The Headmasters Papers (24 page)

In those days I would have said, Ah, an opportunity To Write. Even would have Written—the stuff you always found embarrassing and strident. I remember the time I was really mad at you for your non-interest in some things I had shown you and angrily gave you my artistic manifesto—that poems are to 
celebrate
 experience. To which you said, only if the experiences are worth celebrating. Damn. I used to think, and Meg agreed, that I was right and you were wrong, that I liked the world better than you did, that I was more open to inspiration than you were. I thought you were intentionally closing off to Goodness, Warmth, and supermarket epiphanies out of some left-over Beat affiliation. I thought you were trendy. I still think you are trendy, Jake, but you are also very healthy, and you are alive. I also thought, and told Meg to mark my words, that you would stop writing poetry altogether; without the Goodness, Warmth, etc., you'd dry up. Whereas Matthew Arnold and I, hand in hand, would prevail.

“We still had Thyrsis then-”

I don't mind that I was naive and wanted to 
celebrate—
that's a rare and very useful state of mind for a school. I don't even mind that I was clumsy and mannered in the attempt. But I do mind that the experiences, both the concrete and the mysterious ones, I was so eager to celebrate might only have been projections of my own, smug, Meg-fortified self. The test of that would be to see if, when all bases for smugness were dried up, when all the props were knocked away, I could still celebrate. If I could do that, even a little, then something objectively true, some non-Greeve force would be pulling the celebration through my meager powers of invention. Then my poems would be objectively true, as I've always wanted to believe. Well, I fail the test. All the props have fallen away, and I'm dead as a dead fish, as T.S. Eliot once said about Edith Wharton. I can't celebrate anything. I can't even eat a whole sandwich. When I stick up for the old things at school—easy things, obvious things—I am not convincing, I make people tired. This will not improve by September.

This is what it means to die, I think. Only I have the dubious privilege of being pellucid about it instead of slipping into it senescently. I am all I am ever going to be, and it's not enough, even for me.

Do you realize you never came down to Wells for a reading? Why did we both let that go?

My love to you, old friend,

John

19 March

Mr. Dwight Nimroth

Editor, 
Poetry

1665 Dearborn Parkway

Chicago, Illinois

Dear Mr. Nimroth,

Not too close, I hope, on the heels of the other one, I am enclosing a poem for your consideration.

My good wishes,

John Greeve

UNTHINKABLE AS

What is left, hours later, on the plate.

There is a way.

There are as many ways

As junk mail,

As hair color, as hair color goes,

As vision goes

Black

Or flesh sags under bone,

Bones sag under clothes;

As bones.

Hear, O shoppers

The manic little melody

Of a manic little angel

Flying just behind the ear;

She shadows, she shadows

Each memory and dream.

Grim jingle in the brain.

It could go on for days

This way,

There are so many ways.

John Oberon Greeve

26 March Little House

Mrs. Florence Armbruster

22 Pie Alley

Torrington, Connecticut

Dear Florence,

I am so sorry for the mess. You were very sweet to come see me but you should not have come. I am not fit for visitors, certainly not for you. You are still warm. I am fortune's fool. Do you know that line?

You will see what I mean.

Bless you,

John

31 March
Little House

Mr. Clifford Bennett

Trust Department

The Fiduciary Trust Company

New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Cliff,

Thanks for all the time on the phone. I've drawn up a fair semblance of what you said would go down in the courts. It's basically very simple; the important thing, I think, is that you and others at the Fiduciary are clear of the intent. Here is the gist.

Upon my death I would like my wife's and my share of Little House and the yawl, the 
Valmar,
 which we also owned conjointly with my brother Frank, to go to him and his wife. The rest, such as it is, should be divided as follows: one-third to Wells School for whatever purposes they may choose; the other two-thirds I would like you to hold in trust for seven years for my son, Brian, who has been a missing person for some time, but possibly not lost; if after seven years Brian has not claimed his share, then I would like to give it to my nephew Hugh Greeve, my brother Frank's son.

Enclosed is a more formal statement of this arrangement witnessed as you stipulated by Herb Jenkins, proprietor of East Sandwich Boatyard. Herb has also notarized it.

I have also written and sealed a letter to my son which I would like my executors to hold for him until what time, if any, he can be found.

I thank you once again, Cliff, for the impeccable service you have given my family, especially since Meg's passing. You do your work credit.

Sincerely,

John Greeve

DISPOSITION OF ESTATE

I, John Greeve, being of sound mind and sure judgment, do hereby make on the date indicated below, the following disposition upon my death of my effects and possessions and of all property, revenue, dividends, and interest owned by me or due me.

1. My share of the property of Little House, number 9 Ticonsett Lane, East Sandwich, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, shall pass to my brother, Francis Greeve of Tarrytown, New York.
   
2. My share of the yawl, 
   Valmar,
    shall likewise pass to my brother, Francis Greeve.
   
3. A partition of one-third of my remaining estate shall, in a manner determined and directed by executors appointed by the Fiduciary Trust Company of New Haven, be given over to Wells School, Wells, Connecticut, as a gift. I understand that no special purpose or qualification shall impede the use of this gift by Wells School. Wells School may receive this gift in furniture, library documents, vehicles, or other portable property; or as cash value from such property sold at auction; or as cash and securities from my estate. The determination of the partition, the management of auction or auctions, and the transfer of all cash and securities will be directed by my executors.
   
4. The remaining share of my estate, in no way including or overlapping the dispositions stated in items one, two, and three, shall pass to my son, Brian Greeve, provided he is located and can make a claim to this disposition within seven years from the date of this document.
   

