The Headmaster's Wife Read online

Mark shrugged. “I thought I saw a body.”

  “A what?”

  “I told you you were going to think it was stupid.”

  “A dead body?”

  Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess. I guess not. I mean, I hadn’t thought about dead. It was just lying there, and I could see it from the catwalk window. You know that window up over the main reading room?”

  “Of course I know it.”

  “I was sitting up there by myself, just sort of reading and things, and I was looking out the window and there it was.”

  “The body?”

  “Under the trees. I didn’t really think of it in terms of dead. I mean, it wasn’t moving, but I thought it was somebody who’d gotten drunk. You know. I watched it for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. I lost my watch. I was sitting up there for a long time though. And I kept watching it. And it never moved. So I thought—”

  “Male or female?”

  “What?”

  “This body Male or female?”

  “I couldn’t really see, but I think it must have been male. It was—big. I don’t know. And it was odd big. I remember thinking that it wasn’t a student. Couldn’t be. Because it was big. Except some students are big. I don’t know. It was dark, you know, in the catwalk, and it was dark outside. There isn’t a light on that side of the pond.”

  Philip hesitated. This was not a con. Mark DeAvecca was perfectly serious. It wasn’t even impossible to imagine. Students did get drunk on Friday nights. They usually hid in their dorm rooms to do it, but one of them could have wandered onto campus and passed out. The campus was open to the town. Somebody could have wandered in from one of the little restaurants on Main Street.

  “Is the body still there?” Philip asked.

  Mark shook his head. “I went to check, you know, because I thought it was dangerous. Whoever it was could freeze. It’s cold as hell tonight. So I thought I’d go down and see who it was and either get him to move or get some help to move him, but when I got there he was gone.”

  “Just gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mark was looking at his shoes. Philip felt the impatience rising in him like bile. “Was there any sign that he’d been there?” he asked. “Were there footprints in the snow? An impression of a body under the tree? Anything?”

  Mark blinked. “It’s not snow. It’s hard as slate, for God’s sake. Everything’s iced over.”

  “All right,” Philip said. “You ought to go back to your dorm. Nobody’s there now at any rate. You don’t have to worry about somebody freezing to death.”

  “No,” Mark said.

  “Go directly back to your dorm,” Philip said. “Don’t wander around. It is cold tonight. You’re going to freeze without gloves in this weather.”

  “I lost my gloves,” Mark said.

  That figures, Philip thought, but it was one more thing he didn’t say. He stood and watched while Mark walked away from him up the path to Hayes House. The kid was completely zonked. He wasn’t even functioning. He had probably imagined the whole thing. It was a miracle he wasn’t seeing pink elephants and snakes in the shower as it was.

  Still, there was always the chance. When Philip was sure Mark was on his way up the Hayes House back porch steps, he turned in the other direction and went down the path toward the library and the pond. The pond was actually quite a distance away. The school said it didn’t build closer because of worries about wetlands regulation and the environment, but the real reason was worries about what water damage could do to the foundations of buildings. He went down along the office wing of the library—there was Marta Coelho’s office light, still on—and then past the big Gothic hulk and onto the open campus. Mark was right. It wasn’t really snow anymore. It was all iced over and hard, like a shell on the land.

  Philip skirted the edge of the pond, moving slowly, looking for any sign of a “body” or anything like a body; but he could see, long before he got to the stand of evergreens, that there wasn’t a body there. Philip went up close. There were no footprints, but he was leaving none himself. There was no impression of a body under the trees, but there probably wouldn’t have been, even if the body had been real.

  Philip Candor did not, for a moment, think that the body had been real. He thought Mark DeAvecca had been hallucinating, which was only to be expected. Mark should have been hallucinating for months, considering just how messed up he was most of the time.

  Philip looked around. He could see the catwalk window, still glowing from the light coming up from the main reading room. He could see the first corner that led to the office wing. He could not see the dorms. This was the most isolated edge of the pond, the place farthest away from people and buildings and cars. There was something about it he definitely didn’t like.

  Stupid kid, he thought.

  He dug his hands ever deeper into his pockets and started back to Martinson House and his apartment.

  4

  Peter Makepeace had been counting drops of water falling from the icicle on the porch, but if he was completely honest about it he would have to admit that he had started and stopped counting several times and had no idea how many drops of water had fallen. I’m going to have to do something about the leak in the porch roof, he thought, but it wasn’t his job to do anything about the leak in the porch roof, just as it wasn’t his job to be sitting in his own study on a Friday night thinking about his wife having an affair with a student. The words “having an affair” popped into his head unasked for. It wasn’t the way he put it to himself when he thought about it deliberately. She’s fucking a Student, that’s what he meant to say. More specifically, she was fucking a particular student, this year’s entry in Windsor Academy’s annual socioeconomic diversity sweepstakes. It was incredible just how cynical he had become in the few short years since he had taken this job. It was even more incredible to remember that Alice hadn’t wanted to come here or to any school. She had wanted to take a job in a factory or run away to Fiji or become an artist in Greenwich Village. It was either the wonderful, or the terrible, thing about Alice that her imagination had never progressed beyond the kind of thing most people gave up as silly when they graduated from college.

