Stephen listened with pleasure to the "comfortable words" of our Lord in the mellifluous tones of the headmaster and delighted in the warm presence of Charlie beside him.

The river that afternoon was sluggish and deserted; it was too early in the season for regular canoeing. They drifted along, close to the bank, not speaking except when Stephen, peering into the clustered bushes, identified a warbler. But he was more interested in the vision of Charlie's back before him. His friend had stripped to the waist, and his fine rounded shoulders and curly yellow hair offered a contrast so charming as to make Stephen see his feeling for his companion in a startling but highly exciting new light. Only weeks before he had indignantly spurned the nocturnal advances of a boy in the adjoining cubicle, but now the mysterious and tabu matter of schoolboy love, darkly denounced from the headmaster's pulpit as "sentimentality," struck him suddenly as a natural and delightful thing. And wasn't Charlie feeling the same way? Why else had he taken off both sweater and shirt on a chilly day?

"Let's pull over and go swimming."

"It's too cold."

"I'm going anyway."

They pulled the canoe ashore and climbed up the bank to a small clearing where Stephen rapidly stripped, his back to his friend. Then he turned around and boldly exposed his state. Charlie stared and whistled lewdly.