The Headmaster's Wife (10 page)

But on this snowy afternoon, she comes into my office and says, “Can I see you for a moment?”

I put the papers I was reading down on my desk. “Of course, Mrs. LaForge. Please come in.”

She walks toward the desk and to the leather wingback chairs in front of it. She says, “Do you mind if I sit down?”

This is most unusual indeed, but I nod. “Of course.” I sweep my hand toward a chair. “Sit.”

She sits down. She looks weary and old to me, and I realize it has been a long time since I paid her any attention. She removes her glasses. Her eyes are dark and deep set among her wrinkles. “Mr. Winthrop,” she begins. “You know I have always been loyal to you. And your father before you.”

“Of course, Mrs. LaForge,” I say, wondering where this is going.

“And you know I never get involved in matters that are not my concern.”

“Yes, yes,” I say. “I know this.”

“So Mr. Winthrop—Arthur,” she says. She has not called me Arthur since I was a student and she was a young woman newly arrived in the office of the headmaster. I cock my head and look at her with puzzlement at her use of my given name.

“Arthur,” she says again, “this is hard for me. I do not know how to say this.”

“Speak freely, Mrs. LaForge,” I say, wanting her to be done with it.

“I hear you in here sometimes,” she says.

“What do you mean? You hear me?”

She looks away, toward the window and the snow, then back to me for a moment before resting her eyes on the carpet at her feet. “I hear you talking.”

“I do not follow you, Mrs. LaForge. You eavesdrop on my conversations? Is this what you are saying?”

“No, I do not. What I mean to say is that I hear you talking in here sometimes when you are alone. No one is with you.”

I shake my head. “Well, surely I am on the phone.”

“No,” she says, “you are not. I can tell when you are on the phone. My phone lights up red, remember?”

“Perhaps it’s broken,” I say, and now I am getting annoyed. “What are you implying? That I am talking to myself?”

“No, sir, not that. I mean, not really. You are talking with Betsy.”

So this is what this is about. “Mrs. LaForge,” I say, “I don’t think you know what you are saying. Whatever conversations I have with Betsy Pappas are between me and her, do you understand?”

“I am just trying to help, Arthur,” she says. “You know that, right? I mean, your calling her Betsy Pappas alone worries me greatly. Can’t you see? It is part of my job. Part of my job is to protect you. I hope you understand that.”

“What I understand is that this conversation is over,” I say sharply. I do not need to say anything else. I spin in my chair and put my feet up on the desk and face the wall. I stare at a portrait of my grandfather, at his broad forehead, the peak of his hair, his long nose. On the other side of the office, I hear the door open and then close again.

In the open fields of campus the winter wind sweeps across with great fury, and small cyclones of snow get picked up by it and spin in the air for a moment before settling back down. The wind in this part of Vermont starts all the way up on the plains of Quebec and marches south with the river until it reaches the mountains and blows back onto itself. The students pull their coats tight on days like this, and walk from building to building with their heads down. It is a cruel wind, and on this day, the day after Russell Hurley has left school, I brace against it, but not nearly as much as I brace against the coming of Betsy Pappas, which is as inevitable as winter. She will come. I just do not know when.

I am thinking about what I will tell her. I do not have much to say, other than to plead with her, to give her logic. Russell Hurley determined his own fate, I will say. You have to understand, the powers of head of school are not fully what you imagine. There are things I control and then things I do not. I do not expect you to comprehend all of this, but sometimes events are beyond even my control. They enter the vast stream that is the history of Lancaster, and in those cases, it is precedent that matters.

I consider all these arguments, though, when she finally shows up, outside my house after dinner and before study hall, there is no argument for me to make. Betsy, as is her wont, creates the terms.

I am on the front walk. A yellowish light comes off the porch of the white house and shines on the snow. The night has lifted, and the sky is bright and star-flecked. The air is cold, and I have come outside as if anticipating her arrival, and sure enough, here she is. She marches up my walk with that sense of ownership I have grown to love about her. When she reaches me, she lets me have it, as I knew she would.

