The Headmaster's Dilemma (16 page)

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 reason?"

"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.

I
N 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.

She decided the next day to go to New York and find out what her mother thought about the whole situation. She told her husband that she had to see her old dentist and took the train to Grand Central. Diane met her for lunch at Lutece, her favorite French restaurant. Of course, she knew all about her son-in-law's trouble, and she listened quietly to Ione's rehash, but on the main question she was wholly negative.

"The foundation would never touch Michael if he's expelled," she said sadly. "Of course, in time these things are forgotten or glossed over, but by then the position will have been filled."

"I feel so helpless," Ione complained. "Can you, Mother, who've survived so many office rumbles, imagine any way I can do something for poor Michael?"

"There's not much a headmaster's wife can do, is there? You can talk to trustees, yes, but it's so obvious to them that you have to say what you're saying. All they can do is sympathize. They're not going to vote for Michael because they're sorry for you. And the faculty won't really have much of a voice in this. Some might have, but you say the older ones may be against Michael anyway. And I doubt you could swing the wretched Spencer around even if you offered to sleep with him. Ugh!" Diane made a face as she recalled Donald's features. "Oh, but that reminds me of something!" She suddenly smiled. "I'm rather surprised actually, now I think of it, that you haven't mentioned it yourself."

"I suppose you're thinking of Elias Castor."

"Damn right I'm thinking of Elias Castor. You knew him, of course, before either of you were married."

"I did. Not that I remember it with much pleasure."

"Didn't you have an affair with him?"

"Mother! How the hell did you know that?"

"Mothers who keep their eyes open learn more than you think."

"But it was so brief! Actually only one night! And I think I must have been half drunk, or something like that. Do you know, it was the only affair I ever had?"

"I didn't know that. But it hardly surprises me. You were always so serious. You didn't get
that
from your old ma."

"Elias and I couldn't have been more different! I don't think I ever even really liked him."

"One doesn't always have to. The point is not how you felt about him but how he felt about you."

"I don't know!"

"Well, find out."

"Are you suggesting that I should sleep with
him
now?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Your motive would be too apparent. But call him up—if you can do so without his wife's knowing. At his club, maybe. I'm sure he has one, probably several, to get away from her. Ask him to meet you for a drink."

"And do you imagine he'll come?"

"Oh, he'll come all right. He's a cat for curiosity. Remember he worked for me once. Briefly."

"And what shall I say to him?"

"Darling, you have to do something on your own. I can't do it all for you."

It had indeed been a curious affair.

Ione had met Elias Castor shortly after her graduation from law school, at a time when she was feeling discouraged and depressed. Although her grades had been good, she had failed the procedural half of the New York State bar exams, and she had been unsuccessful in her application for a clerkship in the big Wall Street law firm that she had particularly wished to join. She knew, of course, that a failure to pass both halves of the bar on a first try was too common to be much upset about and that there were plenty of other good firms that were apt to be more receptive to her bid, but with the natural exaggeration of youth she had allowed herself to be plunged in gloom and to wonder if she had not chosen the wrong profession.

It was with the design of cheering her up that Diane Fletcher, at one of her and Ira's dinner parties, had seated their daughter next to Elias Castor. It was not that she had any particular admiration for this ebullient young man, but he was lively and amusing and a bit of a buffoon. She had met him at parties in Gotham; despite his youth and idleness and lack of apparent importance, he seemed to go everywhere, one of the briefly taken-up pets of a glittering world. He had even offered one of the little pieces he sometimes wrote on Manhattan social doings to
Style
, and Diane had actually published it. What he lived on nobody knew; he presumably enjoyed some minimal allowance from his highly respectable family, who were reputed to disapprove strongly of his epicurean existence. Diane never dreamed that he would become anything like a beau of Ione's; she had merely hoped that he would get her to laugh.

Which he did.

"Your ma tells me you've had the good sense to bust the silly bars," he began. "My congratulations!"

Ione stared at the funny man. "Why is it a subject for those?"

"Well, won't it relieve you from a life of getting people out of their bargains by crawling through the small print? Even Portia, after cheating poor Shylock out of his bond, had the sense to give it up and go back to her palace and the strapping husband her money had bought."

"But I'm not giving up the law!" Ione protested in surprise. "I'll take the exam again in the spring, and with any luck I should pass."

"Why do all you pretty and charming girls want to be lawyers and dentists and undertakers?" he protested. "Aren't you afraid of becoming as dull as the men? For it's not our sex, you know, that makes us bores. It's our jobs."

"You mean that, idle, you'd all be dazzling wits?"

"Well, wittier, anyway. Read the old French novels about a
désoeuvré
society. The men are always delightful."

"Do
you
work?"

"Heaven forbid!"

"And you think that's kept you from being a bore?"

"Ah, touché! I guess I asked for that one. But you'd better keep on talking to me, for I can assure you the man on your other side is a worse one. So let's chat. What I really want to ask you is, is it fair to other girls for you to have so many assets?"

"What do you mean by 'assets'?"

"Well, to begin with you have the two that are most needed in the game of husband catching: money and beauty. And you only need one for that game. You're playing it with loaded dice."

"Assuming I'm playing it at all," she retorted with some hauteur. "I can't be a judge of my beauty, as you call it, but I can tell you right now that I'm far from being an heiress."

"Yet your parents certainly live well." He gazed admiringly down the well-appointed table.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this, Mr. Castor, but my parents live well because they work hard and earn well. They are not accumulators, either of them. They believe, as I do, in the here and now."

"So you'll be left like Hans Christian Andersen's little match girl to freeze to death in the snow? Dear me, what a pity."

"Don't be ridiculous. They'll look after me. All I'm saying is that I'm not an heiress."

"You mean we can't afford to marry each other?"

"You mean that
you
can't afford to marry me. Well, I must console myself."

"You sound as if that wouldn't be hard. You should have more sympathy for the poor guy who has to marry an heiress."

"Why do you
have
to?"

"How else do you expect me to live, Ione? I may call you that, may I not?" She nodded impatiently. "And the competition is dreadful. All the fellows are after the moneybags. And bags many of them are."

"Are you implying that all heiresses are doomed to be married for their money?"

"Every blessed one of them."

"And never for love?"

"Oh, that may be sometimes thrown in. But it's not essential. In Europe people are more realistic about this—or used to be. The indispensability of the
dot
was frankly recognized. A suitor who withdrew his proposal if the
dot
proved inadequate was deemed a perfectly reasonable young man. But over here we carried our revolution not only against the tyranny of old Europe but against what we saw as its materialism and immorality, blithely ignoring the fact that we ourselves were even more steeped in those qualities. We proclaimed our faith in liberty and love! And our marriages,
all
our marriages had to be based on love, mutual love. The national myth included a picture of the type of man who married for money; he was sly, sleek, mustachioed, foreign, a kind of stage villain. He was held up to our heiresses as a type to avoid, and avoid him they easily did, as he didn't exist. They rarely saw him in his real form: the handsome, broad-shouldered, blond, blue-eyed captain of an Ivy League shell. So accepted was the legend that the groom himself, handing his lacey bride into the Rolls-Royce that would take them from the church to the opulent reception, may not have fully recognized the role played in his courtship by the gleam of his beloved's gold."