The Headmaster's Wife (16 page)

“And that's what you were thinking about, Alice Makepeace?”

“What? Oh no. It was about the night Michael Feyre died. I saw her the night Michael Feyre died.”

“Where?”

“In the library,” Marta said. “Not in the library proper butin the office and classroom wing. I was correcting papers, and she came in to talk to me.”

“What about?”

Marta shrugged. “Not anything, really. I'd just seen Mark, you see, and I was in a bad mood, so I was talking about Mark. And she was making excuses for him or some-tiling. I don't know. That kid ought to be expelled.”

“Maybe. What about Alice? It doesn't sound like she was doing much of anything.”

“Oh, she wasn't,” Marta said. “It wasn't that. It was after she left. She left by the wrong door.”

“What do you mean, the wrong door?”

“She said she was going home. But to get home, it makes the most sense to go into the library proper and through the library foyer and out the front door. I mean, President's House is right across the quad. But she went out the other door, out the back.”

“Out the back or out the side?”

“Out the back,” Marta said. “To get to the side door, she'd have had to go down the corridor the same way from my office as she would to get out the front, she'd just have had to stop earlier. But she went the other way. There isn't anything there but the back way out. And I couldn't help but think it was odd, and I didn't know about Michael Feyre then, that he was dead.”

“What time was it?”

“It was about nine, or maybe nine fifteen or nine thirty. I don't really remember, but somewhere in there, because when the carillon rang ten I came back home. But the carillon had rung nine. I stopped to listen to it. And the whole thing was nuts, really. It was below zero.”

“It was minus nine,” Philip said.

“Well, then,” Marta said, “why would she want to go out the back door like that? There's nothing out there except Maverick Pond, and she couldn't have been going skating at that time of night But that's the way she went, looking like Batgirl in that ridiculous cape.”

“She wasn't with anybody?”

“Not when she was in my office, no. Oh, I don't know,” Marta said. “I feel completely stupid. I mean, who cares what she did. Maybe she's got another boy. Maybe that's why Michael killed himself, because she'd thrown him over—”

“I don't think I'd say that if I were you,” Philip said. “Peter would go crazy, and so would the newspapers if they ever heard a rumor like that. It's a damned miracle the newspapers haven't gone crazy yet.”

“But it doesn't matter, right?” Marta said. “It doesn't matter where she was or why she was there. Maybe she wasn't anywhere. Maybe it was all part of the mystique, or maybe she made a mistake about which way to go and didn't want to admit it to me. Who knows why she does what she does? And if it doesn't have anything to do with why Michael died, there's no point in being all worked up about it.”

“But you
are
worked up about it.”

“Yes,” Marta said, “yes, I am. I'm worked up about her. I'm worked up about Mark DeAvecca. I'm worked up about being here. I have no idea what I'm doing here. Did I tell you that? Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don't even know where I am. I sit up in bed and for half a minute I think I'm back in my apartment in New Haven.”

“Would you rather be?”

“I don't know. It wasn't too pleasant at the end there. Everybody was getting jobs, but I wasn't. I've got to ask myself about that, too. Why I wasn't. I don't know. Maybe I'm obsessing about Alice because I don't want to admit that I'm sitting here in February without a hope in hell of being anywhere but here next year—if I'm even asked back next year.”

“You'll be asked back.”

“Don't you hate it though? Don't you hate the uncertainty of it? It's that way for the students, too. You never know from one year to the next whether you can stay on. They don't either. It's all so up in the air. And the standards are all so—fuzzy. In graduate school it was just a matter of grade-point averages. As long as I maintained a B average, I couldstay. Here it's about things and I don't even know what they mean: meaningful interaction, dedication to the mission of the school. Nonsense.”

“You'll get asked back,” Philip said again. “Maybe you shouldn't come back. Maybe you ought to go out and do something else, something besides teaching, something besides academia.”

“I wouldn't know what to do. This is what I've always been good at.”

“Teaching?”

“No,” Marta said. “School. Even when I was very little, that was what I was good at. I don't think I've ever been really uncomfortable in a school before, not even in my freshman year at Wellesley. And I don't understand it. If I could have invented a place for myself, if I could have put together a group of people, it would have been just like here. And I hate it. And all I can think of is that it's all about the job. I don't know.”

“Drink your tea,” Philip said. “It's going to get cold.”

Marta looked down into the cup and saw the tea bag still floating there. She hadn't taken off her coat either. All of a sudden it felt heavy and hot on her shoulders. She stood up and shrugged it off.

“We all spend too much time thinking about Alice Makepeace anyway,” she said. “I don't know why we do it.”

Cherie Wardrop had spent the first two days after Michael Feyre died doing what she was expected to do: staying in her apartment in Hayes House or in her office in Ridenour Library, waiting for students to come to see her and pour out their hearts. No students had, but she hadn't expected them to. She thought that the school's near mania on the subject of therapy was silly in the extreme. Most people grieved by doing something moronic in a spasm of emotion and then forgetting as much as possible the thing that had made themgrieve in the first place. Most of the students would not have been grieving for Michael Feyre in any case. He hadn't been well-liked or even well-known. What they really felt was shock and titillation, the same emotions they would have felt if somebody had had to have an abortion or leave school because he'd been caught stealing from the campus store. The students weren't upset or traumatized; they were excited. You could hear the revved-up energy in their voices wherever they gathered together, even when you couldn't make out the words. They were excited and almost pleased, the way they would have been if the news had been about a celebrity instead of a fellow student. Or maybe not. These kids were not impressed with celebrities. Too many of them had celebrities for parents. Still, Cherie thought, their reactions would have been different if Michael had been murdered instead of the victim of suicide. Their reactions
had
been different in those short twenty-four hours when the cause of death had still been in doubt.

