The Headmaster's Wife Read online

  David was sitting in the wing chair with his feet up on the ottoman going through the illustrated catalogue for the Turner show at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an old show, years in the past. James couldn’t believe David was really interested.

  James put the tray down on the coffee table and sat in front of it on the couch. You could see out the window here to the quad, but there was no sign of Alice Makepeace trudging her way to the headmaster’s house. He wondered where she had gone.

  David put down the catalogue and reached for his coffee. “Where have you been? You’re not usually any more than a couple of minutes in the kitchen.”

  “I was watching someone out the window, a mystery.”

  “Oh?”

  James shrugged. “Not really. An anomaly, really, that there’s probably some stupidly simple explanation for. I saw Alice Makepeace coming up from Maverick Pond.”

  “Alice Makepeace is who—the headmaster’s wife?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And what’s at this Maverick Pond?”

  “Nothing, really,” James said, “that’s the mystery. It’s just a water hole in the middle of a field. Everybody pretends to admire it because it’s part of nature, and there’s a demonstration out there every spring when the administration decides it has to spray to get rid of the mosquitoes. But there isn’t anything … there.”

  “So what was she doing there?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. She has affairs with students. If the weather was somewhat warmer…” James shrugged.

  David had picked up his coffee cup. Now he put it down again, interested. He taught at a university in Boston. James knew he looked on Windsor Academy as a kind of exercise in surrealism. He was always asking James why James didn’t just move to some place like Emerson, or even Tufts. James had his degree. He even had his publications. David, on the other hand, had tenure, and he had lost the sense of insecurity that was the inevitable accompaniment to being new and unknown in a strange school.

  “Isn’t it funny?” David said. “Are you sure she’s having an affair with a student?”

  “Of course I’m sure. It’s not the first one she’s had either. I think she looks on it like a tradition.”

  “Do other people know about this? Is it—common talk around the campus?”

  James considered that. “Not exactly,” he said slowly. “She’s not blatant about it really. And I don’t think her husband knows.”

  “Prep school headmasters are like college presidents; they never know anything.”

  “Possibly. In this case, though, I think she’s made a certain amount of effort to keep him from finding out. But people do know. It’s hard not to know in a place as small as this.”

  “And they don’t do anything about it?”

  “What are they going to do?”

  David picked up his coffee cup again. “Think about it. What do you think would have happened if it had been one of us with a student?”

  “Ah,” James said.

  “I know you don’t like to be political,” David said. “Even so, you do have to face reality some of the time. If it had been one of us with a student, we’d have been out with our luggage before we’d had time to pack. There wouldn’t even have been an inquiry. You know that as well as I do.”

  “I supposè,” James said.

  “Don’t just suppose,” David said. “It’s ever since the church scandals, and you know it. Especially here, this close to Boston, everybody’s walking on eggs. That’s a cliché. I know you don’t like them, but there it is.”

  “Yes,” James said.

  “The rumors don’t even have to be true,” David went on. “Nobody even bothers to investigate anymore, half the time. All you need is a student with an axe to grind, somebody you’re going to give a less-than-stellar grade to, and there it is. I’ve heard of three cases in the last two weeks. Oh, they didn’t happen all at once, or all in the same place, but it amounts to the same thing. You can’t be too careful. And you can never be sure.”

  “I don’t have affairs with students,” James said stiffly. “What do you take me for?”

  “It’s not what I take you for,” David said. “It’s what they take you for. All of them. Sometimes I understand the black separatists, I really do. Sometimes I wish we could go somewhere without them.”

  “Who’s them? The entire straight world?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” James said. “Besides, I don’t know what you’re upset about. Aren’t you always telling me that it’s so much better at the university level, where they don’t have to worry about hysterical parents and homosexual men can be honest about who and what they are? I thought the university was a paradise for diversity, or however it is you phrase that on a day when you’re trying to get me to quit my job.”

  “Nothing is a paradise when it comes to this,” David said. “It’s a witch hunt, literally. It’s the same sort of hysteria there was a few years back with satanic ritual abuse. It doesn’t matter what’s true. Doesn’t it bother you that that woman, what’s her name—”

  “Alice Makepeace.”

  “Alice Makepeace can have an open affair with a student, whom I presume is under eighteen—”

  “I think he may be under sixteen.”

  “Under sixteen!” David shook his head. “Think of that. Under sixteen. When it’s one of us with somebody under sixteen, it’s child rape, as if we’d set upon a toddler and buggered him brainless. More than half the cases of priest abuse were against girls, but you never hear about them. The head of the largest organization for priest abuse victims is a woman, but you never hear about her either. You only hear about us.”

  “Yes,” James said.

  “I wish you’d come to your senses,” David said. “I wish you’d think about what you’re doing. I know you don’t like to get involved in causes, but there’s a good reason to get involved in this one: self-preservation. What are you going to do if somebody turns on you in this place? You don’t even have a pension.”

