The Headmaster's Wife (5 page)

Peter shuffled through the photographs and came up with the ones from
this
year, new ones, only a few weeks old. He really couldn't breathe. It was impossible. He knew this boy. It wasn't a boy he would have expected Alice to take up with because Alice—in the end, when she wasn't watching herself, when she wasn't acting a part for the rest of the world—was who she was. She could no more help herself than he could. This boy, though, this boy was all wrong. He was from the wrong background. He had the wrong looks. He had the wrong tastes in sex. The photographs from this year were all predictably vanilla, no odd positions, no leather equipment. The boy's thick, dark hair fell on Alice's breasts as he leaned over her, pumping away in the missionary position.

Peter suddenly wished he had it all on tape, that he could run it back for himself in video the way other men ran porno films to get themselves in the mood.

“There's one thing you have to remember,” a good friend of his on the board had said when Peter had first been appointed headmaster, “a headmaster is always a headmaster. No matter what he does. No matter where he is. Once you take on the title, anything you do will be interpreted as being not your own actions but the actions of the headmaster of Windsor Academy. It isn't a comfortable position.”

No,
Peter thought,
it isn't a comfortable position.
It paralyzed him. He had no idea what he was doing with these photographs. He had no idea what he wanted them for. He couldn't see himself divorcing Alice. Even if she agreed to give him a divorce without a struggle, it would be a disaster. The headmasters of New England prep schools did not get divorced from the women the Board of Trustees expected to act as mothers to the students under their care. What was worse, he didn't want to get divorced from Alice. He didn't want his life disrupted in any way. He only wanted—what?

To find the leather equipment, where she'd put it, what she did with it when she wasn't using it. To see her exposed, not physically, not by the circulation of these pictures, but
exposed,
right down to the bone, so that everybody could see
her for what she was. Peter's real problem was that he didn't know what that was. He had a terrible feeling Alice didn't know either. He reached out for the photographs and swept them up. He put the envelope back into the drawer. He shut the drawer and locked it. Once the photographs were out of sight, he could breathe more easily, but he still couldn't think.

Michael Feyre,
he thought, and the idea was so absurd he simply stopped thinking of it. Even with the pictures in the drawer, he couldn't imagine Alice panting over the body of that thick, awkward, unimaginative clod.

There was no such thing as a Working-Class Genius, Peter thought. There was only one mediocrity after the other, each given a glow by rich people like Alice who preferred their romances written by Dreiser rather than Barbara Cartland.

For the first six months Cherie Wardrop was at Windsor Academy, most of the rest of the faculty had insisted on pronouncing her name as if it were the French endearment: “Che-RIE,” people would say, passing her on the walks in the quad or coming up behind her in the line in the cafeteria, proud of their boarding school French, and she would go along with them. Windsor was a miracle, as far as Cherie was concerned. It was hard enough to find a job of any kind these days. To find one just outside Boston was a near impossibility, and to find one in a boarding school that served the children of the very people she had admired so much as a child was—well, impossible, that was all. It was worse than impossible; it was silly. There were days when she woke up, looked at the bedroom around her, and thought she had somehow been transported from the kind of novels she used to write in secret in the eleventh grade. She'd been careful with those novels at the time. She'd known better than to write them so that the characters had the kind of names she was so fascinated with because she'd known that if she did somebody
would be sure to find them, and then everything would go completely to hell. She wondered if it would have been different if she'd grown up out here instead of in the Midwest, if her parents had been rich and sophisticated instead of middle-class and midwestern. People here certainly liked to think they were different. They liked to think of themselves as “citizens of the world.” It was one of those things Cherie still hadn't managed to understand. On the other hand, Melissa
had
been born and brought up around here. She had even gone to a boarding school like this one called Miss Porter's, where Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had actually been a student. Melissa was just as fascinated by all these people as Cherie was and just as determined to stay part of the world they lived in.

