“Oh, walking doesn’t count as exercise,” he replied. He was a tall, gawky youth with black hair that fell over his forehead and a rather winning air of candor.
“Doesn’t count?”
“We have to do ninety minutes a day and fill out what are called exercise blanks. Mr. Ransome, he’s the athletic director, you know, tours the campus in the afternoon to be sure boys aren’t shirking. But I know his beat. When he comes out of the Schoolhouse, I can duck in there and read for the rest of the afternoon.”
“What will you read?”
“Well, right now I’m reading The Idylls of the King.”
“Oh, what fun! I love Guinevere. But what about the exercise blank?”
“Oh, I fill it in with fibs. Lots of the guys do that.”
She paused to look at him in surprise. “And you tell me that? A master’s wife? How do you dare?”
“Oh, I’ve sat next to you at lunch. You don’t remember, of course. But you remind me of my sister. You’d never téli.”
“It’s true, I never would. But I should think at least your English teacher would like your reading poetry.”
“Oh, Mrs. Barnes, you know the system. Everything here falls into pigeonholes. We read poetry from ten-fifteen A.M. to eleven. They think there’s gotta be something wrong with a guy who wants more than that.”
“And is there something wrong with you?”
“I sure as hell hope so.”
“Then you don’t like Averhill?”
“Me? I hate it.”
“Why don’t you ask your parents to take you out?”
“Are you kidding? My old man’s a trustee. Anyway, what the heck. In two years I’ll be at Harvard, and then I can do anything.”
“Lucky you!” she exclaimed wistfully.
When she left him to dart into the Schoolhouse, she reflected bitterly that in two more years he would be out, at least on parole. But she? And then, with a wonderful, surging excitement she felt again the throbbing hope that had been initiated by Roy Evans’s remark about her novel writing, and she clenched her fists and wanted to cry out aloud.
For there was a novel in the story of the captive headmaster in his prison of red brick and white columns, surrounded by a green graveyard of buried faiths and hopes. Oh, how she might do it! And she would cross every’t and dot every I, too, why not? Was it not her prerogative after the way she had been treated? Dickens and Charlotte Bronte had done the same to their schools. Averhill owed it to her!
And Tommy? What would such a book do to Tommy’s career at Averhill? Well, that was a chance she would have to take. Perhaps she would become so famous that other schools would be glad to employ him just to get her on their campus.
But that night, when he gently suggested that now she was no longer working for Dr. Lockwood she might have time to have a baby, she almost screamed at him.
Ruth’s memoir
MY NIECE Natica and I have always had a close but slightly prickly relationship. The crises that I have seen her undergo may seem pale in contrast with the explosions of young people in this decade of the sixties, but they were nonetheless searing to her. After all, standards are never the same; people were willing to die at the stake in the Reformation for beliefs that seem the merest piffle to us today. And I suppose that Natica’s frustrations must be viewed in relation to the fewer alternatives that were open to women before World War II. My trouble with her was that as an educator I was much more aware than she of the alternatives that were available: women were indeed going to law and medical schools in the thirties. It took more grit to make the grade than it would later, but grit I expected of my niece. Natica, on the other hand, considered me an old maid who was basically sympathetic to an establishment that had downgraded me for not becoming a wife and mother. She was never quite fair to me, but I still loved her. She had such a terrible capacity for unhappiness, even though it was balanced by surprising recoveries.
It was in the early fall of 1937 that Tommy Barnes telephoned me to ask if I could possibly come up to Averhill for the weekend. Natica was undergoing what he described as a “mild nervous breakdown” over the rejection of her novel by a New York publishing house. The refusal of the book had been sufficiently definite to cause her to lose all heart and give up the idea of submitting it elsewhere. She was, as he put it, “in a funk.” I agreed, of course, to go up. My sister and brother-in-law would have been no good in such a crisis. They would have simply told her to buck up and pull herself together.
