The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  “I won’t argue the point,” Kate said, “because I’ve discovered that my modesty is almost always taken for disingenuousness, when the truth of the matter is, as Churchill said of Attlee, I’ve got a lot to be modest about. We’ve had, actually, only one contretemps in the seminar, at the very beginning—I won’t go into it now, because it’s an awfully silly story, really—but the upshot was I insisted on each of the girls writing a poem about the Antigone, taking off from some minor point, you know, nothing crashingly profound or full of oxymorons, just a verse. I thought I’d leave them with you, to cheer your hours lying here trussed up like a steer.”

  “Considering you’ve brought me flowers and the life of Lytton Strachey, I don’t think you need to feel any more responsibility for my dragging hours, but thank you all the same for the kind thought.” She began to look through the poems, just glancing at them in anticipation of reading them later, but she stopped at one and read it through.

  “Now I rather like this,” she said, “though I’d be hard put to tell you why. She didn’t even rhyme, as Horatio complained to Hamlet.”

  Kate looked over the edge of the bed. “Oh, yes,” she said, “that’s Betsy’s. I too am rather fond of it; she’s got a gift for ideas, but she’s got to learn to take the time to find the exact words and put them in the proper order. Perhaps she ought to consider writing in Latin, where the order doesn’t really matter.” She read the poem again over Mrs. Johnson’s shoulder.

  You remember, in the Greek plays, Tiresias

  Had a boy who led him on stage and off,

  Through all his calls to prophecy, standing

  Through all the stated visions, waiting to move

  Out of the range of Oepidus’ or Creon’s anger?

  What I want to know—where is that boy?

  Did he one day say to Tiresias,

  “I am grown and can no longer lead you”?

  I suspect he grew up, became manly,

  Taller perhaps than Tiresias, more erect and

  Seeking manhood, or what he took for manhood,

  Left the presence of prophetic, androgynous wisdom.

  Or did he, leading such blind truth,

  Remain Tiresias’—as the stage directions say,

  His boy?

  “Trust Betsy to write about a character who only had a walk-on,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Well, I have high hopes of Betsy, though she’s not really at home among the tragic Greeks. She would have appreciated Lytton Strachey,” she added, resting her hand on the volumes Kate had brought.

  “I will leave you to him,” Kate said. “Try to cheer up by thinking of all the reports you won’t have to write—the worst part of school teaching.”

  “In exchange for doing something this very minute, taking a walk or playing hopscotch, I would gladly write every report in the school.”

  “I know—as Carlyle said to Geraldine Jewsbury under somewhat different circumstances, these are sorry times for a young woman of genius.” Kate said her goodbyes to Mrs. Johnson, who was reaching for the small sheaf of poems.

  “The poor thing is bored to death,” Kate reported to Reed that evening. “She would so much rather be doing the seminar than lying there, even without any dreary orthopedic problems, while I, such are the ironies of life, would love to have nothing to do but lie on my back and do the work I’m supposed to be doing anyway. Well, the happy man has learned to use what the gods give—I don’t remember who said that, but it was a classical author; I seem to be thinking in classical authors these days. At least if the Theban takes more time than I had anticipated, it no longer takes all my time and energy. I’ve learned to cope with the girls in the seminar, to follow the discussions into the way-wardest of bypaths, and leave all the problems of the younger generations to older and wiser heads—well, wiser anyway. By the time March has assumed its lamblike demeanor, I expect to have got the Theban comfortably in proportion—or does that sound like hubris, which always gets the gods into such a pet?”

  “Kate dear,” Reed said, “I do wish you would assure me once and for all that you don’t really believe in the Greek gods. You know, Olympus has turned into a housing development, and they’ve got a Hilton Hotel in the middle of the Elysian Fields.”

  “Hush,” Kate said. “They’ll hear you.”

  Kate and Reed had just finished the dinner dishes, turned off the kitchen light, and nearly wound up their nightly discussion of whether or not a household of two people really had use for an electric dishwasher, when the telephone rang.

  “What a household of two people definitely hasn’t use for is a telephone,” Reed said peevishly.

