The Headmasters Papers (17 page)

By the way, I was glad for your warm letter. Even though people here could not be kinder or more solicitous, they are responding, I suppose quite naturally, to a sad process going on out at the clinic; you, on the other hand, are kind enough to respond directly to me. I need that, I won't deny it.

Meg will probably not live another two weeks, and unless she can be made more comfortable, I hope she doesn't. This has been awful, all of it. To see her so physically diminished is painful, but the horror of this thing is to see her so constantly on edge. She gets no rest or relief from pain, except for a brief hour or so after injections. Riding the nausea and pain requires all her energy. Conversation can no longer divert her. I doubt that you have seen Meg cry and probably have a hard time imagining her doing so. She cries much of the day. It's the inability to rest, I think, more than anything else, and a rage at the unfairness of it.

You go through these things, you know, like a zombie. There are visiting hours at the clinic, and I am there. There is the daily liturgy of school life, and I am there. School teachers, especially headmasters, have to do a lot of acting, but since Thanksgiving the curtain has rarely fallen. It's bad in a way, since I'm supposed to be helping to 
shape
 the experience here—the board is even hounding me to do a jazzy future plan. But all I do is preside. Not that anyone is making me. I've been invited to take an indefinite leave, to go south, to do whatever I please—but what would that be? That would be terrifying.

I keep telling myself, as if an external voice, that if I weather this, give Meg my all, keep my hand on the wheel at Wells, do right where I can see it, do not fall too hopelessly behind—that will show my people here, maybe even the boys, something important. When at some point all of 
their
 props are knocked out from under them and they feel themselves collapsing, they'll recall that it's not supposed to be that way—you're supposed to hang in there the way old Greeve hung in there. I hope this is important, because it's all I'm living for. The voices inside are certainly no help. They cry and give up and assign blame, usually ending up focused murderously on Brian. Interesting that the external voice, the one with no energy, prevails. Maybe it won't prevail, maybe I'll crumple up, but it's still interesting that I want it to prevail—
want
 isn't even right: that I know it 
ought
 to prevail.

You know, in spite of all our jaded worldliness, we really don't—at least I don't—think enough about ending up. I'm fifty-five and until this fall I never really thought about it at all except as a kind of vague, unemotional tableau of being white-haired and more decrepit. Seeing Meg has taught me that it's not going to be that way. It's bound to be something very different, probably something I never imagined. With Meg gone, I will no longer be able to be anxious about being cut down prematurely.

Although, with the event at hand, I am still not ready for Meg and me to be over. That is what I never imagined. I have never gotten used to Meg, never lost interest in her for a second. My intellectual superior, my arbiter, my planner, my renewer. After the initial five years with Meg for a confidante, I can honestly say I never again felt inadequate—“one down”—in the presence of anybody. I probably should have, but such is Meg's solidity. She is such a fact. Marriage is just as substantial as the Northern Lights or Joy or the four-minute mile. Not everybody gets the experience, but it's real, and those who try to subvert it on intellectual grounds or to sully it by their own infidelities can only be those who never had it. Sad for them, but they do more harm than they could ever imagine. Believe me, Jake, this isn't sentimentality setting in (or if it is, it's a sentimentality of recognition, not a sentimentality of distortion). My present circumstances do not lead me very readily into Browning-like sweetness. What a thing, though, to have loved somebody, in no elaborately qualified sense, for thirty-two years. And been loved back.

Nothing goes the way one expects. I blink to find myself headmaster of a boys' school in a New England village. I am about to become a “widower.” I will, in another deceptive wrinkle of time, blink to find myself 
emeritus,
 with a Wells rocker—where? In a winterized cottage on the Cape? In a home? Last year I still had a boy's view of the Future. I still thought, against all possible evidence, that an elusive Main Event was ahead. I don't know what I thought it would be. A great book, maybe.

I worry about enduring the school year. The archetypal boy never grows up; he cheats and gets caught, loses himself, finds himself, drops out, drowns, thinks chaotically, thinks brilliantly, keeps graduating and then starting over, teasing me somehow back into the game. His energy never flags and he will have no patience when mine does. A soft and pallid Greeve has been imitating himself for four months. A thin but insistent voice tells him what sounds to make and where to go.

But his friend Jake knows better.

I'll let you know about Meg.

Love,

John

18 December

MEMO
To all faculty

Let me stress in print what I mentioned only briefly in our meeting yesterday: please be on hand Friday in the dorms until the last student is packed off for home. Phil Upjohn and I have warded off an avalanche of requests from Boy and Parent for earlier exits, and we have ruthlessly declined them all, claiming that we are far too committed to the academic process to give up even an hour of precious pedagogy. Hawaii, The Bahamas, St. Moritz, home and hearth can just wait. You can imagine what frauds we will seem in their eyes if you yourselves fly the coop early. And again, 
use
 those final classes—or else those who wish to do so are doomed. Special, warm, seasonal surprises are fine—so are testing and quizzing—but please do not dismiss classes early or altogether.

That said, I hope every one of you has the most renewing, joyful holiday possible. There are no words adequate to express my gratitude for the uncountable kindnesses you have given me since Meg fell ill this fall. And as many of you know, the only thing she has not resigned herself to in her condition is that it has forced her to be separated from all of you.

From both of us, deepest thanks, warmest wishes for the holiday, and our love.

J.O.G.

