The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

She decided the next day to go to New York and find out what her mother thought about the whole situation. She told her husband that she had to see her old dentist and took the train to Grand Central. Diane met her for lunch at Lutece, her favorite French restaurant. Of course, she knew all about her son-in-law’s trouble, and she listened quietly to Ione’s rehash, but on the main question she was wholly negative.

  “The foundation would never touch Michael if he’s expelled,” she said sadly. “Of course, in time these things are forgotten or glossed over, but by then the position will have been filled.”

  “I feel so helpless,” Ione complained. “Can you, Mother, who’ve survived so many office rumbles, imagine any way I can do something for poor Michael?”

  “There’s not much a headmaster’s wife can do, is there? You can talk to trustees, yes, but it’s so obvious to them that you have to say what you’re saying. All they can do is sympathize. They’re not going to vote for Michael because they’re sorry for you. And the faculty won’t really have much of a voice in this. Some might have, but you say the older ones may be against Michael anyway. And I doubt you could swing the wretched Spencer around even if you offered to sleep with him. Ugh!” Diane made a face as she recalled Donald’s features. “Oh, but that reminds me of something!” She suddenly smiled. “I’m rather surprised actually, now I think of it, that you haven’t mentioned it yourself.”

  “I suppose you’re thinking of Elias Castor.”

  “Damn right I’m thinking of Elias Castor. You knew him, of course, before either of you were married.”

  “I did. Not that I remember it with much pleasure.”

  “Didn’t you have an affair with him?”

  “Mother! How the hell did you know that?”

  “Mothers who keep their eyes open learn more than you think.”

  “But it was so brief! Actually only one night! And I think I must have been half drunk, or something like that. Do you know, it was the only affair I ever had?”

  “I didn’t know that. But it hardly surprises me. You were always so serious. You didn’t get that from your old ma.”

  “Elias and I couldn’t have been more different! I don’t think I ever even really liked him.”

  “One doesn’t always have to. The point is not how you felt about him but how he felt about you.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, find out.”

  “Are you suggesting that I should sleep with him now?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Your motive would be too apparent. But call him up—if you can do so without his wife’s knowing. At his club, maybe. I’m sure he has one, probably several, to get away from her. Ask him to meet you for a drink.”

  “And do you imagine he’ll come?”

  “Oh, he’ll come all right. He’s a cat for curiosity. Remember he worked for me once. Briefly.”

  “And what shall I say to him?”

  “Darling, you have to do something on your own. I can’t do it all for you.”

  It had indeed been a curious affair.

  Ione had met Elias Castor shortly after her graduation from law school, at a time when she was feeling discouraged and depressed. Although her grades had been good, she had failed the procedural half of the New York State bar exams, and she had been unsuccessful in her application for a clerkship in the big Wall Street law firm that she had particularly wished to join. She knew, of course, that a failure to pass both halves of the bar on a first try was too common to be much upset about and that there were plenty of other good firms that were apt to be more receptive to her bid, but with the natural exaggeration of youth she had allowed herself to be plunged in gloom and to wonder if she had not chosen the wrong profession.

  It was with the design of cheering her up that Diane Fletcher, at one of her and Ira’s dinner parties, had seated their daughter next to Elias Castor. It was not that she had any particular admiration for this ebullient young man, but he was lively and amusing and a bit of a buffoon. She had met him at parties in Gotham; despite his youth and idleness and lack of apparent importance, he seemed to go everywhere, one of the briefly taken-up pets of a glittering world. He had even offered one of the little pieces he sometimes wrote on Manhattan social doings to Style, and Diane had actually published it. What he lived on nobody knew; he presumably enjoyed some minimal allowance from his highly respectable family, who were reputed to disapprove strongly of his epicurean existence. Diane never dreamed that he would become anything like a beau of Ione’s; she had merely hoped that he would get her to laugh.

  Which he did.

  “Your ma tells me you’ve had the good sense to bust the silly bars,” he began. “My congratulations!”

  Ione stared at the funny man. “Why is it a subject for those?”

  “Well, won’t it relieve you from a life of getting people out of their bargains by crawling through the small print? Even Portia, after cheating poor Shylock out of his bond, had the sense to give it up and go back to her palace and the strapping husband her money had bought.”

  “But I’m not giving up the law!” Ione protested in surprise. “I’ll take the exam again in the spring, and with any luck I should pass.”

  “Why do all you pretty and charming girls want to be lawyers and dentists and undertakers?” he protested. “Aren’t you afraid of becoming as dull as the men? For it’s not our sex, you know, that makes us bores. It’s our jobs.”

  “You mean that, idle, you’d all be dazzling wits?”

  “Well, wittier, anyway. Read the old French novels about a désoeuvré society. The men are always delightful.”

  “Do you work?”

  “Heaven forbid!”

  “And you think that’s kept you from being a bore?”

  “Ah, touché! I guess I asked for that one. But you’d better keep on talking to me, for I can assure you the man on your other side is a worse one. So let’s chat. What I really want to ask you is, is it fair to other girls for you to have so many assets?”

  “What do you mean by ‘assets’?”

