The result was even more than he had hoped. His mother’s eyes widened as he had never seen them do, and her scream tore his eardrums.
“Oh, my poor darling ravished child! What can I do to make up for this dreadful thing? Tell me, tell me, my sweety boy, what Mama can do to console you and make you happy again and safe again and her own lovey-dovey innocent babe?” With which she almost smothered him in a maternal hug.
“Don’t send me back there, please Mummy. Don’t send me back.”
“Send you back! To that den of iniquity! I should think not. I’ll send something back to that cesspool—you can be sure of that—but it won’t be my darling boy.”
Asking him now what he would like to do, of all the wonderful things she could offer him to take his mind off the horror, she was a trifle surprised at the speed with which he announced his desire to go to a popular musical comedy, but he was sent off to it at a matinée that same day while she went at once to her lawyer’s office.
That night, when her husband came home from his afternoon bridge game at his club, she told the butler to ask him to meet her in the library. When Elias came in she told him solemnly to close the door behind him.
“What’s up?” he asked, as he complied. “Has your new maid mixed up your winter underwear with your summer things? Oh, but that was last week, wasn’t it?”
“You like to be funny, Elias, about everything, but today I won’t have it. Our son has been subject to a horrible experience at school. Another boy, a school prefect, invaded his cubicle at night.”
“Oh, that sort of thing still goes on, does it? It did in my day, but I rather thought they’d cleaned it up.”
Rosina had been sitting but now she rose and loomed before him. “Elias Castor, our child has been raped! Do you understand what I am saying?”
He knew at once he had to look serious. He was well aware when Rosina was dangerous, and when she was dangerous she could be very much so. He came forward now and took a seat, indicating that she should also do so. “Forgive my silly tongue, Rosina, and tell me all about it.”
It was obviously not going to be one of those moments, like too many others in the minor crises of his largely untroubled life, when he could count on laughs to get him through. These had been his sole refuge in the existence that had preceded his married life, when he had lived with his family, scions of “old New York,” as serious as they were high-minded, but of more lineage than cash, with a brilliant lawyer father who had died young before his fortune was realized, a heroic mother who had somehow made ends meet, and two older brothers who had been Phi Beta Kappas and athletic stars at Yale. Elias, far the youngest and certainly the least talented, blond, short, easygoing, cynical, sensual, and always joking, had from childhood refused to compete with the lofty family standards in morals and games and studies, turning a good-natured back on the disapproval of his siblings and ultimately changing the ill will of his surrounding society into a grudging respect for his bubbling wit and unrebuffable good nature. His favorite motto was Oscar Wilde’s famous advice on how to deal with temptation, and he dared cheerfully to proclaim to all that it was his inexorable fate—thank you very much—to marry for money. Which at age thirty he did. And no one who met Rosina was under any illusion that he could have had any other motive.
There had, however, been one serious period in his unserious life, and it unfolded now before him as his wife inveighed against the horror of Averhill. At age sixteen he had been briefly happy at that school. His ebullient nature and cheerful humor had gained him a mild but definite popularity even with the more athletic leaders of the form, and he had found a resource in poetry that had actually turned his mind away from himself. And he had formed a close friendship with Tommy Bendle, who later became a recognized poet. The two of them had taken long weekend hikes in the beautiful autumnal countryside, reciting quatrains from the Rubáiyat. Elias had even composed a dramatic monologue in what he hoped was the style of Browning about the apostacy of the Roman emperor Julian. It had been a heady time, and he had known a new happiness, but at Yale, where both boys matriculated, Elias was lured too often to New York for debutante parties, and Bendle, increasingly immersed in his verse making, had become something of a recluse. The friendship drooped and finally ended when Elias chose another roommate more in the social swing of college life.
It was the nostalgic memory of those halcyon Averhill days, shedding a roseate glow over the past, that now jarred disagreeably with Rosina’s hysterical denunciations.
