The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

"Mr. Barnes, I apologize for my daughter."
    "Please don't, Mrs. Chauncey. I see just what she means. It's very clever, really. Your daughter knows how to make her point. But I shan't give up trying to persuade her of the beautiful lovability of Jesus."
    Natica could see that his technique as a priest was to disarm his audience with candor, to insist that he was just an ordinary guy who was nonetheless overwhelmed to the point of hyperbole (as you, listening to him, would be too, if you'd only let yourself go) by the simple overwhelmingness of Christ. But "you" were not to be put off by that; he was still a regular fellow.
    "When you spoke this morning about..." She paused.
    "Yes?"
    "Never mind. I'm sorry. I think you've already answered it."
    She had been about to ask him about the blasted fig tree, but now she thought better of it. How many men had tried to make themselves as agreeable to her as he?
    He had certainly succeeded in making himself agreeable to Kitty, who remarked after his departure: "I don't see why you had to be so disputatious with that perfectly charming man."
    "Was I really so bad?"
    "Well, you weren't good, my dear. But you'll have a chance to make it up. He asked me when he could call on us, and I told him he'd be welcome any day. He had his eye on you, Natica. Don't think a mother can't tell!"
    "But, Mother, he's a holy man."
    "Enough of your sarcasm. He's as male as he's holy, and Mr. Eliot told me, before he went off to Jerusalem, that one of Barnes's reasons for taking this parish was that he never meets any marriageable girls up at Averhill. Nothing but faculty wives and cleaning women!"
    "And the cleaning women are all over fifty. I've seen them! So Mr. Barnes has come to 'wive it wealthily' in Smithport. Well, he's come to the right place if not the right house."
    "The summer girls are too snooty to look at a minister. And most of them are away now, anyway."
    "So this is the poor girl's chance?"
    "I know you want to cast me in the role of a matchmaking old busybody, but I won't have it. I don't care what you do about Mr. Barnes. But I think it's only intelligent at least to recognize that he's a man of integrity and character who may well be a headmaster one day."
    "Or even a bishop. There's not much competition in the church these days, one hears."
    "All right, dear. Have it your way. I'm sure you'd be happier with some communist teacher at Columbia plotting to blow up Smithport."
    "Oh, Mother!" In a rare gesture Natica rose to kiss her battered parent. "I promise I'll give you and Dad fair warning before we light the fuse. And thank you for asking Mr. Barnes for lunch. I definitely think I'm going to see him again."
    He asked her to have dinner with him at a fish place in the village the very next day. Slipping into the seat opposite him in the booth where he was waiting, she ordered the fillet of sole, which she knew to be the cheapest item on the menu without glancing at it. She did so briskly, in the manner of a woman who knows her own mind and wants to get on to the serious business of conversation. She expressed an eagerness to know all about Averhill.
    "When I was there, I couldn't help putting myself in the shoes of a boy whose family had been wiped out by the depression, like my own. There are such, I suppose?"
    "Oh, my yes."
    "Don't they find it hard, living with other boys who have so much more money to spend?"
    "Not nearly as hard as you might think. Because being poor doesn't show much at school. We don't allow the boys to keep any cash. All they get is an allowance of twenty-five cents a week, and a nickel of that goes in the plate at chapel, leaving twenty cents to be spent in the village where they can only go on Saturday afternoon. Everything on the campus is theoretically available to everyone."
    "I see. It's a kind of communism. But I remember the Parents' House. All those mothers in mink arriving in limousines."
    "Oh, the world creeps in. You can't keep it out altogether. And