The Friend of Women and Other Stories Read online

  “But am I not to confine myself to sacred studies, sir?”

  “Early divisions in the flock can be a part of that. No boy can fully understand the history of Christianity by reading only of martyrs consumed by lions. He should see it from different points of view. Like Renan’s or Strauss’s. They saw Jesus as a barely educated thaumaturge with a remarkable gift for words and a high standard of ethics, who urged his followers to submit to the harshness of Roman rule and all the injustices of life in order to prepare themselves for the Judgment Day that would, in a few years’ time, put an end to the world. What was the point of fussing about anything else in view of the imminent dissolution? But when the early church was faced not only with the fact that the Day of Judgment seemed indefinitely postponed, but that the faith was being rent by dissention, it had to unite the sects under a new set of dogmas and prepare to rule the world!”

  “But Renan and Strauss, sir, denied the divinity of Christ!”

  “Of course I know that.”

  “And isn’t that the essence of our faith? Isn’t that what I have to teach the boys?”

  “Have I said otherwise? But you can also teach them what so many other people have thought. At the least it is interesting, and sacred studies notoriously bores boys. You can see their heads straighten up the moment you mention a controversy.”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  “See that you do, Goodheart. I’ll audit your class in a week or so.”

  But could it possibly be right to introduce a topic that might cause a sensitive boy some of the anguished doubt that it had in my own earlier being? What could be the headmaster’s motive in directing my teaching down this troublesome course? Was it conceivable that some malign force in the old man’s subconscious was working to undermine the very institution that he would have sold his soul to create?

  It was all very well for me to try to laugh myself out of any such arcane and bizarre theories, but a subsequent discussion with Lockwood in his office brought them back violently to mind. He had asked me to draft a letter to a trustee explaining why he could not honor the latter’s request that a Jewish boy be admitted to the school.

  “The boy has a first-class record in his high school,” I felt obliged, however timidly, to point out.

  “But he’s Jewish, Goodheart! What are you talking about? Are we a church school or are we not?”

  “But exposed to our church, sir, might he not come to see the light? It’s odd enough that his orthodox parents should be willing to send him here. Mightn’t that be a sign that it’s our mission to help the boy?”

  “A sign that you’re an ass, my dear fellow!”

  “But we have the Kramer boys and the Streyers.”

  “They’re Episcopalians!”

  “They’re still Jewish, sir.”

  “Racially, of course. But a converted Jew is a Christian, is he not? I know we have parents who insist that he’s not, that is, if he converted for reasons of social advancement. But why are many Christians Christians, but for social advancement or, at least, social acceptance? We don’t have to go into that. We might not like what we find. I can’t blame a Jew who abandons his old faith. The god of the Old Testament is a terrible deity who slays all who fail to worship him and many who don’t. Even if our Christian faith is an illusion, I still cling to it.”

  “Surely you don’t ever believe it’s an illusion, sir?”

  His answer was a roar. “Don’t tell me what I believe or don’t believe, Goodheart!”

  His anger at last stirred whatever bit of man there was in me. Had I not the cross of Christ behind me? “No, sir. But you have Catholic boys in the school. And Catholic boys who have no idea of converting.”

  “But their god is close to ours. Perhaps the same. And we all might still be Catholics if Anne Boleyn hadn’t refused to spread her legs until the lecherous Harry promised her a wedding ring.”

  I was visibly shocked. “Oh, sir!”

  “Oh, sir!” he repeated mockingly. “Listen to me, my boy, for you’re not a bad preacher, and I may make something of you yet. This thing we’re discussing is an excellent example of how a headmaster can keep a school both successful in a worldly sense and decent, to boot. How, if you want to put it that way, he can have his cake and eat it. To begin with, I cannot afford totally to ignore the prejudice that many of our parents have about not wishing their sons to be brought up cheek by jowl with Jewish boys. So I compromise. I rule that there will be no place for an orthodox Jew in a church school. But if he’s converted, I take him. Oh, yes, there are some parents who will still growl, but they know, fundamentally, that they don’t have a leg to stand on, and I have shown myself a consistent man of principle. Do you get it now?”

