The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  The question was, could he find a place where the dogs would overlook him? That was O’Hara’s challenge. While doubting that he could, Reed was prepared to try.

  The room he had chosen was a small gymnasium, designed for gymnast feats, and hung with ropes, rings, and swinging booms. With agility, Reed swung his lean form up onto the ropes and reached over to the ladderlike rungs which lined the wall. Here, holding on first with one hand and then the other, he donned the jacket. The gymnasium clock, coy behind its protective wire, told him it was three minutes of eight. At eight promptly, O’Hara would release the dogs from the roof. In fact, their departure was announced, so to speak, by the bell which sounded on every hour throughout the school building. With the sound of the bell he swung himself off and hung suspended by the rings from the ceiling like—when Kate had described him she had no idea how literal a description it would be—a tethered goat; well, hamstrung, rather.

  He was on a high floor, so the dogs would not be long. Indeed, before long he thought he heard them, their nails clicking on the floor as they emerged, he assumed, listening, from the stairway to begin their methodical survey of all the rooms on the floor.

  Although he heard them approaching, heard, because he was listening for it, the sound of their feet and their breath, they were aware of him almost sooner. He was at the farthest corner of the room and high up, but they knew immediately that he was there. The growls began in their throats, and the lips pulled back, baring the teeth. Yes, Reed thought, it’s enough to scare anyone to death, enough certainly to frighten a young man into backing up, tripping, and hitting his head, but will they actually let me descend unharmed?

  They did not, as he had thought they would, leap for him as he hung in the air. They stood and watched. Slowly, he released his feet and swung himself back over to the ladder on the wall. Their growls increased as he descended, but they did not move. “They won’t go for your legs,” O’Hara had said. “If you don’t try anything cute, they won’t touch you. But they are trained to leap for a hand holding a weapon” (hence the jacket, should the dogs hallucinate a weapon where there was none) “and, should you attack them in any other way, they will hurl their weight against your chest and knock you down. But only if you lunge at them.”

  Lily and Rose, Reed thought, what singularly inappropriate names. He kept his eyes warily upon them as he climbed slowly down. The growls increased, the teeth glared more menacingly, but the dogs did not move. “Get your back against a wall and stay still till I come,” O’Hara had said. Reed flirted with the idea of lighting a cigarette and abandoned it. It would calm his nerves, but would it do the same for the nerves of Lily and Rose? He doubted it, Furthermore, the actions necessary to reach beneath the padded jacket for cigarette and lighter seemed unlikely to inspire confidence. Without moving his head, Reed raised his eyes to the gymnasium clock. Even as he did so, O’Hara appeared in the doorway.

  “All right, my beauties,” he said. And, going forward, he clipped short, stout leashes onto the collars of the dogs. “Glad you picked a high floor,” he said to Reed. “I couldn’t have done with a much longer wait.”

  “Nor I,” Reed admitted. “O.K. to take the jacket off now?”

  O’Hara nodded. “Convinced?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Reed said. “A very commendable performance. I recommend it to anyone who wants to lose weight fast.”

  “Did you feel afraid, then?” O’Hara asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Reed said. “Scared to death, to coin a phrase.” And he reached for a cigarette and lit it, breaking, he supposed, one of the school’s most stringent rules. Well, he had earned the right.

  “Could you,” Reed asked, “hold on to those charming ladies while I poke around a bit downstairs? There’s something I’m looking for.”

  “How long will you be?” O’Hara grudgingly asked. He owed Reed a good deal, he knew, for demonstrating both that the dogs were unlikely to have frightened Mrs. Jablon to death and then deserted her, and that they did not viciously attack anyone they found—which nasty suspicion had been voiced more than once since knowledge of the dogs had become general. Still, he didn’t care to break the dogs’ routine. “I’ll take them back to the roof. Call me from the switchboard on the main floor when you’re ready to leave; I’ll give you ten minutes after that.”

