The Headmasters Papers (8 page)

I hope this latest mess is what Ed needs to get fed up with the secretive, shoddy, outlaw world of youthful drug use. I think it just might be.

I agree with you, by the way, that the high school is the best idea. Among other things, he will find himself, I think, a relatively strong student there academically. You may contact my secretary, Marge Pearse, for his transcript.

I wish all of you well, and I hope this is not the last I hear of the Hruskas.

My good wishes,

John O. Greeve

11 October

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Slavin
1300 Chafee Circle
West Hartford, Connecticut

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Slavin,

I am writing to confirm officially what I told you over the phone last night: that I have reluctantly accepted the Student Court's and the Faculty Discipline Committee's recommendation to ask you to withdraw Marc from Wells immediately.

I know this is devastating news, and it is truly unpleasant news to bear. For what the admission is worth, Marc's was the only recommendation concerning the five boys involved in this incident that I was seriously tempted to reverse. On his side is his newness to the school, the obvious temptation to play up to big, influential upper formers, and of course his extraordinary intellectual promise. Overriding these considerations, however, is the impact of “pardoning” him on the eighty-nine other boys in the third form. I don't want to lose any more boys here to drugs. In order not to, I need to create a climate of opinion in which drug use is “dangerous.” We have evolved the drug policy we now have because we have learned, painfully, that the use of psychoactive drugs by adolescent boys is dangerous to development, although not always in ways boys can see and accept.

I am not sure how deeply Marc is involved with drugs. I was interested to learn that he is no novice. I honestly hope this incident is sufficiently dramatic for him to reconsider what he is doing and to get free of drugs and their social props. If he is able to do this and if he is so inclined, I invite him to come see me in June and to convince me that he should have another shot at Wells. I would gladly be convinced—and will save him a place in his form, at least through June.

Please address correspondence about Marc's transcripts and records to the attention of Marge Pearse, my secretary.

I am sorry things have taken this turn. May brighter things lie ahead.

Sincerely,

John O. Greeve

12 October

MEMO to Arnold Lieber
Maintenance

Arnold,

Just visited by coaches Shire, Menotti, Griffin, and Deveraux. They say there are 
no
 lines whatsoever on the soccer fields. They also say you 
won't speak to them
 when they approach you about it. Odd behavior, Arnold.

Lines down
today,
 please.

JOG

12 October

MEMO to Florence Armbruster
Mathematics

Dear Florence,

The Student Court has just referred to me a disciplinary decision involving your fourth-form geometry section. I plan to do as you recommend, but I would like you to give some more thought to the idea of “collective” discipline. Funny things get done and felt when a whole class is uniformly punished for an unadmitted, unassignable offense. The guilty party remains ornery and convinced that justice is blind—and so do the innocent majority. Very often nobody is happier or better off, and the tone of the classroom does not improve.

For now the detentions stand as assigned. Care to confer?

JOG

13 October

The Rev. Clive Clague
Rector, St. Christopher's Church
Middlebury Center, Connecticut

Dear Mr. Clague,

Many thanks for your extraordinary talk about the meaning of Gothic in the Middle Ages and after. That is not a subject I would have bet would enthusiastically engage the whole school, especially under formers, but how wrong I would have been. I am always delighted when our boys confront a lively intellect and a well-developed esthetic sense in somebody who is not a teacher. In a boy's mind, teachers are paid to try to be that way. In anyone else the qualities must be genuine, perhaps even valid.

Please find enclosed our modest honorarium. By no means does it represent the extent of our appreciation. It comes with our warm regards, though, and an open invitation to return soon.

My good wishes,

John O. Greeve

13 October

Mr. Robert Miravelli
Miravelli and Associates
2490 Boylston Street
Boston, Massachusetts

Dear Mr. Miravelli,

I am sorry not to have responded sooner to your letter of last week, but there has been much more than the usual crush of work here.

I am decidedly not in a position to have my portrait painted at this time. Traditionally, I believe, the directors of a school, or at any rate someone other than the subject himself, commissions a portrait of the headmaster. In this regard, I bow to tradition.

Sincerely,

John O. Greeve

15 October

Mr. Dewey Porter
Chairman, Seven Schools Conference
Adelbert School
Eavesham, Connecticut

Dear Dewey,

Thanks for your letter and for the proposed agenda for November.

If I hadn't been preconditioned by what I found to be an incomprehensibly dim correspondence from Fred Maitland, I think your response to our tiff with St. Ives would have surprised me. Of course we would be glad to talk about it; we look forward to it. But we are not in a position to reconsider our decision to drop St. I. from our schedule, at least for a year. The reasons are pretty clearly set down in the correspondence I sent you. At any rate, we have already adjusted our own schedule. Deed's done.

The question you posed—do we intend to drop all opponents whose sportsmanship falls below standards—is an interesting one, and I choose not to take it rhetorically. I would certainly like to drop opponents, all of them if it came to that, who refuse to acknowledge play as blatantly dirty and unsportsmanlike as we experienced in our opener with St. I. That is not a fine distinction. What I wanted from Fred was just an 
acknowledgement,
 so that we could address our respective teams and schools appropriately. When this is no longer an obvious course of action, I for one am ready to drop interscholastic athletics altogether.

Nothing could be further from my intentions than to “one-up” St. I. If anything, we are quite publicly one-down. We lost the game, we lost the brawls, and, for the time being, we have lost a time-honored athletic rival.

