The Headmaster's Dilemma (13 page)

"I'm afraid that's so. With some of the older masters I tender a perhaps vain hope that we may ultimately effect some kind of restraint on him."

"Oh, my darling, I hope you keep that just as advice."

Willy was a bit startled. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you know that Mr. Sayre did me the honor of placing me on his right at the school birthday dinner."

"And no more than was your due."

"That's as it may be. But he made a reference to your opposition to some of his changes. He was humorous and charming as he always is, but I got the distinct impression that he was giving me a warning that he wanted me to pass on to you."

"A warning?" Willy felt the rumblings in his chest that usually preceded one of his outbursts. "A warning about what?"

"Not to carry things too far. Not to organize the faculty against him, perhaps."

"He has his nerve!"

"Oh, dear one, please! Be careful!"

Willy couldn't go on with it, for the excitement was clearly too much for her. He kissed her and sent the nurse in. That night she passed into a coma, and three days later she died.

He was shocked at how much he missed her. He had always been gratefully aware of the bond that united them, but he found that it was even stronger than he had supposed. In the year that ensued his temper became worse, and he even caught himself irrationally connecting her demise with the headmaster's misfeasance. He had been in the habit of holding monthly conferences between himself and three other masters who shared his hostility to Sayre to discuss the changes at the school, and now, after his Ritz luncheon with Spencer, he increased these meetings to once a week. Spencer was demanding action, and Willy desperately needed advice. Action, at least other than as executive officer, had never been his forte. He had not been made to be a ship's captain.

Tim Giles, the hirsute and excitable forty-year-old history teacher and junior member of what he didn't hesitate to call a cabal, had no such inhibitions.

"If in addition to this Castor suit," he exclaimed, "we had an instance of tolerated or deliberately ignored sodomy on the campus, mightn't it blow the ground from under Sayre? He might survive one filthy case, but could he survive two?"

"What are you suggesting, Tim?" Willy asked.

"Well, take our chaplain. Everyone knows he's gay, but he's supposed never to
do
anything about it. So far as we can see, anyway. But he's very cozy with Sayre's new male secretary—Schultze's assistant—what's his name? Andrews. I know they've been to Boston together a couple of times, presumably for a matinee. Presumably. Who knows what they do when they're alone in the Hub?"

"And what can we make of that, Tim?" Willy wanted, doubtfully, to know.

"It takes a bit of imagination, I admit, Willy. But I've got a hunch that our chaplain is writhing under the restraint of not being allowed to proclaim his true nature. I don't think it would take much to goad him into making it public. If you, Willy, for example, in your capacity as senior master, should sternly warn him that trips into Boston with headmasters' handsome young secretaries will cause talk and must not be repeated, I'll bet he'll explode and spill the beans. A case of open homosexuality in the sanctity of the school chapel in addition to the Castor business should be as good as fecal stains on a bed sheet."

Willy's lips puckered with disgust at the image, but Tim's idea nonetheless struck him. Did it not offer him a visible way of implementing his pledge to the chairman without any risk to his position on the faculty, no matter what the outcome of the assault upon the headmaster? If he was accused of harshness to young Studebaker, the chaplain, could he not explain it as a merely overzealous concern with the school's reputation?

He entered Jim Studebaker's small office in a transept of the chapel the very next day, looking stern and grave, and closing the door behind him. The chaplain jumped from his chair in surprise at the arrival of so important a visitor. He was obviously a serious young man, possessed of blond and almost angelic good looks.

"Why, Mr. Weldon! What can I do for you?"

Willy seated himself in the chair before the chaplain's desk with a slow and stately dignity. "It's not what you can
do
, my friend. It's what you had better stop doing."

And he proceeded in measured tones to specify just what deductions might be drawn from the "surreptitious" visits to Boston of two young men whose strong mutual affection had already attracted some attention on the campus. Studebaker listened without interrupting, at first with an air of gaping incredulity and finally with eyes aflash with indignation.

