GUY WHO SAYS HIS SPECIALTY IS MAKING DECISIONS. ONCE HE STARTS MAKING THOSE DECISIONS, HE'LL DRIVE EVERYONE CRAZY-WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE SEES WHAT BRILLIANT DECISIONS THE GUY COMES UP WITH! BUT RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE THINKS SOMEONE WHO MAKES DECISIONS IS JUST WHAT WE NEED. RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE'S A SUCKER FOR A DECISION-MAKER,' Owen wrote. 'WHAT GRAVESEND NEEDS IS A HEADMASTER WITH A STRONG EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND; MR. WHITE'S BACKGROUND IS MEAT.' There was more, and it was worse. Owen suggested that someone check into the admissions policy at the small private day school in Lake Forest; were there any Jews or blacks in Mr. White's school? Mr. Early, in his capacity as faculty adviser to The Grave, killed the column; the part about the faculty being 'TYPICAL TEACHERS-INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY' ... that was what forced Mr. Early's hand. Dan Needham agreed that the column should have been killed.
'You can't imply that someone is a racist or an anti-Semite, Owen,' Dan told him. 'You have to have proof.'
Owen sulked about such a stern rejection from The Grave; but he took Dan's advice seriously. He talked to the Gravesend students who came from Lake Forest, Illinois; he encouraged them to write to their mothers and fathers and urge them to inquire about the admissions policy at Mr. White's school. The parents could pretend they were considering the school for their children; they could even ask directly if their children were going to be rubbing shoulders with blacks or Jews. The result-the unhappily second- and thirdhand information-was typically unclear; the parents were told that the school had 'no specific admissions policy''; they were also told that the school had no blacks or Jews. Dan Needham had his own story about meeting Randy White; that was after White was offered the job. It was a beautiful spring day-the forsythia and the lilacs were in blossom-and Dan Needham was walking in the main quadrangle with Randy White and his wife, Sam; it was Sam's first visit to the school, and she was interested in the theater. Almost immediately upon the Whites' arrival, Mr. White made his decision to accept the headmastership. Dan said the school had never looked prettier. The grass was trim and a spring-green color, but it had not been mowed so recently that it looked shorn; the ivy was glossy against the red-brick buildings, and the arborvitae and the privet hedges that outlined the quadrangle paths stood in uniform, dark-green contrast to the few, bright-yellow dandelions. Dan let the new headmaster maul the fingers of his right hand; Dan looked into the pretty-blonde blandness of Sam's vacant, detached smile.
'Look at those dandelions, dear,' said Randolph White.
' 'They should be ripped out by their roots,'' Mrs. White said decisively.
' 'They should, they should-and they will be!'' said the new headmaster. Dan confessed to Owen and me that the Whites had given him the shivers.
'YOU THINK THEY GIVE YOU THE SHIVERS NOW,' Owen said. 'JUST WAIT UNTIL HE STARTS MAKING <i DECISIONS'.' Toronto: May , -another gorgeous day, sunny and cool; Mrs. Brocklebank and others of my neighbors who were attacking their dandelions, yesterday, are having a go at their lawns today. It smells as fresh as a farm along Russell Hill Road and Lonsdale Road. I read The Globe and Mail again, but I was good; I didn't bring it to school with me, and I re-
solved that I would not discuss the sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the diversion of the profits to the Nicaraguan rebels-or the gift from the sultan of Brunei that was supposed to help support the rebels but was instead transferred to the wrong account in a Swiss bank. A ten-million-dollar 'mistake'! The Globe and Mail said: 'Brunei was only one foreign country approached during the Reagan Administration's attempt to find financial support for the contras after Congress forbade any money's being spent on their behalf by the U.S. Government.' But in my Grade English class, the ever-clever Claire Clooney read that sentence aloud to the class and then asked me if I didn't think it was 'the awk-wardest sentence alive.'
I have encouraged the girls to find clumsy sentences in newspapers and magazines, and to bring them into class for our hearty ridicule-and that bit about 'any money's being spent' is enough to turn an English teacher's eyeballs a blank shade of pencil-gray-but I knew that Claire Clooney was trying to get me started; I resisted the bait. It is that time in the spring term when the minds of the Grade girls are elsewhere, and I reminded them that-yesterday- we had not traveled sufficiently far in our perusal of Chapter Three of The Great Gatsby; that the class had bogged down in a mire of interpretations regarding the 'quality of eternal reassurance' in Gatsby's smile; and that we'd wasted more valuable time trying to grasp the meaning of Jordan Baker exhibiting 'an urban distaste for the concrete.' Claire Clooney, I might add, has such a general 'distaste for the concrete' that she confused Daisy Buchanan with Myrtle Wilson. I suggested that mistaking a wife for a mistress was of more dire substance than a slip of the tongue. I suspect that Claire Clooney is too clever for an error of this magnitude; that, yesterday, she had not read past Chapter One; and that, today-by her ploy of distracting me with the news-she was not finished with Chapter Four.
'Here's another one, Mr. Wheelwright,' Claire Clooney said, continuing her merciless attack on The Globe and Mail. 'This is the second-awkwardest sentence alive,' she said. 'Get this: 'Mr. Reagan denied yesterday that he had solicited third-country aid for the rebels, as Mr. McFarlane had said on Monday.' That's some dangling clunker there, isn't it?'' Claire Clooney asked me. 'I like that, 'as Mr. McFarlane had said'- it's just like tacked on to the sentence!' she cried.
'Is it 'tike tacked on' or is it tacked on?' I asked her. She smiled; the other girls tittered. They were not going to get me to blow a forty-minute class on Ronald Reagan. But I had to keep my hands under the desk-my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate
