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Authors: Thomas Christopher Greene

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BOOK: The Headmaster's Wife
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“In a manner of speaking.”

“Because he went in the army? Some people would think that’s a great thing. Serving your country.”

“He’s my only child. My only son.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I need to stand.”

Arthur stands up. He looks down and once again is reminded of his ridiculous clothes. He looks around the small room. He is a kept man, and that should be okay, he thinks, because in many ways that is what he has always been.

He stretches and then sits back down. Sips his coffee. “His mother—his mother worries about him. It’s different when you have only one. I have nothing against the army. But the army is for…”

“For what?”

“I can’t win here. I know that. One thing about being head of school? You learn how to count votes. You never fight a battle you can’t win, you see. Let me put it this way, and my apologies, for I have no interest in offending anyone. My son, by virtue of his birth mainly, had every opportunity. He did not need to become me, though it is a good life. But it was there for him, and it was not a question he had to answer until he was older. He chose to answer it when he did, and you can argue that it was his choice, that he was a man, but I cannot forgive him for that.”

“To play devil’s advocate for a moment … wasn’t it his life?”

“He’s eighteen. There is no choice when you are eighteen. What is he trying to do? Be a hero?”

“You’re asking me?”

“No. I am not.”

“Your wife, Elizabeth, what did she think about his decision?”

“What do you think she thought? She was worried sick.”

“That he might die?”

He looks at the man across from him. He suddenly wants to be outside, and thinks about asking for that. He thinks about asking if he can walk on the city streets outside all this cement, if he can take off these clothes that hang on him like blankets and just trudge through the snow in his bare feet, because he could feel that, really feel that. But he doesn’t ask because part of him knows this man cannot understand what it means to desire something as visceral as the numbing cold, the crusty snow as sharp as knives against your toes.

He takes a deep breath. Looks the man in the eye. He says, “What is the only thing a parent needs to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

“I am.”

“The answer is an easy one. It’s the only answer. Make sure your children live longer than you do. Do that and you’ve really done something, okay? The rest is filler.”

 

I return from the city to find Elizabeth alone in Ethan’s room, sitting in the rocking chair, staring out the window. It is dusk, and there is not much to see. I do not like being in Ethan’s room, and frankly I wish we could acknowledge somehow that he is not here, and therefore this room should return to utility as a guest room. But Elizabeth prefers that it appear as it did when he was a student. It is virtually unchanged from then. His navy sport coats and tan chinos, the uniform of the Lancaster boy, still hang pressed in the closet. There is a Michael Jordan poster above the twin bed. I do not like this room and I do not like that this is how Elizabeth chooses to spend her time now, this and the obsessive tennis that makes no sense to me, either. There is no future in it.

But if you learn anything in a marriage it is when to give up. I used to think that all marriages ran the same trajectory. They start with wanting to climb inside the other person and wear her skin as your own. They end with thinking that if the person across from you says another word, you will put a fork in her neck.

That sounds darker than I mean it to, for it is a joke. The truth usually lies in between, and the most one can hope for is accommodation, that you learn to move around each other, and that when the shit hits the fan, there is someone to suffer with. That sounds dark, too, but I am sure you understand. There are few things in this life we are equipped to do alone is all I am trying to say.

This week I learn that Russell Hurley is, despite his youth, both a better man and a more promising human being than yours truly. He is given every chance to confess to a crime he did not commit, in exchange for leniency, for really nothing more than a handful of demerits that may mean washing the floor in the common areas one winter Saturday morning, but he will have none of it.

Discipline Committee is a crucible. For many kids it is the first major test of their young lives. But Russell Hurley is so sincere in his denial, so unyielding in his belief in himself, that I can see the entire committee bending under his indomitable will, though they have no idea what to do with evidence that is more damning than most of what we see. Not a thing circumstantial about bottles under one’s bed.

He is also a big, good-looking kid, and this doesn’t hurt, either. Nevertheless, the facts are the facts and promises are promises. Knowing what I have committed to Betsy, I ask to see him in my office after the Discipline Committee meets. There is still time to turn this around, but I need his help. You would suppose that, as head of school, I could just wave my wand and it is fixed. Perhaps that is true, and perhaps I should take this opportunity to right this wrong, but once we are into the committee it is more complex than that. Russell has testified in front of his peers and in front of the faculty members and Dean Marx and, not least of all, me.

Outside it is snowing. One of the first substantial snows is anticipated, and what falls as we talk are fat, slow flakes that stick to the bare limbs of the trees. I plead with him.

“Russell,” I say, “Think about your future here. We are not Deerfield. There is no second chance. You can end this now.”

“By admitting I did something I didn’t do?”

“If that’s how you choose to look at it.”

“So you are encouraging me to lie, then?”

“Of course not. I am telling you to be practical.”

“Even at the expense of the truth?”

“Life is a series of trade-offs. Surely you have figured that out by now.”

He goes to the window. I watch him take a deep breath. He stares out at the falling snow as if the answer he seeks were somewhere out there. He turns, and I see him in profile, and it is there that, for only a moment, I see the man he will become someday. An attorney perhaps, thicker around the middle, sallow-eyed, tall but slightly stooped. No longer the lean, young athlete.

I think I have him, but he is resolute. “I won’t lie,” he says.

“So you refuse to admit anything?”

“I won’t lie,” he says again.

“Just to be clear, you know what this means? That you give me no choice? There is only one way I can vote, you do understand that?”

He sighs. “You do what you need to.”

He leaves me alone in my office.

Have you ever wished you could just get out of your own way? That the very moment when things feel inevitable is precisely the moment when you should question their inevitability?

