The Headmaster's Dilemma (14 page)

"Oh, I'll always trust you, sir, of course! But I'd love to go back to Brazil!"

"Unfortunately, in a case like this, your inclinations cannot be consulted."

The big car rolled through the open grilled gates of the Averhill campus and pulled up beside the headmaster's door.

"Tell Patrick to take you to your dormitory and bring you back here when you're packed," Erwin directed his son as he descended from the vehicle. "Wait for me in the car and don't talk to anyone."

A maid ushered Erwin into the headmaster's study where he found Michael waiting for him.

"I'm very quick about my business, sir, and I won't take up much of your valuable time," Erwin began as he took his seat before the central desk. "I appreciate your seeing me on such short notice."

"Of course, Mr. Caldwell, I am deeply sympathetic about your trouble. I can only tell you that we are doing our best to work out some kind of settlement of these suits so that your boy will not be dragged into a sordid court trial."

"That, of course, is to be avoided at all costs. But I should tell you at once, Mr. Sayre, that my lawyers have fully briefed me on all aspects of the legal situation, and I have not come to discuss these at all. I have come for one purpose only, and that is to hear your exact account of what each boy told you after they were apprehended in the dormitory that night."

"I shall be glad to do that, Mr. Caldwell. And I'm happy to assure you that my memory is a fairly sharp one." Michael proceeded to relate, carefully and precisely, his talk with each boy while Erwin intently listened, never once interrupting. But when Michael had finished he was ready with this comment:

"Castor at first maintained that my son had used force? His initial claim, in short, was that he had been raped?"

"He didn't use that term."

"But that was it, was it not?"

"Yes, but he retracted it."

"And you determined that his retraction absolved you of any duty to report the incident to the Massachusetts authorities?"

"Just so. There was nothing that had to be reported. In my opinion, anyway."

"In your opinion, Mr. Sayre, exactly. And it's your opinion that I'm trying to get at. If you had really believed my son's story that he had been subjected to a malicious and damaging assault on his character, why did you sit by impassively when these suits were filed? Why didn't you use your lawyers, your public relations counsel, your anything and everything, to shout to the world that a dastardly lie had been told about an innocent boy in your school?"

"Mr. Caldwell!" Michael was clearly startled by the sudden strength of his visitor's language. "What had gone on in that cubicle may not have been rape, but it was not exactly what many people call innocent. I did not conceive it my duty to prejudge the case one way or another and add more mud to that already flung."

"Or did you simply suspect that neither boy had told you the whole story?"

"You forget, sir, that these things are never all black or white. Different emotions and reactions get involved in an affair like this."

"In other words, you
do
have some doubt as to whether my boy used force! At least in the beginning. That is what I'm getting at. That is what may explain your impassive attitude in this whole matter. You have no sympathy for either side. Which can only mean that there's something you haven't told me."

"Mr. Caldwell, I don't see what you're driving at. Surely you can't want me to convince you that your son was a rapist!"

"I want to know what you really think! I suspect you have a shrewd idea of what actually happened that night, and I want the truth! Once I have the truth, I can decide how I'm going to handle it. That's how I've always managed my life, and I'm not going to change it now, no matter what the cost or to whom. So please do me the honor of being utterly frank. Was there anything at all that caused you in retrospect to doubt if my son had told you the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"

Michael looked down at his blotter for a moment, and then stroked his forehead. He seemed deeply agitated. "There was one thing," he breathed at last. "Something my wife noted when I told her about it."

"Ah!"

"Your son told me that when Castor came into his cubicle to tell him he couldn't sleep he had complained that he was worried over his mother having a cancer scare. It was true that his mother had had one a month or so before and had sent for him to be with her, but she had been given a clean bill of health, and the boy had returned to school. Your son knew of the incident, as he had had to check Castor out of the dorm at the time, and it occurred to me, or rather to my wife, that if your son had wanted to create a picture of how a worried boy had won his sympathy that night, it might help to show him as worrying about his mother, and that incident might have sprung to mind."

