The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

  “You look exhausted, my love,” she said as he came up. “You should really have a drink or a vitamin pill before any meeting with dear Donald.”

  He slumped into the chair beside her. “Oh, he’ll have his vulgar sports plaza, I’ve faced that. There’s no fighting his big bucks.”

  “Yes, but you can moderate them. I’ve been going over the plans. They can be cut down. The new buildings can be scattered. The whole thing can be spread out and muted.”

  “But he’d never stand for it, darling. He’s got his great architect. The whole thing’s a must. It’s what he calls a work of art. You can’t fiddle with works of art.”

  “The board may not see it that way.”

  “Ione, you’re dreaming! They’ll gobble it up.”

  “You have friends on the board. More than you think.”

  “But not enough for a battle like this.”

  She suddenly stood up, as if to make a great point. “And you have the ace of trumps up your sleeve! You can threaten to resign!”

  He too jumped up, but in astonishment. “And if they accept my resignation?”

  “Then we’ll go! There are plenty of other places that will want you. Do you think, my darling, that I haven’t known how often you’ve been wondering if Averhill is really the right place for you? Or if any New England boarding school is the right place for you?”

  He gazed at her in admiration. “Darling, what’s got into you?”

  2

  WHAT INDEED had got into Ione?

  From childhood, she had been a deeply serious girl, eager to find the right place for herself in a confusing society and often wondering if such a thing as a right place existed. At Barnard College she had joined the ranks of the majority of the girls in her class who believed that women should keep their maiden names after marriage, have full-time jobs even while raising a family, hold liberal political views, and prefer casual dress to haute couture. The great thing in life was to be natural. The great thing to be avoided was something called fancy pants.

  The trouble was that her mother, whose only child she was, seemed the very opposite of much of this. In many ways indeed her parents appeared the essence of fancy pants. And yet they were a brilliantly successful couple; they were even, at least in Manhattan, almost famous. Her father, Ira Fletcher, sleek, slim, ebony-haired, and elegant, was the highly reputed designer of women’s wear, and Diane, her mother, the graceful grande dame of urban chic, was the editor of the popular fashion magazine Style. Photographs of the couple in splendid evening attire appeared so often in newspaper accounts of Gotham revelry and charity balls that friends made health inquiries if their images were missing for a couple of weeks. Yet for all of this their manners were open and kind; they exuded a charm that won them hearts wherever they went.

  Ione’s particular difficulty, when she came of college age, was that she couldn’t fault them. They both took what had to be a sincere interest in her studies, in her amusements, in her boyfriends, even in her would-be rebellious resistance to their interest in her. They included her in their parties well before her eighteenth year; they apparently saw no reason why she should not fit snugly into their world. They simply did everything right—shouldn’t that be enough? But wasn’t something missing in her mother’s delicate peck of a kiss on her cheek, in her father’s gentle pat on her back, something like the bear hug she had seen her friends’ parents give their offspring? Did she dare to compare the manicured lives of Ira and Diane to a finely produced and expertly acted parlor comedy?

  She had no occasion to discuss these doubts with her friends because, without exception, they were all, even the most liberal minded, dazzled by her parents, who greeted them with invariable charm and warmth. But as Ione’s graduation approached, she began to feel the absolute necessity of a candid discussion with her mother as to her future career. They had to talk frankly, at least once.

  She had no sooner started on this than Diane interrupted to assure her there would always be an opening on the staff of Style.

  “Oh, no, no, that’s not my idea of a career at all!” Ione exclaimed, seizing on this with a kind of desperation to introduce the real topic. “I have in mind something totally different!”

  “You sound as if Style were beneath you,” Diane replied with a mildly reproachful smile.

  “Oh, it’s not that, Mummy. It’s not that really. Style’s all very well for those that like it. It’s just that … well, I’d like to be more in the real world.”

  “And you think Style isn’t real?”

  “Well, it’s not grubby. If that’s what I mean.”