If she finds it odd that I am outside wearing only my dress shirt and chinos, she does not comment, and I do not offer anything. The chilly air feels good, to tell you the truth. What she says is that she knows what I have done to Russell Hurley, that I planted the alcohol, which is true, and that she will expose me. That she will shout high into the air that this has nothing to do with good-hearted Russell and everything to do with my venality, that I am evil incarnate and so on. That she will take me down, and the whole world will know that I have been fucking her. She will, in short, ruin me.

When I gather myself from her onslaught, grateful suddenly for the deeply cold night and the stiff wind that has picked up and gathered our voices in its embrace, I summon all the coldness I can and I say to her, “Who will believe you?”

She whirls as if to walk away, and in that moment the long bangs she has, the ones she is always pushing behind her ears, slip out. She kicks her head back, and the hair moves with her in the dark. I repeat myself, “Who will believe you?”

She comes at me then. I am unprepared for this. For her violence. She strikes me in the chest first, and then her fists are in my face. I step back and move away from her.

“Betsy,” I say. “Please. Think.”

She steps back from me. We stand in the wan porch light looking at each other. Her face breaks my heart, I find it so pretty. I realize one of the things I love about it is its lack of symmetry. Her lidded eyes are different sizes, her nose slightly off-center—her half-moon Slavic features.

Too often symmetry is synonymous with beauty, and it occurs to me that if we are not symmetrical on the inside then why should we be on the outside?

That perhaps we have it wrong, that, in other words, beauty should be found in things that don’t match, not in those that do.

Betsy stands in front of me breathing hard. I cannot help it, I smile at her. I smile at her from looking at her pretty face, and this is the last thing I should do. She is a wild animal in front of me, all heart and bravado and liquid breathing sentience. I know she will come at me again, and when she does I am ready for her. I catch her and wrap her in my arms.

She struggles against me, and her rage is palpable and kinetic. I feel it in her slender arms and I whisper to her, “Quit it, will you? Just quit it.”

She thrashes in my arms, but I just hold her tighter. I lift her off the ground like a child, and she squirms, but I have her arms fully pinned and, like this, I back the two of us toward the front door of the house. If anyone were to happen by, we would be quite the odd sight. The headmaster with a student in his arms, clearly holding her against her will, as if she’s some spastic child who needs to be restrained.

The door is slightly ajar, and when I push my back against it, it gives way and I fall backward into my front hallway, Betsy landing on top of me.

She scrambles to her feet and is on her way to the door. I do not hesitate, and when I tackle her, it is with no small measure of force. I am on top of her now, and her face is pressed into the Persian carpet. “Let me go,” she says, and I know in this moment that this is the one thing I cannot ever give her. I will not let her go; I cannot let her go; and while you will rightfully imagine it is for the narrow, selfish reason of not having my entire career tossed aside over these indiscretions, that would capture only a portion of what I am feeling.

For the larger truth reveals itself to me while I am lying on top of Betsy Pappas in the foyer of this house in which a Winthrop has resided in for close to eighty years. She stops struggling underneath me, and for a moment there is just my weight on her body, her face turned to the side, the labored sounds of our breathing coming together. And what I realize is that what I want for her is that most unreachable of human desires. I want her to be immortal. Immortal like the great Russian novelists. Immortal like this grand old school built to endure on the flatlands of Vermont alongside the Connecticut River.

And sometimes the only path to immortality, paradoxically, is to die. For to live with nothing in your heart is a greater form of death. To be able to breathe and walk means nothing if you have died inside. It means nothing if you are alone and without love.

It means nothing if all you have built crumbles the moment you cannot have that which you covet the most.

I carry her upstairs. I draw a bath. Back in the bedroom, while the tub fills, I lay her down and undress her. I take my time, for there is no rush. Her skin is still warm to the touch, her face flushed and pink, and it will be awhile before the blood drains and she no longer looks like herself. This is how I want to remember her. Just like this.

When her clothes are off, I stand for a while and admire her. She has never been lovelier. Her eyes are closed and her arms lay slack at her sides, and there is the subtle rise of her full breasts, the brown nipples, the arched cage of her ribs, and the slope of her belly and the dark thatch of her sex.

