The Headmaster's Wife (2 page)

Maybe I should go home,
he thought.
Maybe they're right and I just don't belong here.

Out in the quad somewhere, the carillon was ringing. It did something or other every quarter hour and tolled the hours when they came. It went on all night, so that if you lived in Hayes House or Martinson, in one of the rooms facing the chapel, it could wake you up from a sound sleep. Mark's hands were twitching. Sometimes his shoulders twitched, too, and sometimes the joints in his hands just felt so thick and out of sync that he found it hard to move them. It would be giving up to go home, and that much about him had not changed. He did not give up, not ever. The one time he had wanted to—in that first year after his father had died, when life had seemed like a tunnel without end—he had known, with the kind of absolute clarity most adults couldn't manage to save their lives, that to do it would be to die himself. He'd been less than ten years old.

There has to be something wrong with me,
he thought.
It can't just all be in my head.

But that wasn't true, and he knew it; and so he unwound his body and began to get up. There was nothing to do but go to work and salvage what he could, even if it wasn't much. He didn't understand a word of what he read anymore. He'd finish a page and couldn't remember if he'd been reading John Donne or his biology textbook. He drilled himself for hour after hour in German, or got Fraulein Lieden to do it with him, and half an hour after he was finished it was as if none of it had ever happened. It was cold, but he was sweating like a pig. The sweat was pouring down his back as if he'd just run the Boston Marathon. He was tired, but he knew that if he lay down he would not be able to go to sleep for hours. He had had at least six cups of coffee since lunch;
but if coffee was supposed to wake you up, it didn't work on him. He was the walking dead.

He looked out the window again and for the first time thought it was odd. There was a … person … lying there in the snow, alone, under the trees. It was a person dressed in black, but there was nothing unusual about that. Half the school liked to dress in black and to pretend to be alienated from all things material and capitalistic. Maybe whoever it was had passed out. It was Friday, and the school was supposed to be drug and alcohol free, but Mark knew what that was worth. There was enough marijuana in Hayes House alone to supply a hospital full of terminal cancer patients. If you got caught at it they sent you to intervention, and after a few months they asked you to write up the story of how you beat addiction for the
Windsor Chronicle.
Mark knew people who had beaten addiction three or four times, although they'd only been allowed to write about it once, at the beginning. It was like the pictures the
Chronicle
ran about the memorial service for 9/11. The real pictures had been ruined somehow, and so the school had had them all go back into the quad and pretend to be doing it again, so there would be photographs for the story about how sensitively the school was handling terrorism issues.

Everything about this place is fake,
Mark thought—and he was almost himself again for that split second. Then the feeling faded, and the insight along with it, and he pressed his face to the glass and tried to get a better look at the person in black lying under the tree, not moving.

If he lies there long enough, he could freeze to death,
Mark thought, but there was something wrong with that, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. There was something wrong with the body lying under the trees. Mark was sure that it wasn't a student, although he wasn't sure why he was sure. The person was big, but a lot of the seniors were bigger. He tried to imagine a Windsor Academy teacher getting smashed on vodka and grass and passing out on the ice twenty feet from Maverick Pond, but it didn't compute. The faculty drank mineral water they bought from
a small local company run as a cooperative and talked about how important it was not to allow the liquor companies to invade the rain forest. They didn't wear black either. They preferred earth tones and Polo shirts and books most people found too boring to read.

Something is wrong,
he thought, but he was drifting in and out of consciousness again, in and out of coherency. If he didn't get moving, he'd find himself trapped up here after lights out. He'd already done that once this term and been handed sixteen hours of work jobs because of it. They had been absolutely convinced that he'd done it on purpose because they'd rung the bell three times and sent a librarian through the stacks calling out for anybody who might not be paying attention. He hadn't done it on purpose though. He'd just zoned out. He'd just stopped existing in this body and been somewhere else, except not, because he couldn't remember anything else. If he'd believed in ghosts, he would have thought he was one.

He took another look out at the black figure under the trees, then bent over and picked up his book.

If he went the long way around back to Hayes House, he could stop to see if whoever it was needed any help.

Marta Coelho had been grading papers for four hours, and she still wasn't close to done. Her eyes hurt. Her arms hurt, too. Mostly she found herself thinking obsessively about the fact that she had never spent a Friday night not working, at least not during term time, in this entire academic year. It was the kind of thing that, phrased in the right way, she would have thought of as a good thing about Windsor Academy before she had come to it, but like most of those things—and there had been a lot of them—it now felt egregiously wrong. She found it hard to believe that she had defended her dissertation only eighteen months ago, and that her dissertation committee—at
Yale
—had been absolutely
certain that she'd find a faculty place within the year. If you couldn't find a university job with a degree from Yale, what did you need to do to find one? It was hard to remember, now, that this particular job had seemed like a godsend when it was offered to her because she was up to her eyeballs in debt from college and grad school and close to being evicted from her apartment. It was hard to remember the things she had told herself when she'd written the acceptance letter and walked down Chapel Street to mail it. Bright, committed prep school students had to be better to teach than bored, not-so-bright college students stuck at a fourth-rate state college and wanting only to get through their core courses as quickly and painlessly as possible. A school committed to equality, diversity, and truly innovative ideas in education had to be better than the routinely brutal mediocrity of the high school she had escaped for Wellesley and then the Ivy League. Had to be, had to be, she thought now. There was nothing that anything had to be. Life sucked, as the kids liked to say, and you couldn't even make yourself feel better about it by thinking about sex.

