The Lady of Situations Read Free

to convert such an attachment into intimacy, whose was the loss? Her parents and brothers usually accepted her undemonstrative conformity to their plans and habits as an appropriate family response, but this was not always the case. There were some sharp fallings out. If Natica felt her "secret garden" intruded on, if her mother interfered with her constant reading in favor of outdoor exercise, if one of her brothers tried to peek at what she was so furiously scribbling, if her father sought an hour of her valuable time to teach her his stock market theories, her passive resistance could erupt in bursts of appalling temper.
    "Cat!" a brother would mutter, while her father gladly quit the room and her mother broke into a useless crying fit.
    There was only one serious threat: boys. These were less easily disposed of. Natica found herself all too readily and strongly attracted to male classmates of the athletic type, and as early as sixteen she was known as a "hot neck." But as she never went further, scratching and biting if need be to ward off aggressors, and as such tactics soon tired her boy friends, she never became seriously involved. Also, her basic boredom with the kind of male who most aroused her helped her soon enough to regain her detachment. But what most contributed to her oft threatened but fiercely cherished emotional independence was her sense of the general expectation, encompassing not only her classmates but her family, that sooner or later Natica Chauncey, for all her intellectual airs and "fancy pants" notions of her proper niche in the universe, would yield to the basic female need of a brawny male to knock the silly ideas out of her snooty head and turn her into a clucking wife and mother. It sometimes seemed to her that the gray slatey sky over what seemed to her the eternal autumn of Smithport contracted in a vulgar damp wink at the inevitability of sexual intercourse and the futility of a girl's settling for anything else.
    Her parents seemed to sink, with a slow, an almost contented acceptance, into what she deemed the turbid ooze of their village life, seeing some of their older friends, when the latter chose to remember them, but gradually coming to social terms with the more prominent of the tradesmen whom they had once called "locals" or "natives." Harry Chauncey had aroused his daughter's futile resentment by keeping his less expensive individual, as opposed to family, membership in the Smithport Beach and Sailing Club, so that he could use its fishing camp in the Catskills, with the result that his children had no privileges. It was this, more than anything else, that convinced Natica that anything done for her socially would have to be done by herself, that her parents, well meaning but ignorant, had simply no conception of the things they had deprived her of.
    She made a point now of being at home whenever one of the old "summer" friends called, in the hope that she might be asked to a party for one of their children, and this sometimes happened, although she usually found herself sitting silently and awkwardly by her hostess while the latter's daughter and a clique of friends, excluding her with the ruthlessness of youth, chattered on about their own affairs. At home in the evenings, when she had finished her school work, and her brothers were at friends' houses or bowling, and her mother was listening to one of her idiotic radio programs, she would draw her father out about his past and the careers of long-dead distinguished Chaunceys. Harry, an utterly unsnobbish man, hardly even aware of the hierarchical classifications so definite to his daughter, had little interest in family history as such, but he liked to tell what to him were affectionate and funny stories about dear old aunts and uncles and grandparents, and as these were of a deadly dullness to his wife and sons, he much appreciated Natica's flattering interest. She would carefully note the rare detail that slipped into an