The Lady of Situations (5 page)

She took pleasure in her work, but it seemed to her that the pleasure was largely in her sense of equipping herself with undoubted competence for the achievement of goals that were for the most part hazy. Her motive for reading fiction, of course, was clear enough. She wanted to learn the elements of style. But what of her courses in art and music? Was she seeking the pleasure of perceived beauty or was she aiming to be a finished lady of the world, commenting at a dinner party with wit and precision on Picasso, Braque and Satie? And was history itself anything more than a series of dramatic scenes involving colorful personalities where she could enjoy the titillation of imagining herself as the young Victoria stretching out her hand to kneeling ministers on the dark early morn of her accession or as Marie Antoinette proudly facing a howling mob in the Tuileries? Did she ever get out of herself enough to read even a sonnet just for the loveliness of its fourteen lines?

When she put her problem to Aunt Ruth the latter pointed out that at least she knew what she was missing.

"If you know
that,
you're ready to make a start, and that must be what education is all about. For once you start, you never stop. Most of the girls in my school never make any start at all. I work my fingers to the bone to instil in them some tiny sense of the shimmering beauty, not just of art and books and music, but of the cityscape and landscape around them. But too many of them are simply obsessed with the idea of boys and parties and marrying and leading exactly the same lives as their parents."

"Why should any girl who's lucky enough to come of a family that can send her to Miss Clinton's want anything different? Edith DeVoe, I'm sure, wants to duplicate her mother's life. In her shoes I'd feel the same way."

"Natica Chauncey, you're just pulling my leg!"

"All right, Auntie, that's it. I'm just pulling your leg."

There was no use repeating to Aunt Ruth that in her opinion any girl at Miss Clinton's who was not content with the hand stuffed with trump cards that fate had dealt her was not worth worrying about. Natica had read in the memoirs of Edith Wharton, just published, that New York society ladies in the author's early years had considered writing too inky an occupation for the well bred. Natica thought she could perfectly understand such an attitude. If one had a great house to manage and a great position to maintain, what need was there to scribble? Scribbling was for those who didn't have the big things, for the Natica Chaunceys, if they were lucky enough to have a style, and what did they usually scribble about but the big things themselves?

She knew that Aunt Ruth's failure to understand these things, her sharing of the common fallacy that people actually lived by their professed moral principles, had ruined her own life. For she could have married a man who was now president of one of the largest banks in the city, a man, too, of unblemished character and widely acknowledged charm, who had waited a whole year for Ruth to make up her mind before turning to one of her less attractive classmates and making
her
his wife and the mother of his children. But did Aunt Ruth have any regrets?

"None, dear. You see, I wasn't in love with Alfred. I admired and liked him immensely; we always were and still are the best of friends. But that is not love."

"But you didn't have to tell him that! You could have been a perfectly good and faithful wife to him."

"A faithful one, I certainly hope. But not a good one, at least by my standards. For my idea of a marriage is something more than a contract, even faithfully performed. It's a union of two souls."

Natica could only sigh. She had read in the society columns that Alfred's wife was president of the Colony Club and had her own box at the opera.

She made some friends at Barnard but no close ones. She worked as a salesgirl at a bookstore in the afternoons to help pay for the part of her tuition not covered by her scholarship, and in the evenings she prepared her courses or listened with Aunt Ruth to the latter's large collection of classical records. She had a few dates but did not find a man who really interested her. Work became gradually a habit and at last something of a drug.

She began to live increasingly in a world of fantasies. When she was not actually engaged in study, as when she was walking around the reservoir in Central Park—her sole exercise—or riding the long bus route to school or listening to music, she would let her mind be the theatre of acted plays. The basic plot was always the same: the heroine would be born to a family who did not understand or appreciate her. Her parents would be bigoted Boston puritans or narrow-minded British burghers or anachronistically snobbish and impoverished French nobles, and she would escape their stifling but retentive milieu to a distant metropolis to write or act or sing or even marry a great man and return in triumph to confront her stupid but now dazzled kin and treat them with a generosity they did not deserve. The details of these constructed adventures were worked out with meticulous detail. But she had too much sense ever to write them down. She had learned enough about writing to know that good fiction was not made of daydreams. For that a clear head and an unencumbered day were required. In one whole year she wrote but a single short story.

