The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I’m glad you admit that.”

  “Now don’t get stuffy with me, please, Auntie. It’s too serious for that. My only use for morality is if it makes for the good life. And it certainly isn’t the good life to be always making people unhappy. I’ve failed with one husband, and it’s far too soon to fail with another. What am I going to do about Stephen?”

  “How long do you suppose it will be before he can get the kind of school job he had at Averhill?”

  “Who knows? And there’s even a question in my mind whether he really wants to teach anywhere but Averhill. He seems to have a fixation about the place. It was there he found God and there he lost him. He may imagine it’s the only place he can find him again. An Eden he’s been kicked out of.”

  Aunt Ruth reflected. “I suppose the war might take care of the problem. If we get into it, that is.”

  “Yes, a nice short war where he could be very brave and not be killed might be just the thing. It could make him feel manly and superior to Tyler Bennett, who would be sure to wiggle out of military service. But wars aren’t made to order, are they? And even if they were, one wouldn’t dare order one, for he just might be killed.”

  “Which would never do?”

  “Oh, Auntie, you really do think I’m a fiend. But of course it would never do. I suppose we could travel. South America is still available. But I don’t want to strike the note of the honeymoon again.”

  “How about a farm?”

  “Can you see me on one?”

  “I think, my dear, I can see you any place you put your mind on. But I have a better idea. Why don’t you buy a bookstore? You could run it together.”

  Natica’s first reaction was that it was surprising she hadn’t thought of this herself. “Really, Auntie, you’re like the Lady from Philadelphia in The Peterkin Papers. What can you do when you’ve put salt instead of sugar in your coffee? Pour another cup of coffee! A bookstore might be just the thing. You don’t happen to know of one for sale, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s why I thought of it. Lily Warner and her sister want to sell their shop on Madison Avenue and Sixtieth. They’re getting on and it’s a bit too much for them. And they have a wonderful clientele. I think they dictate what half the social register reads.”

  “I know that store. It’s one of those places that makes you want to read. And they welcome browsers. I wonder what they’re asking for it.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Oh, yes. Stephen, like all people who never think of money, spends all his income and more, and he can’t touch the principal unless the bank consents, and it rarely does.” And then she suddenly recalled what Tyler had said about the wives of the earlier generation receiving settlements. “But there’s always Mrs. Hill, God bless her!”

  She went straight from lunch to the pink palazzo and had the luck to find her mother-in-law in. When she came home that evening she not only had Angelica’s promise; she had obtained a month’s option to buy from the Warner sisters.

  Stephen looked at her with astonishment.

  “But I thought you wanted to work with stocks and bonds!”

  “What I really want is to do something with you.”

  At this he actually hugged her, something he hadn’t done in weeks. “I can’t fight you both, darling. You and Mother. The bookstore it is!”

  18

  NATICA LOVED the store from the beginning. Stephen’s attitude was less enthusiastic, but he had no objection to her taking the lead in all the arrangements.

  “The great thing about your mother’s gift,” she told him, “is that it will allow us to operate in the red until we’ve established the character of our shop. Once that’s done I have no doubt we can attract a steady clientele. And in the meantime we are spared the agony of Christmas and birthday cards, and those overpriced little papier-mâché boxes, and prints of birds and flowers, and, above all, children’s books. We’ll provide a small, hospitable center for serious readers.”

  “What about best sellers?”

  “We’ll have all the best sellers. Only we won’t put them in the window with a sign screaming they’re that. Popular books will take their chance with the others.”

  “And detective stories?”

  “But they appeal to the most serious readers of all! As a matter of fact I intend to make myself an expert in crime fiction.”

  And she did. In a few months’ time Natica became known among browsers of the upper East Side as the attractive and intellectual young member of a famous clan who could discuss the latest book on the Axis powers and the newest whodunit, and who never showed impatience with a non-purchaser. She had always been a rapid reader, and with the added material of reviews and releases she found it easy enough to keep ahead of the neighborhood ladies who, as she put it to Stephen, “matronized” their tastefully redecorated little store.

