The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  Praise for Amanda Cross and her Kate Fansler novels

  “No one has a sharper eye than Amanda Cross.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Cross is wise in the ways of academe, and her figures speak in literate, complete sentences, which surely is a requirement for nuanced ambiguity.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Treat yourself to some of the best mysteries around, and read all the Kate Fansler novels. You won’t be disappointed.”

  —Bay Area Reporter

  “Cross remains queen of the American literary whodunit.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  By Amanda Cross:

  THE THEBAN MYSTERIES*

  POETIC JUSTICE*

  DEATH IN A TENURED POSITION*

  IN THE LAST ANALYSIS*

  THE JAMES JOYCE MURDER*

  THE QUESTION OF MAX*

  SWEET DEATH, KIND DEATH*

  NO WORD FROM WINIFRED*

  A TRAP FOR FOOLS*

  THE PLAYERS COME AGAIN*

  AN IMPERFECT SPY*

  THE COLLECTED STORIES*

  THE PUZZLED HEART*

  *Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1971 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  Copyright renewed 1999 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  A Library of Congress Catalog Card Number can be obtained from the publisher upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80211-8

  v3.1

  To IMΦ

  and IIO

  No, though a man be wise, ’tis no shame for him to learn many things, and to bend in season.

  —ANTIGONE

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  One

  THE telephone and the front doorbell rang simultaneously in the Amhearst apartment with a call to action which, Reed happily observed, reminded him of plays like You Can’t Take It With You.

  “Those were good days in the theater,” he said, rising from the couch where he and Kate were enjoying a cocktail.

  “Perhaps,” Kate answered, putting down her glass, “but I can’t help feeling that the Greeks wrote great plays because they got the characters on and off the stage without the aid of bells.”

  “You get the door,” Reed said. “I’ll get the telephone.” He walked down the passage to his study and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said, wishing he had thought to bring his martini with him.

  “This is Miss Tyringham of the Theban,” a woman’s cultured voice greeted him on the phone. “May I please speak to Mrs. Reed Amhearst?”

  “This is Mr. Amhearst of Kaufman and Hart,” Reed wanted ridiculously to answer. He could hear Kate at the door. “Oh, my God!” he heard her say in astonished tones which boded no good. “Well, come in for a time anyway, and let’s talk about it.”

  “Can you hold on for a moment?” Reed asked. “I’ll see if she’s available.”

  “Thank you. I do apologize for disturbing you at this hour, but it is a matter of some importance. Mrs. Amhearst was Kate Fansler, was she not, when she was at the Theban?”

  Was, is, and ever more will be, Reed happily thought. “Yes,” he answered. “Hold on a moment.”

  He made his way back into the living room cautiously, as a cat might return to a place invaded by unknown, perhaps dangerous, beings.

  He found Kate mixing herself another martini—in itself an ominous sign, since she always claimed that when Reed mixed them they were nectar, and when she mixed them they were intoxicating hair oil—while collapsed on the couch, its head in its hands, was a longhaired youth, revealing himself by his beard as male and by the fact that he rose, after a moment’s hesitation, to his feet as having, in some dimly remembered era, been taught the manners of a lost world. On the run, Reed thought. Let us hope it is Kaufman and Hart, not Sophocles.

  “Reed,” Kate said, “may I introduce John Megareus Fansler, known as Jack to his friends.”

  “Of whom he has many, I’m sure,” Reed said, holding out a hand.

  “That,” Kate said, “is Philip Barry.”

  “A nephew?” Reed asked. “Related to that other nephew, Leo? I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “You haven’t,” Kate said. “Jack did not appear at that massive family reception given by the Fanslers for us newlyweds. Clever him.”

  Jack smiled. “Leo told me it was pretty hairy,” he said, “except for the food. Ted, who is only twelve, never notices anything but food. My brothers.”

  “Will you have a drink?” Reed asked, bending over the martini pitcher. “Beer, perhaps? Sherry?”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t drink,” he said. “I don’t want anything.”

  “I always forget that your generation doesn’t drink,” Reed said. “Nor,” he added, rising from mixing his martini, “should my generation. I’ve forgotten the formidable lady on the phone, asking for Kate Fansler that was. She has probably decided you no longer are, and has gone away.”

  But, when Kate picked up the receiver, Miss Tyringham was still there. Kate apologized.

  “It is I who should apologize for disturbing you at this hour,” Miss Tyringham said. “I’m calling at the suggestion of Julia Stratemayer. Did Mr. Amhearst tell you this is Miss Tyringham, headmistress of the Theban?”

  At the name the Theban there rushed through Kate’s mind, instantaneously as is supposed to happen when one is drowning, a whole series of recollections: singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” at the opening assembly, the elevators in which one was not supposed to talk, profound discussions of sex in the john, the line in the cafeteria, persuading her parents not to send her away to boarding school. “I don’t believe,” Miss Tyringham continued, “that we have met.”

