The Headmaster's Wife (15 page)

Mark went into the bathroom and shut the door. Gregor waited to hear the sound of the shower going on. When he did hear it, he went around the side of the bed to where the phone was and took it off the hook. It was a good thing that it was almost impossible to hear human speech over the sound of running water. He got out his address book and flipped through it. He did not want to call room service right off.

The phone was picked up on the other end by a secretary, which he had been expecting. People like Elizabeth Toliver did not answer their own phones, especially in the middle of a working day when they were in their offices.

“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “If Liz is available, I'd appreciate it very much if she'd talk to me. Tell her I'm up in Windsor, Massachusetts, and I've got something to tell her about Mark.”

The secretary made all the right noises, and Gregor sat back to wait until Liz picked up. He hoped Mark was going to take a very long shower.

Barrett House was a girls' dorm, and under most circumstances Marta Coelho found it unbearable. Today, with classes called off and an edict come down from on high that they were all supposed to spend the afternoon in their offices “making themselves available” to “any student in need,” she thought it was a kind of haven. Marta did not like being in her office when she had no papers to grade. She couldn't sit there reading the way some of the other faculty did, and she was no good at inventing activities for herself to do during office hours. Some teachers just forced appointments, calling out one student or the other and insisting that he had to show up and be seen, or scheduling makeup quizzes and exams so that they coincided with the time spent sitting at their desks. Still other teachers had students who actually wanted to visit. Marta didn't know what to think about that. She had always expected to be a good teacher. She was very competent in her field. Even stuck here in the suburbs of Boston in this joke of a job she had written two papers and submitted them to conferences for the summer. She tried to keep out of her mind the fact that institutions mattered. No matter how good her papers were, they would be judged wanting next to papers from faculty at colleges and universities and even more wanting next to those from faculty at
good
collegesand universities. Academia was a hierarchy. It was no wonder that so many academics were obsessed with gender, race, and especially class. They lived in the only caste society in America. The stratification was far worse on campuses and among them than it would ever be in America at large. Marta knew because she had come from the bottom of that particular pyramid in the real world, and yet she had been able to negotiate it. There was no way to negotiate this. Judgment came down from on high. You were “placed,” and depending on where you were placed, you knew what you were allowed to expect. The knowledge made her skin crawl, but she could never completely suppress it.
It wasn't fair.
That was the problem. That was the kind of thing that kept going through her head.
It wasn't fair
—as if she were a four-year-old with a problem on the playground instead of a grown-up with a Ph.D. and a job, a life, and a future. She had to keep telling herself that. She had a future, even if it wasn't a future she much wanted to reach.

The problem was this: it was four o'clock in the afternoon, and Ridenour Library was deserted. The campus was not much livelier. Marta was sure that if she went over to the Student Center she would find people in the cafeteria and the computer rooms, but they were not the people she wanted to see. They were students, or the kind of faculty who liked to prowl student hangouts and scold the people they found about wasting their time. Marta often felt the urge to scold herself, but she held back. She didn't like to get into face-to-face conflicts with kids whose parents could buy and sell the endowment. She didn't like face-to-face conflicts with anyone. Today she was particularly worried about face-to-face conflicts, or anything else, with Mark DeAvecca because Mark DeAvecca was making her feel guilty. Of course she never wanted face-to-face anything with Mark. He made her so angry; she had a hard time not spitting at him. Now, though, he could genuinely claim to be distraught. Anybody would have been distraught to find what he'd found in his room. Marta thought she herself would have been completely out of her mind for weeks. Sometimes she evenimagined it: Michael with his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging out. That was what people had been saying on campus for days. Of course none of them had been there, except for Mark and a couple of the students on his dorm floor, and the faculty houseparents, and the police, and the administrators.
Christ
Marta thought,
there must have been a crowd.
It wasn't any of those people who were telling stories about what Michael had looked like though. Mark wasn't telling stories. Mark wasn't talking to anybody at all; and Marta had heard, from more than one other faculty member, that he had even stopped the restless roaming around campus that had driven them all so crazy.

“It's like he's gone into a cocoon,” Claire Hadderly had said, leaning against the coffee cart in the faculty lounge at the end of this very corridor. “Maybe when he emerges, he'll be a butterfly that doesn't stink.”

He still stinks,
Marta thought. She had seen him this morning, walking across the quad by himself and looking for god only knew what. He was so aimless. He was so useless, really. If she had been a different sort of person, with different priorities, she would have wanted to shake him.

Now she walked out of her office into the corridor and listened. It sounded as if half of everybody had gone home. James Hallwood was still in his office. Marta could hear the sound of opera coming out his open door. It wasn't turned up full blast the way it often was when he was in his apartment—all the students in his house complained about it—but it was clear enough so that Marta could even identify the opera under way. It was
Aida,
with Leontyne Price in the lead, singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. James would call it a “venerable recording,” and then explain why it was so much better than the more modern recordings made in Germany and Spain. That had been among the hardest things she had ever had to learn. It wasn't enough to prefer opera and classical to hip-hop and early sixties movie music, or Italian films to Hollywood blockbusters, or serious literature to best sellers. You had to be able to distinguish between even the supposedly important. You had to prefer Paganini to Beethoven, Leontyne Price in
Aida
to Beverly Sills in
Aida,
the novels of Paul Auster to the novels of Jonathan Franzen. Taste was an intricate web, and the first rule for surviving inside it was never to admit that you knew you were talking about “taste.”