I had read the book, which Natica had sent me. It was not really a book, but rather the first hundred pages of one, with an outline of the projected balance. Its rejection had come as little surprise to me, and considerable relief, though I should have thought it might have been accompanied by an invitation to submit a second work. Natica’s straight, stabbing style had a certain blunt effectiveness, but it was raw, terribly raw, with no redeeming subtleties or ambiguities. And it was obvious that she was drawing her characters from life; their idiosyncrasies were underlined even where they seemed to have no relation to the theme of the novel. It was, in short, an album of crude snapshots rather than a portrait gallery. Even had the proposed book had the requisite literary quality, a publisher might well have been apprehensive of a libel suit. Certainly it would have been the end of Tommy’s career at Averhill. Natica had not shown him the manuscript, writing me that she had no intention of crossing that bridge until she had to.
Tommy met me at the train; he was very solicitous about my bag and almost lifted me into his car.
“I’ll never forget your kindness in coming up, Aunt Ruth. I haven’t been able to do a thing with Natica. She hardly says a word to me. Oh, it’s not that she’s disagreeable or bad-tempered. But she seems to be in a completely passive mood, almost a daze. It’s as if I wasn’t there.”
And indeed I found his wife in the grip of an uncharacteristic lassitude. But it was soon apparent that this was largely caused by her husband’s presence. After a lunch of sandwiches in which very little but family news was discussed she and I took a walk through the woods to the river, and she became much more animated. I asked her exactly what the editor had said about her manuscript.
“Oh, the lady I talked to, a Miss Sims, was very frank. I suppose she meant to be helpful. But she said that it wasn’t really fiction at all. That I was too angry. That I had better let some time go by and simmer down. She even pulled the old Wordsworth line about ^motion recollected in tranquillity.”
“Even if it’s an old line, mightn’t it still be a good one?”
“But the point is that I write the only way I can, Aunt Ruth! I seethe until I boil over. And what comes out of the pot on the stove is my writing. If that’s not fiction, I can’t write fiction.”
“Then maybe you should try your hand at nonfiction.”
“About what?”
“I guess that has to be your idea.”
“But I don’t know anything! I’m not a scholar, or even an observer of current events. I haven’t been anywhere or done anything with my life. I’m like a Bronte sister without the moors and without the genius. If I can’t make up my own kind of weird stories, I have no function. Can’t you see that?”
“I don’t see it at all. I know it’s frustrating to be told to count your blessings, but it can be a healthy exercise. You have youth, health, an attractive personality and a first class mind. Don’t tell me there’s no future for you simply because one publisher chose not to publish one book.”
“But I’ve made a false start, and I don’t see how to correct it.”
“A false start?”
“My marriage, for one.”
I’m afraid my first reaction was one of exasperation. It had been obvious to me from the beginning that she had not really been in love with poor Tommy, and now it seemed unjust that he should be condemned for lacking qualities she had never expected of him.
“Tommy is a good man. He hasn’t a mean streak in his body, and he adores you.
You can still make something of your marriage, Natica.”
“Listen to me, Aunt Ruth.” She stopped walking and, taking me by the elbow, made me turn to face her. “I want to tell you something about Tommy. I want to tell you how it occurred to him to to offer me a consolation for my disappointment. He invited me into the little study in the back of our apartment which he has converted into a kind of male sanctum, complete with pipe rack, sporting prints and a roll-top desk he found in school storage. It is here that he retires, with his old red robe and Indian moccasins, when he wants to write a chapter of his ‘Talks to Boys.’ Oh, you didn’t know that Tommy was also writing a book, did you? Well, he is, and he has a sublime confidence that literature will somehow grow out of the right setting. If he can only lounge before his desk, in the proper Hemingway pose, puff at his pipe and gaze soulfully out the window…”
“Natica, what are you driving at?” I was determined to interrupt this remorseless shredding of her spouse.
