The Lady of Situations (3 page)

He was evidently pleased, for in the ensuing days he did not renew his amatory gesture. He continued to devote his attention to her at family meals, and he took her sailing once again, but it seemed enough now to be able to tell her of his troubles, to joke with her, and sometimes, at the family board, to wink across the table in recognition of their special link. Perhaps he was relieved not to have to do more. Perhaps it was less challenging to be a god on a pedestal.

"You seem to have made a convert of my brother," Edith drawled one morning at their lesson. "I've never seen him take such trouble to be agreeable. If he keeps this up, he may become almost endurable."

But then came a lunch when Edith's mother nearly rang down the curtain on the little drama of Natica's fantasy of living with the rich. She did not mean to. She had a generous nature, but Natica was always aware that it was limited by the lazy impatience of a woman habituated over a lifetime to the devotion of family and the servility of staff.

Edith, as was her wont, had been talking of the approaching revelry of her debutante year, now only ten months away (she would "come out" in June), and her mother made no effort to conceal her impatience.

"I thought one of the advantages we might hope to derive from your going to college was that it would put a stop to all this silly talk. You won't have time for more than a handful of dances, will you?"

"Of course I will. All the best parties are now given in the summer or on weekends. People realize how many of us will be in college, so they make better use of the holidays. It's not like your day, Ma, when a girl had nothing to do but dress up and dance."

"Dress up and dance! I like that! The year I came out I had to take both German and Italian lessons and practice at the piano an hour a day. And your grandfather used to drill me in the evening to see what I'd learned. I didn't have a smart little Natica Chauncey to drill things into my thick head."

It always made Natica nervous when Mrs. DeVoe used her as a weapon against her daughter. She knew who could only be the loser. But Mrs. DeVoe now gained momentum.

"I wonder, Edith, if you and your friends have any conception of how many people on relief could live on what your father will have to pay for your coming out party."

"Now, Ma, don't try to persuade us you're a socialist."

"Well, maybe we need a bit of socialism where debutante parties are concerned! I think it would be a very good idea if every debutante was required to share her party with another girl who couldn't afford one." Mrs. DeVoe's eye now fell on Natica and at once lit up. "Exactly! Take Natica here. By all rights she should have a party of her own. If the depression hadn't so hit her family, she would be having a lovely one, I'm sure. And that tells me just what I'm going to do. Our invitations will read: 'In honor of Miss Edith DeVoe
and
Miss Natica Chauncey.' There! I think that's a splendid idea. What do you say, Natica, my dear?"

Natica hardly needed to take in the glaze of Edith's dark eyes to understand how odious was the idea of sharing her glory with anyone, let alone a girl who went to high school in Smithport and knew none of her friends.

"Oh, Mrs. DeVoe, if that isn't the sweetest, kindest thing I've ever heard! And I can't imagine a greater honor than sharing the least part of Edith's ball. But my aunt Ruth Felton has set her heart on giving me a little party in the city, and I'm afraid she might feel her thunder sadly stolen if I accepted your kind offer."

"Well I'm sure that does you great credit, my dear. And no doubt you know best what your aunt must feel. Please give her all my best wishes when you next see her. I have no doubt she will give you a lovely party. And I hope she will ask Edith to it."

The invented excuse was accepted, and Natica almost smiled at Edith's transparent relief. But the danger was not yet over. Edith, in a sudden desire to make up to the humble tutor for the ball that the latter's welcome sense of propriety had induced her to decline, turned to her brother.

"Why don't you ask Natica up to Averhill in my place for the Halloween party? I know you only asked me because Daddy suggested it. But I've decided I don't want to go as a brother's guest. It looks as if no one else would ask me."

Grant's stare at his sister hardly expressed gratitude for her suggestion, but Natica spared him the embarrassment of an ungracious answer.

"I think Grant should be free to make his own choice," she insisted, smiling. "And anyway, my parents don't like me to go away for weekends during school term."

That might have been the end of it except for the fact that Grant, on his return to Averhill in September, happened to ask the senior prefect, Leverett Chauncey, if he was by any chance related to his sister's summer tutor. He was informed that they were indeed second cousins.