The office was a high-ceilinged room on the first floor of the Ridenour Library, the one building on campus that looked like it belonged on a campus. The lights above her head hung down on long, dark poles and ended in wide globes that gave out too much light. She could see her reflection in the leaded-glass windows in front of her desk, and her head looked as if it were encased in a helmet of light.
I should dye it a different color one of these days,
she thought absently. Then she tapped the stack of papers in front of her, the ungraded ones, ten to twelve pages each, researched and footnoted. It was impossible to explain to anybody who hadn't had to put up with it just how bone-numbingly boring it all really was, day after day with these kids whose lives had been so perfect they might as well have been produced by Disney. She'd heard all the stories about alcoholic mothers and absent fathers, but she didn't believe any of it. It was the kind of thing rich people liked to say about themselves in order to appear to be Suffering, and
therefore all that much more Virtuous. She knew something about alcoholism and absence. Alcoholism was her father getting fired from his fourth job in two years. Absence was the ritual placement in foster care, three months here, five months there, over and over again—never the same family; never the same school bus; but always the same school—so that everybody knew, all the other students, all the teachers, and she would walk the halls very careful never to let her body touch another person or another thing. If she hadn't been a
truly extraordinary person
—far and away better than those boarding school girls she'd met when she first went to Wellesley—if she hadn't been unlike everybody and everything around her, she would never have ended up where she had. She'd have been waiting tables back in Providence the way her sister still did. Marta couldn't remember how long she had gone on thinking of herself as a
truly extraordinary person.
She did remember when she had stopped. It was on that day she had walked down Chapel Street to mail the letter telling Windsor Academy that she would be happy to teach American History and serve as a dorm parent in Barrett House for the next full school year.

She swiveled her chair around so that she could look through the open door onto the hallway. She always kept the door of her office open. When she closed it, she felt as if she were suffocating. She heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the hall and then saw, suddenly, the hulking figure of one of the students she liked least and respected not at all—Mark DeAvecca, looking as usual as if he had fallen off a garbage truck and was still wearing the odd banana skin. He said, “Hi,” without looking at her. He was staring at the floor, something else that was usual. He either stared at the floor or over your left shoulder. He never looked directly at you, and his body was never completely still. She mumbled something in reply that could have been anything except encouragement. He kept moving until he was out of sight. There he was, that bright, eager prep school student she had heard all about, a monumental mess who never did the reading, never handed his homework in on time, and never studied for tests.
He might as well have been playing football at some farm belt regional high school where all the kids wanted was to take over the family farm, except that he was no good at sports either. He just had a famous mother and a rich father, and that was all he needed to get into a school that was supposed to be more selective than most American colleges. Marta knew, too well, what “selectivity” meant when it came to schools. It meant that they were places that were very careful about who they let in of those people who could not be said to already belong.

For a second she felt energy surge through her as if somebody had turned on her switch. She was suddenly purposeful and angry. She bolted out of her chair and across the office to the door. She stepped into the hall and looked both ways for Mark. She had no idea what she intended to say to him or why she wanted to say anything. She only knew that she wanted to grab hold of him and do
something.
When she saw that the hallway was already empty, she felt angrier still—and then the door at the other end opened, and Alice Makepeace came in from outside, wearing that black, hooded cape that fell to the floor and always reminded Marta of
The French Lieutenant's Woman.

“Marta?” Alice said.

Marta did her best not to cringe. Alice was the headmaster's wife, and no matter how progressive and egalitarian Windsor Academy was supposed to be, junior faculty did not piss off the headmaster's wife without expecting some repercussions from it. Marta bit her lip and looked in the other direction, the direction she had seen Mark go. Alice was … one of those people. She had an accent like William F. Buckley's. She was too tall, and she actually looked good in leather jeans.

Marta had never looked good in much of anything. She was not fat, but her thinness did not make her attractive or fashionable. If she had tried to wear black leather jeans, she would have looked like a sausage in a natural casing.

“Mark DeAvecca just went by,” she said. “I was trying to catch him.”

“Ah, Mark,” Alice said, shaking out her hair. She had long, wavy, thick hair. Marta didn't believe for a moment that the bright red of it was Alice's natural color, although she knew it had been once. Still, nobody cared about that, natural or unnatural. Nobody cared about anything except the special effects.

“He's going to fail history,” Marta said. “Or he's going to come damned close. I've talked to him and talked to him. Nothing seems to help.”

“He doesn't seem to be adjusting well, no,” Alice said. She pushed the cape back over her shoulders. Black cape, black leather jeans, black cashmere turtleneck sweater, black boots—Marta couldn't look at her; she was too ridiculous. Except that she wasn't. She was perfect. It was hard to bear.

“I don't think it has anything to do with adjusting,” Marta said. “I think he's irresponsible, that's all. He doesn't do anything. He has reading assigned in every class. He's supposed to take notes. He never does it. I know. I've asked to see the notes. I don't think he's ever bothered to study for history, even before he came here.”

“He had excellent grades in history,” Alice said. “He had excellent grades in everything.”

“There are ways to get excellent grades without doing any work,” Marta said. “You can have your mother do it, for instance. I don't suppose his stepfather would be any help, but his mother—well, there's always that. You could go to a school where it matters more who your parents are than what work you're doing. There's that, too. Everybody's so hyped on how rigorous this place is. If it's rigorous, he doesn't belong here.”

“Doesn't he?”

Marta flushed. She had been ranting—again. She was getting a reputation for ranting. She knew what Alice Makepeace said about her behind her back.
She's terribly earnest,
that was the line she used to everybody, and now everybody used it, too. Marta
was
terribly earnest, and very dedicated, and of course a complete bore and an utter frump. It was, Marta thought, all true, and she didn't care.