“Please, please, Rosina,” he pleaded, “can’t you take this a little more calmly? Let us go over it step by step. Surely you are not implying that the school does not thoroughly disapprove of what Elihu says happened to him?”
“What Elihu says!” Rosina almost shrieked. “Do you think our son would lie?”
“Any boy might lie.”
“But not about a thing like this! You don’t seem to realize that the child was violated.”
Patiently he listened to her repetition of the episode. A very similar thing had happened to him at Averhill, and he recalled it with unblushing pleasure. It had started with his being rather pushed around, but that was not the way it had ended. Had something of the same sort happened to Elihu? Possibly. But even if not, what harm was done? Boys did that sort of thing. Elihu might well be in emotional trouble, but that was not from Averhill. His mother had been the cause of that.
“Very well,” he said at last. “I think I get the picture. What I fail to see is what you expect us to do about it. If we raise a stink, do you think that is going to help our boy when he goes back to the school?”
“Elias Castor, what are you talking about? Do you think I’m ever going to return my son to that sink of perversion? Never in your life! You ask what I’m going to do about it. I’m going to give that institution the treatment it deserves. I’m going to prosecute it! I’m going to sue it! I’m going to blacken its name from coast to coast!”
“You want damages?”
“I want justice!”
“You don’t care then that this sort of publicity may redound badly on Elihu?”
“Why should it? He’s innocent, the poor boy. He’s the victim. He will grow up to understand that there are cases where a decent citizen must brave dirt thrown to expose crime!”
“A crime? How has the school broken a law?”
“By failing to report Elihu’s complaint. There’s a Massachusetts statute that requires the school to inform the local DA of any student’s allegation of a sexual assault. This was obviously not done. The whole thing was hushed up.”
“You’ve talked to a lawyer already, Rosina?”
“Damn right I have!”
“I think you might have told me first.”
Rosina exploded at this. “Why should I have done that? When have you been the slightest help to me in any of my legal or financial affairs? Have you done anything but be the recipient of my bounty? Well, I’m telling you right now, Elias Castor, that I am expecting some small return for all that I’ve done for you since our marriage. I don’t half like your attitude in this matter. You don’t seem to care about what your own son has miserably suffered. I want you to stand behind me in every step I take in this business, and if you fail me there are plenty of ways in which I can fail you. Don’t put me to it. I made one mistake in letting you talk me into sending the boy to this filthy school. I don’t intend to make another.”
She had risen and was standing before him in a threatening pose, her thick rouged lips flapping as she spoke, her dyed red head shaking. He thought of Jezebel and how she had been thrown down from a high window and consumed by dogs. But he felt a sickness in his stomach with the realization of his utter impotence. Unknown to her his gambling debts at one of his clubs had risen to twenty thousand dollars, and he would need all his diminishing credit with her to get them paid.
7
HUDDLED AT THE TIP of a small rocky peninsula, sticking its nose into the rough Atlantic off
Cape Cod, was a dark, weather-beaten pile of shingle surrounded by deep porches and surmounted by inexplicable towers, the summer residence of Ezra Prentice, retired senior partner of Prentice & Brooks, one of State Street’s most venerable law firms. And seated on the porch with the veteran jurist, contemplating a sea preparing itself for an early spring storm, was his son, Hiram, the small, balding, pale but aspiring district attorney from a mid-state county. Both held in their hands dark glasses of undiluted whiskey.
“There’s very little point in your coming to see me, Hiram, if you don’t take my advice.” Ezra’s tone was emphasized by a deep crackle. “You can do as I say, and maybe one day be governor of the state. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. Or you can listen to that mollycoddle of a wife of yours and end up precisely where you started.”
“But, Father, I never said I wasn’t going to take your advice,” the son protested. “I was just asking you to look at the question from some other points of view.”
“It’s the same damn thing.”
“Is it? You think I’m going against you when I point out that scandals about sex have sometimes boomeranged against the politicians who have used them?”