In the spring of sophomore year she suffered a mild but prolonged depression. She supposed that it could have been the result of her solitary and passive existence; she preferred anyway not to admit that its real cause might have been Aunt Ruth's reaction to the short story she had been rash enough to show her. It dealt with a couple, obviously modeled on her parents, who had survived a precipitous tumble down the social ladder by the simple expedient of not recognizing what had happened.

"I suppose you meant to show there's a strength in sticking to one's guns or standards or whatever. But I'm afraid you've only shown there may be a kind of salvation in stupidity."

"But does the story come off at all?"

"I don't really think it does. There's too much of you in it. And I'm sorry to say it's not the best of you, my dear. There's a note of unkindness in your tale."

"Oh, I know your theories about compassion," Natica retorted, scarcely trying to hide the sharp hurt of not being instantly praised. "But must you have compassion in
everything
you read? Must you have compassion in a short story? Next, you'll be looking for it in a sonnet."

"I don't see why not. Compassion is essential to all great literature."

"Where do you find it in
Madame Bovary}
"

"Why, all through it, but particularly at the end. In that pathetic description of what happens to Emma's little daughter."

"You mean the aunt sending her to work in a textile factory?"

"Yes. I always find that passage almost unbearably moving."

"But, Aunt Ruth, it's simply the bleak statement of a fact! The compassion you bring to it is all your own. Why can't you bring it to my poor story?"

"I don't know, my dear."

Natica had been surprised at the depth of her own disappointment. She could only explain it by its suggestion that Aunt Ruth's confusion of compassion with sentimentality might be one shared by the greater portion of the reading public. And if that were so, how was a writer as clear-headed as herself ever to be accepted by the fuzzy-minded? Had she invested all her pennies in a salvation that might not be available?

As she brooded over this in the days that followed a grimmer doubt assailed her: that perhaps Aunt Ruth was not guilty of the confusion she had attributed to her, that, on the contrary, what Natica had deemed sentimentality could indeed be compassion, and that her own lack of it might disqualify her from the ascent of Parnassus before she had even reached its base.

Looking about her classrooms now she began to see in those earnestly listening young women not the dull housewives or toiling teachers or thermometer-shaking nurses whose drab future lives she had imagined as lightened by the reading of Natica Chauncey's fiction, but persons who would be actively and usefully engaged in existences that repudiated her own passivity.

Aunt Ruth, concerned with her moodiness, suggested that she might have a low blood count and urged her to have a physical check-up. Natica at length agreed and went to Dr. Sanford, the old family physician, in his Victorian office at the rear of his brownstone in Murray Hill. He was a small round bald Dickensian gentleman with a bustling air and a glinting eye who appeared to believe there was hardly a malady that couldn't be cured by common sense, or that at least would not be incurred by a person possessed of it. When he had pronounced her fit and she was about to take her leave, he offered this suggestion:

"Ruth tells me you've been depressed, my dear. Maybe it would help if we talked it out a bit. I don't set myself up as a Park Avenue Freudian, but who knows? I might be able to shed a small ray of light."

Natica, looking into those kindly eyes, thought suddenly: why not? She sat down again and for half an hour she answered questions about her daily routine, her particular interests, her boy friends if any, her relationship with her parents.

"Maybe that's part of it," she said about the latter. "I think I've always been rather horribly ashamed of being ashamed of them."

"Why are you ashamed of them?"

She sighed, preparing herself for the expected reproof. "I shouldn't be, of course. But I suppose I have to be truthful with you if we are to accomplish anything at all. And the truth of the matter is that I consider my father an ass and my mother a fool. So there!"

