The Headmaster's Dilemma (8 page)

But he wasn't going to heed her. His mother had never really subscribed to the Spencer values, at least as he defined them. Oh, she liked the money well enough, that was evident in the spending his father never checked. Asked by a friend once if she had ever felt guilty about having so much when others had so little, Adelaide's much-quoted reply had been: "Yes, I did at first, but as there was nothing I could do about it, I decided to make myself thoroughly comfortable." And she certainly had! There was something in her air, in her attitude, that implied that if men ruled the downtown world, they had done well to leave the truly important things, the arts and the art of living, to women. She had no loyally to the lares and penates of moneymakers. When Donald had once protested after she had invited and paid a famous radical novelist—some said a card-carrying communist—to address her book class, she had simply told him to "grow up."

Caroline, advised by her mother-in-law, began to accept her husband, but it was a silent, moody acceptance. She spent most of her time with the twins now, and hardly seemed to notice whether Donald stayed home or went out. Sometimes, when they had a social engagement, she at the last moment would refuse to go with him on the obviously false excuse of a migraine, and nothing could convince her to change her mind. Still, their married life had the outward appearance of normality, and Donald supposed that this would have to be enough. And it might have been without the episode of the Connecticut house.

Donald's mother had a curious apprehension that the family fortune was not destined to last, at least not in its present bulk, and she used serenely to make occasional purchases of things that would enable them to be comfortable in a reduced scale of living. One of these was a charming little eighteenth-century house in Connecticut, a colonial gem on the edge of a village green. There she would sometimes go for summer weekends, taking Caroline and the twins. Donald's father, who cheerfully paid for everything his wife desired, remarked to his oldest son with a chuckle, "Fortunately, I am still rich enough to afford your mother's economies."

Caroline loved the house, and when her mother-in-law tired of playing Marie Antoinette at her
hameau
, as Donald sourly put it, she asked her husband, who always took title in his own name, to deed it to her daughter-in-law. Howard, of course, instantly complied, but in the Spencer tradition he gave the place to Donald rather than to his wife. To him it was the same thing.

The house was not heated and was closed all winter, so that, the transfer having taken place in October, there was no idea of Caroline spending a weekend there before late spring. And it so happened that only weeks after Donald took title he received a magnificent offer for the property, which had become necessary to a developer who was taking over the entire little village for a huge retirement home. In accordance with every precept of his economic philosophy, Donald promptly sold it, delaying just long enough to sweeten the already succulent offer.

He saw no reason to tell Caroline. He concluded that over the ensuing months she might even lose her interest in the house. But he was a bit nervous about it. She had spoken of it with real feeling, and he had even wondered if she might wish to heat it and live in it permanently, expecting him only for weekends and putting their marriage on that basis.

He did not know it when, on an early spring day, she drove up to Connecticut to show a friend the house. She was faced with a vacant lot. The developer's bulldozer had preceded her.

The scene to which she subjected her husband on her return ended all possibility of a happy union in the future. She screamed at him that he had taken the one thing she loved of the family properties and destroyed it for no other reason than to hurt and humiliate her. He had coldly insisted that he had treated the house like any other asset in his portfolio, disposing of it for a price that would almost surely never come again. He offered to hold the cash proceeds for any purchase that she might ask. She said that she wanted nothing and would take the twins and return to her own family.

In the end she didn't do this. Her parents didn't want her, and she had no grounds for a divorce. Adelaide Spencer intervened, and Caroline was persuaded that the best thing for her and her children was to remain under the protection of the Spencers and their wealth. In a lawsuit Donald would have fought her with all his clout and money; in a reconciliation he would leave her strictly alone and support her in style. What else could she do?

