The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  “ ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ ” Kate hummed to herself, “ ‘Lord God Almighty! Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee.’ No doubt we each have our favorite hymn. Is it still sung at every opening assembly the first day of school?”

  “As long as I’ve been here. Though I believe that a year or two ago there was a suggestion, freely translated as a demand, that we sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ instead.”

  “What did Miss Tyringham do?”

  “Sang them both. After all, Martin Luther King was a minister, so she didn’t have much trouble talking everybody into that.”

  “Do you find her as extraordinary as I do?” Kate asked, wondering if this was an impolitic question on such short acquaintance.

  “Absolutely marvelous. As though she had done it all, and been it all, and somehow understood everything. People of that quality have always been rare, but these days she seems, I sometimes think, unique. Do you want to examine the murky backstage depths, or shall we descend? And, if we descend, shall we take the elevator in a fast plunge, or do you want to take the stairs, peering your way down one floor at a time?”

  “Let’s walk if you don’t mind,” Kate said. “Not that I want to examine the place as though I were going to buy it. You know, a sort of casual once-over.”

  As they walked toward the doors marked STAIRS Kate eavesdropped a bit on the drama group, not too difficult since the young ladies had apparently reached a highly emotional point and their voices were raised either in argument or animated discussion, depending on how you cared to look at it. The stricture from Kate’s day and earlier that no lady raised her voice except in song had gone, and a damn good thing too, Kate thought. My brothers and I might have something to say to each other now, if we hadn’t been terrified of family arguments.

  “What do you really want?” one actor declaimed. “What do you wish for yourself; if you had one wish, what would it be? Can you even say?” Her hand came forward in a questioning, demanding gesture.

  “Mrs. Banister likes them to use their whole bodies,” Anne Copland whispered. “And their whole voices, more’s the pity. Still, no doubt it does them good.”

  “I wish to return to the fundamental elements of life. I wish to live in a small community, where we are not dependent on technology and packaging, but can feel our closeness to the earth. I wish …” The door closed behind Kate and Anne Copland, leaving the unexpressed wish hanging in the air where, Kate could not help feeling, it rightfully belonged.

  Their descent was rapid and for Kate full of reminiscences which she did not trouble to express. What is more trying than other people’s memories, unless it is other people’s dreams? Little had changed. Lockers still lined the halls. The classrooms, such empty ones as they examined, bore evidence that this was the age of posters. “Make love not war” and “War is dangerous to children and other living things” were the most frequently seen. Kate was interested in one poster which showed a coffin, with a flag draped over it, and underneath the caption: The Silent Majority.

  “That’s righter than you might suppose,” Kate said. “Homer used the phrase ‘the silent majority,’ referring to the dead.”

  “The most extraordinary change here is never talked about at all,” Anne Copland said. “Since your time, or long, long before that, I’m certain this school has always been largely Republican in sentiment; not reactionary, you understand, but sound and vaguely right wing. It astounds me how little real support there is for President Nixon, his policies, and particularly his Vice President, not only among the students but among their parents. And these girls represent some of the most prominent families in the country. Of course, the staff isn’t supposed to argue politics with the students, but that’s easier said than done, these days.”

  “After all, these girls largely represent the Eastern Establishment—the people Nixon never tried to get on his side. Do politics come up regularly, if one can call them politics?”

  “The politics of survival, the girls call them—I forget who first made up that phrase. Some of the posters are pretty outspoken or downright vulgar. (‘Make love not babies’ caused a great deal of discussion a while back) and many of the staff wanted to outlaw them altogether, but Miss Tyringham insisted they were to stay up if they didn’t actually express an obscenity. We are surrounded with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but they make the girls feel at home, I guess. This floor, as you see, has student art, which seems to me to change very little over the years.”

  “Lord, yes,” Kate said, looking around her. “A portrait of someone with snowflakes falling—I remember doing the same thing myself, having dropped some white paint on the face I was doing and not being able to get it off. Some things remain the same. And that,” she added, “is the supply closet.”

