The Headmaster's Dilemma (12 page)

Ezra Prentice looked the part he had played in American life as if he had been painted by Grant Wood. His big body and long face were rough and gnarled, as weather-beaten as his summer villa; his beetling brow, steely gray hair, and eagle's nose might have been the prow of an old whaler headed into a giant billow. He ran a small summer fishing business around his peninsula and helped the hired men to haul in the nets in the early morning. Hairs protruded from his ears and nostrils.

"People think we're a type that has died out, but we're a lot tougher than that. We've had to move over a bit to make room for the decadent hordes, but we're still here. We learned with John Winthrop that a New England winter had to be coped with and that a good Indian was a dead Indian. And we're not going to be put off by all the crazy modern isms-makers that have invaded the land: the Irish mackerel snatchers, the socialists and commies, and all the deluded do-gooders who would make hash of our state. They can be controlled, but to be controlled they have to be watched. They have to be manipulated! They have to be understood."

"But, Father, I know all that. How does it help me with this Averhill case?"

"That's what I'm coming to if you'll just hold your horses. Averhill is another of these rich New York—supported nests of liberal thought to which all the pinko teachers whose heroes we've defeated at the polls have retreated to bide their time. Half the universities and private schools in the nation fall into that category. And you, my son, are offered a double-edged sword! Not only can you deliver a fatal blow to a sick academy, you can achieve public acclaim from a moral majority that still honors a few decent principles. Or thinks it does."

"But what happened to this Castor kid might have happened in any other school. You know that, Dad. Is it fair to single out Averhill to be the scapegoat for what goes on everywhere?"

"Hiram, do you want to go places in politics or don't you?"

"Of course I do, but a man should still have some principles, shouldn't he? You were just mentioning them yourself."

"Yes, but not when you have a chance like this one. Of course, I know what boys do, and I don't give a damn about it, either. That's not the point. The point is that sex is a weapon that every politician on his toes must know how and when to use. It's a kind of atomic bomb that you have to be careful with, but there are times when it's indispensable. Schools today are dominated by the mothers who don't know beans about what their little darlings are up to. You can terrify them with words like
sodomy
, or
buggery
, or
oral sex
, or
rape
. By God, this case could make you governor!"

"You make it sound as if it were a kind of moral duty."

"Well, call it that if you like! Haven't I heard that Averhill is bowing to the general trend and is going to admit girls?"

"Oh, it just has."

"Then there you are. The school will become a brothel! Tell the mothers: Send your innocent young daughter to Averhill, and she'll be raped like the Castor boy!"

W
ILLY WELDON
, the senior master and head of the classics department, a stout, fussy fiftiesh bachelor with a round puffy face and grayish hair parted in the middle, was listening to the chairman of the trustees over an excellent lunch in Boston's Ritz Hotel. At the school people were apt to listen to Willy, who could charm both students and faculty with his purring wit and love of gossip but who could also command immediate respect when the purr suddenly swelled into a stentorian burst of temper. But Willy would never show the latter to the few he acknowledged to be his superiors, of whom Donald Spencer was certainly one, and the fine Latin scholar, the editor of a nationally used textbook on Virgil and Horace, was now offering an attention to the chairman that was almost reverential.

"It's important to me, Weldon," Spencer was saying, "that you be up to date on all that is unfolding in this case. Before I recommend any action to the board, I shall need the support of some of the older faculty members who have been out of sympathy with the drastic changes inaugurated in the last few years. You know, of course, that the Castors are demanding not only a half million in damages, but a full apology. What you don't know as yet is that the trustees in yesterday's meeting voted to reject their demands in toto. There were some who wanted to leave the door open for a possible settlement, but the vote denying the apology was unanimous. The Castors' counsel can be expected to file the complaint in court no later than next week, so we're in for it."

