The Headmaster's Dilemma

by Louis Auchincloss

  Donald telephoned now to Elias Castor, whom he had known as a fellow student at Averhill and later as a fellow parent. He had correctly divined that he would more easily touch base with the husband than with the wife, knowing Elias as a man who would probably regard the whole matter of his son and the Caldwell boy as a source for his own amusement. He could be counted on, therefore, to persuade his impassioned spouse to attend a conference with the chairman of the school board that she otherwise might turn down flat. Elias wanted a front seat at the play, and Donald soon received a bid to be present at the Castors’ house that same day at five o’clock. He found Mrs. Castor in a gilded salon, the silent and grim occupant of a large Louis XVI bergère on whose back rested the hands of her standing husband, smirking with the air of a court jester awaiting his chance for a clever crack.

  “Mrs. Castor,” Donald began gravely, “I wish to start by offering you my heartfelt sympathy for the terrible experience to which you and your son have been subjected.” He had the instinct to feel that the omission of her husband would not damage his case.

  “You surprise me, sir,” was the equally grave retort from the bergère. “Counsel for the institution of which you are chairman have rejected my petition in toto. Nor has a single word of sympathy or regret come to me from any official of the school.”

  “Surely you must be aware, Madam, that the moment a litigation is even threatened, a defendant’s lips are sealed by counsel. The silence to which you refer does not mean in the least that the hearts of many of the Averhill community do not bleed for you. I can certainly state that in my own case I harbor a state of outrage at the treatment accorded you.”

  “Are you telling me, Mr. Spencer, that you had no power to alter the situation?”

  “I am telling you, Mrs. Castor, that had I attempted to do so, I should have been overridden by my board. They were following the old rule that when a wrong is charged, one’s first step must be a sweeping denial of any involvement at all. The way is thus cleared for a complete trial of the facts. And may I suggest, Mrs. Castor, that your own counsel would have given us the same advice had we retained them. That is the American lawyer. I’m not saying he’s right.”

  Mrs. Castor seemed slightly mollified by this. She turned around to her husband who nodded as if to approve Spencer’s thought. She turned back to her guest. “I’m not that enchanted with the American lawyer myself, Mr. Spencer. But I guess we’re stuck with him.”

  “Not entirely, Ma’am. We can still talk to each other, as you and I are doing now. And perhaps we can even make some progress. Without a stiff fee, too. I see no reason why two persons as clear-headed as you and I cannot, in a frank and private interchange involving none but ourselves and committing us to nothing, seek the truth in the problem spread before us. Do I have your confidence, Ma’am?”

  “Proceed, Mr. Spencer.”

  “I suggest then that we start with a consideration of the school under Mr. Sayre’s leadership and what this has led to. His purpose, as he frankly stated, was to bring a belated institution into a modern world. That sounds well enough, and it might have been had he limited himself to the good things in the modern world. But Mr. Sayre seemed to want all of it, the bitter as well as the sweet. Young people were to be free to express themselves in coarse language and sexual license, unfettered by the restraints of old-fashioned manners or the limiting standards of good taste. If someone went too far, like the Caldwell boy forcing his unwanted attentions on a younger student, well, that was simply a matter, was it not, for a behavioral therapist. Such things were not so much moral problems as growing pains and should be handled accordingly. There was no need, was there, for people to get excited about it?”

  “Goodness gracious, Mr. Spencer,” Mrs. Castor cried out, “you make me think the school is as bad as Venusberg in Tannhäuser!”

  “A good analogy for old opera fans like you and me. And it’s sad to think that all this was the work of one sincere but misguided man. If he can only be gently but firmly removed from his post, I have little doubt that the school could be returned to its normal and once reputable course. And you, my dear lady, may have the golden opportunity to help us bring this about.”

  “Me? What are you talking about, Mr. Spencer? How?”

  “If you and I can agree to settle your case in the way I am about to outline, I believe I could induce Mr. Sayre to resign. Wouldn’t that, plus an apology to your son, satisfy you? Your concern is not, I deduce, with the beastly Caldwell boy. He is just a bug that the headmaster’s policies have let loose in the school. Nor can I really believe that you are interested in monetary damages. You want a wrong righted, isn’t that it?”

  “It’s true that money was never a first consideration with me,” Mrs. Castro said doubtfully. “It was my lawyer’s suggestion.”

  “Of course! And he’d have got half of it, wouldn’t he?”

  “Something like that, I suppose.”

  “You can be sure of it. You and I are not here to enrich the bar, Mrs. Castor. We have higher motives. More public-spirited ones. My proposal of an apology plus the resignation of the man whose misguided rule has caused all this misery to you and yours should be enough to satisfy your injured honor without subjecting your boy to the trauma of having to relate his shame in a courtroom and be subject to the humiliating cross-examination of opposing counsel, trying to trap him in a lie.”

  “Oh, Mr. Spencer, you’re right! You’re right!”

  “I had the feeling, from the wonderful things I have heard of you, Mrs. Castor, that you and I were people who would soon come to an understanding.”

  “Oh, we think alike! We do!”

