The Headmaster's Wife (36 page)

“All right,” Gregor said, but Mark was already asleep, sitting up in bed and yet completely relaxed, asleep the way children sometimes fell asleep, with complete and unreserved abandon.

Gregor got his coat and made some calculations in his head about just how hard it was going to be to get Brian Sheehy alone in the next forty five minutes.

Peter Makepeace had lived at President's House for a decade, but he'd never taken the time to really look at it before. It was, as headmasters' houses went, neither all that large nor all that impressive. At some of the more prestigious boys' schools, the headmaster got a house made of stone and built to resemble an Oxford University college. Windsor, on the other hand, had started its life as a girls' school, and it suffered from many of the things that had made the girls' schools less impressive and imposing than the institutions the very same parents had supported for their sons. There was, for instance, the conceit that the dorms were really houses, and the school itself really a home. The only building on the entire campus that was not built to ape domesticity was the library, which had been given by Margaret Milbourne Ridenour, who had bitterly resented her exile to Windsor in the days when no coeducation was available and children were shipped off to boarding schools whether they liked it or not. There was a portrait of old Margaret in the library's foyer. Peter honestly believed he had never seen a more sour, less satisfied human being. He didn't think she'd be any less sour if she were sent to Windsor today, with its commitment to progressive education, its self-conscious egalitarianism, its pride in the interest its students took in allforms of political causes. Old Margaret was something of a fascist and even more of a traditionalist. She had wanted Windsor to look like, and be like, the Exeter her brothers had been sent to. It hadn't then. It didn't now. It never would.

It was odd, but he'd spent the entire day thinking about the Mission of the School. He'd never done that before, not even when he was prepping for his interview back when he was only hoping he would get this job. By then he'd known all about Alice, of course. He'd known that she liked to sleep with students; and that if students were not available, and sometimes even if they were, she liked to sleep with faculty instead. He'd known she used sex as a means to politics and politics as a means to sex; and that politics for her meant not the day-to-day grubbiness of compromises on the Highway Transportation Bill and half measures in pursuit of Welfare Reform, but grand visions of apocalypse and redemption, the one sure cure for the boredom of a life in which there was no need to make much of an effort about anything. People thought it was only the rich who found themselves caught in the web of meaninglessness that came with not having to work for what they had, but it wasn't true. There were dozens of upper-middle-class housewives just like Alice, with husbands who were doctors and lawyers and campus-star university professors, who didn't need to work even if they decided they wanted to, who couldn't think of anything to care about, who had to make it all up. Lots of them took to alcohol or children. They came to places like Windsor in droves, driven and furious, insisting that Susie or Johnny would be admitted to Harvard or they'd die trying. Peter had long ago learned to spot the haunted look of those adolescent stand-ins, the children who were supposed to be everything their mothers had not had the courage to be ambitious for themselves. It was the mothers, too, not the fathers. The fathers dealt with it differently. They absented themselves from home and family. They put their desperation into their work. There were a lot of people out there who had not found a place of peace or a plateau of satisfaction. It wasn't only Alice.

Maybe this was why he was thinking about the Mission of the School and about President's House and what it looked like. He was standing on his own front steps—except that they didn't really belong to him; they belonged to the school; headmasters only lived here while they were serving as headmasters—looking into the blackness of a sky whose details were obscured by the haze caused by the lights that were everywhere: coming from the houses, lining the quad, making the world safe on Main Street. Snow was coming down on him in thick, wet flakes. It had started falling an hour ago in the lazy way that made it seem as if no storm could be coming, and now it was gentle but relentless, the beginning of something far more serious. This house, he thought, was just like the house it had been meant to imitate, and just like the man who had once lived in that house, who had defined for all time the role of the American radical manqué. Peter had never had much use for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even the name grated on him. The idea that this fool—this utter dilettante with his third-rate mind and his enthusiasms, his wooly-headed flights into the nether reaches of incoherent antitheology—was supposed to be the very foundation of American literature made Peter angry to the point of violence. There had been a time when he had spent hours of work trying to prove that it wasn't true. He'd done his master's thesis on just that subject. Now he thought that there was nothing truer. Old Waldo's spirit was alive and well and walking the Main Street of Windsor, Massachusetts, just as it had walked the Main Streets of Lexington and Concord and all the towns in between. Waldo would have liked Windsor Academy's Mission Statement, with its dedication to educating “the whole person” and its paeans to creativity, intelligence, and “spiritual excellence.” He wouldn't have known what it all meant any more than the trustees had, but Peter doubted if he'd known what half the things he'd written himself meant.

President's House was, indeed, a perfect replica. There was the hipped roof, the twin brick chimneys, the squared-off entry portico with its thin, Greek Revival columns. Peterwouldn't have been surprised to find that this house had been built to scale. The three women who had founded Windsor Academy had been fond of that kind of historical voyeurism. They had been less interested in what Emerson had had to say than they had been in celebrating a peculiarly
American
standard. It was a time when being American was more fashionable than it had become now.

He went up the front steps and let himself in the front door. He had seen Alice through the front windows, sitting at the desk in his study. He thought that if he got fired—which he almost surely would be—he would spend some time digging up the floor plans for the original Emerson house or even going down to Concord to visit it. He was pretty sure it was still standing. He'd be surprised if it wasn't a shrine. Emerson had lived there for years, and Thoreau had taken over the place when Emerson went to Europe. Everybody from the Daughters of the American Revolution to hippies with an itch for civil disobedience ought to treat the place as if it were hallowed ground.