  “Well, to begin with you have the two that are most needed in the game of husband catching: money and beauty. And you only need one for that game. You’re playing it with loaded dice.”

  “Assuming I’m playing it at all,” she retorted with some hauteur. “I can’t be a judge of my beauty, as you call it, but I can tell you right now that I’m far from being an heiress.”

  “Yet your parents certainly live well.” He gazed admiringly down the well-appointed table.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Mr. Castor, but my parents live well because they work hard and earn well. They are not accumulators, either of them. They believe, as I do, in the here and now.”

  “So you’ll be left like Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl to freeze to death in the snow? Dear me, what a pity.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. They’ll look after me. All I’m saying is that I’m not an heiress.”

  “You mean we can’t afford to marry each other?”

  “You mean that you can’t afford to marry me. Well, I must console myself.”

  “You sound as if that wouldn’t be hard. You should have more sympathy for the poor guy who has to marry an heiress.”

  “Why do you have to?”

  “How else do you expect me to live, Ione? I may call you that, may I not?” She nodded impatiently. “And the competition is dreadful. All the fellows are after the moneybags. And bags many of them are.”

  “Are you implying that all heiresses are doomed to be married for their money?”

  “Every blessed one of them.”

  “And never for love?”

  “Oh, that may be sometimes thrown in. But it’s not essential. In Europe people are more realistic about this—or used to be. The indispensability of the dot was frankly recognized. A suitor who withdrew his proposal if the dot proved inadequate was deemed a perfectly reasonable young man. But over here we carried our revolution not on
ly against the tyranny of old Europe but against what we saw as its materialism and immorality, blithely ignoring the fact that we ourselves were even more steeped in those qualities. We proclaimed our faith in liberty and love! And our marriages, all our marriages had to be based on love, mutual love. The national myth included a picture of the type of man who married for money; he was sly, sleek, mustachioed, foreign, a kind of stage villain. He was held up to our heiresses as a type to avoid, and avoid him they easily did, as he didn’t exist. They rarely saw him in his real form: the handsome, broad-shouldered, blond, blue-eyed captain of an Ivy League shell. So accepted was the legend that the groom himself, handing his lacey bride into the Rolls-Royce that would take them from the church to the opulent reception, may not have fully recognized the role played in his courtship by the gleam of his beloved’s gold.”

  Ione at last found herself intrigued. His elocution was so smooth; he might have been reciting a piece he had learned by heart. Perhaps he was. “Heavens! Where does that leave poor girls like me?”

  “Oh, you have the other asset. It’s more than enough. It might even lure a fortune hunter from his goal.”

  “Even one as committed as yourself?”

  He gave her a sudden strange look. “You know, it might. It really might.”

  “Even if it meant you had to take a job?”

  “Oh, no, no, that might be too much. But wait! Didn’t you say you were going to stick to the law? Mightn’t you become a partner in one of those great firms? And aren’t some of them supposed to make millions?”

  “Not many women, I fear.”

  “But that will change, won’t it? Women are advancing everywhere. And I wouldn’t have to be entirely useless as a husband. In the evenings you could read your briefs to me. I might even give you some pointers in style. I’ve written for your ma’s magazine, you know.”

  “But in the evenings you’d be going to your dinner parties, wouldn’t you? You couldn’t give them up. The hostesses of Manhattan, like the Maenads, would tear you in pieces!”

  He tapped his forehead. “As Albany says in Lear: ‘Great thing of us forgot!’”

  That, as she began to discover, was the thing about Elias. He read a lot; he loved poetry; he had even once written some. There was a serious side to him if one could only pull it out. He had twice cited Shakespeare in their first colloquy.

  The meeting was their introduction to a sometimes acerbic, sometimes hilarious relationship. Elias professed himself at once stricken, as he put it, like a naked Saint Sebastian, a pincushion riddled with the arrows of Eros. He called her constantly to tell her jokes, sometimes off-color ones, accompanied by screams of laughter, and to urge her to go out with him. When she at last agreed to do so, she found that she was diverted. She had started working for Mr. Abrams and was finding the long drudging days in his law library researching obscure points a dismal contrast to the sparkling ones her parents described of their own activities, which she had once tended to look rather down upon. It was something of a relief to dine with the exuberant Elias at a good French restaurant, even when, on a rare occasion, at the end of a meal, he would fling up his hands in mock despair, exhibit an empty pocketbook, and hand her the bill. He somehow made it seem a compliment to her sophistication that they were both above such petty things.

  If she was looking for the hidden good in him, he, like a genial satyr, seemed intent on an opposite quest. He never made a pass at her, but he did not hesitate to suggest that an affair with a lover as adroit as Elias Castor might help to make up for the dreary days of the profession to which she had quixotically chosen to enslave herself. He even, and only half-jokingly, maintained that she had carried her natural early resistance to parental rule to puritanical excess and that she had turned herself into a kind of John Knox hurling epithets at the lovely Mary Stuart. Reluctantly amused, she wondered if there might not be some truth in this.

  One night at a cabaret he waxed almost serious. She had accused him of being less than truthful on the subject of his own parents, whom he described as tyrants and who she had heard were reputed to be a kindly and sympathetic couple.

