The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I can never seem to get away from the money,” he said disgustedly. “And the worst part of it is that there’s always some truth in it. Dr. Lockwood is interested in what my old man can do for the school. Any headmaster would be.”

  “Oh, you’re taking me much too seriously. It’s only envy, after all. Everyone says you’re doing very well indeed. Tommy thinks the world of you, I know.”

  “And as a matter of fact we’re not all that rich,” he continued in the same vein. “Plenty of Father’s friends are much better heeled than he is.”

  She nodded. “I can appreciate that. I grew up on the north shore of Long Island with my pauper’s nose pressed to the grilled gates of the great estates there. I could see that wherever there’s a huddle of millionaires, some are going to be poorer than others. Indeed, some may be so much poorer that they can almost kid themselves they’re ordinary folk.”

  “Now you are laughing at me. I must have sounded like an awful ass. But still I am ordinary. And at least I know it.”

  She shook her head firmly. “Ah, but you’re not. And you never will be. People look at you.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because I did. When I came up to the Halloween dance with Grant DeVoe. You were a sixth former, and if you don’t mind my saying so, a very handsome one.” Her smile was that of the matron who could afford, in her domestic security, the luxury of extravagant language. Or was the smile a mask?

  “Did we meet? I’m embarrassed that I don’t remember.”

  “We didn’t actually meet. But you were pointed out to me.”

  “By Grant DeVoe?”

  “Presumably.”

  He decided to give her a dose of her own candor. “Do you mind my saying I never liked him? You were far too good for him.”

  “He thought it was the other way round.”

  “That proves I was right and that he’s a fatuous ass. Was that the only time you were at Averhill before you came here with Tommy?”

  “Yes. But the memory is a vivid one.” She gave him the sense of holding back important things, as if in a game they were playing.

  “May I ask you a personal question? Why did you quit working for Dr. Lockwood?”

  “It was he who decided that. Or rather Mrs. Lockwood decided for him. She paid me the compliment of being jealous. It was not, I believe, that she suspected me of amorous designs on her venerable spouse. But she found me officious.”

  “I’m sure she was wrong.”

  “She was quite wrong. But at Averhill it doesn’t necessarily help one to be in the right. Certainly not if one is only the wife of a poor curate.”

  He smiled. “You must have decided I’m not a spy if you tell me that.”

  “Or that I don’t care if you are.”

  He frowned. “You’re not really happy at the school, are you? I hate to think that.”

  “Why should it matter to you?”

  “I guess because I love Averhill so.”

  “And it can’t be heaven unless everyone in it is happy?”

  “That must be it. Why do you find it so bad a place?”

  She considered this. “I don’t suppose it really is, for the boys anyway. And I imagine the brand of education is at least equal to the best of the other preparatory schools. But Lockwood is certainly a despot. I concede that may not always be a bad thing for a headmaster to be. It enables him to get a lot of things done, and the boys expect it of him, and anyway they’ll be out of here soon enough. But it can have a bad effect on the faculty, who are exposed to it permanently. If they kowtow they tend to become meek and oily, and if they protest they’re fired or ignored, and in the latter case they become bitter.”

  “And which do you think I’ll become?”

  “Neither. I tell you, you’re different. Your relationship with the headmaster is different.”

  “I’m afraid I have a very different view of Dr. Lockwood. Of course, he’s a bit of a tyrant at times, but that’s just part of the headmaster act. It has nothing to do with the great heart behind it.”

  “Are you so very sure of the greatness of that organ?”

  “Absolutely sure! It’s too easy to exaggerate the dictatorial quality of any headmaster. And isn’t it a smallness in any teacher to become bitter or intimidated by a little brusqueness of manner?”

  “You agreed, didn’t you, just now that it would be unwise to go to him about the Crazy Jane poems?”

  “But that was only a minor matter!”

  “Isn’t that the way intimidation starts?”

  He found her persistence irritating. “Of course, you think it’s only my money that makes me talk so bold.”

