The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  Mr. Griscam led the discussion into the question of what sort of boys the future Justin Martyr should seek to educate, thus placing in issue Duncan Moore’s policy of “broadening the base.” Dr. Prescott asked if this was compatible with his concept of the school as a family.

  “It’s a curious sort of family that can turn down Jack Gregg’s grandson,” Gavin Glenway suggested, with his deep lawyer’s throat-clearing, as he packed his pipe.

  “Has he been turned down?” Dr. Prescott asked in concern. “Has he indeed?”

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked,” Glenway continued, in a tone of weighted sarcasm. “Perhaps we should endeavor to take the modern view. What if Jack Gregg raised a half million dollars for the pension plan? What if no fewer than ten Greggs have graduated from Justin? What if Jack’s father was one of the first trustees? What is all that against simple merit? Let Justin Martyr be as stern as Justice!”

  “But, Gavin,” Dr. Prescott protested, “to admit Jack Gregg’s grandson, would we have to consider what he has given the school? Is it not enough that he is an old friend of the school? And what is so wrong with making an exception for the grandson of an old friend? Would it have to mean that one was truckling to wealth?”

  “I’m afraid it would, Dr. P. Because it’s hard for a man to become a well-known friend of the school unless he gives to the school. And it’s the wealthy who give. However, I am not so scrupulous as you. I most assuredly would manage to find room for any grandson of Jack Gregg who wasn’t a Mongolian idiot.”

  “You mean because of his wealth?” Dr. Prescott persisted, shocked.

  “I’d never answer that question. Why should I? I’m a practical man.”

  “And I’m not?” Here Dr. Prescott rose slowly to return to the drink tray, and Mr. Griscam moved to help him. “No, no, sit down, David,” he grumbled. “I’m just putting another drop of whiskey in this. You made it too light. Sit down,” he repeated irritably, “you’re getting old yourself. A practical man!” he exclaimed, his back to the rest of us as he poured his drink. “How many times a schoolmaster has to hear that term! All you graduates like to believe that you have been buffeted by hard realities whereas we at Justin have lived unspotted by the world. You return here lovingly perhaps, but certainly condescendingly. There’s dear little old quaint Dr. P. Was he the demon who scared us so as boys? Why, he’s as soft as sawdust!” He turned now to face the trustees as they protested and raised his hand to check them. “Now, stop it, all of you. You know it’s true. It’s one of the functions of a school to make even the softest graduate feel hard-boiled.”

  As we laughed, he sat down again, stirring his drink slowly and gazing into it as if unsure whether it were friend or foe. “You want to protect me, so be it. We agree, anyway, about taking the Gregg boy, if for different reasons. You, Gavin, because of your experience in the law, believe that the most discreditable reason must be the governing one. I am not so sure of that. I believe that we could make an exception for Gregg boys simply because we like them and because they belong at Justin.”

  “Well, we can all agree that there’s room in life for exceptions,” Gavin Glenway said placatingly. “I’m sure David will agree with me that a lifetime in the law makes one suspicious of rules.”

  “Perhaps the exception should be the rule,” Dr. Prescott said so mildly that Glenway did not realize that he was being laughed at. “Perhaps that would be a lawyer’s paradise.”

  “Of course, if Jack Gregg had changed the boy’s name to Kowalski, he’d have gotten in fast enough,” Sam Storey intervened explosively. He had followed Dr. Prescott’s example in fortifying his drink. “Next year’s first form might have been garnered at Ellis Island. Now I like to think I’m as democratic as the next guy, but where do we stop? Do we want to jettison altogether the principle of a Protestant school for boys of Anglo-Saxon descent?”

  “But there was never any such principle!” Dr. Prescott protested, shocked again.

  “Not in your eyes, sir, I admit. But in the eyes of most of the country Justin, along with the other New England prep schools, has that reputation. And why should we be ashamed of it? Haven’t our boys come of the families that made America great? Isn’t there something in traditions of honor and responsibility handed down from generation to generation? Look at the aristocratic tradition in England!”

