The Theban Mysteries (7 page)

“She uses her sex, or rather, her sex matters in her having Haemon on her side,” Elizabeth said.

“If Haemon were really a male chauvinist like
Creon,” Betsy said, “he would have gone for Ismene who’s much more ‘feminine,’ if you’ll excuse the expression.”

“Perhaps,” Kate said, “we might discuss the role of Tiresias in that connection.”

“He’s certainly one of the few—perhaps the only true—androgynous characters there are,” Betsy added.

“What I like about talking to you,” Alice Kirkland said, “is that it’s so
educative
.”

“The fact is, I wonder why someone doesn’t write a comedy of manners about
him
,” Betsy said. “Not to mention the boy he is always leaning on—in play after play, he never gets a chance to open his little mouth, like the bat boy with a baseball team.”

“So tell us what’s ‘androgynous’ already,” Angelica said.

“There goes Angelica, the Jewish mother—cut it out, Angie,” Freemond Oliver said. “Angie wrote a skit for the drama group about Saint Mary and Saint Elizabeth as Jewish mothers. It was pretty funny, I’ll admit, but let’s not make it a habit, O.K., Angie?” Her eyes, like Kate’s, were on Elizabeth, who looked embarrassed.

“O.K., Oliver, so what’s—how do you define ‘androgynous’?”

“Both men and women,” Betsy said, “have aspects of both sexes, with one sex predominating if you’re lucky, and one sex predominating too much if you’re unlucky enough to end up with a sewing circle or the Elks. Shaw called
them
manly men and womanly women, but we’ll let that one go by. Tiresias had actually been both a man and a woman, so was the only person who
could report on what it was like to be both sexes, an enviable position, was it not?” My God, Kate thought, she’s got a chance to be something, if she doesn’t try too hard and burn it out. Another reason for not teaching the really young—you see so much promise and most of it gone before they get their wisdom teeth.

“Well,” Betsy continued, “Hera and Zeus got into a rap one day about who had a better time making out; Zeus said women did, and Hera said men did, and so of course they decided to ask old Tiresias, who’d been there and knew.” She paused dramatically, having reached the high point of her story.

“Sooo?” Elizabeth asked, making them all laugh.

“So Tiresias said women did, and Hera was so mad she made him blind. Zeus couldn’t undo that, since one god can’t ever undo another’s work, but he tried to make it up to Tiresias by giving him the gift of prophecy, which has always seemed to me pretty poor compensation, since he keeps coming on in play after play, led by that boy, and getting yelled at by all the major characters. Of course,” she concluded, “he has the satisfaction of always being right.”

“Thank you, Betsy,” Kate said, recognizing a curtain line when she heard one. “If anyone doesn’t have a topic, stop by and discuss it for a minute. Next time I’ll distribute the schedule and you distribute the poems. Each of you get your poem dittoed so we can each have a copy.”

“Jesus, I don’t want anyone else to look at it,” Alice Kirkland said.

Kate bravely refrained from advising her to put her money where her mouth was. “The point of a seminar,”
she said in her best pedagogical tones, “is so that we may all discuss everything together, and learn not to get our vanity involved. Impossible, but our reach must exceed our grasp or what are seminars for?” And she rapidly adjourned this one, before anybody could decide to try to answer
that
question.

F
EBRUARY
, with its alternating freezes and false promises of spring, gave way to March which, though it promised more, was less readily believed. People went around reminding each other that the blizzard of ’88 had been in March and mid-March at that. Mrs. Johnson, still at home in traction and frantic for diversion, was glad to hear Kate’s reports on the
Antigone
seminar.

“Are you using the Jebb translation after all?” she asked Kate, who had come to visit and report.

“Yes, though they’ve read through at least three others, for comparison, and we spend some time discussing them. It’s odd really that I should prefer Jebb, who’s full of thees and thous, verbs with unfamiliar endings and inverted sentences—everybody talks the way one might have supposed Englishmen would have talked at the time of the
Antigone
if there had been an
English language, though of course one knows they would have talked Anglo-Saxon or something if there had been—I’m not making this at all clear.”

