The Theban Mysteries (2 page)

“I will not discuss George Eliot without another drink. And then there’s Jack. Can we,” Kate frantically concluded, “thrash this out tomorrow?”

Back in the living room, Kate found Reed and Jack making conversation. The boy, having learned of Reed’s association with the D.A.’s office, was accusing him of being part of the oppressive police force, an arm of the Establishment, a tool of the system. Reed declined, however, to rise to the bait. He could clearly discern that the boy was troubled, and he did not wish, should his help be needed, to put the boy into the position of having to refuse it.

“Good news, I hope,” he said to Kate.

“That,” Kate said, “was the head of the Theban. Girlhood memories dance before my eyes.”

“Miss Tyringham,” Jack said. “She and the head of my old school keep talking about combining.”

“Why on earth?” Kate asked.

“To be coed, of course.”

“My God,” Kate said. “But then, I suppose if
Haemon and Antigone had been to school together, it might have been a different story.”

“Babble on,” Reed said.

“Kate,” Jack said. He pulled on his beard in a gesture Kate found odd in so young a man. “Dad’s thrown me out. And I’ve quit Harvard. Could you lend me a little money till I get a job?”

“Jack dear, you will bear in mind, will you not, that your father is my brother? True, I have often disagreed with him; in fact, I can’t remember ever having agreed with him about anything. But I don’t feel comfortable going behind his back. Does he know you’re here?”

“He doesn’t know or care where I am.”

“Would you mind if I told him you were here?”

“If that fits in with your straight way of doing things, go ahead. He will merely mention my juice and me stewing in it.”

“What’s happened?”

“I’m going to sign up with my draft board as a C.O. I guess hearing that did it. My hair, I mean, and quitting Harvard, and now this. I don’t believe in this filthy war.”

“Does your father want you to be in it?”

“He wouldn’t mind using his connections to get me into a cushy slot at the Pentagon; I don’t suppose he’d object to my pulling a high number in the lottery. What he can’t stand is what he calls my spitting on the flag—you can find his opinion expressed alliteratively by Agnew. The way I look at it, if you don’t protest against war you’re going along with it. I could even probably get out because of my asthma, but that wouldn’t let them know how I feel about Vietnam, would it? Leo
wanted to come with me, but I told him to stick with school till he’s eighteen. He thinks you’re great.”

Kate looked at Reed. “Any suggestions?” she asked.

“Call your brother. I’ll broil a steak we can all have for dinner. All right with you, Jack?”

“Right on,” Jack said.

T
HE
Theban School was a hundred years old, and had been founded by Matthias Theban because he wanted a school in which properly to educate his four daughters. Other men might have thrown up their hands, hired governesses, and cursed a fate which had deprived them of a son. Such was not Matthias Theban’s way. If fate had presented him with female progeny, he would accept fate’s challenge and educate them as human beings and future members of the learned professions. Combining as he did an eccentric view of the possible destiny of females with a great deal of money, influence, and financial acumen, he was able, in those simpler days, to carry out his plan with an ease which must seem the stuff of daydreams to those who try to found any institution today. Matthias Theban had no need to consult bureaucracies, local governments, foundations, or minority groups. He bought a piece of
real estate in downtown New York in a section he was fairly certain would increase in value, persuaded influential friends onto his board of trustees, hired a forward-looking educator from Harvard (a man; but it was Matthias Theban’s hope, not realized until the twentieth century, to have a woman as head of the Theban), built his school, and got his educational experiment under way.

In the years which followed, New York saw the establishment of many girls’ schools, some new boys’ schools, and a number of schools which were coeducational—although these tended to be more experimental and less aristocratic. Spence, Chapin, Brearley, Miss Hewitt’s, Nightingale-Bamford, and Sacred Heart joined the Theban in the group which came to be known as the “curtsying sisters”: their students curtsied when introduced to an adult, shook hands properly, wore uniforms topped by a school blazer, and were accepted, almost on application, by the college of their choice. All this, of course, was before the middle of the twentieth century. By then, no one over ten curtsied, shook hands, or wore a uniform without protest, and acceptance by a college required as extended and difficult a procedure as the acquisition of Swiss citizenship. The Theban, though one of the curtsying sisters, was nonetheless special, as all its graduates knew with a calm certainty particularly aggravating to graduates of any other school. What made the Theban special was hard to define, though many people, Kate among them, had tried. It imbued its students, despite their inevitable destiny of cotillions and debuts, with a tomboy, bluestocking attitude which was never entirely eschewed.