  “Yes,” James said again. His coffee cup was empty. He couldn’t remember drinking what was in it. There didn’t seem to be any reason to argue with David since he didn’t really disagree with him. Yes, it was a jungle out there. Yes, he could be betrayed and crucified at any moment. Yes, he could lose all he had, which was—what?

  “You know,” he said, “it’s not just a pension; it’s equity.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Equity. This is a faculty apartment. I don’t own it. Some of the other teachers have bought vacation property, you know. It doesn’t make sense, if they’re living here, to buy an ordinary house that they wouldn’t use in the school year, so they buy vacation property. But I haven’t even done that. I don’t know why. It never really caught my imagination, real estate.”

  “I’m talking about the apocalypse,” David said, “and you’re talking about equity.”

  “Look.” James got up. “I went into Boston the week before last and got something to protect myself. It’s not as if I’m ignoring the apocalypse altogether.”

  “Got something to protect yourself?” David said. “What are you talking about? There’s no way to protect yourself against false accusations and envy and spite. It’s not the Iraqi War you’re fighting here.”

  “We had protests against the Iraqi War,” James said. He went over to the high-backed secretary and lowered its hinged writing surface. It was a beautiful piece of furniture, one of the few he owned, and it had taken him nearly two years to find and buy it. “These Regency-era writing desks are really wonderful,” he said. “They always have a secret drawer. Do you ever wonder what it must have been like to live in the time of Jane Austen, when people took manners seriously?”

  “You don’t take manners seriously,” David said. “I don’t think you take anything seriously.”

  The secret drawer popped open. James took the gun out and checked it quickly to make sure it
was loaded. Then he brought it over to the coffee table and put it down again.

  “It’s brand-new,” he said. “A .45. I don’t know what that means, but I do know that it’s more powerful than a .22. It’s probably not as powerful as a .357 Magnum, but those are hard to get. I thought of a few other possibilities, an antique German Luger, something with style, but in the end it seemed sensible to opt for the utilitarian.”

  “You’re insane,” David said. “They could fire you just for having this. And it wouldn’t do you any good. It’s not the kind of protection you need.”

  “Maybe not,” James said, “but it makes me feel better. I thought about it for a long time, believe me. I don’t know why it does, but it makes me feel better.”

  “What if somebody gets hold of it and shoots you with it? What if somebody gets hold of it and shoots somebody else with it? What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Maybe I’ll shoot Alice Makepeace with it,” James said calmly. “I’ve thought about that, too, you know. It’s truly remarkable how often I think about it.”

  “You’re insane,” David said.

  David’s voice sounded petulant and childish—another good sign, James thought, that their relationship was about to be over. People are petulant and childish all the time, but it’s only at the end of things that we notice.

  James got up and put the gun back into the secret drawer, then clicked the drawer back into place, where it looked like nothing but a bit of carved desk front. All of these secretaries had the same secret drawer in the same place. Anybody who had ever seen one before would know right where to go to find the treasure.

  “You’re insane,” David said again, sounding neither petulant nor childish this time.

  James went back to the coffee table, picked up the tray with the coffee things on it, and headed back out to the kitchen to wash up.

  7

  Edith Braxner had never really believed that men and women had sex. She knew, intellectually, that it must happen—all the children who showed up at the doors of schools every September couldn’t be the result of artificial insemination—but the whole thing seemed to be so uncomfortable that she couldn’t understand the point to it. For a long time she simply hadn’t thought about it. She was old enough to have gone through school and college at a time when women were expected to be virginal until they reached the altar or died trying. She’d had no interest in getting married, and the only thing that bothered her about the era’s mania for virginity was its tendency to spill over into what she thought of as sensible things. It annoyed her to discover that men found it erotic, and faintly disreputable, that she had done well in a class on anatomy. It annoyed her even more to discover that many women thought the same way, as if they were convinced that they themselves couldn’t have remained intact and pure if they’d paid attention in their biology classes and not left school under the misapprehension that having sex while standing on one’s head could not possibly result in pregnancy.

  She was in graduate school when the sexual revolution hit, and she found it immediately relaxing. She did not lose her own virginity—how could you lose something that you didn’t really have?, was what she wanted to know—but it seemed as if everybody else did, and in the wake of that she found that men began to leave her alone. She had never been a pretty girl or a pretty young woman. Her features were broad and flat. Her hair was dull. Her body was thin enough but of no particular shape. She thought that there were many girls across the country exactly like she had been who did what her own mother had wanted her to do. They “did something” about themselves. They went on exercise programs. They used makeup. To Edith, it had all seemed a colossal waste of time. It wasn’t that she knew it wouldn’t work anyway, although it wouldn’t. It was that she knew she didn’t care enough to keep it up. She would put in this enormous effort. She would primp and pump and spend. She would have a curious half hour in front of a mirror somewhere, checking out the changes the dyed hair and Elizabeth Arden lip gloss made. Then it would be over. She would have work to do. She would forget. Everything would go back to being the way it was. She would be out a lot of time and money, and maybe be less of a person than she had been before.