  Up on the wall next to the big multipaned window that looked out onto the quad were the plaques and pictures and framed credentials that had always defined Peter Makepeace’s life—his diploma from Andover, his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, his Ph.D. from Princeton. There was a black and white of him in his uniform for the Knickerbocker Greys. There was another black and white of him as a six-year-old in the blazer and tie that had been required for his private day school in Manhattan. These were the memories of a life lived in absolute harmony with itself. At no point, at no time, had Peter Makepeace ever for a moment strayed out of the orbit into which he had been born and out of which he knew he would never be comfortable. Other people might have played with the idea of throwing it all over and becoming revolutionaries or shoe salesmen in Kansas, but Peter knew himself better than that. He knew them better than that. He did not have the gift of social mobility. He was uncomfortable trying to make conversation, not only with students on scholarships, but with the ones whose families, however well financed, had not been well financed for long. He had the kind of voice—the kind of accent, let’s be honest about that, too—that people from the outside routinely made fun of, convinced he had to be putting it on. He did not look right in clothes that were truly casual. Somehow his jeans always looked pressed, and his T-shirts always looked as if somebody had starched them. It was not his fault. He was who he was. It was just easier to be that than it was to try to pretend to be something else for the sake of—what?

  The other picture on the wall that mattered, the one that always caught him first, was the one of Alice in her coming-out dress. It wasn’t a formal coming-out portrait, or one of those staged tableaux of flocks of girls meant to bow together at a mass presentation ball. Alice h
ad thrown out the formal one years ago, and she’d been presented at half the mass presentation balls in the Northeast. She would have thrown this one out as well, except that it belonged to him. He had taken it himself at her private party, and it had come out so beautifully—that incredible cascade of bright red hair—that he had had it enlarged and framed to keep long before he was ever “going out” with her and certainly long before she had ever agreed to marry him. Those were in the days when she was declaring, along with half her class at Smith, that she would never marry at all. She had threatened to cut off her hair. She had wandered around her campus and the streets of New York in Birkenstocks and peasant blouses made by women’s cooperatives in Guatemala. It didn’t matter. Alice was Alice. She never had cut her hair. She never could have because image mattered to her far too much. She had given up the Birkenstocks and peasant blouses, too, and not because she had married him or because he had come here to Windsor Academy to be headmaster and make her the headmaster’s wife.

  The icicle was still dripping. It was bitterly cold out on the quad. He could see the temperature on the round L.L. Bean thermometer he had mounted on the outside wall. Minus nine degrees Fahrenheit. Cold enough for anybody. The porch must be warm somehow. Maybe there was a crack in the sealant around the window letting out heat. This was one of the great things about being headmaster and not an ordinary teacher anymore. He didn’t have to live in a dorm. He didn’t have to share his space with students who would be only too happy to find a way to embarrass him. He knew he shouldn’t think that way about students. Most of them meant well enough, and most of them were not that happy to be away from their families at this young an age. He hadn’t been happy with it either back at Andover. It was odd what you went on doing that you didn’t intend to do at all.

  He was in his study at the front of the house. He went to the door and locked it, although he couldn’t imagine who would bother to come in without knocking. Not only were there no students here, there were no children of any kind. Alice didn’t want to contribute to the world’s problems with overpopulation. Peter thought it was more the fact that she didn’t want to cramp her style. Alice had never had much interest in turning herself into an earth mother. He tried the door and it felt secure. He went to his desk and sat down behind it. He should turn the desk around so that he would be facing the window when he worked. He liked to face a window when he worked. It made him feel less constricted and blocked in. The desk was turned this way because he knew, instinctively, that that was what the trustees expected, and his motto was always to give the trustees what they wanted in little things. That way it was a lot easier to get what he wanted in the big ones.

  He reached into the pocket of his trousers and came out with a small key ring, sterling silver on a fob made to look like two tennis rackets and a ball. He found the smallest key on the ring and used it to open the long center drawer of his desk. The drawer was empty except for a single manila envelope. He took the envelope out and put it down on the green felt blotter in the middle of his desk. The sweat had come out on his forehead. It was incredible, really and truly incredible, how carefully he had made his life all of a piece.

  The manila envelope seemed to pulse. He turned around to make sure nobody was looking through the window at him. That was silly because of course nobody could. There was a tight growth of hedge bushes hugging the walls of the house. Anybody who wanted to get close enough to see what he was doing through the window would get torn apart by evergreen needles.

  He opened the envelope and took out the photographs inside. They were bad photographs, really, and black-and-white, but there was nothing he could do about that except spend so much money he would make himself conspicuous; and that would really and truly defeat the point. The sweat was not just on his forehead now. It was on the back of his neck and running down the sides of his arms. It was in the small of his back. His lungs felt as if they were encased in iron bands, razor thin and pressing against the softness of his flesh whenever he took a breath. He remembered the day he had installed the first of the cameras in their bedroom, the day Alice had gone to New York with her best friend from Smith to attend some kind of rally against George W. Bush. There were times when Peter Makepeace blessed George W. Bush.

