The Headmaster's Wife Read online

  I manage to dump a full glass of red across my table, sending Dick Ives’s wife, Rose, scurrying out of her chair for safety. I plead clumsiness, but everything is seen through a different lens now, and I of all people know that, and if I don’t, it is clear in the look Dick gives me as I do my best to mop up the spill and then signal the waitress for another glass.

  I am out of sorts. That much is certainly true. There is a lot weighing on me right now, and while the conversation flows around me—many of the same old stories we tell every meeting—my mind is across campus. I am thinking of Betsy Pappas, and the more I think of her, her pretty eyes, that angled face out of antiquity, the more I look around this roomful of cultured, wealthy people, middle-aged and older, overweight, the more all of it, all of life, seems so arbitrary to me. Why does any of this matter? This in which I used to put so much import? These men on their fat haunches in their tweeds, and their wives with their plump pearl necklaces? How could any of it even approach what I have come to know in recent weeks? How could any of it hold a candle to the feel of Betsy Pappas asleep in my arms in that hotel room? Studying her body while she slept, seeing where her neck met her shoulder, her shoulder met her arms, her torso curved out to meet the embrace of her hip?

  Okay, we have no business loving each other. But love has no master. Love has no head of school. It is as fickle as the wind.

  Somehow I make it through dinner without further incident. I even contribute to the conversation in ways that to me feel positive. Afterward, we spill out of the old inn on Main Street and disperse, the trustees to the various hotels and vacation homes near campus and I back to the headmaster’s house. Tomorrow is a big day for all of us. The quarterly board meeting.

  And while I should go home, say good night to Elizabeth and do something to sober myself for the morning, I do not. On the walk back to campus I hear the bells in the clock tower tolling, signaling that it is ten o’clock and the end of study hall.

  The students at Lancaster have a half hour between the end of study hall and check-in with their dorm parent in preparation for lights-out at eleven. Many of them take advantage of this small window of freedom by gathering in the student union, or taking walks with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Coming onto the main walks of campus, I encounter many such students, and they greet me cheerily, with a “Hello, Mr. Winthrop,” but I just barrel along, my head full of wine, my feet unsteady as I trudge.

  It is a beautiful night. Unseasonably warm, and above the flatlands of the campus that border the river the stars look close enough to touch. At one point I stop just to drink in the sky. I am on the central path that runs from the girls’ dorms up to the main campus. I am so fixated on the magnificence of the sky that I do not see the couple moving hurriedly toward me until they are on top of me, and I hear the girl say, “Keep going.”

  But the boy says, “Good evening, Mr. Winthrop,” and as he does I pivot my head toward them and watch as they pass me. To my great horror, the girl is Betsy Pappas, her arm locked in the crooked arm of Russell Hurley, the tall new basketball star. He gives me a great cocky smile, as if he knows all about me and Betsy.

  “Hey,” I say, somewhat drunkenly, but they are moving swiftly toward the main campus. I say it again, more of a growl than actual words, but their young legs have already taken them out of range. I can no longer see them. Then, for a moment, near the road, the yellow light of a streetlamp picks up their silhouette. I can see his tall figure, and the shorter one next to him. In the black night it is hard to tell where he ends and she begins.

  I wake with a huge head. A pounding headache from all the wine. Lying in bed, I recall a shameful memory from the night before. I returned to the house, drunk and full of misplaced aggression from seeing Betsy with Mr. Basketball, to find Elizabeth curled up in the fetal position on her bed, her eyes open and staring blankly at the wall. She did not look up when I came into the room. I stood there, swaying slightly, and still she did not look up at me. It occurred to me that the catatonia she had been flirting with for months had finally taken hold, and rather than speak to her softly, try to bring her out, try to bring my wife back, I instead spoke to her in anger.

  “Are you going to spend your life in this bed? Is that what you are now? It’s very nineteenth century, Elizabeth. You know that, don’t you? Should I fetch the doctor to look in on your consumption?”

  She glanced up at me briefly, then back to the wall.

  “You have nothing to say?” I ask.

  This finally gets her attention. “No, it’s you who has nothing to say,” she says.

  “Oh, is that right?” I say, eager to engage. “If you haven’t noticed, I have a school to run. Not that you would know anything about that. There was a time when that was important to you, though it has been so long I can hardly remember.”

  “Go to sleep, Arthur.”

  I stomped my foot. “Do not tell me what to do. I am not a child. Speak to me, Elizabeth.”

  “Go to sleep,” she says again, and perhaps because she refuses to look up at me, or perhaps because even in my drunkenness I see something in the emptiness of her eyes, something that says I will not reach her, not this night, anyway, I give up.

  I go to the guest room and pass out with my clothes on. And this is how I wake: starfished in my suit on top of the covers, mouth dry, full of shame.

  I muddle through a seven-hour board meeting, and there are times I think I will not make it. I am soupy with hangover, and when I present my report to the board—an hour of straight talking—it is as if someone else were speaking. My words come automatically, and from somewhere else. I hear them linger in the air, and it feels like magic that they keep coming. Someone else is in control of my mind.

  I am grateful for the committee reports, which drone on and on, but at least it is the board members talking and not me. Finally, it is over. Back at the house, I collapse on the bed, and the last thing I remember before I fall asleep is seeing Elizabeth getting dressed in the shadows near my closet, putting on her tennis clothes. No doubt heading back to the courts to hit another hundred or so serves. At least she has left the bed, but what is she playing for?

  In the week that follows, I suddenly see Betsy everywhere. In class she is sullen and doesn’t participate unless called upon, but it seems not to matter where I walk on campus, I see her smiling, knowing face. Standing in a pack of students outside the dining hall, she beams as she looks up at the tall Russell, and when I walk by I see that their hands are clasped.

  She is torturing me. It is as if nothing ever happened between us. In fairness to her, she was clear with me about not falling in love with me. Drinking in my study late at night, I find the images coming to me, and I want both to turn them away and to invite them in. I see Betsy and Russell entwined on the wrestling mats in one of those back rooms in the gym, long a chosen place for illicit lovers. Russell is on top of her. Her hands are up in his hair; her hands are all over his long, sinewy body. Betsy takes him in her mouth. She gives him the gift that is her. She gives it to him over and over and without a care for what it all means. I hate her for it. I hate him for it. I hate both of them.

  I am a teenager again. You think this door is closed to you. You think you will never feel the hurt of first love again, and then here it is, a kick to your groin so swift it takes your breath away. Now, I am not a violent man, but I will confess that I have some awful thoughts. I want Russell to disappear. I take that back—I only want Betsy, the promise of what we started that night in the hotel room. I want to make love to her again, to taste her skin on my tongue, to feel the warmth of her breath, her mouth.

  So it is not that I want Russell to disappear, though it is hard to see how I can have Betsy while he is around. Late at night, with a head full of scotch, I have this macabre fantasy. There is Russell floating facedown in the river, his body caught in a small eddy, being repeatedly thrashed against a fallen tree on the riverbank. It will be tremendously sad for our community, but when the school
grieves, the head of school must lead. There will be services to preside over. Individual students to console. Most of all there will be Betsy. She will need to heal, of course, though healing can require a guide. I could be there for her. I could commiserate, lift her through this tragedy. A shoulder to cry on, a warm embrace to take away the chill of the dark nights.

  The macabre fantasies fueled by scotch and the lateness of the hour give way eventually to the reality of the day. One morning I ask Mrs. LaForge to pull Russell’s file and, in my office while a cold rain falls outside the window, I open it and dive in.

  Russell Hurley is from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, though not from the money that has moved into that Berkshire town in recent decades. His father is a plumber; his mother works as a secretary at the high school where Russell was a relatively average student. Certainly not Lancaster material, except for one thing.

  Russell Hurley shattered every scoring record for boys’ basketball in the western part of the state. While Western Massachusetts is hardly a basketball mecca, the sheer numbers are impressive even for those who, like me, have a halfhearted understanding of the game. In his file is a DVD. I take it out and put it into the television. It contains the footage of Russell scoring his two thousandth point in his junior year. It shows a packed house of a small basketball court. He dribbles the ball up the court, and the defenders swarm around him, but he dekes one way, and the ball is like a yo-yo on a string off his fingers. He splits two members of the other team with his dribble, and at the top of the key he pulls up and, with one graceful motion, his body springs into the air and the ball leaves his fingers and spirals toward the basket in one great arc. It swishes through the net, and the game is stopped.

  What follows is the stuff high school dreams are made of. A banner is brought out by earnest-looking cheerleaders. It has the number 2,000 on it. Russell, with a big grin on his face, jumps through it. The crowd goes bananas. The mayor of the small town comes out with a microphone and addresses the crowd about Russell while Russell stands off to the side, the timeless athlete. When it is his turn, he says all the right things, thanks his teammates, thanks the fans, and sounds like someone who was born to be worshipped, as he clearly has his whole life.

  I turn off the television and read his admission essay. It talks about basketball mostly, though he does say that he knows that the NBA is not in his future and that, despite the interest he got as a senior in Great Barrington, his goal is to go to Dartmouth, and to do that, a postgrad year could make the difference for him.

  His references all paint the same portrait: a good, humble kid with a preternatural gift. A natural leader. Someone his classmates all look up to. And on and on.

  I am no match for Russell Hurley, and not just on the basketball court. I am haunted by the image of him jumping through the banner made to honor him. While I have never been the sports enthusiast that many of my peers are, I do know the grip it has on the high school imagination, even at Lancaster. Russell Hurley is instantly the most popular boy on campus, and not just among the students. Suddenly conversations come back to me: the admissions director and Mr. Peabody, the basketball coach, raving about this new boy, maybe the strongest player we’ve had in a generation. We’re talking New England championship, Arthur, he’s that good, they say. Pencil in thirty-five a game, they say. And they couldn’t understand my lack of excitement, but then again, that was before Betsy and during the time I found it difficult to get excited about anything.

  I return Russell’s file to Mrs. LaForge and walk outside into a raw Vermont day. It is late October, and the leaves have mostly fallen off the trees, except for a few that cling to the bare branches like lifeless birds. It is gray and overcast, and as I walk, the first snowflakes start to fall. They won’t mean a thing when they hit the ground, but it is always significant, a harbinger, when you first see snow in the sky. Turns a page on a part of the year. The long dark winter lies in front of us now.

  I walk to the river. It is not often I come here anymore. Across are the barren fields of New Hampshire. The river runs slow and fat and black on this gray day. I stare at the inky water. A big stick comes down the heart of the river, spinning as it goes, caught in the current. This part of the river never fully freezes, though it can be deceptive when a membrane of gray-white ice forms over it on the coldest of days. I follow the stick with my eyes. It spins one more time, then rolls toward the riverbank. It comes to rest at my feet and stops moving.

  “Tell us about the river.”

  “What about it?”

  “You talk about it, but not directly.”

  “What is there to say?”

  “It’s important to you.”

  “Of course.”

  “Expand on that, then.”

  “On why it’s important?”

  “Yes.”

  “I grew up on that river.”

  “Did you swim in it? Fish?”

  “Swim, yes. All the time. Fish? No. People did fish there. But we didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugs. “We weren’t the type that fished.”

  “Because fishing was…?”

  “Something other people did. What are you after?”

  “Tell me about your wife. Did she like to swim?”

  “Elizabeth? Elizabeth wasn’t a swimmer.”

  “Did you find that odd?”

  “What?”

  “That she didn’t swim?”

  “She would dip her toes in the ocean. But she didn’t swim in the river, and of course I didn’t, either, after college.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugs. “Have you ever read Madame Bovary?”

  “Madame what?”

  “Never mind. It’s just that her husband doesn’t dance. Charles doesn’t dance. I don’t dance, either. Or swim. It’s not—for a man like me—it’s not appropriate.”

  When I need alcohol, I travel for it. There is only one liquor store in the town of Lancaster, and it would be unbecoming for the headmaster to be in there as often as I require. So I get in my car and drive fifteen or twenty miles, where I will not be so easily recognized, and pick up what I need.

  It is on one of these sojourns, up to St. Johnsbury, that a lightbulb goes off. At the liquor store, I buy my normal assortment of a case of wine and a case of single malt scotch, but I also buy a smattering of bottles this time that one would not expect me to pick up. Some rotgut vodka, and something called Mad Dog 20/20, and some peppermint schnapps. All products that must appeal to the teenage palate—the times we have found students with alcohol, these are generally what they have.

  That afternoon I do something I am not particularly proud of, though, when it comes to Betsy, all things feel like war, and in war, you see, there is what is euphemistically called collateral damage.

  During the sports hour, I take the skeleton key afforded to me as head of school and open the front door to Spencer Hall. It is a two-story clapboard building on the main quadrangle, and as a student I once lived here, on the second floor. It houses junior and senior boys and is a desirable place to bunk on campus.

  The dorm is empty, as it should be. All the boys are out on the fields. Out of habit, I stop and pick up a wayward flyer that has fallen off the bulletin board. I walk down the long, narrow hallway, and all the flaws of the building catch my eye. It could use a new coat of paint, and the carpet is threadbare down the middle from all those pounding feet, boys wearing cleats inside, which they are not supposed to do but do anyway. Items for next year’s capital budget.

  I climb the stairs to the second floor, and here everything is the same. In an hour or so these hallways will be full of rambunctious boys readying themselves for the dining hall. But for now I have it to myself.

  I find the room I am looking for: 219. I put the paper bag I am carrying down on the floor, just so I can check the number again against the slip of paper in my pocket. I have the right room.

  I key the door and open it. The dorm rooms are al
l the same: high-ceilinged and stately in the manner of the older dormitories, a solitary window that looks out onto the quad. I go to the window and peer out. The quad, too, is devoid of students. One of the things I love about structure: You always know where to find Lancaster students. Their lives are scripted, unlike those at Exeter or Andover, which take a decidedly different approach, though I know they feel equally strong about the preparatory power of their pedagogy.

  This room has two beds, one on either side. This is a challenge I hadn’t really thought about. Which side of the room belongs to Russell, and which side belongs to his roommate, another postgrad basketball player, though much less heralded? They both have basketball posters above their beds, and this does not provide a clue. Then I remember that Brett, Russell’s roommate, is a point guard, and stands only about five foot nine, as compared to the six-foot-five Russell. These rooms have two closets, and the closets are aligned with the beds. It is in here that I discover what I am looking for. In the end, the size of the clothes determines the fate of the man.

  Having decided that Russell sleeps on the left side of the room, I unburden my cache of booze and set about placing it under his bed. The area under his bed is already used for storage, so I find a duffel bag he keeps rolled up under here and fill it with the cheap liquor. I tuck it back deep under the bed and exit his room and then the dormitory itself.

  That night, at a quarter to eleven, right before lights-out, the dean of students and I, having been notified by an anonymous tip, arrive at Russell and Brett’s doorway. The dean of students, a young man named Marx, enjoys the fascist side of his job, and in a loud voice he announces to the boys as they sit on their beds reading, “Room search.” They look surprised but unworried as they stand in their boxer shorts and T-shirts and take their place at the front of the room.