Hangsaman (13 page)

This was lost on Elizabeth; she was staring into her cocktail glass, her long fair hair falling softly down on either side of her face, her eyes intent. When she looked up suddenly, as Natalie finished speaking, she smiled and said, “I suppose I'm more bitter because I used to be a student and now I'm a faculty wife.”

“I should think that would just give you twice as many friends,” Natalie said, wondering if it was friends they were talking about.

Elizabeth shook her head; Natalie thought that the motion would spill her drink and then saw that Elizabeth's glass was empty. Hastily Natalie took up her own glass and sipped. “It means I have almost
no
friends,” Elizabeth said, now watching Natalie drink. “You can't, you know. I mean, girls I used to know as students are in their last year now, and it's very hard for me to talk to them. And of course all the other faculty wives are too old for me.”

“You didn't finish college before you married?” asked Natalie with interest,
here
was an achievement to be envied.

Elizabeth shook her long hair again. “I never wanted to come in the first place,” she said. “I'm
only
about three years older than you are.”

And yet she can sit here and serve cocktails, Natalie thought. “I'm seventeen,” she said.

“You see?” said Elizabeth. “I was twenty-one my last birthday.”

Should I tell her she doesn't look it? Natalie thought. “I think you're terribly pretty,” she said, shocking herself deeply by this statement, which was not in her usual repertoire.

Elizabeth smiled again, her smile this time deepening with pleasure, her eyes shining. “I think that's
nice
of you,” she said. “Another cocktail?”

Natalie looked at her half-finished glass. “I'm very slow,” she said.

“I'll wait for you,” said Elizabeth, turning her glass in her fingers. She was so obviously planning
just
to wait, not doing anything else, that Natalie quickly drank down the last of her cocktail, catching the olive in her mouth and holding out her glass with her mouth still full.

When Elizabeth came back with the drinks, she said, “Try to keep up with me,” as she set Natalie's glass down on the table.

“Yes,” she went on, taking up her conversation where she had left it, “I never realized what I was getting into, marrying my English teacher.” She sat down on the couch and regarded Natalie gloomily. “Sometimes I could
cry
,” she said.

Natalie, who was unused to drinking at best, and certainly unused to two fast cocktails after a confusing afternoon, was beginning to feel delightfully at home, and friendly, and strong, and sympathetic. She could see clearly by now that Elizabeth was a wonderfully beautiful woman; it no longer seemed strange that a student in college should marry, but only strange that any unhappiness should approach this perfect creature.

“I wish I could help you,” Natalie said. She was almost certain that there were tears in her eyes.

“Be my friend,” said Elizabeth. She looked at Natalie earnestly. “Be my
friend
,” she said. “Don't ever tell anyone.”

“Don't ever tell anyone what?”

Elizabeth, who had risen at that moment with her empty glass in her hand, stopped, turning slightly toward the door to listen. When there was no sound in the room they could hear voices from outside, calling to one another and laughing. After a minute Elizabeth relaxed, and made a perfunctory movement toward Natalie's glass.

“No,” said Natalie, “oh, no, thank you.”

Without comment Elizabeth turned and went to the kitchen, and came back in a moment with her full glass. “Don't ever tell anyone,” she said. “No one thinks I'm unhappy, no one even
dreams
I'm unhappy, and you know once you let them know you're unhappy then they start wondering why, and then they look at you and they think you're getting old or something. They were all so jealous
any
way. I'm still as pretty as I ever was.” She turned her head proudly on her neck, and Natalie, feeling herself more than ever thin and unformed, nodded admiringly. “You see,” Elizabeth went on, spreading her empty hands in front of her and looking at the fingers, “all the students think I'm friends with the faculty wives and all the faculty wives think I'm friends with the students or with the
other
faculty wives and all the other faculty wives think I'm friends with the other faculty wives and all the other—” She stopped, her eyes wide. There was a definite step outside the door, then it opened and Arthur Langdon came in.