  Angelica Hill and her daughters were constant customers, and their friends and relations soon followed. Tyler Bennett’s mother, Aunt Sally, as round and dimpled and friendly and breathless as her Hill brothers were lean and grim and dry—proof enough, as Natica took it, of the blander effect of inherited wealth on their sex—was a passionate lover of mysteries and came in almost daily.

  “Tyler told me you had a head for business, my dear, which I suppose is why you do this so well. Of course, he doesn’t consider a bookstore business, and he thinks you’re throwing yourself away. Isn’t that just like Tyler? But I tell him that his glorious ‘downtown’ isn’t the only place in the universe, and that when he’s made all the money in the world, what does he think he’s going to do? He doesn’t go in for cards or sports like his cousins, so he’ll probably end up on a porch rocker reading thrillers like his poor old ma!”

  Stephen soon began to feel and, much worse, to show impatience with the less intelligent and more demanding lady customers, and Natica tactfully suggested that he spend more of his time in the little back office, invisible to the public, taking care of ordering new titles. She kept him from interfering with their hard-working and efficient lady bookkeeper, who shared this space, by persuading him that such toil was beneath him and tried to salvage his pride by sending some of the more intellectual customers back to “consult” with him.

  They had no need of additional help as yet, but one morning before Stephen had arrived (he rarely appeared before eleven) a young man of no more than nineteen came in to apply for a job as salesman. He immediately interested her. He was short, with thick black hair and bunched-up features rendered almost unnoticeable by cold gray penetrating eyes which stared at her with an impertinence sufficiently surprising in one seeking a position.

  “You won’t remember me, but I was a prefect last year in your husband’s dorm in Averhill.”

  She glanced at his scanty résumé and then recalled the name: Giles Woodward. “I have certainly heard Stephen speak of you. But shouldn’t you be in college?”

  “I’ve been suspended for a year.” The stare now seemed to put her on the defensive. “It was supposed to be for a drunken prank, but that was the front for a trumped-up morals charge they couldn’t prove. They think I won’t come back, but they have another think coming.”

  He waited with an air of near defiance for her to ask what the charge was. She decided that it would be more interesting not to. “And you want a job in the meantime?”

  “Well, my old man won’t give me a dime.”

  “I see.” It was still early; there were no customers in the shop. She asked him some questions about current books and found him succinct, sharp and astonishingly well informed in his answers. What could she lose?

  “Can I talk to my husband and get back to you?”

  “Tell him I’d like to work for him. He was one of the decent guys at Averhill. There weren’t many.”

  Stephen was concerned when she related the matter. “A morals charge! That’s apt to mean buggery. Some form of inversion, anyway. Poor Giles. How like him to tell you more than he ha
d to.”

  “Shall I take him on?”

  “Why not? I’d like to help him. But imagine my not having heard about his suspension. It shows how careful people are not to discuss Averhill topics when I’m around.”

  “Did he have that kind of trouble at school?”

  “At school it wasn’t considered trouble. By the students, anyhow.”

  “I see. Boys will be boys. Well, it certainly won’t be noticed in the book business.”

  Giles was just as good as she had hoped. He was the first to arrive in the morning and opened the store. He arranged the new books and even decorated the shop window. He rapidly learned the names and tastes of the principal customers, and knew which had charge accounts, so that prices and addresses did not need to be mentioned. A lady walking out of the store with two books under her arm almost felt as if she had been given a present, and complimented ^n her literary acumen to boot. He was scrupulously polite to Natica, whose orders he executed promptly, but she continued to feel a guarded impertinence in his manner, as if he knew a good deal more about her than he chose to tell. And of course it was impossible that he did not know every detail of her career at Averhill. But did she care? He gave her a curious sense of being an ally.