“Simply that I had been invited to his den to be told that I need not so bitterly regret something that was essentially beyond the capacities of my sex.”
“Do you mean novel writing?” I felt myself immediately sliding over to her side. “He’s never heard of Jane Austen, I suppose. Or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf?”
“Well, he might admit them to the lower slopes of Parnassus, but never anywhere near the peak. Oh, he put it very gently. He twinkled and chewed his pipe and asked me not to take what he was going to say personally. But did a woman—any woman, he put it—have the ‘blood congested genital drive which energizes a great style’?”
I stared. “That doesn’t sound like him. Where did he get that from?”
“Oh, he got it from Hoy Evans, I’m sure. Roy is an aficionado of the great Hemingway. He’s the ball-less teacher of virility in literature to little boys.”
I walked on now, and she followed. For several minutes neither of us said a word. Nothing she could have told me about Tommy—no infidelity, or even battery—could have more convinced me of the hopelessness of that marriage. But what could I tell her?
“Whatever you do, Natica, don’t do it in a hurry. You have time. There are many ways of working out a difficult marriage.”
“What experience do you speak from, Aunt Ruth? But at least you haven’t urged me to have a baby.”
No, I certainly hadn’t. I thought she was in no mood to have a baby. We now proceeded to discuss, in an almost normal fashion, the cottage that the school was at last providing for the Barneses, enabling them to move from the restricted quarters of the “Pest House.” I was astonished at the abruptness of her change of mood. Had she simply wanted the satisfaction of revealing to someone outside the Averhill faculty the full fatuousness of Tommy’s attitude? And now that she had classified him forever, stuck a pin right through the round body between the butterfly wings that no longer deceived anyone, and slammed shut the glass case of her collection of Averhillian entomology, was she temporarily relieved of the duty to analyze and could her mind move on to other distractions?
“Can I see your new home?” I asked.
“We can go there right now.”
We turned back to the school. The cottage, vacated by the widow of a retired master who had recently died, was a pretty white farmhouse, square, with green shutters and a tiny garden in back. Before we had inspected the last of the freshly painted, empty chambers I had promised her all of the furniture of my parents that I had kept for years in storage. It seemed the least that I could do. But I couldn’t help wondering if Natica hadn’t planned it that way. I hoped, anyway, that she had. It might have indicated that she still contemplated a future as Mrs. Thomas Barnes.
Part Two
8
STEPHEN HILL had romantic good looks, with very pale skin and lustrous raven hair, and with moist brown eyes that offered more sympathy than anyone, including himself, could hope to deliver. He was like a youth in an old miniature, in a vitrine with others of beautiful dead young people, discovered on a visit to a boarded-up, mouldering mansion. Yet Stephen considered himself as only potentially romantic; he feared that in some ways he was as precise and literal as his father. The latter was indeed well known for these qualities. In Redwood, the old Kip manor house on the Hudson, inherited by his wife but greatly added to and embellished by himself, Angus Hill would sit silently through the stately service of his dinner, raising his head only at the sound of a distant whistle and commenting, after a glance at his gold pocket watch: “The six-oh-seven to Albany is two minutes late.”
Stephen supposed that his father loved him as he more obviously loved his two older sisters; there was nothing anyway to induce him to disbelieve it. Angus Hill was a small, slight, bald gentleman of sober dress, of rare chuckles, mild criticisms and occasional fits of appalling wrath. His mission in life seemed more that of a spouse than a father: to provide the brilliant settings for the radiantly beautiful wife who so gratifyingly favored him. Stephen had read his Veblen and knew that the American tycoon was supposed to hold out to the world a handsome consort, complete with diamonds and a palatial abode, as proof positive of his wealth, his might, his virility. But his father, who had acquired all his means by simple inheritance, seemed rather to hide behind his mother, deferring to her physical and genealogical superiority, to the extent (except for his occasional temper tantrums) of almost blotting himself out.
