The Lady of Situations (18 page)

"Well, look at you! And we all thought you were such a goody-goody. I'd never have dared suggest anything like this."

***

There was no oportunity for it to happen a second time, for the spring vacation started on Tuesday, and Stephen went home to Redwood and Charlie to Baltimore. But Stephen looked eagerly forward to a resumption of their intimacy when they returned to school, and now it was the holidays that he marked off on his calendar. He had no feeling of shame about what they had done. It simply seemed to him they had discovered a beautiful thing totally outside the laws and morals that were expressed so definitely at Averhill and at home. The all too obvious fact that his father and the headmaster would have denounced it in horror and disgust did not dismay him, nor did it even lower their standards in his estimation. Their world was a good and proper one; it belonged to them and to Stephen so long as he outwardly conformed to its rules, and it should not be disturbed or even affected by love that would be always concealed. Who knew, after all, what things they, with equal propriety, might be concealing from him? And wasn't it an essential part of his new joy that
only
he and Charlie knew about it?

But Charlie, back at Averhill, seemed changed. He made no response to Stephen's covert references to the river expedition and talked rather tediously about a girl he had met at some silly Baltimore party. Stephen allowed a few days to pass to give the effect of the holidays time to wear off and then suggested that they canoe again on the river.

"Sure. Let's get two canoes and ask Phil Trigby and Bill Skates."

"You don't think we might have more fun, just the two of us?" And then, even as he hated its vulgarizing effect on a noble feeling, he allowed himself to wink.

"No, I'm through with that kid stuff." Charlie deepened his voice to take on the semblance of the new adult his holiday romance had made him. "I had a frank talk with my older brother Ben the other day. He asked me about some of the things we did at school and admitted he'd done them too. But he said it was only because there were no girls around. It's the same way in prisons and naval ships too long at sea. But he said it shouldn't become a habit and we should quit well before the end of fourth form year. And that's only two months away."

Stephen, deeply hurt, never mentioned the subject again. He simply tried not to hate Charlie, and they remained ostensible friends. What caused his particular mortification was the loftiness of Charlie's new masculinity; Charlie, the veteran of many such adventures, had the nerve to look down on Stephen, who had had only one! And why? Because Charlie was the first to renounce schoolboy love. The first by two weeks!

But Stephen recognized as he brooded over the incident, burying it deeper and deeper into his secret self, that the real basis of Charlie's superior attitude was that he had somehow inferred, consciously or even subconsciously, that what they had done together was more important to Stephen than to himself. The real shame, Stephen now began to see with burning cheeks, was not in doing it but in consecrating it. So long as it was a form of masturbation, it was adequately manly, but if it involved love, it became degrading, even degenerate. Well, Stephen would know how to behave in future.

That summer he fell in love with an eleven-year-old girl, the daughter of the caretaker at Redwood. The situation struck him as grotesque; he was a man, celebrating his sixteenth birthday in August, and she was still a child, although renowned in the neighborhood for her remarkable beauty. He never told a soul of his love, but he took every opportunity available to be in spots where, without arousing suspicion, he could spy upon her. Back at school in the fall the emotion faded to a pleasant recollection. The Christmas holidays he was now willing to spend in the city, where subscription dances were the order of the day, and he even invited Charlie to come up from Baltimore to go to one with him, and they necked with two girls in the taxi going home. But the romantic haze in which Redwood had been enveloped for him in his earlier years still clung to the square Gothic tower of the Averhill chapel and the sluggish flow of the river in early spring.

A horrid incident marred the glory of his final year at school, where he was editor of
The Averhillian,
president of the debating society and handball champion. Mr. Coster, in the middle of the winter term, abruptly resigned from the faculty and disappeared from the campus. It was officially announced that he had a heart murmur and that his doctor had prescribed a period of absolute rest, but rumor had it otherwise. Rumor had it that the summer before he had written letters of a "sentimental nature" to a boy whose father had found them months later and forwarded them to the headmaster.