  “Maybe I’d better leave the two of you alone,” inserted the grinning Elias. “I know when a husband is de trop.”

  “Oh, Elias, you should have your mouth washed out with soap!” But she was smiling, and when Donald left, an agreement had been made.

  11

  IT DID LITTLE to brighten the darkness of Michael’s mood that the topic for discussion that morning in his sixth-form class was Napoleon, to his thinking the most sinister of all great historical figures.

  “It has been estimated,” he began in a somber tone, “that only Jesus, in all the millions of pages in world tongues, has been the subject of more written words than Napoleon Bonaparte. And if you adopt the orthodox Christian position that Jesus was God, it leaves the little corporal as the most discussed of mortals.”

  His long pause after this introduction led one boy to suppose he was awaiting a comment.

  “Well, there was never a greater conqueror, was there, sir? Alexander the Great seems puny in contrast. And Genghis Khan and Attila and Tamerlane were more like plagues than real conquerors, weren’t they?”

  “Maybe that’s what conquerors are,” a girl intervened.

  “But Wellington defeated him,” another girl pointed out. “Doesn’t that make Wellington the greater man?”

  “It took the whole of Europe to defeat him, really,” Michael observed. “That and a Russian winter. Some historians think he was at his greatest in defeat. His accomplishments were, of course, phenomenal. At one point or another his armies stood in every European capital from Moscow to Madrid. It seemed at times that nothing could stop him. He owned so much of the world that he had to sell some of it off, which was how we got the Louisiana territory, one-third of our nation. Even some philosophers who maintain that history is made up of the flux and reflux of masses rather than by the ambitions and acts of individuals are apt to admit that Napoleon was the one figure who made his own dent in it. As Henry Adams put it, no one knew what Napoleon would do, but everyone knew that what he did would determine the matter.”

  “He wasn’t a greater general than Lee, was he, sir?” This inquiry came from one of the school’s few southern boys.

  “That is certainly debatable, Harry,” Michael replied. “But I don’t want to get into the analysis of battles. I’m sure that you’re better at it than I am. Today I w
ant to get into what all the gunpowder and glory amounts to. Did Lee’s unquestionable military genius accomplish anything but the prolongation of the misery of the South?”

  “It gave us our finest hour, sir,” was the stout reply.

  “Did that bring back the three hundred thousand boys you lost?”

  “No, but it helped.”

  “That’s a good answer, Harry. If it is an answer.”

  One of Michael’s star pupils, an eager, pushing youth from Philadelphia, now took up the cause of the French emperor. “It wasn’t just conquest, sir! Napoleon was resisting the old despots of Europe. He represented the enlightenment of the French Revolution! Not the terror, of course, but the spirit of liberty.”

  “But, Tony, he suppressed liberty of speech. He muzzled the press. He restored the old aristocracy. He even invited the pope to crown him!”

  Tony muttered something about omelet and eggs, and the room tittered, not loudly, for Michael commanded respect.

  “And what about the Code Napoléon?” someone in the back row asked. “Wasn’t that supposed to be a good thing?”

  “People are always pointing that out,” Michael conceded. “But I never know quite what they mean by it. It’s not so hard to write a good law. The Abbé Sieyès wrote many constitutions in that day, some of them perhaps quite good. But people wouldn’t live by them.” He turned now to his main theme. “Why do we reserve our greatest admiration for mighty warriors even when their victories bring disaster upon us? For twenty years Napoleon took his people from glory to glory. He had countless opportunities to pause and make peace and savor his victories, but he always insisted on pushing on. In the end, after France had lost a generation of her finest men, she found herself reduced to the same borders she had had at the beginning. And for this she worshipped and still worships Napoleon beyond any other man in her history! Is it for this that she is considered the most cultivated of nations? Is glory everything? Will glory save us from the atom?”

  But the class disappointed him. They seemed reluctant to pursue a train of thought so abstract. The hour soon exhausted itself in a heated debate of whether or not Napoleon should have kept the Louisiana territory. Some claimed it was too large and remote to be defended against inevitable American encroachment. Others pointed out that the man who could dispatch a million men to the steppes of Russia could have sent a few thousand to our Midwest, which would have been an ample force against an almost unarmed America. Besides, it was darkly suggested, the Indians always joined the French.

  Michael, who would ordinarily have had no difficulty in focusing the class on the larger topic of war and peace, was too preoccupied that day to do much more than idly listen to the chatter. His mind kept running back and forth over the lines of the secret memorandum that Donald Spencer had sent up to him from New York by a special messenger. It contained his account of the Castors’ willingness to drop their suit on certain conditions and his assurance that Massachusetts would certainly drop its suit if this were obtained. The memorandum ended as follows:

  I urge you, my old friend, which you are despite all our differences, to give this your deepest consideration. The flight of the Caldwell boy seems to have almost assured a proof of the charge of rape, and your action, or failure to act under the circumstances, will be proclaimed by our enemy to be a near criminal cover-up. The withdrawal of the claim for damages is, of course, an advantage for the school, but the great thing would be the saving of our reputation. You have already accomplished many of the things you wished to accomplish in your tenure, and nobody need know the reason for your resignation. The Castors have agreed to silence on all matters but the apology, and everyone knows, in our era of cripplingly expensive litigation, that a settlement premised on an apology is no real admission of guilt. You will have a world of other offers. Do this for Averhill!