  Kate answered in the hall.

  “Ah,” came Miss Tyringham’s voice, “thank heaven I’ve found you at home. Could you possibly, out of the kindness of your heart, pop over here a moment; the school building, that is? I can’t take any more time to explain now, but our gratitude will be boundless. I know, I know, you’re thinking I’ve said that before and it already is, but—please, Kate. Angelica’s asking for you, among others.”

  “Angelica!”

  “Say you’ll hop in a taxi right now.”

  “All right, I’ll be there.” Kate hung up the phone. “Damn and blast! Athene heard you, if not Zeus himself. They’ve got a crisis,” she added, somewhat incoherently.

  “Goody,” Reed said. “It’ll give me a chance to get our stuff together for the income tax. A blessing in disguise. I’d never get it done if you were here to talk to.”

  “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” Kate said, scrambling into her coat, “it’s people who look on the bright side.”

  The school building, when Kate got out of the taxi, looked dark and empty—for one horrible moment she wondered if she could have imagined the phone call or, worse, if someone had enticed her to this deserted street for God knew what sinister reasons. Her pulse had begun to race, which annoyed her further, when the door opened and Julia Stratemayer beckoned from within the dark hall. “Thank heaven,” Kate said. “I was beginning to imagine all sorts of eerie things.”

  “Imagine away,” Julia gloomily said. “You wouldn’t be able to imagine this mess if you thought with both hands for a fortnight.”

  “How cheerful. No bodies, I hope. I more or less promised Reed to give up bodies when I married him.”

  “Not a dead body,” Julia ominously said. “We can’t stay here whispering. There’s a conference in Miss Tyringham’s office. Come on.”

  Kate was glad of Julia’s companionship as they walked through the halls. She had never really thought of the building as dark before and began to admire the sheer guts of the boys who had broken in to use the gym and mutilate its floor. The school building was often open at night, of course, for parents’ meetings, dances, plays, concerts, but then the lobby, stairs, and elevators were lit in the ordinary way so that the whole place looked quite as usual, though without the children screaming up and down the halls.

  “Lucky you weren’t having a parents’ meeting when whatever happened happened,” Kate said, more to hear her own, or any, voice, than because it seemed to her a particularly pertinent remark.

  “If there had been a parents’ meeting this wouldn’t have happened. It had to be a night when the building was closed, you see.”

  “Oh,” Kate said, who didn’t see but supposed she soon would. “Why do you have parents’ meetings at night?” she asked. “I thought the mothers always came in the afternoon and were fed tea and well-bred cookies afterward, to revive them.”

  “We’ve been doing this for years now,” Julia said, “in the happy thought that fathers want to attend too and are, of course, far too busy with the important things of the world to spare afternoon hours.” Julia’s voice trailed off as they reached Miss Tyringham’s office.

  “Simply let it ring,” Miss Tyringham was saying. “Just plug my line, though, in case I have to make a call. You might know,” she added to Julia, “that someone would see the ambulance and call to in
quire what the crisis was, if any. I’ve always been most pleased with the way the Theban mothers keep in touch with us if they’ve got the slightest worry, but tonight I could have done without any curiosity. The school is supposed to be closed at this hour, and we will simply act as though it were closed.”

  “Suppose they call Miss Freund at home?” Julia asked.

  “She will simply answer with perfect rectitude that she doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “Wouldn’t she then immediately come round to see what they are talking about?”

  “No doubt you are right. Call her up, Julia, and tell her enough to let her talk with confidence, but tell her to stay at home and grapple, if necessary, from there. Thank you, Kate, for coming. We bump, these days, from crisis to crisis. Like Pooh being dragged upstairs by Christopher Robin, bump, bump, bump. In fact, I think we can avert a real one-hundred-percent stinker in this case, if you’ll excuse the expression, but the implications are terrifying. I hoped,” she added to Kate, “that you might throw light.”

  “Where is Angelica?” Julia asked.

  “Angelica is lying down in the nurse’s office, being comforted by Mrs. Banister. You and she,” Miss Tyringham said to Kate, “are our rescue squad. I hope,” she rather faintly added.

