The Headmaster's Wife Read online

  She swiveled her chair around so that she could look through the open door onto the hallway. She always kept the door of her office open. When she closed it, she felt as if she were suffocating. She heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the hall and then saw, suddenly, the hulking figure of one of the students she liked least and respected not at all—Mark DeAvecca, looking as usual as if he had fallen off a garbage truck and was still wearing the odd banana skin. He said, “Hi,” without looking at her. He was staring at the floor, something else that was usual. He either stared at the floor or over your left shoulder. He never looked directly at you, and his body was never completely still. She mumbled something in reply that could have been anything except encouragement. He kept moving until he was out of sight. There he was, that bright, eager prep school student she had heard all about, a monumental mess who never did the reading, never handed his homework in on time, and never studied for tests. He might as well have been playing football at some farm belt regional high school where all the kids wanted was to take over the family farm, except that he was no good at sports either. He just had a famous mother and a rich father, and that was all he needed to get into a school that was supposed to be more selective than most American colleges. Marta knew, too well, what “selectivity” meant when it came to schools. It meant that they were places that were very careful about who they let in of those people who could not be said to already belong.

  For a second she felt energy surge through her as if somebody had turned on her switch. She was suddenly purposeful and angry. She bolted out of her chair and across the office to the door. She stepped into the hall and looked both ways for Mark. She had no idea what she intended to say to him or why she wanted to say anything. She only knew that she wanted to grab hold of him and do something. When she saw that the hallway was already empty, she felt angrier still—and then the door at the other end opened, and Alice Makepeace came in from outside, wearing that black, hooded cape that fell to the floor and always reminded Marta of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

  “Marta?” Alice said.

  Marta did her best not to cringe. Alice was the headmaster’s wife, and no matter how progressive and egalitarian Windsor Academy was supposed to be, junior faculty did not piss off the headmaster’s wife without expecting some repercussions from it. Marta bit her lip and looked in the other direction, the direction she had seen Mark go. Alice was … one of those people. She had an accent like William F. Buckley’s. She was too tall, and she actually looked good in leather jeans.

  Marta had never looked good in much of anything. She was not fat, but her thinness did not make her attractive or fashionable. If she had tried to wear black leather jeans, she would have looked like a sausage in a natural casing.

  “Mark DeAvecca just went by,” she said. “I was trying to catch him.”

  “Ah, Mark,” Alice said, shaking out her hair. She had long, wavy, thick hair. Marta didn’t believe for a moment that the bright red of it was Alice’s natural color, although she knew it had been once. Still, nobody cared about that, natural or unnatural. Nobody cared about anything except the special effects.

  “He’s going to fail history,” Marta said. “Or he’s going to come damned close. I’ve talked to him and talked to him. Nothing seems to help.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be adjusting well, no,” Alice said. She pushed the cape back over her shoulders. Black cape, black leather jeans, black cashmere turtleneck sweater, black boots—Marta couldn’t look at her; she was too ridiculous. Except that she wasn’t. She was perfect. It was hard to bear.

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with adjusting,” Marta said. “I think he’s irresponsible, that’s all. He doesn’t do anything. He has reading assigned in every class. He’s supposed to take notes. He never does it. I know. I’ve asked to see the notes. I don’t think he’s ever bothered to study for history, even before he came here.”

  “He had excellent grades in history,” Alice said. “He had excellent grades in everything.”

  “There are ways to get excellent grades without doing any work,” Marta said. “You can have your mother do it, for instance. I don’t suppose his stepfather would be any help, but his mother—well, there’s always that. You could go to a school where it matters more who your parents are than what work you’re doing. There’s that, too. Everybody’s so hyped on how rigorous this place is. If it’s rigorous, he doesn’t belong here.”

  “Doesn’t he?”

  Marta flushed. She had been ranting—again. She was getting a reputation for ranting. She knew what Alice Makepeace said about her behind her back. She’s terribly earnest, that was the line she used to everybody, and now everybody used it, too. Marta was terribly earnest, and very dedicated, and of course a complete bore and an utter frump. It was, Marta thought, all true, and she didn’t care.

  She turned away, back toward the inside of her office, where the papers still sat stacked and waiting for her. It was Friday night, and she wanted to be in Boston with friends, out to dinner, at a silly movie about superheroes, in a dark club listening to a band no one had ever heard of. She didn’t want to correct Mark DeAvecca’s research paper, which would be a mess, badly argued, inadequately sourced, physically disintegrating. She didn’t want to be at Windsor Academy at all, except that she had no place else to be where they would pay her enough money so that she didn’t have to worry about it.

  “Well,” she said.

