The Theban Mysteries by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

draftee has the right to distinguish between wars—a sticky point if there ever was one. In my opinion, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think your brother is handling this in the worst possible way. But at least he’s standing by the truth as he sees it, you’ve got to give him that, and so is his son. I’d be likelier to help the kid slip through the net while agreeing with him that he was right in principle—but I always was unfortunately given to the comfortable way of doing things.”
    “Nonsense. You’d never have married me if you were. I understand why the Theban is on the spot—why all schools are. The students want them to be in the vanguard of social progress, and the parents and faculty see it as their duty to defend the rearguard. A hell of a choice, and I see the students’ point, but as Dorothy Sayers mentioned somewhere, all epic actions are fought in the rearguard, at Roncevaux and Thermopylae.”
    “Writers prefer rearguard battles—the issues are clear and tragic. In life, however, I suspect the important actions, though they will never make an epic, are fought in the beginning, before anybody knows what the battle’s all about.”
    “No doubt you’re right, damn it. If I like the battles which are epic, what is rearguard me doing in a seminar room with the vanguard young? Answer me that.”
    “What you need,” Reed said, “is to go home to bed.”
    “Not so soon after dinner, as the lady said in
Private
Lives
,” Kate responded, looking pleased with herself for the first time that evening.
    Monday morning found Kate, with the calm the professional always finds in his own arena, however anxious he may have been before, seated at the head of the table in the seminar room with the students seated on each side—like a king dining with the regiment, Kate thought. The challenging verse was gone from the wall.
    “What,” Kate asked, as an opening remark, “has become of the poem on the wall?” This, while certainly plunging
in medias res
, as the ancients recommended, left something to be desired as a conversation opener.
    The girls looked at one another, not turning their heads but shifting their eyes back and forth in a most disconcerting way. “We had hoped,” one of the girls said—she was clearly used to speaking for the group when a spokesman was required—“that you had not seen it. It was thought better of and removed.”
    “And your name?” Kate asked. “We might as well get that established. I’ll read the list of names given to me, and you each claim your own. O.K.?”
    “I’m Freemond Oliver,” the girl who had spoken said.
    “Ah,” Kate said, in what she trusted were sepulchral tones. “Angelica Jablon?”
    “Here.” The girl who spoke had an expressive face and heavy, curly hair. She looked outspoken, unhappy, unsure of herself and, Kate was pleased to notice, kind.
Engagé
fighters for the right—that is, for the left—were often, in Kate’s experience, remarkably brutal.
    “Irene Rexton.”
    “Here.” A remarkably pretty girl, demure in appearance, with a face so lovely and appealing that one decided, immediately and quite unfairly, that she was probably brainless. Her long blond hair fell over her face and she languidly pushed it back behind her ears with a gesture more seductive than she could possibly have realized. So, at least, Kate hoped.
    “Betsy Stark.” Ah, thought Kate, the comedy-of-manners child. Now why should I have expected her to look like Katharine Hepburn?—an association of ideas, no doubt. It was, perhaps, an association that had occurred to Betsy Stark, who was a most unpretty girl, but of the sort who does not try to improve her natural endowments with a too lavish application of the current fads in makeup or hair style. Whatever her commitment to wit, she had decided to try to accept herself as she was, which Kate thought interesting. She was the only girl in the room whose face was innocent of eye makeup; in my day, Kate