The Theban boasted (a figure of speech: the Theban never boasted about anything) several gyms into which the girls, at odd though scheduled hours, would fling themselves to play basketball, volleyball, or indoor baseball, to high jump or swing wildly, like monkeys, across the ceiling on rings. The Theban was usual in requiring four years of Latin, unusual in offering three years of Greek. It paid unusually high faculty salaries, and taught its students so thoroughly that all of them, to a woman, found college an anticlimax of almost unmanageable proportions. The average Theban girl (though no Theban girl was ever average) discovered two weeks after she had arrived at Vassar or Radcliffe that she could get A’s with no effort whatever; she settled down, therefore, to three years of bridge, love affairs, and an occasional nervous breakdown, pulling herself sufficiently together in her senior year to graduate with honors and move on, if she chose, to graduate school. Many Theban girls chose, and the school’s alumnae rolls were impressive indeed, or would have been had the Theban published them. But the Theban had no interest in impressing anyone.

At its founding, the Theban had been unique in yet another way: it had accepted Jews. Only the right Jews, of course, the ones who were one day to be dubbed “our crowd”; nonetheless, in this as in other actions, Matthias Theban was far ahead of his day. The school’s graduating classes were sprinkled with Warburgs, Schiffs, Loebs, and Guggenheims; later, after the Second World War, when even Spence, Chapin, and Miss Hewitt’s felt the need to welcome a few Jews, the Theban found itself to have been revolutionary without ever losing its reputation for conservatism: a neat trick.

But not so neat as combining educational wisdom with the finer points of real-estate speculation. The Theban’s first building, by the time it had been outgrown and the neighborhood had become too commercial, was sold for many times what it had cost: the profits built the new building and swelled the endowment fund. After Matthias Theban’s death, the school once again called his name blessed: their second building, standing on the spot now occupied by the Biltmore, easily paid for the third and current home of the school in the East Seventies.

Kate had been in the lower school of the Theban at the end of the Depression, the middle school during World War II, the upper school during the Cold War and the frenzied return to normal. Through all these cataclysms the Theban stood firm and steady. It made its concessions, of course: even for the Fanslers, the Guggenheims, and the Rockefellers there were concessions to be made. But nothing essential changed. Kate left the Theban before the fifties, when all over the country students, called “the silent generation,” conformed; a demagogue reduced the nation to a gaggle of witch hunters; and upper-class young ladies moved to the suburbs, had several children, and talked about their feminine role.

It was Miss Tyringham who kept the Theban alive in the fifties. She took no political stands—such was not the policy of Theban heads. But she confirmed, in her downright, cheerful way, that change was possible. She knew that schools do not die; they pass from being vigorous to being fossils without ever noticing the transition. This passage Miss Tyringham prevented before anyone else had considered it. She subtly altered the
school’s acceptances away from the predominance of old money toward those who were nouveaux riches enough still to be vigorous. Naturally she made some mistakes, and the Theban graduated the occasional girl more vulgar than one might have wished; without risks, as she knew, there were no gains. Her faculty began to shift its average age from fifty-five to thirty-five; she encouraged the hiring of young married women, encouraged them to teach through their pregnancies, found substitutes for them during their deliveries, and cheered them upon their early return. She added contemporary literature and history to the curriculum long before that became fashionable, introduced Spanish as an alternative language to French in a city now heavily Puerto Rican, recruited for the school numbers of black girls, and bullied the trustees into providing scholarships for them—all before Martin Luther King had begun boycotting the buses in Montgomery. Honoring ideas from her faculty, she nurtured an extraordinary esprit de corps while most private schools, allowing a patina of chilly courtesy to form, unsuccessfully disguised from students the hostilities which divided the faculty into contending factions. Miss Tyringham was, in short, a genius at her job.

