The Theban Mysteries (9 page)

“I don’t know. There’s no good my saying I can answer that question, because the truth is I have no idea. She’s worked well in the seminar, they all have, but … sorry not to be more helpful.”

“On the contrary; it is precisely because of your lack of certitude that both Julia and I think you might do better here than Mrs. Banister.
Not
that there’s any question of Mrs. Banister’s support to Angelica through the last years; of course we had to call her when the band began to play.”

“All right,” Kate said, rising to her feet and trying not to look at the weary woman before her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

But it occurred to Kate, walking from the office, that in calling her Miss Tyringham had hoped for something—what, Kate did not know; neither, probably, did Miss Tyringham.

Neither, it soon became clear, did Angelica. She lay on the cot in the nurse’s office, in a state close to comatose: bodily fatigue and emotional exhaustion had claimed her. Yet she seemed to have held off sleep till Kate appeared. Mrs. Banister, welcoming Kate with a nod, tiptoed from the room.

“Thank you,” Angelica faintly said.

Kate sat down on the chair next to the cot. Angelica, moving one hand toward Kate but not touching her, closed her eyes as though some struggle had ended. Odd, Kate thought, how once or twice in our lives our presence, merely our presence, brings peace, and we can never know when the moments will be.

Sitting there, Kate sensed that her voice would bring comfort. Thoughts of Antigone and Angelica whirled in her mind, but would not settle into words.

“Wrong?” Angelica said. “Wrong to do?”

And then Kate thought, she would never know why, of Thornton Wilder’s
Woman of Andros
. Well, it was a book about Greeks, after all. “Not wrong,” Kate said. “The mistakes we make through generosity are less terrible than the gains we acquire through caution.”

Angelica smiled and slept. Kate could see the tension leave her face. When the doctor arrived shortly after, Kate made her way back to Miss Tyringham’s office, her mind full of questions about Angelica’s brother. Fleetingly, Kate thought of the Greek gods and shivered.

K
ATE
reached home to find Reed almost invisible behind great piles of papers, which he said he was organizing, though his actions suggested rather that he was building himself a nest and planning to hibernate in it.

“Some people,” Kate said, dropping into a chair, “hire an accountant or, when push has come to shove, a brother, like me.”

“I have considered it,” Reed said, examining some receipt with obvious astonishment. “Now, why should I have supposed I could deduct that?” he mused, moving the paper idly from one pile to another. “I even went so far as to consult an accountant reputed to save one more than his own fee in taxes. I soon discovered, however, that I had to get all the stuff together for him, which is by far the worst part of the job anyway, and that, furthermore, when one of those government
computers spat forth my tax return in that unfair, happenstance way they have, I had to spend four hours a day for a week with the Internal Revenue people because I couldn’t possibly afford to pay the accountant to go for me. I mean, my time may be worth as much an hour as his in theory, but not in cold cash. So, I bethought me, why pay him in the first place? How was your evening, speaking of unpaid hours?”

“If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. The story begins with darkened lobbies and goes on through guard dogs who punch time clocks, becoming a bit emotional at the end with an interview with Angelica Jablon. How do you train a dog to press something with his paw? Before you answer, or I tell, I must get something to eat. I don’t know why odd adventures always make me ravenous once they’re over; probably a nervous response.” They wandered together into the kitchen, and Kate, as she pottered around, told Reed all about the evening.

“They don’t press a time clock with their paws as far as I know,” Reed interjected at one point. “They stand with both front paws on the thing, which responds to their weight.”

“Do you really think they could tell if someone was there, even hidden in a closet?” Kate asked.

“Oh, yes, I should think so. Dogs with a fine smeller and acute hearing would have little trouble with that—unless of course the closet was the size of a small baseball field.”

“Don’t all dogs have fine smellers?”

“They vary. Bloodhounds are the best. Dogs like salukis, Afghans, wolfhounds have very keen sight, for seeing great distances over the desert no doubt, but
they don’t have much sharper noses than a teetotaling woman who suspects her husband of having had a beer in the not too distant past.”

