The Headmaster's Dilemma (9 page)

Visiting Averhill with Rosina after Elihu had been enrolled there, Elias, gaining confidence in the knowledge that they were now treading on his territory rather than hers, found the nerve to warn her that demanding special occasions to check on the school's services, such as insisting on a master's accompanying her on an inspection of the linen closets, covered her with a ridicule that would redound upon their son. Rosina at Averhill came the nearest to meekness she was ever to come.

The masculine note was certainly struck at Averhill. Women were only to be seen in the rather subdued and dreary faculty wives who appeared with their husbands at the ends of the long dining room tables on Sunday lunches, or in the fleeting housemaids chosen by a supervisor who employed none of even passing sex appeal. Girls, it was true, were ultimately admitted to the school before Elihu's graduation, but even then for a time they seemed to present a further hurdle to masculinity.
Did
a boy have a girlfriend?
Could
he have a girlfriend? Sports still ruled, the rougher the better: hockey, soccer, and sacred football. History and even art told the stories of great men. The tall chapel spire dominated the campus like a phallic symbol.

Yet Elihu didn't do too badly at the school. The lesson he had learned at Buckley stood him in good stead. He was comfortably in the middle of his form in grades, below the average in sports but not impossible; he respected the leaders of his group and even made a few friends among the less popular. His wish was to get by, and get by he did. One factor in his favor was the lavish parties his mother gave to his New Yorker formmates on Christmas and spring vacations, which they accepted with boyish condescension and which Elihu had the tact never to mention as entitling him to any consideration on return to school.

As the sexuality of his nature developed he began to find a pleasure in his contemplation of the handsomer boys. Members of the football team in the gymnasium showers struck him as splendid creatures, and he liked to imagine them in erotic poses or engaged in erotic acts. He was perfectly aware there were boys at Averhill who did not confine their sexual impulses to fantasy, and who engaged at night in the dormitories in different forms of sexual experiment with each other, but there seemed to be a sense, even among some of those so engaged, that it was bad, obscene, even wicked, and he was not tempted to do likewise, nor was it dangled before him, as he was not among the lovely boys whose torsos he admired. Besides, he had heard his mother once darkly refer to a departing luncheon guest as a "pervert," and his father made frequent use of such scathing terms as "fairy" or "faggot." Would that describe the boys on the squeaking bed in the adjoining cubicle? Maybe not. Maybe they were just experimenting. Elihu was a reasoning boy. But he would never join them.

For there was another feature in his picture of himself. He had learned to stand back and see the world and Elihu Castor in it. He was pretty sure that his fantasies when he masturbated, which he frequently did, were different from those of other boys. Or from the other boys at Averhill, anyway. Or, say, from the majority of the other boys at Averhill. And the majority was the group that one had at least outwardly to join. If one wasn't in the majority, at any rate, no one in the world must know it. And no one had to. That was life.

He imagined that "other boys," when they masturbated or engaged in some form of sexual activity, thought either of the dirty things they did in a cubicle with a pal or of what they did with some of the girls they met at dances on vacation, where they might rub their stiff pricks against their sometimes shocked, more often titillated partners. But Elihu had other private visions, and ones that he was quite sure were not only not shared by his classmates but which had better be kept as dark as the fatal dollhouse. He thought of himself as a girl, a goddess surprised bathing in a fountain by a peeking swain, or a nude model in the atelier of a handsome artist, or a daring beauty naked in bed with the captain of the football team. This marooned him on an island of his own. But the ferry service to the mainland was always available.

As a fourth-former, thus, at age fifteen, Elihu felt he had achieved a workable balance between his inner and outer lives. Girls had now been admitted to the school, but there were none as yet in his form, and their influence on him was nil. There was, however, in any group of schoolboys always at least one pair of eyes that could penetrate the secret of the most careful lad. "Bossy" Caldwell seemed to have been created to divine the chink in Elihu's armor the way certain foxes know how to overturn a porcupine and sink their teeth into its exposed belly. He was a big, grinning, ugly, muscular boy who would one day exercise his disgusting charm successfully on many a weak woman, but who at seventeen, and in the monastery that Averhill still essentially was, satisfied himself by playing dirty games with younger boys. As a sixth-former and a prefect with disciplinary powers in Elihu's dormitory, he scandalously misused his authority in midnight visits to the cubicles of his prey. Some boys were ready enough to oblige him, but he had a perverse inclination for the "puritans" who resisted.

