The Headmasters Papers

by Richard A. Hawley

  Nothing goes the way one expects. I blink to find myself headmaster of a boys’ school in a New England village. I am about to become a “widower.” I will, in another deceptive wrinkle of time, blink to find myself emeritus, with a Wells rocker—where? In a winterized cottage on the Cape? In a home? Last year I still had a boy’s view of the Future. I still thought, against all possible evidence, that an elusive Main Event was ahead. I don’t know what I thought it would be. A great book, maybe.

  I worry about enduring the school year. The archetypal boy never grows up; he cheats and gets caught, loses himself, finds himself, drops out, drowns, thinks chaotically, thinks brilliantly, keeps graduating and then starting over, teasing me somehow back into the game. His energy never flags and he will have no patience when mine does. A soft and pallid Greeve has been imitating himself for four months. A thin but insistent voice tells him what sounds to make and where to go.

  But his friend Jake knows better.

  I’ll let you know about Meg.

  Love,

  John

  18 December

  MEMO

  To all faculty

  Let me stress in print what I mentioned only briefly in our meeting yesterday: please be on hand Friday in the dorms until the last student is packed off for home. Phil Upjohn and I have warded off an avalanche of requests from Boy and Parent for earlier exits, and we have ruthlessly declined them all, claiming that we are far too committed to the academic process to give up even an hour of precious pedagogy. Hawaii, The Bahamas, St. Moritz, home and hearth can just wait. You can imagine what frauds we will seem in their eyes if you yourselves fly the coop early. And again, use those final classes—or else those who wish to do so are doomed. Special, warm, seasonal surprises are fine—so are testing and quizzing—but please do not dismiss classes early or altogether.

  That said, I hope every one of you has the most renewing, joyful holiday possible. There are no words adequate to express my gratitude for the uncountable kindnesses you have given me since Meg fell ill this fall. And as many of you know, the only thing she has not resigned herself to in her condition is that it has forced her to be separated from all of you.

  From both of us, deepest thanks, warmest wishes for the holiday, and our love.

  J.O.G.

  20 December

  REMARKS TO THE SCHOOL

  What a pleasure this morning is. Not—or not just—because seventeen and one half days of leisure await us in a few hours, but for the morning itself. Even though it is well known that boys of your age resist sentimentality fiercely, it is awfully hard—and awfully silly, really—to resist it today. If you think about it for a minute, you see that it’s not the vacation itself that makes the holiday such a magical prospect. It is having been here, many of us exerting ourselves against the grain, that makes a pause so sweet. It came as a powerful but slightly sad revelation to me years ago that loafing, refreshment, and freedom itself are meaningless states of being, except as contrasted to their opposites. Unless we’re bound up in those opposite states most of the time, there is no pleasure in loafing, being refreshed, and being free. Can you imagine trying to refresh yourself continually? It would drive you frantic.

  This morning is also a pleasure because it is very cold, the snow is very fresh and clean, and Wells Chapel, viewed as I viewed it this morning through a lattice of snowy branches and Hallowell House chimney smoke, has been transformed. No matter how much cheap Christmas cards and the other glittering junk of commercial Christmas have tried to trivialize this season, it can’t be done. We all know the cliché, yet the real thing is as new and as fine as the panorama just beyond our chapel steps.

  This morning is also a pleasure because, although we are all mortified at the sloppiness of admitting it, we share the heightened feelings of this time of year with the people we like most, even with the whole body of this school. The tradition of it feels good. The carols feel good. They even sound good. Like the hot cider and the dark and the nearly holy mood of last night’s Carol and Candle Hall, Wells—there is no denying it—has been transformed by the season.