  “But the Catholic boys don’t have to convert.”

  “Ah, you spy an inconsistency. Life is full of them. Let me point out that our parents and alumni may have a prejudice against Catholicism but not against Catholics themselves. They have no objection to having their sons raised with Catholic boys so long as Catholicism is not taught or advocated in the school. So what do I do? I require that Catholic students attend all our chapel services but send them to Mass in the village in a bus.”

  “Mightn’t an orthodox Jewish boy accept the same treatment? And go to the temple in a bus?”

  “As Lewis Carroll’s Father William put it, I have answered three questions, and that is enough. Be off or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

  But I left him wondering if being kicked downstairs was enough. Mightn’t it be better if I was kicked out of the school? Hadn’t I had a glimpse of the complete amorality of this supposedly devout Christian? Hadn’t he sufficiently demonstrated that, if he had no prejudices, neither did he have any convictions, and that he would go to any lengths, perhaps even improper, to promote the worldly prosperity of the academy to which he had dedicated his life? He might fool everyone else, but could he fool God? Or was it that he was sparring with God? Challenging God on seemingly equal terms with sword drawn? Ah, Satan! Wasn’t Satan as real as God?

  That night I had a grim nightmare. As often takes place in my dreams, I was an anchorite living in a community of mud huts in a North African desert in early Christian times. I was seeking, as usual, peace of the soul, communion with God, and had little difficulty resisting the lewd temptations of the imps who danced around the pious village, hoping to lure one or another of its inmates to the fleshpots of the nearest city. I was wholly intent on the wise and comfortable words of the old abbot who was our self-constituted leader. He appeared as none other than Dr. Lockwood himself, though not the arbitrary and formidable headmaster I saw in the schoolroom, but the gentler cleric I sometimes saw in chapel when his velvet tones swelled to plangent oratory in the pulpit or when he knelt in prayer, his eyes tightly closed, his hands clasped, his voice trembling in a kind of pious ecstasy.

  What turned this placid dream into a nightmare was my happening to see, when I was passing his hut at dusk and he was unaware of my proximity, that he was addressing a respectful half-circle of imps seated quietly at his feet and evidently receiving his instruction!

  I sat up with a cry that awakened Hilda, to whom I related my dream. Ordinarily I shouldn’t have done this, for she had little patience with my nocturnal fantasies, but in my dismay I blurted it all out. She simply laughed.

  “So that’s how you see him edifying his sacred school! Well, all I can say is that I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  A week later Hilda, as with her basic kindness she sometimes did, invited Miss Ethelinda Snyder, a small, giggling, and gossip-loving old maid, to supper with us. She was Dr. Lockwood’s secretary and, of course, his awestricken slave. Yet his treatment of her, unlike his of me, was always kind and courteous; he could afford to shed his benignity on creatures in whom the least spark of independence had been effectively quashed. The poor woman had little or no social life, as the faculty wives had no use for her and the local villagers never cultivated the school staff. She
was enchanted to come to us when asked and partook a bit too freely of the sherry I offered her.

  On one such visit the three of us happened to be discussing the approaching end-of-year departure of a history teacher who had accepted what he evidently considered a better offer to teach at Groton. Miss Snyder hinted darkly that it was just as well that he had decided to go.

  “Why is that?” I asked. “Was Mr. Higgins in some kind of trouble here?”

  Miss Snyder looked cryptic. “Well, I shouldn’t say anything, but…” She paused.

  “Oh, come on, Ethelinda,” my wife intervened. “You know how discreet Percy and I are. And we’re dying for some juicy tidbit to liven up our dull lives. Don’t be stuffy.”

  “Well, I happen to know that Dr. Lockwood had a letter from the father of a fifth former complaining that Mr. Higgins had written his son a letter in the summer vacation that the father considered to be couched in rather too affectionate terms.”

  “If Lockwood kicks out every master who’s done that,” Hilda asserted roundly, “he may have to get a new faculty.”