“I understand exactly what you mean,” Mrs. Johnson said, laughing and then grimacing. “Oh, dear,” she added, “it’s exactly like Saint Sebastian when they asked
him
if it hurt and he said only when I laugh—coughing and sneezing hurt worse, of course, but I don’t mind
not
coughing and sneezing. The most recent translations—Watling and Wyckoff and Townsend and so forth—would certainly be easier for actors, and I suppose manage to turn the speeches into idiomatic English, not to say hep talk—but I too prefer Jebb. Can it be that we resent Antigone sounding as up to date as all that?”

“Well, when you decided the
Antigone
would be relevant, you certainly had your finger on the pulse of the times, to coin a phrase. The girls have got so involved they’re not only doing twice as much work as I would have dreamed of requiring, but three of them are in Mrs. Banister’s drama group, and they’ve been improvising on
Antigone
for weeks now, so she tells me. How these dead bones do take on flesh given half a chance.”

“I’m sure a great part of the credit is yours,” Mrs. Johnson loyally said. “It’s why I insisted they couldn’t just shove a classicist into the spot—not that there aren’t classicists who could have done it, heaven knows, but the ones at the Theban are quite properly interested in the structure of the language and the historical background to Greek lives.”

“I won’t argue the point,” Kate said, “because I’ve discovered that my modesty is almost always taken for
disingenuousness, when the truth of the matter is, as Churchill said of Attlee, I’ve got a lot to be modest about. We’ve had, actually, only one contretemps in the seminar, at the very beginning—I won’t go into it now, because it’s an awfully silly story, really—but the upshot was I insisted on each of the girls writing a poem about the
Antigone
, taking off from some minor point, you know, nothing crashingly profound or full of oxymorons, just a verse. I thought I’d leave them with you, to cheer your hours lying here trussed up like a steer.”

“Considering you’ve brought me flowers and the life of Lytton Strachey, I don’t think you need to feel any more responsibility for my dragging hours, but thank you all the same for the kind thought.” She began to look through the poems, just glancing at them in anticipation of reading them later, but she stopped at one and read it through.

“Now I rather like this,” she said, “though I’d be hard put to tell you why. She didn’t even rhyme, as Horatio complained to Hamlet.”

Kate looked over the edge of the bed. “Oh, yes,” she said, “that’s Betsy’s. I too am rather fond of it; she’s got a gift for ideas, but she’s got to learn to take the time to find the exact words and put them in the proper order. Perhaps she ought to consider writing in Latin, where the order doesn’t really matter.” She read the poem again over Mrs. Johnson’s shoulder.

“Trust Betsy to write about a character who only had a walk-on,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Well, I have high hopes of Betsy, though she’s not really at home among the tragic Greeks. She would have appreciated Lytton Strachey,” she added, resting her hand on the volumes Kate had brought.

“I will leave you to him,” Kate said. “Try to cheer up by thinking of all the reports you won’t have to write—the worst part of school teaching.”

“In exchange for doing
something
this very minute, taking a walk or playing hopscotch, I would gladly write every report in the school.”

“I know—as Carlyle said to Geraldine Jewsbury under somewhat different circumstances, these are sorry times for a young woman of genius.” Kate said her goodbyes to Mrs. Johnson, who was reaching for the small sheaf of poems.

“The poor thing is bored to death,” Kate reported to Reed that evening. “She would so much rather be
doing the seminar than lying there, even without any dreary orthopedic problems, while I, such are the ironies of life, would love to have nothing to do but lie on my back and do the work I’m supposed to be doing anyway. Well, the happy man has learned to use what the gods give—I don’t remember who said that, but it was a classical author; I seem to be thinking in classical authors these days. At least if the Theban takes more time than I had anticipated, it no longer takes all my time and energy. I’ve learned to cope with the girls in the seminar, to follow the discussions into the way-wardest of bypaths, and leave all the problems of the younger generations to older and wiser heads—well, wiser anyway. By the time March has assumed its lamblike demeanor, I expect to have got the Theban comfortably in proportion—or does that sound like hubris, which always gets the gods into such a pet?”

