E. B. phoned Kelly to implore him not to sponsor any memorial service. Kelly told him none was planned. But shortly thereafter, the school’s director of alumni relations sent an e-mail inviting certain alumni to the Johannes Somary Memorial Concert at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. According to the school, Somary’s widow, a retired Horace Mann teacher, and his children, who were all alumni, “asked to communicate with their former students and classmates, and they were granted limited access to the database of alumni.” E. B., whose e-mail address was not included in that mailing, called to demand an explanation and was told that the school did not endorse the concert.

A few days later, E. B. says he wrote a letter to Archbishop Timothy Dolan explaining the situation and asking him “as the spiritual head of the Archdiocese of New York to rescind permission that has been given by the organizers of this concert to use this sacred space.” The church did not respond, he says, but the location for the concert was changed to the Great Hall in Cooper Union.

Despite all that transpired, M., the student whose encounters with Somary stretched over several years, went to his former teacher’s funeral. “I don’t know why I went,” he said. “Still, today, after the drinking and the heroin and the therapy and the battered relationships, I just can’t bring myself to fully hate the man who gave me so much.”





“Great is the truth, and it prevails.”

I have similarly conflicted feelings about Horace Mann. It was in many ways an amazing place filled with inspiring teachers and smart, funny students, with a sense of enthusiasm and possibility. Despite all I’ve since learned about it, I still look back on my years there with affection and gratitude, as do so many former students, even some who shared their harrowing stories with me. But that gratitude is part of what makes these stories so painful. We were at such a vulnerable moment in our lives — just beginning to make the transition from childhood into early adulthood, struggling to come to terms with the responsibilities of sexuality and trying to decide what we were willing to stand up for. We needed strong and consistent role models. In many cases we got them. But in too many other cases, we got models of how to abuse authority, how to manipulate trust, how to keep silent, how to fix your eyes forward.

The statement that the school sent me via the public-relations firm seems to suggest that the system worked as well as it could have. After all, Mark Wright’s and Stan Kops’s tenures at Horace Mann were brought to an end. The school provided no explanation for why the accusations in those cases were treated so differently than those against Johannes Somary. But all three of these stories have something in common: they seem like artifacts of a previous era, a time before the explosion of electronic communication and before the scandals in the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and Penn State. Today, if faculty members disappeared from campus under suspicious circumstances or if rumors were swirling about predatory teachers, students would be texting about it in real time. Outraged parents would be organizing into networks and distributing action plans. And schools would dispatch counselors to help everyone through their pain. According to the school’s statement, “Horace Mann School today has in place clearly articulated and enforced rules, regulations, policies, procedures and expectations concerning appropriate behavior within the community — including whistle-blower protections to ensure that any member of the school community can freely report alleged violations.”

Clearly Horace Mann’s policies have evolved far beyond what they were in Mark Wright’s day. National awareness of the issue has evolved, too, but we still have a long way to go. With its prestigious reputation and its network of influential alumni, Horace Mann could take a leadership position, educating other schools on how to talk about these dangers with their students and their faculty. But first it will have to acknowledge the kinds of experiences former students shared with me for this article.

A little while ago, I took my children to see the school. We sat eating ice cream on the same left-field wall I used to sit on 30 years earlier. The place has changed so much since I was a student; a wave of prerecession fortune left snazzy new facilities in every corner. But at the center of it all is still that same green diamond of manicured grass that a member of the Yankees grounds crew once helped maintain. The smell of spring’s thawing mud reminded me that baseball season was just around the corner. A razor-thin kid shagged flies, and my thoughts drifted back to Inky.