The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Because we’re in this thing together,” Sandy McKim answered unexpectedly. “We’ve been in everything together. If Jules confesses, I’ll say we put him up to it.”

  I was touched, for I would not have anticipated such fineness of feeling from one as passive as Sandy. “Look,” I pointed out. “Nobody’s going to be kicked out. The old boy wouldn’t dare. Four sixth formers, three months before graduation, because none of them would snitch? Think of it! The trustees, all the graduates would be up in arms. No, mark my words, the old boy’s bluffing, and it’s up to us to call his bluff. Besides, what a triumph!”

  “But supposing he’s not bluffing?” Gus insisted.

  “Then if he’s not, I can always confess. That much I promise. He certainly can’t expel you after he has his culprit.”

  Gus had to be satisfied with this or shoulder the terrible onus of snitching, and he gloomily elected silence. He refused to speak any more to any of us, and when we filed into Dr. Prescott’s study that night, he stood sullenly to the side. The headmaster looked grey and grim; his lips were a pale thin line. But his eyes were tired, and there was something faintly quizzical in their expression, as if he wondered where we had come from, four imps whose very existence seemed designed to plague him.

  “Well, this is your last chance,” he announced quietly. “Will one of you tell me now who turned that key?” There was a silence in which we all listened to Gus’s panting. “Will you, Crane?” Gus caught his breath, and I clenched my fists. “No? I will count out a minute.” He pulled out his thin gold watch, a gift, as I remembered, from my father, and waited while the second hand spun a circle. “Very well, gentlemen,” he said in a voice now of infinite sadness, putting the watch away. “You have given me no recourse. You will proceed to your dormitories to pack your clothes. You will spend this night in the infirmary annex. I will telegraph your families to make arrangements for your departure tomorrow. For I must inform you that you are no longer members of our school community and that you will not graduate from Justin Martyr. That will be all, gentlemen.”

  So great was the lingering spell of his authority that I had dumbly followed the file of the other three to the door before I recollected what it was I had to do. Quickly I closed the door after them and returned to stand alone before the headmaster’s desk.

  “Of course you know it was I who did it.”

  There was no flicker of the lids over those great gravely staring brown eyes. “I had my suspicions, yes. What a grief this will be for your poor father.”

  “Shall I call the others back now?”

  “What for?”

  “So you can tell them they’re not expelled.”

  “But they are.” The rich voice had become metallic. “I see no cause for revision.”

  “You mean you’ll make them pay for what I‘ve done?”

  “No. For what they have done. By their deliberate silence they have associated themselves with your deed. Now they may associate themselves with your punishment.”

  Had it not been for my despair I would have laughed aloud at such hypocrisy. As it was I uttered a kind of strangled groan. “Do you think I don’t see through your game?”

  “You forget yourself, Griscam.”

  “Forget myself! When have I seen myself more clearly? Or you, sir? Why it’s as open as daylight. By rejecting my confession, you brand me for life as the boy who got his pals fired to save his own hide! Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s diabolic. To think that I, who thought I was so smart, should have heaped up my own faggots and handed you the torch!”

  Dr. Prescott leaned back in his chair and folded his arms magisterially across his chest. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and did not shift his gaze for several seconds. He might have been seeking in that dirty plaster some hole through which his deity might vouchsafe him an explanation of my conduct. He was no longer angry or even reproachful. He pursed his lips as he looked back at me as though he and I together had a theological problem to unravel.

  “Tell me, Jules,” he said at last in a milder tone. “Why do you ascribe to me so violent an animosity? Why should I wish to apply a torch to your faggots, as you put it?”

  “Because my will was stronger than yours! Because you asked those three to tell on me, and I asked them not to! And they obeyed me, at the cost of being expelled.”

  In my exultation I was not in the least put off by the sudden concern in his eyes. Obviously, he would have to take the position that I was deranged. What alternative had I left him?