  “Right. Mr. O’Hara, let me try your patience a minute longer. On the evening Mrs. Jablon was found here …”

  “The evening before the morning she was found here.”

  “All right. On the evening of the meeting. You took the parents up in one of the elevators. Was the other elevator on the roof?”

  “Yes. I told you that …”

  “Be patient. No one could have brought that second elevator down without your knowing?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “It was up in the auditorium, as high as the elevators go. You would have had to walk all the way, know where to find the key to open the elevator door up there, and bring it down.”

  “Did you use the other elevator—the one not on the top—to bring the parents and teachers down again?”

  “Sure. Ten-fifteen prompt I was up there waiting for them. That’s the orders from Miss Tyringham.”

  “Suppose someone had wanted to leave early?”

  “They could have walked down, or rung the elevator bell.”

  “Were you sitting in the elevator?”

  “I was around.”

  “What does around mean? You were always in the building, always on the first floor?”

  “Or just outside the front door. There were a couple of chauffeurs waiting for the parents and I talked to them some. My job is to watch the entrance, not to serve as butler.”

  “Do the chauffeurs who bring parents wait for them?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly, they go off for a while, with orders to be back at ten. They usually get back sooner and stand around.”

  “O.K.,” Reed said. “Thanks. Do you happen to know which parents come with chauffeurs? If not, I can get the information from Miss Tyringham, I suppose; the chauffeurs might have seen something.”

  O’Hara knew the chauffeurs by sight, and their cars, of course, but that was all. “I’ll give you ten minutes after you call,” he said, turning toward the stairs with Lily and Rose.

  “By the way,” Reed said, “if the dogs heard someone downstairs, would they break their routine and go see?”

  “Of course. They’d find the person wherever he was. I’d miss a regular alarm, and go to look for them; it might take a little longer.” He disappeared up the stairway.

  Reed ran the many flights down to the lobby, stopping on the way to crush out his cigarette and drop the stub in his pocket. He switched the lights on in the lobby and looked around. The entrance, which was large, rather like a theater entrance, had a double set of doors, which formed two sides of the entrance hall leading to the lobby. He saw what he was looking for immediately, behind a set of glass doors in the entrance hall; the doors led to an emergency stairway from the floor below. Lighting another cigarette, he went to phone O’Hara.

  “What’s the dolly for?” Reed asked when O’Hara had answered. “The one off the entrance hall under a canvas?”

  “To move supplies. Papers, books, anything. After they’ve been delivered.”

  “O.K.,” Reed said. “I’m off. With one last question.” And he asked it.

  He called Kate from a phone booth on the corner to tell her he had emerged unscathed from the lions’ den. They were very well-trained lions. “I know now what happened at the school,” he said. “But I don’t know what happened before, or how she got there. Rose and Lily send you their love, or so I discerned. O’Hara obviously wasn’t thinking of you at all, but I made up for that by thinking of you all the time. Did you really, in your ferociously upper-class girlhood, hang from those rings for fun?”

  Ten

  EARLY on the following day, for which no seminar was scheduled,
Kate awoke with the uneasy conviction that she had determined upon some action and the inability to remember exactly what it was. I shall probably emerge from this entire Theban episode, she unhappily thought, no longer able to sleep in the mornings. I shall have to join Reed in the shower and learn all of Cole Porter’s lyrics. She mentioned this dismal conclusion to Reed, who had just arisen. “Excellent,” he said, and disappeared into the bathroom, whence, shortly, could be heard the strains of Kiss Me, Kate.