"But did the Castor boy say anything about a cancer scare to my son?"

"Well, of course, we don't know. But my wife, playing backgammon with the boy on a parlor night after I had closed the case and before Castor had been taken home, had inquired, with a hostess's benignity, if his mother had had any further alarms, and he had said no. He had even seemed surprised that she should have asked. So it seems unlikely that he would have complained about that to your son."

"I see, Mr. Sayre. And that is all I need. I am grateful for your time." Erwin rose to depart.

Michael seemed much surprised. "But surely there is more for us to discuss than just that!"

"No. I'm quite satisfied, thank you."

An hour later Erwin and his son were speeding through the twilight in a direction that suddenly startled Bossy.

"Daddy, do you suppose Patrick knows where he's going? We're on the turnpike headed for Boston."

"Patrick knows exactly where he's going. He's headed for the airport where our company jet awaits us for a night flight to Rio. Don't worry. I have your passport and everything."

"Oh, boy, what a lark! Will we go to the Amazon?"

"You may be going to quite a few places, my boy. But you must always remember to do exactly what I tell you."

T
HE UNEXPLAINED DISAPPEARANCE
of Bossy Caldwell erupted like a clap of thunder in the heavy air over Averhill and reached far enough south seemingly to threaten the very glass in the windows of Donald Spencer's Wall Street office. He had immediately summoned an emergency meeting of the executive committee of the school's board of trustees, a majority of whom were New Yorkers, and some six of whom managed to be solemnly present on an early morning in March. The first hour of the meeting had been devoted to a careful review of all the facts involved.

"I have finally been able to get in touch with Erwin Caldwell," Donald announced to the attentive group. "As you all know he is in charge of a vast lumbering operation in Brazil where he has presumably taken his son. He is back in his office here now, but he has flatly refused to discuss with me his reasons for withdrawing the boy from school. He informed me bluntly that a parental decision prompted by a concern over the boy's health was nobody's business but his own, and he instructed me to see that any property his son had left with any bills owing should be forwarded to him. Not another word could be got out of him, and knowing the man as I do, I can assure you that none will."

"But what can the man be after?" the large, loud, volatile Mrs. Fox demanded. "Surely he must see that hiding away a youth who has been accused of virtual rape before the case has even come to trial is a virtual admission of guilt?"

"Maybe he sees his son's case as a hopeless one," suggested Leonard Chase, a prominent Wall Street lawyer, a man of noted suavity and charm, famed for his skillful handling of baffled juries in complicated corporate litigations. "And by removing his son altogether from the reach of a court he may think he can hamstring the Castors' ability to prove their case. It's a kind of desperate remedy but he may deem the situation a desperate one."

"But can't the boy be brought back if necessary?" Mrs. Fox inquired. "Can't he be—what's the term?—extradited?"

"Can you extradite a witness? Don't forget the Caldwell boy is not a defendant in either of the two cases. The school is."

"And regardless of what the law is," Donald concluded, "I think we can all agree that Erwin Caldwell has not only the will but the ability to hide his son in the jungles of Brazil in such a way that the president of the United States and the entire Marine Corps could never get their hands on him. And anyway I doubt that the Castors are even particularly interested in nabbing Bossy Caldwell. I think they regard him as a mere factor of the evil emanating from the headmaster's policies. It's the school—the school remodeled by Michael Sayre—that is the subject of their ire. I suspect that Mrs. Castor believes that what happened to her boy is a common occurrence on our campus and that she is using a moral hose to clean the place out!" Donald cast a shrewd glance around the long table at which they were assembled and shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe the woman has a point."

"
Quelle horreur!
" exclaimed Mrs. Fox in unexpected French.

"In any case," lawyer Chase opined, "there can be no doubt that the flight of young Caldwell has contributed to the danger of these two suits. The school is unquestionably more vulnerable."

