The Headmaster's Dilemma by Louis Auchincloss Page B

widower paternal grandfather, and when the old gentleman had died his mother, the lovely Adelaide, had stripped off the hieroglyphics and redecorated the interior in elegant French eighteenth-century style, satisfying her long frustrated fine taste. His father, Howard, though totally subservient and under the spell while he lived off his own father, the famous banker Lloyd Spencer, whose bedroom the motherless boy had shared up to his own marriage, had nonetheless, on Lloyd's death, transferred much of this loyalty and devotion to his stronger-minded mate. He had insisted on retaining, however, the management of their oldest boy, whose development and education he tightly controlled, leaving her virtual sole charge of the two younger boys, who though hearty and handsome, shared little of the brains or aggressive manners of their plainer, stouter elder brother whom they were bullied into obeying.
    Howard Spencer, a charming, kindly man who seemed to apologize to the world for being so wealthy, suffered from the peculiar obsession that his destined role in life was to be the needed link between his tycoon father and his future tycoon oldest son. For this, by efforts almost heroic, he had turned himself away from the publishing career of which he had dreamed and become instead the competent if not brilliant chairman of the great bank his father had founded with the duty to pass it on intact to his son. But if he had supplemented whatever he lacked as a banker with his fine selection of able officers, he had shown less judgment in his indulgence of every quirk of his chosen heir. It can be argued in his favor that he spotted early the remarkable talents of the boy whom he took with him on all his business trips to check on companies his bank underwrote: the boy's aptitude for accounting, his quick grasp of administrative problems, his imaginative concept of the industrial field. But less can be said for his theory that a natural genius should be left undisturbed to develop as it would.
    Donald was the constant companion of a father who bought him everything he wanted and applauded his every idea. Not only was he taken on the business trips, but on cruises on the family yacht he shared the huge paternal cabin (his mother suffered from sea sickness and remained happily ashore) and relayed to the captain his father's orders, which he sometimes changed to suit himself. Even after the younger brothers had developed the muscle to oppose him physically, the habit of obedience and their father's unfailing support of him quelled any but silent retaliation. And at day school in the city Donald was spared any violence that his arrogance aroused in his classmates by the fact that they were at all times in a closely supervised classroom or playground.
    Adelaide was always aware that her eldest son needed disciplining, but she found her usually compliant husband as steel in this area, and she finally renounced interference and concentrated her love and care on the younger boys, whom she adored and whose poor performance in school she sought to improve by her own tutoring at home. The contrast of Donald's high grades was painful to her, and there began to develop between mother and son a kind of mute hostility of which only the two of them were aware. Donald knew that the household contained one critic whom he could never impress, and he resented it, and Adelaide, ashamed of a dislike that seemed unnatural to the mother in her, tried to convince herself that she would love the boy as soon as he was straightened out by a boarding school and that her recommendation of his being sent to one was for his good and not her own.
    Indeed it took some persuasion, for Howard balked at the idea of separating himself from his favored child. What brought him around in the end was the argument offered by friends in the Downtown Association, where he regularly lunched, that a boy who hadn't been to an acceptable prep school would be socially handicapped at an