  And while rest and relaxation, the snow, the cold, and school traditions are all part of the transformation, they are not all of it. There is something else. It is the thing that is planted deepest in our core, the thing we recognize uncritically as children, yet the thing we find ourselves the most anxious to grow out of. I am of course talking about the mystical center of the tradition, the reason for it, the energy behind it. We can’t get away from it, no matter how unreligious we may choose to be. Two thousand years ago it happened. A cluster of less-well-established but pious Jews bore witness to the birth of what they say was everything man has always hoped for. They felt that in this birth lay the solution to every woe and an answer to the riddle of being alive. You all know the outline of the event from Sacred Studies and from Western Civ. classes, but the novelty and the oddness of the claims made about Jesus can not be overemphasized. Divinity itself made into human flesh: a staggering concept, except for infants and younger children.

  For infants and younger children, the idea of a holy gift who is also a human baby is not a hard concept. Something inside them has always rather felt that way itself. In fact, the Jesus miracle is perfectly continuous with the Santa Claus miracle. It is a miracle, you know, before it becomes a pagan custom. The miracle, if you think about it, is this: a magical grandfather from remote reaches, but who is somehow only a man, visits us in a way we can never quite see, except in story and imagination, and he gives us everything we want, even more than we expect. Children, at least the pre-civilized ones, have no trouble accepting the reality of the Universal Giver. The world seems to them to be that sort of place. Later, most children know differently, but they never really know better.

  The miracle part of Christmas, the part about the human giver who never gives out, is not a charming fiction. We take charming fictions lightly, replace them with updated fictions, and ultimately forget them. But we can’t seem to forget this fiction. We can project our feelings about it onto certain of its sideshows like a family ski trip or the loot under the tree, but, as some of you have by now realized, while those things are very nice, there’s no magic, none of the original feeling in them. But there is, I swear there is, some of the original feeling still at large. I know I heard it last night, for minutes at a time, during Carol and Candle, I know I saw it through the branches on the way over here this morning, and if I am not mistaken, there is some of it among us this very minute.

  And as I said, it is a pleasure.

  Before I send you off to enjoy the rest of it, I want to take just a moment to thank each of you and all of you for the good wishes, cards, gifts, good company, and blessedly good behavior that have enabled me and Mrs. Greeve to endure a really trying illness. What a gift to me, while I am on the subject, to be cared for and buoyed up by the very people I am supposed to be caring for. Thank you.

  And now, we will close by singing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” four verses; third formers departing as we sing the first, fourth as we sing the second, and so on.

  A very merry Christmas to all of you.

  PART TWO

  16 January

  Little House

  Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve

  14 Bingham Drive

  Tarrytown, New York

  Dear Val and Frank,

  I have just given enough thought to answering a thousand and some condolence letters to know that I can’t do it. It does nag me, though, that there are so many people I want and need to thank— you two foremost. I can’t place a value on the support and love, but I can place a value on the sheer time you have given us and then me since the holidays. That will simply have to stand as a debt. I suspect you were both aware that for a few days after Christmas I seemed to disappear altogether. It is hard to describe that feeling of nothing being substantial, even the loss, even the grief—odd. I remember for some reason the impression that, whereas the day Meg died, a strong
drink took me away from the blackening, falling feeling, a few days afterwards a drink seemed to pitch me into it. And there you were, a solace beyond alcohol.

  Home is a place where, when you have to go there,

  They have to take you in.

  Exactly right.

  You were both right and not right about my coming here. It is too suffused with Meg for comfort, but that is not the main thing wrong. It’s also too insubstantial, too not-enough for what I feel and need right now. It is no company at all, and it shoots me full of the fear that there is no company anywhere. (Pitiful, Greeve, pitiful). And so I’m taking off. I’d like to pop in on Jake Levin, my poet friend, in New Hampshire, and if he can’t manage it, I’ll go inn-hopping off the beaten path. It’s what I should have done in the first place. I know your place would be easiest, but I have got to toughen up, to practice. I’ll drop you cards.

  School has begun without me—funny feeling. I’m thoroughly relieved not to be doing it because I can’t, but I’m also feeling that August feeling that I couldn’t possibly manage a school, even teach a class. It’s a funny way for a fifty-five-year-old schoolmaster to feel, but I always feel that way after a lay-off. And if the school manages nicely without me—what then? The hell with it. I shall visit inns and read their books: Good Morning Miss Dove, A Man Called Peter, Lost Weekend, etc.

