The Headmaster's Dilemma (17 page)

Ione at last found herself intrigued. His elocution was so smooth; he might have been reciting a piece he had learned by heart. Perhaps he was. "Heavens! Where does that leave poor girls like me?"

"Oh, you have the other asset. It's more than enough. It might even lure a fortune hunter from his goal."

"Even one as committed as yourself?"

He gave her a sudden strange look. "You know, it might. It really might."

"Even if it meant you had to take a job?"

"Oh, no, no, that might be too much. But wait! Didn't you say you were going to stick to the law? Mightn't you become a partner in one of those great firms? And aren't some of them supposed to make millions?"

"Not many women, I fear."

"But that will change, won't it? Women are advancing everywhere. And I wouldn't have to be entirely useless as a husband. In the evenings you could read your briefs to me. I might even give you some pointers in style. I've written for your ma's magazine, you know."

"But in the evenings you'd be going to your dinner parties, wouldn't you? You couldn't give
them
up. The hostesses of Manhattan, like the Maenads, would tear you in pieces!"

He tapped his forehead. "As Albany says in
Lear
: 'Great thing of us forgot!'"

That, as she began to discover, was the thing about Elias. He read a lot; he loved poetry; he had even once written some. There was a serious side to him if one could only pull it out. He had twice cited Shakespeare in their first colloquy.

The meeting was their introduction to a sometimes acerbic, sometimes hilarious relationship. Elias professed himself at once stricken, as he put it, like a naked Saint Sebastian, a pincushion riddled with the arrows of Eros. He called her constantly to tell her jokes, sometimes off-color ones, accompanied by screams of laughter, and to urge her to go out with him. When she at last agreed to do so, she found that she was diverted. She had started working for Mr. Abrams and was finding the long drudging days in his law library researching obscure points a dismal contrast to the sparkling ones her parents described of their own activities, which she had once tended to look rather down upon. It was something of a relief to dine with the exuberant Elias at a good French restaurant, even when, on a rare occasion, at the end of a meal, he would fling up his hands in mock despair, exhibit an empty pocketbook, and hand her the bill. He somehow made it seem a compliment to her sophistication that they were both above such petty things.

If she was looking for the hidden good in him, he, like a genial satyr, seemed intent on an opposite quest. He never made a pass at her, but he did not hesitate to suggest that an affair with a lover as adroit as Elias Castor might help to make up for the dreary days of the profession to which she had quixotically chosen to enslave herself. He even, and only half-jokingly, maintained that she had carried her natural early resistance to parental rule to puritanical excess and that she had turned herself into a kind of John Knox hurling epithets at the lovely Mary Stuart. Reluctantly amused, she wondered if there might not be some truth in this.

One night at a cabaret he waxed almost serious. She had accused him of being less than truthful on the subject of his own parents, whom he described as tyrants and who she had heard were reputed to be a kindly and sympathetic couple.

"Oh, they didn't beat me, if that's what you mean," he retorted without his usual snicker. "They even loved me, if you like. But they were too greedy for their children's love in return. Why, they always wanted to know, couldn't we be one big happy family? Why? Because the price was too great. My brothers paid it, but I couldn't. I couldn't lie."

"Lie about what?"

"About everything. Oh, it didn't matter if everyone knew it was a lie. It only mattered that you should say it. That you loved Christmas, for example. That you loved Mummy and Daddy more than anything. That you loved baseball, football, and all those horrid sports. That you loved the beach club in summer and the nasty little brats whom you had to play with. That you loved Jesus. That you loved God! You accuse me of untruthfulness, Ione. Well, if there's one thing I stand for in my admittedly rather screwed up existence it's the truth!"