Yet Stephen, without jealousy, or at least without an awareness of it, regarded these paternal qualities, which he reluctantly recognized in himself, as the appropriate uniform for the adorers of Angelica Hill. For her loveliness was in itself quite enough for any one family; it had to be sufficient function for the rest of them, including his sisters, thin and darkly pretty, though not so much so as to compete with their mama, to perform as acolytes at the maternal altar. And this despite the fact that the quality of Angelica’s looks was largely in the aura they shed, in the glowing pink pearl of her skin, the wide serenity of her sky blue eyes, the abundant crown of her high-piled, finely gray hair. In a mere photograph one saw a stylish lady of late middle age, tending the least bit to the stocky, with a lineless heart-shaped face and a beautifully chiseled nose and chin. It took a portraitist in the tradition of Sargent to bring out the glow, the enchanting sense of personal solicitude, the unfailing kindness sometimes in conflict with an inherited puritanism. Angelica was loving but stubborn, full of small superstitions and amiable obsessions, a bit stupid in generalities but shrewd in particulars, and at all times perfectly aware of the absolute power she wielded over her loved ones. She could afford to ignore their constant, exasperated cries of “Oh, Mother!”
Stephen himself was the most vociferous. It agonized him when he saw her sink an indulging spoon into the plate of ice cream she had sworn off the day before, or light the cigarette from which she had pledged abstention, or even reach for the second cocktail in defiance of her resolution to limit herself to one. If he was an acolyte, he was certainly an angry one, constantly officious in his self-imposed duties of preserving the beauty, health and total sobriety of his idol. Angelica simply laughed at him, blithefully repeating both her resolutions and her defections, and quelling him when he had gone too far with a mild: “Darling! Remember that I am, after all, your mother.” As if he needed to be reminded!
There had always been friends who had told him that it could not have been an easy thing to be the only son of Angus and Angelica, that the burden of their rather august and ceremonious existence must have at times weighed heavily on his shoulders. Yet Stephen was quite aware that they never expected anything of him but that he should accept the good things of life as complacently as they did themselves. His father had always been the first to admit that he himself had done nothing with his life but preserve his inheritance and serve on a few charitable boards. And his mother simply wanted him to marry a nice girl.
Never in his life had Stephen fretted so much about his parents as in the fall of 1937 when he returned from a s
ummer tour of European capitals taken with three Yale friends, all like himself newly graduated, to settle down in the tall, pink Florentine palazzo with its small L-shaped courtyard and potted plants that an imaginative urban architect had constructed for Stephen’s parents in East Ninetieth Street at the time of their marriage. He had originally planned to rent an apartment of his own, but as the palazzo offered him a whole floor to himself, and as his job prospects were still uncertain, it seemed the indicated temporary residence. For ten years, six at Averhill and four at Yale, he had lived at home only on vacations, and he had not been prepared for the problems that the uninterrupted proximity of his parents and two older sisters would bring.
What was really wrong, he decided reluctantly, was largely his own fault. Living at home, he could no longer see himself as at least romantically superior to his family. At school and college he had written sonnets and prose poems and reveled in English poetry, and it had been easy enough to feel himself considered a youth of great promise by friends who asked only that the compliment be returned. But without his claque, without a job or even a regular schedule, he hardly seemed as different from his mother and sisters, with their silly parties arnd routine charity committee meetings, or his father, with his endless talk of accounts and investments, as was imperative to his more aspiring soul. This made him a constantly critical companion. His sisters responded to his describing their committee work as purely formal and banal with tart demands that he identify a single disadvantaged person he had ever assisted, and his father, whom he criticized much more guardedly, suggesting that it was the class of capitalists and not the individual who might have been wanting in public spirit, muttered that it was a pity to have provided a son with so expensive an education only to have him turn out a Bolshevik. And his mother … well, she was, as always, lovely, adorable and impossible.
The Lady of Situations Page 9