Well, she could drink, and that, alas, she did. She isolated herself more and more from her friends and became a shadowy figure rarely seen and talked about with shaken heads. She suffered from recurrent severe depressions and spent much of her time in a psychiatrist's office. Adelaide saw a great deal of her and kept her from going seriously off the tracks. The two children, who had inherited a good slice of their father's toughness, did surprisingly well with all the governesses and tutors and servants that money could supply. Even Donald, guided more and more by a mother whom his domestic crisis had hoisted into a position of necessary supervision, took a more proper paternal interest in them, and their mother faded into a frail ailing presence that could be kissed in the morning and forgotten during the day.

Donald was too clear an observer not to feel the contrast of the failure of his home life with the success of his business one, nor could he escape the bleak recognition that the only common denominator between the two was the hostility he had incurred in both. He was sensitive enough to be hurt by this, and he found himself looking around for some way or ways to establish a more favorable reputation for his name and career. Why should a man like Michael Sayre get all the glory in a world largely managed by men like Donald? Donald wanted a good name; he wanted people to point to his good works. Had not his creed been that money could buy anything? Why should it not buy him that? Philanthropy had always a good name, and what bought it but money?

The obvious object of his bounty was Averhill. Any gift to his alma mater, Harvard, would be lost in the sea of that institution's vast wealth. Moreover he had a definitive nostalgia for his years at preparatory school. The one thing in his life that he could romanticize was his own gallant fight to rise from a state of ridicule and persecution to a prefectship, all accomplished by his own willpower and without the aid of a penny of the family fortune. The school had several rich trustees but none who were able or willing to do as much as he. As a big enough donor he might identify his own name with that of the academy.

The election of Michael to the headmastership had been an ugly shock to Donald, as he saw his own prospect of fame dimmed in relation to the shining reputation of this new star in the field of education. The only practical way of handling the situation was to ally himself to the new head in such manner as to create the illusion that they constituted an equal partnership. Everyone knew that they had been fellow formmates—could the myth not be spread that the board chairman and the headmaster had been joined in a lifelong union dedicated to the growth and glory of Averhill?

It had not, however, worked out that way. Donald had not foreseen the sweeping changes that Michael would inaugurate, the credit for which could not be attributed to anyone but the headmaster. Donald himself had been strongly opposed to almost all of them. He hated the admission of girls to the student body, the loss of preference for the sons of graduates, the increase of racial and religious diversity, the general relaxation of discipline, the presence of what he considered radicals on the faculty. He firmly believed in an Averhill as much as possible like the one he had attended. He had suffered a loss of prestige in the defeats he had met opposing these measures from a board that seemed as hypnotized by the headmaster as the children of Hamelin by the Pied Piper. It had been to regain his authority over the trustees that he had devised his great sports plan. And now the insufferable Michael was proposing to cut it into slivers and was actually making some headway with the younger and more liberal members of the board!

It was too much, really too much.

But wait! Arriving early at his Wall Street office one morning he found the school's lawyer waiting to see him. He brought news of a lawsuit threatened against the school by the parents of a boy who claimed he had been the victim of a homosexual rape. As Donald skimmed through the counsel's memoranda outlining the nature of the case, he felt a warming of his heart. Sexuality was the gift of an inscrutable god, accorded to man for his damnation as well as his reproduction. Many a great man had stubbed a fatal toe on it. Why should Michael Sayre not be another?

M
ICHAEL WAS EVER AFTER
to refer to the boy Elihu Castor as Eris, because it was she who cast the apple of discord into the banquet of the gods.

Elihu, as a fourth-former and fifteen, was a black-haired, chubby lad of a lounging physical attitude, with large, deeply apprehensive red-brown eyes, the pampered only child of a rich, stout, opinionated mother who had been married solely for her money by a merry, mocking, little cynic of a multi-clubbed gentleman who was too mortally afraid of his jealous and strictly supervising spouse to indulge in the adulteries that constantly tempted him. Rosina and Elias Castor lived in a Beaux Arts house, too pompous for its exiguity, on East Seventieth Street in Manhattan and in a shingle villa in Newport. In the latter resort they clung to the fringes of the summer community that Rosina imagined that she dominated. Her husband, keener if more duplicitous, knew better.