Marta went back into her office. Her books were neatly stacked on her desk. Her correcting was arranged in folders. There was nothing she needed to do about either. The rest of the week stretched in front of her like an abyss. She hated having time to think. She put the correcting folders into her cordovan leather tote bag and got her coat off the back of her chair. If she'd seen herself walking down Main Street in Windsor, she would have dismissed herself as being just another one of those NPR ladies, those women who infested every upscale suburb on the East Coast. High boots with stack heels. Long, wool skirt in the winter that changed to a long, cotton one with a print in every other season. Good cashmere twinset under a good wool coat. In spring and summer, the twinset would be made of heavy cotton, in carefully calibrated colors. This was a uniform, just as the fondness for opera and Paul Auster was a uniform. It was important to have your cotton sweaters in watermelon and teal instead of red and blue.

I'm driving myself crazy,
Marta thought. She slung her tote bag over her arm and went out, down the corridor toward the front of the library where the door opened onto the quad. She thought about the night Michael had died and about Alice Makepeace going out the wrong door when she said she was going home. She let herself into the big, open front foyer and waved to the women at the desk. She could never remember their names, although she'd probably talked to both of them dozens of times, in the library and out. She went out the front door into the quad. It looked deserted. The lights were on along the pathways. It was already getting dark.

If she went back to her apartment now, she'd have one ofthose nights when she just wanted to throw something, hit something, do something. She did not understand people like Michael Feyre, who committed suicide, but she did understand people who committed murder. She could cheerfully have murdered two dozen of the students on this campus and called the world a better place for it.

There were lights on in some of the faculty apartments. She stopped where she was and looked toward Martinson House, the house she herself had always wanted to live in because it was closest to the library's front door and the largest and most elaborate in its design. Not only were the lights in Philip Candor's room on, she could see Philip himself pacing back and forth in his living room, his head bopping from side to side. He wouldn't be listening to opera either. He wouldn't even be listening to the Beatles or Chuck Berry, who had become the standard guilty pleasures for people who taught in places like Windsor Academy. That was the power of the Baby Boom. There were so many of them, they could incorporate their music even into the halls of Intelligent Taste.

Marta did not stop to wonder why, when she had a problem or needed to feel steadied in a storm, she always went to Philip Candor. She didn't stop to wonder why everybody on campus went to Philip in the same circumstances, so that he served as the unofficial anchor of Windsor Academy. It had been going on for so long, it felt natural. Philip Candor was a very steady and straightforward person.

She went up the front steps of Martinson House and into the hall. She went down the back hall and stopped at Philip's door. He was listening, she thought, to Eminem. She only knew it was Eminem because Philip had once told her.

She knocked twice and waited. The music was not turned up very high. She was sure he could hear her. Then again Philip sometimes didn't answer if he didn't want to answer.

The music stopped. The door opened. Philip looked out. He was, Marta thought, the calmest person she had ever known.

He stepped back and held the door all the way open.

“Marta,” he said, “don't tell me you're worried about Gregor Demarkian, too.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” Philip closed the door behind her. “I've had a few visits today, that's all. I thought you must have been hanging out in the faculty lounge with practically everybody else. Can I get you some coffee? Or tea. I've got herb tea, if you want it.”

“Oh, yes,” Marta said. “I would like herb tea. Camomile, if you have it.”

“I always have it.”

“I don't like the faculty lounge,” Marta said, sitting on the edge of the couch. There were two things you learned early in your acquaintance with Philip Candor. You didn't sit in his favorite chair, and you didn't ask him to put out his cigarette in his own apartment. He had a cigarette going now. He always had one going.

“I don't like the faculty lounge much myself,” he said. “They don't let me smoke there, but that can't be your problem.”

“No, no, of course not. It's just—I don't know. I feel on display, as if I had to put on a performance: dedicated prep school teacher with all the right attitudes.”

“So what's the problem? Don't you have all the right attitudes?”

“I don't know,” Marta said. “Maybe not. Sometimes I just get so angry here I don't know what to do with myself. I mean, here's this beautiful school, with every possible facility, and there are all these kids, with parents with money and with opportunities I couldn't have dreamed of when I was their age, and, I don't know. So many of them don't deserve it. I would have killed for a place like this when I was their age. I didn't even know places like this existed.”

Philip came back with a teacup and a small plate to put it on instead of a saucer. Marta didn't bother to be surprised. Philip always had hot water ready and cookies from the bakery on Main Street. If he'd had a house of his own instead of a faculty apartment, he'd have had a fire in the fireplace, too.

They weren't allowed to light fires in the fireplaces of the faculty apartments, although some people did it. It caused too much havoc with the fire insurance.

Marta put her teacup down on the coffee table. It took at least five minutes before it tasted like anything. “The thing is,” she said, “I was wondering. They really are sure that Michael Feyre committed suicide, aren't they?”

“From what I've heard, yes,” Philip said. “In fact, definitely yes, and I got that from one of the women in the dispatcher's office, not from Peter Makepeace. It wasn't the kind of thing somebody else would have found easy to stage.”

“That's what I thought. Somebody said something about the tongue and the eyes, you know, but I didn't understand it. And no, don't explain it. I don't even like thinking about it. It's not about that anyway. It's not about what makes them sure Michael didn't commit suicide.”

“What is it about?”

Marta looked down at her hands. “It's about Alice Makepeace.”

“Ah.”

“Oh, don't say 'ah,' Philip. Everybody on campus knew she was sleeping with that boy, and from what I've heard there have been other boys. And she's, I don't know, she's such a compelling person, isn't she? She's somebody you have to pay attention to.”

“She's very beautiful, even at forty-five,” Philip said, “and she's the headmaster's wife. Of course you have to pay attention to her.”

“You know what I mean. She commands attention. She does. She's just one of those people, charismatic people, something.”