The Headmaster's Wife (17 page)

This is in the fall. The city is gorgeous in autumn color, and they catch a Broadway show, eat dinner at a French restaurant, where a duck is carved at the table for them and a sauce is ladled out of a copper pan and onto their plates.

They drink bottles of wine and afterward they walk down the busy city streets with their arms locked, strolling while the bustle flows over and around them. Everyone, it seems, is in a hurry except for the two of them.

That night, when they are both high from the wine, she dances for Arthur. It begins as a lark, something funny to do, though she admits she likes his gaze on her as she takes off her clothes in front of the window, not giving a shit who might be looking in from the big city. She likes his gaze as she begins to move for him, closing her eyes and letting her body go, truly go, for the first time in her life.

They make love in the huge shower with water spilling over them, and afterward, now on their third bottle of wine, she breaks down again, this time even more unexpectedly—it comes over her faster than a cold—and maybe it is because it happens after a magical night in the city, the gift of it that he has given her on her birthday, and while Arthur wants to deliver her from this moment, she knows that he cannot and that, like a cold, it will have to run its course.

He goes silent, and she rolls away from him on the bed, toward the wall, toward the window that looks west between the buildings to the Hudson. A few minutes later, she hears him leave the room.

At one point she falls asleep, and when she wakes he is nowhere to be found. She moves through the apartment until she finds him on the balcony. He is naked with his hands on the top of the ornate balustrade. She comes up behind him, and now he is the one who is weeping. The air is cool this high up, and the breeze stiffens her nipples and blows her hair off her shoulders. She does not say anything, but follows his eyes to the ground far below. It is late at night, but the street is full of people. Cars stream down Central Park West toward Columbus Circle.

He turns and looks at her, his eyes fat with tears.

“What are you thinking about?” she says.

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I am thinking I would like to walk in the park naked. Disappear into its trees and not come back.”

And then she realizes that they are more alike than she has imagined. Like her, he is broken. And she thinks perhaps this is what love is: letting someone else see that part of you that shatters like glass. All of us are broken in our own way. And in that moment, on her birthday, looking over the black trees to the bright lights of the other side, she knows she will marry Arthur. They will grow old together, broken together, and as long as they both don’t completely shatter at the same time, they might find a way to pick each other off the ground.

One night they are at a faculty dinner at one of the houses on the row. It is early September but might as well be midsummer for there is a heat wave, and while the wife offers gin and tonics, the husband lights the grill for steaks. They could be anywhere, Betsy thinks, at any old cookout, except that the white clapboard is so classically New England and in the walled-in garden the faculty chatting in small groups are mostly in their late twenties and thirties, a particularly handsome group of people, she thinks, especially in the bright sunlight and against the pale blue sky.

She is standing with Arthur and with James Booth, the new art teacher, and his wife, Ella, who has been hired into music. They are a little different, more bohemian, she supposes, and this is partly on her mind, but mostly she is not listening, for behind them she sees the host’s daughter, a girl of about thirteen, sitting cross-legged near the rosebushes in the far corner of the garden. The girl is beautiful, with long, straight flaxen hair, and she is shucking corn for dinner. She has on a sundress and is barefoot. In front of her is a large pot, and as she shucks she takes the freshly cleaned cobs and places them in it. For some reason this moves Betsy, and she can’t keep her eyes off the girl.

For the remainder of her life she will remember this simple moment, a pretty girl shucking corn, and she will never tell anyone about it. And she does not know why this moves her so—could it be because it was something she did as a child when her parents had summer cookouts? No, it’s bigger than that, it’s more what the girl represents, this idea of family, and for the first time she sees herself as someone who should carry a legacy to a new generation. And that night, when they return to their apartment, the two of them gilded from gin and tonics in the sun, it is she who initiates the lovemaking, first with passionate kissing in the living room and then when they move to the bedroom and undress each other. In the dim light she looks up at Arthur, and he smiles warmly at her and brushes her hair off her forehead before he lifts her shirt up and over her head. And when Arthur reaches for the condoms in the top drawer of the nightstand next to the bed, she stops him.

