The Lady of Situations (4 page)

Both sexes at the table indulged in crude guffaws. It was a stoutly Republican group.

"It's rather shaming, really," Natica mused. "Fortunately not many charms are needed."

"Fortunately? Aren't you downgrading your sex?"

"No, yours."

"
Touché!
"

With Lev's exclamation the conversation changed, but Natica felt suddenly elated. She had had her moment in the spotlight, and she felt she had brought it off. Dancing with Grant between the courses, she wondered if she didn't love everyone in the great chamber except Jessie Ives.

"Could we go outside a moment?" she asked him. "It's such a lovely warm evening. Oh, I know we're not supposed to leave the party alone, but others are sure to follow."

He led her, albeit reluctantly, to a door which opened on a wide terrace used for gymnastics in the spring. It was empty and they strolled about. Natica's spirits were so high that she felt she had to do something to give them expression.

"You know what I'd really like? I hardly ever smoke, but I'd love a puff. You don't have a cigarette, do you?"

"Of course not!" He was shocked. "It's absolutely
verboten.
Dr. Lockwood told us that if any of our girls just
had
to smoke, she could do so in his study. But of course he was being sarcastic."

She laughed. "It would be fun to test him. Shall we try?"

"Natica! Are you crazy tonight?"

"Well then, you can give me a kiss instead."

He drew back. "There's not supposed to be any smooching either. Certainly not at the party. It's a strict rule."

"I don't want to smooch. Ugh! What a disgusting idea. I want just one kiss. A chaste one, planted lightly on my lips. Come, sir. A gentleman can't refuse a lady that."

He glanced nervously about and then gave her just what she asked, no more. But she wanted no more, and she would have been quite satisfied had not fate intervened.

"Ooops!" came a voice from the doorway. "Let's not go out there. I thought we were at Averhill. But it seems we've stumbled into Smithport High."

Jessie Ives turned around in the doorway and pushed Lev back to the dance floor.

"It'll be all over the place now," Grant said sourly. "She'll tell everyone we've been necking in the bushes. Let's go in."

"Necking in the bushes! When I've had one tiny kiss! And when I
think
what we've spied going on in corners and behind stairways this weekend!"

"That wasn't the party," he said stubbornly.

It was the end of her exhilaration; there would be no more of that now. She felt only disgust with the whole visit and with herself for having accepted Grant's invitation in the first place. On the dance floor he was sullenly silent, hoping that someone would cut in, but not sanguine about it. She looked up to see his mother sitting on the balcony with the other chaperones. Mrs. DeVoe waived to her gaily.

"I'm going up to sit with your mother for a bit. You can dance with some of these lovelies. But be sure they don't lure you out on the terrace!"

Mrs. DeVoe remonstrated volubly at the idea of Natica's leaving the dance floor to talk with "an old woman like me," but when Natica insisted, she was happy to tell her how she had been employing her time on the balcony.

"I'm keeping count of the number of times the more popular girls are cut in on. Of course, my dear, you're subjecting yourself to a severe handicap by being up here."

"Oh me. I wouldn't have a chance anyway." She marveled at this manifestation of Mrs. DeVoe's relentless competitiveness and wondered if it mightn't explain some things about Edith and even Grant. "I don't know anybody but Grant and Lev."

"Pish! A pretty face and a good figure are what they're after. Oh, look!" Her eye had not left the dance floor. "The Sargent girl has been cut in on again. I wonder what she's got that's so alluring."

"Mrs. DeVoe?"

"Yes, dear?" The brown, oddly noble face under the high crown of loosely gathered auburn hair, too noble, really, for her present occupation, perhaps for any of her occupations, was turned now to Natica.

"I want you to know how deeply I appreciate all your kindness › tome.

"Don't be a goose. It's been my pleasure. And now you should go down to that dance floor and wow all those nice young men."

