The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

  She did not like it, however, one evening at a nightclub, when she asked for his opinion of her law firm and received this calm but devastating evaluation:

  “I appreciate the argument that every plaintiff is entitled to the best presentation of his case. Lawyers have always cited this as exempting them from any responsibility to society for the havoc that swollen jury awards, vastly exceeding the cost of any damages suffered, have inflicted on our economy. The result is that we perish in paperwork and enormous insurance premiums. An audiologist can’t take wax out of your ears without a life history of your illnesses, operations, and allergies.”

  “And you accuse my firm of causing all that?” she demanded indignantly.

  “Simon Abrams is notorious for the way he bamboozles juries. Everyone knows that.”

  “You’re calling him a shyster?”

  “I haven’t, but I’m quite willing to.”

  Ione was outraged. “You pretend to care for me, yet you sit there calmly and slander my boss!”

  Michael seemed entirely unperturbed. “I don’t for a minute admit it’s slander, and I fail to see what his being your employer has to do with my assessment of what he may be.”

  “Because you’re calling me a shyster, too!”

  “I am not. You look up the law for him. He’s certainly entitled to that. It doesn’t make you responsible for what he does with it.”

  “But you think I should quit my job, don’t you?”

  “I’d be happy if you did, yes. But that’s your affair. You must lead your own life, my dear, and not mine. However, I’m always going to be frank with you when you ask me a question. You asked me one tonight.”

  “Well, I shan’t ask you again! You’ve spoiled my appetite, and I want to go home.”

  In the taxi she pouted in silence, and at her house she leaped out of the cab without bidding him good night. But there was very little sleep for her in the restless hours that ensued. She finally brought herself to the point of admitting that she would have to choose between her job and Michael. She couldn’t go on seeing him and knowing how he viewed her daily occupation. And by morning, pale, exhausted, and defeated, she had made peace with her decision that he was going to be her life. Or at least, she added to herself, with a last fling of defiance, a good part of it.

  The very next day she gave notice to her firm that she was quitting her job, offering the acceptable excuse that she was contemplating matrimony, and a few weeks later she applied for and accepted a position with Legal Aid. Michael actually laughed when she informed him of this, and said she hadn’t had to go that far, but she could see that he was deeply pleased, and in the following month they were married, to the great satisfaction of both their families. The hours at Legal Aid were less arduous than those at her old firm, and she was able to give more time to the babies, a boy and a girl, who made their appearance in the first three years of a blissful marriage. Michael, despite his absorption in his newspaper work, was just as helpful in their domestic duties as she had been sure he would be, and though she never agreed with him that her former boss was a shyster, she knew she had the perfect husband. And when the dazzling offer of the headmastership of Averhill was made to him, he added, if such were possible, another jewel to the crown of his marital perfection.

  He told her firmly that he wouldn’t consider a position that involved the giving up of her Legal Aid job that the move to Massachusetts would require.

  “Oh, my darling,” she replied with a gasp, “you can’t really compare the headship of a nationally famous school with my representing a few battered wives and petty shoplifters. Of course we’re going to Averhill.”

  “I don’t see it that way at all,” he retorted stoutly. “I see it as a plush academy for rich kids as opposed to helping the poor and needy in their legal troubles. And not only are you doing a splendid job in Legal Aid—you know you love it.”

  It was true, Ione reflected ruefully. She was doing a decent job, and she did love it. A good nurse looked after the children in the daytime, and she was home by six and all the weekend. It was a good life. But she knew what people would say. “He gave up a great career because his selfish wife wanted to keep her trumpery job.” She had always believed that in a perfect modern marriage the minor career should bow to the bigger one. She knew that Michael would have surrendered his had she been offered the headship of a great girls’ school in another state.

  “We needn’t argue about it, my dear,” she said conclusively. “I shall tell Legal Aid tomorrow that I’m leaving them—whether or not you accept the Averhill offer. So my job will cease to be a factor in your decision.”

  She went on to insist that their new life at the school would present an exciting challenge for both of them. It was easy for her immediately to see that this attitude was distinctly gratifying to him. Oh, yes, he wanted that job, so long as he could have it with a clear conscience!

  “Well, I will say this about it,” he commented. “It’s really a post for both of us. A headmaster’s wife, like a diplomat’s, is a partner of her husband.”

  3

  A FULL PARTNER? An equal partnership? Well, for a time Ione had tried to see it that way. The first year at Averhill had been a busy and distracting one for her: rearranging and redecorating the rather worn headmaster’s residence, getting the children settled at the local nursery school, meeting the faculty and the faculty wives, acquainting herself with academic ways and traditions. But after that it became apparent that there was a wide and impassable gap between the new headmaster’s hectic and crowded days and her own so much more placid ones.