The incident was much discussed. Mr. Coster had not been suspected of such inclinations, but his past was now reexamined meticulously in the new light of his guilty correspondence, and many of his remarks and gestures were coarsely reinterpreted. Stephen did not join in any of these speculations. It filled him with sorrow and an odd kind of targetless anger that the love and sympathy he had found so welcome in that dear man might have come from
that.
Yet wasn't that love too? Stephen, anyway, had learned the cruelty of which his world was capable. It was terrible indeed, but he could only hope that it was the poet in his nature that derived an indignant comfort from the notion that there could hardly be light without dark or beauty without ugliness.

A
FTER THE
reading at Mrs. Knight's Natica became a near obsession to Stephen. Between classes, at his desk, his mind would wander from the text he was preparing for assignment to recapture the sharp quick step with which she entered the dining hall and the open friendly smile she would toss in his direction as she passed his table. In chapel he would look for her and wonder irritably what she was doing if she wasn't there. And soon his fantasies were taking a bolder turn. He imagined her joining him in the throng after a Sunday service, suddenly clutching his arm to draw him aside and whisper miserably that she couldn't stay with Tommy another day. She had fallen in love with him, hopelessly in love with him, and she had to tell him that very minute! At night in bed he would toss and turn with lustful thoughts.

She seemed now the sole female element in a world of unrelieved maleness. It was as if she had sprung from the middle of the green campus, like Botticelli's Venus from the sea, thrusting into the shadows of the surrounding buildings stray members of the cruder sex and withered examples of her own. She had come to incarnate all the romance he had once so strongly sensed in the school; without her the masters and their wives, like the gods and goddesses of Valhalla after the abduction of Freia, became old and gray.

There were brief, angry periods when he would try to shake himself out of his preoccupation. Venus from the sea? That busy trim little creature in tweeds who cast so bleak a golden stare at the foibles of Averhill? Who had married a bumbling curate to get away from parents she despised, very likely for no better reason than snobbishness? And who probably, in any case, was a cold fish? Perhaps it was indeed time, as his mother was always suggesting in her letters, that he should be cultivating the families in the Averhill neighborhood with marriageable daughters. There was even a country club that had already indicated that young bachelor masters would be pushed ahead on the waiting list of potential members. Might not the persistent image of Natica be the simple product of his own repression?

He had become almost intimate with one of his dormitory prefects. Giles Woodward, that small sharp weasel of a boy, brightest and most impudent of the sixth form, he had won to his side by the simple expedient of asking him to act as his "executive officer" in maintaining discipline. From a sarcastic but never openly insubordinate critic Giles had overnight become his warmest supporter, and he often now sat up late at night in Stephen's study, reading while the master read or wrote, but always ready for a chat when the latter wished.

It was thus that he happened to be present one night when Stephen was talking on the telephone with his mother.

"I trust my beautiful boy is behaving himself." Angelica's bantering tone rarely implied sarcasm. Her admiration of her son's looks was quite as sincere as his of hers. But she reduced Averhill and even its headmaster to the rank of minor things. However, there were few things that she regarded as major.

"How would I not be, Ma? The campus is not exactly fraught with temptation."

"What about all those faculty wives?"

"You should see them! And anyway they're most of them a generation older than me."

"That hasn't always stopped you."

"That's a low blow. And there aren't any Annettes among them."

"But I hear there's one quite pretty and apparently brilliant one. Madeleine DeVoe was telling me about her when I mentioned that you were teaching there. A Mrs. Barney or Barnard, would that be right? She used to live down on Long Island and married a minister.

He could only marvel at the way his mother always seemed to know everything, at her way of taking over his life before he had even started to live it. But still he wanted to talk about Natica.

"Barnes, you mean. She married Tom Barnes."

"You know her?"

"Of course, I know her. Everyone knows everyone up here. She's very nice. We had a poetry reading the other day at your friend Mrs. Knight's."

"Just the three of you?"