20 December

R
EMARKS
T
O
T
HE
S
CHOOL

What a pleasure this morning is. Not—or not 
just—
because seventeen and one half days of leisure await us in a few hours, but for the morning itself. Even though it is well known that boys of your age resist sentimentality fiercely, it is awfully hard—and awfully silly, really—to resist it today. If you think about it for a minute, you see that it's not the vacation itself that makes the holiday such a magical prospect. It is having been here, many of us exerting ourselves against the grain, that makes a pause so sweet. It came as a powerful but slightly sad revelation to me years ago that loafing, refreshment, and freedom itself are meaningless states of being, except as contrasted to their opposites. Unless we're bound up in those opposite states most of the time, there is no
pleasure
 in loafing, being refreshed, and being free. Can you imagine trying to refresh yourself continually? It would drive you frantic.

This morning is also a pleasure because it is very cold, the snow is very fresh and clean, and Wells Chapel, viewed as I viewed it this morning through a lattice of snowy branches and Hallowell House chimney smoke, has been transformed. No matter how much cheap Christmas cards and the other glittering junk of commercial Christmas have tried to trivialize this season, it can't be done. We all know the cliché, yet the real thing is as new and as fine as the panorama just beyond our chapel steps.

This morning is also a pleasure because, although we are all mortified at the sloppiness of admitting it, we share the heightened feelings of this time of year with the people we like most, even with the whole body of this school. The tradition of it feels good. The carols feel good. They even 
sound
 good. Like the hot cider and the dark and the nearly holy mood of last night's Carol and Candle Hall, Wells—there is no denying it—has been transformed by the season.

And while rest and relaxation, the snow, the cold, and school traditions are all part of the transformation, they are not all of it. There is something else. It is the thing that is planted deepest in our core, the thing we recognize uncritically as children, yet the thing we find ourselves the most anxious to grow out of. I am of course talking about the mystical center of the tradition, the reason for it, the energy behind it. We can't get away from it, no matter how unreligious we may choose to be. Two thousand years ago it happened. A cluster of less-well-established but pious Jews bore witness to the birth of what they say was everything man has always hoped for. They felt that in this birth lay the solution to every woe and an answer to the riddle of being alive. You all know the outline of the event from Sacred Studies and from Western Civ. classes, but the novelty and the oddness of the claims made about Jesus can not be overemphasized. Divinity itself made into human flesh: a staggering concept, except for infants and younger children.

For infants and younger children, the idea of a holy gift who is also a human baby is not a hard concept. Something inside them has always rather felt that way itself. In fact, the Jesus miracle is perfectly continuous with the Santa Claus miracle. It is a miracle, you know, before it becomes a pagan custom. The miracle, if you think about it, is this: a magical grandfather from remote reaches, but who is somehow only a man, visits us in a way we can never quite see, except in story and imagination, and he gives us everything we want, even more than we expect. Children, at least the pre-civilized ones, have no trouble accepting the reality of the Universal Giver. The world seems to them to be that sort of place. Later, most children know differently, but they never really know better.

The miracle part of Christmas, the part about the human giver who never gives out, is not a charming fiction. We take charming fictions lightly, replace them with updated fictions, and ultimately forget them. But we can't seem to forget this fiction. We can project our feelings about it onto certain of its sideshows like a family ski trip or the loot under the tree, but, as some of you have by now realized, while those things are very nice, there's no magic, none of the
original
feeling in them. But there is, I swear there is, some of the original feeling still at large. I know I heard it last night, for minutes at a time, during Carol and Candle, I know I saw it through the branches on the way over here this morning, and if I am not mistaken, there is some of it among us this very minute.

And as I said, it is a pleasure.

Before I send you off to enjoy the rest of it, I want to take just a moment to thank each of you and all of you for the good wishes, cards, gifts, good company, and blessedly good 
behavior
 that have enabled me and Mrs. Greeve to endure a really trying illness. What a gift to me, while I am on the subject, to be cared for and buoyed up by the very people I am supposed to be caring for. Thank you.

And now, we will close by singing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” four verses; third formers departing as we sing the first, fourth as we sing the second, and so on.

A very merry Christmas to all of you.

16 January

Little House

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve

14 Bingham Drive

Tarrytown, New York

Dear Val and Frank,

I have just given enough thought to answering a thousand and some condolence letters to know that I can't do it. It does nag me, though, that there are so many people I want and need to thank— you two foremost. I can't place a value on the support and love, but I can place a value on the sheer time you have given us and then me since the holidays. That will simply have to stand as a debt. I suspect you were both aware that for a few days after Christmas I seemed to disappear altogether. It is hard to describe that feeling of nothing being substantial, even the loss, even the grief—odd. I remember for some reason the impression that, whereas the day Meg died, a strong drink took me away from the blackening, falling feeling, a few days afterwards a drink seemed to pitch me into it. And there you were, a solace beyond alcohol.

Home is a place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

Exactly right.

You were both right and not right about my coming here. It is too suffused with Meg for comfort, but that is not the main thing wrong. It's also too insubstantial, too not-enough for what I feel and need right now. It is no company at all, and it shoots me full of the fear that there is no company anywhere. (Pitiful, Greeve, pitiful). And so I'm taking off. I'd like to pop in on Jake Levin, my poet friend, in New Hampshire, and if he can't manage it, I'll go inn-hopping off the beaten path. It's what I should have done in the first place. I know your place would be easiest, but I have got to toughen up, to practice. I'll drop you cards.

School has begun without me—funny feeling. I'm thoroughly relieved not to be doing it because I can't, but I'm also feeling that August feeling that I couldn't possibly manage a school, even teach a class. It's a funny way for a fifty-five-year-old schoolmaster to feel, but I always feel that way after a lay-off. And if the school manages nicely without me—what then? The hell with it. I shall visit inns and read their books:
Good Morning Miss Dove, A Man Called Peter, Lost Weekend,
etc.