"Lev says he's never met you and would love to," Grant wrote to Natica in an epistle imbued with a new respect. "He's got a girl named Jessie Ives coming up for Halloween, and he suggested, if I asked you, that the four of us might have a table together at the dinner dance. How about it? Do you think your parents would make an exception? Tell them my mother says she's coming up for that weekend and will take you in the car and deliver you safely home Sunday night."

Mrs. DeVoe did more than that. She telephoned to Natica's mother, who made no objection to this infringement of a supposed domestic rule, and then asked if there would be any obstacle to her making Natica the present of a new evening dress. Mrs. Chauncey agreed to this as well. Turning to her daughter after the call she said:

"I don't know why people say that Madeleine DeVoe gives herself airs. She seems to me just as nice and dear as she can be. And arrogant? Why, she's as simple as an old shoe!"

Natica smiled to herself. The world was not so hard to put together. Certainly Grant DeVoe was as obvious as his sister. She had already learned about Leverett Chauncey from Aunt Ruth, who gleaned much from the girls at Miss Clinton's. He was not only the senior prefect at Averhill; he was one of the cleverest and most popular boys in the school, and the principal heir to his maternal grandfather's oil fortune.

N
ATICA WOULD
have many occasions to alter her first impressions of Averhill School, but she would never altogether lose her sense of the bright idealism in which she had initially chosen to see it bathed. On that clear October day it had struck her as a vision of rosy red brick and gleaming white columns around a broad green campus, with here and there a stately elm, and presided over by a serene gray Gothic chapel which seemed to bring a domesticated medievalism into harmony with a restrained transcendentalism. Natica had read about the school and about New England; she had heard Aunt Ruth, who had some prejudice about boys' schools, describe Averhill as "a mixture of Emerson and Wall Street, sugared over with a glossy sermon by Phillips Brooks." But she had not been prepared for the red and yellow glory of the countryside beyond the school gates, for the rich smell of varnish in the polished corridors and classrooms, for the unexpected Palladian splendor of the gymnasium, for the hurrying, laughing, jostling boys, so seemingly scrubbed and clean for the festivities, yet so muscular, so agile, so noisily good-natured. And when Grant, on their initial tour of the grounds, took her into the chapel and showed her the great Daniel French statue of a wounded doughboy, a memorial to the war dead, she murmured to herself the lines:

This is the chapel; here my son,
Your father thought the thoughts of youth
And heard the words that one by one
The touch of life has turned to truth.

Not that she thought that Grant had such dreams. But surely there had been, or were now, those who did. Or if not, anyway, this was the place for them. There was no such place for Natica Chauncey.

For the moment the sadness of this reflection, tempered with the silver sweetness of a conscious self-pity, was not unpleasant.

The weekend proved a good deal easier than she had anticipated. She and Jessie Ives, chaperoned by Mrs. DeVoe, stayed at a small white inn, owned by the school and used for visiting parents. Grant's mother, as the wife of a prominent graduate and trustee, was received by all from the headmaster down with a demonstrative warmth and respect. Jessie Ives, small, tritely pretty and rather aggressively blond, with an air of faint malice in her pale tan eyes and slight snub nose, was adequately polite to Natica, who had heard all about her from Edith. Her father had also been ruined in the crash, but her mother had faced that plight very differently from Kitty Chauncey. Mrs. Ives, haggardly but stylishly thin, and always elegant in the last year's dresses of her rich friends, supported her family by giving bridge lessons to, and playing the game for high stakes with, the donors of her wardrobe. She clung passionately to every link with her old world, fiercely determined that Jessie should "get it all back." And indeed the girl showed every aptitude and inclination to do just that.

Natica sighed to think how cheerfully she would have labored in that vineyard had her own mother adopted the course. She wondered if she could not read, behind Jessie's thin cordiality, the distrust of another girl in the same boat. Her wonder became assurance the moment Lev Chauncey showed an interest in her. Was this common creature from a mere high school, Jessie's instant glare demanded, trying to elbow into
her
territory?

