The Headmaster's Wife Page 4

  Michael Feyre, he thought, and the idea was so absurd he simply stopped thinking of it. Even with the pictures in the drawer, he couldn’t imagine Alice panting over the body of that thick, awkward, unimaginative clod.

  There was no such thing as a Working-Class Genius, Peter thought. There was only one mediocrity after the other, each given a glow by rich people like Alice who preferred their romances written by Dreiser rather than Barbara Cartland.

  5

  For the first six months Cherie Wardrop was at Windsor Academy, most of the rest of the faculty had insisted on pronouncing her name as if it were the French endearment: “Che-RIE,” people would say, passing her on the walks in the quad or coming up behind her in the line in the cafeteria, proud of their boarding school French, and she would go along with them. Windsor was a miracle, as far as Cherie was concerned. It was hard enough to find a job of any kind these days. To find one just outside Boston was a near impossibility, and to find one in a boarding school that served the children of the very people she had admired so much as a child was—well, impossible, that was all. It was worse than impossible; it was silly. There were days when she woke up, looked at the bedroom around her, and thought she had somehow been transported from the kind of novels she used to write in secret in the eleventh grade. She’d been careful with those novels at the time. She’d known better than to write them so that the characters had the kind of names she was so fascinated with because she’d known that if she did somebody would be sure to find them, and then everything would go completely to hell. She wondered if it would have been different if she’d grown up out here instead of in the Midwest, if her parents had been rich and sophisticated instead of middle-class and midwestern. People here certainly liked to think they were different. They liked to think of themselves as “citizens of the world.” It was one of those things Cherie still hadn’t managed to understand. On the other hand, Melissa had been born and brought up around here. She had even gone to a boarding school like this one called Miss Porter’s, where Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had actually been a student. Melissa was just as fascinated by all these people as Cherie was and just as determined to stay part of the world they lived in.

  The truth was, Cherie’s name was not pronounced like the French endearment. It was pronounced “cherry.” Her mother had named her after Cherry Ames, the heroine of a series of books for girls that had been popular when her mother was still in grade school. Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, the first one was called, and then the series went from there. Army Nurse, that was one—Cherry Ames went off to fight the good fight in World War II. Dude Ranch Nurse. Private Duty Nurse. Jungle Nurse. Boarding School Nurse. She should have read that last one, except that she couldn’t have. She couldn’t read any of them because the books were arranged carefully on a built-in bookshelf in the living room protected behind a thin sheet of soft plastic, preserved for all time. The closest Cherie had ever come to reading any of the books was listening to her mother tell her the stories, which happened several times a week from the age when she might have been interested in fairy tales. Other mothers read Dr. Seuss to get their children to sleep. Cherie’s told the stories of Cherry Ames.

  I wonder what she wanted? Cherie thought now. It was one of the great questions of her life. Maybe her mother had wanted to be a nurse, but, if so, it was hard to understand why she hadn’t just become one. One of her mother’s sisters was a nurse. It wasn’t as if Cherie’s grandparents would have put barriers in Cherie’s mother’s way. It wasn’t as if Cherie’s mother had the usual excuse either. She hadn’t become pregnant out of wedlock, and if she had she would have been able to get an abortion, if that was what she’d wanted, and go ahead with her plans. An abortion is what Cherie’s mother said she’d wished she’d had when she found out that Cherie was not only not interested in being a nurse but was actually going to leave home for the Northeast and become a liberal and a member of the Democratic Party on top of it. Even worse than that, Cherie insisted that everybody know she had become a member of the Democratic Party.

  “I’m not insisting on their knowing,” Cherie had said, trying to be patient, trying to be calm. “It’s not like that. I just think people should stand up for what they believe in—”

  “How can you believe in a perversion?” her mother had said. “The Democrats are no better than Communists, that’s all they are. And they’re atheists. You were brought up to believe in God.”

