The Headmaster's Wife (12 page)

Craftsbury, Vermont, where her family moved when she was five, is, even now to Elizabeth, a place of both singular beauty and stifling insularity. The decision her parents made—well, her father, to be precise—to leave the security of the family business in New York to make life anew among these highlands of sloping hills and grassy valleys in Northern Vermont is the first of these changes.

Her grandfather had started an air-conditioning company on Long Island that soon grew to the point that he was the go-to guy for air-conditioning systems in the city. The company even installed one for the Empire State Building. Her grandfather became quite wealthy, and it was always assumed that her father would eventually take over the family business. He, however, was as stubborn as her grandfather. He was stubborn and brilliant, and he went to Harvard with the bright-eyed idea that he would come back to Long Island and live the comfortable life of a corporate executive. This was in the placid fifties, but things, at least in the underground of America, were beginning to change. Her parents met in Boston. Her mother was at a small finishing school called Pine Manor, in Chestnut Hill. They fell in love. Her mother got pregnant with her that first year, and they decided to have the child. Her grandfather implored her father to get it taken care of, and to get rid of this girl who clearly had no morals. In the end he threatened to cut him off, and her father said to go ahead.

Her parents got married at City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and with no means of support, they dropped out of school and her father taught himself to be a carpenter, and five years later, with her younger sister now in tow, they moved on a whim to Northern Vermont, where a thousand dollars got you an old farmhouse and a piece of green earth with views of mountains. They had romantic ideas of growing their own food and living off the land. He would build and repair houses. She might get a pottery wheel and learn how to throw pots.

As with all romantic ideas, theirs was short-lived. That first winter, they ordered five cords of wood for the stove that was the old house’s only heat and failed to stack it right away. When the frost came, the wood froze solid in the pile where it sat in the yard. Her father would chip away at it piece by piece, removing the blanket of snow to get at it, but no matter what they did, the wind whistled through the old windows and, on some nights, when the mercury dropped below zero, they huddled in blankets in the main room and were lucky if it got above fifty degrees inside. There was no work for carpenters in Northern Vermont. For a time her proud father, who had spent a year at Harvard, cleaned toilets at a local hotel so they could eat. The cars they owned, an old Saab and a Peugeot that refused to run in the rain, more often than not sat idle in the driveway covered with snow or, in the summer, up on cinderblocks with the hoods propped open.

But the second year, her father got a job teaching woodworking at the small private college in town, and things began to look up. In hindsight, it was a happy country childhood for Elizabeth. There were some neighborhood friends and fields to run and play in, and long, sloping hills to sled down in the winter.

There were also books. Books were her great escape, and Elizabeth had her father’s mind. Early on, her father made a house rule that as long as you were reading you could stay up as late as you wanted, provided you were in your own bed. She read everything she could get her hands on. Her parents traveled to used-book stores just to feed her growing appetite. The public school in town, where she and her sister both went, had only forty-six students, from kindergarten through grade twelve. School could not keep up with her. She was bored and got little out of it. Instead, she learned from the books that gradually filled her house, and the math and science her father taught her at the kitchen table on cold winter nights, when outside the wind swept across the highlands and buffeted the windows.

The summer she turned fifteen, she listened late at night in her bed while her parents argued. They did not know their words carried so easily from the kitchen to where she lay with her knees up, her head on the pillow, a novel rested, as always, on her thighs. They fought about her. Her dad said she was dying here, that there was nothing for her, and her mother took the position that anything she needed she could get from him.

“She’s already outgrown me,” her father said. “She runs fucking circles around me. Do you get what kind of mind she has? It’s time for her to move on.”

It was an argument her father won, as he won all important arguments in their family, and the following morning, for the first time, the subject of boarding school was presented to her.

She imagined it. She thought about being away from here, this place she both loved and loathed. She thought about her friends—in truth there were not many. A few that mattered to her, but this was a town impervious to change, and they would be here. This much she knew. She had lived long enough to know that some would leave Craftsbury and some would not, and it was pretty much predetermined which camp you were in. She knew she belonged to the former and while she did not think she would leave so soon, she had to admit it held an attraction for her. The new. A chance to begin again. To be something else than what she had always been.

She looked from her father to her mother. “I want to,” she said.

“We don’t know that we can afford it,” her mother said.

“You need to take some tests,” her father said.

“Okay,” she said.

That fall, her father took her to Andover, to Exeter, to St. Paul’s, to Groton, to Miss Porter’s and Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, and, finally, to Lancaster, which was the closest of the bunch. She took the SATs and focused her energy on each question, and when the test scores came back and she was four questions off from being perfect, her father gave her a hug, for it had confirmed what he felt: that her mind was as sharp as any around.

Walking around those old campuses, seeing the students, handsomely dressed and put together, she thought, This is a world I want to belong to. In the end, she favored Exeter and Choate, though her mother insisted she apply to them all, but especially Lancaster, so it would be easy to come home on weekends. Exeter and Lancaster offered full scholarships, and from there the decision was easy. One was an hour away. The other was four. This would be her mother’s victory.

In the fall of 1973, she left Craftsbury and enrolled at the Lancaster School. Her life had switched tracks again.

Her mother called her Elizabeth. Her father called her Boo, after the character in
To Kill a Mockingbird,
his favorite novel. Some of her friends called her Lizzy. As a child, she did not like her name. It felt stuffy to her, like an old lady’s name. A name for queens, not small-town Vermont girls. Her first act upon going to Lancaster was to change it—well, partially. She chose a new derivative. She had settled on this new name the July before she went away to school and she kept it a secret. She wrote the name over and over in her notebook, practicing how it looked. Sometimes she stood in the mirror and said it out loud, and when she did, she imagined herself at the fancy prep school, moving along the walks, beside the manicured lawns, sitting in classes and arguing with boys who thought they were smarter than she just because they were boys. This was the part of going away she liked the best: She could reinvent herself. She could be whatever she wanted. She no longer had to be this girl who lived in a Podunk Northeast Kingdom town in a drafty house with a driveway full of cars that worked only on sunny days.

