The Headmasters Papers (5 page)

Incidentally, Fred, I
have
considered whether I have “over reacted” to the “rough-housing” in the opener. I do not think I needed the reminder that football is a “contact” sport. The kinds of contact admissible are clearly stated by the rules and by tradition. What both of us observed three weeks ago wasn't boyish high spirits; it was thuggery. Much worse, it was thuggery boosted for a few moments by the support of fans and the lack of appropriate restraints.

We have to do better than this.

Faithfully,

John

27 September

Mr. Jared Thomson

19 Chauncey Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Jay,

I have just returned from two weeks on the road—in fact, from just across the Charles from you—and so am a little late in thanking you for your kind words and for the efforts you have made to help locate Brian. I have tried to get in touch with the Rini boy myself, through his parents, but have so far had no luck. I shall follow up those other leads, though, and needless to say, will be grateful for any new information you may get hold of. Frustrating!

I will convey to Mrs. G. your warm wishes for a speedy recovery.

What is it that makes a former gypsy turn scholar? Let me know so I can pass it on to Brian.

My good wishes,

John Greeve

27 September

Mr. Samuel Weintraub

Department of Educational Psychology

University of Massachusetts

Amherst, Massachusetts

Dear Mr. Weintraub,

I have been out of town for the past two weeks and have only just now seen your letter proposing Wells School as one of the sites for your study correlating school structures and adolescent values.

I am afraid I must decline on the school's behalf. It is no doubt a sign of my antediluvian education, but I do not happen to believe that real values can be detected by a questionnaire. Adolescents, including our boys, are increasingly savvy about saying the appropriate things, not only on questionnaires but also in forums for free discussion. But the boy who can reason in a clear and sophisticated fashion through a hypothetical moral dilemma in print or in discussion does not necessarily, at least in my experience, behave in a related fashion when confronted with a similar dilemma in his dormitory life. Similarly, the boy who may tick the appropriate columns in the answer forms to indicate that he is tolerant of interracial activity does not necessarily do anything in his daily life to promote it. You would get to know us and our values better by spending a few days here participating in and sharing school life than you would by administering an anonymously taken questionnaire. Moreover, our boys are rather at their limit of standardized tests as it is: D.A.T.s, S.A.T.s, pre- S.A.T.s, Achievements, Advanced Placements, etc.

But while your proposal is not for us, I wish you luck in carrying it out elsewhere.

My good wishes,

John O. Greeve

28 September

Brother Thomas Merriam

Headmaster, The St. Francis Priory

Storrington Rise, Connecticut

Dear Brother Thomas,

Thank you for your letter apprising me of the vandalism done there and of your feeling, no doubt well founded, that Wells boys were involved. I am appalled by all of it and can relate with special sympathy to the theft of your sign. We have lost dozens since I have been here, and some have been very costly. That yours was so beautifully carved in Carolingian script makes the loss doubly annoying.

The fact that the incident occurred on a
week
night may help us limit our search. We will begin by checking our upper formers' late sign-ins for last Thursday, and I shall begin my own sleuth work. I suspect whoever pinched your sign wants to have it.

I plan to address the school on the subject and will keep you posted on what follows. Have you thought, too, about Storrington High School boys? My own imperfect intelligence tells me that the passion of their rivalry with St. Francis is unbounded, whereas ours is only borderline pathological.

Let's stay in touch.

Faithfully,

John Greeve

29 September

ANNOUNCEMENT

For Chapel and both lunches

Then to be posted at dormitory landings

It has come to Mr. Greeve's attention that the field house at St. Francis's was spray-painted and their sign removed from its footings last Thursday night, sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight. There is good reason to think that Wells boys were involved. The missing sign is one of a kind, valuable, and an important tradition of St. Francis Priory.

If any Wells boys were involved in this vandalism, they are invited to make themselves known to Mr. Greeve today or tomorrow. Whoever does so will be placed on disciplinary probation for the rest of the term, will be responsible for cleaning the field house, and will be required to return or to replace the sign. If Mr. Greeve, through his own efforts, identifies a Wells boy or boys as the offenders, that boy or those boys will be dismissed from the school.

30 September

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve

14 Bingham Drive

Tarrytown, New York

Dear Val and Frank,

Sorry for the tardy correspondence, but school has been proceeding just as if my life were not in disarray. It is my mature feeling as a schoolmaster that over the centuries during which schools have been established to pass on the culture to adolescents, the cumulative gains have been exactly zero. Every single boy seems to have to try being a laggard, thief, cheat, lunatic, solitary, etc., for himself. That you and I and millions of others have already learned these lessons matters not at all to these hell-bent
tabulae rasae.
This evening as I was walking from my tidy school study to my untidy home study, a dorm master presented me with a badly shaken third former who had escalated some dorm room rivalry by urinating copiously into a balloon and then chucking this dreadful missile through the open door of his enemies. Are there appropriate words of rebuke for such an infraction? What, if anything, shall I write the parents without their losing all hope? The boy won my heart, though, by offering absolutely nothing in his own defense. Sometimes I think of my Prize Day speeches or Addresses to New Parents about the beautiful mission of youth and about my own beautiful mission
to
youth, and then I think of things like flying balloons full of urine.