  “You want to know what’s happened, of course,” she continued. “We found a young man hiding out in the building almost unconscious with fright, worry, and near-starvation I suspect. But, for any of this to make sense, I’ll have to explain all the complicated heaving and hoing we’ve been put to here to try to keep the school building safe from intruders. If you want to smoke, smoke. I’d offer you something to drink if I had it, but I don’t. Will you be patient with me for a moment as I go through this rather long-winded explanation?”

  Kate leaned back, lit a cigarette, and decided that if it were possible to wring anyone’s interest to a higher pitch than hers was now wrung to, she didn’t know what methods would have to be employed.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about some of the damage we’ve suffered in the building from intruders and thieves,” Miss Tyringham began. Kate said that Anne Copland had told her about the stealing and the ruined gymnasium floor. “Yes; of course our first steps were to put up metal gates over all the lower windows and to secure the doors so that they were literally impenetrable with any device short of a major explosion. But the ways of today’s intruders are many, varied, and ingenious. For one thing, however much of an eye we try to keep out—and we simply can’t, for many reasons, have doormen guarding the lobby every moment of the day—anyone who puts his mind to it can gain entrance to the building and simply lie low until everyone’s gone home. True, this takes a certain agility and dodging about to avoid the cleanup people, but I don’t think it’s past the ingenuity of even the most simple-minded robber. In addition, though it doesn’t do to say so these days, our staff, both kitchen and cleaning, changes constantly for the most part—we have, of course, our old and faithful regulars—and one never knows what their motives may have been in taking the job. One is happy enough to find someone who will push a mop these days without being certain he was made for higher things: in short, very few questions are asked. Then there are the delivery men, plumbers, carpenters—well, I needn’t go on endlessly with all the details; we have been damn lucky, actually, that nothing really untoward has happened in the school. Everyone was upset about the gym floor, of course, but it could have been a lot worse.

  “Then,” Miss Tyringham continued, “we acquired, blessed was the day, Mr. O’Hara, late of the United States Army, where he had been a sergeant with years of experience at guard duty. He liked the penthouse apartment we could offer him, and the small salary was no special problem since he has his pension and no one dependent on him. Forgive me if I seem to be going on at unconscionable lengths, but unless you have a picture of the setting, so to speak, you can’t understand what happened.

  “Mr. O’Hara moved in and he did keep a much better eye on things. He locked all the stairway doors, for one thing, and took both elevators up with him at night—he didn’t mind walking down for the second one, he said; it was only up that he began to feel his years—and we seemed to be doing fine until the fire people discovered about the locked stairways and pointed out that, in case of fire, Mr. O’Hara would have no fast way out of the building except by leaping off the roof hopefully into a fireman’s net (I do hope I have used the word ‘hopefully’ correctly, I can’t bear to have it used to mean ‘it is hoped,’ such sloppy syntax) and of course we couldn’t have Mr. O’Hara leaping off roofs, however hopefully, and it was then that he came to me with a proposal which seemed at first startling, but has turned out to be a most workable arrangement. He suggested dogs.”

  “Dogs?” Kate said. It was not what she had expected.

  “Yes, my dear, dogs. Two mighty-vicious-looking Doberman pinschers which, however, Mr. O’Hara assures me, would never attack anyone. Their job, which they do superlatively well—so unusual these days, and, as Mr. O’Hara, who I fear is extremely conservative, pointed out, without demands, demonstrations, or strikes—is simply to make sure that nobody is in the building when it’s closed. Nobody. Naturally, when I first heard the suggestion of dogs I said flatly that the thing was impossible—imagine two vicious dogs, however disinclined to bite, in the midst of a school of five hundred girls, not to mention the faculty, staff, parents, or cleaning people. The idea was ludicrous. But Mr. O’Hara assured me that department stores around the country have been using dogs successfully for years with no danger to customers or anyone else; the dogs are never let out except when there is no one in the building, or no one who has any business to be there, which is just the point.”

  “Where do they stay?”