“Against the politicians who have misused them! You’ve got a clear case, my boy.”
“How can I be sure of that?”
“Because it’s the kind of flung dung that always sticks. Now you listen to me, Hiram, while I go over a few fundamentals of who we are, men like you and me, and how we got to where we’ve got. I know it’s an old story, but something tells me that your memory needs jogging. It’s probably the fault of that wife of yours. A man who mixes his wife with his business is a man lost.”
Ezra Prentice looked the part he had played in American life as if he had been painted by Grant Wood. His big body and long face were rough and gnarled, as weather-beaten as his summer villa; his beetling brow, steely gray hair, and eagle’s nose might have been the prow of an old whaler headed into a giant billow. He ran a small summer fishing business around his peninsula and helped the hired men to haul in the nets in the early morning. Hairs protruded from his ears and nostrils.
“People think we’re a type that has died out, but we’re a lot tougher than that. We’ve had to move over a bit to make room for the decadent hordes, but we’re still here. We learned with John Winthrop that a New England winter had to be coped with and that a good Indian was a dead Indian. And we’re not going to be put off by all the crazy modern isms-makers that have invaded the land: the Irish mackerel snatchers, the socialists and commies, and all the deluded do-gooders who would make hash of our state. They can be controlled, but to be controlled they have to be watched. They have to be manipulated! They have to be understood.”
“But, Father, I know all that. How does it help me with this Averhill case?”
“That’s what I’m coming to if you’ll just hold your horses. Averhill is another of these rich New York—supported nests of liberal thought to which all the pinko teachers whose heroes we’ve defeated at the polls have retreated to bide their time. Half the universities and private schools in the nation fall into that category. And you, my son, are offered a double-edged sword! Not only can you deliver a fatal blow to a sick academy, you can achieve public acclaim from a moral majority that still honors a few decent principles. Or thinks it does.”
“But what happened to this Castor kid might have happened in any other school. You know that, Dad. Is it fair to single out Averhill to be the scapegoat for what goes on everywhere?”
“Hiram, do you want to go places in politics or don’t you?”
“Of course I do, but a man should still have some principles, shouldn’t he? You were just mentioning them yourself.”
“Yes, but not when you have a chance like this one. Of course, I know what boys do, and I don’t give a damn about it, either. That’s not the point. The point is that sex is a weapon that every politician on his toes must know how and when to use. It’s a kind of atomic bomb that you have to be careful with, but there are times when it’s indispensable. Schools today are dominated by the mothers who don’t know beans about what their little darlings are up to. You can terrify them with words like sodomy, or buggery, or oral sex, or rape. By God, this case could make you governor!”
“You make it sound as if it were a kind of moral duty.”
“Well, call it that if you like! Haven’t I heard that Averhill is bowing to the general trend and is going to admit girls?”
“Oh, it just has.”
“Then there you are. The school will become a brothel! Tell the mothers: Send your innocent young daughter to Averhill, and she’ll be raped like the Castor boy!”
8
WILLY WELDON, the senior master and head of the classics department, a stout, fussy fiftiesh bachelor with a round puffy face and grayish hair parted in the middle, was listening to the chairman of the trustees over an excellent lunch in Boston’s Ritz Hotel. At the school people were apt to listen to Willy, who could charm both students and faculty with his purring wit and love of gossip but who could also command immediate respect when the purr suddenly swelled into a stentorian burst of temper. But Willy would never show the latter to the few he acknowledged to be his superiors, of whom Donald Spencer was certainly one, and the fine Latin scholar, the editor of a nationally used textbook on Virgil and Horace, was now offering an attention to the chairman that was almost reverential.
“It’s important to me, Weldon,” Spencer was saying, “that you be up to date on all that is unfolding in this case. Before I recommend any action to the board, I shall need the support of some of the older faculty members who have been out of sympathy with the drastic changes inaugurated in the last few years. You know, of course, that the Castors are demanding not only a half million in damages, but a full apology. What you don’t know as yet is that the trustees in yesterday’s meeting voted to reject their demands in toto. There were some who wanted to leave the door open for a possible settlement, but the vote denying the apology was unanimous. The Castors’ counsel can be expected to file the complaint in court no later than next week, so we’re in for it.”
