The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  “We can smoke later in the staff cloakroom, if you are about to suffer from nicotine withdrawal symptoms,” Julia said, reading her mind. They were in fact close friends, though they had never cared for each other all through their years as classmates at the Theban. Was there a moral here somewhere about childhood friendships, Kate wondered. Those who had been her closest friends through school, even in the last years, were now acquaintances whom she encountered infrequently, though gladly enough. Julia, when young, had seemed interested in little but volleyball and the domestic virtues; she had not only entered, in her senior year, some nationwide homemaker contest, she had actually won it, which seemed to Kate the absolute end. Julia, in her turn, considered Kate overintellectual, which she was, and snobbish, which she wasn’t. Because Kate had had, since her fourteenth year, a long, lean model’s figure, natural taste in clothes, and the money to dress with stunning simplicity, she had impressed a lot of people as more “proper,” more devoted to correctness, than she was, which in fact was not at all. She and Julia after graduation had gone their different, predictable ways, Kate to graduate school and a series of mad jobs (“If I ever publish a book,” Kate used to say, “I want to be able to say on the jacket that, like Arthur Koestler, I have worked at everything and sold lemonade in the streets of Haifa.” Kate had never been to Haifa, with or without lemonade, but the phrase always stood to her for the ultimate in worldly experience). Julia had quit college at the end of her sophomore year, to marry, move to the suburbs, and bring up a large family. Hers, rather than Kate’s, was the typical pattern of their generation. But Julia, when everyone least expected it, had proved to be untypical. She had made up her mind quite suddenly one day never to set foot in a country club again. Her husband, it transpired after the first real conversation they had had in fifteen years, was delighted with the thought of moving back to the city, with its public transportation for the children and its noncommuting for him. She had finished college, taken her master’s degree in literature, and turned up looking for work at the Theban.

  Miss Tyringham had nothing for her, and in any case took on Theban alumnae only if they had had experience elsewhere, but she heard of a need for a substitute teacher in another school and steered Julia into that. Five years later, Julia was a member of the English Department at the Theban, and six years later she was in charge of curriculum revision. She turned out to possess exactly the right qualifications for this odd job, having a highly organized mind, a flexible attitude toward change, and the amazing ability to talk about the problems of curriculum with parents’ groups. She assured them that, while the Theban was undertaking many fundamental changes, nothing fundamental about the Theban would be changed. Obviously, a prize. Kate had run into her shortly after her move from the suburbs, stopped to talk, and discovered a friend for life.

  “Miss Tyringham’s pleased,” Julia said as they walked toward the faculty lounge for the promised smoke. “She hated the thought of fobbing off someone from inside who hadn’t really prepared the seminar—it would rather have taken the bloom off the whole thing.”

  “The bloom,” Kate said, “will come off me instead. Frankly, I’m having qualms. Look, Julia, ought this damn thing to be a bull session or a structural study? I mean, should we sit around and rap about sex and women’s lib and the Black Panthers, should we really do a solid piece of work on the Antigone, or do we alternate—as though that were possible?”

  “Start sounding very structured, of course. One’s first session is always plans, schedules, assignments, and expectations. Though you may not believe it, the girls will be to some extent scared of you from the great big university world. If, eventually, Haemon’s stabbing himself and dying while embracing the dead Antigone leads to a discussion of sex, discuss away. I guess what I’m saying is, ride easy with it. If you start feeling the onset of hysteria, which I don’t for a moment imagine you will, press the panic button and I’ll come and force brandy down your throat.”

  “When,” Kate asked, “did your conversation become so replete with slogany phrases—an academic habit, I take it?”

  “Since talking to parents. Believe me, Kate, the girls are nothing to it. I’ll trade you the ninth-grade mothers for the Antigone any day.”

  Four

  KATE met Reed for dinner at the Plaza; he took one look at her, ordered martinis, and politely inquired about her day.

  “Oh, the hell with it,” Kate said. “What about the draft?”

