The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  “I ought not to take your time,” Mr. Jablon said, “but you see, I am trying very hard to understand. It seems to me that the youth in this country have gone mad, they have …” Mr. Jablon’s voice was rising, and he caught himself with the air of one who remembers, with difficulty, that he has come to inquire, not pronounce. Kate thought of Marianne Moore’s phrase: “The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.”

  “Was there something special you wanted to ask of me?” Kate suggested. Supposedly Mr. Jablon could discuss the problems of today’s youth with anyone at the Theban, preferably those on a regular salary.

  “It’s about the play you’re studying; Angelica has been telling me about it, saying there were the same arguments among the Greeks. I never had time to learn about the Greeks, but it always seemed to me that I would like to have my children study the Greeks, and their children, if they wanted to. It sounded so profound, the Greeks. Now I discover that your play is an excuse for betraying one’s country, and that the hero of all this is a girl whose father murdered his father and married his mother, and whose mother was her grandmother too. Is that really great art?”

  He sounded so genuinely outraged that Kate did not quite know what to say. It was the sort of conversation that could have been humorously recounted—the straight-faced retelling of famous dramatic plots is notoriously funny. Yet the farcical element was lacking here. Mr. Jablon not only thought that Oedipus was a dirty old man, he was unhappy about it.

  “It was a question of destiny,” Kate said. “Fate. For the Greeks, a man cannot escape his destiny.”

  “But that is what all these young people, with their dirty clothes and rioting, seem to be doing; they are trying to escape their destiny, which is to work and have respect for their elders and their country and learn something.”

  Kate sighed. “I know what you mean,” she said. “If they care for nothing but the moment, like hippies, what are they going to be doing when they’re forty?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. They should be preparing themselves.”

  “But that is your idea of destiny, not theirs. Oedipus thought he could run away from his destiny …”

  “And they think they can run away from theirs.”

  “No. You think they are running away from what you conceive their destiny to be. But there are no oracles any more to tell us what is fated, or pleasing to the gods. There is no longer a Tiresias. You know, the play Angelica is studying was rewritten in modern times, similar in many ways, but without Tiresias. There is no one today who can tell us the truth.”

  “It is hard to be old,” the man said. “My grandson, the boy who was found here … in earlier days, he used to talk to me sometimes, and he told me a line from Dante, another great writer I have never read: ‘I did not die, yet nothing of life remained.’ That puts it well.”

  “It seems to me,” Kate ventured, “a great deal remains. Your grandchildren, your health, you have enough money. These things only seem insufficient when we have them, don’t you agree?”

  “What good is money today? So that my granddaughter can go to school and learn to sneer at authority? So my grandson can refuse to serve in the army of his own country? So that they can conspire against their own government? Even in little things. I can’t take a walk at night, as I like to do; I will be mugged. I can’t even walk during the day without being sickened by the garbage in the streets. I can’t breathe the air. I have a car, an expensive car, but I can’t park it on the streets, so what good is it to me; I can’t go anywhere in it. If people still lived by the eternal principles …”

  “Do you know what they are?”

  “Everybody knows. They pretend they don’t. They …” Again the old man stopped. He was beginning to get angry. “It can never be right to betray your country.”

  “Isn’t the word ‘betray’ a loaded word? Can you ‘betray’ a democracy by disagreeing with the government in power?”

  “Angelica told me some girls wanted to support the war here, and they were shouted down. She was proud of the fact.”

  “That is wrong, without question. That, I agree with you, is betrayal. But disagreeing about policy is not. Do you know who Dante put in the lowest circle of his hell?” It was not a rhetorical question, and Kate waited for an answer. The old man shook his head.

  “Those,” Kate said, “who betrayed their friends rather than their country.” The old man shrugged as though to say he was not surprised; the education he had wanted for his children had turned out to be an illusion. The moderns, the ancients, none of them stuck by the old truths.

  Kate, looking up, saw that tears had come to the old man’s eyes, the helpless tears of age. He remained still until he had mastered them; he did not admit their presence.

  “I don’t know what I can say,” Kate continued, after a moment. “I believe the Antigone is a great play. I don’t think we agree on what are eternal truths, apart from the facts that man only learns at a terrible price and there are no easy answers.”

  “This is quite a school,” the old man said. “I have spent several days in the lobby, just looking at it. Oh, it’s very unostentatious, but so well run, so well organized. It is an old school.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “For an American school, it’s quite old.”

  “It has always been a school for the best people,” he said. “I know that. And now my granddaughter goes here. That is America.”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  “I am a Jew,” the old man said. “Do you know how I got to this country?”

  “I know something about all that, in a general way,” Kate said. But, she was thinking, he and my brothers are both so defensive about what they call America. Yet no doubt my brothers think America made a mistake in letting in the Jews. Patriotism makes strange bedfellows.