Willy’s eyes glistened. Mightn’t the very fact that Spencer had arranged their meeting outside the school signify that he felt a delicacy about taking any action against the headmaster on the campus itself? Had the golden moment really come when Sayre could be compelled to resign? For two years now he had been in constant veiled communication with the chairman, who had easily gleaned the abhorrence of the Latin scholar for a schedule that rendered the dead languages optional and of the confirmed and virtuous old bachelor for the introduction of chattering, giggling girls to what he had deemed a kind of monastery. Willy had naturally apprehended that he himself would appear in this new academy, where youth was so blithely catered to, as an old fogy, a relic of an era that had been rightly consigned to the dustbin. In such a situation was rebellion not sanctified? Willy had been passionately loyal to Michael’s predecessor, the Reverend Paul Prideaux, who for forty years had dominated the school with his fervent Episcopalian oratory, his faith in the ordered life, and his command presence. And he had tried his best to be similarly loyal to Michael at first, but there had come a time when he had had to decide that some sort of resistance was needed to save the life work of Dr. Prideaux from total annihilation. But until this lunch he had not thought it feasible actually to oust the headmaster.
“And it’s not only the Castors’ suit,” Spencer continued. “Our lawyer has also informed me that the state of Massachusetts is about to bring criminal proceedings against the school for not reporting to it the Castor boy’s complaint, as required by statute. Is it not now actually the duty of the chairman of the school trustees to institute an inquiry as to the fitness to continue in office of a headmaster whose action—or nonaction—has brought this obloquy down on our heads? What do you say to that, Weldon? Eh?”
“Dear me, sir, I suppose it may be.”
“You just suppose? Y
ou don’t roundly affirm it?”
Willy quailed, as before a basilisk. “Yes, sir, I affirm it.”
He trembled a bit as he spoke. Strongly as he felt, he had never expected to be compelled to choose sides openly in a conflict that might prove an ugly one to win and an uglier one to lose. Only as late as the previous summer had he come to realize the almost sinister power that Spencer exercised over those who came within his sphere of influence. Willy, who enjoyed a small inherited trust income in addition to his salary, had been able to rent a suite for the summer months in a plush hotel in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he was pleasantly entertained in the great houses of hostesses delighted to find so cultivated an extra man for their dinner parties. But he had recently found that, in the month when Spencer occupied the great Stone mansion on the Shore Path that his father had left to him, he was monopolized by the chairman, who wanted exhaustively to know everything that had gone on in Averhill in the previous year.
“Affirmation may not be quite enough, my friend,” the remorseless Spencer now went on. “I want to know if I can expect your active cooperation in this matter.”
“But isn’t it, sir, a matter for the board? Would they really wish to have the faculty involved?”
“Shouldn’t they? Look here, Weldon. If Michael Sayre finds there’s a movement to unseat him, he’s going to fight it, and fight hard. He’s not the type to go quietly. I’ve known him most of my life, and you can believe me when I tell you that. There’ll be a war and a bloody one, and not one in which innocent bystanders are spared. Everyone will be involved whether they like it or not: trustees, faculty, alumni, parents, even the students. I want to know, Weldon, just how you stand. And whether you’ll help me or not.”
Willy glanced nervously at those small staring eyes. The yellow in them seemed even yellower.
“Oh, I’m with you, of course, sir.”
“I thought if nothing else would bring you around, your moral sense would. I can’t imagine William Weldon tolerating open sex on Averhill’s campus. Girls with boys. Boys with boys. Girls with girls. And, eventually, even with faculty members. Why not? A free-for-all. The great Michael has no vulgar prejudices!”
The Headmaster's Dilemma Page 9