  “You’re looking for something grubby? How singular.”

  “I was thinking of law school.”

  “Well, I guess that’s grubby enough for anyone.” Diane paused now to consider this new option. Oh, she was always ready to consider things! “Actually, women are beginning to make great strides in the law. They say Betty Stackpole has made a fortune in divorce cases, and I hear she’s going to represent Ted Saunders in his wife’s bigamy suit. That should net her a walloping fee.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’d go in for domestic relations. I’d want a wider field than that. Divorce lawyers make dirty waters dirtier. I’d want something more in the public interest.”

  “Well, so long as you don’t spit at money, my dear. You’ll find it can come in very handy. But talk to your father about this. He’s had more experience with lawyers than I have. He won a big suit last year against some crazy shop that claimed he’d stolen a design. That was grubby enough for anyone.”

  Ione decided that she would discuss it with Ira that very night, and when he came home he promised that he would go into it with her at dinner, which, for once, they were all three to have alone. But at the last moment the table in the elegant Pompeian dining room had to be reset for four because Ray Adla, the great ballet star, had asked himself suddenly to the meal on the pretext of discussing with Ira the offer from a French ballet company that he had just received.

  Adla had been a protégé of the Fletchers ever since his humble and impecunious start, and his subsequent fame had not tempered his gratitude. He consulted them in everything, eagerly and submissively. Ione reflected bitterly, as the evening droned on until bedtime, with her father never seeming to notice that he had promised her an important meeting, that Adla was like the son he had never had.

  And then a nasty thought struck her, the fruit, no doubt, of her suddenly aroused jealousy. She had been having some sad talks recently with a Barnard friend who was distraught over her discovery that her beau and lover was finding greater diversion with a member of his own sex. She took note now of the peculiar warmth of her father’s treatment of his ballet star. Was it really paternal? Wasn’t it something more cherishing? Even more carnal?

  The young man was certainly lovely to look at. His every motion was gracefully true to his profession. And his reputation in love, as Ione and his fans well knew, was notoriously bisexual. This, of course, was common in the world of ballet and hardly to be commented on. But what Ione was coldly observing from across the room was not the dancer but her father. He was totally taken with his guest; Ione and her mother for the moment had ceased to exist.

  He did, however, find the time to discuss with his daughter at breakfast the next morning her desire to go to law school, but she could not but compare the seemingly perfunctory speed at which he approved her plan with the rapt attention he had given to Adla’s problem the night before. Still, his assent and support served to quell her mother’s doubts, and Ione found herself enrolled the following fall in New York University Law School, and deriving even greater satisfaction from her courses than she had anticipated. She particularly liked contracts, where she sat by and soon made something of a pal of a sandy, tousled, and tense young man called Tom Murphy who was a deeply devoted student and obviously the type destined to make the law review. He came of a very different background from Ione’s—his father was a police detective—bu
t he responded to her friendly overtures and was soon helping her to analyze difficult cases. After a few weeks she got up the courage to ask him for a weekend at her family’s villa in Rye, and to her surprise he not only accepted but easily fitted into a household more elegant, presumably, than any he had previously encountered. He brought his law books with him; they must have been the only things that really impressed him.

  Ira and Diane were charming to him, of course, but Ione could see that he bored them, however little they showed it. Unexpectedly she found herself sharply resenting this. Alone with her mother on Sunday night after Tom had returned to town, she suddenly challenged her.

  “You were bored stiff with poor Tom, weren’t you?”

  “Dear me, did I show it?”

  “Only to me, of course. Never to anyone else. But it troubles me that you don’t see anything in a man like that. He’s good and true, and he’s going to be a first-rate lawyer. Maybe even a great one. And you don’t give a damn. Any more than Dad does.” She felt an odd wave of relief as her tone waxed almost strident. “You both only care about how things look. And I care about what they are. That’s the difference between us!”