It was not that Lev's interest was more than cousinly, even second cousinly. He showed a genial concern in getting to know ."this long-hidden blossom" of his family tree. He was a restless squirrel of a young man, with bright blue eyes and black hair, who dominated his schoolmates by his cheerful, strong-willed vigor and an irresistible good will. It had been a feat for one so diminutive to be elected to so high a school office, and Natica guessed that Jessie's principal attraction was that she, too, was small.

Lev was good to his promise to Grant that they would constitute a foursome, and Natica's escort was obviously pleased that his guest was proving (as he had no doubt planned) a wedge into the senior prefect's more intimate circle.

At the dinner dance in the big hall of the gymnasium, whose Palladian elegance had been garishly disguised with pumpkins, lanterns and streamers, Lev and Grant and their girls sat at a table with two other couples. Lev introduced the topic of careers for women. He favored them.

"The women in my family have more brains than the men," he observed. "And I'm sure that Natica here is no exception. What about the DeVoes, Grant? Doesn't Edith have more bean than you? Not that that's saying much."

"I doubt Edith has much bean," Grant retorted. "But that shouldn't hold her back, should it? When my sister wants something, she wants it with a terrible force. It's awesome to watch Edith wanting something."

"Is that the way to get things?" Jessie asked. "I thought it was important to hide your wants."

"If you can. But Edith couldn't possibly hide hers. You'd see them sticking out under her dress."

"But does Edith want a career?" Lev inquired.

"Edith wants whatever the going thing is. She picks the box office with the longest line. And then claws her way to the front of it."

Natica reflected that sibling rivalry had made Grant almost intelligent.

Lev turned to Jessie. "How about you, Jess?"

"I might like to do some designing. Or decorating. I think I may have a bit of a flare for that. But my family would always come first."

Natica noted the conventional qualification, designed, no doubt, to improve her grade in the matrimonial market.

"And you, Natica?"

Natica resolved suddenly to sparkle. Or try to, anyway. It had to be worth a gamble. When would the chance come again?

"Oh, I want a career! By all manner of means a career."

Her tone caused a slight stir of interest around the table.

"What kind of a career?" one of the men asked.

"Oh, the very squarest, the least feminine. One where I'd wear mannish suits and be taken very seriously indeed."

Jessie squinted at her as if trying to divine her game.

"Would you wear those awful three-cornered black hats, like Madame Secretary of Labor?"

"Or even something uglier!" Natica clasped her hands in affected enthusiasm. "I adore Madame Perkins's hats. I adore everything about Madame Perkins!"

"But surely a woman can have a career and still be attractive and well dressed," one of the girls observed.

"No, no," Natica protested. "The men would associate her with dolls and put her in a little house to be played with. A butterfly that wants to be esteemed by moths must shed its bright colors."

"So we men are moths, is that it?" Lev demanded.

"Well, look around this hall. All those gray and dark blue suits. But the girls are like the lilies of the field, quite unsuited for toiling or spinning. Even my humble gown would hardly be the uniform for the floor of the Exchange or for Grant's father's bank." She glanced at Grant, who had been watching her apprehensively, and saw that the reference was mollifying.

"Then I take it," Lev pursued, "that you've liberated yourself from the onerous labor of having to attract the moths. You can all ravage the linen closet together."

"Is that how you see Wall Street? No doubt you know. But yes, I suppose, a girl must make a choice. An ambitious girl, that is. She can marry her way up or work her way up. Of course, it might come to the same thing."

The four men at the table laughed; the girls did not. Natica's sharp ear took in Jessie's murmured remark to her neighbor: "They say there's a lot of feminist agitation in the public schools. At Fox-croft we learn to be ladies before we're men."

"You wouldn't want a family and children?" another girl asked Natica.

"Well, when I consider the brand of joy I've brought to my own darling mama, I wonder if I might spare myself that."

"Haven't plenty of wives and mothers become famous?" Lev put to her.

"Of course! But don't they owe at least their start to wedlock? Not the movie stars, of course. That's another dimension. But who would have heard of Eleanor Roosevelt if she hadn't made effective use of her feminine charms to catch the wandering eye of our president?"