  “Would I have married you, I wonder, if I had really considered the ramifications of all your nephews? If the war goes on long enough we will no doubt have to go through all this with Jack’s little brothers.”

  “Did the draft turn out to be so complicated, even now that they’ve got a lottery?”

  “Especially now that they’ve got a lottery. Never mind that for the moment. Tell me about the Theban.”

  “Well, there’s nothing really to tell till I meet the class on Monday, but I already know it contains three girls from whom I could see trouble coming if I were blindfolded in the middle of a foggy night with no moon.”

  “It’s always been the problem, you know, in dealing with adolescents, as Terence Rattigan pointed out. They’re too old to spank and too young to hit over the jaw, if anybody ever thought of doing either these days, which of course they don’t.”

  “You’ll be overjoyed to hear that one of the darlings is an admirer of comedies in your period, as we say in graduate school. She thinks literature leaps more or less from Shakespeare to The Philadelphia Story, omitting, of course, most of the masterpieces of the last three hundred years.”

  “Ah, the martinis—things will soon look brighter. Cheer up, perhaps she’ll talk like a Philip Barry character.”

  “I don’t know what she talks like,” Kate said taking a sip and lighting a cigarette, “because I haven’t met her. I must say I would prefer the Plaza to the Theban dining room even if I couldn’t smoke or drink here—imagine what it must be like to teach in a girls’ boarding school. Well, let’s not imagine and rattle our nerves further. I learned about the three students from Mrs. Banister, who does dramatics—not as a class but as an activity, and obviously she takes the label ‘activity’ with appalling seriousness. She encouraged the three girls to take my seminar; it’s not clear whether I’m to be grateful or to poison her chicken à la king, but the latter I rather fancy, since her dramatics bit consists in everyone being emotional off the top of her head, which is definitely not my scene.”

  “Sounds like the encounter sort of business.”

  “It does, and I gather is, at least part of the time. That is, sometimes the girls write plays and act them out, sometimes they act out their longings and emotions, and sometimes they play guessing games to stimulate their imaginations, which need stimulation as much as I need this job, which is not at all.”

  “Guessing games? Charades?”

  “Not exactly. Julia explained it all to me while holding my hand during today’s earlier collapse. For example, I say to you: ‘A man comes out of a restaurant where he has just tasted albatross. He kills himself. Who is he and why does he kill himself?’ You ask all sorts of intelligent and searching questions and eventually discover. Want to know the answer?”

  “Well, after a second martini I don’t mind if you tell me, provided it isn’t so long they’ll throw us out to the bar and refuse to let us order dinner.”

  “No more than two sentences—and never mind the remark about the length of my sentences. I will be brief, as Polonius said to Gertrude before going on forever. You know, I’m beginning to have more and more sympathy for Polonius, whose only trouble was that he was operating in one world by the rules of another.”

  “The man has just tasted albatross,” Reed said, tasting his second martini.

  “Yes. Well, after all sorts of questions it drearily transpires that he is a sailor, has been shipwrecked, only three men left, they had nothing to eat but albatross and a mate recently beheaded by a fall
ing mast; to save everyone’s feelings the cook mixed the two up so that they wouldn’t have to know which they were eating. Now, having tasted albatross, the sailor knows what he ate was human flesh and he kills himself at the horror of the thing.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Why on earth what?”

  “Well, I meant why on earth kill himself at the horror of the thing, but now that you ask, why bother with the whole bit? Why not just act Hamlet or Design for Living?” Reed caught the headwaiter’s eye. “We’ll order now,” he said. “What will you have?” he asked Kate.

  “Hemlock and sour cream.”

  “Oh, Kate, do pull yourself together. Why panic over a bunch of kids?”

  “They wrote me a nasty poem and put it on the wall—it was a threat, actually.”

  “Did it rhyme?”

  “More or less. I’d rather it hadn’t.”

