The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Dear me. How far will you take me? To the White House?”

  “Don’t laugh at me. But it’s true that I set no limits. You might be the head of a great university.”

  He shrugged. “Well, let’s leave all that to the future. In the meantime I have my hands full at Averhill.”

  “Well, of course you have. But haven’t you already, and in only three years, basically achieved what you set out to do?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Girls are admitted now. That was the great step. And Latin made optional after the third form. And Catholic and Jewish students exempted from compulsory chapel. Racial prejudice is down, and kids no longer get suspended for the dirty talk they’ve learned at their own fireside. Weekends home are allowed once a term, and you even have a fairy as chaplain—”

  “Darling, your tone!” Michael interrupted reproachfully.

  “Oh, I know, I know, but when I’ve had to mind my p’s and q’s all day and night in your temple of political correctness, it’s a relief every once and a while to play the philistine.”

  “But that term! And from you!”

  “All right, call him gay, homosexual, whatever you want. I know he’s still in the closet, but something tells me he’s about to pop out. Anyway, my point is that the main bastions of the old days have been leveled. Isn’t it at least time to consider your next step?”

  “Darling, if I stop for a minute, I may fatally lose momentum. I might indeed lose all. What I’ve accomplished so far is as precarious as a clearing in the jungle. If the bulldozers are idle for even a month, regrowth will swallow it up. I don’t know when the time will come for me to consider a change, but it’s a long way away. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll go back to my study to prepare for tomorrow’s class. You should finish your drink and get some sleep to cure that headache.”

  Ione was silenced for the time being, but she was glad she had broken the ice on a subject that she had no intention of dropping. She was determined to cling to the notion that his real job at the school had been largely accomplished. It allowed her to indulge in a dream that the time was approaching when a headmaster could be tempted, like Alexander the Great, to look about for new lands to conquer. She tried to see this in the light of a natural desire to spur her husband on to the achievement of higher and nobler goals and not to a selfish yearning on her part to escape the ennui of her life at Averhill. She detested the idea that she might be motivated by any concern for her own welfare. At the same time, however, she was too honest and too intelligent not to see both sides of her dilemma.

  She was much relieved, therefore, when something in the next week happened to glorify Michael’s alternative to remaining a headmaster in such a way as to reduce to nothing any question of a benefit to herself. She had gone to New York to attend a big dinner party celebrating her parents’ wedding anniversary, and she found herself seated next to Timothy Armstrong, chairman of the board of the famed Gladwin Foundation. Michael had had to remain in Averhill for class reunion day.

  Well trained by her mother in how to handle tycoons, Ione induced the stout, ivory-haired, gravelly-voiced distributor of millions to talk about himself. He at once proceeded to complain about the troubles of his day. The director of his foundation had just received a diagnosis of lung cancer and would have to retire.

  “It’s hard on him, of course,” he conceded, “but it’s also hard on me.”

  “Because you now have to find a successor for him?” she asked. “But that shouldn’t be too difficult. Anyone you ask will jump at the chance. It’s a great position.”

  “Yes, but here’s the problem, Mrs. Sayre. If you’re looking for the head of a university or a hospital or a museum, you retain a headhunter who will provide you with a list of eligible professors, doctors, or curators. But a foundation head doesn’t have to belong to any special category. The whole world, so to speak, can apply, and you’re faced with a list as long as the telephone directory.”

  “You couldn’t limit it to officers in other foundations?”

  “And rule out some great scientist or statesman or industrialist? Would that be doing our duty to the public? Giving away money requires wisdom and caution and worldly common sense, which are qualities to be found in all fields of leadership.”

  “Even in private boarding schools?” she ventured to ask with a smile, as if in jest.

  “Like Averhill? Why not? By the way, I hear great things about your husband. They say that school is leading all the others in New England now in student applications.”

  “I’m glad people speak well of him. He’s really working his tail off. I worry about his killing himself.” Here she appeared to be continuing her little joke. “I wish your foundation would rescue him. Mightn’t he do for you?”

