Free The Headmaster's Dilemma by Louis Auchincloss Page A

Caroline was persuaded that the best thing for her and her children was to remain under the protection of the Spencers and their wealth. In a lawsuit Donald would have fought her with all his clout and money; in a reconciliation he would leave her strictly alone and support her in style. What else could she do?
    Well, she could drink, and that, alas, she did. She isolated herself more and more from her friends and became a shadowy figure rarely seen and talked about with shaken heads. She suffered from recurrent severe depressions and spent much of her time in a psychiatrist's office. Adelaide saw a great deal of her and kept her from going seriously off the tracks. The two children, who had inherited a good slice of their father's toughness, did surprisingly well with all the governesses and tutors and servants that money could supply. Even Donald, guided more and more by a mother whom his domestic crisis had hoisted into a position of necessary supervision, took a more proper paternal interest in them, and their mother faded into a frail ailing presence that could be kissed in the morning and forgotten during the day.
    Donald was too clear an observer not to feel the contrast of the failure of his home life with the success of his business one, nor could he escape the bleak recognition that the only common denominator between the two was the hostility he had incurred in both. He was sensitive enough to be hurt by this, and he found himself looking around for some way or ways to establish a more favorable reputation for his name and career. Why should a man like Michael Sayre get all the glory in a world largely managed by men like Donald? Donald wanted a good name; he wanted people to point to his good works. Had not his creed been that money could buy anything? Why should it not buy him that? Philanthropy had always a good name, and what bought it but money?
    The obvious object of his bounty was Averhill. Any gift to his alma mater, Harvard, would be lost in the sea of that institution's vast wealth. Moreover he had a definitive nostalgia for his years at preparatory school. The one thing in his life that he could romanticize was his own gallant fight to rise from a state of ridicule and persecution to a prefectship, all accomplished by his own willpower and without the aid of a penny of the family fortune. The school had several rich trustees but none who were able or willing to do as much as he. As a big enough donor he might identify his own name with that of the academy.
    The election of Michael to the headmastership had been an ugly shock to Donald, as he saw his own prospect of fame dimmed in relation to the shining reputation of this new star in the field of education. The only practical way of handling the situation was to ally himself to the new head in such manner as to create the illusion that they constituted an equal partnership. Everyone knew that they had been fellow formmates—could the myth not be spread that the board chairman and the headmaster had been joined in a lifelong union dedicated to the growth and glory of Averhill?
    It had not, however, worked out that way. Donald had not foreseen the sweeping changes that Michael would inaugurate, the credit for which could not be attributed to anyone but the headmaster. Donald himself had been strongly opposed to almost all of them. He hated the admission of girls to the student body, the loss of preference for the sons of graduates, the increase of racial and religious diversity, the general relaxation of discipline, the presence of what he considered radicals on the faculty. He firmly believed in an Averhill as much as possible like the one he had attended. He had suffered a loss of prestige in the defeats he had met opposing these measures from a board that seemed as hypnotized by the headmaster as the children of Hamelin by the Pied Piper. It had been to regain his authority over the trustees that he had devised his great sports plan. And now the