The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

perhaps Aunt Ruth was not guilty of the confusion she had attributed to her, that, on the contrary, what Natica had deemed sentimentality could indeed be compassion, and that her own lack of it might disqualify her from the ascent of Parnassus before she had even reached its base.
    Looking about her classrooms now she began to see in those earnestly listening young women not the dull housewives or toiling teachers or thermometer-shaking nurses whose drab future lives she had imagined as lightened by the reading of Natica Chauncey's fiction, but persons who would be actively and usefully engaged in existences that repudiated her own passivity.
    Aunt Ruth, concerned with her moodiness, suggested that she might have a low blood count and urged her to have a physical check-up. Natica at length agreed and went to Dr. Sanford, the old family physician, in his Victorian office at the rear of his brownstone in Murray Hill. He was a small round bald Dickensian gentleman with a bustling air and a glinting eye who appeared to believe there was hardly a malady that couldn't be cured by common sense, or that at least would not be incurred by a person possessed of it. When he had pronounced her fit and she was about to take her leave, he offered this suggestion:
    "Ruth tells me you've been depressed, my dear. Maybe it would help if we talked it out a bit. I don't set myself up as a Park Avenue Freudian, but who knows? I might be able to shed a small ray of light."
    Natica, looking into those kindly eyes, thought suddenly: why not? She sat down again and for half an hour she answered questions about her daily routine, her particular interests, her boy friends if any, her relationship with her parents.
    "Maybe that's part of it," she said about the latter. "I think I've always been rather horribly ashamed of being ashamed of them."
    "Why are you ashamed of them?"
    She sighed, preparing herself for the expected reproof. "I shouldn't be, of course. But I suppose I have to be truthful with you if we are to accomplish anything at all. And the truth of the matter is that I consider my father an ass and my mother a fool. So there!"
    He said nothing for a moment, but he appeared to be thinking. "But doesn't everyone think that?"
    "You mean, doesn't everyone think their parents idiots?"
    "No. I mean, doesn't everyone think
your
parents idiots? Amiable ones, of course. Even lovable ones. But still fools."
    Natica was later to consider that he had, with a single sentence, pulled her out of a dark tunnel. For her father and mother suddenly loomed in her mind as two crumpled, rather desperate and pathetic souls.
    She called her mother that same night.
    "What's on your mind, dear?" Kitty asked.
    "Does something have to be on my mind? I just wanted to know how you and Dad were."
    "If you'd ever come down to Smithport you could find out. But of course we know it's too dull for you here."
    "I'm sorry you think that."
    "But, my child, it's hardly anything new. You've always downgraded us. The difference between the way your brothers treat us and the way you do is ... well, dramatic."
    Natica thought how fiercely she would have once flung back her own cherished wrongs. But now she felt only a faint weariness at the prospect of combat.
    "How have I downgraded you, Mother?"
    "Do you realize that you have not come home once since Christmas? Unless you count that trip to pick up your summer clothes."
    Natica had been planning to spend July and August in the city except for a short visit to Aunt Ruth's cabin by a lake in New Hampshire. Now she changed her mind.
    "Suppose I come home for the whole summer. Would that help to make up?"
    Had she expected her mother to be taken aback, even a bit disappointed by this quick cessation of hostilities? She was not sure, even as she was not sure of the motive for her abrupt resolution. At any rate there was no question as to the utter pleasure in her mother's tone. Perhaps parents, at least mothers,
were
different.
    "Oh, my