I know this is a trap. This is a mistake, but there are those who live by principles and those who live by nothing at all. And at Lancaster you have no choice—gratefully, despite the hardship that can come with the consistent application of principle—but to be in the former group.

 

I get Russell’s father on the phone. He is a plumber, and I do not expect this to be a difficult conversation, and it is not. There is no nice way to say it, but men like Russell’s father are not accustomed to questioning men like me, and when I am done talking he says, “When should I get him?”

“Russell?”

“No, some other kid. Yes, Russell. Is he done now? Or is there something else he’s got to do?”

“No,” I say. “He’s done now. Today would be fine.”

“All right, then. Why do things have to be so hard with you people?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I mean it. I hang up the phone.

It is done now; Russell is done now, and I am not the one who sees him off. I do get a look at him moving across the quad with Mr. Marx, on his way back to gather his belongings. The two of them walking through the falling snow to the boys’ dorm. It is an old ritual, one that has been around as long as there has been a Lancaster, and I do not suppose it gets any easier, especially when the boy in question is not at fault, which is not unprecedented, but is not an everyday thing, either.

The truth is Russell Hurley had a way out, and he could have fulfilled his promise here and averaged his 27.5 points a game and maybe taken us to the New England championships for the first time in a decade, and in the process have carved his own path south to Hanover and to greatness at Dartmouth College.

But he stood on principle, and so did we. And when two parties stand on principle, the weaker of the two, the one without the backing of history and institution, gives. It always does. It is the way of the world, and I do not make the rules, only follow them.

In the middle of this—and perhaps to avoid Betsy Pappas, since I know her wrath is coming, since she will see Russell’s expulsion as a violation of our agreement—I go to see my father.

He lives, as he has since his retirement, in an old house just down the street from campus. It is where, you could say, old headmasters go to die. The house is owned by the school, and it is modest, hardly as grand as the house I call my own. Nevertheless, it is a classic New England white clapboard home with green shutters, and around it are the gardens that have become his work since my mother died. It occurs to me that I have been so desperate, and for so long, to be my own man that I have not sought his counsel perhaps as often as I should. He has sat where I sit, and there are not many of us who can say that. One thing that is unassailably true about being head of school is that until you actually occupy the office, you cannot understand its challenges. You think you do, but, trust me, you do not. This is one of the reasons our fraternity, despite our competition, is one of peership and understanding.

My father greets me at the door. He is not expecting me, and it has been awhile since I was over. Too long, in fact, though that is my issue more than his. What can you say about fathers and sons that has not already been said? What can you say that Turgenev, for instance, has not said better?

“Arthur,” my father says. “Come in.”

He walks with a cane now, and his silver hair is thinner than it used to be, and he is stooped from age. But even not expecting visitors on some random Wednesday night in November, he is put together as if the board itself might show up at the door. His clothes are pressed as always, a crease down the center of each leg of his tan chinos, his gig line perfect, buttons lined with buttons.

He leads me into his study, where he has a fire going. My father insists on fires most of the year. Even in June. The room is overheated, though my father does not notice. He wears a sweater under his blue sport coat.

“Scotch?” he says.

I nod, and he pours us each a couple of fingers from the carafe on the table next to his desk. His hand shakes as he brings me the glass. We sit in wingback chairs in front of the fire, and I do not tell him why I am here, and I do not have to. I do not just visit, and he knows this.

“You been having a bit of a hard time of late,” my father says.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I keep my ear to the ground,” he says.

“The board is a little tricky right now.”

“Penny Wilton?”

“Yes. Dick is doing good work. But she’s a problem.”

My father nods. He looks thoughtfully into the fire. I follow his eyes. It can be a beautiful thing to watch a fire. He says, “Arthur, how much of this is about Betsy?”

I turn to look at him. He continues to look straight ahead. Who has he been talking to? Mrs. LaForge? Have some of my conversations been too loud?

I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t be daft, Arthur, really.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Arthur, listen to me, okay? I want you to listen to me. No one expects you to be perfect. You get that? You do not have to be so controlled all the time. You need outlets.”

“Outlets?”

“Yes, ways of coping. We all do. You know the old saw: ‘Bottle it up and it will explode.’”

I look at my father as if I am seeing a different man. This is an uncomfortable conversation. I find myself wishing I had not come here. He wants to talk more about this, but in truth I am suddenly not feeling particularly well. I stare at the fire, and his words bounce off me and back to him, and now and again I offer him platitudes as if I were listening.

That night I have a very strange dream. I dream that my heart has come outside my body. It is on the outside of my chest, first as a nub and then fully formed. Though it doesn’t really look like a heart; it looks more like a jellyfish. It is a clear, oblong thing that hangs like a limp balloon with works inside it, like you see in clocks. Small machinery that moves up and down, up and down. I am very afraid to have my heart outside my chest like this. I feel like I need to talk to someone about it. I try to find Elizabeth but cannot, so instead I go over to my father’s house and show this to him. I expect sympathy and remorse and alarm. Clearly, I am dying. This could happen only to a dying person. But my father simply looks at my hanging heart and says, “That is going to be expensive.” It is the worst thing he could say. It shows he doesn’t understand the scope of the problem. Similar to when he brought up Betsy, as if he could possibly understand what it means to love her, as if he could possibly understand the danger I am in. He never did a wrong thing in his life. When did he become so cavalier? Perhaps age is getting to him finally. Maybe he is losing his mind.

 

The following afternoon I have a most curious conversation with Mrs. LaForge. Mrs. LaForge is not someone to offer her opinion, and this has always been a part of her utility: She keeps her head down and does her work. She is most capable, and in all the years she has served a Winthrop in this grand old office, I cannot remember one time when she offered unsolicited advice.

BOOK: The Headmaster's Wife
11.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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