He said nothing for a moment, but he appeared to be thinking. "But doesn't everyone think that?"

"You mean, doesn't everyone think their parents idiots?"

"No. I mean, doesn't everyone think
your
parents idiots? Amiable ones, of course. Even lovable ones. But still fools."

Natica was later to consider that he had, with a single sentence, pulled her out of a dark tunnel. For her father and mother suddenly loomed in her mind as two crumpled, rather desperate and pathetic souls.

She called her mother that same night.

"What's on your mind, dear?" Kitty asked.

"Does something have to be on my mind? I just wanted to know how you and Dad were."

"If you'd ever come down to Smithport you could find out. But of course we know it's too dull for you here."

"I'm sorry you think that."

"But, my child, it's hardly anything new. You've always downgraded us. The difference between the way your brothers treat us and the way you do is ... well, dramatic."

Natica thought how fiercely she would have once flung back her own cherished wrongs. But now she felt only a faint weariness at the prospect of combat.

"How have I downgraded you, Mother?"

"Do you realize that you have not come home once since Christmas? Unless you count that trip to pick up your summer clothes."

Natica had been planning to spend July and August in the city except for a short visit to Aunt Ruth's cabin by a lake in New Hampshire. Now she changed her mind.

"Suppose I come home for the whole summer. Would that help to make up?"

Had she expected her mother to be taken aback, even a bit disappointed by this quick cessation of hostilities? She was not sure, even as she was not sure of the motive for her abrupt resolution. At any rate there was no question as to the utter pleasure in her mother's tone. Perhaps parents, at least mothers,
were
different.

"Oh, my dear child, that would be simply divine!"

***

Natica had expected the summer to be dull but tranquil. Its dullness, however, was interrupted by an event that doomed tranquillity, though not as decisively as such an event might have doomed it in a novel by Jane Austen or a Bronte sister. The minister of the Episcopal church in Smithport departed for a two-month leave of absence to visit the Holy Land, and his place was filled for the summer by a thirty-year-old bachelor priest, Thomas Barnes, assistant to the rector of Averhill School, who wanted the experience of administering a parish. Natica, who had now come to romanticize the school, having elected to see it as the shrine of the values of the great world and the training ground for its leaders, was curious to meet a member of its faculty and went with her parents to church on the first Sunday when Barnes was to preach.

He looked adequately handsome in the pulpit, with long wavy brown hair rising high over what seemed a noble forehead and large earnest eyes. He conveyed a pleasant, an even stimulating sense of masculine vigor not overly repressed by his black robe and shining white cassock. And his voice was rich and warm, his smile almost intimate.

He invited the congregation to share some of his biography, explaining that he was a pedagogue in a church school for boys. He even allowed himself a discreet joke at the nature of his institution, admitting that a journalist wag had described the student body as "overfed, overhoused and overclad." But he hastened to emphasize the basic idealism of Averhill and then warmed to his theme: how he had discovered, in seeking to make Jesus more human to boys, in likening him to a friendly master who shared the troubles of campus life with his charges, that this was much the same Jesus that adults needed.

"There are those who claim that he has no merit for the patience and courage with which he bore the agony of his trial and execution. He was God, so how could he have felt pain? Boys, I find, are particularly prone to ask this. But isn't it evident from the Gospels that Christ became so wholly Jesus, the man, that he must have suffered pain even more keenly than we do? He actually subjected himself to such minor human afflictions as irritability, of which we catch a glimpse when he blasted the fig tree that yielded no fruit. Does that not bring him to a level where we feel we can reach out a hand, however timidly, to touch him? Ah, how he welcomes us, how he spreads his arms!"

Kitty Chauncey, who was very active in parish work, had invited Barnes for lunch after the service, and he beamed at the assembled family. Natica's two younger brothers, who had little interest in church matters, were silently polite and took their leave the moment the meal was over, but she and her mother sat and talked with the voluble young minister on the verandah for an hour afterwards.