  “No,” Kate said. “But I gather from Julia Stratemayer that you are all coping, in these difficult times.”

  “We try, but it isn’t easy. One never knows what will turn up, all the girls in pants, or in sandals, or barefoot, or wanting to close the school because of the war. We try to move with events, which come not singly but in battalions. Julia is doing a wonderful job on the revised curriculum.”

  “So I hear,” Kate said. She wondered where the conversation could possibly be leading. Miss Tyringham, though she had been twenty years in the school, had come after Kate’s graduation. She had the reputation of being a first-rate head, but Kate, apart from an idle glance at the alumnae bulletin, a willing response to alumnae fund-raising pleas, and delightful conversations about the Theban with her friend and classmate Julia Stratemayer, thought of her school as in another world.

  “Has Julia perhaps anticipated my call and told you all about it?”

  “No. All about what?”

  “We are in a jam,” Miss Tyringham said. “One of the curriculum changes already instit
uted is that which allows the seniors to spend their final semester in small seminars on subjects of their own choice. All their requirements have been fulfilled, and we are trying to prevent the final semester from being anticlimactic, particularly since that semester’s work does not count for college admissions. Are you still there?”

  “Still here,” Kate said. “I remember about the last semester, though of course in my day one pretended to be working while not.”

  “Yes. No one pretends anything any more, which I suppose is a good thing, though I can’t help sometimes feeling that the constant expression of emotion in itself becomes the cause of the emotion which is expressed. But that is neither here nor there. One of the senior seminars is a study, with all possible modern ramifications, of the Antigone of Sophocles.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “that sounds properly scholarly and irrelevant.”

  “Only at first blush. Antigone stands, you see, for expressions of love versus tyranny, for actions of a woman against a male-dominated world, for the battles of youth against age. I understand that George Eliot was particularly intrigued with the Antigone, which is perhaps what suggested you to Julia Stratemayer.”

  “I’m delighted to be brought to mind by the thought of George Eliot,” Kate said, “but I’m afraid I don’t altogether …”

  “Of course you don’t; I’m being frightfully long-winded. Mrs. Johnson, who was to have done the seminar, has slipped a disc. She must be flat on her back and in traction for months. The new semester, of course, begins next week. Julia, knowing how desperately we needed someone frightfully exciting to take over the seminar, suggested …”

  “But Miss Tyringham,” Kate interrupted. “I’m on leave this year.”

  “Exactly, my dear. We thought—rather we hoped—that therefore you would have the time. The girls are really very keen, but they do require a teacher who is not only experienced in the running of seminars but also, as they would say, ‘with it.’ Unfortunately most classicists, while terribly sound on the study of Greek, do not always appreciate the modern ramifications in quite the way we might hope. Mrs. Amhearst, we are in desperate need of help, and appeal to your charity and kindness. Of course we will pay, but I realize …”

  “May I have a little time to think about it?” Kate asked. “You see, I’m supposed to be working on a book.”

  “Oh, I know you’re frightfully busy and will have to squeeze us in. I can’t express how grateful we would be. Now, don’t say anything yet. I’ll ask Mrs. Johnson to send you her reading list; perhaps you would like to talk to her. I’ll give you a day or two to decide. Shall I call you in a few days, Mrs. Amhearst?”

  “All right. Miss Tyringham, I hope you don’t mind, but professionally, and you do want a professional I take it, I use the name Kate Fansler. Miss Fansler, if the students still call their teachers by their last names.”

  “Good for you. Of course, my dear. One wants to be correct socially, but no one knows better than the head of a girls’ school how confusing this continual change of names can be, particularly in these days of frequent divorce and remarriage. Goodbye for now, Miss Fansler, and I hope, indeed I trust, that you will come to our aid in this emergency.”

  Kate’s goodbye echoed faintly over the already disconnected line. Swearing, she quickly dialed Julia Stratemayer’s number. “Julia,” Kate said, when she had got her friend on the telephone, “I have just heard from Miss Tyringham, and if I were not at the moment occupied with a troubled nephew, I would come over and wring your neck.”

  “Listen, Kate,” Julia said, “I know how you feel, but I honestly think you’ll find these seniors fascinating, and anyway we’re desperate.”

  “The Antigone, Julia, I ask you. I haven’t thought about Greek since the Theban.”

  “Never mind Greek, love; read the play with the aid of Jebb. Virginia Woolf thought there hadn’t been a real woman character between Antigone and her own Mrs. Ramsay. And George Eliot …”

  “I will not discuss George Eliot without another drink. And then there’s Jack. Can we,” Kate frantically concluded, “thrash this out tomorrow?”

  Back in the living room, Kate found Reed and Jack making conversation. The boy, having learned of Reed’s association with the D.A.’s office, was accusing him of being part of the oppressive police force, an arm of the Establishment, a tool of the system. Reed declined, however, to rise to the bait. He could clearly discern that the boy was troubled, and he did not wish, should his help be needed, to put the boy into the position of having to refuse it.