  Kate gathered her wits together sufficiently, first, to remember what she had decided to do, and then, which was harder, to decide how to do it. The day seemed, the more she thought about it, to contain an amazingly large number of conversations, heart-to-heart talks, or what she hoped would be heart-to-heart talks, and just plain worming round. She began upon this rather long series of investigations by calling Miss Tyringham at school. Miss Tyringham, as Kate had learned, arrived at the Theban shortly before eight every morning, and could be reached in her office by those to whom she was willing to speak after they had identified themselves to Miss Strikeland at the switchboard, whose arrival was planned to precede Miss Tyringham’s by a matter of minutes. Miss Strikeland had failed to arrive, despite the threats of weather, strikes, and power failures, once only, when the crosstown bus she was on had broken down in such a way that the driver was unable to open the doors. Miss Tyringham had been so worried by this uncharacteristic tardiness that she became visibly distraught and sat there working the switchboard herself in the hope of some news. This morning, however, Miss Strikeland was in place and soon put Kate through.

  “How are you?” came Miss Tyringham’s cheerful voice. “I understand your gallant husband faced our menacing beasts with commendable sang-froid. Mr. O’Hara is beside himself with admiration, feeling that total canine vindication has been accomplished. Where does that leave us with our other problems?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kate said, “but I’m full of theories, and shall certainly never get a moment’s rest until I test them. For that I need your permission or at least acquiescence.”

  “Why don’t you stop in this morning as soon as you can? I shall have to cut two meetings, but it’s all in a day’s work. How much time do you need?”

  “Oh, well, probably not too long. Sorry to barge in on the school day, but of course I’ve become compulsive and insist on bringing this whole business to some conclusion. I knew that the Antigone seminar would interfere to some extent with my work on the Victorians, but not that I would become so feverish. Reed says the only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it; I hope he’s right.”

  “You’re suggesting he may have been right when he counseled us to abandon the whole investigation?”

  “Well, he was certainly right about not stopping halfway through. Nine o’clock then?” Kate rang off.

  She decided to walk to the Theban, since she had ample time, taxis were impossible to get at that hour of the morning, the buses were crowded, and walking would help to clear her head. In fact, she wanted to reduce her confused emotions to some sort of order. She had not many doubts, after talking to Reed last night, about what had happened on the night before the morning when the body so mysteriously appeared at the Theban. There were a great many details to be worked out, of course, either laboriously or more quickly, through a lucky chance. Discovering hidden events is like searching for a misplaced document immediately required. You may hit on it the first place you look, or you may have to peer into every cranny and file folder you own, but if the document is there you will find it, and it will all come to the same thing in the end.

  What troubled Kate was whether or not the Theban or the Jablons would emerge from this investigation healthier than if it had never been undertaken. Indeed, could any institution or family or relationship survive the pressures of these difficult times? She remembered how, in earlier years, one returned to the educational institutions from which one had graduated only occasionally, but then in the certainty of finding peace. One had always thought to oneself, If only I could come back here where everything is ordered and in proportion. But what such places were there now? Whatever had brought this body to the Theban, or the boy to the Theban before it, had shattered forever the mirage of the school as a place of peace. Dogs patrolled its rooms, and the dead and frightened were found upon its premises.

  The Theban stood on one of those delicious side streets on the East Side which appear unchanged from earlier, more halcyon times. This is an illusion—since the town houses were almost all divided into apartments, or even into offices. The street was quiet, nonetheless, tree-lined and airy; there were no tall buildings in the immediate vicinity, the Theban itself, ten stories high, being the tallest. Was it a street on which anyone was likely to notice very much? Its busiest moment came in the afternoon, when the buses gathered to drive the younger students home. Only then did the demure, if institutional-looking building declare itself a school. For, like all elegant girls’ schools in New York, it bore no name, no sign, no plaque upon its entrance to announce itself. One either knew this was the Theban, or one had no business knowing.

  Miss Tyringham greeted Kate with a kind of fatigued relief.

  “You are all right, aren’t you?” Kate asked. “I’ve got so used to seeing people in positions of authority in academia grow tired, ill, and full of despair and foreboding that perhaps I’ve become unduly alarmed. But you do look what the English call nervy.”

