The Headmasters Papers (14 page)

Tepler thinks it may have been a little after 10:30 when he ran from the pool to find Kreble. Froehling meanwhile made repeated dives below Lewandowski and attempted to boost him up to the surface so he could breathe. Feeling this was futile, he swam to the side, got out, and picked up a long wooden bench from against a wall and placed it in the pool. This he used as a prod to nudge Lewandowski into the shallow racing lanes.

At this point, about 10:35, Kreble entered with Tepler. Kreble entered the water and they were able to remove Lewandowski, who was now unconscious, without difficulty. Feeling a pulse, but detecting no respiration, Froehling and Kreble began to apply two-man cardiopulmonary resuscitation. At this point they realized that Lewandowski had swallowed his tongue. They had some difficulty opening his jaw to correct this and, after that, further difficulties in extricating the tongue. When this had been done, cardiopulmonary resuscitation was resumed until an ambulance arrived, a few minutes after 11:00, to take the boy to Three Counties Clinic. At 11:30 we were called and notified that the boy had not revived and was dead on arrival.

The school had been made aware by the boy's parents that he had been taking anti-seizure medication daily as a precaution against the recurrence of a single seizure his parents reported during the past summer. His teachers, dormitory master, and his coaches were all aware of the boy's condition. Both the boy's physician and our resident physician had advised against contact sports, but had allowed others under appropriate supervision. There had been no other evidence of a seizure this fall or winter. Tepler, who is one of Lewandowski's roommates, said Lewandowski had told him about his medication and had told him once that he really didn't need to take it. In light of the date of the boy's most recent prescription, the number of pills remaining in the prescription bottle suggests he probably did not take the medication regularly.

I have had a chance to question the boy's other roommate and his teachers intensively and am convinced that no other drug or substance had been taken by Lewandowski prior to the accident.

John O. Greeve 12/5/19-

6 December

R
EMARKS
T
O
T
HE
S
CHOOL

In Memoriam, David Lewandowski

Boys, ladies and gentlemen of the faculty, Mr. and Mrs. Lewandowski:

It is too soon and too sad to try to put yesterday's tragedy into perspective. What we feel now is a numbing sense of loss. There is undoubtedly some great scheme into which the death by drowning of an able, energetic, sixteen-year-old boy fits, but if so, it is a design perhaps far too magnificent and terrifying for us to comprehend.

What we must all work to keep in mind is that our grief and dread today are not for David but for ourselves. David's fear and discomfort were brief and are now past. Ours, especially today, continues. A death among us, especially of one so young, makes us question bitterly the loss of so much promise. Anyone who knew David Lewandowski knows that his promise was considerable. The deeper dread, though, is of the loss of our own promise and vitality; we have had a stark reminder that our own are not infinite, nor guaranteed, nor safe. David's fatality confirms our mortality, and we don't really want the news.

Difficult, as it is, we have got to avert our musings from his fatality to his vitality, for it is in this, not in his passing, that David had something to teach us. Consider David for a moment. He was a new fourth former this year, but there was not, I'll wager, a boy in his form who didn't know him 
well
 by Thanksgiving. Rarely does a boy take to Wells—and Wells to a new boy—so quickly and so surely. As one housemaster in Hallowell put it, “He was so easy to like.” Easy because he was so indomitably high-spirited. No one who has spoken of him to me in the last twenty-four hours has done so without remarking on his laughter, how quickly it would come, how infectious it was, how it was always occasioned by the unexpected or by the lunacy of school life, never, apparently, by the shortcomings of others or at their expense.

David was also a risk-taker, a volunteer. On the campus twenty-four hours this past September, he volunteered to become varsity football manager. He did this because he wanted to help out and because he wanted desperately to be close to football. It is characteristic of him that practically none of you was aware that he was forbidden, on doctor's orders, to play contact sports. His name also appears, I notice, first among the fourth-form volunteers for the Christmas food and clothing drive. He was not yet, as it happens, a first-rate student—in fact, was a little daunted by Wells the first term. But he was not one to let a set-back get him down. Mr. Shire tells me he requested tutors on his own and was in the process of finding his feet scholastically. I am certain he would have done so. His kind always do.