He was handsome and tired, and looked, in his worn sports jacket with the elbows patched in chamois, rather as though his mental picture of himself was somewhat more refined than the actual sight of him to others. When he came in through the door his eyes took in, swiftly, his wife, Natalie, and their empty cocktail glasses. Without speaking he set his brief case down just inside the door, and came slowly into the room. After one quick, inclusive glance again at Natalie, he regarded his wife.

“My dear,” he said cordially, and smiled over his shoulder at Natalie.

“I only had one,” Elizabeth said. “This girl will tell you, I only had one.”

“Of course you did,” he said to her, and turned and smiled largely at Natalie. “My wife seems to be reluctant to introduce us,” he said. “I'm Arthur Langdon.”

Who did he think I
thought
he was? Natalie wondered. “I'm Natalie Waite,” she said, and, to establish her position immediately (so that he might throw her out if he chose?), she added, “I'm in your freshman English class.”

“I thought you were,” he said. “Think I could join you in one of those?”

He took Natalie's nearly empty glass from her, passed his wife without apparently seeing her glass, and went into the kitchen. After a minute he came back, looked once at his wife, and handed Natalie her full glass. “Here's luck,” he said, and he and Natalie drank, Natalie very cautiously, and noting that he had taken the one cocktail glass for his drink. “Well,” he said, and sat down on a chair near Natalie, “what do you think of it here?”

“I like it very much,” Natalie said. “It's a little strange still, of course.”

“It will be strange for quite a while,” he said. “It's taken
me
four years to get used to it, I know.”

“I've been enjoying your class,” Natalie said, thinking, My father taught me to be more intelligent than this; but Arthur Langdon perplexed her. He was subtly familiar to her, as though his words were meaningful on more than one level, as though there were an established communication between them in the course of five minutes, as though, actually, he were clearly aware that she
could
talk more intelligently than this, and was waiting indulgently for the strangeness of the environment to wear off before any conversation began. I wonder if he makes everyone feel like this, Natalie thought. The horror of feeling a reaction everyone else might feel led her to say, stumbling, “You reminded me of my father this morning in class.”

He smiled. “All first-year students find sooner or later that some professor reminds them of their fathers.”

“Now you remind me of him again,” Natalie said. “
He
talks like that.”

Arthur Langdon raised his eyebrows incredulously.

“He's a writer,” Natalie said weakly; it crossed her mind that she would not have so much trouble bringing out the words if her father had been a plumber, or even a policeman; unless he asks me who my father is, she thought, I will have to come right out and tell him and then suppose he doesn't know who I'm talking about and what
can
I say? “Arnold Waite,” she said.

“Really?” Arthur Langdon nodded; for a minute Natalie was sure that he had never heard of her father and that she might—with discomfort, with confusion and perhaps even apologies—have to explain, and then Arthur Langdon nodded again and said, “Like to meet him sometime.”

“I hope you will,” Natalie said politely.

Elizabeth Langdon, who had been leaning forward with her long hair falling about her face and her empty glass cupped in both hands, staring brightly from her husband to Natalie as each one spoke, now said with an appearance of alert interest, “Isn't he the writer?”

Her husband and Natalie both looked at her silently. “I mean,” she said, moving her glass in illustration, “isn't he Arnold Waite, the writer?”

“I suppose so,” said Natalie lamely, “although he's only really written one
book
.”

“I was
sure
he was a writer,” said Elizabeth Langdon with satisfaction. “You remember,” she said nudgingly to her husband, “you gave me some article of his to read in some magazine, and I read it and I thought it was very good.”

Arthur Langdon said to Natalie, “I hope when your father comes to see you we'll be able to get together. And when you write him,” he added with a modest laugh, “tell him I'm using some of his stuff in my advanced classes.”

“I certainly will,” said Natalie thankfully.

“By the way,” said Arthur Langdon, turning directly to his wife to show that he was speaking to her, “a couple of the girls are going to drop over sometime before dinner.”

There was a short silence. And then, “Who?” asked Elizabeth Langdon.