“Not tonight,” she says.

“No?” he says, surprised.

“No,” she says.

And when he is inside her, she presses her face into the pillow, and her mind empties until there is only the simple feel of him, his hands on her hips, the strength of him, of her, of both of them.

The thing she imagines, before having a baby, that she will dislike the most, breastfeeding, she falls in love with. Seeing it from a distance, other women sneaking into the coatroom and sliding up their shirts, holding a screaming baby like a football, there was a primalness to it she found entirely unappealing: women as cows. But now, with Ethan, once she gets over the initial soreness and they figure it out together, how to latch, the two of them a team, she finds herself looking forward to it, the tug, the release of milk into his eager mouth. It is almost sexual, this feeling—but of course that cheapens it. It is more complex and nuanced than sex, more as if a fifth chamber in her heart has suddenly revealed itself.

He is more beautiful than other babies, she thinks, not one of those weird old men. He has perfect features, and when he is nursing, she stares down at his beatific face and she loves him more than she thought it possible to love any living thing. Most of all she loves that she can give him this, the milk. The fact that she has this ability innately is as close as she has come to believing in God.

Later she will look back on this as the time in her life she was happiest. Ethan grows like a tree. Motherhood suits her. Arthur is a rising star in the classroom and even more so in the school at large. They have found their place fully in the world, and when that happens, you cannot help but feel it. It is as if their lives were locks that needed to be calibrated. Suddenly everything fits.

Soon Ethan is walking, banging into everything, muttering his first words. He is verbal early, and this pleases Arthur to no end, and when Arthur tells her excitedly, “I think he’s smart. He looks smart, doesn’t he? I mean, look at him.”

“He’ll be smart enough,” Elizabeth says.

“No, I mean, he’s got a gift. Look how quickly he’s learning. He’s so curious. He’s like a scientist.”

“All children are scientists,” she tells Arthur.

And as Ethan grows, each year passing more quickly than the last, this is the only time there is any acrimony between the two of them. It is a question of expectations. She wants to build a shield around Ethan and protect him from his father’s desires. Arthur sees his son’s life with such narrative precision. He will become tall and handsome, a star athlete and accomplished student (in his field of choice, of course, as long as it is something traditional), and then Yale awaits after Lancaster, and then the return to Lancaster to take his rightful place in the classroom and wait his turn to move into the big white Colonial.

Maybe, Elizabeth thinks, she should have considered all this before she married Arthur. After all, it was pretty clear what came with Arthur, this explicit sense of primogeniture, but wasn’t it also what she loved about him? That she could wear this old school like a blanket? Grow old inside its woolly warmth?

It is only through Ethan’s eyes that it gives her pause. Ethan’s eyes—brown as a doe’s, heavy-lidded—do not have her husband’s sharpness. Even in childhood pictures she has seen of Arthur there is a beady-eyed awareness in his brown eyes. But Ethan is an innocent, she thinks, surprised by anything other than straightforward benevolence. As for all children, the world is created for him every day anew, but unlike other children, he does seem open to this idea’s being shattered, even when cruelty intrudes and does it for him.

Once, when he is four, at a July 4 faculty party, they set up a bike race for the kids. It is in front of the girls’ dorms, and the kids race in groups by age. Ethan has his bike with the training wheels, and to the back of it he has attached, all on his own, a winter’s plastic sled, and in it is his stuffed rabbit, Bun, which he carries everywhere with him under his arm. When the four-year-olds get their turn, Elizabeth approaches Ethan to help him, but he says, “Mama, I want to do it myself.”

And he does. Down the road he goes with the other kids, pedaling his little heart out, the sled dragging noisily on the pavement. But when he gets close to the finish line, an older kid, maybe twelve and large for his age, steps in front of Ethan and impedes his progress. Elizabeth sees this blurrily, and she glances around for Arthur, but he has his back to the race, chatting with some of the men. Right then the larger boy throws Ethan off his bike and onto the ground.