  That was her junior year at the University of Michigan, and of course her mother thought it was all the university’s fault—the entire state thought that Ann Arbor was nothing but a collection of Commies and perverts. Maybe it would have been different to grow up out here. At least people didn’t call other people “Commies,” and only ignorant people used the word “pervert.” Maybe words made a difference in the long run.

  There was movement behind her, and Cherie looked back to see Melissa coming through from the kitchen carrying a mug of tea. Melissa was a miracle too, in a way. They had met fifteen years ago at a summer training camp for women activists in Virginia, and everything had fallen into place so quickly that Cherie had distrusted it at first. Melissa had grown up in New York. She was used to taking control of her life and getting the things that mattered to her. This whole plan that they’d come up with—to go from school to school, to be paid for seeing the country—had been Cherie’s idea, but it had only happened because Melissa insisted.

  “What are you looking at?” Melissa asked now. “Have they decided to stage a festival of spring in the snow or what?”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that,” Cherie said. “That’s the kind of thing that drives people like Alice Makepeace nuts. And we want to stay.”

  “We want to stay, yes,” Melissa said. She sat down in the big leather armchair and stretched out her feet. “We want to stay at least because it would be impossible to get as good an apartment anywhere near Boston for less than it would cost to lease a Porsche. But that doesn’t mean you need to be on pins and needles all the time.”

  “I’ve always been on pins and needles.”

  “Persecution in the Midwest. I know.”

  “It wasn’t persecution,” Cherie said. “It was—” She shrugged and went back to looking out the window onto the quad. “Do you know who I saw a moment ago? Mark DeAvecca.”

  “Stoned as usual, I take it. It’s Friday night.”

  “You can call it stoned if you want to.”

  “It’s the best way of putting it,” Melissa said. “It fits his behavior. I’ve known dozens of kids like him in my life. There’s a soft underbelly of them in every good school.”

  “He’s a brilliant kid,” Cherie said. “I know a lot of people around here think he’s stupid, but it isn’t true. It comes out every once in a while when you talk to him.”

  “He’d have to be a brilliant kid,” Melissa said. She curled her legs up under her. “Look, I know I make fun of this place a lot It’s hard not to make fun of it. They’re so damned self-conscious about how progressive they all are, they make political correctness look sane. But even I know that the work here is not easy. If he wasn’t a brilliant kid, he couldn’t get away with the crap he pulls without flunking out.”

  “He’s not even close to flunking out. I know a dozen kids with grades worse than his.”

  “Exactly. And that in spite of the fact that he doesn’t know where he is half the time. But Cherie, no matter how bright he is, there’s nothing you can do for someone like that.”

  “Everybody thinks he takes drugs,” Cherie said again, feeling mulish. “His roommate takes drugs sometimes, what’s his name, Michael Feyre. You can smell it on him.”

  “Well, yes,” Melissa said, “Michael Feyre is not a brilliant kid. He doesn’t hide it very well.”

  “With Mark DeAvecca, it’s not like drugs. It’s like—”

  “What?”

  Cherie shrugged. “Senile dementia.”

  “Senile dementia?” Melissa said. “The k
id is sixteen, for God’s sake, and you think he’s got Alzheimer’s disease?”

  “No, not really.” Cherie shook her head. “It’s not that I think he has it, it’s that that’s what it’s like. He does things. He forgets things—She’ll be sitting in class and we’ll be working out a problem, and he’ll do it. He’ll sit right there and do it. Then we’ll move on to something else, and maybe ten minutes later I’ll ask about the problem, and he won’t remember it. He won’t remember a tiling about it.”

  “Drugs.”

  “No,” Cherie said. “If it was drugs, he wouldn’t have been able to do the problem in the first place. There’s something going on with that kid. I wish I knew what it was.”

  “Don’t bother. I mean it, Cherie, there’s no point in bothering. The kid’s got a famous mother and a rich father. A rich and famous father, come to think of it.”

  “Stepfather,” Cherie said automatically. “His biological father is dead.”

  “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. They won’t throw him out of here, and they won’t do anything about what’s going on because they don’t want one of the paying customers to leave, and they don’t want a lawsuit or, worse, Mama to hit the Op-Ed pages of all the best newspapers blasting them to hell.”