  He was different with Stephen, whom he evidently admired. She supposed that if Stephen’s theory of the reason for Giles’s college suspension was true, the youth might well have a crush on her handsome husband, even one that had started at school. She had no objection to this, which should simply add to the efficiency of her new employee, but she didn’t like Giles’s constant volunteering to take jobs off Stephen’s hands, which had the result of the latter’s taking off more time from the shop to spend in the bar or squash courts of the Racquet Club. However, she could only take care of so many things at once. Her present job was to get the store on its feet.

  One afternoon, when she and Stephen were in the back office opening book packages, Giles burst in to announce the approach of a presumably unwelcome visitor.

  “It’s old lady Knight! She’s flying over Madison Avenue and preparing to land here.”

  “Flying?”

  “Well, she’s on a broomstick.”

  Natica found a moment to wonder if he even knew everything about her and Estelle. “What do you suppose she’s doing in New York?”

  “Maybe she’s founding another poetry class. Isn’t that what she did at school? Shall we pray for a recklessly speeding bus?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Giles. Stephen, shall we ask her to lunch?”

  “In God’s name, no! Don’t even tell her I’m here.”

  Natica went towards the door to greet her former friend. The poetess looked even older and more raddled under a large shiny black straw hat. She stretched both hands out to Natica and crooned:

  “My my, my!”

  “My, my, what, Estelle?” Natica rather coolly took one of the offered extremities.

  “My, my, my, aren’t you the clever one?”

  “Clever?”

  “To have achieved not only a beautiful husband with a thumping bank account, but to have set up the most popular bookstore in town!”

  Natica did not mind Stephen overhearing this—it served him right for cowering in the office—but she didn’t like the presence of the grinning Giles, whom Estelle of course did not recognize, having had no contact with students. She pointed to a browsing customer, and Giles left. “What happy chance brings you to town, Estelle?”

  “Well, you know I have to have my breathing spells, and Wilbur made me sell my Boston flat.”

  “Made you? Wilbur?”

  “Oh, he was very stern. Not at all like his usual self. He said that he would never set foot in it again. I decided I’d better humor him. And anyway, I like coming to New York. But he went on like a madman at the idea of my taking another apartment, so I’m staying at the St. Regis. I suppose he doesn’t trust me with flats. Dear me, maybe I should be mum about all that.” Here she glanced conspiratorially about the little shop.

  “I don’t see any reason that you and I should not discuss apartments, Estelle.”

  “Well, you are a cool one. Perhaps I’d better buy a book. What do you recommend?”

  “You don’t have to buy a book. Tell me the news. How are all our friends at Averhill?”

  “Friends? I don’t know that I number many such in that benighted institution. Do you?”

  “Well, there’s one I may no longer be able to call a friend, but whose welfare I shall always care about. And that, of course, is Tommy Barnes. How is he?” “You never hear from him?”

  “Never. And that’s only natural. I don’t expect him to write. But have you seen him?”

  “I haven’t. Wilbur has. Indeed, Wilbur and he have become rather thick. My righteous spouse may be trying to make up for that Boston business. Whoops! There I go again. Mum’s the word. Anyway, Barnes is leaving at the end of this school year.”

  “Oh. Lockwood was ruthless about that?”

  “My dear, what did you expect?”

  “A miracle. And their day is over. Do you happen to know what Tommy is planning to do next?”

  “I think Wilbur said something about his getting a parish in the South. The Deep South, I believe. In a Negro neighborhood.”

  “Oh, Estelle!”

  “Well, they have souls, too, I suppose.”

  Natica was hardly aware of what either of them said after this. When Estelle took her leave at last, she hurried to the back office where she found Stephen pale and tense.

  “I must go up and see Tommy,” he announced grimly.

  “Oh, my dear, what can you possibly accomplish?”

  “That’s just what I’m going to have to find out.”

