The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  Harriet was right. Prescott ultimately announced to the trustees his willingness to entertain the “Griscam” project, but only on condition that the plan be entirely revised and that the proposed fund for new masters’ salaries be doubled. If Justin was going to increase in quantity, he argued, it would have to increase as well in quality. It would have to achieve the highest academic rating in all of New England. Similarly, the spiritual side of school life would have to be re-emphasized, and the project was again conditioned on funds to be raised for a new chapel designed by an architect of the headmaster’s choosing. And finally he stipulated that the committee to go to the public for money under my chairmanship was to operate under his own constant review. It was the most dictatorial program ever presented to my knowledge by a headmaster to a board of trustees, yet the latter acceded to it without a protest or a dissenting vote. It established definitively the master-servant relationship which was to last for the remainder of his long tenure of office.

  The principal burden of working under his conditions fell, of course, upon my shoulders. Prescott proved to be a remarkable, indeed an indispensable fund raiser, but I could never be sure that he would not undo six months’ good work with a single burst of temper. When I organized dinners for friends of the school and asked him to speak, he would always comply so eloquently, so humorously, so winningly that I believe no tongue could have opened more purses. Yet behind the scenes no Italian tenor of the Metropolitan could have behaved more outrageously. He would fuss and fret over what he called the “Hippodrome” that I had prepared for him and demand in clipped, biting tones if his performance had been up to expectations, if his words had been converted into coin at as favorable an exchange as at the previous dinner. He would describe himself pathetically to friends as David Griscam’s dancing bear, led by a ring through its nose from laughing village to smirking town.

  Had it not been for Harriet I wonder if I might not have given the whole thing up. She preserved at all times her extraordinary equilibrium and helped me to understand the suffering even of the ambitious artist when he finds his work marketed on a national scale, and to see that Frank was having to learn to share his life’s dream with every starched shirtfront that I had gathered in a dozen gilded halls. It must have sometimes seemed to him that the very soul of Justin Martyr would dissolve into the smoky air over the soiled plates and stained napkins and fade away with the waves of stale laughter evoked by his own jokes.

  Far worse, however, than the private scenes between us, which had no effect on the fund raising, were his violent reactions to any gifts to which he chanced to see conditions, expressed or implied, attached. Sometimes he was perfectly right, as when he ushered to the door without further ceremony a man who had offered him fifty thousand dollars to admit his delinquent son to the school. At others he was too suspicious of interference, and I would have the devil’s own time persuading him that a graduate’s offer to build handball courts was not necessarily an improper attempt to add a new sport to the curriculum. But the episode that made him angriest of all was that of the two new dormitories. The donor of one had modestly left its naming to the headmaster, while the donor of the other, in order not to seem a lone egotist, had stipulated that both buildings be named for their contributors. Prescott’s indignation at such meanness threatened to cost us not one but two dormitories, and only by the greatest diplomacy was I able to persuade the modest donor to allow his name to be used and to restrain the headmaster from mortally insulting the other. Yet for all our difficulties, the money poured in.

  We had almost reached our goal, except for the chapel, and I thought I was close to a pledge for that from Shelley Tanager, a Chicago meat-packer who had a boy in the fifth form, when the episode occurred that was to detonate the mounting tension between Prescott and myself and nearly bring our whole project to the ground.

  I was spending a week at Justin, where an office and secretary had now been assigned to me, and breakfasting with the Prescotts when Frank explained the troublesome business of the “trots.” Apparently translations of Latin and Greek texts had been circulating among the boys, and the masters had been complaining of a growing uniformity in recitations. The sixth form had made raids on desks and studies and confiscated a number of trots, and severe penalties had been meted out, but the practice had stubbornly continued. It was particularly galling to Prescott, himself an accomplished classicist, to be faced with so widespread a resistance to a proper study of the ancient tongues at just the moment when he was determined to raise academic standards in proportion to the contemplated new enrollment.

