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With surprise Kate realized that Hawthorne was sincere, and she saw that she had expected something specious about Bishop’s Hill’s new headmaster. She had thought he would be like the others, someone who couldn’t get a job elsewhere and for whom Bishop’s Hill was the last stop. At best, she’d seen his hiring as a cosmetic change: a good-looking professional man to handle the fund-raising. This insight made her more attentive, and her colleagues, she noticed, were more attentive as well, sitting straighter, and two or three of them were even taking notes, although their faces, if possible, were stonier.

Hawthorne spoke about theories of alternative behavior, how that didn’t mean enforcing rules that led to punishment but called for the substitution of other responses that in turn meant increased interaction with every child. He wanted to dismantle the school’s system of merits and demerits. “We can’t punish behavior unless we’re willing to teach the child alternatives that he or she can substitute. A merit/demerit system is how you create a prison. We must be careful to be neither baby-sitters nor prison guards curbing our students’ actions till their sentences are up.”

It occurred to Kate to wonder why Hawthorne was there. Not why he had been hired but why he had decided to come to Bishop’s Hill. Unlike Fritz Skander, he had nothing casual about him, no trace of the easygoing administrator. He appeared thoroughly professional. Why should Hawthorne want to settle in rural New Hampshire, where people’s main links to the outside world were the satellite dishes attached to the sides of their dilapidated barns? And with that question Kate felt a rush of fear she couldn’t understand. After all, she held her job lightly no matter how much she cared for her students. Were she fired, she would find another. Even though she had no wish to work in an office or a store, such a situation would hardly be permanent. Then it seemed to her that fear was what she saw on the faces of her colleagues. Whatever the past had been, the future would be different and the angular man at the podium represented the moment of change. Even his angularity made Kate uncomfortable. It made her think of sticks shoved in a bag, chafing and poking at the insides.

“We’re here to help these children in their transition to the adult world,” Hawthorne was saying. “They have been injured and their sense of cause and effect is based on a distorted sense of survival. Even those of you who have been victims of their anger must realize that it is characteristic of damaged children to display anger when it would be more appropriate for them to be sad.”

The reference to anger made Kate think of her ex-husband, whom she hadn’t seen since July, when the divorce was finalized. She supposed even George’s anger existed because he lacked the courage to show his sadness, but after a point Kate no longer cared, especially when he had drunkenly tried to knock her down. Every Saturday morning Kate drove Todd in to the YMCA in Plymouth for his swimming lesson. George would pick him up. Then on Sunday evening he would drop Todd off at the library for Kate to pick up. She wouldn’t ask Todd about his time with his father. She knew that George would again have told Todd what a terrible mother she was and would have grilled him as to whether she had a boyfriend or whether any man had been sleeping at the house. He had even made Todd reveal her uninspiring date with Chip Campbell the previous spring, a dull dinner followed by a bad movie to which Chip brought a thermos of martinis. And at least once George had yelled at Todd and called him a liar. She had tried to ask Todd if there had been other kinds of abuse, but Todd was oddly protective of his father, as if George were a younger sibling who was especially clumsy or weak.

Kate shifted her legs and the afternoon light reflected on the gold ankle chain with the letter
K
around her left ankle. She had bought it the day her divorce had been finalized. At first she had intended to get a golden heart but that seemed sentimental. Even with a
K,
though, the chain represented her future, a new future. She had also wanted it to mean hope, but as her life continued without dramatic change, the chain came to mean no more than “on-goingness.” And what changes did she still hope for? If not romance, at least some form of male companionship. The very fact that George was jealous made her wish for something just so it wouldn’t seem that she was agreeing to his terms. And he wasn’t really jealous. He had for her neither love nor liking; rather, he hated the idea of another man’s fingerprints on what he still saw as his property: his hunting rifles, his Dodge four-by-four, his ex-wife. What appeared to be jealousy was the result of frustrated ownership, not affection. Surely that was why he was so insistent that Kate stay in the area and not because of Todd, whom he never called except to question him about his mother’s behavior and whose visits with his father were mostly spent in front of the television.