  “My older brother, who was fifteen, came and earned the money for our passage. For my father and sister and me; my mother was dead. We brought our food onto the boat, the steerage, and cooked it over fires we made. I was six when I came here. My brother settled in New England, he worked in the mills. I went to school, and I didn’t know any English. The boys brought their lunch—soup we used to bring in those days—and I remember there was a boy with a piece of meat in his soup. He made a face to throw it away, ach, soup meat, and I wanted that piece of meat so badly it was a pain. But I was too proud to ask. He tossed it away, into the dirt. I see it there yet.

  “That’s not the point,” he said, shaking his head. “The point is this country. I went to work at fourteen; I looked like a man. I went to college at night; I went to law school. I have been successful, and America made that possible. Shouldn’t I feel gratitude toward my country, and loyalty? My grandchildren spit at America. What has your Antigone to do with that? Had her country given her such opportunities?”

  “How many children do you have?” Kate asked.

  “Two. My son died in Korea. He was proud to go. My daughter lives in California. I am seventy years old. My daughter-in-law is—an unhappy woman. So, sixty-four years after I come to this wonderful country, my grandson spits on the flag and my daughter hides him from the law. And you encourage this?”

  Kate could not imagine what to say. Could she suggest that Haemon, Creon’s son, argued with him in just this way, that Sophocles understood all this, that it was not new and did not spell the end of the world? Would he understand? Creon had many problems, but undue gratitude to Thebes was not among them.

  “I have always been honest,” the old man said. “I have never used my money for a bad purpose.”

  Her brothers liked to say that too. Probably it was true enough, in context. But what of the line from Proverbs: “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent”? Still, Mr. Jablon at least had made haste to be rich; he had not inherited the money which someone else had sinned to get, like Angelica, like her, Kate Fansler.

  “I shouldn’t waste your time,” he said.

  Kate shook her h
ead. “You pay literature the honor of taking it seriously,” she said, “but I don’t know how to answer you. I want to pay you the honor of being honest. In that play, Creon does learn that he has been overcertain of the rightness of his decrees, that he has overestimated the importance of law and order. Of course, he learns it too late to save the life of his son, or his wife, or Antigone, all of whom die because of his stubbornness.”

  “Because life is cruel, does that mean he was wrong?”

  “He knows in the end of the play that he was wrong. But I think it is only in plays that old men change their minds.”

  “So the young are always right?”

  “I didn’t say that. But today, with the question of this war, I believe they are not wrong.”

  “Well, you have been honest. My grandchildren shout at me. Do you think it is right that they should shout at an old man, at their grandfather?”

  “I think it’s an enormous compliment. It shows that they care enough about what you think to try and argue with you. I think you should be honored.”

  “That is not honor. One honors the old by treating them with respect.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “we don’t agree about that either. I’m not talking about manners in the formal sense. I’m talking about the exchange of ideas, the expression of feeling. I’m sorry. I haven’t been any comfort at all, I know, but I haven’t offered easy consolation. That would be easier.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Look,” Kate said, “suppose you had asked for that piece of meat. Suppose you had eaten it, admitted your hunger, instead of remembering the meat lying in the dust. Would that have been so much worse?”

  To Kate’s surprise the old man shook his head, and bowed it. She could see the tears again. “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. “I’ll leave you.”

  “No,” he said, rising. “Don’t go. I ought not to get upset. I ought not to get emotional.”

  “Well,” Kate lightly said, “we disagree to the last. I think you ought, when you’ve something to be upset about. Why else be human, why else love people?” She held out her hand to the old man. “Goodbye, Mr. Jablon. If you don’t mind a good fight, come and see me again.” And Kate, leaving the room, realized that she meant it.

  “Which is all very well,” Kate said later that afternoon to Miss Tyringham, “but I didn’t mean to be quite as relevant as this. If only you had used a classicist who had muttered on about stichomythia.”

  “Poor Kate. And now Mr. Jablon has really put the lid on it. Of course, you’re not as used to outraged parents as I am, and what doesn’t make it any easier is that half the time you agree with them.”

  “That’s it,” Kate said. “There’s nothing so uncomfortable as seeing both sides of a question. That’s the Antigone for you, conflicting demands with right on both sides. The troubling thing about Mr. Jablon is that he’s got a right to be conservative, if you see what I mean. He worked damn hard for everything and he’s grateful for the chance to have been able to.”

  “And now he wants it all to be easy and frictionless. Oh, I’ve seen it often. What parents will so seldom understand is that love is hard work. Sexual love or other, and one thing we can say for this generation is that they admit there is another. Damn. I can tell we’re in trouble here at the Theban by my daydreams. When I start playing with plans for a cottage somewhere in England where I can garden and fiddle in a string quartet with three other lost souls, I know things have come unstuck in a serious way.”

  “Dream all you want. You’d no sooner have settled in than they’d put up a development next door, or a power storage plant. I’ve seen it many times.”

  “I shan’t run away yet. I’m really grateful to you for talking to Mr. Jablon; otherwise, of course, it would have been me. Everyone’s very impressed with you around here, as far as I can see. Have you ever thought of joining the Theban in some permanent capacity?”