He had noted Elihu's failure to join in the smutty talk with the little group of fascinated boys that surrounded the prefect at any dormitory party, like the Bandar-log around the writhing figure of the rock python Kaa, and he chose to address his lewdest remarks to him. Once he took the boy aside for a private chat.

"Ya want it, kid, don't ya?" he suggested with a leer.

"Want what, Bossy?"

"Ya know what I mean." He pressed a hand on Elihu's crotch. "I can feel it. The little Christer who's ashamed of his stiff prick."

Bossy was right. Elihu's throat was clogged with his throttled reaction.

"Go away, Bossy," he managed to murmur. "Leave me be."

Bossy gave him a swift kick in the rear and dismissed him with a mocking laugh. But that night, after lights, Bossy's large naked figure loomed in the drawn curtains of Elihu's cubicle.

"Move over, kid," he whispered. "I'm getting in."

"No, no!" Elihu hissed violently.

He struggled in vain; the arms of the much stronger boy pinned him to the bed, and he felt Bossy's fingers against his testicles. Suddenly he went limp; his body seemed to take fire; his left arm went around Bossy's neck. When orgasm came he breathed in a horrible ecstasy. After that he obeyed his partner's hissed instructions, and when Bossy, presumably satisfied, sat up, he too sat up, and, suddenly driven by an impulse, tried to kiss his assailant on the lips. He was roughly repulsed.

"Kissing is only for little fairies like you," Bossy snarled.

But as he rose from the bed to return to his own cubicle his naked outline was illuminated by a flashlight. It was the dormitory master's.

D
AVID SMITHERS
was only twenty-five and was thinking of getting a Ph.D. in literature at Yale. He had taken a job teaching English at Averhill to see if he was fitted for an academic life. Boston-bred and the son of two high school teachers, he was a very serious and conscientious young man, in love with the English romantic poets, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. He was gentle, even timid, but there was a strength and sincerity to his good intentions that commanded the respect of even the rowdiest boys. They sensed his essential integrity.

He had been aware for some time that the strict rule against nighttime visiting in the cubicles was being violated, for he left the door to his study open while he read late at night, but he had assumed that the patter of feet that he sometimes made out might be for some harmless need to chitchat or to exchange candy, and he thought he might safely leave the matter to the discretion of the dormitory prefect. But when he happened to mention this to a fellow master, the latter had warned him at once, and very seriously, to take steps to stop it, and it was on the night after receiving this advice that he caught Bossy in Elihu's cubicle. The prefect's nudity and the shocking violation of his duties penetrated even David's naivete; the unhappy teacher ordered Bossy to his cubicle and retired to his study to consider for a long fretful time what he had to do. There was obviously only one course open to him, and he went the next morning, immediately after breakfast, to report the episode to the headmaster.

Michael, met at his front door on the way to morning chapel, slipped an arm under David's and listened carefully to him as they crossed the campus. He spoke not a word until they were at the chapel door, and then simply said, "Thanks, David. Send both boys to my office in the schoolhouse after chapel. And not a word about this to anyone."

But Michael's calm was all on the surface. In chapel his mind seethed. This sort of thing was a headmaster's nightmare. Disciplinary action might lead to public scandal, hurting the school; condonement might lead to worse. If only a couple of lower form boys were involved, a discreet silence after a severe warning sometimes worked; the boys themselves were terrified of their families finding out. But with a prefect implicated! If only David had shut his door!