  “Oh, it’s just one of those flu things I always seem to get at winter’s last gasp, nothing serious, what my mother used to call up-doings and down-doings. At least,” she added, “that does for an explanation. In fact, of course, I’m worried.”

  “About the body?”

  “Among much else. We don’t talk frankly about it, you know, but we’re running into a good bit of trouble—we, in that sentence, being the figures of authority at private schools. Oh, I don’t just mean pants, and Moratorium Days, or even the threat of drugs. A number of our girls don’t go to school at all, particularly the seniors. I think if the figure of how many middle- and upper-class youngsters in New York were simply not attending school at this moment were published—which heaven forbid—the Mr. Jablons would really begin to fret.”

  “Is Angelica’s staying out part of all that, do you think?”

  “Possibly, possibly not. She certainly had a hard time. She’s home now, but doesn’t want to consider school.”

  “One of the things I wanted to ask you is if you have any objection to my going to see her. Of course, I’ll courteously ask her grandfather, but he’s hardly likely to refuse unless Angelica does. Do you mind if I talk to him too?”

  “No, I think not. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this, if that’s possible in anything under a fifteen-year psychoanalysis.”

  “Long private analysis is going out of style, I think. The new thing’s encounter groups, acting out and all that.”

  “Is it, indeed? Well, to be frank, I never could muster up much faith in psychoanalysis, though we’ve had an extraordinary number of our students in therapy if not analysis over the years. There was a time when it seemed as de rigueur as orthodonture, and that, I’ve always suspected, was necessary in twenty percent of the cases, at a generous estimate.”

  “Have you heard anything of encounter groups here?”

  “Here at the Theban? No.” She looked at Kate. “Oh, dear,” she said, “you’re trying to tell me something, or if you’re not trying, I’m hearing it anyway. Never mind, I don’t want to know. I was right anyway about the Antigone, wasn’t I? Isn’t it still relevant?”

  “I’m beginning to think extraordinarily so. For example, when Creon finally becomes convinced that he was wrong not to have buried Polynices and to have punished Antigone for doing so, he goes to release her from the cave where he’s had her interred. But he stops on the way to bury Polynices, and when he gets to the cave it’s too late. She’s dead, and so is everyone he cared for. Oh, don’t look so stricken, I’m
not predicting any more bodies, merely suggesting that perhaps it is Angelica who should get our first attention—doubtless just a fancy, to bring my subject into the news, a common academic ploy.”

  “Oh, dear. Go ahead and cope with the Jablons if you will be so good. What else have you on your agenda?”

  “More dreary questions. Tell me a bit, in a rapid sort of way, about the five other girls in the seminar. You advise the seniors, don’t you; consult about college, and all that?”

  “Oh, yes. I also hold a class in ethics, a Theban tradition, if you can believe it—but of course you must remember.”

  “Certainly I do. What in God’s name does ethics mean these days?”

  “Well may you ask. I’ve ended up doing what everyone in the academic world does do now, I let the girls decide what they want to discuss, hoping to heaven it isn’t sex, because of course, no matter what people say, that really can’t be handled by the school except scientifically and in a factual sort of way—our science teachers take turns at it, with a frankness that astounds me. But my unmarried state happily protected me from the fate of discussing sex—they were afraid of startling me, I suppose. What they did want to discuss was their parents, which was almost worse than sex. However, I managed to turn that into a more or less organized combination of questionnaire and sociological study. We asked all the students in the last two years of the upper school what they most objected to in the behavior of their parents and then—this was where I thought I was rather clever—we asked the parents of the two first years in the upper school (because we didn’t want people actually comparing notes) what they most objected to in the behavior of their children. It all turned out to be fascinating, and if we want to call it ethics, who’s to stop us? Which seems a remarkably long-winded way of saying, yes, I do know something about the seniors.”

  “Did all the parents and all the students agree, more or less, on what they couldn’t stand in the other group?” Kate asked, fascinated.