“The things you know. I suppose there’s a reason why they work in pairs.”

“Much harder to diddle, much more threatening and powerful. A robber
might
try a pot shot at one dog, if he were hanging from the chandelier or something, the robber that is, not the dog, but it would hardly be worth the risk with two. What did you conclude from your talk with Angelica?”

“She was far too tired to talk at all, really. I
think
she was glad I’d come along, but she’d really had it. The problem is complicated by the grandfather, who, one gathers, has been a sort of father figure in the family, and of course the generation gap there is so enormous it’s not a gap, it’s a canyon.”

“I thought grandparents and grandchildren were supposed to get on so well together, without the usual problems parents and children always have.”

“That, I think, is only when the parents are actually there. In that case, the children and grandparents unite against a common enemy. But if the grandparents are in loco parentis, somehow all the old jollity doesn’t work. I don’t know which is more worrisome, really, the damage to Angelica and her brother or to the school. It does seem as though Miss Tyringham had had enough problems without this.”

“But
this
is all part of the same problem, that damn awful war. Exactly what position was the boy in?”

“More or less the same as Jack’s. At least, that’s as much as I know, though doubtless there are simply reams of ramifications; there always are.”

“Well,” Reed said, “I’m sure you were a help, and perhaps she and her brother could hide out here if necessary. We can bring your nephew back, who will no doubt have some similarly circumstanced friends, and then the government can arrest us all for harboring draft dodgers. Sorry, you did say you hated people who looked on the bright side.”

Kate, hungrily gobbling scrambled eggs, cocked a snook at him.

But, on the next day, Angelica showed up for the seminar and seemed in fair condition. The question of obedience, whether to the state or a father on the one hand, or to one’s self or divine dictates on the other, was the question scheduled, with a pertinence that Kate found on the whole regrettable. Kate took her three minutes to inform them of a legal treatise on the subject by Daubé which discusses the problem of where obedience is due in connection with three great classical examples: Orestes, who kills his mother at Apollo’s orders and is menaced by the Eumenides; Danaüs’ fifty daughters, who have been ordered by their father to kill their bridegrooms on their wedding night and are thus torn between obedience to their father and to Aphrodite (the girls showed a certain inclination to discuss this case at exorbitant length, but Kate persisted in her introduction, subtracting discussion time from her three minutes, she having provided herself with a stopwatch for the purpose); and Antigone, torn between the decree of Creon and the laws of religion and familial love.

Alas, Kate continued, the knowledge that the problem of disobedience was older than one might have supposed did not make clearer where one’s duty lay.
That, of course, was the whole point of Greek drama, if not of life, and Antigone is perhaps to be especially commended for having acted righter, anyway, than Orestes and the Danaids, except for the one among the fifty who took a fancy to her bridegroom and did
not
murder him. Her name, Kate concluded, her eye on the sweep hand, was Hypermnestra, if anybody cared.

Through all of this Angelica seemed much her usual self, if a bit subdued. The others entered into the question with their accustomed vigor, both Irene and Elizabeth defending the proposition that Ismene was quite right since she was like Antigone, a woman; it was not her business to give orders or disobey them. This point of view might have drawn more fire from Kate if the others had not leapt on Irene and Elizabeth with so much excitement that she had all she could do to keep order.

“And what,” Angelica asked, “about Antigone’s argument that she can never have another brother, so she owes him more than she would a husband or child who might, if they died, be replaced?”

“A really gross idea,” Alice said.

“And spurious besides,” Freemond said. She was their accepted Greek authority. “Anyway, Jebb says it’s spurious, though I know Aristotle quotes it, and there’s a good bit of disagreement. The point is, the whole thing doesn’t make much sense, and it’s certainly more Jesuitical than Antigone’s usual arguments, which are quite straightforward and uncomplicated, no offense, Elizabeth, I hope.”