  “I think it’s part of it. But not all. You have some fire in you. Don’t lose it.”

  When they rose from the table, he thought they would retire to the living room, that she might even offer him a drink. But instead she led him to the front door to bid him good night.

  “I see you’re surprised I’m making it such an early evening. But Marjorie Evans can see this door from her front windows. She may have already noted that Tommy has gone and that you’re still here. Young bachelor masters and masters’ wives are not encouraged to have tête-à-têtes at Averhill.”

  He stared. “My God, can the place be that petty?”

  “You have a lot to learn, my friend. And now, good night!”

  10

  STEPHEN HAD known Mrs. Estelle Knight as a schoolboy knows the semi-reclusive wife of one of the older masters—little more than by sight. But as Mrs. Knight’s family mansion on the Hudson had been a neighbor to Redwood, and as Angelica had been a childhood friend of Estelle’s younger sister, she had insisted that her son, now a master himself, call on her.

  “She’s an odd duck, I admit, full of airs and fancies, but she’s basically rather an old dear, and I think she’s had a hard life. Wilbur is a good man, but too much the pedagogue … Oh, I’m sorry, darling, I keep forgetting you’re one yourself now. Still, you knew Wilbur at school; you know what I mean—the solemn Latin teacher who makes his class greet him with a Salve, magister. Didn’t you tell me that yourself? That wasn’t the life Estelle dreamed of in the old days in Rhinebeck. She likes to think of herself as a poetess, but she bought up the whole edition of the one book she managed to get printed. Apparently she got cold feet just before publication. But be kind and go to see her.”

  Stephen performed his duty on an October Sunday afternoon. The Knights lived in a large Elizabethan red-brick house, somewhat apart from the other faculty residences, which they had built. The long dusky living room, with red damask curtains partially drawn, into which he was ushered to await his hostess seemed to proclaim the independence from the school that a private fortune conferred. The walls were paneled in dark linen fold, and the carved cream-colored ceiling bore the roses and portcullises of the Tudors. A good deal of silver, platters and chalices, glinted on side tables; the thin cushions of the high Jacobean chairs were a faded pink. Estelle’s entrance, after he had waited ten minutes, struck him as emulating a great actress in retirement.

  “So! Angelica’s boy has come to see me at last. Do you realize, Stephen Hill, that you never once set foot in this house the whole time you were a boy at school?”

  He knew that she was several years older than his mother, which put her certainly in her sixties, but the very violence with which she combated the years made her seem older. Was all that high-piled reddish auburn hair a wig? The thick powder and painted blue under her large black eyes made a kind of mask of features that untouched might have been fine enough: the distinguished aquiline nose, the high brow, the firm chin. And her slow pace across the room, the short train of her black velvet tea gown trailing behind her, was not without a certain regal dignity. She might have been an aging Elizabeth giving audience to a potential Essex. Indeed, it occurred to him that such was exactly what she was mentally enacting.

  “I doubt that Dr. Lockwood would have approved of his boys making
social calls.”

  She drew herself up at this and then took a rather stately seat in a high-backed chair, indicating with a gesture that he should do the same. “There are many things of which Dr. Lockwood doesn’t approve. He’s a great one for slamming doors and windows. I wonder if he isn’t a bit afraid of the out-of-doors of life.”

  It seemed an odd remark from one who had encased herself in such a gilded shell, but Stephen said nothing, and she proceeded to ask him for news of his “beautiful mother,” who, she told him, had been dubbed the “Rhine maiden” by the Hudson River neighborhood of their younger days.

  “Your mother was the loveliest of the Kip sisters, yet they were all lovely. My mother used to deplore the fact that I didn’t have Angelica Kip’s golden hair or Dotty Kip’s dainty feet. I was so mortified! But tell me about yourself, young man. How are you getting on with your English classes? Do you find that you strike any sparks? Are there any young Keatses or Shelleys in that assemblage of bankers’ sons? Alas, I fear not. You’d have as much chance of finding a poet in my accountant. ‘Ode to a Capital Loss Carryover’!” She threw back her head to give vent to a throaty laugh.