  “So it is. A particularly feverish memory, I gather.”

  “Sad, really, though I still can’t think of it without chuckling. I was in the middle school, and we had acquired a German math teacher of overpowering qualifications. A refugee, no doubt, from Hitler. He knew a great deal and might even have been able to explain it so that a group of giggling eleven-year-olds could understand. But he was unbearably pompous and moralistic, always fulminating against American spoiled youth in general, and our own lack of manners, brains, and attention in particular. As they would say today, he didn’t relate to the group. One day he stomped out to get some paper for an exam that was to punish us for our sins, and as one being we floated out the door and locked him in the supply closet. Then we went back to the classroom and bent innocently and silently over our books. His screams eventually aroused someone in authority.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oddly enough, nothing. We waited for the fearful summons, but it never came. He was out sick for a week, and then it was Christmas; we all felt so bad we chipped in to buy him a fruitcake. When we returned from the vacation we had a new math teacher, frightfully up-to-date, who kept one lesson ahead of us, understanding children rather than decimals. What monsters youngsters are. Yet, you know, we weren’t really unkind, only bewildered.”

  Anne Copland showed Kate the seminar rooms, newly decorated, and each holding a table surrounded by chairs, with bookcases around the walls. “To get rid of the classroom look, heaven forfend,” Anne explained. “The surroundings turned out to be half the battle. You’ll be in here.” She opened the door of a room at the moment empty. A sign “Hurrah for Antigone” was spread across the wall, and below it was a poster with a poem:

  Miss Kate Fansler, who is she,

  Expounder of Antigone?

  Will she hold forth like old Tiresias

  Propounding some established thesias?

  Or will she know, or learn like Creon,

  That we’ll discuss what we agree on?

  “Well,” Anne said, looking at Kate with some trepidation, “you are warned. I didn’t know that would be there. Hope you aren’t offended.”

  “Not offended,” Kate said. “Terrified.”

  They debouched, Kate feeling somewhat stricken, onto the entrance floor. She was not only slightly offended, which she had denied, and terrified, which she had admitted, but also a bit angry. It’s easy enough to talk about the delightful and honest young, she thought, until they get their fangs into you. Now, why didn’t I tell Miss Tyringham, impressive though she be, to take her seminar on Antigone and jolly well teach it herself if she’s such a bloody genius. Is it too late, I wonder, to back out now? And, faced with her first personal encounter with the high-school generation, Kate wanted to take to her heels and fly. At least my brothers know where they stand, she told herself grimly. You phony liberal, you.

  She pulled herself together to greet the lady who attended the switchboard and kept a watchful eye on the large entrance hall.

  “I’d like you to meet Miss Fansler,” Anne was saying. “This is Miss Strikeland, who stands between us and the great outside world.”

  “How do you do,” Kate said, to be interrupted by the switch
board.

  “The Theban School,” Miss Strikeland chirped; “certainly, just a moment please.” She plunged in a plug with one hand, beckoning to Anne with the other. Anne moved in closer.

  “He’s here again,” Miss Strikeland whispered.

  “Who?”

  “That man. Walking around over there. It’s the second or third time he’s come.” Cautiously, Kate and Anne followed her glance, but the man had his profile to them and could be examined freely. He looked in his early seventies, impeccably dressed. He held his hat in his hand and gazed about him exactly as though he were in a museum he had come miles to visit. Certainly there wasn’t much to gaze at—the occasional girl dashing through the lobby, the people who entered and came to Miss Strikeland’s window for information, the members of the staff on their way to the staff lounge or one of the offices. Yet the elderly man seemed to study it all as though, as Ophelia said of Hamlet, he would draw it.

  “How odd,” Anne said. “He looks harmless enough. Have you asked him what he wants?”