Ione had been impressed by this. It had a good deal to do with what happened that night when, for the first time, she let him come up to her apartment when he took her home. There was also an element of experimentation in it. She had been a virgin longer than many of her friends, and had begun to see the state as an inhibition rather than a virtue. So they copulated. She was always to insist to herself that this was precisely what they had done. They did not become lovers. He professed to be one, but she didn't really believe him, and she herself was certainly not. Nor did they "sleep together," for she sent him home afterward. No, they copulated, purely and simply, and without having previously so much as kissed. He had even chuckled as he pulled down his pants and murmured, "You're going to love this, honey. You really are."

Well, yes, she had liked it. Sort of. But it was never repeated. The next day he appeared unexpectedly at her office and insisted that she go out for lunch with him. When she pleaded that she had to work he threatened to make a scene, and she rapidly consented.

In the restaurant he proposed marriage. He was deadly serious. She tried in vain to make light of it.

"But your heiresses, Eli. What about them?"

"They'll have to do without me, that's all."

"And what do you propose that we should live on?"

"You have a job, and your parents will do something for us. Even mine will if they decide I'm serious and will go to work."

"You could bring yourself to that?"

He smiled and tried to take her hand across the table. But she withdrew it. "You see what you've reduced me to," he reproached her. "You behold passion's slave."

Ione remembered ruefully that her mother had once told her, "Sex is never a thing to play with, my dear. Even I have learned that." For she saw now with a blinding clarity that poor Elias was desperately trying to cast himself in a role he would never be able to sustain. He might have been sincerely in love. He might have truly wished to become a responsible and loving spouse. It might even have been, had she cared to boast about it, which she certainly didn't, a triumph on her part to have subdued so indurated an epicurean to this state, but she could only bitterly regret it. Elias would have to get over this. And, of course, he would get over it.

"The whole thing is quite impossible, Eli," she said gravely now. "I'm not in love with you, and I never could be. You're a good friend, and that's all. And I'm not so fatuous as to imagine that our friendship will survive my refusal to have it become anything more. You will naturally resent me, however unreasonable that may be. Life is like that."

His face showed only too clearly that he had taken in that she really meant it. He made one last try. "Was I that bad last night? I can do better."

"You were fine. That's not it at all."

"What do you suppose this is going to do to me? Have you no sense of responsibility?"

She had to smile. "Of course, it's a blow to your masculine vanity. Men shouldn't take it that way but they do. However, you'll get over that. You can console yourself by thinking what a sad mistake I've made. You may even find yourself a tiny bit relieved."

At last she heard his old laugh. "You're a little devil, Ione! And you're sending me back to the big one!"

Whereupon he abruptly left the table, the restaurant, his unfinished meal, and the bill. Ione gratefully paid it.

Some months later at a Fletcher dinner party Ira informed his daughter that she would be seated by a young man called Michael Sayre.

"He's not another Elias Castor," he observed.

"That may be a point in his favor."

"By the way, what did you ever do with Castor?"

"Nothing."

"Perhaps that's all one can do with him."

W
HEN IONE LOOKED UP
in her Social Register the name of Elias Castor, whom she had not seen, except for a casual meeting on the street or a glimpse at a social gathering, for a decade and a half, she was not surprised to find him listed as a member of no less than four men's clubs. She telephoned to the first, the Patroons, at five o'clock one afternoon and was informed that Mr. Castor was indeed presently in the card room, but could not be disturbed. She insisted that it was an emergency and boldly gave her name. Some minutes later she heard Elias's indignant query in her ear.

"Is that really you, Ione? You should know that we can't talk except through counsel."

"There's no reason adverse parties to a suit can't meet so long as both agree to it."

"But I don't agree to it! So please hang up. I want to get back to my bridge game. The others are waiting for me."

"Eli, I've got to talk to you! For the sake of our old friendship. Please!"

"A fat lot you care about our old friendship! Why should I do anything for you, Ione, after the way you treated me?"

"Because you're a nicer person."

"Oh?" His tone showed some relenting. "But don't you know that if Rosina found out I'd even spoken to you on the phone, she'd take the first plane to Reno?"

"Rosina need never know. Oh, please, Eli!"