Willy's eyes glistened. Mightn't the very fact that Spencer had arranged their meeting outside the school signify that he felt a delicacy about taking any action against the headmaster on the campus itself? Had the golden moment really come when Sayre could be compelled to resign? For two years now he had been in constant veiled communication with the chairman, who had easily gleaned the abhorrence of the Latin scholar for a schedule that rendered the dead languages optional and of the confirmed and virtuous old bachelor for the introduction of chattering, giggling girls to what he had deemed a kind of monastery. Willy had naturally apprehended that he himself would appear in this new academy, where youth was so blithely catered to, as an old fogy, a relic of an era that had been rightly consigned to the dustbin. In such a situation was rebellion not sanctified? Willy had been passionately loyal to Michael's predecessor, the Reverend Paul Prideaux, who for forty years had dominated the school with his fervent Episcopalian oratory, his faith in the ordered life, and his command presence. And he had tried his best to be similarly loyal to Michael at first, but there had come a time when he had had to decide that some sort of resistance was needed to save the life work of Dr. Prideaux from total annihilation. But until this lunch he had not thought it feasible actually to oust the headmaster.

"And it's not only the Castors' suit," Spencer continued. "Our lawyer has also informed me that the state of Massachusetts is about to bring criminal proceedings against the school for not reporting to it the Castor boy's complaint, as required by statute. Is it not now actually the duty of the chairman of the school trustees to institute an inquiry as to the fitness to continue in office of a headmaster whose action—or nonaction—has brought this obloquy down on our heads? What do you say to that, Weldon? Eh?"

"Dear me, sir, I suppose it may be."

"You just suppose? You don't roundly affirm it?"

Willy quailed, as before a basilisk. "Yes, sir, I affirm it."

He trembled a bit as he spoke. Strongly as he felt, he had never expected to be compelled to choose sides openly in a conflict that might prove an ugly one to win and an uglier one to lose. Only as late as the previous summer had he come to realize the almost sinister power that Spencer exercised over those who came within his sphere of influence. Willy, who enjoyed a small inherited trust income in addition to his salary, had been able to rent a suite for the summer months in a plush hotel in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he was pleasantly entertained in the great houses of hostesses delighted to find so cultivated an extra man for their dinner parties. But he had recently found that, in the month when Spencer occupied the great Stone mansion on the Shore Path that his father had left to him, he was monopolized by the chairman, who wanted exhaustively to know everything that had gone on in Averhill in the previous year.

"Affirmation may not be quite enough, my friend," the remorseless Spencer now went on. "I want to know if I can expect your active cooperation in this matter."

"But isn't it, sir, a matter for the board? Would they really wish to have the faculty involved?"

"Shouldn't they? Look here, Weldon. If Michael Sayre finds there's a movement to unseat him, he's going to fight it, and fight hard. He's not the type to go quietly. I've known him most of my life, and you can believe me when I tell you that. There'll be a war and a bloody one, and not one in which innocent bystanders are spared. Everyone will be involved whether they like it or not: trustees, faculty, alumni, parents, even the students. I want to know, Weldon, just how you stand. And whether you'll help me or not."

Willy glanced nervously at those small staring eyes. The yellow in them seemed even yellower.

"Oh, I'm with you, of course, sir."

"I thought if nothing else would bring you around, your moral sense would. I can't imagine William Weldon tolerating open sex on Averhill's campus. Girls with boys. Boys with boys. Girls with girls. And, eventually, even with faculty members. Why not? A free-for-all. The great Michael has no vulgar prejudices!"

Willy stiffened at last. His beloved Averhill had always been, at least in its ideals, a citadel of virtue where the carnal appetites of the world were kept outside firmly closed gates. It was a stalwart monastery free from designing, undulating, lewd women and giggling, perverted males. Not that the inmates were monks. Far from it. They were more like King Arthur's knights—strong, chivalric, pure—who would remain unstained until they met their virgin mates—
after
and not before their graduation.

"Oh, yes, I'm with you, Mr. Spencer!" he gasped.

"But I want more than that," the inexorable chairman continued. "I want to know that you'll work with me if I undertake this thing. You have given me the names already of those on the faculty who are opposed, or at least lukewarm, to the headmaster's innovations. I want to know which we can count on to support me when it comes to their being interrogated, as they will be, by trustees and alumni."