  “Oh, he’d qualify all right.” The look he now gave her was a chairman’s look. “But he wouldn’t think of leaving Averhill, would he? He’s pretty well stuck up there, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, he might be detached,” she replied in a tone more matter of fact. “He was hired to bring the school up to date, and he’s pretty well done that. A new challenge might be just the thing he needs.”

  “I’ll make a note of that. I really will.”

  He had to talk now to the aggressive old lady on his other side whose imperious poke reminded him that the table was turning.

  She decided to make no mention of this exchange when she returned to school. She knew that a good deal of work would have to be done on Michael before he could be induced to leave Averhill, and she would need a plan and the time to form one. But she had followed tensely the discussion between Michael and Donald Spencer about the proposed sports plaza and had seen in it the seed of a major conflict between the headmaster and the board of trustees. If Michael should try to temper the project, which seemed only too likely, and Spencer should dig in his heels, which seemed equally probable, and the board should support Spencer, which they were only too apt to do where large sums were promised, might not Michael, strongly backed by a loving spouse, pull out altogether? And move on to a glorious career in a city where he and Ione could both do the work they loved? Who said that one couldn’t have one’s cake and eat it?

  Donald Spencer, when he next came up to the school, was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the headmaster had, in only a few days’ time, made a thorough study of his architect’s rough draft for the proposed sports plaza and already sketched out with his own hand some drastic alterations. The gymnasium was reduced in size by a good half and located off-campus on the edge of a declivity in such a way that the top two stories visible from the main school oblong were on a level with the other buildings, while its bulk, with the great hall and swimming tank, discreetly descended the slope in back without dwarfing other structures. The indoor hockey rink was abandoned but the pond near the school that was now used for the sport when iced over was provided with heated changing rooms. The nine-hole golf course was abandoned, as were the oval seats around the football field, but new wooden stands for onlookers were specified. The tennis and squash courts were not changed.

  “Well, if ever a gift horse was stared in the mouth, this is it,” Donald expostulated.

  “That equine is being saved a great deal of money,” Michael assured him.

  “And since when did I ask you to be my treasurer?”

  “You didn’t, of course. But you can hardly expect a headmaster to hold his tongue when he sees the basic character of his institution being altered.”

  “I expect a headmaster not to hurl a donor’s money back in his face! My project will put this school right up at the top of the New England prep schools where it belongs!”

  “We have been into that already, Don. You and I will never see eye to eye, I fear. We must leave the decision to the board.”

  “And how do you propose to persuade them that my plan changes the character of the school?”

  “If they don’t see it themselves, I’m afraid I can’t. Your pla
n, by placing the major emphasis of Averhill on sports, or at least giving it that appearance, is fundamentally anti-intellectual. Appearances are only too apt to become realities.”

  “And all this you deduce from the simple improvement of the athletic facilities available to students?”

  “It goes deeper than that, Donald.” Michael’s dry, cool, impassive tone angered the chairman, suggesting as it did that if his interlocutor would only divest himself of vulgar prejudices for a minute he would have to agree. “A worship of sports can be a challenge to the basic aims of academe. Instead of individual thinking, instead of a fearless questioning of even the most accepted principles, the cult of the muscle and competitive games looks to robotlike teamwork and subservience to a leader.”

  “You would abolish athletics altogether?” Donald glimpsed an argument that could destroy the headmaster.

  “Certainly not. I used the word “cult” advisedly. The emphasis on athletics, like most academic affairs, is a matter of degree. I do not think it’s irrelevant to keep in mind that dictatorships have always favored sports as a convenient way of drilling young men into tightly organized and obedient units. I may be oversensitive but I sometimes catch a faint whiff of Heil Hitler in the roar of a crowd in a stadium.”

  “Are you calling me a fascist, Sayre?”