Mrs. DeVoe turned resolutely back to her game, and Natica was left to sit silently by her side. She was overcome with a sense of dry desolation. She wanted to love and be loved by Mrs. DeVoe. She wanted to throw her arms around her, to hug and be hugged. But that could never be. If the older woman should catch even a glimpse of how passionately she coveted all the things that Mrs. DeVoe, having them, could afford to regard as the mere externals, the mere decorating externals, of the essentially good inner life, she would turn her back with scorn on her as a climber, a schemer, a sinister watcher from the dark street of the lighted festival within.

Gazing down at the agitation of a rumba on the floor below, Natica knew with an ache in her heart that her trouble was that she saw herself just as she was and at the same time saw the different image that she managed at times to create in the eyes of others. She saw herself as doomed to wear a mask, and were not masks in the end almost invariably detected? Life's trophies went to the self-deceived or to those who were capable of deceiving with relish. Armed with a fatuous complacency or a fuzzy emotionalism, she might make her way into the society that so dazzled her imagination without in any way impressing her intellect. But the girl who saw her own story unfolding chapters ahead of where she was placed in it was headed for an unhappy ending. Why? Because she saw the ending, and, seeing it, had already composed it.

What could she do but write? Ah, yes! She clung to the old salvation, pressed it to herself. Hadn't Jessie Ives in her spitefulness offered her a character for a story as good as the snooty Blanche Ingram, who had made life so miserable for Jane Eyre?

Grant unexpectedly appeared behind her. Was she ready to go back to the floor? Of course, he could hardly abandon the girl he had invited and who had been brought up to school by his mother.

"I'll be keeping score," Mrs. DeVoe said cheerfully.

It turned out that Natica had enough partners not too much to disappoint the scorekeeper. The senior prefect had passed the word that his cousin was to be looked after.

***

But the next day, before her departure with Mrs. DeVoe, she had a ritual which she had promised herself during her largely sleepless night to perform. She had slipped a cigarette out of Mrs. DeVoe's purse in the Parents' House, and after lunch, holding it between her fingers, she asked Grant to show her where the headmaster's study was. He glanced in horror at the cigarette and demanded what the hell she thought she was going to do.

"I'm not asking you to take me there. I'm asking you where it is."

He refused point-blank to have anything to do with her insane project, so she left him, and having been informed by a small boy on the campus that the headmaster's study was in the vast red-brick cube of a residence that formed the end of the largest school building, she made her way there. She was ushered by a maid into a dark room in the center of which Dr. Lockwood was reading a book at a table desk under a green lamp. Of course, she had seen him when he greeted the Halloween guests, but she had not been close, and now she made out the curious red stare in the rocky square face that looked up to the doorway. He was about to rise from his desk when she said:

"Is it all right, sir, if I smoke in here?"

He sat back at once in his chair, waving her to a seat opposite him. Without uttering a word he resumed his reading.

Natica, puffing at her weed, gazing at the long tiers and rows of framed photographs on the walls—of teams and crews, of stalwart athletes expressionlessly holding oars or bats or footballs, of suited figures in chairs clasping copies of the school paper or magazine, of classes arrayed on steps after commencement, of gathered faculty, all male—felt like Kipling's jungle boy who had come, hidden, to see the mystery of the elephants' dance. When she crept away silently at last and cast a furtive glance back at her companion, it was to note that he remained as motionless as a Buddha.

N
ATICA HAD SO
prepared herself for the letdown that would inevitably follow her Halloween weekend that she found it not too hard to cope with. Besides, she was busy preparing for college entrance examinations in the spring, for Aunt Ruth had arranged for a partial scholarship at Barnard if she got in, and she was to live the following winter in her aunt's apartment. So liberation, at least from home and Smithport, was in sight. Edith DeVoe was at school in the city, and Grant, after one perfunctory letter, had ceased to write, so she had no further relations with the family at Amberley, even on weekends, when they presumably were there. No doubt it was just as well. She had evidently served her purpose in giving Grant an access to the senior prefect's crowd, and the cigarette episode with the headmaster had no doubt scared him away for good.

There was, however, to be one more meeting with him. Kitty Chauncey, seemingly assured of pleasing her daughter, announced one evening in the Christmas vacation:

"I saw your friend, Grant DeVoe, in the drugstore this morning. The family are here for the holidays. I asked him for Sunday lunch."