If after seven years no claim is made by my son on this part of my estate, it shall pass forthwith to my nephew, Hugh Greeve.

This statement was composed in the presence of Herbert Jenkins of East Sandwich, Massachusetts on March 31, 19__.

(Signed)

John Oberon Greeve
March 31, 19__

(Witnessed)

Herbert Paul Jenkins

March 31, 19__

(Notarized)

Herbert Paul Jenkins

March 31, 19__

31 March
Little House

Dear Brian,

In earlier letters to you, unclaimed and unanswered, I tried to explain how hard it was expressing things to someone who might not be there. In the event you are there and one day read this, you will know what I mean.

If/when you come home, you will want information, history. Frank and Val will have that. Rely on them for as long as you need. Both of them care about you. I do want you to know, though, that tonight I am fairly clearheaded, although not too hot physically. I am steady about your mother's loss this past winter, steady but not “adjusted” to it.

The most recent intelligence I have on you is that your wallet and passport were turned in to the police a year ago in Tangier. A lady in an agency told me to expect the worst, which I do.

I am not a desperate man, the way you might think of one in a movie or in a Poe story. I feel used up, overcome, gnawn on, by irritations which, if I admit them fully to consciousness, will turn out to be the Furies themselves. What I am trying to say, Brian, is that I am not crazy. But I am finished.

This is even harder than I thought. Now my head is full of you, memories of you. Memories of all of us. A pitiful image of you keeps cropping up, like something in Dickens: you return this summer with your knapsack, sunburnt, cheery, perhaps even with a pal or a girl, to surprise Meg and me, maybe even to make some sort of end-of-adolescence, commencement-of-manhood reconciliation, only to find that your mother and I have, as the Wells boys say, checked out. Just a picture, not what I think will happen, not even, necessarily, what I want. It's a picture to hurt myself with, because I can't imagine, should that scene ever happen, your being able to handle it. It is a picture of you as me now. Me not you. Every bubble bursts back to me. It should make me sad not to believe in the picture—the part about your coming home gladly to see us—but I don't. I don't think you are alive, Brian. I don't think that you are glad or were ever glad in your travels. I think you are dead and that you died in terror, possibly not in your right mind. I don't think you thought much about your mother and me, which is not to say that we weren't crucial anyway. I think your runaways, your school rebellions, your silences, your frightening flights of fantasy when you were little—I think all of them were ways of negating us. Now we are negated, but by our own demons and diseases, not by you. You hurt us, Brian, because you wouldn't let us know how we hurt you. You hurt us, but you didn't kill us. May you live.

Your mother was 34 and I was 33 when we had you. There had been lots of gynecological problems and failures, but then it finally worked. No child was ever more wanted. But we were aware of that, and like intelligent educators steeped in child-development, we vowed not to smother you. From the beginning you were given real liberty—and we watched in fear for liberty to fail. Did it? Or was it the watching and the assessing and the knowing on our parts? Maybe granting liberty negates the liberty. I'm back to “negates.” I wish I knew the answers. I was only the father of you, just that once. I was not really very confident about it. I think I was a good teacher, a very good teacher (why be modest?). As a teacher and usually as a headmaster, I was very sure, which made me seem even strong at times. But not as a father. As a father, I always felt I was guessing. I felt I was guessing and felt you knew I was guessing. I didn't know whether to hit you or hold you, whether to make you turn out the light and go to sleep or to turn up the light so you could see what you were doing. What 
did
 I do? I think I generally went on down the hall, thinking about it. Thinking a lot about it. Oh, Brian! What I wanted was for you to be admirable without ever being told to or told how—to surprise me with your brains and skill and splendid qualities, qualities that would burst forth simply because you were ours and we were good. I wanted you to be happy, one-of-a-kind, passionate, imaginative. I wanted to follow your happiness and be happy about it, like the dads whose hearts thrill in the stands when their sons hit a long ball. Any old kind of long ball would have been fine with me. But you sensed me in the stands. I was not only a dad in the stands but a headmaster in the stands. I don't like to think about that.

I was glad to be head of Wells, Brian. I think I was good at it, and I think people who know thought I was good at it. I was better than old-fashioned. Like Socrates, but less purely, I had my “little voice” and it told the hard truth. I also had something else that was good for a school—I loved the culture. Not everything, not the whole mess, but the triumphs of its building, its pictures, its literature especially, at least the English pockets of it I knew. It is great to love some things like that and stand by them, to be able to pass them on with energy and conviction. What am I talking about? Headmastering. That's what I was. It was good for me, but not for you.

Your mother was headmaster, too, even more so. Her judgment was better, she could take more stress, and she was funnier. Your mother was the greatest talker I have ever known—and that includes some good ones at Cambridge. She was company, Brian. I loved her every minute I knew her, and I love her still. She would say the same, I think. That is rare, Brian, and that is good. It must have been good for you too. It must have been. I don't want to sadden you, but to reassure you, by saying you were obsessively in her thoughts during her illness.

Guilt is inherent to life. If you are alive—may you live—you are feeling guilty. Do not feel excessively so on our account. We lived richly, and, as I say, loved. We didn't collapse because you wandered away from us. Which is not to say, sonny boy, that you don't owe us a few. As the world reckons, we were pretty nice folks, pretty damned nice parents. You got clothed, held, fed, sent-to, given-to, sat-up-with, nursed, and even cultured by some pretty good people. So while a long ball is not really necessary, your very kindest, truest self would be much appreciated.