Yet not even an administrative genius could have been prepared for the last half of the sixties. Everyone was unprepared, but—some were less unprepared than others. As a whole, the private schools weathered the storm through the use of cautious blackmail: their waiting lists were long, the idea of public school unthinkable. A suggestion that if Johnny or Susy did not behave their parents had perhaps better look for a
school more suitable to their child’s needs usually sufficed to achieve some change in demeanor.

For a while. But, by 1968, some students were ready to fling out of school in spite of any threats, parental or scholastic. At the Theban, the esprit de corps held, for the most part. Miss Tyringham, firm and cheerful as ever, coped with pants in school (she ignored them), drugs (she gave the students and their parents the facts in the clearest, least moralistic way), the black revolution (she had foreseen that), and the demands for coeducation (in regular meetings with the headmaster of the boys’ school Kate’s nephews attended she explored the situation, emerging from time to time with enigmatic reports; whether she was considering coeducation or stalling, no one quite knew).

What she could not cope with was the Vietnam War. Whether the history of the United States would have been fundamentally different without that war is a question scarcely worth asking now. What Miss Tyringham knew was that it had driven apart the generations and political parties of the Theban as no other crisis had ever done. Students began shouting one another down in assembly, greatly offending the older faculty, who had always assumed the practice of Jeffersonian democracy, the right of everyone to be heard. On Moratorium Days, the students refused to come to school. Miss Tyringham kept the school open as a center for discussion and petition writing, for or against the war (but very few were for it). She had already begun a radical curriculum reform, with Julia Stratemayer in charge; the school carried on. But, like everyone else in the country during the early months of 1970, Miss Tyringham was feeling the strain. This was
the situation into which Kate walked on a suspiciously mild February day, the sort that promises spring as beguilingly as an incurable philanderer promises fidelity.

“Well, we
are
glad to see you,” Miss Tyringham said, welcoming Kate into the head’s office. The holy of holies, Kate thought. She could remember having been there only three times during her student days. Once when, as a member of the student government, she had been called to an important conference to discuss, not whether the students should be allowed to run the school and hire the faculty, which was the sort of thing that came up now, but whether the students could be sufficiently interested in their own affairs to justify any student government at all. Then, she had been in the office with her parents to discuss her college application; Miss Tyringham’s predecessor had managed, with infinite grace, to talk Kate’s parents out of Vassar (where her mother had gone) as she had three years earlier helped Kate talk them out of Milton Academy. Kate mentioned the three visits to Miss Tyringham. “And here I am now,” she added, “to discuss Antigone. Did you know that the President of Princeton wrote a book on the imagery in the
Antigone
? In quieter, bygone days, of course.”

“Did he indeed? I hope he is not the last college president this country has who is capable of doing that. Do you know, we shall actually be sending some graduates to Princeton this year? What exciting times we live in, as I keep trying to persuade the older parents, who wonder, in all the rapid change, if they may not outlive the earth itself. Our oldest living graduate mentioned to me recently that in her youth there were no
automobiles to speak of, and now we have gone to the moon. I could not help rejoining that in her youth the Long Island Railroad was somewhat speedier than it is today, and the letters were delivered in half the time. None of that’s important, of course. What matters is that we are today a society that must, whether we want it or not, be willing to learn from the young. That’s a bitter pill for most people my age to swallow.”

“If we haven’t anything to teach, why are we teaching?” Kate asked.

Miss Tyringham leaned back in her chair, looked upward, and smiled—a smile as beautiful as any Kate had ever seen. Miss Tyringham was, indeed, a beautiful woman, not the less so because her face, which had been ever free of makeup, her hair, which had always been casually brushed back, seemed trying to detract from her beauty, to deny it: the onlooker perceived the beauty more acutely because he imagined he had shown unusual perception in noticing it at all. There were, to be sure, those among the parents who objected to Miss Tyringham’s way of “getting herself up,” and they used occasionally to express to one another their wish that
someone
would tell her not to wear such mannish suits. The parents of girls who had
not
been accepted at the Theban made more pointed remarks about Miss Tyringham. Kate admired the courage or natural insouciance or simple shortage of time which permitted one to be so emphatically oneself.