Was she a mind reader? "No, Mr. Knight was there. Don't worry about me, Ma. I lead a monk's life."

"That's what I'm afraid of. I wish you'd join that country club. I'll make you a present of the dues."

When he rang off, he noticed that Giles was watching him over the top of his book.

"Is your mother warning you off?"

"What on earth do you mean?"

"Mrs. Barnes. Mothers are wonderful, aren't they? Yours could sniff that out all the way from New York."

"Sniff what out?"

"That Mrs. Barnes is giving you the eye."

"Does it occur to you that you may be treading on rather thin ice, young fellow?"

"Just trying to be a pal, sir. Just trying to be a pal. I'd hate to see a nice guy like you get muddied up with a minister's wife."

Stephen knew that he should send him straight off to bed. But his immediate need to know on what Giles based his impudent and fascinating assumption prevailed over every caution.

"What makes you suppose that a lady as perfectly proper as Mrs. Barnes is giving me what you vulgarly call 'the eye'?"

"The fact that she came over to join you at your table, leaving Mr. Barnes's. No one's ever seen a master's wife do that before. And then she looks at you, too, when you're not watching. I've seen her. And finally, she's bored by her boob of a husband. I've seen him sneak up behind her in the kitchen and kiss the back of her neck. I could see she hated it, too."

"How could you see any such thing?"

"From a window in the infirmary. When they lived in the Pest House. It was right next door."

"You mean you were a peeping Tom!"

"Me and a dozen others."

"And what else did you see?"

"Ah, you
do
want to know, don't you?" Giles's laugh was a triumphant rasp. "But never mind. I didn't see anything else. Barnes is the kind that always does it with the lights off."

Stephen, his pedagogic authority in tatters, now sent his informant to bed.

The next day he received a letter from Mrs. Knight, hand delivered by her husband in the faculty coffee room.

"My wife tells me that this is important," the Latin teacher said solemnly, turning at once away, as if not wishing in the smallest degree to exceed the limitations of his embassy. Stephen opened the scented purple envelope.

Elizabeth Bergner will be coming to Boston in January to do
The Duchess of Malfi.
Natica says she wouldn't miss it if she had to walk to it on bare feet over a road strewn with tacks. What strong imagery the dear girl uses! But of course we must refamiliarize ourselves with the divine Webster. Come on Sunday. Don't fail us!

It never occurred to him to do so. He would have defied the specific prohibition of the headmaster himself, and he telephoned Mrs. Knight to assure her of his presence.

"There's a good boy. But this time I want darling Natica to read the main part. She's a kind of duchess of Malfi herself, poor dear."

Stephen was actually struck by this when Natica read the part at their Sunday meeting. It was evident that she knew the play very well. There was a firmness in her tone to manifest the ineluctable will of the beautiful and virtuous heroine to enjoy her love despite all that a raging world could do to prevent her. The very motivelessness of her brothers' opposition to her morganatic marriage now appeared to Stephen as Webster's finest touch. For the playwright had taken the simple and innocent love of the duchess and her steward and arrayed against it all the gleaming and monstrous paraphernalia of a Renaissance court. It was a pastoral idyll interrupted by a violent tempest, a natural passion smothered by a civilization that could not endure the contrast that it offered to its own obscene artificiality.

His voice trembled when he read the famous lines of the villain: "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young."

When he walked with her afterwards to her cottage, he was talking a bit wildly.

"You read that so beautifully! I couldn't help but think of you as somehow imprisoned in all of this." With an indignant sweep of his arm he sought to encompass the chapel they were passing and the green circle beyond it. "And of Lockwood himself as the grim cardinal brother."

"Dear me, I must really have carried you away. Elizabeth Bergner had better look to her laurels. But what could his eminence, Cardinal Lockwood, hold against me? My marriage to poor Tommy?"

"Not that at all. Not that at all."

She paused. "What are you trying to tell me, Stephen?"

"I'm afraid if I answer that, you might give up the readings."