Michael himself had spent two years in an English public school when his father had accepted an invitation to teach philosophy for that period at Oxford. He was quite aware of what had notoriously gone on among the boys in those venerable institutions in the past, some of which had subsisted to his day. He knew that to have discharged the culprits might have been to have marred the lives of some of Britain's most distinguished leaders, later the heads of fine families. And he could well imagine Bossy Caldwell as a future president of the stock exchange and the father of a dozen promising children. One had seen stranger things. And wasn't this random groping of teenage males as essentially harmless as what puppies do in a den?

He had his sixth-form class in current events, which included everything from politics to modern art, immediately after chapel, but his mind was full of the interviews that would follow it, and he found it difficult to concentrate, although the course provided him with his most fruitful contact with students. That day he had arranged to have two large pictures mounted on easels that faced the class. One was a colored reproduction of a Frederick Church painting of giant icebergs; the other, Emile Bernard's rendition of three house fronts appearing over a green park in Brittany's Pont-Aven. The subject of the day was: is either, or are both, a work of art?

The class knew its headmaster well enough by now to suspect that he would pick as his favorite what to most of them was the least attractive of the two canvases, but they were quite willing to give him a fight over it. They knew how he favored dissension.

"Those huge islands of ice enthrall me!" one girl exclaimed. "It's the kind of great picture that makes you feel how small and insignificant you are compared to mighty nature. It's exhilarating and humiliating at the same time!"

"Is that because you know how dangerous icebergs can be to navigation?" Michael asked her. "Don't you think immediately of the fate of the
Titanic
?"

"Perhaps."

"Then isn't it something outside the picture itself that sends you off? Wouldn't a perfect colored photograph have the same effect?"

"It might, but the painting's so beautiful, sir! Could a photograph ever equal it?"

"I think it's possible. With the right light and the right camera. And, like the painting, it would be a work of great beauty. That I fully concede. But is it art?"

"Why not?" a boy demanded. "If it inspires you?"

Michael at this took another look at the Church. Certainly it was more inspiring than the picture in his mind of two naked boys wriggling in a bed. Couldn't he derive a moral code from towers of ice and infinite blue water? No, he couldn't. A headmaster had other fish to fry. Scorpions rather. Why hadn't Mr. Smithers kept his damn door closed? But a prefect! A school prefect! He shook his head to scatter these intrusive thoughts.

"Because it is not the composition of the painting that arouses you," he now explained. "Whether you are actually looking at the icebergs themselves, say, from a boat, as Church himself was, or seeing them in a painting or photograph, the result to you is very much the same. It is the subject itself that does the job. Whereas if I took you to Pont-Aven and to the exact site of the houses and park in Bernard's painting, it wouldn't excite you in the least. It might even bore you. But when you look at that Bernard you are seeing something much more than three very commonplace houses and a chunk of greenery. Those bus rides in Provence that take you to the sites where Cézanne painted are perfectly ridiculous. The whole point is what artists like Cézanne and Bernard
did
with what they saw. It is their vision of the ordinary that is interesting. Or even exciting."

"Why is it exciting?" another boy, with a touch of truculence, wanted to know. "What is it that Bernard is trying to tell me? I don't get it at all. Am I just another hopeless philistine, sir?"

"It doesn't matter what you are, Billy. What matters is that you are reacting to a work of art very differently from the way you reacted to the icebergs. That is a beginning in the process of appreciation. You will soon begin to see other things in those houses. Is the artist doing something with the contrast between their banal regularity and the seeming disorganization of the chunks of greenery below them? But look again. Isn't there actually a more interesting organization in the squares and triangles of the leaves? Why do the three different colors of the house fronts meld with the total greenness of the park in such a way as to create a startling beauty? Doesn't Bernard make beauty out of nothing, so to speak, while Church simply reproduces it?"

He saw that he was not getting through to the class, and that they were now confining their opposition to silence. After all, he
was
the headmaster, and they were not going to tell him that he was all wet. Besides they liked him well enough and didn't give a damn if he preferred a Bernard they had never heard of to the celebrated Church. Grownups were apt to be a bit wacky, but they had to be tolerated.