"People must have a great appetite for scandal at Averhill," he retorted at last, "if they can find it in anything as innocent as a trip to Boston to take in a matinee."

"In such a case, Studebaker, the appearance is as bad as the crime. To a senior master, anyway, whose duty it is to perceive how things, even innocent things, may appear to others."

"A crime, you say? Even if what the scandalmongers believe were true, would it be a crime?"

"I believe it would, under the old statute."

"You mean, something going back to the witches of Salem? But would it be a crime morally? Today?"

"Any right-minded person would think so."

The chaplain at this seemed to throw caution to the winds. "I can't help wondering if some of these right-minded people aren't driven to such hysteria by fearing the same thing in themselves!"

Willy was now excited with his progress. He moved in for the kill. "Are you suggesting that men with a concern for the school's reputation are perverts at heart?"

"That's not a word I use, Mr. Weldon."

"Is there a better one?"

"Do we need one at all? To describe a perfectly natural relationship between two human beings which is nobody's business but their own? Your word for it should go the way of
kike
and
nigger
."

"A man cannot help being a Jew or a black," Willy rebuked him. "But he can certainly help being a homosexual. And he certainly should!"

The chaplain had risen to his feet. His hands were trembling. "That is a subject, sir, on which we must agree to disagree."

Willy also rose and turned to take his leave. "Very well, Studebaker. But I warn you, here and now, that if you are tempted to air any of your views on this detestable subject to any student on this campus or cause further scandal in the way you spend your free time, your retention of your present post will be brief."

Willy was elated at how easy it had been to bring the young man to the very edge of revolt. Time, and not much of that, could be counted on to finish the job. He telephoned Spencer and related the incident jubilantly.

"Good work, Weldon!" was the gruff response. "When this thing breaks, I'll see to it that the press interviews the chaplain. Who else more proper than the guardian of the school soul? And I'll give you ten to one that he spills his guts on the love that dares not call its name!"

Two days later Willy had another opportunity to strike a blow in the chairman's battle without the least danger to himself. A new and powerful member of the school trustees, the multimillion-dollar heiress Mrs. Myron Fox, a devout Roman Catholic who had nonetheless chosen to send her son to a largely Protestant school for reasons of social advantage, wished to tour the institution over whose destinies she had elected to preside, and no one less than the senior master had been appointed to be her guide.

Taking her on a visit to the infirmary, Willy had decided to enter it through the dispensary rather than the main hall, and he had deliberately chosen to pause, presumably to speak to a nurse, before a table exhibiting a tray whose contents Mrs. Fox could not help noticing. They were condoms.

"Mr. Weldon!" the lady exclaimed. "Are these things what I think they are?"

He followed her glance and affected a shudder. "I'm afraid so, ma'am."

"If they're for the men who work on the place, the janitors and so forth, I suppose it's none of my business, but why on earth are they put out here, where the students—even the girls—may see them?"

"But, Mrs. Fox, they are
for
the students!"

"Good God in heaven, Mr. Weldon, what are you telling me? Does the headmaster know of this?"

"The headmaster ordered it. He says we must keep up with the times."

Mrs. Fox had no response. She followed him into the infirmary and finished her inspection of the school grounds. Her continued silence was sinister.

The filing of the two suits against the school occurred in the next week, and the press coverage was astonishingly broad. Astonishing, that is, to those who did not know how hard Donald Spencer had been at work. His greatest coup was to induce the nationally known Paula Preston to interview Rosina Castor on her popular television news commentary.

"Our subject tonight involves the socially impeccable and highly exclusive New England preparatory school Averhill. If you had thought that those privileged little boys and girls, overfed, overhoused, and overclothed, as one wit has put it, were scrupulously minding their
p
's and
q
's we have Rosina Castor with us tonight to convey a different impression. It is the burden of her suit against the school that her son was subjected to violent sexual abuse."

