The Headmaster's Wife (32 page)

“I don't think so. I used to be able to eat like that without getting sick. It was a long time ago.”

“Will you do it?”

“I suppose,” Jimmy said, “but I still want to know. If you didn't get Gregor up here because nobody would believe you weren't taking drugs, why did you get him up here?”

Mark shrugged. “Because of something I saw on the night Michael died or maybe something I didn't see. I could have been hallucinating it. I could have been wrong. I saw it out the window of the library from the catwalk. And it was dark.”

“You've been hallucinating?” Jimmy said.

“I don't know,” Mark told him. “I really don't. It was just so weird. And I tried to tell a bunch of people, Cherie Wardrop, even Philip Candor, although he hates the hell out of me, but he's the kind of person people tell things to. And nobody would listen. Even the police wouldn't listen. So I thought Gregor Demarkian would, and if I was just hallucinating he'd find that out, too, and I could just check myself into a loony bin. Except I don't feel like I need to be in a loony bin anymore. Are you going to go get me something to eat? We've got to do it before Mom gets back because she'll make me eat broccoli and stuff. Except she won't if the food is already here. You know.”

“You sound better than I've heard you in months,” Jimmy said.

Mark felt better than he'd felt in months. He had no idea why, and he didn't care. He just wanted to eat something and do it soon.

It was noon, and that meant it had now been at least two hours since some of the particulars of what had happened to Mark DeAvecca had begun to filter through the Windsor Academy campus. Philip Candor would never have accused Peter Makepeace's secretary of listening at doors or, better yet, at intercoms, but he knew she did it, and so did everybody else. That was why the news was out within minutes of

Liz Toliver's meeting at President's House, that Mark's drug tests had come back negative, not only the quick ones that had been done when he was first admitted, but the more accurate ones that had taken until this morning to be read and interpreted. Mark was not on marijuana. Mark was not on speed. Mark was not on heroin—not that Philip had ever suspected that one. Heroin made people calm, not wired and frantic. Of course, Mark was not on cocaine either, which was a much more interesting finding. Philip would have bet his life that that kid was pickled in cocaine, even if he didn't snort it through his nose or leave dustings of powder on the hardwood surfaces of his dorm room.

The gossip had been somewhat more hazy about just what had been wrong with Mark when he'd vomited all over Sheldon's ceiling and collapsed in convulsions on the bathroom floor, but the best guess was an overdose of caffeine tablets of the kind kids used to stay up to study for exams. There was no question that Mark had been found with the half-digested remnants of several of these tablets in his stomach when he was admitted to the hospital, and Philip supposed that it was not impossible that Mark had taken them. Drugged or not, the kid had been making no sense for most of the time he was on this campus. Unlike most of his colleagues in the cafeteria, however, Philip knew enough to be sure that caffeine pills weren't likely to explain the projectile vomiting, never mind the myriad other symptoms they'd all been watching for months on end. There was something seriously wrong here, and it was likely to get even more wrong in the next few days. Jimmy Card had arrived. Liz Toliver had been around for twelve hours. The one thing Philip had spent most of his life avoiding had arrived, and he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that there was nothing he could do to escape it. His best chance lay in staying out of sight as much as possible and in making sure that he was prepared for any eventuality. That was why he was cleaning and loading his stainless steel Colt Anaconda. It was not a gun he liked very much. It had only a six-round chamber, and it was too heavy for most of the purposes for which people wantedhandguns. At the time he'd bought it, however, he hadn't had much choice, and he hadn't had the time to go shopping. He'd only been back in Idaho for the week.

He saw Alice coming up the walk before she knocked. He could have put the gun out of sight if he'd wanted to. He knew that no matter how easily he'd strong-armed the Windsor Academy administration over the matter of his smoking, he would not be able to strong-arm them on the matter of this gun. They would insist that he get rid of the gun or get himself out of faculty housing. He wanted to do neither.

Even so, he opened the door to Alice without putting the gun away. It was lying out in the open on the coffee table when she walked in. She took off her cape and stared at it, truly shocked. Philip thought it was the only time he had ever seen her shocked. Then he amended that. It was the only time he had ever seen her show a thoroughly genuine emotion. Alice was always on stage. She was like that remarkable hair of hers: overblown, overcolored, overwrought.

“Well,” she said, “you got paranoid very fast. I wouldn't have expected that of you. What did you do, go into Boston last night and pass a man a hundred on a street corner?”

“No.” He sat down on his own couch and went back to loading the chamber. “I bought this gun in 1998.”

“And you've had it here ever since? In the dorm?”

“That I have.”

“The trustees will have a complete fit. They won't let you keep it, you know. And I don't understand why you have it in the first place. It's not as if Windsor is a high-crime area.”

“No.” There was more crime in Windsor than she knew, but that was one of those things Philip had long since ceased trying to explain to the faculty of Windsor Academy. He finished loading the chambers and tried siting at his reflection in the wall mirror. Alice Makepeace shuddered.

“I'll be happier when they make you get rid of it,” she said. “I don't know why you want it here to begin with. Especially not now. God only knows what's going to happen around here now that we're in the middle of this mess. Don'tyou hate what it's like around here? When the institution is threatened, I mean. Peter gets insane. You should see him.”

“I'd expect that Peter is afraid for his job.”

“Of course he is. And of course we're going to have to leave. That's inevitable. If it wasn't when Michael decided to kill himself, it was as soon as that poisonous Mark DeAvecca starting flopping around Sheldon's bathroom like a rag doll. That woman came to see Peter this morning, you know. Mark's mother.”

“Liz Toliver. I've seen her on television.”

“Yes, well, so have I. That hardly matters, does it? Anyway, she's breathing fire and when she breathes fire,
The New York Times
breathes fire along with her. The whole thing is such a mess, I don't know where to start. That's why I came. Maybe you can tell me where to start.”