The plant and the books are greatly appreciated by Meg. She is for the moment reasonably comfortable at the clinic. She has made the decision to have no surgeries, and this has been awfully hard for her. I agree with her completely, although the decision carries with it the certainty that she will have less time and probably more pain, sooner. One thing we had not thought of was that given the nature of this particular kind of cancer and of its medications, she has virtually no immunity or resistance to anything else. Among other things, this means that the possibility of homestays, even on a temporary basis, is doubtful. This hurts, as it's the thing Meg wanted most. She says she can't imagine being scared of anything at home in her own bed. We shall have to see. For the time being, she seems to be managing well. She has little interest in food, but she reads voraciously between jabs and intrusions from the nurses, and her conversation is still in top form. She asks after you without cease. For my sake, too, I hope your projected New England run works out. It would be good for you to see her while she is still relatively strong.

Thanks, Frank, for helping me wrestle with the Brian problem. It's maddening when there is no promising starting point. I have no idea what country he's in—or even what continent. I find this makes me so irrationally angry at him I can't sleep. Then I begin torturously to imagine all the sad and vile things—including the worst—that might have happened to him. Nevertheless, if he should cruise in casually six months hence all hairy and rumpled with another incomprehensible companion in tow and learn that his mother is dead, that would be a guilt and a sadness I would like very much to lighten. We shall see.

I think I'm glad school keeps me preoccupied. It's quite different this year: running very powerfully down wind with a wobbly, undersized tiller and no other point of sail possible.

Hope to see you soon.

Love,

John

1 October

Separate copies to the parents of:

Toby Witherington (6th)

Tom Foster (6th)

Charles DeMas (5th)

Dear Mr. and Mrs._____________

By now ________ has possibly told you that he has, along with two companions, been placed on disciplinary probation for the remainder of the term for a Major Infraction: spray-painting a wall of the St. Francis Prior field house and removing and concealing the school sign. This foray behind St. Francis's lines also entailed signing out falsely, thereby violating the school's honor code—an infraction every bit as serious as the vandalism.

“Vandalism” may sound harsh, but I am going to retain the term. What the boys had in mind, frankly, was something of a lark. And that, in our opinion, was what it mainly was, although I don't think I'll tell them that. For your information, no harm was finally done. The boys will experience the decidedly appropriate humiliation of two long weekend afternoons scouring and repainting a large fieldhouse wall, and they have already returned undamaged the sign from its place of concealment.

You can be proud of the forthright manner in which they confessed—albeit under a fairly stern ultimatum from me. They are good boys who have each put together a creditable record of achievement and service here. Please be assured that this stunt, provided its like does not recur too often, will do nothing to mar that record.

I hope you will not hesitate to write or call if I can be of any further assistance or if I can clarify
___________'s
disciplinary status at the school.

My good wishes,

John O. Greeve

1 October

Brother Thomas Merriam

Headmaster, St. Francis Priory

Storrington Rise, Connecticut

Dear Brother Thomas,

Thanks very much for your warm note. I'm glad you had a chance to meet the boys, and that your facilities will be restored to order by next weekend. Justice done, I think.

Yes, they are good boys—but maybe not that good. They have received a just penance and an opportunity to confront the likes of you, which they will always, with a little trepidation, remember. I don't know whether to say they had their cake and ate it too, or that they had two cakes and ate neither of them. I'm sure you will see what I mean.

Anyway, thank you for not being so regardful or timid or busy as to let the thing drop. You have given three promising rascals an important experience.

For your information, we've wired up our own sign to lethal voltage. Pass the word around.

Faithfully,

John Greeve

3 October

Mr. Jake Levin

R.D. 3

Petersfield, New Hampshire

Dear Jake,

Thanks very much for
A Grief Observed.
I have very mixed feelings about it. First, that you, staunchest of pagans (or so I had always been led to believe), should send me a reflection by a popular Christian apologist is a phenomenon worth thinking about. I read the book straight off, but if I hadn't I would have wondered what you had in mind sending me Lewis's reactions to a
dead
spouse, when life is all we are letting ourselves think about here. But you were absolutely right to send it. I guess you know, although I don't know how, that it is not the process of Meg's dying that I fear. I hate that, but I don't fear it. What I fear is afterwards. Being married, having been married for twenty-nine years, the expectations, obligations, routines of being married, that great shared backlog of experiences, humor, etc.—this has always fueled and consoled me more than anything else in my life. My closest friends here say I am a schoolaholic, an updated, rather more reflective Mr. Chips, but they are dead wrong. As I've often told you—and meant it—I have retained my objectivity about, and respect for, school as well as I have chiefly because something deep within me still dreads school, is afraid of it and its demands. My thirty-two years' accrued experience has produced only the thinnest, most uneasy kind of confidence. Like a farmer who has not yet lost a harvest but who is working an ancient flood plain, I know that the worst can always happen. I have seen it happen in a classroom, and I have felt it threaten, but not quite bring down, a whole school. It begins in some hard-to-define chemistry of morale: bad feelings between faculty or between faculty and some students. Then some dramatic events may occur. They can be unrelated, like an accidental death or a fire or a disciplinary crisis. And then suddenly—poof! Nothing feels right at school. Nobody is reassuring or believable. If you're on the bottom, people on the top seem nervous and tentative. If you're on the top, you feel unsupported and unappreciated. There is no longer the corporate confidence that is so necessary to personal confidence and growth.
That
is what seems always to be lurking just below the surface of school life, and that is what I would be perpetually afraid of, were it not for Meg, whose company is more reliable, more familiar, a balm. School, although through the gate and along the path, is Away. Meg is Home. So again, what I fear is the loss, not the losing, which is still practically having. And this is what Lewis addresses directly.