  “It’s the kind of thing one expects of little boys,” he grumbled, “but it’s most offensive to find it in the upper forms. I’m told it’s particularly rank in the fifth. And here we are, almost at the end of the school year. Next fall those are the boys on whom I must lean to run the school!”

  “Let us hope for good things of the summer.”

  “It’s nothing to be facetious about, David. It’s the kind of rot that can bring a school down.”

  “But, surely, all schools have trouble with trots,” his wife put in. “I remember distinctly using one at Miss Yarnell’s, in French class.”

  Prescott glared down the table while Harriet imperturbably continued to pour coffee. “I have announced to the fifth form,” he continued, “that any member who is hereafter caught using a trot will not be welcome back next year.”

  “Isn’t that rather stiff?” I asked.

  “Perhaps it is. But I have given fair warning. It seems to be the only way to impress upon them that as sixth formers they will share with me and the masters the responsibility of administering the school.”

  I was faintly bored by the subject and said nothing more. I could not see that the use of a trot would necessarily disqualify a boy from being a good administrator, but I assumed that Prescott’s warning, however fierce, would at least accomplish its purpose. I did not dream that any fifth former would be such a fool as to risk his school career for a dozen lines of Ovid.

  Yet as early as the third day of my visit, when I was following the boys after morning chapel over the path, soft with spring mud, to the Schoolhouse, Prescott came up beside me with the bad news.

  “You’ll be sorry to hear, David, that a fifth former has not seen fit to heed my admonition. You’ll be even sorrier to hear who it is.”

  The hope of spring vanished from that day, and the light blue of the sky faded to a dead winter’s whiteness. “Shelley Tanager’s boy?”

  Prescott nodded and then shook his head roughly as if to confound the boy and his father and perhaps myself as troublemakers in an otherwise serene Justin. There was even a hint of something akin to triumph in his eye, almost of downright malevolence, which ended by exasperating me. When I thought back in later years on this scene I wondered if I could not date from it the first appearance of a new trait of hardness in Prescott, a hardness that was to grow, along with his great fame, in the coming decade and a half, culminating at last in the terrible episode of my own son, Jules. No one could write Prescott’s biography without considering this side of him. It was a spasmodic, inconsistent hardness; a boy might spend six years at Justin without once encountering it, and I think most did. But those few who ran afoul of the headmaster in this period were apt to remember him for life with bitterness.

  “Is there no doubt about it?”

  “Well, he denies it.” Prescott shrugged contemptuously. “He says the trot was put in his desk by his roommate, Max Totten. It seems sufficiently curious that Totten, a poor orphan whose tuition Tanager’s father pays, should find it worth his while to ‘frame’ his benefactor.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “Ah, yes, wouldn’t it be nice, David? And then we should not find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to expel the son of our potential benefactor, should we?” Prescott’s voice rose in a cascade of sarcasm. We had reached the School-house and were standing outside the big windows of t
he assembly hall where some of the boys could see, but not hear us. “You must not be so anxious to save the hides of those who can be useful to us. Let us not gain the world and lose our souls!”

  “Has it occurred to you,” I demanded sharply, “that you may be condemning this boy for the glory of spitting in his rich father’s eye?”

  For once I saw that I had the upper hand; for once Frank Prescott was taken by surprise. It was part of his charm that he should not have made the smallest effort to conceal it. “Do you suppose that could be?” he asked soberly, raising his eyebrows. “That would be a very terrible thing, David.”

  “I’m only suggesting that you should not leap to conclusions.”

  “Would you care to be present when I see the boy? He and Mr. Mygatt, the master who made the charge, will be in my office after assembly.”

  “I should indeed be interested.”

  “You may act as his counsel if you wish,” he said, and as he turned to go into the Schoolhouse, he gave me one of his slow, unsmiling winks. “I’m sure that Shelley Tanager’s father can afford even the charges of a partner of Prime and Griscam.”