"Oh, all right. But give me an hour to finish my bridge game. And then come down here—we'll meet in the bar. No, Rosina's ghastly brother-in-law might be in there, tanking up. I'd better get a private room. Give your name at the door as Mrs. Smith, and I'll leave word you're to be admitted."

An hour later, in a small sitting room hung with hunting prints, Elias silently and somberly consumed two martinis while Ione related the story of the long and bitter conflict between her husband and Donald Spencer and how she had unwittingly contributed to its final and fatal rift.

"And now this terrible case is going to finish off poor Michael," she concluded dolefully. "And it's all my fault!"

Elias shook his head. "I don't agree it's that, and I'm sorry for your trouble. But I cannot fathom what you expect me to do about it or even why you're here at all."

"That's what I'm coming to. Michael is convinced that your son is lying to clear himself and keep the truth from his mother. That would be a perfectly natural thing for a scared boy to do. Throw the blame on another, particularly an older boy, a bully, and a prefect of the school who had no business being in his cubicle. Oh, Eli, if you could only make your son realize the damage he is causing and that telling the truth is really not going to hurt him all that much!"

Elias's eyes gleamed with sudden humor. "You mean it was a classic case of when rape is inevitable... You know the rest."

"Something like that."

"And you really expect me to get my boy to
admit
that?"

"You wouldn't have to go that far. If you thought there was any chance that Michael's assumption was correct, you could simply drop the suit."

"Rosina would never do that."

"But you're a co-plaintiff. Her suit would collapse if you withdrew."

"I daresay it would. But what do you think the tigress, deprived of her prey, would do to
me
? I'd lose my spouse, my son, and my sole means of support at one fell swoop!"

"You told me once, Eli, that the one moral principle that you had adhered to all your life was truth. That if everything else was a lie, you still had that. Isn't it worth saving no matter what the cost?"

"You're pretty free with other people's costs. You consign me to the gutter with a few noble words. And what makes you so sure that I believe that your husband's theory of what went on that dark night in my son's cubicle is correct?"

"Because you wouldn't have agreed to see me today if you didn't suspect there was something in it."

Elias chuckled. "That, I admit, is a shrewd thrust. I will also admit that we have no sure means of knowing exactly what
did
go on in that cubicle. Of course, Elihu may have lied. Scared boys often do, as you say. On the other hand he may not have. And I will also tell you frankly that, had the decision been mine alone, I would not have instituted this suit. The force behind it is solely Rosina's, but it's a terrible force."

"You could still save us. Just by admitting your doubts. Would Rosina really find that so unforgivable? Oh, Eli, I appeal to what I know is the real good at the bottom of your heart!"

"I note where you place it. No, you ask too much, Ione." He glanced at his watch. "And now, if you'll excuse me, I must be getting home. Rosina will be expecting me."

Ione arose in despair. "Will you at least think it over?"

"Ah, my dear, I think I can assure you that I shall be thinking of little else in the next few days."

But after she had gone, he did not go home. He went into the bar and had two more drinks, sitting moodily at a corner table and rejecting with a curtness most unlike him the offers of fellow members to join him. What he had not told Ione was that the father of a classmate of Elihu's at the day school the boy was now attending had called on Elias privately to explain to him why Elihu was no longer welcome at his house and why his own son would not be allowed to visit Elihu's. The classmate's father had caught the two boys playing "dirty games" together, and he refused coldly to specify what those games were. When Elias had related this later to his wife, which he had to, for Elihu was asking why he couldn't visit his pal, Rosina had become almost hysterical.

"The poor child has become hopelessly corrupted by what they did to him at Averhill! We must bend all our efforts now to saving his soul!"

"You don't think it throws any doubt on the validity of your case?"

"On
my
case! Do you mean you're not with me, Elias Castor?"

"I'm not one hundred percent sure that I am."

"You'd better make yourself sure, then," she said grimly. "Or at least button your lips on any doubt you're disloyal enough to entertain. We're in this thing together, and I shall know how to treat any defector!"