  For there was really little enough for a headmaster’s wife to do, in the highly organized academic schedule, that seemed worthy of her training in law or even of her general aptitudes. There was the duty of entertainment, to be sure: visiting parents, trustees, and alumni had to be greeted and sometimes fed; “parlor nights,” when selected groups of students came to her house for games and cider, had to be organized; faculty wives had to be visited and certain school functions attended. But it was all a bit like being royalty on a very minor scale; a trained and efficient staff did most of the work, and a gracious smile often sufficed as her contribution. Nor did she find any particularly congenial friends among the faculty wives, who struck her on the whole as a rather dreary lot. Everyone was very kind, very helpful, but she was a long way from the glittering world of her parents, which she at last fully appreciated. And the contrast of her life with Michael’s zestful and industrious one was not pleasant.

  For he had plunged with energy and enthusiasm into what he didn’t hesitate to call the challenging job of hauling the school into the modern era. The introduction of coeducation had substantially enlarged the student body; a new dormitory had to be constructed, classrooms expanded, women teachers employed. Courses in science and philosophy had to be added to the schedule, and Michael himself, despite the endless administrative demands on his time, had insisted on teaching a new class in current events that included everything from the arts to government. He even lent an occasional hand in football coaching, and he always attended the Saturday afternoon games with neighboring schools. There was little relief for him, either, on weekends, when he made himself available for conferences with worried parents when he was not traveling to New York or Boston to address alumni on fund drives.

  One period each day, however, was rigidly kept for him to be alone with his wife, and that was the half-hour before their bedtime when they discussed the events of the day over a nightcap.

  “Darling, you’re going to kill yourself if you don’t ease up,” Ione observed sadly on one such occasion.

  “Not so long as I thrive on it!” Michael exclaimed. “So long as I can actually see the barge getting slowly under way as I tug on it, the whole thing is a joy. Arnold of Rugby said there was no happiness on earth comparable to that of a headmaster who feels his school is on the right track.”

  “And Arnold died of it at age forty-six. Rea
d your Strachey.”

  “Anyway, I’m sure he died a happy man. But don’t worry, my love. I shan’t do much dying so long as I have you. Which brings me to something I’ve been mulling over and which I’m now ready to discuss. I’ve been very much aware that I cannot expect you to get the same kick out of this Averhill job that I do. And I never forget that you gave up a career you loved for me.”

  “Oh, Michael, it wasn’t all that great,” she protested, suddenly mortified at receiving so much credit for so minor a resignation. “I rather liked your thinking I’d sacrificed myself for you. Not that I wouldn’t have, anyway.”

  “Nonetheless, you did it. And I’ve been racking my brain to find a way of reviving your law career. The big firms in Boston or Springfield are too far to commute to with any comfort, and I’m too selfish and too crazy about you to contemplate your moving there and our being reduced to a weekend marriage.”

  “Oh, never. Not that.”

  “But our local burg, Glendon, has a small but reputable law firm only ten minutes’ drive from here. Of course the school’s regular counsel is in Boston, but Bates and Harris do our local work, and Joshua Bates is willing to supply you with an office in which to do legal aid work if the idea appeals to you. He won’t give you a salary, but you can use his office staff, and he will refer clients to you who can’t afford counsel for their wills and mortgages and marital troubles. You won’t get paid, and you’ll have to get yourself admitted to the Massachusetts bar, but neither of these need trouble you. It’ll be the same kind of useful work you did so well in New York.”

  Ione was touched almost to tears at this evidence of how sensitive he had been to a discontent that she thought she had concealed from him and what pains he had taken in his busy days to work out this plan in her behalf. She could imagine how it must have pained him to use a client’s pressure on a dependent local lawyer to benefit his wife, and she had little doubt that he had used his own money to rent that office and buy a share of the staff time. Really, as a husband he was too good to be true!

  She motored the next day to Glendon for an interview with Joshua Bates. Glendon was a dreary little town with a few dreary little shop-lined streets, as unlovely as some New England villages could be charming. The nondescript offices of Bates & Harris occupied the second story of a two-story brick shop building. Mr. Bates was polite but reserved; Ione could well feel that he had no interest in legal aid and cared only to oblige the institution that probably supplied him with a good portion of his revenue. The office she would occupy was small and bare; it had probably been used to store files and had just been cleaned out by Mr. Bates’s sullen old secretary who showed it to her and no doubt already resented the extra stenographic work that this grand lady from Averhill would demand. Ione could imagine the distrust with which the poor farmers of the neighborhood would regard “Mrs. Fancy Pants” from New York as she looked over their mortgage papers. Driving back into the beautiful Averhill campus, she wondered how she could ever have dreamed of leaving it.

  Michael expressed no disappointment when she told him of her decision not to accept the Bates offer, but simply said he would have to find another solution for her. He frowned, however, when she suggested that she might teach a girls’ class in English Lit.

  “There are no girls’ classes, dear. All classes are coed. And keeping order where there may be boys showing off to girls and girls making up to boys requires a practiced hand.”

  “Oh, I can handle boys.”

  “The girls may be even harder. The impudent ones—and you can always count on at least one of them to be that—can be very subtle.”

  “Not subtler than I!”

  “Well, let me think it over.”

