The Headmaster's Wife Read online

  It probably is drugs, she thought, watching him move unsteadily down the path toward her window. She wondered where he had been. He seemed to be coming from the direction of Maverick Pond, but that made no sense. There was nothing out at Maverick Pond this time of year, and the cold was bad enough to give you frostbite if you decided to go out there and contemplate nature. Mark DeAvecca did not seem to be the kind of person who would want to contemplate nature under any circumstances. She had a lot of sympathy for that.

  He had stopped on the path and turned to look behind him. Edith bit her lip and made up her mind. She stepped out of her apartment into the hall. She stepped out of the hall onto the back stoop. She hated being outside on the campus on weekend nights. It was always too deserted.

  “Mark?” she called to him.

  He looked up. “Ms. Braxner?”

  Edith did not correct him. The culture of the school didn’t matter to her at all. She preferred to be addressed formally, and all the students addressed her formally. Even Alice Makepeace addressed her formally on occasion, but that was a story with a different moral and not one she wanted to think about now.

  “You look frozen,” she said. “Worse than frozen, really. Where have you been?”

  Mark looked around. “Out to the pond. And around. I was talking to Philip for a while.”

  “Philip Candor?”

  “Yes.”

  “About what?”

  Mark looked around again. “I went back to Hayes and I was going to go to bed, but it was still bothering me, so I sort of turned around and came back out; and then I went down there to see, and it wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t there. I imagined it, I guess.”

  “Imagined what?”

  “Nothing,” Mark said. “This is where? What house is this?”

  “Lytton.”

  “Oh, right. There was somebody named Bulwer-Lytton, am I right? They didn’t name the house after Bulwer-Lytton though, did they?”

  “No. He was an English writer from the nineteenth century. Famously bad.”

  “Okay.”

  Edith hesitated. She did not usually fraternize with students. She did not like this pretense of equality that Windsor Academy was so desperate to foster. She didn’t like to know too much about her students’ private lives. Mark DeAvecca’s private life positively frightened her. Still, she thought. Still He looks so cold. There were traces of ice in his heavy dark eyebrows.

  “You could come in if you like,” she said. “I’ve got a pot of tea. I’ve got hot chocolate if you’d rather have that.”

  “Thank you,” Mark said. He wasn’t looking at her. He never looked at anybody directly. He turned in a complete circle and then faced her again. The muscles in his face were twitching. While she watched him, his whole body seemed to convulse, quickly and painlessly. It was over in a moment.

  “Come in,” she said. “You don’t look well. Have you been to the infirmary?”

  “The infirmary isn’t open.”

  “I meant anytime in the near past.”

  “I go every once in a while,” Mark said. “There’s never anything wrong with me. I don’t have a temperature. They send me back to class.”

  “I didn’t say I thought you should miss class.”

  “I know. I know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe nothing’s wrong with me. Except, you know, it was never like this before.”

  “Like what?”

  Mark shook his head. Edith was beginning to feel the cold. She wondered why she hadn’t felt it long ago. There was something odd about this scene. It was as if they were both suspended in space, riding in a bubble without weather. There was a wind in the quad, though, the same wind that had blown Alice Makepeace’s cape around her legs. Edith thought it was going to take her an hour before she got herself warmed up again once she was back inside.

  “Come in,” she said. “Warm up. Have something to drink. You look awful, and I’m freezing.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Mark said, “but I’ve got to get some sleep, I think. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t slept all year.”

  “You look as if you’re sleeping now, right on your feet.”

  “Sleepwalking,” Mark said solemnly. Then he turned away from her and looked across the quad, all the way to the other end, where Hayes House was. “I don’t remember leaving and coming out again. I don’t remember it. I remember deciding to do it, but I don’t remember doing it. I don’t remember anything until I got down to the pond, that was the second time at the pond, I think. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. That’s what this year has been like. I can’t ever remember anything.”

  Edith almost said something, too sharply, about the fact that he almost never remembered his homework, but she bit it back. Maybe it was drugs. Maybe he was stoned all the time. There was certainly something wrong with him. He was swaying on his feet. She thought he might pass out right in front of her, but it didn’t happen.

  “If you’re not going to come in, go back to Hayes,” she said. “Go back right now. Go to your room and lie down. You shouldn’t be wandering around in the condition you’re in.”

  “The question is, what condition am I in?” Mark said. “That’s it, you see. The infirmary says there’s nothing wrong with me. For a while I thought I had that thing, Huntington’s disease, Huntington’s chorea—”

  “Does it run in your family? Did one of your parents have it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  “I know,” Mark said, “but the thing is—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Mark said. “I must have been hallucinating, and that’s a first. I’ve never hallucinated before.”

  “Go back to Hayes,” Edith said.