“Where to start what?” Philip asked. “Explaining yourself? Getting Peter another job?”

“People come to you and tell you things. I know that. Everybody knows that. You're everybody's father confessor, except mine.”

“That's quite all right, Alice. I wouldn't want to be your father confessor.”

“I don't have one,” Alice said, “I know better. But people talk to you, which means you know what they're thinking.”

“They don't talk to me as much as you think, Alice. And they don't tell me their secrets. If that's the kind of thing you want, hire a private detective and have them bugged.”

“I want to know what they're saying. About Michael. About me.”

“Like I said, have them bugged.”

“It wouldn't do any good to have them bugged now, would it? They've already done their talking. I don't think you realize the seriousness of what's been going on here.”

“Oh, I realize the seriousness, Alice,” Philip said, “I just don't evaluate it the same way you do. Are people talking about the affair you had with Michael Feyre—”

“I didn't have an ‘affair' with Michael Feyre.”

“—then yes, they're talking about that. They've been talking about it for months. Why should it matter to you that they're talking about it now?”

“People don't understand the problems a boy like Michael has finding himself,” Alice said. “They're used to their own comfortable lives, and they just don't realize how repressed somebody like Michael is. How oppressed. Oppressed by false consciousness, really, thinking that the system is just fine, really, it's all their own fault if they constantly screw up. You have to give them back their self-respect if you're going to teach them to see the world clearly, if you're going to make them understand that they're the victims here.”

“And you do that by fucking them in broom closets in the off-hours on weekends? Alice, try to make sense for once. You like to star in your own movie. You like to be the center of attention. You do it every year, and you're only going to stop doing it when those lines on your face get deep enough so that the boys can't help noticing.”

“I don't have lines on my face.”

“Yes, Alice, you do, and in a year or two you're going to face the choice all fair-skinned women do. You're either going to have to go in for surgery or Retin-A, or you're going to have to give it up. I'm betting on the surgery myself. You'll never give it up, and Retin-A would mean no more long afternoon walks in the sun.”

“Michael,” Alice said, choosing her words carefully, “was a misguided but very intelligent boy. He could have become a great leader, a truly authentic leader—”

“Michael,” Philip said, “was a thug. He was a thug when he came to Windsor, and he was a thug when he hung himself. His mother could see him for what he was. He was a thug without pretensions, at least until you got to him. He was better off where he was.”

“He was better off as a thug?”

“Yes,” Philip said, “thugs rehabilitate themselves sometimes. I've seen it happen. Thugs with pretensions, though, they're hooked worse than any junkie ever was.”

“If he was hooked, as you put it, why would he have killed himself?”

“I have no idea why he killed himself.”

“You really don't understand,” Alice said. She was pacing. Philip thought she had been pacing for a long time, but he hadn't noticed. His eyes were always going on and off the gun. It was fully loaded by now. She could pick it up and use it. He knew she wouldn't.

She stopped at the wall mirror and checked herself out. She kept her back to him and said, “There's a whole world out there that has nothing to do with the trivialities you concern yourself with. There's a whole world that has nothing to do with equations and geometry proofs and logic templates or whatever it is you call them. There's a world of people.”

“I'm aware there's a world of people, Alice. I'm more aware of it than you are.”

“There's a world of history, too,” Alice said. “History is marching on whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. History is not on the side of this place and the people in it—people like you.”

It was a measure of the extent of the radical change that had taken place since Mark DeAvecca collapsed in Hayes House that Philip was tempted, even if only for a moment, to deliver a lecture on “people like” himself, a lecture so detailed and explicit that even Alice Makepeace would have no way of misinterpreting it. He stopped himself just in time, but he couldn't deny that he'd tapped a vein of recklessness in himself that he'd thought he'd exorcized forever a very long time ago. His cigarettes were on the table next to the gun, two kinds of coffin nails huddled together for warmth in the icy moralistic air of a progressive school. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with the plain blue plastic Bic lighter he kept next to the ashtray. He had Bic lighters all over the house. They were the only kind he used.

“You know,” he said, “there are people out there, people in this country, who take revolution seriously. They're not playing a game, and they don't deal in concepts like 'false consciousness.' They just do what they do. They're very dangerous. You wouldn't like them much. You'd approve even less.”

“I want to know if anybody saw me talking to Mark last night in the cafeteria.”

“People like Timothy McVeigh,” Philip said.

Alice turned away from the mirror. She looked like she was forcing herself. “Leave it to you to call a fascist like that a revolutionary.”

“He was a revolutionary, Alice. He was a homegrown, working-class American revolutionary. If the proletariat of the United States ever rises up to overthrow the capitalist hegemony, that's what they're going to look like: Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph. Take your pick. And you do. Take your pick, I mean. You picked Michael Feyre because he had no interest in revolution at all.”

“I picked Michael Feyre because he was one of the most intelligent and tortured souls I'd ever met.”

“And the one last year? Alex Cowby. He was an intelligent and tortured soul, too. Until he became too obviously disappointing.”

“You can't save everybody,” Alice said. “They're so damaged by the time they get here, saving them isn't always possible. They buy into the whole thing, into the big corporate lie. Into the idea that having things and making money are what they should be after.”

“Alice, for God's sake. We've got a Socialist Club and a Communist Youth League. We've also got a nice little sprinkling of working-class kids on scholarship. Not one of them wants anything to do with—”

“Why are we going into this again?” Alice said. “What's your point, Philip? Is there some reason that this is all you can ever talk about? I asked you a question. I asked if you'd heard anybody say they saw me in the cafeteria with Mark last night.”

He took a deep drag on his cigarette and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Why? Were you trying to seduce him, too?”