Kate smoothed her green cardigan down over her breasts. She found herself trying to determine the last time she had been held. Two summers ago she had taken a seminar for secondary school teachers in Romance languages at UNH and had gone out half a dozen times with a Spanish teacher from Portsmouth. Todd had been staying with her parents in Concord. Was that the last time she had been embraced—fourteen months ago? She had had no strong feelings for the man, whose last name she couldn’t recall, but now he stood as a high point in her romantic life. How pathetic, Kate thought. Here she was, still young, reasonably attractive, and in good physical condition and she could almost feel the skin decaying on her bones. Her sense of waste heightened the anger she felt toward her ex-husband. There were plenty of places where she could take courses next summer. Even California wouldn’t be too far. She would apply and take Todd with her. To hell with George. But the summer was nine months away. It was only September and she still had the winter to get through.

“If we see teaching as a twenty-four-hour activity,” Hawthorne was saying, “it will require a great deal of communication not simply among the faculty but among everyone at Bishop’s Hill. Our job is behavior management and behavior change—education is part of that but our primary instrument of change is Bishop’s Hill itself. We’ll need to have regular staff meetings, which won’t just be the usual, depressing rehashes of inappropriate behavior and who did what to whom. The point won’t be to discuss what’s been done but what might be done. And we’ll all need to pool staff resources to think up alternatives that might be of assistance.”

Kate perceived that whatever changes were initiated by the new headmaster she herself would be asked to give up more time. This thought was followed by resentment. She saw herself as a responsible teacher whose homeroom duties, six sections of languages, field hockey chores, and occasional mail room and dining hall duties kept her fully occupied. What right had Jim Hawthorne to demand more of her? By redefining their endeavor and calling it a milieu—Kate automatically suspected other people’s jargon—he was making her job something else. But along with irritation she felt sympathy for Hawthorne, who surely was arousing the resentment of her colleagues. They were used to their routines. It wasn’t necessarily that Hawthorne was asking them to do more work—he was meddling with their complacency.

Yet Hawthorne was right about the students. Many were disturbed and troublesome. They acted out and lost their tempers. They were unhappy and felt unloved by their families. Even the best seemed to be trying to accommodate themselves to what Kate thought of as a reform school mentality—following orders out of fear of punishment rather than to be successful. And she was reminded of the new girl who had appeared in Spanish I on Tuesday—Jessica, her name was. She had an ankle bracelet like Kate’s, though thicker and shinier. Her roommate, Helen Selkirk, also took Spanish. Helen had talked to Kate about the girl after class, saying that Jessica had made Helen switch to the top bunk, threatening to wet her bed if Helen didn’t move. But that hadn’t been the most disturbing thing. What had Jessica said? “Who do I have to fuck to get along here?” In class the next day—pretty and blond and fifteen—Jessica had seemed to exude the animated naiveté that passed for innocence among adolescent girls. Yet what was her history and what dreadfulness in her past had led to her question? And when Helen told Jessica that she didn’t have to fuck anyone, she hadn’t believed her. “Sooner or later you got to do it,” Jessica had told her, “that’s just how things are.”

Kate studied Hawthorne standing behind the podium—his dark gray jacket, his white shirt and tie. She saw he wore a wedding ring, though she’d heard nothing about a wife. She wondered how she felt about that and detected a trace of disappointment. It made her scold herself again. Perhaps Hawthorne’s wife was someone with whom she could be friends. God knows, she’d be glad to find someone to talk to. As Kate listened, she felt that Hawthorne knew what he was saying was unpopular and that he didn’t care. No, that wasn’t right. He cared but it wouldn’t make him change his approach. He meant to take Bishop’s Hill forward and those who didn’t follow would be cut loose.

Kate glanced out the window—the shadows were lengthening across the playing fields and the light was increasingly golden. A red-haired boy in a red sweater was walking toward the trees, presumably to have an illegal cigarette. She recognized him as an eighth grader, although she couldn’t think of his name. He kicked a stone and it glittered in the light as it flew through the air.