So, in Auden's words, “What instruments we have agree”: David Lewandowski was a good boy. And what we came to know this fall, the Lewandowskis have known for much longer. David did, and does, them glorious credit as parents. It is for them, as well as for ourselves, that we so wholeheartedly appreciate and honor David here this morning. Mr. and Mrs. Lewandowski, to you go all our love and support. We cannot lighten your grief, only share it. We must acknowledge together that this grief could not have been had David not been the boy he was. Let's remember and honor that.

Thank you, and good morning.

6 December

Mrs. Florence Armbruster
Mathematics

Florence,

I must ask that with respect to future disciplinary measures you observe the following policy without fail: if you dismiss a boy from class for misconduct, make sure he 
reports
 somewhere, either to me or to Phil Upjohn. We are both well used to receiving such miscreants. If you wish to do the follow-up yourself, ask the boy to wait in our offices until you are free. In the event that either of us is otherwise occupied, Marge Pearse will know what to do with the offender.

This is 
by no means
 a suggestion that you have been negligent or are in some way responsible for the Lewandowski boy's accident. There is no blame to assign there.

I would appreciate your cooperation on the disciplinary matter. The wrong kind of boy finds it a treat to be dismissed early from class if there are no other consequences beyond the dismissal. Thanks.

J.O.G.

9 December

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve
14 Bingham Drive
Tarrytown, New York

Dear Val and Frank,

This is not a Christmas card. I regret to say it is the opposite of a Christmas card. “He who has the steerage of my course” has for some reason determined to wreck what is traditionally the most lovely passage of the school year, the between-holidays month, when the illusion of good will and anticipated comfort hangs cozily over the old quad like weather. Advent.

Not so this year, I'm afraid. Meg was taken back to the clinic today by ambulance after a night of terrible pain and, late this morning, a very bad hemorrhage. I can't even think about it. She is so miserable and tired and so angry. What an affront this disease is. I am thoroughly convinced that, almost from the time it was diagnosed, this cancer's treatment has served only to aggravate it; cancer may have been prolonged, but Meg has not been. Until now, except for one afternoon years ago on a cruise, I have never seen Meg nauseated the way these drugs have nauseated her. Not until this have I ever seen Meg close herself to others—out of sheer exhaustion, embarrassment, and pain. Meg could never stand to be such bad company as she feels this disease and its “treatment” have made her. Meg was not made to lose her hair and her appetite and her color. She wants to die but rails at the cowardliness of doing it herself. She is not likely to live past Christmas, and I hope to God she is spared the hell of another bout like last night's.

I can't get it into words, but something is so wrong with all of this. It's not the dying or even the cancer—it's the treatment, or the illusion of treatment. Hurtful and terrifying as it is, Meg's dying ought to be in the same run of phenomena as birth, marriage, and parenting. I don't know. This hasn't been right for Meg. It's not the way she should leave us.

I'm very full of death. A boy drowned in the pool this week— a terrible wild card, nobody's fault. He seems to have been a borderline epileptic who had gotten negligent with his daily medication and convulsed in the water. A very nice boy, game, very kind, a not-too-bright innocent. The blow to the parents was indescribable, their dignity in the face of it even more so. We put together a quick memorial chapel for them here the morning after. The boys rose to the occasion and to the parents' need like angels. I've never seen anything quite like it, the parents desperately attaching all their parental affection to each boy they got to know. They decided to bury him here and stayed on the campus three days. Going home without him was the hard thing, the real thing.