  It feels good to write you—like having you here. Best love to Hugh. Don’t tell him his uncle, the Headmaster, is folding up.

  Love,

  John

  16 January

  Little House

  Mr. Jake Levin

  R.D. 3

  Petersfield, New Hampshire

  Dear Jake,

  I won’t say things have settled yet, but there is enough regularity in the blur that I feel I can get in touch. Now that it’s over, it’s worse than I thought. You feel prodded by shadows, urged on by something vaguely awful.

  Coming here doesn’t help. The place evokes Meg and then, by a scrap of handwriting or by a half-knitted sleeve, documents her finitude. She keeps dying.

  What I really would like to do is to drive up and see you. Is it possible? I mean now. At any rate, I’m clearing out of here in a few days. I’d clear out immediately, but I have accepted a dinner invitation from some nice, retired friends down the lane—how could they ever understand that my presence in their house confirms their luck and their fragile safety?

  May I come? I’ll call Monday a.m. at the college. If you can’t do it, leave word. If you can, see you soon.

  Best,

  John

  18 January

  Little House

  Mr. William Truax

  President, The Fiduciary Trust Company

  P.O. Box 121

  New Haven, Connecticut

  Dear Bill,

  I don’t have the fuel yet to acknowledge appropriately the enormous amount of help and love extended to Meg and me over the course of our ordeal, so I won’t just yet. I hope you will convey to the board, though, that their efforts and their presence over the holiday period were deeply appreciated.

  I am grateful, too, for this open-ended leave. Wells will certainly be better for it. It’s a funny thing though; it puts me rather on edge.

  Between you and me, hiding away out here was not a good idea. The effect is the opposite of relaxing—almost like being hounded by something. I suspect it’s truancy guilt of some kind.

  Again, deepest thanks. I shall be back in the saddle soon. I’ll be in New Hampshire with a friend for a spell, then back down to Wells. Phil Upjohn and Marge Pearse have numbers to call if you need to get in touch.

  Warmest regards,

  John

  18 January

  Little House

  Mr. Arnold Lieber

  Director, Physical Plant

  Wells School

  Wells, Connecticut

  Dear Arnold,

  I can’t begin at this point to acknowledge the gracious and feeling letters written to me after Meg’s death, but I want to respond to yours before any more time passes.

  I was deeply moved by what you had to say about Meg and the school. I don’t think anyone else has seen as clearly what she did for the place or what she thought about it. You’re right—she was the practical one. Unfortunately, perhaps, she was also the imaginative one and the diplomatic one. Wells School did not really have a headmaster; it had us.

  Again, Arnold, no letter meant more to me than yours. I’m sure you know that you were always a great favorite of Meg’s, and she didn’t hand out such distinctions lightly.

  I’ll be leaving here in a couple of days and heading up to see an old friend in New Hampshire. It wasn’t a very good idea to come here. Then on through a bit of New Hampshire and Vermont, then back to Wells—I almost wrote “home.”

  I hope you and Phil Upjohn are getting on. He has numbers, should you need to call me for anything.

  Gratefully,

  J.O.G.

  24 January

  Petersfield, New Hampshire

  Mr. Philip Upjohn

  Director of Studies

  Wells School

  Wells, Connecticut

  Dear Phil,

  Just a note to let you know I am leaving Petersfield tomorrow and will be slowly winding my way down to Wells, via New Hampshire and some Vermont inns. I should be back in a week or so—no longer than ten days—and I will call from time to time.

  I assume that all is in order, no doubt in rather better order than if I were pottering about at your side. I hope you know, Phil, how deeply grateful I am that you have been kind enough to stand in during this rocky stretch. I only wish that the additional responsibilities could have fallen on a less busy man. They could not have fallen on a better man.

  My good wishes,

  J.O.G.

  27 January

  Franconia House, N.H.