  “Some of the boys are intelligent enough,” Stephen countered. “And some even have rather wild imaginations. Though I can’t help suspecting that to them Donne, for example, is a kind of double acrostic to be solved. That they have no concept of the lyric poetry that explodes out of his elaborate technique.”

  “No sense of the mortal moon passage, you mean?” And once more the auburn pile of tresses was tilted back, and the deep voice suddenly soared. ” ‘Weep me not dead in thine arms! Teach not the sea to do what it may do too soon.’”

  He was startled to hear her deliver, and with such vigor, his favorite lines. “How feelingly you recite that! Is it true what Mother told me about your suppressing your book? Wasn’t that a loss to poetry lovers?”

  “It’s not quite a loss. I believe the copies are in a warehouse somewhere. And a number of the poems appeared in magazines. There was even one in The Atlantic Monthly.”

  “Would you lend me a copy? I’d love to read them.”

  “My dear boy, I’ll be happy to give you one! It’s entitled Weep Me Not Dead. So you see how dear the ‘Valediction’ is to me.”

  “Is it too personal for you to tell me why you wouldn’t let the book appear?”

  “I don’t think so. Unless you feel it might be disloyal for you to hear something not wholly laudatory about your sacred headmaster.”

  “Dr. Lockwood disapproved of your publishing?”

  She shook her head slowly, sadly. “Rufus Lockwood never took me seriously enough to approve or disapprove of anything I did. What is a master’s consort in his great academy? The only thing he deigned to object to in me was that my private means made me less subject to the absolute control he loves to exercise over his little court. Oh no, it was not my poor poems that he cared about. My dear husband, who is the noblest as well as the most loving of men—I know the boys find him stuffy; you undoubtedly did, too…”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Anyway, you will appreciate him, I know, in time. You’re too intelligent not to. But to the point. Wilbur had long urged me to gather my little efforts into a book and exhibit them to the world. But I’d always had a horror of the idea of being held up to the sneering gaze of Philistines. Indeed it was all he could do to get me to consent to appear in the little magazines. He sometimes even sent in poems without my knowledge. But at last he prevailed upon me to do as he wished. A publisher was found, and this pretty booklet was duly printed.” Here she picked up a blue leather volume with a flower border, evidently specially bound for herself, from the table at her side. “But a few weeks before the publication date an event occurred that took the heart out of me.”

  She paused so long now, staring fixedly across the room at nothing in particular, that he felt constrained to ask her if the experience had not been too painful to relate.

  “No, no,” she answered hastily. “I feel I can tell you anything. You are très sympathique. My husband had once been offered the post of headmaster of a small boys’ preparatory school near Rhinebeck, close to my old family home and also, of course, to your dear mother’s. It was not a great institution, but he had always dreamed of a school of his own, and for me it would have been sheer heaven, back to the river, close to my brother and many old friends. I have sometimes felt, foolish as it sounds, that my muse, if I dare call it that, can flourish only on the banks of the glorious Hudson. But Rufus Lockwood decreed otherwise. He promised Wilbur the post of senior master, as soon as it should become vacant, if he would stay. He persuaded him that he was committed to Averhill, that his and the school’s destinies were somehow intertwined, that it was even his duty to remain. And poor Wilbur, as he well knew, is very vulnerable to the word ‘duty.’ Of course, all that Lockwood wanted was an expert Latin teacher. They were getting very hard to find. So we stayed on, and when the then senior master retired … well, you tell me what happened.”

  “It was given to someone else?”

  “It was given to the man who still holds it! To Roy Evans, though he was a decade younger than Wilbur, and so young at the time that we had never even considered him a candidate.”

  “How did Dr. Lockwood explain it?”

  “God doesn’t have to explain. I believe there was something said about the trustees finding Wilbur too classical, but we all know that Rufus Lockwood dominates his board. No, my friend, he never had any intention of making Wilbur senior master. He simply didn’t want to lose a good Latin teacher. What was it to him that by the time he made his appointment of Evans, Wilbur was too old to be considered for another headmastership? The accent had swung to youth.”

