The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

  He had no chance, he recognized, of being chosen as the senior prefect. That was apt to go to the captain of one of the athletic teams and one not so weak academically as to incur the veto which the headmaster held over the election outcome. Of the three or four likely candidates Michael Sayre seemed the most favored, but it was by no means a sure thing, any more than was Donald’s chance of being chosen one of the lesser prefects. Canvassing was frowned upon but it surreptitiously existed, and Donald decided to make full use of it even with a student of such reputed rectitude as his former champion, Michael. Had not Michael helped him once, and when it had been unpopular to do so?

  He fell in with Michael one afternoon when he spied the latter walking down the path to the river for crew practice.

  “I thought you were a shoo-in for senior, Mike, but some guys tell me that Ted Ives is running you close,” he began.

  “Are people discussing that?” Michael demanded curtly. “They shouldn’t and they know they shouldn’t.”

  “Well, do you want to have a dope like Ives our boss? Do we have to lie down and let his snotty clique run over us?”

  “If Ives is chosen, that’s okay with me.” Saying which Michael broke into a jog as if to terminate an unwelcome discussion. But Donald kept up with him.

  “Ives is seeking votes right and left. Of course he shouldn’t. But isn’t he forcing us to do the same thing?”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “Mike, for Pete’s sake listen to me! I can swing six votes for you which should put you over the top. And if you in turn will back me up, you’ll have a damn good and loyal executive officer!”

  Michael stopped at this and faced him.

  “Look, Spencer. I take for granted that any prefect elected will be a loyal aide to any senior elected. And I’m not going to discuss with anyone whom I’m going to vote for. All I’ll tell you is that I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re elected or not. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I want to jog on to the river.”

  This was delivered in a flat dry tone that expressed even more forcefully the contempt in which the speaker held the person addressed. When Michael resumed his jog, Donald did not follow him.

  Michael was elected senior prefect, and Donald as one of the lesser ones, but Donald in their final year did not show himself the supporter of his superior that he had offered. His enthusiasm for the champion of his early years was now replaced by envy and resentment that intensified by having to be hid if he did not wish to appear irrationally hostile to a universally popular figure. He had to content himself with minor sniping to other prefects over any slip in the conduct of the admired senior, which was so little noticed that the object of the sniping was the only one to know he had a real enemy. And when, seventeen years later, the board of Averhill, of which Donald was then a member though not yet chairman, was presented by its search committee with the name of Michael Sayre as the successor chosen to the retiring headmaster, Donald had bitterly to recognize that any opposition to so popular a candidate, lacking specific grounds for complaint, might seriously diminish his influence on trustees hitherto awed by his large grants. The vote for Michael was unanimous, and when, shortly after his appointment, Donald himself was raised to the chairmanship, he established a working relationship with the new headmaster that both men knew was a practical necessity and that both men knew was simply a form.

  Donald, with the total backing of a father powerful even in his retirement and with a great bank virtually at his disposal, had used his own financial ability to enormous advantage, and while still in his thirties had, like a number of his contemporaries, accumulated a fortune of many millions. He had been less happy in his marriage, though not from the cause of his hated nickname at school, which maturity had taken care of. At twenty-nine he had decided, with very little previous experience with women in his busy life, that Caroline Kip, quiet, reserved, pretty, conventional, the devoted and submissive daughter of a drearily respectable couple of Knickerbocker descent, was just the wife he needed to give him children to inherit his fortune without interfering in the hectic schedule of his many deals and trips. He was enough of a realist to recognize that he was looking for docility, and not afraid to call it just that, but not perspective enough to know that it was a quality that women of an earlier time merely feigned. He did not see, either, that Caroline, anxious to escape a dull home and not presented with many eligible admirers, understood just what he was after and was only too ready to supply the appearance of it. But our motivations are rarely simple: she wanted the money, yes, but she also wanted love, and she had almost succeeded in persuading herself that Donald was the prince of her dreams—perhaps in disguise—and he did at times look something like a frog. At any rate, they married.

  Trouble was not long in coming. Donald was accustomed on Saturday afternoons to playing squash at the Racket Club, after which he would have drinks with his friends at the bar, and if there happened to be a group dining there, join them. Caroline went along happily with his business trips—she never objected to anything connected with his work—but if he was home she certainly did not expect to spend her Saturday nights alone. She objected in vain; she made scenes in vain. He would retire to his study and lock the door. He was like a heavy barge that would cease its barely perceptible moving the moment one stopped pushing: it was impossible to get any way on.

  She hoped things might improve with the birth of their twins, a boy and a girl, but Donald, who was one who took no interest in children before they reached their teens and not much then, was always too busy to push their perambulator in the park, even on a weekend. She appealed at last to her motherin-law, who was more than willing to give her oldest son a piece of her mind.