  “I think you’ve been under a great strain, Jules,” he began. “I think I had better talk to your father . . .”

  “Never mind about Father.” I cried. “Everyone knows that he’s your rubber stamp. You’ve hated me from the beginning because you were shrewd enough to know that I saw through you. You had to get me before I got you!”

  “And when you saw through me, what did you see?”

  I was not taken in by his almost conversational tone of curiosity. I paused, but only to spit out the words more offensively. “I saw you weren’t God. I saw that you don’t even believe in God. Even in yourself as God. I saw you were only a cardboard dragon.”

  “I will pray for you, Jules,” he said in a very soft tone, almost a whisper. “And for your father.”

  “And I, dear Doctor Prescott, will pray for you. Till we meet in hell!”

  This time his eyes really sparkled, and I knew it was my moment to turn about and march from the room. If he had won, I had had the last word. And a pretty magnificent last word, at that.

  Two days later Father and I walked on the banks of the Lawrence in the damp exhilarating air of what seemed at last to be spring. From time to time he paused to identify a bird, and once he expressed surprise at seeing a chewink so early in the season. There were no sermons or recriminations. Father knew when milk had been spilt, and he was not one to try to scoop it back in the bottle. Even I had a dim appreciation of what it must have meant to him to have a son expelled from Justin, and for once in my life I made an effort to be diplomatic. I told him that I was sorry for what had happened and that I accepted my punishment, but that I hoped he would be able to use his good offices to obtain a pardon for the unoffending three.

  “I have already tried that, Jules,” he told me in his dry, matter-of-fact tone. “I first made it clear to Dr. Prescott that I was not asking for any reconsideration of your own case. That would have been hopeless. But I begged him only to suspend your friends and allow them to return for graduation. Unfortunately, their parents have already organized a group of graduates into a noisy campaign of telegrams. This, of course, will be fatal to their case. However, they didn’t consult me.”

  He shrugged in that way I knew so well, the shrug of the foreign minister who moves disdainfully aside when militarists or radicals take over the government. Father had only contempt for stupidity. I think he believed that the stupid deserved to suffer, unless they had the inspiration to take their problems to David Griscam.

  “You mean there’s no chance he’ll change his mind?”

  “Not now,” Father emphasized. “Dr. Prescott was never a man to be stampeded.”

  “But can’t the trustees overrule him?”

  “And have him resign?” Father gave me a pitying glance. “Do you really think they’d be willing to lose the greatest figure in American secondary education to save the scalps of your three little friends? You don’t know the world, my boy.”

  “I don’t want to know the world,” I said bitterly, “if the world admires a man like Dr. Prescott.”

  “You’re not to criticize him to me,” Father retorted with sudden sharpness. “It comes most ungraciously from you, who have caused this whole sorry mess. I have not reproved you, Jules, because I feel you have suffered enough and, alas, that you are going to suffer more. Our job, yours and mine, is to work out a future for you.”

  “How can we? The old man’s done me in. I’ll always be known as the boy who wouldn’t own up to
save his buddies.”

  “For ‘always’ read ‘six months,’” Father said with a brisk little headshake. “You won’t believe how soon this will pass. No, you won’t,” he repeated sternly, raising his hand as I was about to protest. “Don’t let’s discuss it. Youth is hopelessly astigmatic. All I ask is that you cooperate with me in getting yourself and your friends into Harvard.”

  Harvard! I had not dreamed that such a horror was still possible. Was there to be no end of the New England experiment? Had I climbed the windmill ladder only to have to do it again and again? “Father,” I pleaded in sudden desperation, “I don’t think Harvard is the place for me. Couldn’t I go abroad for a year? With Chanler? Or off somewhere on a tramp steamer? Please, Father,” I went on, even more earnestly, as I saw him stiffen, “I think it might be the making of me. I think it might be the only way!”