“I don’t think it’s so complicated,” Angelica said. “The point of what Antigone is saying, it seems to me, is that a woman can be anybody’s wife or mother, but
she can only be her brother’s sister. It’s about the only role a woman in Greece had that was ordained, so of course she felt she owed the brother everything.” Her voice shook slightly, or perhaps Kate only imagined it. After a moment’s hesitation, Kate brought the discussion back again to the conflict between the laws of state and of conscience. It was not merely a matter of the Greek dramatists, if that could be called mere. Socrates obeyed his god rather than the Athenians, Joan of Arc her voices, and Thomas More his religious beliefs. The Nuremberg trials considered this very point, and the soldier in a democracy who has been ordered to shoot into a crowd of demonstrating pacifists is not as recent an instance as we might suppose. Ought he to obey the law of the army or the law of the land?

“It always comes down to a matter of love, doesn’t it?” Betsy asked. “Either you love someone or something enough to go out on a limb or you don’t.”

“Why did Antigone love her brother and not her sister?” Irene asked. “She couldn’t have another sister either, could she?”

“But it wasn’t a question of her sister’s soul,” Freemond said. “And some people think that she refused to let Ismene share her death in order to save Ismene’s life.”

“I don’t believe it,” Alice said. “She wanted all the glory.”

“What’s so glorious about being stoned to death, or walled up in a cave, if it comes to that?”

“At least it isn’t
boring
,” Alice sighed, with the weltschmerz possible only to the very young and the very old.

• • •

After considerable discussion, during which Kate was certain the particular case of Angelica’s brother, or at least the question of civil disobedience in connection with the Vietnam War, would come up, the seminar disbanded without, in fact, touching on these tender spots. Kate decided that the girls, well aware of the contemporary relevance of the
Antigone
, had pitied Angelica and forborne.

Kate was sitting in the seminar room, wondering whether or not to go in search of Angelica, when a little girl knocked on the door and handed Kate a message, bobbing the curtsy of the young Theban girl. Kate thanked the child; the note, which was from Miss Freund, asked Kate to come to her office at the earliest possible moment. No doubt, Kate thought to herself, the dogs have nosed out someone else.

But the dogs hadn’t. It had been Miss Strikeland.

She had noticed the same old man in the lobby again and, following orders, had notified Miss Freund. That lady now welcomed Kate to her office and presented the old gentleman Kate had observed on that earlier occasion. He had removed not only his hat but also his overcoat today, no doubt at Miss Freund’s invitation, and was conservatively and expensively dressed, with a look of infinite sadness about him. Anyone less like a molester could scarcely be imagined.

“Miss Fansler,” Miss Freund said, “this gentleman is Angelica Jablon’s grandfather. He—er—wandered about the school, though as I told him, we should have been pleased to show him around.…”

“You’re all busy,” the man said, “with your work to do.”

“Part of our job is to welcome parents and grandparents to our school. However, when I asked Mr. Jablon to come into my office today, he did finally ask if he might talk to you, Miss Fansler.” Her faintly admonishing tone indicated clearly enough her opinion of Mr. Jablon’s behavior, which had subtly contrived to move outside all regular channels.

Kate was inclined to agree with her. Her first reaction, as she later admitted to Reed, was selfish and inexcusable: for someone paid far from lavishly for conducting one seminar, she appeared to be taking on the most extraordinary interviews on behalf of the Theban. Her second reaction was to wonder if this wasn’t going to be her brothers all over again, self-righteous patriotism and conservatism with the
Times
dismissed as a radical press and so on and so forth, impossible enough in one’s brothers, but did one really have to take the whole matter up with old men who, after all, had a right to their own opinions if only they would keep them for their very own.

“Of course,” she said, “but where …?”

“I’m off to lunch anyway,” Miss Freund said. “Use my office. If anyone asks for me, tell them to come back later.”

Kate sat down warily in Miss Freund’s desk chair, hoping it would confer some air of authority. She felt alarmingly silly.

“I ought not to take your time,” Mr. Jablon said, “but you see, I am trying very hard to understand. It seems to me that the youth in this country have gone mad, they have …” Mr. Jablon’s voice was rising, and he caught himself with the air of one who remembers, with difficulty, that he has come to inquire, not pronounce.
Kate thought of Marianne Moore’s phrase: “The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.”