  “I know a bit about that, Sam,” Dr. Prescott replied, still, I thought, with astonishing mildness. “Don’t forget that I went to Oxford. But in England the upper classes used to give something in return for their privileges. They went into government and into the army and the church. It was a tradition of public service.”

  “Well, Groton produced Franklin Roosevelt,” I volunteered. I had been silent so far, respecting the presence of my elders and betters, but I could not resist this opportunity. The reaction was immediate.

  “Ugh!”

  “Groton should be ashamed of it.”

  “Groton is ashamed of it!”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Dr. Prescott exclaimed, raising both hands now, a glimmer of amusement in his eye. “You forget that David Griscam was one of our late president’s diplomatic appointees.” There was a murmur of perfunctory apology. “It has always been my chief regret,” he continued in a sadder tone, “that Justin has sent so few men into public service. When the English nobility began to turn to the stock market, it seemed to me there was no further justification for an upper house.”

  “Yet it’s just what saved it!” protested Ira Hitt. “That’s the only way any of your old families survive. By adapting themselves to the new. Ask Dave here.” I had never heard anyone call Mr. Griscam “Dave” before, but no doubt excitement made him intimate. “He’s the expert. Would families like the Griscams occupy the position they occupy today if they’d gone into the army or navy or wasted their time in politics? Hell, no! I beg your pardon, Dr. Prescott.”

  “It’s quite all right, dear boy,” the old man replied blandly, waving his arm. “Hell no, as you say. Pray go on about the Griscams.” He cocked a mocking eye in Mr. Griscam’s direction. “I find it most instructive.”

  “They stayed in the market. They put their money where the new people were putting their money. They even married the new people. Isn’t it so, Dave?” He pressed on, ignoring Mr. Griscam’s irritated shrug. “Because business is our aristocracy. Finance is our aristocracy. Even after thirteen years of creeping socialism! You should be proud, Dr. Prescott, that you have sent your boys to take their places in the front ranks of American progress. And until the day we go Commy—which may not be far off—business will continue to be the front ranks. I believe Justin Martyr should educate the sons of our business and banking leaders. And, of course, a certain percentage of the new people, too. I was a new person. I made my way, but I got my start at Justin!”

  We were all a bit embarrassed by this outburst, but Dr. Prescott knew just how to deal with it. “That’s very gratifying to hear, Ira,” he said smoothly. “I remember when you were a third former and wanted to put the school store on a paying basis. You even had a plan to issue stock. We suspected then that you would go far.” The rest of us laughed, and Ira flushed with pleasure. “I take it, then, that in broadening our base you would select, in addition to the Cabots and Lowells, boys who look as if they might grow up into Cabots and Lowells?”

  “Well . . . yes. As a matter of fact, I rather like that way of putting it.”

  “I am glad that my phrase was so felicitous. I think I begin to put together the opposition that you gentlemen feel to my successor’s program. Gavin would favor the sons of the rich, and Sam, more in the tradition of John Adams, would lean to the well-born.”

  “Now, Dr. P, it’s not that simple.”

  “Ah, but it’s an old man’s privilege to oversimplify. And Ira would lean to both while keeping a wary eye on the hordes from which new recruits for the Social Register must be periodically selected. I must say, gentlemen, you make me feel like the patron sa
int of the Chamber of Commerce. Or should it be the Society of the Cincinnati? My likeness should be raised upon a pedestal at the foot of Wall Street.”

  “You may laugh at us, Dr. P,” Gavin Glenway rejoined, “but in sober truth you should be proud. It is the moral tone of the business community that sets the moral tone of the nation. And you have done your share of elevating it.”

  “Good, good,” the old man muttered.

  “Of course, I don’t say Mr. Moore is entirely off base,” Ira Hitt conceded. “In these days a school must keep an eye on its tax exemption. The time may be coming when it will be politic to have a couple of coons to show the Revenue boys. Just to keep the record straight.”

  Dr. Prescott’s face was drawn to an expression of the tightest fascination. “Coons?” he asked softly.