  “My dear child, what has that young man’s goodness and truth and legal aptitude to do with me or your father?” Diane’s tone manifested pure reasonableness; she offered no acknowledgment of her daughter’s rising temper. “We wish him well, of course, very well. But his virtues are hardly my affair. He doesn’t interest me. Except, of course, as a possible husband for my dearly loved daughter. Mothers always see any young man their daughter brings home in that light. We can’t help it.”

  “Well, you can cross Tom off that list. He’s not my affair. We work together, that’s all. He won’t marry until he’s a junior partner in some big firm, and then it will be to Miss Mouse. But if I were to take him seriously as a beau, how would you feel about it?”

  “We needn’t go into that, need we?”

  “I’d like to know your criteria.”

  Diane paused. When she spoke it was after her evident decision that perhaps her daughter did need some guidance. “Well, it’s my belief that if one has only one life, it better not be spent being bored. The girl who marries your Tom will probably have a kind and faithful husband. But unless she’s devoid of imagination she will, after the first thrill of sexual union has passed, have to come to grips with a lifetime of ennui. If she’s as hipped on the law as he is, that may be a way out for her.”

  Ione realized at this with a sudden shock that what her mother was implying was perfectly true: no daughter of hers would ever dream of marrying a man as devoid of humor and imagination as the honest and industrious, the all-deserving Tom. But did that have to mean that she had become a captive of the maternal philosophy, if philosophy it could be called? She found that she was actually trembling with a nervous irritation. She felt an irrational need to shy a stone against the glittering glass fabric of what she wanted desperately to believe was the parental palace of illusion.

  “Boredom isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world!” she exclaimed hotly. “Boredom may be only a minor problem in a fundamentally happy marriage to a good and useful man. I don’t want my marriage to be like…” Here she paused. Was she really going to say it?

  “Like your father’s and mine?” Diane finished for her coolly. “Go ahead and say it, my dear. It’s obviously on your mind. We’d better have it out.”

  “Well, it does strike me at times,” Ione answered in a humbler tone, “that your marriage is based more on the things you don’t mention than on the things you do.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Oh, Mummy, please!”

  “What sort of things?” Diane repeated inexorably.

  Ione took a deep breath. “Well, Daddy’s rather excessive feeling for Adla, for example.”

  “Ah, at last!” Diane exclaimed as if a great point had been reached. “You catch a whiff of homosexuality?”

  “Well, I don’t mean they actually do anything,” Ione murmured miserably.

  “They do quite a lot, actually.” Diane settled back in her chair. “And I see it’s time you and I had a frank talk about these matters. Girls your age chat about everything, I know, so there’s no reason for you to suppose that your parents live on a different planet. Your father’s generous nature includes both sexes. He has a distinct penchant for handsome young men with which I not only sympathize but which I share. We have both discreetly indulged this penchant. We never asked for it; nature gave it to us. Like alcohol it is harmless unless taken in excess. We have both recognized that we live in a society which is perfectly tolerant of anything that is not blatantly exhibited. We have no wish, in any event, to make a proclamation of things that are essentially private. We regard such follies as ‘gay pride’ parades or public displays of affection between men and women as the ultimate vulgarity. We enjoy our own warm compatibility and deem our marriage happier than most. It is perfectly true that we care vitally about appearances, perhaps too much, but it’s because we both hate ugliness. The world, like your dress and your drawing room, needs to be kept clean and handsome. If you make a good enough replica, it is not only as good as the truth. It can become the truth! There we are, my dear. You can take us or leave us. We hope, of course, that you’ll take us. But in any event we’ll always support you.”

  When Diane had finished there were several moments of silence during which she gazed with a mildly inquiring look at her daughter while the latter looked down at the floor. When Ione answered her at last her tone was low and apologetic.

  “You make me feel that I’ve been presumptuous and even impertinent, Mummy.”