Elizabeth bounds toward them, and Ethan is crying like mad, and the bigger boy is standing over him saying, “You can’t have anything attached to your bike,” like this is a race with rules.

It takes everything for Elizabeth to refrain from striking this boy who has pushed her son off his bike. Some big dumb kid standing in front of her shirtless, with downcast eyes, and she wants to run a knife through him.

She says to him, “Jesus, what’s wrong with you? He’s only four.”

Ethan is wailing. “Mama, Mama, why did that boy do that?”

And the truth is Elizabeth has no idea. It is no big deal, a bully. There are bullies everywhere. But in that moment, she wants to tuck Ethan back in her womb, where he will always be warm and no one will try to hurt him again.

Arthur’s father announces his resignation on a Friday in the spring. Elizabeth hears about it as a buzz that hums through the library.

“Did you hear about Mr. Winthrop? He is finished at the end of the year.”

Elizabeth waits until before dinner, when they are in their dorm apartment, readying themselves to make their way as a family for their nightly trek to the dining hall, before she asks Arthur about it. Six-year-old Ethan is in his room playing with a model airplane. She can see him if she turns her head, carrying the small model over his head, making whooshing sounds.

Elizabeth says, “I heard today that your father has decided to retire.”

“Yes,” Arthur says, taking a pull on a glass of wine and then putting it down on the bureau, not turning around to face her. He is straightening his tie in the mirror.

“Did you know about this?”

“Not the exact timing,” he says.

“What happens now?”

“There will be a search, of course.”

“Are you a candidate?”

He turns toward her now and gives her a quick smile, then back to the mirror and his Windsor knot. “They will want to talk to me, I am sure.”

“They will want to? What aren’t you telling me, Arthur?”

He finishes with his tie and spins around and smiles. “Betsy,” he says. “There is nothing to tell right now.”

She looks toward the room where their son is now spinning in circles, dipping the plane in his right hand up and down above his bed. “Bullshit,” she says a little loudly.

“Okay,” he says. “Look. I can’t have this around the school.”

She might fall apart. “What do you know?”

He looks toward the window and then, gratuitously, toward the door, like some student might barge in and reveal their secret. “Okay,” he says. “It’s mine to lose. I think you are looking at the next head of school.”

A huge grin sweeps across her face. “Holy crap, Arthur! I don’t know what to say. This is unbelievable.”

He likes this, her obvious happiness. He runs a hand through his hair. “Well, nothing is done now but…”

“What does this mean?”

He laughs. “No more living in a dorm, for one.”

“Oh, that will be nice.”

“Yes,” he says. “Won’t it? A fireplace? A big house? Are you ready?”

“I’m going to explode.”

“You can’t say anything.”

She shook her head. “Who am I going to tell?”

“I know you won’t.”

“This is so amazing.”

“And I didn’t even tell you about the salary.”

“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me.”

“Put it this way: Maybe we can get a place at the beach.”

Elizabeth jumps to him then, jumps the few steps that stood between them, and he takes her in his arms. He gives her a stiffish hug, but it doesn’t matter to her. Nothing can get in the way of her happiness. Who wants this more, she or he? Before she can decide, Ethan is there.

“Wash your hands,” she says to Ethan. “We need to leave for dinner.”

Walking across the expanse of lawn to the dining hall and then, in the hall itself, sitting at their normal faculty table, she can hardly focus. She looks over to where her in-laws hold court at the most prestigious table at the far end, overlooking the entire room. She imagines sitting there. On the way back to the dorm, they pass the headmaster’s house. She has been by it thousands of times, inside it hundreds of times, but this time is different, and while the three of them walk past, she stares into the lit windows and in her mind she is moving through that great house, sitting in front of the large fireplace with the logs replenished daily by the maintenance staff, hosting parties in the high-ceilinged rooms. She looks over at her husband and for the first time in a while she sees him as she imagines others see him—this man who aspires to greatness, a man elevated above his peers, and she is proud of him.