"Yes, sir." Willy sighed.

"Good. I've brought a faculty list. Let's go over it, one by one."

Which they did, over a very good meal that Willy was hardly able to relish.

He had loved Averhill from his own school days there. As a boy he had been a great deal stouter than he now was—almost freakish—until a doctor, fearing the weight on his heart, had dieted him for a year, reducing him to a more normal if still chubby appearance. The early condition had seemed an objection to his being sent away to school, at least to his mother, a plain, dowdy, goodhearted, overdressed rattle of a woman who uncritically adored the sole issue of her old loins, but not to his dry stick of a father, the tall, grim, and usually silent light of the Boston municipal bond bar, who insisted that a Beacon Street Weldon must go to Averhill.

Of course, he was called "Fatty" by the boys, but his brilliance in Latin and Greek, his funny jokes and friendly smiles, aroused a mild respect, and his appalling screams of fury if attacked, plus the fact that his physical condition seemed to make violence bad form, protected him from the usual hazing. And after his excess avoirdupois was shed, he achieved an actual popularity as a campus figure. He had found his niche and was completely happy.

The conviction that he had, quite passively and unresentfully, acquired as an obese boy—that he could never be attractive to girls—unfortunately survived into his normalcy. In adulthood he enjoyed the company of women—he always loved chitchat and gossip—but his friendships with the opposite sex tended to be with those whose age or plainness had taken them out of the field of gallantry or had at least rendered them more open to platonic pleasures. As sex seemed to be closed to him, it was natural for him to denigrate it, and this denigration with the passage of years slowly slipped into sourness and finally disgust. Women who indulged in it save in wedlock were sluts or whores; men, satyrs; lovers of their own sex, dykes or faggots.

A principal blessing of Averhill, of course, was that, at least under the Reverend Prideaux's stern aegis, sex had no recognized place on the campus. Chastity reigned; law and order prevailed; the dead languages flourished. Graduating from Harvard, a much less exalted institution, Willy applied for a post on the Averhill faculty where he was warmly greeted, as competent teachers of Latin and Greek were not easy to find, and as Prideaux liked to have under him masters he had himself trained and whom he could fully trust. And as Willy had a sharp eye for everything that went on at a school he cherished and rarely left, and possessed the ability to inspire students in his classes, amuse them in his dormitory, and awe them into obedience with his soaring temper, his rise in the hierarchy was steady until he reached the post of senior master, directly under the head. The students attributed to him a kind of second sight; he seemed to sniff out infractions of the rules before they happened. Yet there was respect, even a grudging affection, in their attitude. He liked the boys, and it was considered a privilege by them to be invited on an evening after study hour to gather in his great book-lined study and listen to his fine collection of classical records, or even gossip about the day's events on the campus, for Willy could become quite cozily confidential with his favorites.

His mother, who had finally given up her long cherished sentimental hope of seeing her "darling Willy" take a lovely young bride, decided, after her somber husband's death, that it had to be up to her to supply her son with a mate—herself. For a lady of her fatuity she showed a surprising subtlety: she purchased a house not so near the school as to suggest that she was pushing herself into her son's life but close enough to provide easy access to him whenever he wished relief from the academic routine and to give him a place in which to entertain his friends on the faculty or in the neighborhood. She was shrewd enough to perceive that the masters at Averhill had little opportunity to enjoy blue-ribbon cooking and the finest French wines, and she soon became a popular figure with them and their wives, whose names and family problems she was careful to learn. Willy, who loved her as dearly as he had not his unsympathetic father, rejoiced in her presence and in her discretion. She only once had the courage to offer him a piece of advice—unwelcome as advice usually is—and that was at her end, when she was dying of cancer, and he was sitting, tearful and distraught, at her bedside.

"Forgive me for saying it, dear son, but I haven't been able to avoid noticing in the past year that the differences between your ideas and the headmaster's seem to be sharpening."