  “Do you know what Dickens said when they asked him to stand for Parliament? ‘I believe that no consideration would induce me to become a member of that extraordinary assembly.’ That’s the point of quotations, you know: one can use another’s words to be insulting. Sorry, but if I can stagger through the next two months without falling right into the generation gap between Angelica and her grandfather, I shall fold my tent like the Arabs and as silently steal away.”

  The one who fell through that particular generation gap, however, was not Kate but Angelica’s mother. They found her body at the Theban the following morning, and the secret of the dogs was a secret no longer, but communicated to the world.

  The Theban had shut down for wars, protests against wars, in blizzards, and during strikes and power failures. Now it shut down for a criminal investigation.

  Seven

  “WE hope,” Julia said, “to open the day after tomorrow. But, oh Lord, what a mess. Why couldn’t that dreary woman have gone and panicked to death somewhere else? She was one of those phobic types, I understand, the sort who was afraid of everything—airplanes, fast cars, thunderstorms. One would have thought she could have had the decency to drop dead from fright on a highway somewhere.”

  “I gather,” Kate said, “that decency wasn’t her long suit.”

  “She didn’t know the meaning of the word. Poor kids,” Julia added, though whether she was referring to the Theban students in general, or Angelica and her brother Patrick in particular, Kate didn’t know; it didn’t seem to matter.

  “Of course,” Julia went on, “Mr. O’Hara is furious. He feels the integrity of his dogs has been impugned.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “They didn’t stop to notice her; maybe they thought she wasn’t an intruder within the meaning of the act. There was a parents’ meeting last night—that means the dogs didn’t start their rounds until all the parents had gone. Then, apparently, the dogs went ahead and pressed their darling little paws where they should have. He says the body was dumped there this morning, after the dogs were back on the roof.”

  “Can’t one tell when the body was dumped, or if it was dumped?”

  “Can one? Perhaps Reed knows. Let’s ask him; it’ll give us an excuse to go upstairs and hover around the scene. I don’t know how many more balls Miss Tyringham is going to be able to field,” Julia said, reverting to her parental lingo, largely composed of outdated idioms. “You can tell she’s thinking about that cottage in England more and more.”

  Gloomily, they began to make their way upstairs—stairs usually filled, at this hour, with rushing, laughing, shouting girls. The Theban, which demanded silence in the elevators, had long since realized the futility of requesting silence on the stairs. School discipline, where it succeeded, was a rare question of balance, and if one was fortunate, or clever, one won on the swings what one lost on the roundabouts. Because of the usual noise on the stairs it must, Kate thought, have been particularly eerie to creep up them in the vastness of the night—clearly one would be in a state of sufficiently heightened anxiety without encountering the hound of the Baskervilles and friend. But why on earth would the woman have come here—to see where her son hid out? One scarcely made such expeditions in the middle of the night. Besides, was she the sort of woman who would investigate the hiding place? From Julia’s reports, she would have developed fifteen phobias at the very idea.

  Suppose she had not come alone, or had been induced, enticed, enforced—could the other person have managed to arrive and depart between dog rounds? It seemed an outside chance, surely. Kate reminded herself that without even those meager facts the police were now collecting, all such speculation was foolish. Well, sensible, perhaps, in that it prevented the picture of that terrified boy and then the terrified woman from occupying her mind.

  At the door of the room on the third floor, Kate found Reed. He was chatting with someone, no doubt a detective from the police force. Kate glanced quickly toward the room but saw nothing. “They’ve taken her away,” Reed said. “I was just about ready to go in search of
you. Hi.” This last to Julia, whom he knew. “I guess I have something approaching information for your head lady.”

  “Do you want to see her now?” Julia asked.

  “Is there anywhere we could get some coffee?” Reed asked.

  “There’s always a pot going in the faculty sitting room. With the school closed, the place might even be decently deserted.”

  It was characteristic of the Theban that, however great the need for space as the student body expanded, the faculty sitting room, which served no practical purpose whatever in the functioning of the school, was retained. It was an enormously comfortable room, filled with rather shabby easy chairs and a hot plate on which the promised pot of coffee pleasantly perked. Reserved for the faculty and never, no matter what the pressure, used for anything else, the room added greatly to the morale of the teaching staff. It was rumored around the Theban that the opinion of that room was a determining factor whenever the trustees chose a new head of the school. Anyone who found the room impractical (which it was) or space which could more obviously have been used for classrooms (requiring very little expenditure of funds for conversion) or a snobbish affectation, as though the Theban were an English college requiring a senior common room, cast immediate doubt upon herself as a suitable candidate. Such thoughts were considered to emanate from the sort of person who thought you should erect buildings in parks and hot-dog stands in national forests. But what good, Kate reminded herself, is morale in a school closed by a particularly horrible death? Parents had always been a problem to schools, certainly, but schools were not expected to deal with difficult parents by having them devoured, or anyway confronted, by vicious dogs.

  “This is nice,” Reed said. “I like your school and I hope it doesn’t suffer too much from this mess.”

  “What we wanted to ask you,” Julia said, pouring out coffee, “is if there is any chance the body was dropped here this morning, after the dogs were back up in their cage. That’s what Mr. O’Hara insists, but then he’s awfully defensive about his dogs.”