I wish you had seen the game, Dewey.

Sorry not to be more helpful. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Best,

John

16 October

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Greeve
14 Bingham Drive
Tarrytown, New York

Dear Val and Frank,

Thanks for your good, warm letter.

I don't think your visit tired Meg. I think it stimulated and touched her, although she has a hard time registering that through the discomfort. She is not distressed by the people who visit, but by being unable to respond to them appropriately. But it's still Meg in there, and she loves both of you fundamentally.

It's been a bad week, to tell the truth. Meg is very uncomfortable, depressed, and unable to sleep. Part of this I am sure has to do with the hospital. I know I am no one to speak, with my polite humanities education and having come of age before the technological behemoth of modern medicine, but Meg's regimen in the hospital is patently hopeless. Everything about the place is a confirmation of her disease. Except for her flowers, redolent of pity and utterly alien in the off-white, waxy confines of a hospital cell, there is nothing to engage eye, ear, or imagination, nothing except the hospital's own business. There is no privacy, no quiet. The rate for the room alone, without medicine and specialists' fees, is $325 per day. The only responsible alternative is to have her home here with round-the-clock nurse's care. This course, which may be more humane, is less expensive, but not coverable by medical insurance. It would break our little bank to bring her home, but I am glad to do it. My only worry is that I won't be able to keep this place peaceful enough. I've let it get a little Grand Central-ish since Meg's been gone. I suspect I could reverse that. The other problem is that I've generated the useful fiction that Meg is only routinely ill. If she comes home, more friends will want to see her, which would further exhaust and sadden her. I don't want Meg to see her condition through the eyes of well-meaning but horrified friends. I guess I have to work this through. If I feel the same way in a week, home she comes.

Terrible letter! Sorry. I'd tell you a little about school, but it's no better at the moment.

Thanks for your wonderful offer to come up here with Hugh for a Thanksgiving do. I am going to decline it—for purely selfish reasons. Even being minimally festive and pleasant would take energy from me, and my humble pail is nearly empty. I conserve what I have by minimizing routines, especially social ones, and sacking out whenever I can. (I have slept the night in my clothes, by mistake, twice this week.) One side benefit is that I am slimming down nicely. I have a few alumni fetes to preside over—one of them in Philadelphia, the worst city in the world—but otherwise I plan to “crash”, to use Brian's phrase, for as much of the Thanksgiving break as I can.

Best love to Hugh. I loved your account of his weekends on duty in the dormitory. Such is the case, I suppose, in small residential communities of healthy adolescent boys and girls. Why did anyone ever imagine it would be otherwise? “Love goes from love as schoolboys to their books,” Shakespeare has Romeo say. As about everything else, the bard knew all about co-ed.

Love,

John

17 October

Mr. Calvin Kingery
Timothy Dwight College
1121 Yale Station
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Calvin,

It is always good to see you, although some times more than others.

Tuesday was one of the others. Needless to say, I was disappointed by the program you and your Boolas gave us. You sang beautifully, all of you, and your presence on stage is impressive, but some of the material was inappropriate for us, and you know it. I cautioned you about “judgment” last spring when we confirmed the date, and Phil Upjohn said he spoke to all of you backstage and was given jocular assurance that all was going to be good clean fun.

I suppose if a similar group, without a Wellsian among them, had given us the same show, I would be less disappointed, but every bit as disapproving. Calvin, you 
know
 what goes and what does not go on our stage. Thanks to your program, some of our boys will undoubtedly claim precedent for various vulgarities they have been contemplating but not yet dared.

For what an old prude's opinion is worth, I think your group is too musically sound to rely on the vulgar stuff for audience response. It is easy to hear the difference between delighted laughter and embarrassed laughter. The former is better; the latter is easier.

So much from me. It must be reassuring for you to know that I haven't changed with the times. Incidentally, we were going to give the Boolas a modest honorarium of $150 to help defray travel expenses. But since you didn't quite keep your side of the agreement, I am donating it to United Way instead, on your behalf of course.

In spite of all this, I hope we see you here again soon, with or without your 
Boolas.

Faithfully,

John Greeve

17 October

Mr. William G. Truax
President, Fiduciary Trust Co.
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Bill,

We are all set for the board, here, a week from Tuesday. Budget figures and other materials are in the mail today.

I'll be more than happy to set aside some open time to discuss the St. I. decision. I am not surprised there is some stink about it. I trust you would agree, though, that it's necessary stink. Leacock and Bolwell are old Ionians, are they not? Some things run thicker than principles . . . Don't worry, I'll be reasonable.

Best, John

19 October

Mrs. Philip Stone
Honey Hill
R.R. 2
Bedford, New York

Dear Mrs. Stone,

There is no way, I suppose, to soften the hurt and bad feelings that follow the dismissal of a student, especially a sixth former, from school. I feel, however, that in Charles' case, those bad feelings may have distorted some important matters of fact. Whatever the source of the confusion, let me make the following matters clear:

(1)     I made no disciplinary distinction between the boys who purchased the drugs and the boy who sold them, because both acts violate the very core of the school's drug policy. I simply don't believe that the buying/selling distinction is important. Without one, there would not be the other, either way. I am aware that the state and federal laws do draw a distinction, and I am also aware that according to every published measure of the phenomenon, the state and federal laws have done nothing to curb rising drug use among the young.