  “On the roof, my dear, next to Mr. O’Hara’s penthouse. They have most elegant quarters, indoor pens and out, and Mr. O’Hara takes them for a run in the park very early every morning. I’ve been up to see them in their cages—of course, one simply must know everything that goes on in a school of which one is the head—and they stood behind their bars and bared their teeth at me in a quite properly terrifying manner. No one can get up to the roof, since the door off the auditorium is locked and there’s a trap door at the top of the stairs as well. I expect I was finally won over to the whole idea because it’s so absolutely uncanny—I mean, one could scarcely believe dogs were capable of so complicated an operation—I’ll tell you about it in a minute—though of course one knows of seeing-eye dogs and all those sheep dogs of Hardy’s and Lassie Come Home and all the rest of it.

  “We installed electrified pads, one on the end of each hall, and when the dogs have been through all the rooms on that floor, and made certain there is no one in any of them, they press their paws on the electrified pad and it rings a bell in Mr. O’Hara’s apartment. They make their way up and down the building during the night, and if they find an intruder, their job is to keep him until help comes, not to attack him unless he tries to run or to reach for a gun or something of the sort. Then they would leap on him, as I understand this—Mr. O’Hara offered to demonstrate with a man dressed in heavily padded clothing, but I decided to take his word for it as long as he was able to assure me that they were trained not to kill under any circumstances. Now, as you will readily have seen, if the dogs are cornering an intruder, they will not press their paws on the electrified pad at the end of the hall, and when he does not hear the bell go off, Mr. O’Hara, armed, one gathers to the teeth, goes to see what has happened. He lets the police know before going, on my insistence, and that’s it.”

  “A neat system,” Kate said. “I take it it’s been a complete success.”

  “Complete. We haven’t had a single robbery or intrusion, Mr. O’Hara thinks, because, however secret we may have been about the dogs, those who set about to make illegal entries know well enough that the dogs are here. We did have an unfortunate repairman, in the early days of the dogs, who agreed quite nobly to
stay overtime to fix a leak in one of the lavatories, and no one thought to mention it to Mr. O’Hara. The dogs cornered the poor man, who fortunately simply stood in one place and trembled till Mr. O’Hara came and called the dogs off.”

  “Naturally,” Kate said, “there are a million questions I want to ask about this fascinating arrangement, but I suppose I ought to contain my curiosity till we get to tonight’s problem. I’m to gather that the dogs found someone tonight.”

  “They did. Angelica Jablon’s brother, not to put too fine a point on it. The boy was in a dreadful state to start with, and when those two snarling beasts cornered him, he panicked completely and finally fell backward, striking his head on the corner of something. Of course he had a scalp wound which bled all over the place, scalp wounds always do; he’s now in the hospital being treated for concussion and shock. He’ll be all right, at least as far as tonight’s little episode is concerned. Angelica, who saw him lying in a pool of blood, literally, I gather, before they took him to the hospital, is having hysterics down the hall in the nurse’s office, being comforted, one fervently hopes, by Mrs. Banister. The dogs are back on the roof and the Theban is faced with another crisis. We are one over par this week.”

  Kate appreciated the light tones with which Miss Tyringham told this extraordinary story. From the point of view of the head of the school, it was vital to play down the drama—a boy had naughtily hidden out, been frightened by some dogs, and hit his head. An unfortunate accident; one did not wish to underestimate the human implications of his actions, but if there was any horror to being evoked by dwelling on the occurrence at the Theban, Miss Tyringham did not intend to evoke it. Kate could hardly blame her.

  Yet, listening to Miss Tyringham, Kate was herself overcome with the sheer naked terror that boy must have felt. To hide out alone in an unlit building is to expose oneself to certain fears which the mind may explain away but the stomach responds to; to hide out as a criminal, it scarcely mattered why, even if his reasons were beyond question sound, could not be the calmest of undertakings. Then, suddenly, wholly without warning—for surely the dogs walk silently—to back away from two foaming monsters, well, not foaming, perhaps, but Miss Tyringham had said that they bared their teeth and certainly if he moved they growled. How was the boy to know they would not attack, and would he have been able to convey the news to his thumping pulses even if he had known?