  19

  THE BIG three chambers of the piano nobile of the pink palazzo had been cleared for Angelica’s spring ball, an annual event for her and her children’s friends. The library with its tall tiers of ancient volumes, never read but reputedly valuable, a bibliophile’s collection purchased to fit the room, was used for the buffet, the dining hall, with its stately blue and green marble walls and its vast hunting scene tapestry, being more suited to dancing. In the conservatory, by the central fountain of a bathing dryad, under a Tiepolo ceiling, Angelica and her elder daughter received the guests.

  Natica sat on the stairway, halfway up, with Edith Bennett, drinking champagne and looking down on the passing show.

  “Do you remember the first time I came to your family’s house in Smithport? I made the most awful scene.”

  “But we were awful to you, Natica! You had on some ghastly dress you’d hooked out of your mother’s closet. And none of us would even talk to you. Aren’t children horrors?”

  “They show what we’ve learned to conceal. But I had it coming to me. I was pushing myself in where I wasn’t wanted.” She took in Edith’s sidelong glance. “And you’re thinking I’m still doing it, aren’t you?”

  Her friend was hardly bothered by the imputation. “But you’ve arrived, my dear. You’re a succès fou. Far more than I am, anyway.”

  “I don’t know that I’m so fou with Stephen. He hasn’t really found his niche.”

  “Well, maybe that’s just as well with a man. Tyler’s found his, God knows, and he’s the most awful bore about it. His mother’s always after me to get him to relax and take an interest in something besides business. She can’t get it into her fat head that he’s utterly immune to female influence.”

  “Are you happy, Edith?”

  “What a question! I haven’t really thought about it. But yes, I suppose I am. Tyler and I are hardly Romeo and Juliet, but I have a lot of things I want.”

  “Would you ever think of having an affair?”

  “Really, Natica, what a funny mood you’re in tonight.”

  “I suddenly feel I can be absolutely frank with you. Maybe it’s because you saw me way back. You saw how much I wanted all this.” Her gaze took in the floor below.

  “And do
es it make you happy, now you have it?”

  “Isn’t it odd? Yes, it does.”

  “I thought those shiny things in the store window always looked a bit shabby when you got them home.”

  “Oh, they do. But what’s happened is that I don’t mind their shabbiness. I know, for example, that the Tiepolo above us is a copy, and a bad one at that, but it’s successfully decorative. I know the family couldn’t read half the books in the library, even if they wanted to. They’re in Italian or Latin. And I know that my father-in-law would be just as happy living in some Victorian horror. He wouldn’t notice the difference. And I know he dislikes me.”

  “Oh, Natica!”

  “Oh, he despises me, of course. I don’t mind. Just so long as he doesn’t say so. And I think Stephen’s mother is the most beautiful and romantic figure in the world, even when I know she’s an amiable, self-indulgent egotist who is beginning to put on too much weight. And his sisters are dears but such sillies.”

  “Have you a kind word for anyone tonight?”

  “But for all of them, of course! Don’t you see that I am kind? The fact that my eye isn’t clouded doesn’t make any difference to my heart. I love them all! Even Mr. Hill. It’s because, for the first time in my life, I feel I belong. You can’t imagine what that’s like, Edith. You have to have spent your life on the outside looking in.”

  She had been talking to amuse herself, but she suddenly realized it was true. The feeling that bubbled up so richly inside her, filling her, drowning her, exhilarating her, had to be happiness! She had an impulse to tell Edith about a reissued novel of Trollope she had been reading in the store that morning, but Edith never read anything. Trollope had understood as no other novelist the ecstasy of belonging. No doubt it was why so many intellectuals despised him.

  “So now you have everything.” Edith looked bemused. “You wouldn’t even need an affair.”

  Natica understood that she wanted to return to that theme. “No! What could an affair with the sexiest man in the world add to the joy I now feel?”

  “I should think a good deal. I suppose I’m in a period of suspension. Between the early years of marriage and the time when a girl might like something … well, something more exciting.”