The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Rosina need never know. Oh, please, Eli!”

  “Oh, all right. But give me an hour to finish my bridge game. And then come down here—we’ll meet in the bar. No, Rosina’s ghastly brother-in-law might be in there, tanking up. I’d better get a private room. Give your name at the door as Mrs. Smith, and I’ll leave word you’re to be admitted.”

  An hour later, in a small sitting room hung with hunting prints, Elias silently and somberly consumed two martinis while Ione related the story of the long and bitter conflict between her husband and Donald Spencer and how she had unwittingly contributed to its final and fatal rift.

  “And now this terrible case is going to finish off poor Michael,” she concluded dolefully. “And it’s all my fault!”

  Elias shook his head. “I don’t agree it’s that, and I’m sorry for your trouble. But I cannot fathom what you expect me to do about it or even why you’re here at all.”

  “That’s what I’m coming to. Michael is convinced that your son is lying to clear himself and keep the truth from his mother. That would be a perfectly natural thing for a scared boy to do. Throw the blame on another, particularly an older boy, a bully, and a prefect of the school who had no business being in his cubicle. Oh, Eli, if you could only make your son realize the damage he is causing and that telling the truth is really not going to hurt him all that much!”

  Elias’s eyes gleamed with sudden humor. “You mean it was a classic case of when rape is inevitable… You know the rest.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you really expect me to get my boy to admit that?”

  “You wouldn’t have to go that far. If you thought there was any chance that Michael’s assumption was correct, you could simply drop the suit.”

  “Rosina would never do that.”

  “But you’re a co-plaintiff. Her suit would collapse if you withdrew.”

  “I daresay it would. But what do you think the tigress, deprived of her prey, would do to me? I’d lose my spouse, my son, and my sole means of support at one fell swoop!”

  “You told me once, Eli, that the one moral principle that you had adhered to all your life was truth. That if everything else was a lie, you still had that. Isn’t it worth saving no matter what the cost?”

  “You’re pretty free with other people’s costs. You consign me to the gutter with a few noble words. And what makes you so sure that I believe that your husband’s theory of what went on that dark night in my son’s cubicle is correct?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have agreed to see me today if you didn’t suspect there was something in it.”

  Elias chuckled. “That, I admit, is a shrewd thrust. I will also admit that we have no sure means of knowing exactly what did go on in that cubicle. Of course, Elihu may have lied. Scared boys often do, as you say. On the other hand he may not have. And I will also tell you frankly that, had the decision been mine alone, I would not have instituted this suit. The force behind it is solely Rosina’s, but it’s a terrible force.”

  “You could still save us. Just by admitting your doubts. Would Rosina really find that so unforgivable? Oh, Eli, I appeal to what I know is the real good at the bottom of your heart!”

  “I note where you place it. No, you ask too much, Ione.” He glanced at his watch. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be getting home. Rosina will be expecting me.”

  Ione arose in despair. “Will you at least think it over?”

  “Ah, my dear, I think I can assure you that I shall be thinking of little else in the next few days.”

  But after she had gone, he did not go home. He went into the bar and had two more drinks, sitting moodily at a corner table and rejecting with a curtness most unlike him the offers of fellow members to join him. What he had not told Ione was that the father of a classmate of Elihu’s at the day school the boy was now attending had called on Elias privately to explain to him why Elihu was no longer welcome at his house and why his own son would not be allowed to visit Elihu’s. The classmate’s father had caught the two boys playing “dirty games” together, and he refused coldly to specify what those games were. When Elias had related this later to his wife, which he had to, for Elihu was asking why he couldn’t visit his pal, Rosina had become almost hysterical.

  “The poor child has become hopelessly corrupted by what they did to him at Averhill! We must bend all our efforts now to saving his soul!”

  “You don’t think it throws any doubt on the validity of your case?”

  “On my case! Do you mean you’re not with me, Elias Castor?”

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure that I am.”

  “You’d better make yourself sure, then,” she said grimly. “Or at least button your lips on any doubt you’re disloyal enough to entertain. We’re in this thing together, and I shall know how to treat any defector!”

