The Headmaster's Wife (6 page)

For a moment, you see, I am nervous that they know about Betsy. But if they did, the conversation we would be having would be very different. To the extent there is a third rail in our business, a relationship with a student is it. I am assured that they know nothing about it. Which raises the question, what the hell are they talking about? Who out there is chattering about me? The academic dean who, like all academic deans, secretly covets my position? Some brave member of the faculty? Certainly not Mrs. LaForge, who is far from perfect but who, over the years, has developed the utmost sense of discretion in all matters. It is the most important part of her job, and one that I have never questioned.

Penny Wilton says, “Arthur, let me ask you something directly. I am sorry if this is uncomfortable, but how much are you drinking?”

I can feel my face growing red. I am indignant. Even my servitude to the board has certain limits. “Friends,” I say, my voice rising a little bit. “If there is something concrete related to school you would like to discuss, then I am happy to do it. But a spurious conversation built on innuendo I will not engage in.”

“We have an obligation,” Penny says, “a fiduciary responsibility to—”

Dick Ives cuts her off. “Okay, everyone. I think Arthur has a point here.”

Mark Saltonstall speaks. He leans forward and says, “We all just want to help, Arthur, if we can. You’ll let us know what you need, right? What we can do?”

“Naturally, Mark, “I say. “But I am quite fine.”

Mark nods and settles back in his seat. He is a handsome man with large features. He is over six foot five. Both our families go back to New England’s founding, though I am from a branch that chose to serve, you could say, rather than to lead.

“I think we’re done here,” Dick Ives says. “We have a busy weekend in front of us. Plus, if we hustle we can make the end of the football game.”

Penny Wilton looks positively furious as we file out of the room. Outside on the walk, Brian Corcoran catches up with me. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Arthur,” he says. “I think you’re holding up pretty well. Not sure I’d be as strong as you, frankly. And don’t worry about Penny. You have a lot of friends on this board.”

“Thank you, Brian,” I say to him. “I appreciate your support.”

We walk together in silence toward the football game. The day is bright, and the foliage in the faraway hills is a stunning mix of reds and yellows. I think about asking Brian what the hell they think is happening here, since all this talk, if they are not aware of Betsy, confuses me. But I know from working with a board for as long as I have that there is always politics. Or, as my father used to say dismissively, the politics at elite secondary schools is so bad because the stakes are so low. Maybe so. I just need to be on my guard.

Elizabeth does not attend any of the board functions with me. She used to be a staple at the Saturday night dinner and cocktail party. She never enjoyed the banal conversation, and in recent years she just stopped coming. I know there is an expectation at some schools that the wife be an extension of the head, always on his arm, perhaps hosting some events in her own right. Some of the other elites have even begun to provide the head’s spouse with a salary and a budget for just such work. As if it were the White House.

That is the new model, if you will. Elizabeth and I do things the old-fashioned way. She’s always had her own position at school, her own interests. Nowadays they hire heads who do not even come with a history of the school or come out of the faculty. They are mercenaries, you see, who know only how to cut costs and raise money. They will gladly switch ties for the right paycheck. The whole thing sickens me.

Nevertheless, one of the advantages of having Elizabeth at my side is that she is accomplished at moderating my behavior. No more wine, dear, she would say, and like the loyal boy, I would obey. Now, you would think, given the tenor of the conversation earlier this afternoon, that I would be on my best behavior, but the whole thing is nagging at me, and looking across the cocktail party at Penny Wilton whispering in the ear of Dick Ives, I see conspiracy all around me, and in truth, I drink more than I should. The glasses of wine cannot be refilled fast enough, and by the time we sit down for dinner I am pretty much in my cups.

I manage to dump a full glass of red across my table, sending Dick Ives’s wife, Rose, scurrying out of her chair for safety. I plead clumsiness, but everything is seen through a different lens now, and I of all people know that, and if I don’t, it is clear in the look Dick gives me as I do my best to mop up the spill and then signal the waitress for another glass.