  “He says he just wants to look around. I pointed out that this was a school—after all, there isn’t a sign outside and sometimes people don’t know. He said he knew it was a school, the Theban School, and that’s why he wanted to look around. He hoped I would be kind enough to allow him to do so. I told him he couldn’t go upstairs, and he said he wouldn’t. Last time he sat down on a bench and watched the girls leaving—he sat there for several hours.”

  “Miss Strikeland,” Anne said, “do you suspect him of being a dirty old man?”

  “Well, he doesn’t look like it, does he? I’ve kept a pretty close eye on him. All the same, it’s worrying.”

  “He’s going,” Kate said.

  “So he is. Well,” Anne said, “if he comes again, Miss Strikeland, you’d better let someone know. Miss Freund, for instance; she’s good at this sort of problem.”

  “You’re right,” Miss Strikeland said. “Welcome to the Theban, Miss Fansler. Sorry to be so distracted.”

  “The same Miss Freund as in my day?” Kate asked. “Admissions, excuses, and frantic receiver of appeals for carfare?”

  “The same. Except now she also handles bus passes, and is on very chummy terms with the local police precinct.”

  “Because of the boys in the gym?” Kate asked, following Anne back to the stairs.

  “No. Because sometimes the girls no sooner poke their little noses outside the door than they are set on by gangs of kids—lower-class gangs, though it doesn’t do to say so. But they taunt the Theban girls with being rich, so one rather gathers that’s the point. After several hysterical parents’ meetings, we now have a standard operating procedure. One of the girls returns immediately to the school and Miss Freund gets in touch with her policemen buddies. The girls are asked to report if they’re molested on the buses or anywhere else. It’s hard, really, to expect them to be simple and innocent in a world that’s so criminal and brutal. Well,” she added, pushing open a door and leading the way into a lunchroom where the din was so intense it struck one with palpable force, “How about lunch? I never know whether a tour like this sharpens the appetite or kills it. Good, I see Mrs. Banister. Shall we go and chat about dramatics at the Theban? Needless to say, we haven’t even mentioned the problems of literature and seminars, except for the intrusion of that unfortunate poem. You aren’t brooding, are you?”

  “No more than is good for me.”

  “Splendid. Then sit down and introduce yourself, and I’ll get you some lunch. It’s either tuna-fish sandwich or chicken à la king. I recommend tuna fish.”

  Mrs. Banister proved to be a tiny woman of enormous vivacity and emphatic views which she enunciated with vigor and abandoned with alacrity and without regret if she was successfully challenged. She had an enormous affection for youngsters and respect for them—so much was immediately clear; certainly she herself appeared to have retained many of their better qualities. The gift of being able to establish rapport with young adults is rare enough; many people are good, or they think they are, with young children. Once past early childhood, however, the children often begin to find the nurses, kindergarten teachers, and baby lovers generally cloying and burdensome. Mrs. Banister was a rare specimen.

  “I feel particularly giddy today,” she told Kate, “because Andrew and I have finally solved the problem of New York transportation. Motorcycles. Last night we went to an evening thing complete with evening dress and I sat pillion behind Andrew. Marvelous. We had no trouble parking, and unlike the taxis we didn’t have to wait hours with our meters ticking away even to approach the entrance. Benefit concert, Lincoln Center,” she added, setting the scene.

  “But suppose it rains?” Kate asked, greeting Anne and the tuna-fish sandwiches.

  “Sou’westers, oilskin head to toe, and my evening slippers in a little plastic bag. One must move with the times or one is likely to get stuck in a traffic jam and never move at all. Not to mention pollution.”

  “Do you ride on a motorcycle to school?” Kate asked.

  “No. Andrew, who has to get about much more, takes it during the day. I bicycle. Healthier, less pollution still, same sou’wester and plastic bag in case of rain. I hear the girls are looking forward to your seminar.”

  “Do you?” Kate said. “I wish I could say the same. The fact is, I’ve got a bad case of stage fright.”