  Mark nodded slightly. Edith stood back a little, giving herself the partial shelter of the doorway, and watched him head off down the path in the direction of Hayes House. Had he really already been there once tonight and then come out again for a … hallucination? What were the drugs that caused hallucinations? She’d never paid much attention to the drug information that floated around campus like confetti in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She wasn’t interested in her students’ drug lives any more than she was interested in their sex lives. Mark was bobbing and weaving as if his bones had half melted under his skin. Edith stepped all the way back into the hall and closed the door in front of her. Lytton House was very quiet tonight, as quiet as she usually liked it to be. Now it felt oppressive and stale.

  She went back into her apartment and closed that door, too. She sat down in her big club chair and looked at her cup of tea. They all just assumed the boy was on drugs. It was the most obvious explanation for the way he was behaving.

  It had suddenly occurred to her just how much trouble that boy’s parents could make for this school if it turned out they were all wrong and something was really the matter with Mark.

  8

  Alice Makepeace knew that her husband had a surveillance camera in their bedroom, and she knew what it was he used it for. Every once in a while, when he was safely out of state at a conference of independent school heads—the euphemism drove her crazy; when had they decided to hide the elitism of it all under cover of that bourgeois word “independent”?—she went into his study with her spare key and looked through the photographs in the desk. They were terrible photographs more often than not, grainy and unreal, nothing at all like what she had really experienced in bed. She was not afraid of the photographs any more than she was afraid of Peter. It would hurt him far more than it would hurt her if anybody ever knew what was in them, just as it would hurt him more than it would hurt her if anybody ever found out about the boys. She was no Mary Kay Letourneau. She wasn’t conducting a grand passion or working out the demons from a tackily wretched childhood spent feeling guilty and ugly on the streets of some subdivision in flyover country. She had had a wonderful childhood, thank you very much, and an even more wonderful young adulthood. She had been to Paris four
times before she was eight. She had spent every one of her winter vacations on the Riviera right up until the year she married Peter, when they had had no winter vacation because he was taking seminars at Harvard and attempting to beef up his résumé. She should have realized, then, that this was what it would be like—the unutterable boredom, the endless sameness of it all, day after day, week after week, year after year, with nothing to look forward to but the malice in the eyes of the old ladies on the board, the ones who hated her for merely existing.

  Boredom was the key. In the end everything came down to that. Most of the time Alice lived in a positive fog of boredom, and she knew herself too well to think that she could do what most women in her position did to make the time pass. It was a tradition in “independent” schools that the headmaster’s wife had a teaching job at the school or a place on the support staff. Husbands and wives worked together almost always because that meant two paychecks and a more viable household income from jobs that—except on Peter’s level—didn’t really pay much at all. Alice could not see herself as a counselor. She could not see herself teaching English. She could not see herself at faculty meetings. She could barely see herself making her way across the quad every morning to have dinner in the cafeteria, although she did it, the way she did everything that was required of her.

  She was not bored tonight, although she was oddly lightheaded. It confused her because she didn’t often get dizzy. She’d come into the headmaster’s house by the side door. She was standing in the little mudroom with its built-in storage bench and its brass wall hooks and its full-length mirror hanging on the door that led into the kitchen. Some nights she stood in front of that mirror and contemplated the realness of herself. There were times when she did not actually feel entirely real. Tonight she felt more real than she wanted to. She stripped off the black leather gloves and put them down on the bench. She took off the cape and hung it on a hook. The black leather of her jeans almost blended into the black leather of her boots, giving her an uninterrupted visual line. She was a tall woman. This made her look taller still, as did the fact that the boots had three-inch heels. One summer when she was in college, she had taken a trip to Greece with three of her cousins. They had gone to the harbor at Rhodes, and she had stood there on the shore thinking of what the Colossus must have looked like, if it had ever existed, with one foot on one side of the water and the other on the other. Later, Julianne—the “smart one,” as the family liked to call her; the uptight idiot with the grades everybody was always marveling about, as if it mattered to them when none of them had cared one way or the other all the time they were in school and wouldn’t have liked anyone who did—had said it wasn’t true. The Colossus didn’t really bestride the harbor. It had just been a statue, off to one side. Alice had thought, immediately, that that was too bad. It was the kind of thing she would have liked for herself, to be tall enough to stand like that, with her legs so far apart ships could go through them.

  She was wearing a black silk blouse, her best one, bought in New York on one of the buying trips she took to get away from Peter. Peter was glad to let her take them. He wanted to get away from her. She leaned over and took the gloves off the bench and looked at them. They did not seem to be any different than they had ever been. She supposed they had no reason to be. She wished she could get rid of this jumpy nervousness that was making her feel like running back out the door and down the quad and into the night to nowhere.

  She dropped the gloves again and went through the door into the kitchen. The light was on in the living room. The television was on, too. The sound coming from it was the weird flat hush of public broadcasting documentaries. She wondered why the announcers on PBS always felt they had to whisper when they talked.