  “Negroes. We may come to that. Oh, a couple would do the trick. And some of them, you know, could pass for whites.”

  “So?” Dr. Prescott pursued. “Is there an agency that supplies them? Can we write and ask for a Negro with a white face and a Jew with a straight nose and a Japanese who’s hardly yellow at all? Ah, the wonders of your liberal world, Ira!”

  “I didn’t make the world, sir,” Ira said sulkily. “You can make fun of me, of course, if you like.”

  The pause that followed this was a bit weighted with constraint, and Gavin Glenway ended it by asking: “What does David think? He hasn’t expressed an opinion.”

  “Oh, David believes in everything,” Dr. Prescott answered in a strong voice tinged with bitterness. “David would have the old families and the new, the bright and the stupid. The Jew and the Gentile. And somehow, when David was through with them, they’d all be the same. They’d all be Davids. Isn’t that the American dream?”

  As he rose to bring his drink again to the bar table, the trustees exchanged uneasy glances.

  “I wonder if it isn’t my bedtime,” Gavin Glenway suggested.

  “I think perhaps it’s everybody’s,” Sam Storey agreed, and we all rose.

  “Can I see you home, sir?” Glenway asked Dr. Prescott.

  “No, no, I’m going to stay and have a nightcap with David and Brian,” Dr. Prescott said without turning from the bottle that he was carefully pouring. “Don’t worry about me. I shall be fine. Good night, gentlemen. And thank you for your ideas.”

  As I watched the departing trustees one by one take Dr. Prescott’s hand to bid him good night, adding further stories and opinions to what had already been said, a great light flashed on in the attic of my mind, illuminating suddenly what had been only a dusky doubt. I had been disturbed about something obscurely but unpleasantly at hand in our meeting, a something that seemed to amount to a small sense of surprise that trustees of Justin could be so ordinary, so angular, so predictable. But if predictable, whence the surprise? It was just the answer to this that I now saw: if they seemed predictable it was because they had been predicted, because Mr. Griscam had picked them out and turned them on. He had stacked his hand with the men on whom he could count to persuade Dr. Prescott that Duncan Moore, with all his faults, was an idealist compared to the average graduate. To warn him that if he ever did unseat Moore, his successor might be worse!

  I saw Mr. Griscam nod to the others as he shut them out, to reassure them, perhaps, that he would take care of the old man, and then return to his seat. Dr. Prescott took his drink back to his armchair. He sat for several minutes staring moodily into the fire, and when he spoke it was clear that he had been thinking my thoughts.

  “Did you plan it that way, David?” he asked, and when Mr. Griscam did not answer at once, he pursued: “Did you plan that little discussion to open my long-sealed eyes?”

  “I thought you might find it interesting.”

  “Then you must answer me something. Truthfully.”

  “When have I not?”

  “Oh, many times, David. You are like a Jesuit with truth. You believe in meting it out according to the recipient’s capacity to take it. Mine you have always rated very low. But I am learning—oh, yes, I am making strides. I sometimes think my education began with my retirement. I can take most anything now. Tell me truthfully.” Here he paused and held up a finger to warn Mr. Griscam that he was in earnest. “Are those three men—Sam and Gavin and Ira—representative of graduate opinion?”

  As I opened my lips to protest, I saw Mr. Griscam’s eyes fixed upon me in what, surprisingly enough, seemed a rather mild stare. “All right,” he appeared to be telling me, “rush in and break things up, go on, impetuous youth. But, remember who came whining down to New York last Christmas for help and tell me afterwards who will keep the old man from making a fool of himself tomorrow night.” He continued so to look at me, perfectly patient, ignoring Dr. Prescott’s question, throwing me, so to speak, the ball, until in silence and confusion I could only bow my head.

  “I believe they are typical, Frank,” he answered gravely.

  “I see.” Dr. Prescott gave one of his deep sighs. “I don’t, but does it matter? If even some are that way! Of course, none of them is actually young.”

  “The young don’t make the decisions. You know that, Frank.”