Sitting on the grass near the back of Adams Hall, Kate saw, was the girl she had been thinking about—Jessica. She wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt and she sat with her knees drawn up as she watched something hidden by the edge of the window. Kate pushed back her chair. A man was splitting wood. He had his shirt off although it wasn’t warm. He would position a log on the chopping block, then stand back and swing the ax lightly over his shoulder, letting it gather momentum as it plummeted downward. A second after the log split in half, Kate heard the noise, a faraway thud. At first she couldn’t identify the man—dark-haired and muscular with a narrow face—then she realized she had seen him before. He, too, had just come to Bishop’s Hill. He was Larry Gaudette’s cousin and he worked in the kitchen. Indeed, the previous day he had made bread and the wonderful smells coming from the oven had cheered everyone. Kate had noticed him in the dining room yesterday afternoon, but then he had his shirt on and was wearing a Red Sox cap.

Jessica sat about fifteen feet away from him. Kate didn’t know how long the girl had been there but she felt that the wood splitting had been continuing for a while, at least she’d been aware of the sound of the ax at some low level of consciousness. The man swung the ax, kicked the pieces aside, then positioned a new log and brought the ax up with one hand, gripping the handle with the other when the ax reached the top of its arc. The movement had an easy grace. Kate wondered if the two had spoken or if the man knew that Jessica was watching, though she suspected he knew even if no words had been exchanged. In her baggy jeans and sweatshirt, the girl looked sexless, but her roommate had told Kate how Jessica had a garish tattoo on her bottom. “One of those woman symbol things,” Helen had said.

The beginning of applause brought Kate back to the room. Hawthorne had come to the end of his talk. She turned forward and began to clap, thinking as she did that the applause lacked the enthusiasm of the applause fifteen minutes earlier. Nobody stood.

Hawthorne held up a hand for silence. His slight smile suggested to Kate that he wasn’t sure what to do with his face. It occurred to her that he wasn’t as confident and inflexible as he at first seemed.

“I expect some of you have questions,” he said.

Chip Campbell got to his feet and raised his hand. “I’d like to hear more about these regular meetings.” He glanced around him with a certain severity. “I’m sure we all would.”

“We have about 120 boarders and a dozen or so day students divided between the upper and lower schools. The faculty of each school would meet weekly to discuss what they see as problems and difficulties among the students, as well as what we can do to help.”

“Some of us teach in both schools,” said Chip. Dressed in khakis and a brown tweed jacket over a Bishop’s Hill sweatshirt, Chip stood with his hands on his hips. He had a thick red neck and oversized red ears that his short hair made seem larger.

“I’m aware of that,” said Hawthorne. He spoke patiently but coolly, as if he were discussing numbers or automotive mechanics rather than people. “Those faculty would need to attend both meetings. And I’ll be attending both meetings myself, as well as the meetings of the nonacademic staff.”

“That’s a lot of time,” said Campbell.

“Yes.” Hawthorne seemed about to say more, then didn’t.

Chip glanced around at his colleagues, obviously hoping that one or more would continue this line of inquiry, then he sat down. When Kate had gone out with him that spring, Chip had barely been able to drive by the end of the evening. On the other hand, she was impressed that he had taken a thermos of martinis to a movie. And she even slightly blamed herself for his condition. After she turned down his offers of a martini, he had drunk the whole thermos himself, as if the contents would spoil if he didn’t act quickly. Chip had asked her out two other times, but each time she’d been busy, or said she was. Kate had already spent a quarter of her life with one alcoholic and she worried about her brief attraction to Chip, as if it suggested too much about her failings.

Mrs. Sherman, the art teacher, had her hand up. She was a rather flamboyant woman in her midfifties who wore a beret. “I’m worried about what you say about the demerit system. I often feel almost incapable of controlling some of my students and without the demerit system I think I’d be completely at sea. Isn’t there a danger of too much permissiveness?”

“I don’t believe it’s a matter of permissiveness,” said Hawthorne, “but of giving the students increased responsibility and trying to remove a them-against-us type of thinking. Our kindness to them must be separated from any notion as to whether they deserve it. The student who acts out and the student who never opens his mouth may be equally in need of help, and those are issues best addressed by the weekly meetings as well as other methods.” He went on to discuss the role of the two counselors now at the school and how each would be responsible for half the students and would work with him and the school psychologist. Sometime during the year Hawthorne hoped to hire a second psychologist. And he spoke of increasing the students’ sense of connection to the school by instituting a buddy system between upper and lower classmen, starting discussion groups within each grade, and assigning students to the grounds crew, the kitchen, or the library to help with certain tasks.