  “You have a lot to learn about women, my dear,” she told him. “Caroline is not as hard to please as you like to make out. She’s not asking for much, simply that you give her more of your company. If you give her that, you’ll soon find out, as many husbands have, that she doesn’t need that much, and you’ll have your sacred freedom back. Maybe even too much of it.”

  “It seems to me that I’ve already given her all a reasonable woman could want,” Donald retorted, angered as always by the maternal jabs. “How many wives have a car and chauffeur at their disposal, a penthouse in town, a villa in the country, servants galore and a princely allowance?”

  “Silly boy, silly boy. Don’t you realize that she wants you to give her something that it hurts you to give? She wants a concession on your part. Something that shows you love her.”

  “Well, I’m afraid she’s going to have to learn to take me as I am.”

  “Oh, she’ll never learn that.”

  “Didn’t she agree to take me for better or for worse?”

  “Women knocked out the ‘worse’ when they got the vote. You’re out of date, dear.”

  “Then it’s a pity they ever got it!”

  “Don’t be a fool, Donald. You’ll wreck everything. You know how to run a business. Learn to run a home.”

  But he wasn’t going to heed her. His mother had never really subscribed to the Spencer values, at least as he defined them. Oh, she liked the money well enough, that was evident in the spending his father never checked. Asked by a friend once if she had ever felt guilty about having so much when others had so little, Adelaide’s much-quoted reply had been: “Yes, I did at first, but as there was nothing I could do about it, I decided to make myself thoroughly comfortable.” And she certainly had! There was something in her air, in her attitude, that implied that if men ruled the downtown world, they had done well to leave the truly important things, the arts and the art of living, to women. She had no loyally to the lares and penates of moneymakers. When Donald had once protested after she had invited and paid a famous radical novelist—some said a card-carrying communist—to address her book class, she had simply told him to “grow up.”

  Caroline, advised by her motherin-law, began to accept her husband, but it was a silent, moody ac
ceptance. She spent most of her time with the twins now, and hardly seemed to notice whether Donald stayed home or went out. Sometimes, when they had a social engagement, she at the last moment would refuse to go with him on the obviously false excuse of a migraine, and nothing could convince her to change her mind. Still, their married life had the outward appearance of normality, and Donald supposed that this would have to be enough. And it might have been without the episode of the Connecticut house.

  Donald’s mother had a curious apprehension that the family fortune was not destined to last, at least not in its present bulk, and she used serenely to make occasional purchases of things that would enable them to be comfortable in a reduced scale of living. One of these was a charming little eighteenth-century house in Connecticut, a colonial gem on the edge of a village green. There she would sometimes go for summer weekends, taking Caroline and the twins. Donald’s father, who cheerfully paid for everything his wife desired, remarked to his oldest son with a chuckle, “Fortunately, I am still rich enough to afford your mother’s economies.”

  Caroline loved the house, and when her motherin-law tired of playing Marie Antoinette at her hameau, as Donald sourly put it, she asked her husband, who always took title in his own name, to deed it to her daughter-in-law. Howard, of course, instantly complied, but in the Spencer tradition he gave the place to Donald rather than to his wife. To him it was the same thing.

  The house was not heated and was closed all winter, so that, the transfer having taken place in October, there was no idea of Caroline spending a weekend there before late spring. And it so happened that only weeks after Donald took title he received a magnificent offer for the property, which had become necessary to a developer who was taking over the entire little village for a huge retirement home. In accordance with every precept of his economic philosophy, Donald promptly sold it, delaying just long enough to sweeten the already succulent offer.

  He saw no reason to tell Caroline. He concluded that over the ensuing months she might even lose her interest in the house. But he was a bit nervous about it. She had spoken of it with real feeling, and he had even wondered if she might wish to heat it and live in it permanently, expecting him only for weekends and putting their marriage on that basis.

  He did not know it when, on an early spring day, she drove up to Connecticut to show a friend the house. She was faced with a vacant lot. The developer’s bulldozer had preceded her.

  The scene to which she subjected her husband on her return ended all possibility of a happy union in the future. She screamed at him that he had taken the one thing she loved of the family properties and destroyed it for no other reason than to hurt and humiliate her. He had coldly insisted that he had treated the house like any other asset in his portfolio, disposing of it for a price that would almost surely never come again. He offered to hold the cash proceeds for any purchase that she might ask. She said that she wanted nothing and would take the twins and return to her own family.

  In the end she didn’t do this. Her parents didn’t want her, and she had no grounds for a divorce. Adelaide Spencer intervened, and Caroline was persuaded that the best thing for her and her children was to remain under the protection of the Spencers and their wealth. In a lawsuit Donald would have fought her with all his clout and money; in a reconciliation he would leave her strictly alone and support her in style. What else could she do?