  Cherie bit her lip. The carillon was marking a quarter hour. She’d noticed the clock in the kitchen at nine fifteen just a little while ago. It had to be nine thirty. The quad was empty. She’d always hated the cold. Back in Ann Arbor, she’d promised herself that as soon as she had the chance she’d go somewhere warm. She’d do her graduate work in Florida or Hawaii. She’d move to Texas or South Carolina and civilize the Bible Belt. Instead, she’d done her graduate work in Wisconsin and then moved to New Jersey, to the first of the boarding schools. The only way she could have managed to get any colder would have been if she’d gone to Alaska, or if they had boarding schools at the North Pole.

  She turned away from the window. Melissa was still sitting in the big leather chair and still sipping her tea, black tea, the strong kind.

  “There’s one other thing,” Cherie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Alice Makepeace doesn’t like him.”

  “Doesn’t like Mark DeAvecca?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s just because he’s Michael’s roommate, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Cherie said. “I know he must be in the way, but that hardly seems like enough of a reason. She really doesn’t like him. Not at all.”

  “Then that’s one more reason for you to stay away from him,” Melissa said.

  “He’s my student.”

  “I mean stay away from his problems,” Melissa said. “I really hate to be the heavy here, Cherie, but the simple fact is that that woman is dangerous, and you know it. She’s dangerous in ways I can’t begin to count. She’s dangerous to anybody who gets in her way—”

  “You’d think somebody would catch on to what she’s doing,” Cherie said. “This is the third student in three years. One of them is going to file a complaint one of these days. And don’t say she’ll just talk herself out of it. People don’t just talk themselves out of it these days. Think of the priest scandals. She’ll go down, and she’ll bring the school down with her.”

  “Maybe. My only concern is that she doesn’t bring us down first. She—does things to people, Cherie, you know she does. She can get almost anybody fired if she wants to, and she isn’t brutal about it. She’s got a lot of finesse. But you’re just as fired with finesse. And you don’t want to be fired—or in jail.”

  “No,” Cherie said. “That’s true enough.”

  “The only way to survive in these places is to do what we originally planned. It’s worked so far and no fuss. Alice Makepeace is one of those women who gets what she wants the way she wants it. She’s got the conscience of a Roald Dahl villain. Don’t get in her way. If it’s true and she really doesn’t like Mark DeAvecca, then Mark DeAvecca will get shown the door and you won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “But I will worry about him,” Cherie said. Then she turned back around and looked out the window one more time. Everything looked dead, or worse. She wished that spring would come. Everything always felt better in the spring. That had been true even back in Michigan.

  Maybe what was really wrong with her, and with Melissa, was the obvious—that Alice Makepeace was exactly the sort of woman both of them wanted so very much to be. It was terrible to think that people couldn’t be happy no matter how much they worked at it. It was terrible to think that people, even women, would choose danger over safety, intensity over security, flash and dash over the solid day-to-day of love. It was terrible to think it, but it was probably true, and it was especially true of both of them. Now she had a whole raft of student accounts to rectify, and the house accounts to do. She should have a stack of student IDs to verify, too, but they were gone, and she hadn’t had a chance to get them back again. One of them belonged to Mark DeAvecca. It was the third one he’d lost this year.