He went through the hall to the door of the study and stopped. The door was not locked. Alice would not hide what she considered to be something she deserved to do by right. He looked in on her seated at the desk, jimmying the lock on the long center drawer. Then he cleared his throat and waited until she looked up.

“You could always just ask me for the key,” he said. “It would be easier.”

“Would you give me the key?” Her red hair shone in the muted light from the desk lamp. It was such an improbable color, and yet Peter knew for certain that there had been a time when it was completely genuine.

He came forward with the key in his hand. “I won't give it to you, but I'll open the drawer,” he said. He half expected her to grab it out of his hand while he bent forward to slip it into the lock, but she didn't. He opened it up and stepped back. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

She sat staring at him for a moment, emotionally blank. Then she pulled out the drawer, found the manila envelope, and pulled that out, too. She was, he thought, curiously without affect. She showed only those emotions she wanted to, meaning none of the ones she actually had. She dumped the contents of the manila envelope on the green felt desk blotter and spread them out under her hands.

“Well,” she said.

“You can keep them if you want to,” he told her. “For a long time I thought of them as insurance. I'd use them if I ever had the guts to divorce you, and you wanted to make trouble over it. But I've realized, these past few days, that I don't want to divorce you.”

“Worried about your reputation in the field?” Alice said.

“No,” Peter told her. He thought he ought to sit down. It would have a better effect. He couldn't make himself do it. “My reputation in the field is shot, and you know it. There isn't going to be another headmaster's job after this one. I'll have to retire to New Hampshire and live on what's left of my trust fund. You'll have to do what you want.”

“I thought you said you didn't want to divorce me.”

“I don't. But I don't intend to force you to stay with me either. You can do what you want to do. You can take those with you.”

“They're a form of pornography, aren't they?” Alice said. “Did you masturbate to them?”

Peter went over to the window and looked out onto the quad. The snow was beginning to come down very heavily. People were walking along the paths in the direction of the Student Center and the cafeteria. They both ought to be on their way over right now.

“I want to know the truth,” he said. “I want to know if you tried to kill Mark DeAvecca.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No, Alice, I'm not crazy. I've been cut out of the loop on the official end. His mother can't stand me, which under the circumstances I think makes a good deal of sense. Even so, it's not that easy to keep me from getting the information I want, and I do know what's been going on at the hospital all this afternoon. Somebody poisoned Mark with arsenic. Nota single dose of arsenic, apparently, but several weeks' worth of smaller doses—”

“You don't necessarily die of arsenic.” “True enough,” Peter said. “That's another of the possibilities they're considering, that somebody was just trying to make Mark ill. If that was what they were looking for, I'd say they got it, wouldn't you?”

“I don't believe it,” Alice said. “He hasn't been sick. He's been doped to the gills—”

“Not according to the lab tests.” “—and treating this place like it was a residential party. He's all wrong for Windsor, Peter, and you know it. He's not serious.”

“He may not be serious, Alice, but what has happened to him is; and there's no way around it, at least not from what I've heard. He was found with arsenic in his body as well as enough caffeine to have killed him. There's arsenic in his hair. A lot of it, apparently. Which means he was being poisoned for weeks at least—”

“Or poisoning himself,” Alice said quickly.

“What for? Alice, let's leave the realm of the ridiculous here for a moment. Let's leave the realm of that
Hustler
centerfold you like to turn yourself into when the occasion arises and look at what we have here. We were nearly out from under the problem caused by Michael Feyre's suicide, a suicide you almost certainly had something to do with—”

“Don't be an idiot.”

“I'm not. I'm being practical. If you weren't the reason Michael committed suicide, you could be made to look like the reason. But that was all right. We were almost clear from that one. Now we have this. And we aren't dealing with Dee Feyre anymore, somebody with a lot of money but without sophistication or education or connections, we're dealing with Liz Toliver. And I've seen her, Alice. She's on the warpath.”

“She can be on the warpath all she likes. She can't do anything. You've said yourself that we're not going to beasked to stay on after all this. What difference does it make what she does?”

“It makes a difference if she lands you in jail, Alice. I don't think you're going to like the women's correctional facility in Concord.”

“She can't land me in jail,” Alice said. “I haven't done anything to get landed in jail.”

“You were sleeping with a minor and a student, that could land you in jail.”

“He was sixteen.”

“It doesn't matter; he was under eighteen. That's the law, whether you intend to recognize it or not.”

“Those laws were passed to prosecute male predators who abused female children,” Alice said. “They have nothing to do with teenaged sex, for God's sake. Teenagers have sex with each other all the time; they don't get prosecuted.”

“They don't get prosecuted if they have sex with each other. But never mind. It doesn't matter. What does matter is whether or not you're going to find yourself arrested for attempted murder, and the possibility does exist. You were feeding Mark coffee last night. You were seen. In the cafeteria.”

“I wasn't feeding him,” Alice said. “I just got him a cup. He asked for it.”

“Two cups.”

“Whatever. We were talking.”

“About what?”

“About Michael. Why shouldn't we talk about Michael? For God's sake, Peter, everybody has been talking about Michael since it happened. Until today, I mean. It's only natural. It's a small community.”

It was the word “community” that stopped him, that catchall word meant to impose order and cohesion on random collections of people. Windsor was a “community.” They said it all the time. He went back to the desk and swept up the photographs and the manila envelope. The photograph on the top was of Alice sitting astride some boy whose name Peter no longer remembered. It was a younger Alice.

Even in black and white, her hair looked thicker and more glossy; her breasts looked firmer. They had no children and because of it, and of the fact that they were small, Alice's breasts had lasted much longer than women's ordinarily do. Still, it was coming to her as it came to all women everywhere. That was the problem for a woman who had based her life on sex.