"And he's coming?" Natica asked with unconcealed dismay.

"Of course he's coming. Why shouldn't he come? Do you think he's too grand to sit at our humble board? I thought I had to do something about him, seeing that he asked you up to his school and his mother paid for your trip and a new evening dress. Really, Natica, one never knows how to please you."

Natica could picture the little scene at the drugstore. She knew how persistent her mother could be and what a poor actor Grant was. He would have stammered out a lame excuse which she would have promptly punctured, and he would have been left with no alternative but to accept.

It was all quite as awkward as she had anticipated. Grant arrived so late that they repaired at once to the dining room. This, at least, was the best room in the house. The Duncan Phyfe chairs, rare surviving Chauncey heirlooms, with their simple but vaguely offended dignity, like marquises in a Jacobin prison, distracted some attention from the dreary backyard and the frame houses beyond and from the flapping pantry door through which the black cook, hired for the day and not even in uniform, slammed in and out with the dishes. And on the sideboard, raised on a stand, was a fine George III silver platter which her father had refused to sell because the coat of arms of its original owner, an English earl, was supported by two large fish. But nothing could make up for the way her father used a toothpick behind his napkin. As a host in his former glory at Amberley this might have passed for an "old New York" eccentricity, an amusing reminder of high life in the 1840s, but in their cottage it was simply vulgar. And would her mother never cease with her odious comparisons?

"I know you're used to better things up the hill, Grant, and I'm sure it's very good of you to take potluck with us. We're not as fancy as we used to be, but I don't think we do too badly, either. Some people like to talk of the good old days before the depression, but do you know something? I'm not sure they were all so very good. What I've learned about human decency and good, old-fashioned simple kindness since we moved into this village I couldn't begin to tell you. When you come here just for the summer or weekends you don't get to know the real Smithporters. And they're great people, they really are!"

"I don't doubt it, Mrs. Chauncey."

"One of the reasons I'm glad that Natica has gone to public school here is that she'll feel more at home with many of the girls at Barnard when she goes there next fall. But I suppose in Harvard you'll find so many men from schools like Averhill and Groton and Saint Paul's that it won't matter."

"What won't matter, Mrs. Chauncey?" Grant asked in some bewilderment.

"Why, that you've not been to public school! Have you never thought that it sets you apart just a bit?"

"Isn't that what it's supposed to do? If you're already in heaven, how can you improve yourself?"

But there was no point trying to joke with Kitty. She took immediate umbrage. "Well, I still maintain—and I shall continue to do so no matter what all the smart young gentlemen may say—that there's no such great advantage in setting yourself above your fellow men."

Harry Chauncey at this point started one of his endless fishing stories, which was almost worse. Natica decided that the only way to endure the meal was to try to see it as a scene in a play and store it in her literary memory for some kind of future use. Watching poor bored Grant out of the corner of an eye she assessed him with dispassion. It was plain to her now that even possessed of the charm of a Marlene Dietrich, she could never really attract him. In him snobbishness was a virus so virulent as to cause something like panic at the prospect of being trapped even temporarily in a milieu not acceptable to the arbiters of his tiny world. Where had he caught it? His parents were persons of stalwart independence; his background fairly bristled with security. But the way he never looked at her, the way he took his leave immediately after the meal, with no word as to a future meeting, was ample evidence that he wanted to flee the house as an infected area.

"I daresay he's a nice enough young man," Kitty observed after his departure. "Though a bit spoiled, of course. I hope you won't mind my saying, dear, that I don't think he's ever going to set the world on fire."

"No, Mother, I shan't dispute you there. We must look elsewhere if we want an arsonist."

"I thought he was rather snooty about private schools. Who does he think he is, anyway?"

"I think he thinks he's someone who's never going to have another Sunday lunch with the Chaunceys."

N
ATICA WAS
admitted to Barnard without difficulty, and she occupied the unused maid's room in Aunt Ruth's small apartment on Lexington Avenue. Her freshman and sophomore years were not eventful, marked principally by her consistent industry. She elected courses in French and English literature and in art, music and European history, reading exhaustively from the suggested lists and earning high grades.