  6

  James Robert Hallwood should have been a professor in an Ivy League English department in the 1950s or even earlier, when erudition and elegance were assumed to be the goals of anyone with half a brain in his head and nobody laughed at Clifton Webb. Well, James admitted, probably everybody laughed at Clifton Webb; they just didn’t come out and say what they were thinking because in those days homosexual men were not only supposed to be in the closet but invisible. They were not invisible, of course. James may never have been a professor in an Ivy League English department, but he was old enough to remember the 1950s. He’d had an uncle whom everybody had referred to as a “confirmed bachelor,” as if a taste for going into New York and hanging out in Greenwich Village bars was the sign of a man too dedicated to chasing girls to ever settle down. People sniggered—that was the word, too, sniggered, something different from “laughed” or “chuckled” or even “derided,” a word with a world of meaning in it, a sense of time and place. James had not sniggered. Even then he had been plotting a path, and although it included confirmed bachelorhood—he’d known that much before he was twelve—it did not include Greenwich Village bars. The real difference between the young and the old was that the young had no sense of the realistic. What looked to rational people like insurmountable obstacles seemed, to a teenaged boy with a true spirit of invincibility, just a few silly details to be ignored more than to be overcome. Now he wasn’t sure if he had been lucky or unlucky. He would not have found it easy to live in a time when being what he was could get him arrested and sent to jail. He wasn’t good at dissimulation, and he didn’t have the patience for pretense that surely had been required of men like Clifton Webb. The problem was, he had no patience for so much of what had come in the same boat that had brought the need for pretense to an end: victim’s studies, feminist criticism, gender-race-and-class. There was something truly obscene about holding the Pietá up to the light and seeing only the basis for a diatribe on capitalist retrogressions or the triumph of hegemonic male privilege.

  Outside, the carillon was doing one of its minor jiggles. It was a terrible carillon, politically correct, like everything else at Windsor Academy. James checked the clock on the wall behind him and saw that it was ten thirty Then he turned back to what he was doing at the counter and looked out the window. It was not a good view from this kitchen. There was a good one, out on the quad, in the living room; but faculty apartments being what they were, one view per unit seemed to be the best that could be expected. This window looked out on the long stretch from the library to Maverick Pond. In the winter, with the snow piled high, it looked like a wasteland.

  He poured black coffee into large, bone china cups and put the cups on his best serving tray. He put the silver sugar bowl there, too, but not the cream pitcher, because neither of them used cream. It fascinated him a little. They were both “effeminate” men, in a way of being “effeminate” that had gone out of style many years
ago; but neither one of them had women’s tastes. The coffees were plain black brews, good Colombian, and imported, but without the bells and whistles of the kind of person who found Starbucks a personal affront to aesthetics. There was no cinnamon or French vanilla. There was no sales slip in the utility drawer indicating a buying trip into Boston to the place where a pound of ground coffee beans cost as much as a small car.

  Out in the wasteland, there was movement. James stopped what he was doing, his hands full of silver teaspoons, and watched the figure in black walking away from the pond with her head bent into what must have been wind. There were no lights out there, but he knew who it was, knew it as surely as he would have if he had seen her red hair flashing under one of the security lights. He wondered what she was doing out there at this time of night, and alone. Alice Makepeace was never alone, and when she was it was because she was coming or going to an assignation. He couldn’t imagine what kind of assignation she could be having at Maverick Pond in the middle of a cold February night, when even the squirrels weren’t interested in making love in the out-of-doors.

  He put the teaspoons down on the tray. He watched Alice Makepeace reach the top of the hill near the west door of the library and then begin to move along the path toward the quad. She was wearing that floor-length black wool cape she’d affected since the day he’d first met her. She looked like she was auditioning for a part in an all-female remake of Zorro. The way things were these days, somebody probably would make a female Zorro, and then all the girls in the English Department would write essays full of torturously complicated language for the Publication of the Modern Language Association saying, basically, that it was a Very Good Thing to show women in nontraditional roles, and that the movie would probably result in the death of capitalism and the coming of a Utopia built on nurturing, cooperation, and classically female values.

  Alice Makepeace had disappeared out of sight in the quad. James picked up the tray and began to carry it into the kitchen, thinking that he ought to put something sensible on the CD player before the night got too quiet for either his comfort or David’s. He didn’t know when that had started—the uncomfortable feeling they both had when there was too much silence between them—but it had started, and James had been through enough of these things to know that it meant the relationship was winding to a close. It was too bad really. He didn’t love David. He didn’t have much use for all this new talk of love and relationships and permanency that characterized this phase of the “gay” movement. He refused even to call himself “gay.” Still, it was too bad. He and David were companionable. They had been together a long time.