  “Tell them so and set them each to writing you a poem about Antigone. That’ll be one in the eye for them!”

  “Reed,” Kate said, “you’re a genius.”

  “Only on certain Thursdays in February,” Reed said. “Have some pâté, cheer up, and I’ll tell you how to avoid the draft.”

  They were well into the main course, and halfway through their bottle of wine before Kate persuaded Reed to return to the draft. “I thought,” she said, “that the point of the lottery was to end all the unfair exemptions, like being in college or graduate school or being a father, though I’ve always privately thought that fatherhood ought to be allowed as an exemption provided the father stayed home all day with the little one. From what I hear, he’d enlist so fast they wouldn’t have to bother with a draft.”

  “Not a bad idea at that,” Reed said. “Well, the lottery, like so many cures, is worse than the disease, only in different ways. Disease, in fact, is the operative word. Almost seventy percent of the men are found to be 4F at their first physical, and thirty percent of the rest are let off on physical grounds the next time around.”

  “They all have flat feet, you mean?”

  “Or just about anything else you can name, including braces on their teeth or hair that has to be shampooed every day.”

  “Tell me another.”

  “With pleasure. The army considerately publishes a guide to what it considers physical fitness, and anyone can buy it from the Government Printing Office. The country is now full of draft counseling agencies, as they call themselves, though not as full as New York is, and each of them has a well-thumbed copy. Anyway, the induction centers are so understaffed that they have to rely on the word of the would-be-draftee’s doctor, and most doctors are sympathetic to the poor kids. The army in its proud old days didn’t want anyone who was very ugly, wet his bed, acted queer or was, or bit his nails. Now they’re no doubt rueing the day, but the simple fact is almost everyone around New York manages to get off for something.

  “If,” Reed went on, filling his wine glass and Kate’s, “they don’t get a physical exemption, they can claim to be a conscientious objector. There are various ways of diddling around with one’s status, gambling on one’s lottery number, or, if all else fails, simply failing to show up for induction.”

  “Don’t they find you and put you in jail?”

  “In theory. In practice, after the hideously understaffed Selective Service unit has written around to make sure the guy actually did get the letter, a year has passed, and then they simply can’t follow up all the cases. Not one man in the city has so far been indicted for delinquency, as a matter of fact. And if the worst should happen and the guy who failed to show up for induction was found, tried, and convicted, he would end up serving considerably less than a year in one of the better prisons. He would have to serve with the army in Vietnam for two years.”

  “Has it always been like that, with only innocents like me remembering everyone but cowards and operators marching off to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before? My mind does seem to run to hymns lately, the effect of the Theban no doubt. All the guys I knew …”

  “That, my love, was a war the country was behind. There have always been operators who got out of active service and there always will be, but, though I haven’t looked into the history of the thing, I have the impression that this situation developed because of the great unpopularity of this war, which is even more unpopular in New York than elsewhere, as our Vice President keeps telling us. And don’t think I’ve covered all the ways of not getting drafted, because I’ve hardly begun.”

  “In that case, what is the problem with Jack? Can’t he have braces put on his teeth? Anyway, he’s got asthma; he told us so.”

  “But he is young and full of principles for which he is willing to suffer, always so embarrassing an attitude, though I think I have persuaded him to suffer at Harvard. The point is, if he registers as a C.O., which is what he wants to do, he will be involved in litigation, which is long, expensive, and unlikely to be paid for by his rich papa, though according to Jack’s lights that is the only honorable course to follow. The question must ultimately be faced, I think, as to whether a draftee has the right to distinguish between wars—a sticky point if there ever was one. In my opinion, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think your brother is handling this in the worst possible way. But at least he’s standing by the truth as he sees it, you’ve got to give him that, and so is his son. I’d be likelier to help the kid slip through the net while agreeing with him that he was right in principle—but I always was unfortunately given to the comfortable way of doing things.”