  Michael was not for a moment taken in by these weasel words. He knew what Donald was after and could even admire the skill with which he went about obtaining it. Donald knew that he would lose if he called on the board to do his dirty work for him. This way he was handing Michael the noose and inviting him to stick his neck in it. It was clever, for Michael was strongly tempted to do so. He was utterly disgusted at how much was being made of what two boys might or might not have done in bed at night and of how preoccupied a great school could be with the randy couplings of juvenile males. He wanted to get out, to breathe fresh air, to shout at the parents and trustees to take their bloody academy and…! The prospect of a public trial was even more nauseating, with prying, insinuating, grinning counsel perhaps implying that the headmaster was himself some sort of perverted voyeur who smacked his lips at a vision of buggery!

  And then, too, quite aside from the avoidance of sordid exposures, Spencer’s little plot would save the school the cost of damages and the interference of the state. And Spencer was quite right that nobody would take seriously an apology rendered, so to speak, at gun point. Averhill would be saved a staining experience. And as to himself, would a resignation really cost him much? Retirement after only a brief term had become common enough among private school heads in an era where once fundamental principles of administration were under constant reexamination. It was no disgrace for a headmaster to find himself in disaccord with his board or his parents or his faculty. There would be some gossip and speculation, of course, but the whole matter would soon be as dead as her late majesty Queen Anne, and there would be plenty of opportunities for one of Michael’s good record. What about that foundation of which Ione had spoken? And where Ione was concerned, hadn’t he agonized over her failure to find a satisfactory role for herself at Averhill? What was he waiting for?

  That very evening, over their usual nightcap, he put this question to his wife. “Do you think the Gladwin Foundation might still be interested if I agreed to go down for an interview?”

  Ione was already in her nightgown and sitting up in bed, a drink in one hand, the other idly turning the pages of a fashion magazine. He was standing before her tying the belt of his robe. She looked up quickly and then put her glass on the bedside table with a sharp click. “What the devil do you mean by that?”

  “Simply that it might not be the wisest thing in the world for me to turn my back on even such a crack of an opening as you suggested.”

  “Michael, come off it! What’s happened?”

  “This has happened, darling.”

  He turned to remove the Spencer memorandum from his coat pocket and handed it to her. She seized it and read it intently without a motion or a word. Then she looked up at the ceiling for a moment of thought before rereading the document. He simply watched her.

  “I never read such garbage,” she said at last. “Will you even answer it?”

  “Darling, I’m thinking very seriously of acting on it. It’s not at all a bad settlement for the school. My real job here is more than half done, and a great foundation is a great opportunity. For both of us.”

  “Not at this price—never.” She tore the memorandum in two and threw the pieces on the floor. “Have you gone crazy, my dearest? Do you think Gladwin would so much as look at you if you came to them with a stain like that?”

  “Why would Gladwin even know?”

  “Because they go over every candidate with a microscope! And even if they missed it, do you think I would ever allow you to accept such a stain?”

  “Ione, my sweet, it’s not that bad. And, anyway, Gladwin or no Gladwin, you and I could have our wonderful old life back again. You know you haven’t been exactly in love with Averhill. Oh, you’ve been good as gold about it, I know, but it’s never really been your cup of tea, and—”

  “Well, from now on it’s going to be!” she broke in passionately. She got out of bed now to throw her arms around his neck. “Darling, give me another chance! Please, please, please! I want to show you what I can do. We’re going to fight this thing till the wretched Spencer will wish he’d never been born!”

  “Ione! Will you listen to r
eason?”

  “No! And if you so much as threaten again to quit your job here, do you know what I’ll do?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll answer that from the hotel in Reno where I’ll be establishing my residence for a divorce.”

  Michael laughed as he kissed her. “I guess that does it,” he conceded.

  12

  IN THE AFTERMATH of their joint resolution to fight the Castors to the death and when the exuberance of their accord had died down a bit, Ione was obliged to realize that she had really no armies to throw into the field. It was all very well to assume that Michael would defeat Spencer in any overt attempt to oust him, but could she be sure of that? A proven case that he had condoned a rape might create such a division in the board that Michael might feel compelled to quit for the good of the school!

  She could only leave the house and stroll to the river, despite the constant rain, to mull things over, her eyes now sometimes smarting with hot tears. For if she had just let Michael alone when he was inclined to give in on the sports arena question, Spencer would have been his stoutest ally in this Castor matter. Together they would have annihilated the silly suits. But because she had hoped that an uncompromising resistance to the sports issue would result in his dignified and understandable resignation as headmaster and begin a better life for both of them, she had talked him into taking a position that was now resulting in possible ruin.

  If she had acted solely for his good, she could have forgiven herself. But she was too honest not to face the fact that she had acted because she was bored at school, that she had been willing to risk her husband’s career for her own satisfaction. It was unbearable.