Free The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss Page A

chance to speak."
    Natica, deeply mortified, did not open her mouth again during the discussion. Even when a question was directed to her, as one or two were, by women obviously trying to make up for their hostess's rudeness, she simply indicated, with a slight smile and self-deprecating shrug, that she had used up her small store of criticism. But that night she exploded to Tommy.
    "Do we really have to stay in this school? Wouldn't you like to have a parish of your own? Or even be a missionary like your brother? I'd rather face the cannibals than Marjorie Evans and her sacred
cercle!
"
    He tried to pass it off as momentary pique on her part, but when she insisted that she was serious, he got up and took her in his arms and whispered what it was that she, and he too, basically needed. She pulled at once away from him.
    "But we agreed we wouldn't even think about a baby for a year!"
    "But there's no law that says we can't change our mind, is there?"
    "Oh, Tommy, I
can't
get into that before I know where I am. Don't make me feel trapped!"
    He at once relented, and when they went to bed he made love to her, but with the usual precautions. Making love would always be his answer to her problems; she was beginning to understand that. Oh, she liked it well enough, but she was wondering already why he had to do it every time in exactly the same way and why he was so confident that he never failed to confer an ecstasy upon her. After only two months of marriage she was simulating orgasms.
    That night she slept fitfully, and her dreams were confused with her waking fantasies. It seemed to her that she was a soul alone, clad in a long white robe, as she envisioned Phèdre at the Française, isolated from the others, some jeering, some passively sympathetic, all peering, set apart by the bleak fact of her damnation. Then she fled across the boards and into the darkness of the wings, flitting as in a ballet, but in the coolness of shadows and by the trickle of streams she found no consolation in the frantic and ineffective devotion of her equally damned old nurse. She might hide herself away from the harshness of daylight and the people who found an inert contentedness in the little niches of the exposed rocky slopes outside, but in the end that daylight would penetrate even to her blackness and shrivel her into a little heap of dry bones.
    When she fell at last into a deep sleep it was almost morning, and she awakened late. Tommy had gone to school, but he had left her a note:
I didn't think last night was the time to tell you, but poor Miss Stringham's complaint has been diagnosed as cancer. Mr. Lockwood has asked me if you would consider taking her position. Think it over. It might give you just the interest and distraction you need at the moment.
    Natica clasped the note to her breast. God bless Tommy, after all! Miss Stringham was the headmaster's secretary.

6
    T HE HEADMASTER'S office in the "Schoolhouse," as the main classroom building was known, was across the corridor from the principal assembly hall, and when the door was open the roar and rush of boys changing classrooms on the hour was deafening. But when it was closed the large chamber was almost soundproof, and Natica enjoyed the sense of sitting in the eye of the whirlpool of this strange male educational process. From the two French windows she had a sweeping view of the whole circle of the ever active campus, muted like a film with a dead soundtrack. Her own little room adjoining was windowless and bare except for the typewriter desk and file cabinets and a large stained photograph of the Roman Forum, but the door to Lockwood's office was always open except when he had private visitations, and she could see across her machine to the great eighteenth-century French boule table covered with gold and silver mementos which he used for a desk and the Sargent portrait behind it of his clerical predecessor.
    Her duties required her to be at the office immediately after