The truth was, Cherie's name was not pronounced like the French endearment. It was pronounced “cherry.” Her mother had named her after Cherry Ames, the heroine of a series of books for girls that had been popular when her mother was still in grade school.
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse,
the first one was called, and then the series went from there.
Army Nurse,
that was one—Cherry Ames went off to fight the good fight in World War II.
Dude Ranch Nurse. Private Duty Nurse. Jungle Nurse. Boarding School Nurse.
She should have read that last one, except that she couldn't have. She couldn't read any of them because the books were arranged carefully on a built-in bookshelf in the living room protected behind a thin sheet of soft plastic, preserved for all time. The closest Cherie had ever come to reading any of the books was listening to her mother tell her the stories, which happened several times a week from the age when she might have been interested in fairy tales. Other mothers read Dr. Seuss to get their children to sleep. Cherie's told the stories of Cherry Ames.

I wonder what she wanted?
Cherie thought now. It was one of the great questions of her life. Maybe her mother had wanted to be a nurse, but, if so, it was hard to understand why she hadn't just become one. One of her mother's sisters was a nurse. It wasn't as if Cherie's grandparents would
have put barriers in Cherie's mother's way. It wasn't as if Cherie's mother had the usual excuse either. She hadn't become pregnant out of wedlock, and if she had she would have been able to get an abortion, if that was what she'd wanted, and go ahead with her plans. An abortion is what Cherie's mother said she'd wished she'd had when she found out that Cherie was not only not interested in being a nurse but was actually going to leave home for the Northeast and become a liberal and a member of the Democratic Party on top of it. Even worse than that, Cherie insisted that everybody know she had become a member of the Democratic Party.

“I'm not insisting on their knowing,” Cherie had said, trying to be patient, trying to be calm. “It's not like that. I just think people should stand up for what they believe in—”

“How can you believe in a perversion?” her mother had said. “The Democrats are no better than Communists, that's all they are. And they're atheists. You were brought up to believe in God.”

That was her junior year at the University of Michigan, and of course her mother thought it was all the university's fault—the entire state thought that Ann Arbor was nothing but a collection of Commies and perverts. Maybe it
would
have been different to grow up out here. At least people didn't call other people “Commies,” and only ignorant people used the word “pervert.” Maybe words made a difference in the long run.

There was movement behind her, and Cherie looked back to see Melissa coming through from the kitchen carrying a mug of tea. Melissa was a miracle too, in a way. They had met fifteen years ago at a summer training camp for women activists in Virginia, and everything had fallen into place so quickly that Cherie had distrusted it at first. Melissa had grown up in New York. She was used to taking control of her life and getting the things that mattered to her. This whole plan that they'd come up with—to go from school to school, to be paid for seeing the country—had been Cherie's idea, but it had only happened because Melissa insisted.

“What are you looking at?” Melissa asked now. “Have they decided to stage a festival of spring in the snow or what?”

“You shouldn't say things like that,” Cherie said. “That's the kind of thing that drives people like Alice Makepeace nuts. And we want to stay.”

“We want to stay, yes,” Melissa said. She sat down in the big leather armchair and stretched out her feet. “We want to stay at least because it would be impossible to get as good an apartment anywhere near Boston for less than it would cost to lease a Porsche. But that doesn't mean you need to be on pins and needles all the time.”

“I've always been on pins and needles.”

“Persecution in the Midwest. I know.”

“It wasn't persecution,” Cherie said. “It was—” She shrugged and went back to looking out the window onto the quad. “Do you know who I saw a moment ago? Mark DeAvecca.”

“Stoned as usual, I take it. It's Friday night.”

“You can call it stoned if you want to.”

“It's the best way of putting it,” Melissa said. “It fits his behavior. I've known dozens of kids like him in my life. There's a soft underbelly of them in every good school.”

“He's a brilliant kid,” Cherie said. “I know a lot of people around here think he's stupid, but it isn't true. It comes out every once in a while when you talk to him.”