  “But that’s the way he is,” Miss Snyder said hurriedly. “He’s death on that subject. So when the letter from Groton came, he passed it right on to Mr. Higgins.”

  “Didn’t he have to do that anyway?” I demanded in some surprise. “Why didn’t Groton write directly to Higgins?”

  “Oh, that’s not the etiquette,” Miss Snyder explained. “If you want a teacher from another school, you write first to his headmaster.” She giggled. “And you won’t be too surprised, I’m sure, to learn that some of those letters stick to Dr. Lockwood’s desk.”

  “You mean he doesn’t forward them?”

  “I mean nothing else. Dr. Lockwood doesn’t hesitate to take on himself the decision to sit on letters which might result in his losing a teacher he thinks valuable to the school.”

  Miss Snyder looked at us here with a sly wink. She evidently loved showing her intimate knowledge of the habits of the great. The sherry was doing its work.

  “But what would he say to the headmaster making the offer?”

  “Oh, he would simply write that the teacher whom the other school wanted was happy at Averhill.”

  “Ethelinda, you’re fantasizing!”

  “What makes you so sure of that, Percy?” my wife now indignantly injected. “Really, your subservience to that old slave driver is becoming obsessive. If you were a black, I’d call you an Uncle Tom!”

  “But, Hilda, Ethelinda doesn’t seem to realize what she’s saying!” I was really hot now. “It’s one thing to call a man a slave driver. It’s quite another to call him a crook. To accuse him of telling lies in order to cheat an employee out of the chance to better himself! Think of it! It’s preposterous!”

  Miss Snyder was now aroused to defend her veracity at any cost. Her cheeks were dyed a mottled red. “How would you like to know what happened in your own case, Percy Goodheart? You, who seem to know everything? Did I not myself type a letter to Dr. Cram of the Derby School explaining that you were too happy with your position at Averhill to ever think of leaving?”

  “Oh, my god!” This was from Hilda. “That must have been what my friend Anita Hunt was hinting at! Her husband is a master at Derby, and she told me he had suggested to the headmaster that Percy might be a possibility as head of the lower school!”

  Miss Snyder, realizing now the full extent of her indiscretion, implored me not to betray her. She waxed almost hysterical, crying, “I’ll lose my job! I’ll lose everything I’ve got. Oh, please, dear Percy, don’t say anything about this. After all, it shows how much Dr. Lockwood esteems you. You know he’d do anything for the school. And Derby’s not all that great, anyway. It’s not half the size of Averhill!”

  I finally quieted her down, gave her an aspirin and a dose of whiskey, and walked her to her tiny cottage in the village. When I returned, I found Hilda with a dark drink, looking ominous.

  “I hope this will finally pull the scales off your eyes, Percy. I trust you will now see how tightly the old devil has you in his clutches. And I’m going to drive over to Derby and talk to Anita and see if that job might still be open. Anything to get us out of here!”

  I told her there would be no use in that. I had already learned from other sources that Anita’s husband himself had been given the post. And I wasn’t even sure that I would have taken it if it had been directly offered. But I didn’t wash to discuss my more somber suspicions about Lockwood’s conduct. I was almost frightened myself by them, and I knew she would simply think I was crazy.

  We were both exhausted when we finally went to bed, and I was still in a comalike sleep when the harsh jangle of the bedside telephone awoke me at six. Hilda answered, and I heard the headmaster’s peremptory “Put Percy on, please.” She handed me the phone without comment. Lockwood told me gruffly to change the hymn for morning chapel from the one assigned to “Oh, Jesus, art Thou standing, outside the fast-closed door?” and hung up.

  That morning in his office he brought up a dormitory master’s discovery of some sexual activity among certain boys at night. The supposed ringleader had been sent home, and I was to see what personal possessions the boy had left at school.

  Armed with Miss Snyder’s revelation, I found myself able for once to voice a query. “Is what the boy did, sir, really grounds for expelling him? I’m not defending it, certainly, but I’m afraid it’s not uncommon with juveniles. We know, for example, that at St. Jude’s last year—”

  “I’m not expelling him,” Lockwood interrupted. “And I don’t give a tinker’s damn what happened at St. Jude’s. Expelling him would be to make this thing public and give us a bad name. Bigger and bugger things at Averhill! Can’t you hear them?”