I am out of sorts. That much is certainly true. There is a lot weighing on me right now, and while the conversation flows around me—many of the same old stories we tell every meeting—my mind is across campus. I am thinking of Betsy Pappas, and the more I think of her, her pretty eyes, that angled face out of antiquity, the more I look around this roomful of cultured, wealthy people, middle-aged and older, overweight, the more all of it, all of life, seems so arbitrary to me. Why does any of this matter? This in which I used to put so much import? These men on their fat haunches in their tweeds, and their wives with their plump pearl necklaces? How could any of it even approach what I have come to know in recent weeks? How could any of it hold a candle to the feel of Betsy Pappas asleep in my arms in that hotel room? Studying her body while she slept, seeing where her neck met her shoulder, her shoulder met her arms, her torso curved out to meet the embrace of her hip?

Okay, we have no business loving each other. But love has no master. Love has no head of school. It is as fickle as the wind.

Somehow I make it through dinner without further incident. I even contribute to the conversation in ways that to me feel positive. Afterward, we spill out of the old inn on Main Street and disperse, the trustees to the various hotels and vacation homes near campus and I back to the headmaster’s house. Tomorrow is a big day for all of us. The quarterly board meeting.

And while I should go home, say good night to Elizabeth and do something to sober myself for the morning, I do not. On the walk back to campus I hear the bells in the clock tower tolling, signaling that it is ten o’clock and the end of study hall.

The students at Lancaster have a half hour between the end of study hall and check-in with their dorm parent in preparation for lights-out at eleven. Many of them take advantage of this small window of freedom by gathering in the student union, or taking walks with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Coming onto the main walks of campus, I encounter many such students, and they greet me cheerily, with a “Hello, Mr. Winthrop,” but I just barrel along, my head full of wine, my feet unsteady as I trudge.

It is a beautiful night. Unseasonably warm, and above the flatlands of the campus that border the river the stars look close enough to touch. At one point I stop just to drink in the sky. I am on the central path that runs from the girls’ dorms up to the main campus. I am so fixated on the magnificence of the sky that I do not see the couple moving hurriedly toward me until they are on top of me, and I hear the girl say, “Keep going.”

But the boy says, “Good evening, Mr. Winthrop,” and as he does I pivot my head toward them and watch as they pass me. To my great horror, the girl is Betsy Pappas, her arm locked in the crooked arm of Russell Hurley, the tall new basketball star. He gives me a great cocky smile, as if he knows all about me and Betsy.

“Hey,” I say, somewhat drunkenly, but they are moving swiftly toward the main campus. I say it again, more of a growl than actual words, but their young legs have already taken them out of range. I can no longer see them. Then, for a moment, near the road, the yellow light of a streetlamp picks up their silhouette. I can see his tall figure, and the shorter one next to him. In the black night it is hard to tell where he ends and she begins.

I wake with a huge head. A pounding headache from all the wine. Lying in bed, I recall a shameful memory from the night before. I returned to the house, drunk and full of misplaced aggression from seeing Betsy with Mr. Basketball, to find Elizabeth curled up in the fetal position on her bed, her eyes open and staring blankly at the wall. She did not look up when I came into the room. I stood there, swaying slightly, and still she did not look up at me. It occurred to me that the catatonia she had been flirting with for months had finally taken hold, and rather than speak to her softly, try to bring her out, try to bring my wife back, I instead spoke to her in anger.

“Are you going to spend your life in this bed? Is that what you are now? It’s very nineteenth century, Elizabeth. You know that, don’t you? Should I fetch the doctor to look in on your consumption?”

She glanced up at me briefly, then back to the wall.

“You have nothing to say?” I ask.

This finally gets her attention. “No, it’s you who has nothing to say,” she says.

“Oh, is that right?” I say, eager to engage. “If you haven’t noticed, I have a school to run. Not that you would know anything about that. There was a time when that was important to you, though it has been so long I can hardly remember.”

“Go to sleep, Arthur.”

I stomped my foot. “Do not tell me what to do. I am not a child. Speak to me, Elizabeth.”