  “How shocking!”

  “The only really shocking thing was that Wilbur and I had been naive enough to believe him. But the whole wretched business filled me with such a sickness of heart that I lost all desire to show my poems to a world in which such a man as Lockwood was esteemed and admired.”

  Stephen decided that he had better not comment on this. She had talked freely to him; she might talk with equal freedom to others. He had not enjoyed hearing her story, but after all, had it come as a complete surprise? Even as a sixth former he had taught himself to excuse certain of the headmaster’s highhanded acts as the fruit of a noble passion to place his school above all other interests.

  “Would it be asking too much to have you read one of your poems?”

  It was a happy notion. Rufus Lockwood and his opportunism vanished away as Estelle at once opened the little blue volume.

  “I shan’t try your patience. I’ll read you the shortest one in the book! What I call a chinoiserie. But promise you won’t laugh.”

  He held up a hand in affirmation, and she turned the leaves.

  “Ah, here it is.” She cleared her throat. “It’s called ‘On Watching a Child at Breakfast.’”

  “It must be very nice to feel

  Ecstasy

  About oatmeal.”

  The oddest thing about her performance was that it gave a certain validity to the silly jingle. Reciting the first line, she leaned down as if addressing a child and spoke with the saccharine condescension of a fatuous adult. Then she threw back her head, closed her eyes and almost cried out the word “ecstasy.”

  “That has always been one of my favorites, Estelle.”

  Stephen turned to face Wilbur Knight in the doorway. Grave, gray, with chiseled features, a rigid posture and a beautiful tweed sports jacket which he wore like a morning coat, the head of the classics department seemed the symbol of all that was needed in a rational world to keep his wife’s exuberance in check.

  “Mrs. Knight has been entertaining me so well, sir, that I’ve overstayed my leave. I really must get back to my dorm before supper.”

  “Well now you know the way, as the saying is!” his hostess exclaimed. “If you like reading poetry, how would you care to come in some afternoon
and read with me and Natica Barnes? I find her uncommonly intelligent, a real oasis in this academic dryness.”

  “I’d love to, but you know what my schedule is. I’ll certainly try.”

  Wilbur Knight attended him to the hall, and Stephen felt that he must cut a sorry figure in the older man’s eyes, listening to an old woman read her silly verse on a beautiful afternoon when all youth should be out-of-doors. But Knight’s words expressed no such reaction.

  “It was kind of you to call on my wife, Stephen. She has few amusements, I fear. I’m sure that reading poetry aloud with a bunch of women is not your idea of an afternoon sport, but if you ever have a free hour to spare her, I should much appreciate it.”

  Walking hurriedly back to school in the darkening air, Stephen decided that the old Latin teacher was very likely the saint his wife deemed him.

  11

  STEPHEN WAS able to discount much of Mrs. Knight’s grievance against the headmaster as the exaggeration of a perfervid imagination, but he had more trouble reconciling Natica Barnes’s cool assessment of Lockwood with his own high admiration of the man. She had been willing to exempt the boys from the ill effects of what she had called Lockwood’s despotic regime, but only because their subjection to it was of limited term. But wasn’t that term the most impressionable part of their lives? Hadn’t it been of his own?

  He had chosen to see Lockwood as a kind of craggy creative genius, forgivably indifferent, even callous in his treatment of lesser beings who stumbled between him and his goals. He had conceived of him as a man whose passionate sense of divine light and fierce need to convey some rays of it to his boys made any idea of ordinary human rights on his campus seem secondary or even irrelevant. And his impression of the headmaster’s idealism had bathed the school in a romantic light that had persisted even after his college years had considerably dulled his religious faith. Indeed it was this that had really motivated his return to the school.

  Could he now afford to have much to do with a woman whose radically different opinion, if accepted by him, would strip Averhill and his own life of a juice so apparently essential to his imagination?