The Theban Mysteries Read Free

Theban had been unique in yet another way: it had accepted Jews. Only the right Jews, of course, the ones who were one day to be dubbed “our crowd”; nonetheless, in this as in other actions, Matthias Theban was far ahead of his day. The school’s graduating classes were sprinkled with Warburgs, Schiffs, Loebs, and Guggenheims; later, after the Second World War, when even Spence, Chapin, and Miss Hewitt’s felt the need to welcome a few Jews, the Theban found itself to have been revolutionary without ever losing its reputation for conservatism: a neat trick.
    But not so neat as combining educational wisdom with the finer points of real-estate speculation. The Theban’s first building, by the time it had been outgrown and the neighborhood had become too commercial, was sold for many times what it had cost: the profits built the new building and swelled the endowment fund. After Matthias Theban’s death, the school once again called his name blessed: their second building, standing on the spot now occupied by the Biltmore, easily paid for the third and current home of the school in the East Seventies.
    Kate had been in the lower school of the Theban at the end of the Depression, the middle school during World War II, the upper school during the Cold War and the frenzied return to normal. Through all these cataclysms the Theban stood firm and steady. It made its concessions, of course: even for the Fanslers, the Guggenheims, and the Rockefellers there were concessions to be made. But nothing essential changed. Kate left the Theban before the fifties, when all over the country students, called “the silent generation,” conformed; a demagogue reduced the nation to a gaggle of witch hunters; and upper-class young ladies moved to the suburbs, had several children, and talked about their feminine role.
    It was Miss Tyringham who kept the Theban alive in the fifties. She took no political stands—such was not the policy of Theban heads. But she confirmed, in her downright, cheerful way, that change was possible. She knew that schools do not die; they pass from being vigorous to being fossils without ever noticing the transition. This passage Miss Tyringham prevented before anyone else had considered it. She subtly altered theschool’s acceptances away from the predominance of old money toward those who were nouveaux riches enough still to be vigorous. Naturally she made some mistakes, and the Theban graduated the occasional girl more vulgar than one might have wished; without risks, as she knew, there were no gains. Her faculty began to shift its average age from fifty-five to thirty-five; she encouraged the hiring of young married women, encouraged them to teach through their pregnancies, found substitutes for them during their deliveries, and cheered them upon their early return. She added contemporary literature and history to the curriculum long before that became fashionable, introduced Spanish as an alternative language to French in a city now heavily Puerto Rican, recruited for the school numbers of black girls, and bullied the trustees into providing scholarships for them—all before Martin Luther King had begun boycotting the buses in Montgomery. Honoring ideas from her faculty, she nurtured an extraordinary esprit de corps while most private schools, allowing a patina of chilly courtesy to form, unsuccessfully disguised from students the hostilities which divided the faculty into contending factions. Miss Tyringham was, in short, a genius at her job.
    Yet not even an administrative genius could have been prepared for the last half of the sixties. Everyone was unprepared, but—some were less unprepared than others. As a whole, the private schools weathered the storm through the use of cautious blackmail: their waiting lists were long, the idea of public school unthinkable. A suggestion that if Johnny or Susy did not behave their parents had perhaps better look for aschool more suitable to their child’s needs