  “No. They simply die for those who do. So be it.” He was silent again, and there was no sound but the crackling of the fire and the sipping of his drink.

  “Don’t finish that, Frank,” Mr. Griscam suggested softly. “You have a long day tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be impertinent to your elders, David. I know exactly what I can drink, and I have every intention of finishing this one.”

  We sat for a few minutes more until suddenly Dr. Prescott started talking, in a low, somber tone, gazing into the fire. “I took my daughter Evelyn’s youngest child to the circus in Boston last week. There was a clown in it who kept trying to escape from a round bright spotlight trained on him from the top of the house. He ran all about; he tried to escape into the audience. Everywhere the bright circle remorselessly pursued him. Now I see that I was that clown. And the spotlight was the effort of all the rest of you to keep the truth from me.”

  “The truth?” I burst out in dismay. “What truth?”

  Dr. Prescott looked at me as if he had forgotten my presence. But his tone was perfectly kind. “The truth about Justin Martyr, Brian. I was to see only the bright light of the circle in which I was to perform. Beyond it was the darkness which was no affair of mine. Oh yes, you saw it, David, you and the others. You were used to the darkness. But it was not for clowns. Clowns had to keep clowning so that the rest of you could forget the darkness in which you sat.”

  “But now you see it,” Mr. Griscam said impassively.

  “As if it were light.”

  “And what exactly do you see?”

  Dr. Prescott jerked his head around to give his interrogator a cold stare. “I see that Justin Martyr is like the other schools. Only I, of course, ever thought it was different. Only I failed to see that snobbishness and materialism were intrinsic in its make-up. Only I was naïve enough to think I could play with that kind of fire and not get my hands burnt. But you, David, of course, understood all that. You even saw how to make a selling point out of my naïveté. You persuaded the world that the gospel of Prescott of Justin was the passport to good society. And the world believed it! When I urged the boys to go into politics or the ministry, they accepted it as Prescottism, so many lines of a lesson to be learned that had no relation to the real world at home. They learned their lines, yes. Some of them even enjoyed learning them. They had been told by their parents that to be a graduate of Justin would be a material aid in that real world. Ah, yes, reality.” He grunted here and paused. “Reality was the brokerage house, the corporation law firm, the place on Long Island, the yacht, the right people. The obvious things. One can’t be too obvious about them. I was simply added to their list.”

  “Why, Frank,” Mr. Griscam demanded, “must you assume that nobody but you has any idealism?”

  “I assume there was no idealism in this room
tonight!” Dr. Prescott exclaimed in a loud barking tone. “I listened to those men. I listened carefully. Your unhappy boy Jules thought I was a devil. Had he lived, he would have learned that I was only a fool. Perhaps Jules and I had more in common than either of us suspected. Perhaps we were both clowns imprisoned in our spotlights.”

  “But you’ve always been a realist,” Mr. Griscam protested, “ever since I’ve known you. A rather bitter realist, too. There are those who’ve even called you a cynic. You’ve professed to understand the worldly motive, the power of snobbery, the dollar. Why suddenly is it so appalling to face those things in Justin?”

  “Because I created Justin!” Dr. Prescott cried out. “And I created it precisely because I saw the world as you say. Because of the carpetbaggers who sold out the victory in my boyhood! And now I see that Justin is only another tap for the world’s materialism. For you, David. Oh, rot!” He rose suddenly and disgustedly to go. “I may be a maudlin old man, but I’m not a complete idiot. I see your game. You’ve had wind of my speech tomorrow night, and you’re trying to head it off. Well, sleep well, old boy. You’ve succeeded. As you’ve always succeeded in everything you’ve tried to do here.”

  “Please, Frank.” Mr. Griscam followed him to the door. “It breaks my heart to hear you talk that way.”

  “You should know how to mend hearts, David. Isn’t it your trade?”

  “That’s not fair!” Mr. Griscam was suddenly angry himself. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever been disillusioned? Do you think the rest of us have experienced nothing in life? How do you think I felt when Jules pitched that rock through the chapel window that I had given?”