  “Nonsense. Julia Stratemayer tells me you’re frightfully good at your university. This is a bit more personal perhaps, but the twelves have one foot out the school door already. Quite grownup, really. I’ve got three of your Antigone bunch in one of my drama groups: Angelica Jablon, Betsy Stark, and Freemond Oliver.”

  “Is that actually her name?”

  “Absolutely. I strongly suspect there was a Susan or something in front of the Freemond once upon a time, but it’s plain Freemond Oliver as long as I’ve known her. She’s quite extraordinary at Greek and Latin and athletics. Betsy Stark’s quite another kettle of fish—devoted to every form of the comedy of manners from The Way of the World through Dorothy Sayers. She believes the great time in the theater after Shakespeare—and she insists, naturally, that Much Ado About Nothing is his greatest play—is the American comedy of the twenties and thirties, all sparkling confusions and wit with a wide streak of sentimentality up the middle. The Philadelphia Story, one gathers, is the prize of them all.”

  “My husband agrees with her. I’m surprised she wants to study the Antigone.”

  “Well, that may be just a little bit of my influence—not that you must think she’s been persuaded against her inclinations, nothing of the sort. She’s very fond of the Odyssey and considers the conversations between Odysseus and Athene the first witty man-woman exchanges in all literature. In fact, she says, there wasn’t another such till Beatrice and Benedick, but no doubt she’s exaggerating—the twelves do.”

  “And the third girl?” Kate asked, wondering how in the world she was going to conduct a seminar with an athletic Greek scholar and an admirer of George Kaufman’s burdened with neither Greek nor humility.

  “Angelica Jablon,” Mrs. Banister said in a dreamy sort of way. “A most unusual girl, though less easily catalogued than the other two, at least in Theban terms. She, you see, is committed, engagée as the French say. What excites her about the Antigone is that she feels it as the story of our times.”

  “Yikes. And no doubt she identifies with Antigone—I go to my death willingly for the right and all that sort of thing.”

  “Does that strike you as foolish?” Mrs. Banister said. “Perhaps I’ve misjudged …”

  “Sorry,” Kate said. “I’m afraid I tend to come all over scholarly at the wrong moments. I’ve learned, you see, to be wary of the student who finds some work which alone holds the secret of life. On the other hand, such a student, if she has real devotion to scholarship, may make such a discovery the start of some real work. I’m sure that will be the case with Angelica.”

  “Perhaps. No doubt you w
ill find all the girls stimulating; I’m certain at least that you’ll keep them within hailing distance of the scholarly approach, which is beyond me—that’s why I direct drama groups and don’t teach anything. A matter of temperament.”

  Kate wanted to ask if any of the girls was given to the writing of rhymed doggerel—Ogden Nash had a lot to answer for, Kate often thought, having invented a form of verse which no one but he seemed able to grasp the first thing about—but she felt a mysterious reluctance to mention the seminar poster. If I can’t straighten it out alone with them, she thought, I better quit now.

  “Hi.” Julia Stratemayer stood balancing a tray at Kate’s arm. “May I join you or are you enmeshed in Greek drama?”

  “Good to see you,” Kate said.

  “I’ve been following you and Anne around the building like a blasted bloodhound, but you always seemed to have just left wherever I was. Miss Strikeland told me you’d probably alighted here.”

  “Did she mention her mysterious visitor?”

  “She did. I’m afraid she’s getting the wind up a bit, though from what I can gather he couldn’t look more harmless or benign. Still, one can’t have men, however ancient, loitering around school buildings, so when he appears again, Miss Freund is going to go down and cross-examine. Why is the tuna fish one gets in boughten sandwiches always so wet?”

  Kate settled back more comfortably in Julia’s presence. She would have liked a cigarette, but of course one could not smoke in the school dining room—another of the disadvantages of teaching at the Theban was borne in upon her.