“Shut up,” I said.
Mr. Harper had won his skirmish, and my leading lady had won her role. But the battle for Camelot had barely begun.
Chapter 3
God, it was a battle. It was actually fortunate for Olivia that she didn’t live in the girls’ dorm. She and her mother, the housekeeper for said dorm, shared a little stucco cottage behind the maintenance building. Haviland had a policy that the children of full-time employees, even the janitors and kitchen help, could attend the school gratis if they could meet admission requirements. Though it was a generous benefit, it extended only to tuition, not to a room in a dormitory. Since most of the eligible offspring were already housed on campus with their parents, it made sense from a financial point of view. The trouble was, social interaction at Haviland happened mostly in the dorms, which meant that the children of employees were mostly excluded. The teachers’ children, who possessed enough confidence to climb through windows at night, suffered the least, but kids like Olivia were so invisible they weren’t even shunned. If she hadn’t tried out for the musical, I might well have graduated without knowing Olivia existed.
But she did try out, even though her mother, I later learned, tried her best to talk her out of it.
“Don’t torture yourself, Livie,” she’d said when Olivia announced her plan. “You don’t have a chance against all those debutantes.” Eleanor de la Vega later told me herself that she knew her warning was futile.
“When Olivia makes her mind up,” she said, shaking her head, “forty mules can’t budge her. But I thought it was worth a try.”
A nasty little editorial in the school paper aroused my wrath. It appeared the day after Mr. Harper announced his decision. “Taco Time in Camelot,” the headline read, and even though it was against school rules to publish a story anonymously, the piece was mysteriously byline-free.
I knew who’d written it the second I saw it. Elizabeth Dunhill was the editor of the Haviland Horn, and she’d recently whipped up a tempest with another of her little masterpieces: a detailed article about how to grow, store, and smoke marijuana in a dorm room without getting caught. In 1968, it was enough to convene an emergency meeting of the board of trustees. Elizabeth, in exchange for agreeing not to submit the story to a local paper, got off with a warning, and the next day, she wore pajamas to her American history class to protest the school’s uniform requirements. I mention the latter incident to illustrate the fact that Elizabeth was not driven by principle. She just liked making a splash, and she took advantage of the immunity her powerful father gave her.
Elizabeth wasn’t unique. Most students at Haviland had been guilty of such entitled behavior at one time or another. Prep schools strive to maintain high standards and strict codes of conduct, but they can’t afford to bite the hands that pay for their science buildings. Elizabeth was attached to one of those hands. Still, I couldn’t accept the possibility that there might well be no penalty for her cruel diatribe against Olivia. If things took their accustomed course, the headmaster would give a terse little talk in morning assembly on his favorite theme: To whom much is given, much is expected. If I didn’t do something, that would be the end of it.
For the first time in my own overprivileged experience, I personally felt the sting of injustice. Olivia was so damned innocent, and she seemed so powerless to defend herself. I had never met anyone so obviously in need of a champion, and I had already been given the title. I was Lancelot, and Elizabeth Dunhill’s editorial spurred me to action.
I didn’t wait for Dr. Whitehead’s morning sermon. I was too full of righteous anger, especially when it became apparent that the majority of Haviland’s student body didn’t care a bit about Elizabeth’s racist remarks. After my history class let out, I headed straight for the headmaster’s office. I’d be late for rehearsal, but this was too important to put on hold.
Christopher Whitehead was the quintessential prep school leader, imported directly from the land of school ties and A levels. He had all the right credentials, including an accent that would make Queen Elizabeth weep with pride. On the wall behind his desk hung his Oxford diploma and a triumphal oar from his sculling days at Balliol.
Fortunately, he wasn’t an over-gentrified fop. In fact, he was a pretty good guy, and he was succeeding remarkably well guiding Haviland through the rough waters of the Vietnam era. In the good old days of the Free Speech Movement, campus unrest was as much a fact of life at elitist prep schools as it was on college campuses.
If I had been a different person, Elizabeth’s editorial might have inspired me to organize a sit-in or a noisy protest. But I was an apolitical violin player, and I wasn’t into global causes. I had never marched into a headmaster’s office unannounced before, and I could tell from Dr. Whitehead’s expression that he was just as surprised as I was.
His secretary had already left for the day, and since the door to his study was half open, I just walked straight in without knocking. Dr. Whitehead was standing with his back to the door, a wisp of smoke rising over his head. He appeared to be looking for a book on the shelf under his oar, and he didn’t hear me enter. By way of announcement, I cleared my throat.
Dr. Whitehead spun around immediately. He removed the carved meerschaum pipe from between his lips and looked at me questioningly. He was a fairly young man to have his job, not exactly Mr. Chips. He couldn’t have been much past forty, and his wavy brown hair was trendily cut in a style halfway between the Beatles and John Kennedy.
“Mr. Spencer!” he said, smiling. “Or should I say Lancelot? You sneaked up on me!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I should have knocked.”
“No, no. The door was open.” Dr. Whitehead tamped out his pipe and sat down in the leather swivel chair behind his desk. I sat down on the other side in one of the two upholstered chairs facing him. It had been quite a while since I’d been in his office. Dr. Whitehead was a hands-on, mingle-with-the-masses kind of leader. Usually if you went looking for him in his office, you wouldn’t find him there.
“What can I do for you, Spencer?” Dr. Whitehead asked. He folded his hands on the blotter in front of him and waited.
“Well, I—” I couldn’t believe it. I was stammering, and I couldn’t seem to help myself. “I—I’m really upset about the editorial in today’s Horn.”
“Oh.” Dr. Whitehead paused, then extracted a copy of the paper from a folder on his desk. “I, too, found the piece upsetting.” He paused again, and I rushed to fill the silence.
“It’s—it’s racism at its worst!” I blurted. “And we all know who wrote it! She should be expelled!”
Dr. Whitehead took his time before responding to my outburst. He looked at the paper, perused the story again. I wondered how many other people had already bent his ear about it.
“As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Spencer,” he said at last, “we do not know positively who the author is. But whoever wrote it, Mr. Kincaid should never have let it run.”
Mr. Kincaid was the Horn’s faculty adviser, and my wrath was rekindled as I realized he was going to be the fall guy.
“Elizabeth Dunhill wrote it!” I almost shouted. “Everyone knows it! She’s been boasting all day!”
Dr. Whitehead was maddening in his measured response, and I was tempted to grab his oar off the wall behind him and whack him with it.
“Calm down, Spencer,” he said. Another pause as he pushed up his wire-rims and looked me straight in the eye. “Perhaps you will enlighten me as to why you are making this your personal crusade.”
I jumped to my feet. “It should be everyone’s crusade!” I cried. “Olivia de la Vega’s civil rights have been violated! Isn’t this what Selma was for? Isn’t this what Martin Luther King is always talking about?”
Once