The Theban Mysteries Read Free Page A

usually sufficed to achieve some change in demeanor.
    For a while. But, by 1968, some students were ready to fling out of school in spite of any threats, parental or scholastic. At the Theban, the esprit de corps held, for the most part. Miss Tyringham, firm and cheerful as ever, coped with pants in school (she ignored them), drugs (she gave the students and their parents the facts in the clearest, least moralistic way), the black revolution (she had foreseen that), and the demands for coeducation (in regular meetings with the headmaster of the boys’ school Kate’s nephews attended she explored the situation, emerging from time to time with enigmatic reports; whether she was considering coeducation or stalling, no one quite knew).
    What she could not cope with was the Vietnam War. Whether the history of the United States would have been fundamentally different without that war is a question scarcely worth asking now. What Miss Tyringham knew was that it had driven apart the generations and political parties of the Theban as no other crisis had ever done. Students began shouting one another down in assembly, greatly offending the older faculty, who had always assumed the practice of Jeffersonian democracy, the right of everyone to be heard. On Moratorium Days, the students refused to come to school. Miss Tyringham kept the school open as a center for discussion and petition writing, for or against the war (but very few were for it). She had already begun a radical curriculum reform, with Julia Stratemayer in charge; the school carried on. But, like everyone else in the country during the early months of 1970, Miss Tyringham was feeling the strain. This wasthe situation into which Kate walked on a suspiciously mild February day, the sort that promises spring as beguilingly as an incurable philanderer promises fidelity.
    “Well, we
are
glad to see you,” Miss Tyringham said, welcoming Kate into the head’s office. The holy of holies, Kate thought. She could remember having been there only three times during her student days. Once when, as a member of the student government, she had been called to an important conference to discuss, not whether the students should be allowed to run the school and hire the faculty, which was the sort of thing that came up now, but whether the students could be sufficiently interested in their own affairs to justify any student government at all. Then, she had been in the office with her parents to discuss her college application; Miss Tyringham’s predecessor had managed, with infinite grace, to talk Kate’s parents out of Vassar (where her mother had gone) as she had three years earlier helped Kate talk them out of Milton Academy. Kate mentioned the three visits to Miss Tyringham. “And here I am now,” she added, “to discuss Antigone. Did you know that the President of Princeton wrote a book on the imagery in the
Antigone
? In quieter, bygone days, of course.”
    “Did he indeed? I hope he is not the last college president this country has who is capable of doing that. Do you know, we shall actually be sending some graduates to Princeton this year? What exciting times we live in, as I keep trying to persuade the older parents, who wonder, in all the rapid change, if they may not outlive the earth itself. Our oldest living graduate mentioned to me recently that in her youth there were noautomobiles to speak of, and now we have gone to the moon. I could not help rejoining that in her youth the Long Island Railroad was somewhat speedier than it is today, and the letters were delivered in half the time. None of that’s important, of course. What matters is that we are today a society that must, whether we want it or not, be willing to learn from the young. That’s a bitter pill for most people my age to swallow.”
    “If we haven’t anything to teach, why are we teaching?” Kate asked.
    Miss Tyringham leaned back in her chair, looked upward, and smiled—a smile as beautiful as any