  After his fourth martini Elias felt a wonderful buzzing in his head. Wonderful because it was attended with a mental view of a splendid horizon as seen from an Alpine peak. He saw himself as the apostle of truth that Ione had so eloquently invoked. He saw himself as the man he might have been had he married her. Another Michael Sayre! Why not? Of course he knew that the vision wouldn’t last. Tomorrow he would be Elias Castor again, his same shabby, joking self, except with a hangover. He beckoned now to his old friend, the gently disapproving bartender, to bring him a fifth cocktail. The one thing he could do would be the one decent thing of all his days, something irradicable that no matter how far down he slipped he would never be able to forget. He would be Sydney Carton and Rosina the guillotine!

  He laughed his own old laugh at the sentimental fool that he was and went to the telephone booth in the hall and dialed, with some difficulty, his lawyer’s home number.

  14

  SOME MONTHS AFTER the dramatic collapse of the Castors’ lawsuit and the state of Massachusetts’s grudging settlement of its complaint for a nominal sum, the rehabilitated headmaster of Averhill and his much relieved wife were enjoying a restful weekend in New York as the guests of her parents. They were leisurely dressing for the small dinner the Fletchers were giving in their honor, and had treated themselves to an early cocktail.

  Ione was showing a faintly uneasy curiosity about a visit her husband had paid that afternoon to Elias Castor, who, evicted from his home by Rosina, was living at one of his clubs. She had never told her husband about her one-night affair, not because she feared his jealousy but because she was ashamed of her partner.

  “Well, I hadn’t seen Castor since the day his case blew up,” Michael explained. “And I’d never properly thanked him. After all, he gave up a lot for us.”

  “He righted a wrong he had done. Still, you have a point. Is he absolutely bust? Should we help him out?”

  “He told me he had sold the pornographia collection he had bought with Rosina’s money for a cracking sum.”

  “How like him!”

  “And he has custody of Elihu half the year. He says the surrogate may award him an allowance out of the trust Rosina set up for the boy in the months that Elihu is with him.”

  Ione clapped her hands with a laugh. “You know he is clever. He’s beaten the terrible Rosina at her own game. I guess we won’t have to worry about him.”

  “But he told me something else. He told me that one of his reasons for killing the case was to assuage your feeling of guilt about embroiling me with Spencer. He seems to think that you wanted us to leave Averhill and that this was a way to bring it about. And that you felt responsible for the whole mess. Is that true, darling? Did you want to leave Averhill that much?”

  Ione twisted her shoulders in discomfort. Why did this wretched thing have to come up when everything was straightened out? “Oh, maybe I did, a bit, back then. But all that’s over now. These awful lawsuits have made me appreciate Averhill and what you’re doing for the school. We don’t know a good thing until it’s about to be snatched away from us.”

  “But you were bored to dea
th with life at school?”

  “Oh, maybe a bit. But that’s over, as I say.”

  “I knew it. And I think I’ve found a solution. If we stay at the school, which will depend on whether you think it’s one. I want you to share my job, not just in theory but in fact. I want you to accept a salaried post as dean of women. The girls will soon make up half the student body, and I want you to be as much in charge of them as I am of the boys. You will have your own office and teach any course you choose. I suggest you might start with history of art. And when we get our little art gallery—I already have a couple of good pledges—you will, of course, be its curator.”

  “Oh, Michael!” The sudden tears stung her eyes. “You really are the perfect husband.” She reached for the glass on her dresser and finished it with a gulp. “You make me feel so … so inadequate. I think I want another cocktail.”

  “Well, you’re not going to have one. I don’t need an alcoholic wife on my hands, like poor Donald.”

  Ione was too full of grateful emotion not to welcome the opportunity for an abrupt change of subject. “Speaking of whom, I suppose the great sports plaza is down the drain since his resignation from the board.”

  “That was only to be expected. But some of the trustees are feeling sorry about the way I’ve been kicked around. There’s talk of raising money for a new gym. One of which even I will approve.”

  Ione rose now from her dressing table and moved to the door, ready to join her parents in the parlor. “Well, one thing, anyway, is clear from this whole nasty business. The Donald Spencers of this world are not going to run schools like Averhill.”

  Michael buttoned his dinner jacket as he joined her. “Not yet, my dear. Not yet.”