  “Nonsense. You’d never have married me if you were. I understand why the Theban is on the spot—why all schools are. The students want them to be in the vanguard of social progress, and the parents and faculty see it as their duty to defend the rearguard. A hell of a choice, and I see the students’ point, but as Dorothy Sayers mentioned somewhere, all epic actions are fought in the rearguard, at Roncevaux and Thermopylae.”

  “Writers prefer rearguard battles—the issues are clear and tragic. In life, however, I suspect the important actions, though they will never make an epic, are fought in the beginning, before anybody knows what the battle’s all about.”

  “No doubt you’re right, damn it. If I like the battles which are epic, what is rearguard me doing in a seminar room with the vanguard young? Answer me that.”

  “What you need,” Reed said, “is to go home to bed.”

  “Not so soon after dinner, as the lady said in Private Lives,” Kate responded, looking pleased with herself for the first time that evening.

  Monday morning found Kate, with the calm the professional always finds in his own arena, however anxious he may have been before, seated at the head of the table in the seminar room with the students seated on each side—like a king dining with the regiment, Kate thought. The challenging verse was gone from the wall.

  “What,” Kate asked, as an opening remark, “has become of the poem on the wall?” This, while certainly plunging in medias res, as the ancients recommended, left something to be desired as a conversation opener.

  The girls looked at one another, not turning their heads but shifting their eyes back and forth in a most disconcerting way. “We had hoped,” one of the girls said—she was clearly used to speaking for the group when a spokesman was required—“that you had not seen it. It was thought better of and removed.”

  “And your name?” Kate asked. “We might as well get that established. I’ll read the list of names given to me, and you each claim your own. O.K.?”

  “I’m Freemond Oliver,” the girl who had spoken said.

  “Ah,” Kate said, in what she trusted were sepulchral tones. “Angelica Jablon?”

  “Here.” The girl who spoke had an expressive face and heavy, curly hair. She looked outspoken, unhappy, unsure of herself and, Kate was pleased to notice, kind. Engagé fighters for the right—that is, for the left—were often, in Kate’s experience, remarkably brutal.

  “Irene Rexton.”

  “He
re.” A remarkably pretty girl, demure in appearance, with a face so lovely and appealing that one decided, immediately and quite unfairly, that she was probably brainless. Her long blond hair fell over her face and she languidly pushed it back behind her ears with a gesture more seductive than she could possibly have realized. So, at least, Kate hoped.

  “Betsy Stark.” Ah, thought Kate, the comedy-of-manners child. Now why should I have expected her to look like Katharine Hepburn?—an association of ideas, no doubt. It was, perhaps, an association that had occurred to Betsy Stark, who was a most unpretty girl, but of the sort who does not try to improve her natural endowments with a too lavish application of the current fads in makeup or hair style. Whatever her commitment to wit, she had decided to try to accept herself as she was, which Kate thought interesting. She was the only girl in the room whose face was innocent of eye makeup; in my day, Kate thought, it would have been lipstick. Also in my day, she realized looking around, we always wore the uniforms. These girls wore different-color shirts with pants or odd skirts. I refuse to think about the question of uniforms, Kate thought, deciding that the reasons for not teaching in the school you have yourself attended are numerous, though hidden.

  “Elizabeth McCarthy. I understand,” Kate added, “that you’re new to the Theban this year, having transferred from the Sacred Heart in Detroit. Did you know that when you transferred to the Theban you would get seminars?”

  “She came because she’s what my little brother calls a Roaming Catholic,” Betsy Stark said.

  Elizabeth McCarthy smiled at this sally. “I’ve always been with the Mesdames,” she said, “and when we moved to New York I thought I’d like to switch. I’ve had seven years of Latin, but no Greek.”

  “Let’s be quite clear about the whole question of Greek,” Kate said. “The last Greek I had was in this very building a long time ago, so I will be glad to learn from those of you who know Greek, and happy to share my ignorance with those of you who don’t. And you,” Kate added, turning to the last girl, “must be Alice Kirkland.”