  “You’re not adjusting too well either,” Alice said. “It’s not uncommon, really, for people who are used to more structured and traditional schools. It’s hard to get past the dominant paradigm and learn to experience something new.”

  “I’m fine,” Marta said. She was still looking into her office. She didn’t want Alice to see the expression on her face, which was not the expression of a teacher dedicated to progressive ideas and the encouragement of diversity in every aspect of campus life. She could, she thought, recite the entire text of the viewbook they had sent her when she’d first applied for this job. It had been written by a good PR firm in New York that specialized in “development” materials for academia.

  “I’m fine,” Marta said again, turning back to look at Alice’s bright red hair. “You’re all wet. You’ve got snow on you.”

  “I should have. It’s snowing again. We’re supposed to get eight inches by tomorrow morning. Maybe you should knock off and get a little rest before you finish whatever you’re trying to finish.”

  “Research papers. I’ve got a lot of them.”

  “Yes, I know you do.” Alice shrugged. “I’ve got to knock off though, or I’ll miss the library. One of these days I’m going to get organized well enough to remember to pick up my books in the afternoon. Are you sure you’ll be all right by yourself?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Well, you only have to go back to Barrett House. There’s that. Have a good time with your papers.”

  “I will,” Marta said.

  Alice shrugged a little and walked away, in the same direction Mark had gone, and Marta stood in the hall and watched her leave. The doors at both ends of this corridor were fire doors. They had air closures. They made a hissing sound when they fell back into place, if you listened for it.

  Marta went back to her desk and sat down again. The first paper on the stack belonged to Sue Wyman. It would be serviceable and unimaginative, but it wouldn’t require much correcting. She took the paper clip off and spread the sheets across her desk. She picked up her red pen and adjusted the glasses on her nose. She thought that she really should do something about getting contact lenses.

  It was minutes later, when she had gotten to the point where Sue was arguing doggedly in favor of an “expanded understanding of the role of women in the American Revolution,” when it suddenly occurred to her: it made no sense at all for Alice Makepeace to come in the door she’d come in and go out the door she’d gone out if what she was doing was coming in from the outside to go to the li
brary. You could get in from the outside from that end of the hall. Just beyond the fire door, there was a breezeway that connected the office wing of the library to the main part, but the main part was over there in that direction. If you went out the door on the other end, the only way to get into the library was to go around the pathways to the front. It was like going from Boston to New York by way of Philadelphia. It made no sense.

  Marta took off her glasses and put them down on Sue Wyman’s paper. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and then her forehead, as if rubbing would wake up some faculty of discernment she’d never yet possessed. Did Alice Makepeace ever make sense? Was she supposed to? The answer was “probably not,” to both, and it was all beyond anything Marta was capable of understanding anyway. If there were different kinds of intelligence, then she lacked the kind that fit well in a place like this.

  3

  Philip Candor did not work on Friday nights, or on Saturday nights either, not even to the extent of correcting papers or hosting dorm students in his apartment. He didn’t go to Boston or go to clubs. He didn’t drink, and he didn’t feel comfortable sitting in cramped little rooms where the music was loud enough to drown out thought when he wouldn’t even be allowed to smoke. That had been a big issue, a few years ago—the fact that he smoked and wouldn’t give it up. They couldn’t very well fire him for smoking when they’d known he was a smoker when they hired him, but they had hired him over a decade ago. Times change, ideas change, people do not change. Sometimes Philip understood his father almost well enough to accept that the man had been, legitimately, who and what he was. It wasn’t always paranoia when you felt civilization closing in on you like one of those trick rooms in an old Outer Limits episode where what you thought was your hotel room was really an alien device for crushing you to death. There was the fact that so many people needed nothing more or less than control, control of themselves, control of their property, control of you. There were times when he missed what he had grown up with. He surely missed the openness and emptiness. There was nowhere in the entire state of Massachusetts where you could go to be completely and irrevocably away from people. Here, even in the national parks, you were never more than half an horn-away from truth, justice, and the American Way.

  He adjusted his thin, gold wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose and moved slightly to get a better look at Maverick Pond. This was not a good window from which to see the water. He was on the side of it with the stand of evergreen trees blocking off the view, and he was in Martinson House besides, which meant that he was at the wrong angle to see it without making an effort. He didn’t usually bother to watch what went on out there because it was usually the same old same old. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll were everywhere, it seemed, even in fancy New England prep schools where the tuition ran to thirty thousand dollars a year. He wondered if their parents had any idea at all what their kids got up to when they were left on their own on a campus like this. He wondered if their parents cared—but that was an issue for another night with a different theme song. He shifted a little on the edge of his big leather club chair and tried to see more clearly across the pond to the library. All the security lights that were supposed to be on were on. The paths that ran along the library and through the quad were well lit. Everything was empty. He could swear he’d seen Alice Makepeace’s bright red hair, but there was no sign of it anymore.