  “I’m simply pointing out that there’s a bit of that in all of us. We have to watch it. I myself find even the power of a schoolmaster a dangerous instrument.”

  “You’ll find it that if you try to use it against my board of trustees.”

  “Some of whom already deplore your frank espousal of the late Senator McCarthy’s views.”

  “Oh, you discuss that with them, do you? No doubt some of the younger ones have been brainwashed by indurated liberals who refuse to credit the infiltration of our government by reds. But if you think you’re going to get anywhere with that crap with the sounder members of our board, you’re riding for a fall.”

  Michael was at least aroused to an argument ad hominem. “Which of us fought in Vietnam, Donald?”

  “With that I’ll leave you!” the other exclaimed wrathfully. “It’s useless for me to discuss the matter further with you. We can leave it to the board.”

  And he strode out of the room.

  “What it really gets down to,” Michael explained to Ione that night, “is who’s going to run Averhill, him or me.”

  “What a curious man he is,” she mused. “Why, with his millions, does he care so?”

  “Ah, that’s his whole life.”

  It was. Or an essential part of it. Donald’s first hard battle in life had been at Averhill, and he liked to think he had won it, though only after a considerable struggle. The struggle had come as a rough shock to him, for up to his boarding school entry age of thirteen he had ruled the roost as eldest son in the big square brownstone mansion on Sixtieth Street with its fringe of Egyptian hieroglyphics on the façade and which, unusually for Manhattan, had been occupied by more than one generation of Spencers. Donald’s parents had shared it with his widower paternal grandfather, and when the old gentleman had died his mother, the lovely Adelaide, had stripped off the hieroglyphics and redecorated the interior in elegant French eighteenth-century style, satisfying her long frustrated fine taste. His father, Howard, though totally subservient and under the spell while he lived off his own father, the famous banker Lloyd Spencer, whose bedroom the motherless boy had shared up to his own marriage, had nonetheless, on Lloyd’s death, transferred much of this loyalty and devotion to his stronger-minded mate. He had insisted on retaining, however, the management of their oldest boy, whose development and education he tightly controlled, leaving her virtual sole charge of the two younger boys, who though hearty and handsome, shared little of the brains or aggressive manners of their plainer, stouter elder brother whom they were bullied into obeying.

  Howard Spencer, a charming, kindly man who seemed to apologize to the world for being so wealthy, suffered from the peculiar obsession that his destined role in life was to be the needed link between his tycoon father and his future tycoon oldest son. For this, by efforts almost heroic, he had turned himself away from the publishing career of which he had dreamed and become instead the competent if not brilliant chairman of the great bank his father had founded with the duty to pass it on intact to his son. But if he had supplemented whatever he lacked as a banker with his fine selection of able officers, he had shown less judgment in his indulgence of every quirk of his chosen heir. It can be argued in his favor that he spotted early the remarkable talents of the boy whom he took with him on all his business trips to check on companies his bank underwrote: the boy’s aptitude for accounting, his quick grasp of administrative problems, his imaginative concept of the industrial field. But less can be said for his theory that a natural genius should be left undisturbed to develop as it would.

  Donald was the constant companion of a father who bought him everything he wanted and applauded his every idea. Not only was he taken on the business trips, but on cruises on the family yacht he shared the huge paternal cabin (his mother suffered from sea sickness and remained happily ashore) and relayed to the captain his father’s orders, which he sometimes changed to suit himself. Even after the younger brothers had developed the muscle to oppose him physically, the habit of obedience and their father’s unfailing support of him quelled any but silent retaliation. And at day school in the city Donald was spared any violence that his arrogance aroused in his classmates by the fact that they were at all times in a closely supervised classroom or playground.