  I looked down at my knees in embarrassment. “But if you say he’s not coming back, sir?”

  “He’s not. His father agreed to withdraw him. On grounds of health. It appears the poor fellow has asthma.”

  Had he actually winked at me? It was hard to tell. “Then the father knows the real reason?”

  “Of course he knows. I made it very clear.”

  “Mightn’t he be too shocked? Mightn’t he take it out on the boy?”

  “That’s no concern of mine. The welfare of the school is my concern. This way the whole matter will be swept under the rug, which is where it belongs. You will find that rugs have their uses, my friend. The father will never tell. It’s not something he’s likely to boast about. And the boys here will all know why Hudgins isn’t coming back and will be much more discreet in the future.”

  “Discreet?”

  “Yes. If a boy learns not to do openly what he can be punished for, he will have learned a valuable lesson in life.”

  “But he can do it in private? Or in vacations from school?”

  “I didn’t say that, Goodheart. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “But, sir, I’m a priest! There are things I must ask!”

  “Does being a priest involve butting in where you’re not wanted? Well, perhaps that is what being a priest involves. Go ahead then. Ask your question.”

  “Did you mean to imply, sir, that what Hudgins did was not wrong in itself?”

  “And if I did?”

  “Then, sir, isn’t he being wrongfully punished?”

  “For doing something that may give the school a bad name? Hardly.”

  “Oh, sir, can that be right?”

  “Goodheart, there are moments when I wonder if I will ever succeed in making a man of you. The purpose of Averhill is to train youths to become leaders in this world, not in some Utopia of your dreams. And you’re not going to become a leader if you go about outraging a possible majority of humans who cling, however blindly, to their inherited prejudices. Except, of course, when a real moral issue is at stake.”

  “And when is that?”

  “What the Nazis in Germany are doing to the Jews is one. That must be resisted to the death. But what is not one is the whole questi
on of sexual deviation. There are activities which one can condone if they are decently concealed. I happen, for example, to know that one of the great benefactors of this school is a homosexual. He has a wife and children and leads a life of the utmost respectability, yet I have reason to believe that he is a regular visitor to a male brothel. What’s that to me? Nothing!”

  “And what is it to God?”

  “Oh, Goodheart, get out of here. And bring me your notes for my graduation address at noon.”

  It was at this point that I began to understand that Lockwood had built his school as the Christian Church had been built in the age of Constantine. Anything was permissible that would hammer in the nails that were to support the steel edifice that was to dominate the world of believers. The meekness and humility of Jesus’s teaching was muted; the simplicity and gentleness of the early fathers was forgotten; a new theology was constructed; dissent was crushed. The warrior priest replaced the martyr. Salvation could be attained only through the church militant.

  The foe to be suppressed was no longer Rome. Rome had been taken over, and the Inquisition would one day replace the Praetorian Guard. The real foe was to be found in heresies: in Manichaeism, in Gnosticism, in Arianism. They were the heralds of Antichrist. But didn’t the heretics see Antichrist in the church itself? And mightn’t I see a devil in Rufus Lockwood?

  I do not know what would have emerged from my seething doubts and troubles had it not been for the case of Nicholas Rice. He was an Averhill graduate who had left before my time and whose wealthy father, Lyman Rice, was still the chairman of the school’s board of trustees. Nicholas had been known while at Averhill to be a deeply serious and religious boy and one of the headmaster’s special favorites, a “disciple,” as he had liked to call himself. But at Harvard he had become a Catholic convert, despite his having surprised his friends by turning into a high-living epicurean, and after graduation he had put the cap on a variegated career by entering a Trappist monastery. This last twist had just happened and was the talk of the Averhill campus. The story that went around was that on the very eve of taking his final vows, he hosted a drunken and raucous party for his bachelor friends in a private dining room at his club.