We have heard nothing from or about Brian, and Meg is now unable to talk about him. I don't know if she thinks about him. I hope not. I don't know myself anymore what I expect or what I want from him. I spend hours at a time, at my desk or lying in bed, when I positively, murderously hate him. Perhaps this has always been there, perhaps the real cause of all that's gone wrong. I don't want to believe this, and for the most part I really don't, but it's a possibility. And if it's true, if that land of hate is really running my engine, then all this other business, the avuncular reasonableness, the old-shoe headmasterly patter I do, this affection I think I feel for practically all of these boys who have been milling around me for the past thirty-two years—it's all a veil over something pretty ugly.

I've gone over Brian's growing up a thousand times in the last few years. It's all there in bold strokes: only son of headmaster, like son of clergyman, finds adult expectations impossible, so end-runs or self-destructs or compulsively fails. Until his teens, though, Brian, wasn't anything more alarming than a little passive and occasionally stubborn. I always think of Brian's and Hugh's respective approaches to performance, whether musical, athletic, or scholastic. Brian would be pleased to master a tune on the piano—would get it note-for-note perfect through solitary practice. Then, when asked to perform, even if only for Meg and me, he would decline. I once begged him to play for company until he wept. Hugh, on the other hand, liked to perform. He was never a show-off, but he always seemed delighted that you would actually like to see or hear something he had been working on. I will never forget one summer evening at Little House when Hugh had haltingly pounded his way through “Bumble Boogie” and we all cheered wildly. Late that night it started to rain, and as I was cranking windows shut in Brian's room, he startled me by saying, “Dad, you know I can play it really well.” I don't know what I said, probably something like “I'd love to hear it.” But both of us understood that was not going to happen.

I think I understand pretty well the dynamics of Brian's relationship to me and Meg. It's called passive-aggression in the psychoanalytic literature. All adolescents do it to an extent. The idea is for the adolescent to get you by not performing and thus spoiling your expectations. It is very hard to respond to. Real love and support sustain the passivity by reinforcing it; anger fuels it. It's also hard to be angry at the passive kid because 
he
 isn't (consciously) angry, and he is suffering consequences, too: failure, loss of esteem, lack of mastery, lack of recognition. It's deadly. Whole lives are organized on the principle. In my view, though, a lot more kids grew out of it before drugs. Kids always like to frustrate parental ambitions (even Hugh, who is perfect, is not an entrepreneur yet), but they also like to please and to acquire skills—social skills, vocational skills, recreational skills, intellectual acumen—and this requires growing up, knitting onto and using the adult order. Drugs block this healthy transition. They have done it to dozens of boys I have known well, and I believe in my bones they've done it to Brian. Drugs are made for passive-aggression. In the old world, in which we may be the graying last generation, being high (without chemicals) was the reward of achievement: goal reached, girl won, etc. Now being high (with chemicals) replaces achievement, 
is
 the achievement—no behaviors necessary, no mastery, no exchange of favors with the world.

School has always been an adult-adolescent battleground, but the battle was so much more invigorating and honorable before drugs. We can only, usually, guess if a boy is stoned. Druggy boys can get us every time. They can play their heads like chemical juke boxes, while we are drilling for order, for esthetic response, for logical subtleties. Masses of contemporary young never get very subtle. Their language and discrimination are fuzzed, perhaps a little, perhaps a lot, but forever. Medical schools, businesses (as you know) will accept them; the arts expect them. Which does not prove, at least to me, that drugs are harmless. Consider the medicine we get, consider the manufacturing, marketing, and delivery we get; consider the arts. Take Val to the movies, Frank. Take her to 
Apocalypse Now.
 Listen to the diction and syntax of talk-show guests—and of the host. I can imagine, without irony, a near future in the West in which the culture can 
only
 be endured with drugs.

But the hell with the near future. My present is hardly manageable. My near past is what I would like to understand better. I saw Brian grow up sweet, bright, maddeningly private and tentative. But promising! I saw him waver and grow tense at fifteen, and after that I never saw him entirely clear headed again. Which, in our particular Oedipal combat, is just about perfect, since being a clear-headed member of humanity is possibly my only firm expectation of Brian.