  The first of the photographs was of Alice with a student who had left the school last year, graduated, and gone on to the University of Denver or one of the other places where rich boys who don’t want to work very hard liked to get together in fraternities. Alice was sitting astride him as if she were Lady Godiva and he were the horse. She was holding her legs wide open, so that he could clearly see the tuft of her hair in that place. If he’d been able to use color film, it would have looked like a flame. The boy’s face was out of sight, hidden by some pillows and a fold of the sheet. It didn’t matter to Peter Makepeace, and it probably hadn’t mattered to Alice. It said a lot about her that she did not shave herself there and yet she very carefully did shave her underarms and legs.

  The next picture looked distorted. The camera was on the ceiling of their bedroom, in a corner, disguised by a hanging plant. He’d had to disguise it with something. From that angle, some … positions … looked less probable than others. This was a simple thing really. Alice on the bed on her hands and knees and the boy coming at her from behind, not just doing it doggy-style, as they used to say when Peter was at Andover, but ramming it up her behind, half off her and half on, his face contorted, hers pulled into a grimace, her breasts hanging down. Peter could almost see them sway. The pictures all seemed to be alive anyway. They moved like the photographs in the Harry Potter books. Peter’s mouth was dry; his brain felt too big for his head.

  The third photograph was the one that always made him stop because it proved that this was all deliberate. It wasn’t just a few cases of desperate, overwhelming passion. It wasn’t that Alice needed sex and he wasn’t giving her the sex she needed and so she found herself overcome with desire and just gave into it. In this photograph the boy was tied to the bed, not with twine or rope from the garage, but with black leather straps that had obviously been made for the purpose. Peter had seen them for sale in shops in Boston. The boy had a gag in his mouth and a black leather blindfold over his eyes, and those had also been professionally made. Peter wondered how she had gotten hold of them. She couldn’t have just waltzed into a store somewhere and bought them herself. There was her hair. It made her stand out. Maybe she’d gotten the boy to buy them. Maybe she’d sent away for them on the Internet and just trusted that she would be home when they came and that nobody else would get hold of them. In this photograph she was kneeling between the boy’s spread legs and bent over so that her hair half fell in front of her face. Enough of that face was visible so that Peter could see she had the boy’s penis in her mouth, so deeply it seemed to be climbing down her throat.

  Boys, Peter thought, they aren’t really boys. That was true. This one, the “boy” from last year, had been eighteen at the time the photographs were taken. He’d been as big as a house and stronger than Peter had ever imagined himself capable of being. The boy this year—yes, of course there was a boy this year, there was a boy every year—was sixteen, and Peter suspected that that was deliberate. Alice would know the law and know what she needed to do to stay inside of it. She served on the boards of organizations dedicated to “fighting child abuse.” Of course the child abuse they were fighting was the abuse done to girls. The only time Alice had ever been interested in the abuse done to boys was when it had looked like a policy of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Peter shuffled through the photographs and came up with the ones from this year, new ones, only a few weeks old. He really couldn’t breathe. It was impossible. He knew this boy. It wasn’t a boy he would have expected Alice to take up with because Alice—in the end, when she wasn’t watching herself, when she wasn’t acting a part for the rest of the world—was who she was. She could no more help herself than he could. This boy, though, this boy was all wrong. He was from
the wrong background. He had the wrong looks. He had the wrong tastes in sex. The photographs from this year were all predictably vanilla, no odd positions, no leather equipment. The boy’s thick, dark hair fell on Alice’s breasts as he leaned over her, pumping away in the missionary position.

  Peter suddenly wished he had it all on tape, that he could run it back for himself in video the way other men ran porno films to get themselves in the mood.

  “There’s one thing you have to remember,” a good friend of his on the board had said when Peter had first been appointed headmaster, “a headmaster is always a headmaster. No matter what he does. No matter where he is. Once you take on the title, anything you do will be interpreted as being not your own actions but the actions of the headmaster of Windsor Academy. It isn’t a comfortable position.”

  No, Peter thought, it isn’t a comfortable position. It paralyzed him. He had no idea what he was doing with these photographs. He had no idea what he wanted them for. He couldn’t see himself divorcing Alice. Even if she agreed to give him a divorce without a struggle, it would be a disaster. The headmasters of New England prep schools did not get divorced from the women the Board of Trustees expected to act as mothers to the students under their care. What was worse, he didn’t want to get divorced from Alice. He didn’t want his life disrupted in any way. He only wanted—what?

  To find the leather equipment, where she’d put it, what she did with it when she wasn’t using it. To see her exposed, not physically, not by the circulation of these pictures, but exposed, right down to the bone, so that everybody could see her for what she was. Peter’s real problem was that he didn’t know what that was. He had a terrible feeling Alice didn’t know either. He reached out for the photographs and swept them up. He put the envelope back into the drawer. He shut the drawer and locked it. Once the photographs were out of sight, he could breathe more easily, but he still couldn’t think.