  Adelaide was always aware that her eldest son needed disciplining, but she found her usually compliant husband as steel in this area, and she finally renounced interference and concentrated her love and care on the younger boys, whom she adored and whose poor performance in school she sought to improve by her own tutoring at home. The contrast of Donald’s high grades was painful to her, and there began to develop between mother and son a kind of mute hostility of which only the two of them were aware. Donald knew that the household contained one critic whom he could never impress, and he resented it, and Adelaide, ashamed of a dislike that seemed unnatural to the mother in her, tried to convince herself that she would love the boy as soon as he was straightened out by a boarding school and that her recommendation of his being sent to one was for his good and not her own.

  Indeed it took some persuasion, for Howard balked at the idea of separating himself from his favored child. What brought him around in the end was the argument offered by friends in the Downtown Association, where he regularly lunched, that a boy who hadn’t been to an acceptable prep school would be socially handicapped at an Ivy League college.

  Thrown to the lions in the arena of Averhill, as Donald would later describe it, he found himself subject to the jeers and fisticuffs of boys who were not in the least impressed by his family’s wealth. The ones who themselves came from rich backgrounds saw it as no reason for boasting, and the ones who didn’t saw it as something to be resented. All agreed that it was no excuse for clumsiness at sports or oddity of appearance, and Donald was hazed more than the other new kids, and as he had not learned the art of making friends he was isolated indeed. Worst of all was the bitter humiliation of the nickname “Peewee,” attributed by the boys’ discovery in the shower room that his private parts had been slower than normal in their development. At this his will was almost broken, and he was on the verge of appealing to his father to bring him home.

  What intervened to prevent this was the sudden and totally unexpected support that he derived from Michael Sayre, the handsomest and most popular member of his form. Hearing another boy spitting the hated epithet at poor Donald, he grabbed him roughly and shook him hard. “That’s a filthy thing to call him for something that’s not his fault!” he exclaimed, and for a few days afterward he showed his endorsement of Donald, walking beside him on the way to chapel, sitting next to him in the dining hall, and giving him pointers in
football practice. The horrid epithet was heard no more. Michael had made it unfashionable, and boys follow fashion as docilely as men.

  Donald for the first time in his life was overwhelmed with affection for someone other than himself. Michael now represented to him everything that he would like to be and wasn’t. He tried to fancy himself as a kind of partner in a glorious friendship: together they would dominate the form and ultimately the whole school. But Michael, like a doctor whose patient is cured, moved quietly out of Donald’s life. He had his own circle of friends, the inner crowd of the form, and though they treated Donald civilly, he would never be really one of them. It was hard but it had to be faced. He would have to make do with what he could find outside the sacred circumference.

  At any rate Donald would remain at Averhill. There was no further question of appealing to his father. Averhill was clearly a test of manhood, and this was a test that Donald was determined to pass. He scanned the school, the students, the faculty, the curriculum to determine just where and how the institution could be “had.” Sports were the most obvious path to popularity and esteem, but in them he was barely adequate. If one could excel in just one, it would help, and he concentrated on fencing, where there was very little competition and in which he could enjoy the fantasy of actually killing his opponent. There was a school weekly to which he could become a regular contributor, reporting on games and other events, and a debating society in which he was sure he could ultimately star. Finally there was the dramatic society in which, without the looks for a hero, he could train himself to play villains and even buffoons. Oh, yes, there were opportunities for one who cared.

  Over the years before his graduation, Donald achieved a considerable status in the student body. He adopted the role of a mordant critic whose bite was always qualified by wit and just a hint of concealed benevolence. As the boys grew older and began to take account of the outside world, he made himself something of an expert in politics, reading newspapers and periodicals, and found that he was at his best with the students of rich parents and with his always watching father by taking a conservative view and posing as the weary and well-documented realist who saw through the hypocrisy of the idealist and the reformer while flattering his listener with the assumption that he was too smart not to agree. It became almost a mark of superior sophistication to be included in Donald Spencer’s set. At the end of his fifth-form year he nursed hopes of being elected by the fifth and sixth forms (the latter was the graduating class) as one of the seven prefects who assisted the faculty in the administration of the school in their final year.