  That he did so and took considerable pains about it, she learned later. A plain, severe, and highly competent single lady of fifty, Miss Thompson, headed the English department. She finally—and reluctantly—agreed to let Ione teach one of her classes on Friday mornings, and Ione, much excited, brushed up on the four great tragedies of Shakespeare and the two novels of Henry James that she was assigned to teach. Her students would be sixth-formers, mostly aged seventeen, and presumably mature.

  At her first session, the class, of some thirty boys and girls, was silent and attentive—they were taking her measure. A headmaster’s wife in the classroom was certainly a novelty. The girls were probably admiring the smart suit that she had worn for the occasion; the boys may have been sniffing out the lawyer behind her very feminine façade. In that initial hour, Ione found herself delivering a monologue on Hamlet’s real or feigned madness. But she thought she had been accepted.

  The following Friday, with Othello as the assigned reading, the class was more responsive. A serious bespectacled lad wanted to discuss just how black Othello was and whether Shakespeare could be accused of racism in depicting him as an unreasonably jealous and insanely violent man. A black girl then retorted angrily that, on the contrary, Othello was seen as a great and noble hero and that Iago was the racist, clearly disapproved of by the playwright. Ione began to fear, as the discussion was noisily joined by others, that any literary criticism was being lost over an issue that had hardly been one in Shakespeare’s day. She raised her voice over the clamor.

  “We know from Shylock and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta that anti-Semitism flourished among the Elizabethans, but the number of blacks in England at that time was much too small to have caused any feeling about them one way or the other. The only character who shows any real shock over a white woman’s marriage to a black man is Desdemona’s father, and the Venetian senate is clearly against him. Iago is not a racist; he simply uses every bit of mud he can get his hands on to sling at Othello. Let us now discuss the question of whether or not Othello is naive in being so easily misled.”

  A stout, round-faced girl raised her hand. She was Sally Evans, whom Ione knew to be the daughter of a famous backer of Broadway drama. “You’re a lawyer, Mrs. Sayre, are you not? Can you tell us why, even if Othello truly believed his wife to be adulterous, he had to strangle her? Couldn’t he just have divorced her? Surely adultery was grounds for that in Venice—or even in Cyprus. Wouldn’t that have been better than smothering the poor woman with a pillow? And doing it so clumsily that she survived just long enough to try to exculpate him?”

  “I may be a lawyer, Sally, but I don’t presume to know the Venetian code on domestic relations. But anyway Othello gives us his excuse for such drastic action. He is afraid, if Desdemona lives, that she will betray more men.”

  “And why is that any business of his?”

  “Evidently he felt a moral obligation to protect his own sex. You must remember, Sally, that in Shakespeare’s day people were more inclined to impose their morals on others by force than we are. Look at the religious wars of that era.”

  “But divorce was known to be available! Look at the stink Henry VIII made over Catherine of Aragon.”

  “But after that he learned a quicker way!” a boy in the back row almost shouted. “He cut off the heads of two wives for adultery! Othello was a piker compared to him!” Ione felt that the class was getting out of control, and she was relieved when the bell tolled the end of the hour and the class filed out, laughing and loudly talking. But when she tried to make light of the discussion to Miss Thompson, the latter frowned and shook her head.

  “They’re testing you, Mrs. Sayre, to see just how much they can get away with. I know that Sally Evans. She wasn’t in the least interested in what Othello did or didn’t do. She was making a joke of the whole thing and a mess of your class. You should have told her roundly that her question was out of order, and if she had persisted in it, to leave the room.”

  “But, Miss Thompson, wouldn’t that have been stifling free discussion?”

  “The Evans girl was stifling free discussion. And knew she was doing it, too. Anyway, it’s better to overdo than underdo the discipline when you’re starting with students you don’t know. Once you’ve made it clear that you wo
n’t take any nonsense, then you can ease up a bit. But first things first, Mrs. Sayre.”

  Nothing would induce Miss Thompson to call her “Ione.”

  Ione disagreed with the department head’s attitude and disliked her, but she found that she had no wish to discuss their exchange with Michael over their nightcap that evening. She was not sure that he would not consider the backing up of his department heads a primary duty of a headmaster.

  Two weeks later Ione’s classroom was the scene of what she feared Miss Thompson would regard as near anarchy, but which she persisted in viewing as a step forward in unrestricted inquiry. The subject of discussion was the final chapter of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, when Strether rejects the virtual proposal of marriage offered him by Maria Gostrey on the theory that out of the whole business of his betrayal of trust by urging Chad Newsome to stay on in Paris rather than go home to Woollett he should have got nothing for himself.

  “But why shouldn’t he marry a fine and attractive woman who will look after him in the city he has come to love?” the bespectacled boy inquired earnestly. “Isn’t it a kind of masochism for him to insist on going home to Dullsville and friends who now hate him for having failed them?”

  Ione had anticipated the question and had her answer ready.

  “You have to see that Maria Gostrey, for all her amiability and good sense, is what James called a ficelle. That is a character whose sole function is to elicit from the protagonist information necessary for the reader’s understanding of the plot. Gostrey is like the chorus in a Greek drama; she stands aside from the action. Any marriage between a ficelle, a piece of string, and a real character is out of the question.”