“Kate dear,” Reed said, “I do wish you would assure me once and for all that you don’t really believe in the Greek gods. You know, Olympus has turned into a housing development, and they’ve got a Hilton Hotel in the middle of the Elysian Fields.”

“Hush,” Kate said. “They’ll hear you.”

Kate and Reed had just finished the dinner dishes, turned off the kitchen light, and nearly wound up their nightly discussion of whether or not a household of two people really had use for an electric dishwasher, when the telephone rang.

“What a household of two people definitely hasn’t use for is a telephone,” Reed said peevishly.

Kate answered in the hall.

“Ah,” came Miss Tyringham’s voice, “thank heaven I’ve found you at home. Could you possibly, out of the
kindness of your heart, pop over here a moment; the school building, that is? I can’t take any more time to explain now, but our gratitude will be boundless. I know, I know, you’re thinking I’ve said that before and it already is, but—please, Kate. Angelica’s asking for you, among others.”

“Angelica!”

“Say you’ll hop in a taxi right now.”

“All right, I’ll be there.” Kate hung up the phone. “Damn and blast! Athene heard you, if not Zeus himself. They’ve got a crisis,” she added, somewhat incoherently.

“Goody,” Reed said. “It’ll give me a chance to get our stuff together for the income tax. A blessing in disguise. I’d never get it done if you were here to talk to.”

“If there’s one thing I can’t
stand
,” Kate said, scrambling into her coat, “it’s people who look on the
bright
side.”

The school building, when Kate got out of the taxi, looked dark and empty—for one horrible moment she wondered if she could have imagined the phone call or, worse, if someone had enticed her to this deserted street for God knew what sinister reasons. Her pulse had begun to race, which annoyed her further, when the door opened and Julia Stratemayer beckoned from within the dark hall. “Thank heaven,” Kate said. “I was beginning to imagine all sorts of eerie things.”

“Imagine away,” Julia gloomily said. “You wouldn’t be able to imagine this mess if you thought with both hands for a fortnight.”

“How cheerful. No bodies, I hope. I more or less promised Reed to give up bodies when I married him.”

“Not a
dead
body,” Julia ominously said. “We can’t stay here whispering. There’s a conference in Miss Tyringham’s office. Come on.”

Kate was glad of Julia’s companionship as they walked through the halls. She had never really thought of the building as dark before and began to admire the sheer guts of the boys who had broken in to use the gym and mutilate its floor. The school building was often open at night, of course, for parents’ meetings, dances, plays, concerts, but then the lobby, stairs, and elevators were lit in the ordinary way so that the whole place looked quite as usual, though without the children screaming up and down the halls.

“Lucky you weren’t having a parents’ meeting when whatever happened happened,” Kate said, more to hear her own, or any, voice, than because it seemed to her a particularly pertinent remark.

“If there had been a parents’ meeting this wouldn’t have happened. It had to be a night when the building was closed, you see.”

“Oh,” Kate said, who didn’t see but supposed she soon would. “Why do you have parents’ meetings at night?” she asked. “I thought the mothers always came in the afternoon and were fed tea and well-bred cookies afterward, to revive them.”

“We’ve been doing this for years now,” Julia said, “in the happy thought that fathers want to attend too and are, of course, far too busy with the important things of the world to spare afternoon hours.” Julia’s voice trailed off as they reached Miss Tyringham’s office.

“Simply let it ring,” Miss Tyringham was saying. “Just plug my line, though, in case I have to make a call. You might know,” she added to Julia, “that someone
would see the ambulance and call to inquire what the crisis was, if any. I’ve always been most pleased with the way the Theban mothers keep in touch with us if they’ve got the slightest worry, but tonight I could have done without any curiosity. The school is supposed to be closed at this hour, and we will simply act as though it were closed.”