  “Oh, they didn’t beat me, if that’s what you mean,” he retorted without his usual snicker. “They even loved me, if you like. But they were too greedy for their children’s love in return. Why, they always wanted to know, couldn’t we be one big happy family? Why? Because the price was too great. My brothers paid it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t lie.”

  “Lie about what?”

  “About everything. Oh, it didn’t matter if everyone knew it was a lie. It only mattered that you should say it. That you loved Christmas, for example. That you loved Mummy and Daddy more than anything. That you loved baseball, football, and all those horrid sports. That you loved the beach club in summer and the nasty little brats whom you had to play with. That you loved Jesus. That you loved God! You accuse me of untruthfulness, Ione. Well, if there’s one thing I stand for in my admittedly rather screwed up existence it’s the truth!”

  Ione had been impressed by this. It had a good deal to do with what happened that night when, for the first time, she let him come up to her apartment when he took her home. There was also an element of experimentation in it. She had been a virgin longer than many of her friends, and had begun to see the state as an inhibition rather than a virtue. So they copulated. She was always to insist to herself that this was precisely what they had done. They did not become lovers. He professed to be one, but she didn’t really believe him, and she herself was certainly not. Nor did they “sleep together,” for she sent him home afterward. No, they copulated, purely and simply, and without having previously so much as kissed. He had even chuckled as he pulled down his pants and murmured, “You’re going to love this, honey. You really are.”

  Well, yes, she had liked it. Sort of. But it was never repeated. The next day he appeared unexpectedly at her office and insisted that she go out for lunch with him. When she pleaded that she had to work he threatened to make a scene, and she rapidly consented.

  In the restaurant he proposed marriage. He was deadly serious. She tried in vain to make light of it.

  “But your heiresses, Eli. What about them?”

  “They’ll have to do without me, that’s all.”

  “And what do you propose that we should live on?”

  “You have a job, and your parents will do something for us. Even mine will if they decide I’m serious and will go to work.”

  “You could bring yourself to that?”

  He smiled and tried to take her hand across the table. But she withdrew it. “You see what you’ve reduced me to,” he reproached her. “You behold passion’s slave.”

  Ione remembered ruefully that her mother had once told her, “Sex is never a thing to play with, my dear. Even I have learned that.” For she saw now with a blinding clarity that poor Elias was desperately trying to cast himself in a role he would never be able to sustain. He might have been sincerely in love. He might have truly wished to become a responsible and loving spouse. It might even have been, had she cared to boast about it, which she certainly didn’t, a triumph on her part to have subdued so indurated an epicurean to this state, but she could only bitterly regret it. Elias would have to get over this. And, of course, he would get over it.

  “The whole thing is quite impossible, Eli,” she said gravely now. “I’m not in love with you, and I never could be. You’re a good friend, and that’s all. And I’m not so fatuous as to imagine that our friendship will survive my refusal to have it become anything more. You will naturally resent me, however unreasonable that may be. Life is like that.”

  His face showed only too clearly that he had taken in that she really meant it. He made one last try. “Was I that bad last night? I can do better.”

  “You were fine. That’s not it at all.”

  “What do you suppose this is going to do to me? Have you no sense of responsibility?”

  She had to smile. “Of course, it’s
a blow to your masculine vanity. Men shouldn’t take it that way but they do. However, you’ll get over that. You can console yourself by thinking what a sad mistake I’ve made. You may even find yourself a tiny bit relieved.”

  At last she heard his old laugh. “You’re a little devil, Ione! And you’re sending me back to the big one!”

  Whereupon he abruptly left the table, the restaurant, his unfinished meal, and the bill. Ione gratefully paid it.

  Some months later at a Fletcher dinner party Ira informed his daughter that she would be seated by a young man called Michael Sayre.

  “He’s not another Elias Castor,” he observed.

  “That may be a point in his favor.”

  “By the way, what did you ever do with Castor?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Perhaps that’s all one can do with him.”

  13

  WHEN IONE LOOKED UP in her Social Register the name of Elias Castor, whom she had not seen, except for a casual meeting on the street or a glimpse at a social gathering, for a decade and a half, she was not surprised to find him listed as a member of no less than four men’s clubs. She telephoned to the first, the Patroons, at five o’clock one afternoon and was informed that Mr. Castor was indeed presently in the card room, but could not be disturbed. She insisted that it was an emergency and boldly gave her name. Some minutes later she heard Elias’s indignant query in her ear.

  “Is that really you, Ione? You should know that we can’t talk except through counsel.”

  “There’s no reason adverse parties to a suit can’t meet so long as both agree to it.”

  “But I don’t agree to it! So please hang up. I want to get back to my bridge game. The others are waiting for me.”

  “Eli, I’ve got to talk to you! For the sake of our old friendship. Please!”

  “A fat lot you care about our old friendship! Why should I do anything for you, Ione, after the way you treated me?”

  “Because you’re a nicer person.”

  “Oh?” His tone showed some relenting. “But don’t you know that if Rosina found out I’d even spoken to you on the phone, she’d take the first plane to Reno?”