Lying there on the white quilt, with her pale skin, it is almost as if she were in a state of suspended animation. Part of me wishes I could keep her like this forever, on this bed, nude, like some magnificent piece of art I come to commune with whenever I desire.

I carry her off the bed and bring her to the bath. I test the water with my elbow as if she were a child, and then I lower her in. She falls back into it and starts to sink, until I pull her up and settle her head against the back. Then I begin to wash her.

I use the large sponge that Elizabeth loves, and I slowly, carefully, move it around her face and eyes, across her nose and down her mouth, along the long trunk of her neck, over her chest and her breasts, down her slender arms, across her belly, through her sex, along her right thigh and then her left, and, slipping down her calves, to her feet. I then start the whole thing over again.

I do this until the water grows cold. I lift her out and return her, draped in towels, to the bedroom.

I lay her on the bed and reluctantly—for I love her nakedness—dress her. Her clothes seem inadequate for the occasion, and I find myself wishing there was something of Elizabeth’s that might work, something formal perhaps, but the ravages of age have made Elizabeth a different woman from when she was a girl, of course, and her clothes would not fit Betsy’s body.

So I slide her white tights back up over her legs, and then I put on her black pencil skirt. Next I struggle a little with her bra, but once it is on, I put on her white button-down, slowly lifting each button through the hole, finishing by tucking the shirt into the top of her skirt.

Outside, the night has cleared and it is now bitter cold. The wind is not as vicious as it was, but it still runs right through me as I walk. It is late. The campus is silent and asleep. Dwayne, the night security, is the only one I might run into, but I know from experience that he seldom leaves the security shed, and if he does, it is to smoke cigarettes in the dark in front of it. That is on the other side of campus.

Betsy is in my arms, wrapped tightly in a wool blanket. I hold her like a lamb, my arms underneath the mass of her, cradling her. In my arms across the snowy fields, she is suddenly amazingly heavy. It feels like the weight of her will tear my arms off. I look up and measure with my eyes the distance to the girls’ dorms, the dorms my father built, the dorms that meant a Betsy Pappas would be at Lancaster at all. It feels impossibly far, but I remember the old rule about long treks and look down at my feet. I take it one step at a time.

The wind is icy on my face, and my fingers are cold. The ache in my arms is almost too much to bear. But at the same time, I can look up and fix my eyes on the horizon, and there are the winter stars in the sky. I can see the great curve of the earth, arcing away from me, and for a second I have that awareness of movement, the ceaseless, endless spinning that keeps us locked on the ground.

I come down the small slope before the girls’ dorms, and the dorms themselves are black in the night. In the far corner, where Mr. Linder and his family live, there is the glow of lamplight in the window. Otherwise it is as it should be: sleeping students, silence.

I am going to the only place that makes sense to me right now. When I reach it, when I reach the river, I stop and take a moment before I continue. I lay Betsy down on the snowy bank, and it is good to have my arms back, the numbness receding up my limbs.

It is dark here, since there is no moon. But under the starlight, I can see where the water still flows in places and where it is still, covered with a light tarp of gray ice. I can see across to where the other bank rises sharply, and then, in the distance, the barren fields of New Hampshire, a darker black against the thin light of the sky. I look up and, for a moment, study the infinite stars. The thing about stars is that we cannot tell, with the naked eye, which ones are alive and well and which ones have already died but have not told us yet.

I bend down and, for the final time, gather Betsy in my arms. I step forward and then take a slight step downward on the bank. When my shoes reach the river’s edge, I feel the crumble of ice, and then the water is in them, shockingly cold water, around my ankles and soaking my socks, but I do not care. I step forward again, and now the water is up to my calves. I breathe in deep against the cold.

And then I turn sideways. I want to get this right. She is so heavy. Betsy is so heavy. It takes all the strength I have, but I lean back and, transferring the weight from my right arm to my left, I push her out into the air as much as I can. One moment she is there, and the next moment she is not, and when she hits the ice, the sound is strangely beautiful. The ice is thin, and it cracks immediately on impact. It is like glass breaking—no, more subtle than that. It crumples underneath her like the crust on a crème brûlée from a fork’s pressure, and then there is the sound of the water spilling up around her, pulling her down to the bottom of the river.