“A couple of my students,” said Arthur Langdon.

“It must be almost five,” said Natalie quickly. “I'd better be getting back.”

She rose, and Arthur Langdon said, “Don't go, unless you really have something important to do. You might enjoy meeting these girls.”

“Well,” said Natalie hesitantly, not knowing to what extent these people might be trusted to want her for her father's sake, or her own. “I
would
like to stay,” she said, reverting to her never-never land of no precedents.

“
Please
stay,” said Elizabeth Langdon.

This, at any rate, could not be insincere. Natalie smiled shyly and sat down again.

Once she had definitely indicated her continuing presence Arthur Langdon seemed to feel free to speak to his wife, as though Natalie were now enough a member of the family not to hear anything he said. Her seniority as guest allowed them to talk of the new guests expected, and even to hope, perhaps, that Natalie might share in their arrangements for entertainment, perhaps carrying glasses, or emptying ashtrays, or simply preparing herself with a stock of small talk to be used directly they entered.

“They won't drink any more than two cocktails apiece,” said Arthur Langdon to his wife. “Do you have any pretzels or anything?”

“What's all the fuss over
them
?” Elizabeth asked, not moving.

“I like things to be nicely arranged when my students come to see me,” he said.

“It looks all right to
them
if they get a free drink and a few words of wisdom from you,” Elizabeth said.

“Nevertheless,” he said emphatically, “I want my students treated as well as possible.”

Elizabeth addressed Natalie, “You and I don't need anything fancy, do we? Pretzels? Imported caviar? Breast of guinea hen?”

Natalie opened her mouth to speak, Arthur Langdon opened
his
mouth to speak, and the doorbell rang. “I'll get it,” Arthur said quickly. His wife watched him without expression as he hurried to the door.

“Can't wait, can he?” she said unpleasantly to Natalie.

Natalie, uncomfortable and wishing she had left, and yet at the same time enjoying immensely a series of events which she could watch without being really implicated, stood up uncertainly as Arthur opened the door.

“Can I get the pretzels or anything for you?” she asked Elizabeth.

Elizabeth laughed. “Arthur will get them,” she said. “Watch little Arthur be the little host.”

Arthur came back into the room, followed by two girls. Natalie, looking at them with a frank stare possible only because they were both looking at Arthur and for the moment ignoring both herself and Elizabeth, saw with the irritation she was beginning to know as jealousy that they were both lovely, in the way that Elizabeth Langdon was lovely: the rounded, colorful, rich beauty of girls who have been pretty babies and pretty little girls and pretty boarding school girls and who have, at last, in college, reached a fulfillment of prettiness because they are finally nubile; that their loveliness would be deadened as Elizabeth's had been deadened was not more than a small consolation to Natalie; that this loveliness built and recharged itself with an awareness of loveliness, and almost certainly masked vacant stupidity, was no consolation at all. The further thought that, premising the loveliness of young women as nature's infallible way of insuring them husbands, these two could at best marry no more than a few of the men in the world, was less than no consolation at all.

Vicki, one of them was named, and the other was Anne. Vicki had great, long-lashed dark eyes which she disguised, as though it were a joke between herself and the beholder, with heavy-rimmed glasses; these glasses, to enhance the joke, she played with constantly, taking them off and putting them on with a mock-efficient gesture, using them to wave with, to hold in her hands, but very rarely keeping them over her face. With or without the glasses, she gave an additional impression of seeing clearly everything that went on around her, and of enjoying it without pity.

Anne—had these girls become friends on purpose?—was sweet and subdued; like something out of
Little Women
, Natalie thought with scorn, thinking almost at the same minute that she would not be wise to underestimate Anne, who smiled shyly and almost curtseyed, who looked sweetly at Natalie and at Elizabeth and at Vicki and at Arthur Langdon, as though in this pretty world it was incredible that everyone should be so kind to shy Anne; who would never, it was perfectly clear, give away an inch of anything she had once gotten hold of.