"And not only to big damages assessed by a jury probably already prejudiced against private schools for what they believe are millionaires' children," Donald stressed, "but also to a sad loss of reputation in the public at large. And then, of course, there's the horrid question of what this may do to our forthcoming fund drive."

"Our refusal even to consider a settlement has to be rethought," the lawyer agreed.

"Is it really as bad as all that?" Myra Pickens, youngest of the trustees but far from the least active, was the bright, pert, black-eyed partner in a successful hedge fund, with a young son at the school and a mind as liberal as the headmaster's. She was known to enjoy needling the older members of the board with sharp reminders that their views were dated. "Don't you think enough of us are on to the fact that Mrs. Castor may be the kind of vindictive old bitch who goes bonkers every time her little boy thinks another boy has so much as touched him?"

"I see no reason for using such strong language about the mother of one of our students," Mrs. Fox retorted with considerable hauteur. "The poor woman's son may well have been the subject of a nefarious assault. You should have more respect, Mrs. Pickens, for her feelings and what she has been put through."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Fox. I didn't realize I was speaking of one of your pals."

This did little to appease her opponent. "Mrs. Castor doesn't happen to be what you call one of my pals. We are not even acquainted. But I still feel for her pain—even her agony—under the circumstances. And I also feel that we on the board must face up to our responsibility for the conditions in the school that have led up to the tragic incident."

"Isn't 'tragic' putting it rather strongly? Can any of us be so naive as not to be aware of the kind of thing that goes on between young males with rapidly developing sexual drives when they find themselves alone together? You can't watch them every minute of the day and night!"

"They can be controlled, Mrs. Pickens! They can have drilled into them what is right and what is very, very wrong! That is a school's job, Mrs. Pickens! Would you turn it into a brothel?"

Donald saw that it was time to intervene. "Mrs. Fox has a point. We can't just stick our heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches. We have to face the facts of juvenile sexuality and just how we're going to handle it. We also have to assess how it has
been
handled. Even how it has been handled by those we very much admire. I don't think I have to tell any of you here how deeply I like and respect Michael Sayre. As all of you know, we were classmates at school here and have worked together ever since for the betterment of our beloved institution. Inevitably, we have not always agreed. You're all aware, I'm sure, that recently Michael and I have not quite seen eye to eye on the question of expanding our sporting facilities—"

"I'd call it something more than not quite seeing eye to eye," Leonard Chase interrupted with a dry laugh. "It sounded to me more like the opening guns of World War Three."

"Our learned counsel always has to have his little joke," Donald replied mildly enough, though he had to swallow to repress his snarl. "But there was nothing in our differences that couldn't be straightened out with a little more talk. Now we are faced with a much deeper crisis. Michael, with the best of intentions, I do not doubt, in a sincere desire to spare the school the odium of a sexual scandal, has done his best to make what I fear was a criminal assault on the innocence of a minor appear in the light of a far less pernicious though still wrongful species of adolescent sexual experimentation."

"Still very wrongful," grumbled Mrs. Fox.

"Oh, don't misunderstand me, Corbina. Of course it is. I'm simply distinguishing between a crime and a misdemeanor. The latter is something all schools face. It is an unfortunate aspect of the academic picture. Rape is not. Rape can destroy a school."

"You're going pretty far there, Donald," the lawyer objected. "Anything like rape in our case is a long way from being proved."

"It's less of a long way since Erwin Caldwell flew his son to Brazil," Donald insisted. "What I keep getting back to is what we must do to bolster Averhill's tottering reputation. We have to give the academic community some reasonable reassurance not only that we deeply regret what has occurred, but that it can never happen again!"

"By which, I take it, you mean we should toss someone's head to the angry mob?" The lawyer's tone was now frankly hostile.

Donald needed more time, but he decided he couldn't wait. He had to meet the challenge. "You might put it that way, yes."

"And considering that this meeting has been called an executive session, with the express purpose of not inviting the headmaster, I assume that the head under consideration is his?"