The school chaplain, interviewed by a Boston paper, did not help to allay the public indignation by maintaining that if there was any truth in the allegations of the suits, which he didn't admit, any misconduct had been caused by society's unreasonable prejudice against certain sexual acts, the arbitrary prohibition of which could lead to violence.

As the flames of the scandal raged over the landscape of the preparatory schools, the wiser headmasters murmured, "There, but for the grace of God, go I," but the consensus of opinion was that Averhill was in a bad way indeed, and that its administration had to be in some way at fault. Donald Spencer, together with three trustees including Mrs. Fox, took it upon themselves, without waiting for a formal meeting of the board, to issue a statement to the press that they were deeply concerned about the moral questions presented by the lawsuits to the administration of the school.

E
RWIN C. CALDWELL
puffed slowly away at his cigar as he sat in the comfortable back seat of his Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce limousine as it glided through the lovely Massachusetts countryside on its way to Averhill School. He was a large man; stout, strong, bald-headed, and more formidable in appearance than there was any need for him, or really any great desire in him, to be. He had already got pretty much everything out of the world that he had wanted, and having contented himself, he had no particular desire to impress anyone else, including his son, Edward (Bossy), seated silently in the jump seat ahead of him. It was a comfortable enough seat, with a soft back and arm rests, though still a jump seat, but the boy would no more have pointed out that there was room for him beside his parent in the back than would his mild, semi-invalid mother have complained of being always left at home. It was hard to call Erwin Caldwell a tyrant because his rule was never questioned.

He had sent his only son to Averhill not because he had the slightest admiration of, or desire to mingle with, an eastern seaboard upper class very different from the humbler one of his own origin, but because he thought that the Averhill stamp might give the boy a slight advantage in the Wall Street financial world to which he was destined. Erwin's aim in his own life had been to play every card that he was dealt, or that he could arrange to be dealt, to its greatest advantage, with a total disregard to any moral or even cultural association with the card played or with the nature of the play. Viewing his son objectively—as he did everything else—he could not see that the school had made much of a dent in the boy, but he was perfectly willing to concede that this might not be the fault of the institution and that Edward might be poor material to work on. If that were so, it was not something to get overwrought about. It was simply another problem to be faced.

His own fortune had been acquired in lumber from the Brazilian rain forest with a ruthless disregard, that he never stooped to defend, for all ecological or even legal restraints. Unlike many tycoons he had no interest in cloaking his piratical methods in the robes of industrial creativity, nor did he in any way deplore the efforts of liberal-minded statesmen to oppose the headlong destruction of our environment. He was a man of equable temper; he rarely found anything worth getting angry about. That he should take and others resist his taking seemed to him simply the way of the world.

And so with this business at Averhill. Erwin had listened patiently to his son's account of what had happened in his dormitory that night and had not supposed that he was getting an unprejudiced version. He had never known the boy as a disciple of truth; he had too often observed him to mitigate the rigor of that rule. He had sent for Edward to come home and explain the affair; now he was accompanying him back to school for the purpose of having a frank talk with the headmaster. He looked at his watch. Sayre was to receive him at three. They would be just on time.

He broke his silence as they approached the school grounds. "How long will it take you, Edward, to get ready, if I decide, after talking to Mr. Sayre, to take you home with me?"

"You're thinking of taking me out of school, sir?"

"Just answer the question, please."

"I suppose I could pack up in an hour."

"Then do so while I'm having my interview with Mr. Sayre. I may or may not decide to take you home after I've seen him, but I want you to be ready in any case. Be sure to take enough clothes for a possibly long stay."

"But what will I tell my dorm master, sir?"

"Tell him to put any questions he has to the headmaster."

"And may I ask
you
a question, sir?"

"Go ahead."

"If you take me out of school, will it be for good?"

"It will be for
your
good. But I haven't made up my mind about that yet. It all depends on what I learn from the headmaster. It may be that you will stay at school and graduate. It may be that you'll go to Brazil. You'll just have to trust me, that's all."