“Go to sleep,” she says again, and perhaps because she refuses to look up at me, or perhaps because even in my drunkenness I see something in the emptiness of her eyes, something that says I will not reach her, not this night, anyway, I give up.

I go to the guest room and pass out with my clothes on. And this is how I wake: starfished in my suit on top of the covers, mouth dry, full of shame.

I muddle through a seven-hour board meeting, and there are times I think I will not make it. I am soupy with hangover, and when I present my report to the board—an hour of straight talking—it is as if someone else were speaking. My words come automatically, and from somewhere else. I hear them linger in the air, and it feels like magic that they keep coming. Someone else is in control of my mind.

I am grateful for the committee reports, which drone on and on, but at least it is the board members talking and not me. Finally, it is over. Back at the house, I collapse on the bed, and the last thing I remember before I fall asleep is seeing Elizabeth getting dressed in the shadows near my closet, putting on her tennis clothes. No doubt heading back to the courts to hit another hundred or so serves. At least she has left the bed, but what is she playing for?

In the week that follows, I suddenly see Betsy everywhere. In class she is sullen and doesn’t participate unless called upon, but it seems not to matter where I walk on campus, I see her smiling, knowing face. Standing in a pack of students outside the dining hall, she beams as she looks up at the tall Russell, and when I walk by I see that their hands are clasped.

She is torturing me. It is as if nothing ever happened between us. In fairness to her, she was clear with me about not falling in love with me. Drinking in my study late at night, I find the images coming to me, and I want both to turn them away and to invite them in. I see Betsy and Russell entwined on the wrestling mats in one of those back rooms in the gym, long a chosen place for illicit lovers. Russell is on top of her. Her hands are up in his hair; her hands are all over his long, sinewy body. Betsy takes him in her mouth. She gives him the gift that is her. She gives it to him over and over and without a care for what it all means. I hate her for it. I hate him for it. I hate both of them.

I am a teenager again. You think this door is closed to you. You think you will never feel the hurt of first love again, and then here it is, a kick to your groin so swift it takes your breath away. Now, I am not a violent man, but I will confess that I have some awful thoughts. I want Russell to disappear. I take that back—I only want Betsy, the promise of what we started that night in the hotel room. I want to make love to her again, to taste her skin on my tongue, to feel the warmth of her breath, her mouth.

So it is not that I want Russell to disappear, though it is hard to see how I can have Betsy while he is around. Late at night, with a head full of scotch, I have this macabre fantasy. There is Russell floating facedown in the river, his body caught in a small eddy, being repeatedly thrashed against a fallen tree on the riverbank. It will be tremendously sad for our community, but when the school grieves, the head of school must lead. There will be services to preside over. Individual students to console. Most of all there will be Betsy. She will need to heal, of course, though healing can require a guide. I could be there for her. I could commiserate, lift her through this tragedy. A shoulder to cry on, a warm embrace to take away the chill of the dark nights.

The macabre fantasies fueled by scotch and the lateness of the hour give way eventually to the reality of the day. One morning I ask Mrs. LaForge to pull Russell’s file and, in my office while a cold rain falls outside the window, I open it and dive in.

Russell Hurley is from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, though not from the money that has moved into that Berkshire town in recent decades. His father is a plumber; his mother works as a secretary at the high school where Russell was a relatively average student. Certainly not Lancaster material, except for one thing.

Russell Hurley shattered every scoring record for boys’ basketball in the western part of the state. While Western Massachusetts is hardly a basketball mecca, the sheer numbers are impressive even for those who, like me, have a halfhearted understanding of the game. In his file is a DVD. I take it out and put it into the television. It contains the footage of Russell scoring his two thousandth point in his junior year. It shows a packed house of a small basketball court. He dribbles the ball up the court, and the defenders swarm around him, but he dekes one way, and the ball is like a yo-yo on a string off his fingers. He splits two members of the other team with his dribble, and at the top of the key he pulls up and, with one graceful motion, his body springs into the air and the ball leaves his fingers and spirals toward the basket in one great arc. It swishes through the net, and the game is stopped.