  “I thought you would have something like that in mind, Jules. But don’t you see, that to run off to Europe would be to stamp yourself forever with this wretched business? No, my boy, you must make a go of Harvard and then it will be forgotten. Or if remembered at all, it will seem a boyhood prank.”

  I knew from his tone that the case was hopeless. I was being “handled,” and there was no appeal from that. “It’s one thing to get me into Harvard,” I said sullenly. “It’s another thing to make me go.”

  “I think you will make yourself go,” Father retorted blandly. “For the simple reason that if you don’t, I shall not speak to President Lowell about your three friends. You have been instrumental in their losing their Justin degrees. Will you wish to be involved in the loss of their Harvard ones?”

  “But that’s blackmail!”

  “It is no such thing. It is a fair exchange. I do something for you, and you do something for me. You’re a difficult young man to bring up, Jules. One has to fight you for your own good all the way.” He stepped suddenly to the side of the path and peered down the slope into a clearing. Then he snapped his fingers. “Dammit all!” he exclaimed, forgetting the proximity of the Justin campus. “I should have brought my field glasses. I could swear that was a great northern shrike.”

  19

  Jules Griscam’s Memoir

  FATHER, in his usual fashion, did an efficient job, and it was arranged that all four of us would be admitted to Harvard, provided that we passed the entrance examinations. Unhappily, he could not take these for us, and Sandy McKim failed. Gus Crane, who now hated me with all the vindictive force of his womanly nature, told everybody that Sandy had failed because of a nervous crackup brought on by our expulsion from Justin. It may have been partly true, and it was certainly widely believed, and I found that the smudge of that black eye which Dr. Prescott had dealt me, for all of Father’s patient scrubbing, was never entirely going to come off.

  Father was good to his word and did not give me any formal punishment, as I had “suffered enough,” but he suggested that it might be more “appropriate” that summer if, instead of joining the family on their stately tour of first-class hotels in European capitals, I should work as a counselor in a camp for city boys of which he was a trustee. I agreed to do this, seeing in it the opportunity to square my accounts with him, and when I entered Harvard in the fall I felt no longer under the least obligation for what he had done—or tried to do—for my fellow delinquents. It was a curious thing, considering how little Father expected to be thanked, that nobody could ever bear to be indebted to him.

  The only thing that Harvard seemed to offer me was freedom: freedom from home and freedom from Justin Martyr, and Chanler and I, as roommates, determined to drink as deeply of it as we could. We avoided our old school classmates and spent our evenings and our money in the areas of Boston from which it had been a goodly part of Dr. Prescott’s ambition to exclude his graduates. Chanler was really interested only in low women and I in booze, and we made a gloomy enough couple for two young men who wanted to revel in their newfound liberty.

  Father had given me a very large allowance on which, in accordance with his usual “responsibility” theories, I was expected to support myself and two indigent old maid Griscam cousins, and I reduced the poor dears to a lamentable state of need, promising them golden things in the future. I knew that they would ultimately complain to Father, but the moment was mine, and the moment was all I wanted. I did not really believe in Harvard or in Father or in his dreary theories. Reality was gin and whiskey and poetry and fast driving and the evil memory of Justin Martyr.

  For the maddening thing about Dr. Prescott was that he still refused to shrink into the past. It sometimes seemed to me that his shadow was actually broader at Harvard than it had been at school and that we had not so much gained our freedom as he had enlarged his jurisdiction. My faculty counselor was always asking about him. He prided himself on being a liberal and opposed to private schools, but he liked to describe Prescott as the only intellectual who had ever been a New England headmaster. Men whom I met in classes, on the campus, on Boston evenings, when they heard I’d been to Justin would immediately identify it with Prescott and make some inquiry such as: “Is the old boy the ogre they say he is?” But there was usually a note of respect in the question. Even Chanler’s tarts had heard of him. And certainly the evidences of his whip were still around me, in the proximity of poor Sandy McKim working unhappily in a Boston insurance company, in the bitter glances of his older brother, Bert, a sophomore, in the dozen little weekly reminders, by chance allusions or semi-snubs, of my own still fetid reputation.