  I sat in a corner of Prescott’s office, unintroduced and almost unnoticed, during the arraignment. The master, a rather oily, olive-complexioned fellow, told his story while Shelley Tanager, Junior, a tall, slight boy with curly blond hair and the pouting face, even at sixteen, of a spoiled child, sullenly listened.

  The master had suspected Tanager of continuing to use a trot, although punished for it once already, and had been on the watch. He had searched the study which Tanager and Max Totten shared the night before while the school was at supper, and had found nothing. Half an hour later, during study period, he had knocked on their door, sent both boys on contrived errands and had then discovered the trot, open and face downward, as if hastily concealed, in the first drawer of Tanager’s desk. Nobody but Tanager and his roommate had entered the study between the two searches.

  “And you deny, Tanager, that you placed it there?” Prescott asked in the dry, melancholy tone that he used for such inquests.

  “I do, sir.”

  “If you did not, I take it there’s only one other person who could have.”

  “Only one, sir. That’s correct.” The boy’s expression was certainly unendearing. He seemed totally unconcerned with the improbabilities of his accusation, as if his own malevolence should somehow be taken as ample evidence.

  “Why should Totten have had a trot?” Prescott continued in a sterner voice. “He was a first-rate Latin scholar long before the first of these wretched books appeared on the campus.”

  “How do you know, sir, when the first one appeared?”

  Prescott had to nod to acknowledge the unexpected justice of this. “But when do you suggest that he could have concealed the trot in your desk? When did he have time?”

  “How should I know? It was his trot.”

  “His, you say. Yet you were caught with one yourself three weeks back, is that not so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And phrases from this trot, the one Mr. Mygatt discovered in your desk last night, have been found in your written exercises.”

  “If that’s so, I got them from Totten. He sometimes helped me with my work.”

  “Surely, you know, Tanager, that’s improper!”

  “Yes, sir, but it’s not using a trot.”

  And so it went, for a quarter of an hour, Prescott’s questions, like those of a cross-examining lawyer, rising in vigor and hostility. He mercilessly pointed up the contrast between Max Totten the able student, brilliant athlete and natural leader and Shelley Tanager the dunce, the fumbler and lone wolf. Was it likely that the former would resort to a trot that he did not need and then use it to compromise a roommate for whom he had never shown anything but kindness and whose father was his own sole support? Was it not more likely that Tanager, jealous of the superiority of his friend both at home and at school, should have sought to cast his own blame on those stronger shoulders? But Tanager would concede nothing, even if he could explain nothing, and when he had been dismissed, I protested to Prescott against his roughness.

  “But the boy not only obviously had the trot,” he retorted angrily; “he’s trying to get his friend expelled!”

  “Aren’t you begging the question?”

  “Well, what more do you need to convince you, David? Do you have to eat the whole apple to tell it’s rotten?”

  “Perhaps you would allow me to ask Mr. Mygatt a few questions.”

  “‘Sir, a whole history,’” Prescott quoted impatiently and turned away in his swivel chair as I addressed myself to the master who had been listening with awe to our testy exchange. He had probably never heard the headmaster contradicted before.

  “Tell me, Mr. Mygatt, when you asked Tanager to go on that fabricated errand, where exactly were you standing?”

  “In the doorway to his study.”

  “How was he able to leave?”

  “Why, I stepped aside, naturally.”

  “Did you step back, or did you step forward into the study?”

  Mygatt, perplexed, considered this. “I stepped back into the corridor. Yes, I remember that because I saw Jimmie Dunn across the way reading a magazine, and I made a mental note to speak to him later about it.”

  “And when you returned to the study occupied by Totten and Tanager, Tanager was gone?”

  “Gone? Oh, yes. He had gone to the library, as I told him.”

  “But Totten was still there?”

  “Well, only for a second. I sent him off, too.”

  “How long had you been in the corridor?”

  “Oh, two seconds maybe.”

