Desperate Measures

3

As the door was finally closed, Meecham said, an edge in his voice, “What do you really want?”

“Just what we told you-to know your father’s attitude toward Grollier and the grand counselors,” Pittman said.

“If you’re aware that my father never graduated from Grollier, that he dropped out in his junior year and went to another school, it must be obvious to you that he had ambivalent feelings.”

“Did he ever say anything about one of his teachers? Duncan Kline?”

Meecham’s gaze became piercingly direct. “This has nothing to do with a book about education.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not here because you’re doing a history of Grollier.” Meecham stood abruptly. “You know about Grollier. You keep talking around the subject, hinting about it, but you know.”

“I don’t understand,” Pittman said.

“Otherwise, you wouldn’t have mentioned Duncan Kline.”

“He taught the political science class that your father dropped out of.”

“The man was perverted.”

Pittman had taken a sip from his martini. Surprised by Meecham’s comment, he swallowed hard. “Perverted?”

“You mean you actually don’t know?” Meecham looked threatened, as if he’d let down his defenses.

“We know something happened there,” Pittman said. “Something traumatic enough to make Jonathan Millgate obsessed about it, even all these years later, on his deathbed.”

“I can’t speak for Jonathan Millgate. All I know is what my father told me when I suggested that I send my own boys to Grollier. It was one of the few times he ever showed open emotion. He told me that under no circumstances was I to send his grandsons there. I was to send them to a decent school, a place like Groton, from where my father had eventually graduated and then gone to Yale.”

“But why did he dislike Grollier so much?” Jill asked.

Meecham scowled at the floor, debating with himself. “Maybe it’s time.” He looked up. “Maybe Grollier hasn’t changed. Someone should have done something long ago to make sure it stopped.”

“To make sure what stopped?”

Meecham nervously tapped his fingers against his martini glass. “This is all off the record.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“It’s the way it has to be.” Meecham seemed to struggle with himself in order to say the words. “Duncan Kline was a pedophile.”

Pittman stared.

After further painful hesitation, Meecham continued. “A boy’s prep school was a perfect environment for him. From what my father told me, I gather that Duncan Kline was a brilliant instructor, quick, amusing, encouraging, the sort of charismatic figure who attracts the brightest of students. Apparently he was also an athlete, particularly when it came to rowing. His policy was to assess each incoming class, to select the most promising boys, a very small group, a half dozen or so, and then to nurture them throughout their four years at Grollier. I suspect that he also chose them on the basis of how emotionally distant they were from their parents, how keenly they needed a substitute father. Certainly my father was never close to his father. Duncan Kline encouraged them to take small private seminars from him. He trained them to be oarsmen and to outdistance the best official Grollier team. He gradually became more and more intimate with them, until by their junior year… As I said, one group from each incoming class. That way, as one group graduated and went on to college, another was there to take that group’s place.”

Pittman felt sick.

His face tight with emotion, Meecham took a long sip from his martini. “My father rejected Kline’s advances. Kline backed off. But soon he came back and persisted in making advances. This time, when my father rejected him, Kline was either so indignant or else frightened of being exposed that he made academic life intolerable for my father, giving him impossible assignments, ridiculing him at every opportunity. My father’s grades declined. So did his morale. And his health. Apparently he had some kind of collapse at home during the Easter break of his junior year. He never went back to Grollier.”

Pittman couldn’t keep dismay from his voice. “But didn’t your father’s parents do anything about Duncan Kline?”

“Do what?” Meecham shook his head, puzzled. “What would you have had them do?”

“They should have reported Kline to the authorities. They should have reported the whole mess to the headmaster of the school.”

Meecham looked at Pittman as if he’d gone insane.

“Reported…? You obviously don’t grasp the situation. This happened in the early 1930s. The time was repressive. I assure you that topics such as child molestation were definitely not considered fit for conversation. Not in polite society. That type of sordidness existed. Everyone tacitly knew that. But surely it didn’t occur often, and when it did, it happened to other people, lesser people, unrefined, crass people who were economic and moral inferiors.”

“Dear Lord,” Pittman said.

Meecham looked more disturbed as he took another long sip from his martini. “That was the prevailing opinion of the time. Grollier boasts governors, senators, congressmen, even a President of the United States among its distinguished alumni. For a student to claim that sexual abuse occurred on a regular basis at that school would have been unthinkable. So many reputations would have been at stake that the authorities would never have treated the charge seriously. They would have been forced to conclude that the student was grievously mistaken, that he was making such an outrageous accusation because he needed to blame someone for his poor grades. As a matter of fact, when my father told his father what was happening at Grollier, his father slapped him, called him a liar, and told him never to repeat such filth again.”

Pittman was astonished.

“So my father kept it a secret and never told another person until I suggested to him that Grollier might be a good prep school for my sons.”

“But surely the other students would have supported your father’s claim,” Pittman said.

“Would they have? Or would their parents ever have allowed them to be subjected to questions of such a gross nature? I wonder. In any case, it’s a moot issue. The matter never got that far.”

Her blue eyes intense, Jill leaned forward. “Are we to assume that Duncan Kline made advances to the grand counselors, also? That those advances were accepted?”

Meecham stared at his martini glass. “They were Duncan Kline’s chosen few, and they did continue to take his seminars. By the time my father told me this-my sons went to prep school in the mid-seventies-it was too late to do anything about Kline himself. He died in the early fifties. By then he’d retired from Grollier and had a place here in Boston. My father said that one of the happiest days of his life was when he read Kline’s obituary. Believe me, my father had very few happy days.”

Meecham finished his martini and frowned toward the pitcher as if he could use another drink. “I don’t know what you’ve set out to prove, but if there were other instructors like Kline at Grollier and if their counterparts still teach there and if your book exposes them, we’ve both done some good.”

Suspecting something, Pittman asked, “Would you be willing to be quoted?”

Meecham reacted sharply. “Of course not. Do you think I’d want that kind of public attention? I told you before, this conversation is strictly off the record. I’m just pointing you in the right direction. Surely someone else would be willing to substantiate what I’ve told you. Ask the grand counselors.” Meecham looked bitterly amused. “See how willing they’d be to go on record.”

“When Jonathan Millgate was in intensive care, he told his nurse, ‘Duncan. The snow. Grollier.’ What do you suppose he meant by the reference to snow?”

“I have no idea. Certainly my father never mentioned anything that linked Duncan Kline with snow.”

“It’s a slang expression for-Could it be a reference to cocaine?”

“Again, I have no idea. Was that expression even used back in the early thirties? Would someone as distinguished as Jonathan Millgate reduce himself to that type of language?”

Pittman shrugged in discouragement, then turned, hearing a knock on the door.

Frederick stepped in. “Mr. Meecham, two policemen are at the door.”