  Shit, he thought, half falling onto the hardwood floor that had been so big a selling point for the dean of faculty when he had first been recruited out of Williams College to come and teach. He straightened up and stretched. This window was not supposed to have a view of the pond. He got to his feet and tried pressing his body against the glass. There was nothing out there, no matter what he had thought at first. The campus was dark and quiet. The carillon had rung nine just a few minutes ago. In another hour it would be weekday curfew, and everybody would be expected to be back in their dorms and ready to pretend that Windsor was a school just as strict, with students just as unsophisticated, as the one in The Trouble with Angels.

  He stood back away from the window and ran his hand through his hair. Seen but not heard, he was every human being’s picture of the Complete New England Preppie. He had the fine features, the tall and slight body, the slightly too-long hair, the wire rims, the wool crewneck sweaters. He was as perfect as a model in a J. Crew catalogue, until he opened his mouth. He had been able to learn to dress at Williams, but he had not learned to talk. He thought he would die still issuing forth with that nasal western twang.

  I sound like a hillbilly, he thought yet again, and for a split second he could see Alice Makepeace’s face the first time they had ever talked, that look of shock and the hasty attempt to suppress it. “You’re from the South,” she had said, after too long a pause.

  “I’m from the West,” he’d corrected her, and then, “Wyoming,” knowing that he had nothing to fear from the lie. She wouldn’t know the difference between his accent and a Wyoming one any more than she would have known the difference between Kmart and Target. He didn’t think she had ever been to either, and he didn’t think she had ever spent time in the American West except at ski resorts and in luxury hotels, where somebody might be holding a conference. That was before he knew about her politics, of course, and for a while the revelation of her seeming passion for the Revolution had worried him a little. He’d known too many people who’d had a passion for the Revolution and meant it—although it had been a different revolution than hers. He soon realized he had nothing to fear, at least directly. She was no more interested in real poor people than she was interested in real revolutionaries. She lived in a bubble of self-regard that required nothing to feed it but the reflection of herself that she saw in the eyes of male students and male junior faculty, who took her to be the goddess Athena come to life—or something. Philip thought he ought to do something to prick that bubble one of these days when he was feeling as if he had nothing to lose.

  There was movement on the path. Philip held his breath, and then let it out only seconds later. It was nobody, really, only Mark DeAvecca, weaving a little as usual, looking disoriented. If Philip had had to guess about Mark, he would have said a combination of speed and downers, something to rev him up in the morning and keep him up during the day, followed by something to bring him down again when the rev got too painful or too out of control or had just gone on too long. He had brought it up at a faculty meeting a month ago, and the usual things had been done. One of Mark’s dorm parents had searched his room while he was out at class. The school had a handy little rule requiring the dorms to be locked and off-limits to boarders during the school day. Nothing had turned up, even though it had been a very thorough search, with the head of Security present. They had looked between the slats, under the bed, and under the carpet, and tapped along the walls of the closet to find a hollow space. Philip wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened, but it turned out that Mark did have his act together in at least one respect. He hid his stuff with the ingenuity of a master criminal. He didn’t hide it in his backpack either because that was always lying on the floor of the breezeway with a hundred other backpacks, often overnight; and one night, after everybody else was in bed, Philip himself had gone through it. Nothing.

  Mark stopped again, turned again, and shook his head. His entire body seemed to be trembling, but that could be the cold. Philip grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and went out into the hall and then onto the back porch. It was cold as hell. Philip could feel the pain of it in his hands, even though he had them stuffed into his pockets. Mark wasn’t moving.

  “Mark?” Philip said.

  Mark turned around, looking confused. “Mr. Candor?” he said. Then he blinked, shook his head slightly, and shrugged. “Philip,” he said. “Sorry.”

  A lot of the kids who came from more traditional schools had trouble with this business of calling their teachers by their first names. Philip had trouble with it himself. Still, it had bee
n over five months. Mark should be used to it by now.

  “Are you all right?” Philip asked. “You look—” You look drugged to the gills, Philip thought, but he didn’t say it. He understood the concern about lawsuits, too.

  “I’m all right,” Mark said. Then he turned back to look in the direction of the pond again. “I’m fine, really. I just thought I saw—”

  “Saw what?”

  “You’re going to think this is stupid.”

  I think you ‘re stupid, Philip thought, but he didn’t say that either. Besides, it wasn’t true. Mark DeAvecca wasn’t stupid. He was just a mess.

  “What do you think you saw?” Philip asked again.