  “There’s no occasion for that, my dear. Your generation prides itself on its tolerance. I simply expect you to stretch it to cover your parents, which I know is difficult. The most liberal of the young are still capable of being Queen Victoria herself when it comes to judging Mummy and Daddy. I believe that your father and I have been as useful, which is the term you use, as any lawyer, even if that’s not saying much. We have tried to contribute a little beauty to a world that signally lacks it, he in how women dress and I in how they live.”

  This conversation had a considerable effect on Ione’s thinking during the rest of her law school career and afterward in her job as an associate in the law firm of Abrams and Sholtz, where she engaged in legal research for the great negligence lawyer Simon Abrams. While she prided herself on being a part of what she liked to think of as the “real world” of injured plaintiffs, ugly lawsuits, and large damages, she was still occasionally glad that it was at least partially balanced by the lacquered world of her parents, whose denizens dressed well and talked well and cultivated charm as a primary virtue. When her mother came to court one day to hear Abrams cross-examine a hostile witness on a subject worked up by her daughter, Ione had to admit that she made the whole procedure seem rather shabby.

  She had her own apartment now, a handsome four-room affair beautifully decorated by her mother—her parents always supplemented her moderate salary—and she had developed a lively circle of bright young professional friends who questioned everything from the war in Vietnam to the existence of God, but who were as one in their belief in the importance of “getting ahead.”

  Her father, whose keen interest in her and deep affection she no longer felt was in any way diminished by his sexual tastes, was much concerned with every aspect of her social life. He was obviously motivated by the desire to see her marry a man whom he would consider worthy of his beloved daughter and one who was apt to make his mark in the world. To Ira, the lawyers in Ione’s firm and practice were usually what she called “grubby.” But she could never afford not to recognize his impeccable taste or that the young men she met at the family board, those who had clearly been invited for her benefit, were able and honorable youths who bore the aura of success in their different fields and had none of the characteristics of a certain ballet star. Ira Fletcher, like his wife, w
as always deeper and smarter than one might suspect.

  When, therefore, Ione met Michael Sayre at a dinner party at her parents’ she knew that he had to be taken seriously, even if his good looks and smooth manners did not assure him of that. He was a young friend of Ira’s, a member of an evening discussion group at the Century Club to which both belonged. She couldn’t help sending an amused glance down the table at her father, conveying the silent message “Dad, you’ve hit the jackpot.” For Michael was perfect: in looks, in manner, in wit, in sympathy, and in his immediate and enthusiastic reaction to her. He called her at her office the next morning, and they were soon seeing each other on a regular basis. She had had friendships with men, and even one affair, but nothing remotely like this had ever happened to her.

  Yet they didn’t have an affair, though she made no secret of her willingness. Michael firmly made it clear that with him it was marriage or nothing. He did not in the least imply that he was a virgin, or that he wanted to be one, or that he set the least value on any such state; it was simply, he insisted forcefully, that in his life she had assumed an importance that made any relationship outside of wedlock irrelevant. That was the odd term he used. This, of course, was intensely winning, if it were not mere flattery, and hearing him, she could not doubt his sincerity. It was impossible to doubt his sincerity.

  Was this not the man she had been waiting for, the man who would at last unite the seemingly inconsistent worlds of her parents and herself? For like Ira and Diane, he cared for appearances: he showed this in his clothes, in his neatness, in the smooth agility of all his motions, in his careful and beautiful diction, in the ease with which he adjusted himself to any friends to whom she introduced him. On the other hand, his role as a protester against the war in Vietnam had shown him effective and fearless in dealing with mobs and the police, and in his military service in the conflict—for he had refused to reject the draft and he had been decorated for valor. The only inconsistent thing about him was his extraordinary impassivity; he never seemed to lose his temper or even to demonstrate that a right cause or a wrong one had aroused much feeling in him. He was totally consistent in his invariable support of the moral imperative, but bad things, evil things, seemed to him to be simply vermin that had to be efficiently and unemotionally disposed of. Ione imagined him as a heretic hauled before the Spanish Inquisition, coolly pointing out to the court its manifest errors and facing the stake with total equanimity.