The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss Page B

novelist at work?"
    "Perhaps that is the only role you've left me."
    "Will you allow me, at any rate, to say how sorry I am?"
    "No, Roy, I won't. I'm going to say what I have to say no matter how much it hurts us both. You allow your wife the full rein of her bitchy temper. It's your fault that she gets away with it."
    He took it well. He even nodded. "But what can I do?"
    "You could leave her."
    "Oh, Natica." He closed his eyes as at the hopelessness of explaining such things to her. "At any rate, I can console myself that my problem is not yours. Your Tommy is a fine guy and he loves you.
    But she would not let him have even this. "My Tommy's an ass!" she hissed. "And you know it!"
    ***
    Two days later, on a cloudy, cold, misty afternoon, Natica was circling the empty campus for exercise, for something to do, for an excuse to get out of the house. The boys were on the baseball diamonds or in the gymnasium, and the deserted chapel and Schoolhouse, the latter with no windows lit, seemed to question her intrusion. A boy, perhaps fifteen, was walking just ahead of her. When she caught up with him, for he was only strolling, she asked him if he was out for exercise.
    "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
    M Y NIECE Natica and I have always had a close but slightly prickly