  “Good news, I hope,” he said to Kate.

  “That,” Kate said, “was the head of the Theban. Girlhood memories dance before my eyes.”

  “Miss Tyringham,” Jack said. “She and the head of my old school keep talking about combining.”

  “Why on earth?” Kate asked.

  “To be coed, of course.”

  “My God,” Kate said. “But then, I suppose if Haemon and Antigone had been to school together, it might have been a different story.”

  “Babble on,” Reed said.

  “Kate,” Jack said. He pulled on his beard in a gesture Kate found odd in so young a man. “Dad’s thrown me out. And I’ve quit Harvard. Could you lend me a little money till I get a job?”

  “Jack dear, you will bear in mind, will you not, that your father is my brother? True, I have often disagreed with him; in fact, I can’t remember ever having agreed with him about anything. But I don’t feel comfortable going behind his back. Does he know you’re here?”

  “He doesn’t know or care where I am.”

  “Would you mind if I told him you were here?”

  “If that fits in with your straight way of doing things, go ahead. He will merely mention my juice and me stewing in it.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’m going to sign up with my draft board as a C.O. I guess hearing that did it. My hair, I mean, and quitting Harvard, and now this. I don’t believe in this filthy war.”

  “Does your father want you to be in it?”

  “He wouldn’t mind using his connections to get me into a cushy slot at the Pentagon; I don’t suppose he’d object to my pulling a high number in the lottery. What he can’t stand is what he calls my spitting on the flag—you can find his opinion expressed alliteratively by Agnew. The way I look at it, if you don’t protest against war you’re going along with it. I could even probably get out because of my asthma, but that wouldn’t let them know how I feel about Vietnam, would it? Leo wanted to come with me, but I told him to stick with school till he’s eighteen. He thinks you’re great.”

  Kate looked at Reed. “Any suggestions?” she asked.

  “Call your brother. I’ll broil a steak we can all have for dinner. All right with you, Jack?”

  “Right on,” Jack said.

  Two

  THE Theban School was a hundred years old, and had been founded by Matthias Theban because he wanted a school in which properly to educate his four daughters. Other men might have thrown up their hands, hired governesses, and cursed a fate which had deprived them of a son. Such was not Matthias Theban’s way. If fate had presented him with female progeny, he would accept fate’s challenge and educate them as human beings and future members of the learned professions. Combining as he did an eccentric view of the possible destiny of females with a great deal of money, influence, and financial acumen, he was able, in those simpler days, to carry out his plan with an ease which must seem the stuff of daydreams to those who try to found any institution today. Matthias Theban had no need to consult bureaucracies, local governments, foundations, or minority groups. He bought a piece of real estate in downtown New York in a section he was fairly certain would increase in value, persuaded influential friends onto his board of trustees, hired a forward-looking educator from Harvard (a man; but it was Matthias Theban’s hope, not realized until the twentieth century, to have a woman as head of the Theban), built his school, and got his educational experimen
t under way.

  In the years which followed, New York saw the establishment of many girls’ schools, some new boys’ schools, and a number of schools which were coeducational—although these tended to be more experimental and less aristocratic. Spence, Chapin, Brearley, Miss Hewitt’s, Nightingale-Bamford, and Sacred Heart joined the Theban in the group which came to be known as the “curtsying sisters”: their students curtsied when introduced to an adult, shook hands properly, wore uniforms topped by a school blazer, and were accepted, almost on application, by the college of their choice. All this, of course, was before the middle of the twentieth century. By then, no one over ten curtsied, shook hands, or wore a uniform without protest, and acceptance by a college required as extended and difficult a procedure as the acquisition of Swiss citizenship. The Theban, though one of the curtsying sisters, was nonetheless special, as all its graduates knew with a calm certainty particularly aggravating to graduates of any other school. What made the Theban special was hard to define, though many people, Kate among them, had tried. It imbued its students, despite their inevitable destiny of cotillions and debuts, with a tomboy, bluestocking attitude which was never entirely eschewed.

  The Theban boasted (a figure of speech: the Theban never boasted about anything) several gyms into which the girls, at odd though scheduled hours, would fling themselves to play basketball, volleyball, or indoor baseball, to high jump or swing wildly, like monkeys, across the ceiling on rings. The Theban was usual in requiring four years of Latin, unusual in offering three years of Greek. It paid unusually high faculty salaries, and taught its students so thoroughly that all of them, to a woman, found college an anticlimax of almost unmanageable proportions. The average Theban girl (though no Theban girl was ever average) discovered two weeks after she had arrived at Vassar or Radcliffe that she could get A’s with no effort whatever; she settled down, therefore, to three years of bridge, love affairs, and an occasional nervous breakdown, pulling herself sufficiently together in her senior year to graduate with honors and move on, if she chose, to graduate school. Many Theban girls chose, and the school’s alumnae rolls were impressive indeed, or would have been had the Theban published them. But the Theban had no interest in impressing anyone.