And so on her first day, after a tearful good-bye with her parents during which she both wanted them to stay and could not wait to see her dad’s Peugeot leave campus before it sputtered to a halt, she corrected Mr. Crane, her dorm parent, when he called out her name at the first dorm meeting.

“It’s Betsy,” she said, and from then on it was. It was that easy.

Those first nights, she was homesick. She cried in her bed after lights-out, sobs she hoped the pillow muffled so that her roommate, some rich girl from New Jersey with clothes she could only dream about, would not hear. She felt unmoored suddenly and thought that perhaps she had made a terrible mistake. In Craftsbury she had been the smartest girl in town, and while there were lots of smart kids here, there were also dozens of rich kids, and this she was less prepared for: how much money meant. From the moment she arrived she saw that the culture was different. She didn’t have the right stuff. Not only the right clothes, but also the right albums and the right posters. She had nothing she should have had, and for a day or two this was enough to cause her face to break out in a way it never had before, and this only exacerbated her sense of loneliness, and she wanted to go home.

But then classes started, and she liked the small classes, and it was different from Craftsbury—students spoke out, and soon she did, too. Sports were mandatory, and she signed up for field hockey and she was not much for sports, but she liked that the choices were made for her. In other words, it was not a question of whether she would play sports or whether she was good at sports, but instead which one she would choose.

But when the clear structure of the weekdays dissipated in the evenings and on the weekends, she felt exposed, and she was painfully aware of how she stood on the outside of things at Lancaster. She joined the other girls who didn’t have boyfriends—or invites to the city or ski houses or wherever the campus emptied to on weekends—in the sad TV room with its tired furniture, where they ate ice cream in their pajamas and watched whatever dreck the television spat out. She saw girls on her hall readying themselves for that half hour of freedom after study hall when some cute boy waited for them outside and the two of them would move out together into the darkness. She longed to be one of them. But instead the TV room became her room outside her room, and she couldn’t help but notice that the girls in her position were also the outsiders—the foreign girls; the scholarship girls; the girls who had decided, or had had it decided for them more likely, that their Lancaster would be limited to the classroom and the athletic fields.

But then, after she was there a month, something extraordinary happened. She was invited to an off-campus party. A girl, the daughter of faculty members, hosted it. Her parents were away, and the invitations were exclusive, hers whispered to her by a senior girl in her dorm who had never spoken to her before, with the message that if she were to tell anyone else, her invite would be rescinded.

“Why me?” she asked.

The girl smiled. “Someone wants you there.”

It was a Saturday night, and curfew was not until eleven. She kept the secret and did not know who else who would be at the party, beyond the girl who had whispered the invite to her. The house was one of the white Colonials down on the main street, and she arrived at seven, just as the dusk was settling on the early fall night. The girl whose parents owned the house opened the door for her, and she was led into the back living area, where about fifteen students were sitting around on sofas drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. They looked up when she came in, but the conversation continued. She felt awkward and unsure what to do with herself. Then one girl whom she had seen around campus, tall and pretty with long, straight black hair, came over to her and said, “You’re Betsy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Kenna. Want a beer?”

It was an act of kindness, reaching out and bringing her across the breach, and she smiled and said, “Sure,” and soon she had found a spot on one of the couches. Crosby, Stills, and Nash harmonized on a stereo in the corner, and a joint was being passed around. The conversation was about Nixon, and as she listened to the easy, intelligent banter, it occurred to her how much they were children playing adults, mimicking their parents with their cigarettes and their beer and their talk of politics and war.

The joint made its way to her, and she looked at it as Kenna handed it to her and she shook her head and passed it on.

“Hey,” a boy across the way said. “You don’t smoke?” He had slightly longish brown hair and wore a tattered corduroy jacket. Suddenly all eyes were on her.

“Leave her alone, Arthur,” her new friend, Kenna, said.

So this was Arthur Winthrop, she thought, the headmaster’s son. She gazed across at him, across the smoke, and said, “No. Is there a problem?”

He shrugged. “Nah,” he said, “no problem. What do I care if you partake?”

“Okay, then,” Betsy said, and around her everyone laughed, and she felt that she had won something.

A little bit later she found herself in front of a large goldfish tank. The ten or so goldfish all seemed to be standing in place at different depths, as if stuck. Their tails wagged like dogs. She was watching them intently and didn’t hear Arthur until he was right next to her.

“Do you think we are like those fish?” he said. “And the earth is a tank?”

She looked at him. “Don’t be obvious,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘Don’t be obvious.’”

He stepped back. “Wow. Are you always this tough?”

“It depends.”

“On?”

“Who’s bothering me.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good, ’cause you’re sort of pretty.”

“Sort of? That’s a hell of a compliment.”

“I just meant you have nice green eyes.”

“You don’t do this much, do you?”

“Do what?”

“Talk to girls.”

He laughed. “I can see we didn’t start well. I’m Arthur Winthrop.”

“I know who you are.”

“Oh, good, and you are Betsy?”

“Betsy Pappas.”

“Betsy Pappas. Where are you from, Betsy Pappas?”

“Craftsbury.”

“Craftsbury what?”

Now it was her turn to laugh. “Craftsbury, Vermont. It’s only an hour from here.”

“Which way?”

“North.”

“I never go north.”

“You really are a snot, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess I am.”

She suppressed a smile and watched a goldfish in front of her, its eyes like tiny marbles. “At least you know yourself. Not many people can say that, you know.”