  She went through the kitchen to the living room. Peter was sitting on the long, floral couch, his shoes off, his feet up on the coffee table. That was as close as he ever came to informality unless he was in bed—and even there he wore tailored pajamas, dark blue with white piping, bought at Brooks Brothers. At the moment he was in sports jacket and tie. His trousers still had perfect center creases.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, not turning around.

  There was a drinks tray on a small occasional table set just behind the couch. Alice bypassed the gin and the vodka and the Scotch and opened a small bottle of Perrier. Like most of the women she knew, she only drank wine, and only good wine, and only episodically. The last thing she wanted was to start guzzling booze like an advertising executive at lunch. God, she thought. They could have put her down in the middle of one of those ethnic restaurants in Boston, the ones that got written up in the weekend section of the Globe, and the only way anybody could have told her apart from all the other suburban Boston ladies with their memberships in WGBH and their days at the Gardner Museum would have been by her hair, and that was a good enough reason never to let herself go gray. Even the—things—she did didn’t set her apart. She was convinced that half the women she saw with their beaten-silver Native American jewelry and their J. Jill flowing-linen summer skirts did all the same things she did, or worse, and then wrote about them in journals kept meticulously, year after year, on the assumption that they would one day provide the basis for a novel of sensitivity written by a woman who cared. That much, at least, she had to congratulate herself on. She did not keep journals, and she did not expect ever to write a novel.

  “Alice?” Peter said.

  “I’m here. I’m getting some Perrier.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Walking.”

  “Outside?”

  “Of course outside.”

  “It’s not the weather for it. It’s below freezing.”

  “Nine below,” Alice said. She looked into the little silver cannister, but the ice that had been in there had melted into water, and there were no more slices of lime to be found. She walked around to the front of the couch and took a seat on the chair at its side, the chair that was positioned exactly as it had to be so that the person sitting in it couldn’t see the television screen at all.

  “I wish we could think of some place else to put the television set,” she said. “Sane people don’t have television sets in their living rooms.”

  “Most people have television sets in their living rooms.”

  “Most people aren’t sane. But I think you’re wrong anyway. Most people have television sets in their family rooms. They leave their living rooms free for company. We keep it in here the way Catholics keep statues of the Virgin in their gardens. It looks like something we worship.”

  “Catholics don’t worship statues of the Virgin.”

  “Don’t get silly. There ought to be somewhere else to put it. Maybe we could get rid of it altogether. I never watch it.”

  “I do.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for watching television, Alice. I’m not even going to apologize for watching The West Wing.”

  “I didn’t ask you to apologize.”

  “Oh yes, you did. You always do.”

  “We’re going to have to do something about this marriage. It’s gotten to the point where we don’t have fights anymore; we simply assume we’ve had them.”

  “We’re not having a fight. I asked you where you’d been. You’re avoiding answering.”

  The glass of Perrier was half-empty. Alice Makepeace was definitely a half-empty, not a half-full, person. She leaned forward and put it down on the coffee table. She could not remember the first time she’d met Peter Makepeace. He was one of those boys who had just always been around, going to the same dancing classes, going to the same parties. Everybody knew him, and he knew everybody. Alice did remember when she had first decided to marry him and how carefully she had thought it all out: what the marriage would mean, just how much she would be able to put up with. In the end it had turned out far worse than she had hoped. It did matter that she had never expected it to turn out well.

  “Are you goi
ng to tell me where you’ve been?” Peter asked. “You’ve been out for hours.”

  “I haven’t really been anywhere. I’ve been walking. And yes, in the cold. It’s minus nine, if you want to know. Or it was a little while ago. I just wanted … to move around.”

  “All right.”

  “I stopped in the library for a while. I talked to Marta Coelho. She was working.”

  “Marta’s always working.”

  “I know.”

  Peter shifted slightly on the couch. The PBS documentary, whatever it was, was going off. Alice hadn’t paid any attention to it so all she knew was that it wasn’t one of those awful evenings of swing or Liberace that all the PBS stations had become enamored of in the last decade. Peter had a bald spot on the top of his head. It was only the size of a nickel, but it would grow. She wondered if he would try to compensate with a comb-over.

  “It’s not a dirty word, you know,” Peter said, “work. I don’t understand how you can spend so much time working for the causes you do and then look down on somebody like Marta, who takes her work seriously.”

  “I don’t look down on her for taking her work seriously.”

  “But you do look down on her.”

  “She’s a cipher, Peter. She might as well be a voice program. HAL the computer had more personality. She was worrying about Mark DeAvecca by the way.”

  “Ah,” Peter said. “Well, one of our mistakes.”

  “She said something along the same lines. That he’s irresponsible. Of course you think he’s on drugs.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Alice looked away. “I’ve talked to his roommate, Michael Feyre. Michael doesn’t think he’s on drugs.”