  Once she’d started thinking about it, Edith decided that, for many people, sex had to have an ulterior motive. They didn’t fall into bed because they wanted to fall into bed but to get something else, not sleep, not ecstasy. At least that was true of women. With men, Edith was never quite sure. She got along well with men. She always had. If they weren’t intent on doing something physical, they were straightforward and uncomplicated. They didn’t worry overmuch about their emotions or take things personally. She liked boy students better than girl students, too. It was hard to get boy students to do any work at all; but when you did, what they gave you was likely to be risky and original. Girls worked hard, and diligently, but they stayed within the lines. They played by the rules. They would hand you a twelve-page paper that had absolutely nothing new to say.

  Like me, Edith thought, because it was true. She had always been a good student and a conscientious one, but she had never had that spark of originality that would have made her a brilliant one. She had never failed to get a grade below an A in any course she had ever taken anywhere, but she had also never failed to do the expected thing. She had gone from a small town in upstate New York to Wellesley. She had seen immediately that there were belles and swots, and that she was a swot. She had looked with some curiosity on the girls who were a third thing nobody was ever willing to label with a word—the ones who were expected to explode into fame or significance once they graduated—and known immediately that she was not what they were and never could be.

  It didn’t really matter, in the end, because she was what she wanted to be; and now, in her early sixties, she had what she had wanted from the start. She read five languages other than English and spoke three. She had spent sabbatical years in Rome and Paris and Salzburg. She had this lovely, large apartment looking out on the quad and the rising neo-Gothic spires of Ridenour Library, just a few steps from Main Street in Windsor, which was the kind of place she’d only been able to dream of in her childhood. It was a wealthy place, but intellectual, too, full of people who liked to go into Boston to hear Beethoven and walk through the museums, who valued excellent tea and quiet contemplation as much as other people valued trips to Disney World. She had never been to Disney World herself. She had never even seen a Wal-Mart. What she liked best were nights like tonight, when she could sit in her big club chair near the vast multipaned window in her living room drinking Double Bergamot Earl Grey that she’d ordered from the Stash Tea Company, reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in German for the fifth or sixth time. All her correcting was done. She always got her correcting done early in the day because she hated to clog up her evenings with too much bad news about human nature. She had her accounts done, too. Every single student in her House had had her allowance money and drawing account checked and rechecked until there was no possibility of an error of even a penny. The Lytton House outlays for Letitia Markham’s birthday party and the pajama party they’d given for Valentine’s Day had been totted up and reconciled with the bills. She was a lot of things, but she was not one of those women who got a good education and did not put it to use.

  She had been thinking about that—all those debutantes at Wellesley in her era, going out with the same Ivy League boys they’d gone out with when they were still at Miss Porter’s or Madeira—when Alice Makepeace had come striding out from around the other side of the library and then onto the quad, that ridiculous cape streaming out behind her in the cold February wind. Edith had always found Alice Makepeace oddly comforting. Not only was she just like all those debutantes Edith had once known at Wellesley, but she so obviously indulged in sex for ulterior motives, and ulterior motives that were easy to discover and discern. Power, Edith thought, watching Alice make her way back to the headmaster’s house, that bright red hair whipping and flashing under
each of the security lights in turn. What Alice Makepeace wanted was the sense of power she got from the boys whose lives she made a misery year after year, that and the thrill of the exotic, of the vicarious experience of poverty and want. Of course Alice romanticized it all. Alice romanticized everything. Edith had known that the first time they’d met. Under the romanticism, though, there was a simple need, naked and raw. Edith may not have spent any time in bed with men, but she knew that need as thoroughly as she knew the difference between Single and Double Bergamot Earl Grey tea.

  Alice disappeared, going off on a side path somewhere. She was not a straightforward woman. Edith did not find it odd that she would not be able to take a straightforward path home. She was about to go back to her chair and her book when she saw somebody else, and the somebody else gave her pause. Mark DeAvecca. Practically everybody in school thought Mark DeAvecca was taking drugs, handfuls of them. They were trying to ease him out of the school without actually confronting him about it because—Edith had heard this from one of the secretaries in the dean of Student Life’s office—they had done a secret search of his room and not been able to find a single thing. Even his roommate hadn’t had anything, and that was Michael Feyre, who came from one of the less savory neighborhoods of Boston and had connections. There was obviously something wrong with Mark. He sat through classes and didn’t hear a word that was said. He handed in homework that was only half-done, or didn’t hand it in at all, or did it and then left it on the study desk he’d been using in the library so that it was lost, never to be found again. She would have thought he was stupid beyond belief except that she remembered him from the first two weeks of classes, when he had been very different.