Elihu, who had inherited a portion of his father's intelligence with his mother's fatuity, had always understood their relationship. He had seen that his mother ruled and that his father, for all his sly innuendos and somehow lewd chuckles, obeyed. He knew that their sputtering arguments always terminated in a maternal mandate and that his own soft life of ease in a household of well-trained servants depended on the emotion he aroused in the ample bosom of an adoring female parent. On evenings when she read aloud to him of the dashing rescues of the Scarlet Pimpernel he would nestle in her comfortable lap and inhale her fragrant perfume and finger her large pearls. His father's futile gibes and smutty jokes, even when he sensed in them the timid overtures of something like a paternal affection, could hardly be weighed against the conclusive power of the waved maternal wand.

But a goddess was still a goddess. He had often witnessed the effect of her wrath on others. Brunhild's
hojotoho
was a piercing cry, and if her spear was never pointed at him, it was always there. It was not hard for him to please her, but please her he must.

She wanted him constantly with her. It was she and not Nanny who picked him up after classes at Buckley, the day school he attended before Averhill; he would find her waiting for him in the luxurious back seat of the crimson Rolls-Royce where, on a cold day, she would immediately bundle him in the fur cover and hug him close. And she would take him shopping with her, asking him to advise her in choosing dresses paraded before her at Bergdorf Goodman or jewels submitted to her inspection by unctuous attendants at Tiffany's or Black, Starr & Frost. A whole room in the townhouse was devoted to the toys she bought him, including a fabulous dollhouse with period rooms furnished with objects that he and she shopped for together and carefully arranged and rearranged.

It was this dollhouse that alerted Elihu to the existence of a world with quite other standards than Mama's and one with which he would have to learn to deal. At Buckley until he was nine, he saw little of the other boys as he went home immediately after classes and exercised with a private instructor in a small gymnasium room in the attic of his home. But the school persuaded the reluctant Rosina that he should be allowed to play ball in Central Park in the afternoon with his classmates, and he thus came to make his first friendships. One of these was with a boy called Sam Taylor, whom he made the unfortunate effort to impress by telling him of a new plan for adding a "music room" to the interior of the dollhouse. Sam chortled.

"A dollhouse! You have a dollhouse! What kind of a sissy does that make you, Castor?" He turned to the other boys. "Say, fellas, what do you know? Castor has a dollhouse!"

Poor Elihu was about to say that it was his sister's, but then he immediately realized that they would find out that he had no sister, and he said it was an old dollhouse of his mother's, but he still had to suffer gibes and pokes for some days until the incident was forgotten. He never told his mother for he had a conviction that she would not understand. And he never told his father for he had an intuition that he would. He thought he might give up playing with the doll's house and convince his mother that he had tired of it, but she just then had purchased a little piano for it that played a tune, and he loved it too much. It dawned on him finally that the dollhouse was a crime only at school and not at home. He did not know it, but he had made a discovery that would guide him through life. Morals were made by the environment. Silence was the answer to all.

There were plenty of occasions to develop his theory at Averhill to which he was sent at age thirteen. His going there had been a severe emotional crisis for his mother. She had hoped to keep her child at home at least until college, but she had finally been prevailed upon with the argument, presented by teachers, friends, and even her husband, that graduation from an accepted New England boarding school, was, at least in her social milieu, something of a must for social success at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Elias Castor had taken a rather firmer stand in this matter than in other domestic affairs; he had been briefly happy himself at Averhill, and he was far too perceptive not to see that a temporary freedom from the maternal embrace was not going to do Elihu any harm. Indeed, he may have desperately reached a hand toward the very maleness of the institution to lend him a bit of strength to oppose the overpowering opposite in his home. Yet even at that he confined his arguments in favor of the school to those that appealed to the worldly nature of his wife and her social aspirations for their son.