  Mr. Jake Levin

  R.D. 3

  Petersfield, New Hampshire

  Dear Jake,

  Well, I’ve found one—and not just “one,” but it. It’s a big old much appended-to frame house with creaky passages and stairways going off in every direction. There’s a nice sweet sort of smell of pine soap and something harder to pin down: must and, I think, a little rot. There’s a ripply-floored sitting room with a fireplace and clusters of odd chairs and sofas and end tables—all satisfyingly deserted, as the skiing is apparently terrible. Mr. Soughan—“call me ‘Harry’”—fixes the meals more or less on call. He is concerned that I don’t eat much, and even were I hungrier, this would not be easy, as the fare is awfully tired looking when it is set before one in the dining room (laundry to be sorted on an adjacent table), and Harry is none too fastidious in his personal turnout. What could be better? So far I have borrowed three treasures from the sitting-room shelves: Marjorie Morningstar (Wouk), On the Beach (Chute), and Sand and Foam(Gibran). This trilogy, I have found, runs the full gamut of human possibility—earthly striving, earthly mortality, and transcendence. This is a wonderful place, and it is very quiet.

  I hope my morose and even lachrymose presence was not too irritating for you. I could tell it was a little irritating. Nobody who is working should ever have to play host to someone who is not. I am afraid my picture of you in Petersfield was way off. I imagined hours of phoneless, reflective time in which you read, or composed, or dreamed into the firelight. How was I to know you worked so hard? I thought the university job was just a formality, a lucrative honor, like certain British crown appointments before modernity. You actually teach and mark papers and receive callers from their jeeps. And, I never bothered to anticipate, you have friends, among them more than one attractive woman. And you shop at a mall and cut wood and drive nearly a hundred miles a day. Unsettling for me to realize you are not a timeless hermit, but a busy, productive Modern Man, your poems written not by the brook’s gurgle, but by the hum of the university library clock. Men are less busy, less modern at Wells school! Were it not for this enchanting pl
ace and for Harry, I might think the whole world—even its poetry-producing dimension—had passed me by. Thank God for Sand and Foam, for the eternal verities.

  I want to tell you how I found this place, because the process is important and rare and nobody ever talks about it. I willed my way here, maybe even willed the inn. Without a guidebook, without a map, I was united, as if by a kind of spiritual magnetism, with the exact object of my imagination. I didn’t ‘find’ this inn; I joined it. I’m with the Jungians here. This inn was simply on my path. Only once before do I remember having this experience so vividly. Thirty years ago when I was reading English at Cambridge, I suddenly found myself preoccupied with minerals: crystals and gems. An obsession sprang without warning from my depths. It had also been an obsession during a phase of my childhood (ages eight till ten). Anyway, this crystal obsession finally eclipsed all else, and I remember springing from my chair one day and taking to the streets, driven in an altogether different way than I might have been for a sandwich. I, a relative stranger to England and to the Cambridge streets, wanted crystals. I stalked purposefully down Bridge Street past the colleges, past the shops toward the station, then suddenly turned up a narrow, coal-blackened lane called Silver Street, composed mostly of the backs of academic buildings; turned again up a dust-bin-lined alley, through an iron gate, up onto a loading platform, through two heavy service doors, down a passage or two—all without hesitation, all without encountering another soul—opened a heavy door and found myself in a large gray storeroom or laboratory. Black tile counters lined the walls; otherwise the room was full of dusty glass display cases—of bones, of rocks, and of crystals. On the tops of the cases and on the counters were little heaps of rock, and I somehow moved to the piles that were crystals: honey-colored, maple-colored, wine-colored, diamond-white. Some were fine as slivers of frost, others thick and tooled as smokey ice cubes. There I was, immersed in all the crystals I had ever wanted. Then the rest of the setting began to sink in: the dust, the bones, the cold gray stone crystal beds. It was all very clear. The message wasn’t about crystals; it was about time. Something older and bigger and more important was getting in touch with me through those Cambridge rocks. I am reminding you, they said, that your business is just the surface skin of something very old and deep. Don’t lose touch. It was the same sort of experience as finding this inn. A reminder.