Now Cherie pulled into her parking space behind President's House and shut off the engine. She'd done what she was expected to do for as long as she could, but today it had just been impossible. She'd gone to her office, sat waiting and staring out the window for half an hour, and then decided that she'd had enough. She'd packed up her things, gone back to the apartment, and gotten Melissa out of bed. Melissa was an anomaly, an artist without discipline. She maintained a schedule when Cherie maintained one, but as soon as Cherie was at loose ends, Melissa was sleeping in until noon. Cherie had had to pull the covers off her to get her to move, and even then she'd had to threaten a bowl of cold water. Only once she'd heard the sound of the shower going on had Cherie felt free to settle down in the living room. She was distressed to find that Melissa's small stack of papers next to the computer—the collection of short stories she was writing under contract to Woman Vistas Press—hadn't grown by a single sheet since the night Michael Feyre had died.

They were all too wound up, that was the problem. Theboy was dead. The administration was dealing with it by canceling classes and behaving as if they were all in a public service announcement about mental health maintenance, and nobody wanted to admit the level of anxiety they were feeling, not only about the trauma itself, but about the possibility that the school might not survive the firestorm. There was going to be a firestorm, and Cherie knew it. Even though it hadn't happened yet, she could feel it coming. It made it impossible for her to do the petty housekeeping chores, the house accounts, the student accounts. Edith Braxner had scolded her more than once for the mess her accounts were in. She couldn't make herself take them seriously, and today, trying to focus on them in the wake of Michael's dying and the unbearable nervousness that affected everybody and anybody, she'd finally just given up on them and tossed them into the back of a drawer.

Cherie prodded Melissa, fast asleep in the passenger seat. It had been a very good day.
They
had gone into Boston and seen the first in a daylong film marathon of women's independent productions. Then they had ducked out of that and gone to eat sushi at a little place they knew in Cambridge. Then they'd dropped in at the New Words Bookstore in Cambridge and melted plastic until they'd felt guilty about it. Then they'd gone back to the film marathon and seen a movie about a woman coming out in India, which in the end had been too bloody and violent for them to enjoy watching. They were, Cherie thought, completely American. They wanted their endings happy and their heroines' quests triumphant.

Cherie prodded Melissa again. Outside the car, it was almost dark. Lights were on in President's House. Cherie thought that if she were Peter Makepeace—or Alice—she might have been happier with all the lights on, too. She prodded Melissa for a third time. Melissa moved.

“Wake up,” Cherie said. “We're home. And I've been thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“What?” Melissa stretched.

“I've been thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah,” Cheriesaid. “I was thinking about what we'd talked about the other night, do you remember? About how the scandal would get out eventually, and the school could be forced to close, and how everybody knew that but everybody was trying very hard not to notice it?”

Melissa opened her eyes. “Christ, Peter's got that place lit up like he's never heard of an energy crisis. What's wrong with him?”

“Maybe it's Alice. Maybe they're both looking over their shoulders. I'd be scared as hell if I was either one of them.”

“That's still no reason to waste electricity.”

Cherie sighed. “I was thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah,” she said again. “I was thinking about how this place could be shut down, and that it wouldn't be such a bad idea, that it was like Sodom and Gomorrah. That this place is so—filthy—that maybe shutting it down is the only thing that could clean it.”

“Filthy?” Now Melissa was thoroughly awake. She sat up straight in her seat and stared. “What's this about? Are you going Midwest on me again? Are you having guilt feelings about not playing by the midwestern married lady book?”

“I don't think so,” Cherie said. “I mean, I thought I might be at first, but then it occurred to me that I don't think the place is filthy because it lets us get away with what we do. It isn't about that. It's about Mark moving back into his room.”

“The room where Michael Feyre died?”

“That's the only room he's got,” Cherie said. “We got the news this morning from administration. Well, from Peter, really, even though nobody ever said so. It's incredible the way they hold tight to information around this place. But that's the idea. The police are finished with the room. The staff is going to go in there and clean. They want Mark back in the room before the end of the week because there's no place else for him to stay. It's nonsense, really; he's staying with Sheldon. Sheldon doesn't want him around anymore. Nobody wants him around, but that doesn't mean they should be sending the kid back to the room he found a dead body in.”

“Don't suggest having him live with us,” Melissa said. “It wouldn't work.”

“They wouldn't allow it in any case. They wouldn't allow it because we're women and he's a boy.”

“God, they're impossible around here. Don't you ever wish you could find some normal people? And why is it that practically everybody anywhere who's ever had anything to do with a place like this is completely nuts?”

“I don't think it's true that they're all completely nuts,” Cherie said. She popped open the door and was immediately cold. This was the coldest winter she could remember since she moved out east from Michigan. “Back to Sodom and Gomorrah. It wasn't us I was thinking about; it was Alice. Don't you think it's incredible that Alice has gotten away with the things she's gotten away with?”

Cherie got out of the car and slammed the door shut, locked. Melissa got out her side and began putting her jacket on. Melissa always took off her jacket in the car.

“Look,” she said, “I know I was the one who said Alice Makepeace was dangerous, but I think you're taking this one too far. The verdict is in, last I heard. It really
was
a suicide. She didn't kill him.”

“I know she didn't kill him, at least not in the ordinary sense of the term 'kill.' Oh, I don't know. It's not just the people she sleeps with. It's the whole thing. The way she is. The way she insinuates herself into everything, every decision, every issue. And the longer this goes on without there being any fallout, the more I wonder if there's going to be any fallout at all. We think it's inevitable that the papers will get hold of it, but we've got board members who own newspapers or big chunks of them. This place has connections everywhere. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe she'll get away with it.”