“He'd have to be a brilliant kid,” Melissa said. She curled her legs up under her. “Look, I know I make fun of this place a lot It's hard not to make fun of it. They're so damned self-conscious about how progressive they all are, they make political correctness look sane. But even I know that the work here is not easy. If he wasn't a brilliant kid, he couldn't get away with the crap he pulls without flunking out.”

“He's not even close to flunking out. I know a dozen kids with grades worse than his.”

“Exactly. And that in spite of the fact that he doesn't know where he is half the time. But Cherie, no matter how bright he is, there's nothing you can do for someone like that.”

“Everybody thinks he takes drugs,” Cherie said again,
feeling mulish. “His roommate takes drugs sometimes, what's his name, Michael Feyre. You can smell it on him.”

“Well, yes,” Melissa said, “Michael Feyre is not a brilliant kid. He doesn't hide it very well.”

“With Mark DeAvecca, it's not like drugs. It's like—”

“What?”

Cherie shrugged. “Senile dementia.”

“Senile dementia?” Melissa said. “The kid is sixteen, for God's sake, and you think he's got Alzheimer's disease?”

“No, not really.” Cherie shook her head. “It's not that I think he has it, it's that that's what it's like. He
does
things. He forgets things—She'll be sitting in class and we'll be working out a problem, and he'll do it. He'll sit right there and do it. Then we'll move on to something else, and maybe ten minutes later I'll ask about the problem, and he won't remember it. He won't remember a tiling about it.”

“Drugs.”

“No,” Cherie said. “If it was drugs, he wouldn't have been able to do the problem in the first place. There's something going on with that kid. I wish I knew what it was.”

“Don't bother. I mean it, Cherie, there's no point in bothering. The kid's got a famous mother and a rich father. A rich and famous father, come to think of it.”

“Stepfather,” Cherie said automatically. “His biological father is dead.”

“Whatever. It doesn't matter. They won't throw him out of here, and they won't do anything about what's going on because they don't want one of the paying customers to leave, and they don't want a lawsuit or, worse, Mama to hit the Op-Ed pages of all the best newspapers blasting them to hell.”

Cherie bit her lip. The carillon was marking a quarter hour. She'd noticed the clock in the kitchen at nine fifteen just a little while ago. It had to be nine thirty. The quad was empty. She'd always hated the cold. Back in Ann Arbor, she'd promised herself that as soon as she had the chance she'd go somewhere warm. She'd do her graduate work in Florida or Hawaii. She'd move to Texas or South Carolina and civilize the Bible Belt. Instead, she'd done her graduate
work in Wisconsin and then moved to New Jersey, to the first of the boarding schools. The only way she could have managed to get any colder would have been if she'd gone to Alaska, or if they had boarding schools at the North Pole.

She turned away from the window. Melissa was still sitting in the big leather chair and still sipping her tea, black tea, the strong kind.

“There's one other thing,” Cherie said.

“What's that?”

“Alice Makepeace doesn't like him.”

“Doesn't like Mark DeAvecca?”

“Exactly.”

“That's just because he's Michael's roommate, don't you think?”

“I don't know,” Cherie said. “I know he must be in the way, but that hardly seems like enough of a reason. She really doesn't like him. Not at all.”

“Then that's one more reason for you to stay away from him,” Melissa said.

“He's my student.”

“I mean stay away from his problems,” Melissa said. “I really hate to be the heavy here, Cherie, but the simple fact is that that woman is dangerous, and you know it. She's dangerous in ways I can't begin to count. She's dangerous to anybody who gets in her way—”

“You'd think somebody would catch on to what she's doing,” Cherie said. “This is the third student in three years. One of them is going to file a complaint one of these days. And don't say she'll just talk herself out of it. People don't just talk themselves out of it these days. Think of the priest scandals. She'll go down, and she'll bring the school down with her.”