  Well, she could drink, and that, alas, she did. She isolated herself more and more from her friends and became a shadowy figure rarely seen and talked about with shaken heads. She suffered from recurrent severe depressions and spent much of her time in a psychiatrist’s office. Adelaide saw a great deal of her and kept her from going seriously off the tracks. The two children, who had inherited a good slice of their father’s toughness, did surprisingly well with all the governesses and tutors and servants that money could supply. Even Donald, guided more and more by a mother whom his domestic crisis had hoisted into a position of necessary supervision, took a more proper paternal interest in them, and their mother faded into a frail ailing presence that could be kissed in the morning and forgotten during the day.

  Donald was too clear an observer not to feel the contrast of the failure of his home life with the success of his business one, nor could he escape the bleak recognition that the only common denominator between the two was the hostility he had incurred in both. He was sensitive enough to be hurt by this, and he found himself looking around for some way or ways to establish a more favorable reputation for his name and career. Why should a man like Michael Sayre get all the glory in a world largely managed by men like Donald? Donald wanted a good name; he wanted people to point to his good works. Had not his creed been that money could buy anything? Why should it not buy him that? Philanthropy had always a good name, and what bought it but money?

  The obvious object of his bounty was Averhill. Any gift to his alma mater, Harvard, would be lost in the sea of that institution’s vast wealth. Moreover he had a definitive nostalgia for his years at preparatory school. The one thing in his life that he could romanticize was his own gallant fight to rise from a state of ridicule and persecution to a prefectship, all accomplished by his own willpower and without the aid of a penny of the family fortune. The school had several rich trustees but none who were able or willing to do as much as he. As a big enough donor he might identify his own name with that of the academy.

  The election of Michael to the headmastership had been an ugly shock to Donald, as he saw his own prospect of fame dimmed in relation to the shining reputation of this new star in the field of education. The only practical way of handling the situation was to ally himself to the new head in such manner as to create the illusion that they constituted an equal partnership. Everyone knew that they had been fellow formmates—could the myth not be spread that the board chairman and the headmaster had been joined in a lifelong union dedicated to the growth and glory of Averhill?

  It had not, however, worked out that way. Donald had not foreseen the sweeping changes that Michael would inaugurate, the credit for which could not be attributed to anyone but the headmaster. Donald himself had been strongly opposed to almost all of them. He hated the admission of girls to the student body, the loss of preference for the sons of graduates, the increase of racial and religious diversity, the general relaxation of discipline, the presence of what he considered radicals on the faculty. He firmly believed in an Averhill as much as possible like the one he had attended. He had suffered a loss of prestige in the defeats he had met opposing these measures from a board that seemed as hypnotized by the headmaster as the children of Hamelin by the Pied Piper. It had been to regain his authority over the trustees that he had devised his great sports plan. And now the insufferable Michael was proposing to cut it into slivers and was actually making some headway with the younger and more liberal members of the board!

  It was too much, really too much.

  But wait! Arriving early at his Wall Street office one morning he found the school’s lawyer waiting to see him. He brought news of a lawsuit threatened against the school by the parents of a boy who claimed he had been the victim of a homosexual rape. As Donald skimmed through the counsel’s memoranda outlining the nature of the case, he felt a warming of his heart. Sexuality was the gift of an inscrutable god, accorded to man for his damnation as well as his reproduction. Many a great man had stubbed a fatal toe on it. Why should Michael Sayre not be another?

  4

  MICHAEL WAS EVER AFTER to refer to the boy Elihu Castor as Eris, because it was she who cast the apple of discord into the banquet of the gods.

  Elihu, as a fourth-former and fifteen, was a black-haired, chubby lad of a lounging physical attitude, with large, deeply apprehensive red-brown eyes, the pampered only child of a rich, stout, opinionated mother who had been married solely for her money by a merry, mocking, little cynic of a multi-clubbed gentleman who was too mortally afraid of his jealous and strictly supervising spouse to indulge in the adult
eries that constantly tempted him. Rosina and Elias Castor lived in a Beaux Arts house, too pompous for its exiguity, on East Seventieth Street in Manhattan and in a shingle villa in Newport. In the latter resort they clung to the fringes of the summer community that Rosina imagined that she dominated. Her husband, keener if more duplicitous, knew better.

  Elihu, who had inherited a portion of his father’s intelligence with his mother’s fatuity, had always understood their relationship. He had seen that his mother ruled and that his father, for all his sly innuendos and somehow lewd chuckles, obeyed. He knew that their sputtering arguments always terminated in a maternal mandate and that his own soft life of ease in a household of well-trained servants depended on the emotion he aroused in the ample bosom of an adoring female parent. On evenings when she read aloud to him of the dashing rescues of the Scarlet Pimpernel he would nestle in her comfortable lap and inhale her fragrant perfume and finger her large pearls. His father’s futile gibes and smutty jokes, even when he sensed in them the timid overtures of something like a paternal affection, could hardly be weighed against the conclusive power of the waved maternal wand.