  It was as if Dr. Prescott had challenged me to a game of proving which of us was real and was now laughing in his triumph. “You thought you’d find your world after Justin, didn’t you? But, my dear boy, you woefully underestimated your old prestidigitator. See where the universe has become a school!” Of course, it hadn’t—I knew that. He knew it, too, the old devil. But he could make it look that way. He knew that if men cared little about faith, they still yearned to be hypocrites. The single lunatic in a world of timid sanity, he made his fellow beings pretend they were in an asylum.

  I think it was my feeling of helplessness in defeat that made me drink. I doubt that I was ever really alcoholic. For after I had conceived my great idea, after I had felt with loving fingers in the pocket of my soul the long sharp secret weapon that I was going to use, I lived more on exhilaration than on gin, reverting to the latter only when my weapon seemed dull or in the desperate moments when my clutching hand could not find it at all.

  My idea was born in the unlikely delivery room of a party that Chanler Winslow and I gave after the Yale game. Half the people who came we did not know. Some of them had simply happened upon the wrong party. Chanler’s tart friends from Boston did not improve the tone, and after a couple of hours I retired to a window seat, in fuzzy isolation, with a glass and a bottle of whiskey, to consider sardonically the scene before me as it might appear to my solicitous father’s eye.

  “Well, if it isn’t our Jules! The spunky little guy who wouldn’t squeal—on himself.”

  I contemplated thoughtfully the tall rangy figure of Sandy’s brother, Bert McKim, that sprouted into a small, spotty head with small features and sticky blond hair. “How charming,” I replied. “In the stuffy old days people used to feel they shouldn’t go to parties of people they disapproved of. Now, with their inhibitions removed by their host’s liquor, they feel free to vent their spleen on him.”

  Bert stared down at me with troubled irresolution. “Party? Whose party? Not yours.”

  “Oh, but it is, my dear fellow. And please don’t misunderstand me. You are very welcome. You hate me, because of Sandy. I hate the world, because of Sandy. We have more in common than you think.”

  “Sandy’s as good as they make ’em,” Bert said in a slow, sullen suspicious tone, “and what happened to him shouldn’t have happened to a dog.”

  “I quite agree. But you seem very solicitous for an older brother. I cannot pride myself that I would share a similar concern over my brother
Sylvester. Though I hope, at least, I would have the decency to show it.”

  “Sandy and I have always done things together.” Bert sat down unsteadily on the window seat, and I was astonished to see what appeared to be tears in his eyes. Was he simply drunk and maudlin? Acting on a sudden prick of inspiration, I began piecing together what I knew of him. I knew that he and Sandy were the children of their father’s first marriage and that they had the bond of a lost mother and an unsympathetic successor. Bert had not gone to Justin because of a sinus condition, since cured, but he had frequently visited the school with his father and certainly knew the grounds. As I caught the first glimmer of my idea I was so dazzled by its beauty that I threw back my head and laughed.

  “Laertes,” I exclaimed, in jubilant paraphrase, “was your brother dear to you? ‘Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart?’”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About Sandy. About what really happened to Sandy. About you and me. And what we can do about it.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

  “Bless you, my boy, I haven’t even started!”

  “Oh?”

  Bert seemed totally confused, and I saw it was the moment to take a firm position. “I care for Sandy as much as you do, Bert. Make no mistake over that. But I don’t propose just to moan. I propose to act. If I can find the right partner.”

  “Act?”

  “I want to get back at the mean old man who did him in,” I said bluntly. “But now is not the time to discuss it. You and I must meet alone, if you’re interested. I will let you know when. And where. What I want you to do now is leave the party in a big huff, telling people you didn’t know I was giving it and that you won’t stay another minute. Lay it on thick. Do you want me to help you?”