  “Not more? Even in the exercise of your inspection of young Dunn’s reading habits?”

  Mygatt flushed. “No, sir. A few seconds at the most.”

  “But long enough for Totten to have placed that trot in Tanager’s drawer?”

  “Oh, not possibly, sir. Besides, I should have seen him.”

  “How? Through an eye in back of your head?”

  “Please remember, David, that you’re not in a courtroom,” Prescott interrupted. “You happen to be in my office, addressing a member of my faculty.”

  “I’m very well aware of that, sir. I suggest that I am using no stronger language than you used to Tanager. A boy’s whole life may be at stake here.”

  Prescott faced my stare for a moment and then nodded. “Proceed.”

  “I meant, sir,” Mygatt volunteered, “that I would have been aware of the boy’s movements. I was standing so close.”

  “But has the headmaster not just described Totten as a brilliant athlete?” I pursued. “And does not that imply physical coordination? What would be simpler for an agile boy, while your back was turned, to have crossed a small study, opened a drawer and pushed a book in?”

  “But I would have heard him, Mr. Griscam!”

  “If he did it stealthily? Come, Mr. Mygatt, all I’m asking you to concede is that it’s not impossible.”

  Mygatt glanced at the headmaster in appeal, but the latter only scowled and grumbled: “Answer the question, Mygatt. It’s a fair one.”

  “Very well, then, sir. I suppose it wasn’t actually impossible. Only I can’t see . . .”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mygatt,” I interrupted firmly. “And now to the matter of the trot itself. Where is it?”

  “In the faculty room. The Latin masters have been examining it to see what phrases they can pick up in their exercises.”

  “You mean they’ve been handling it?”

  “How do you mean, handling it?”

  “I mean touching it. Putting their fingers on it.”

  “Well, inevitably.”

  I groaned aloud. “I suppose a print test would show half the fingers of the faculty.”

  “You don’t mean you’d go in for fingerprinting here?” Prescott asked, shocked.

  “I’d go in for anything to prove a boy’s innocence!�
� I exclaimed. “Let me ask you, Mr. Mygatt, to lock the trot up until this investigation is over.” I turned to Prescott. “Will you allow me to see Totten alone?”

  He shrugged. “Most certainly. I shall see that he’s sent directly to your office.”

  “Not for an hour, please. I’d like to study his file first.”

  At my own desk, with the door closed, I studied the contents of the manila folder marked “Totten, Max, Form of 1908.” There was a passport-size snapshot of him, full face, showing a high forehead, a big jaw and nose, every feature giving the impression of strength and candor except for the small dark eyes. I learned that his father had been an impoverished cousin of Mr. Tanager’s and that he had grown up an orphan in the millionaire’s household, earning his keep by bolstering, morally and intellectually, his feebler cousin. He appeared to have the same facility for success that young Tanager had for failure, but despite what were evidently engaging manners he was not popular with his formmates. He was considered “political,” according to one master’s report and “insincere” according to another’s. In each case, I noted, the reporting master disagreed with the boys whom he quoted. Max Totten was evidently a student who knew how to ingratiate himself with the faculty.

  When he came in, he struck me as even bigger, darker and more attractive than I had visualized. Unlike his cousin and roommate, he was already a man.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Griscam?” he began, politely enough.

  I explained, slowly and carefully, the accusation made against Shelley Tanager and the damning nature of the evidence. All this he knew already and shook his head with a very proper commiseration. I then proceeded to relate Mr. Mygatt’s story, beginning with the search of the study during supper and taking it step by step to the discovery of the trot. Totten listened to me with close attention, but betrayed nothing. I was watching for the least reaction to his discovery from my recitation that if he had planted the trot in Tanager’s desk, Tanager, and later Tanager’s father, would necessarily know of it. For Mr. Mygatt’s first search, of which Totten could not have previously known, had established that the trot had not been in the study before the boys had come in after supper. He did not so much as blink.