The Headmaster's Wife (6 page)

“Maybe. My only concern is that she doesn't bring us down first. She—does things to people, Cherie, you know she does. She can get almost anybody fired if she wants to, and she isn't brutal about it. She's got a lot of finesse. But you're just as fired with finesse. And you don't want to be fired—or in jail.”

“No,” Cherie said. “That's true enough.”

“The only way to survive in these places is to do what we originally planned. It's worked so far and no fuss. Alice Makepeace is one of those women who gets what she wants the way she wants it. She's got the conscience of a Roald Dahl villain. Don't get in her way. If it's true and she really doesn't like Mark DeAvecca, then Mark DeAvecca will get shown the door and you won't have to worry about him anymore.”

“But I
will
worry about him,” Cherie said. Then she turned back around and looked out the window one more time. Everything looked dead, or worse. She wished that spring would come. Everything always felt better in the spring. That had been true even back in Michigan.

Maybe what was really wrong with her, and with Melissa, was the obvious—that Alice Makepeace was exactly the sort of woman both of them wanted so very much to be. It was terrible to think that people couldn't be happy no matter how much they worked at it. It was terrible to think that people, even women, would choose danger over safety, intensity over security, flash and dash over the solid day-to-day of love. It was terrible to think it, but it was probably true, and it was especially true of both of them. Now she had a whole raft of student accounts to rectify, and the house accounts to do. She should have a stack of student IDs to verify, too, but they were gone, and she hadn't had a chance to get them back again. One of them belonged to Mark DeAvecca. It was the third one he'd lost this year.

James Robert Hallwood should have been a professor in an Ivy League English department in the 1950s or even earlier, when erudition and elegance were assumed to be the goals of anyone with half a brain in his head and nobody laughed at Clifton Webb. Well, James admitted, probably everybody laughed at Clifton Webb; they just didn't come out and say what they were thinking because in those days homosexual men were not only supposed to be in the closet but invisible.
They were not invisible, of course. James may never have been a professor in an Ivy League English department, but he was old enough to remember the 1950s. He'd had an uncle whom everybody had referred to as a “confirmed bachelor,” as if a taste for going into New York and hanging out in Greenwich Village bars was the sign of a man too dedicated to chasing girls to ever settle down. People sniggered—that was the word, too, sniggered, something different from “laughed” or “chuckled” or even “derided,” a word with a world of meaning in it, a sense of time and place. James had not sniggered. Even then he had been plotting a path, and although it included confirmed bachelorhood—he'd known that much before he was twelve—it did not include Greenwich Village bars. The real difference between the young and the old was that the young had no sense of the realistic. What looked to rational people like insurmountable obstacles seemed, to a teenaged boy with a true spirit of invincibility, just a few silly details to be ignored more than to be overcome. Now he wasn't sure if he had been lucky or unlucky. He would not have found it easy to live in a time when being what he was could get him arrested and sent to jail. He wasn't good at dissimulation, and he didn't have the patience for pretense that surely had been required of men like Clifton Webb. The problem was, he had no patience for so much of what had come in the same boat that had brought the need for pretense to an end: victim's studies, feminist criticism, gender-race-and-class. There was something truly obscene about holding the
Pietá
up to the light and seeing only the basis for a diatribe on capitalist retrogressions or the triumph of hegemonic male privilege.

Outside, the carillon was doing one of its minor jiggles. It was a terrible carillon, politically correct, like everything else at Windsor Academy. James checked the clock on the wall behind him and saw that it was ten thirty Then he turned back to what he was doing at the counter and looked out the window. It was not a good view from this kitchen. There was a good one, out on the quad, in the living room; but faculty apartments being what they were, one view per
unit seemed to be the best that could be expected. This window looked out on the long stretch from the library to Maverick Pond. In the winter, with the snow piled high, it looked like a wasteland.

He poured black coffee into large, bone china cups and put the cups on his best serving tray. He put the silver sugar bowl there, too, but not the cream pitcher, because neither of them used cream. It fascinated him a little. They were both “effeminate” men, in a way of being “effeminate” that had gone out of style many years ago; but neither one of them had women's tastes. The coffees were plain black brews, good Colombian, and imported, but without the bells and whistles of the kind of person who found Starbucks a personal affront to aesthetics. There was no cinnamon or French vanilla. There was no sales slip in the utility drawer indicating a buying trip into Boston to the place where a pound of ground coffee beans cost as much as a small car.

Out in the wasteland, there was movement. James stopped what he was doing, his hands full of silver teaspoons, and watched the figure in black walking away from the pond with her head bent into what must have been wind. There were no lights out there, but he knew who it was, knew it as surely as he would have if he had seen her red hair flashing under one of the security lights. He wondered what she was doing out there at this time of night, and alone. Alice Makepeace was never alone, and when she was it was because she was coming or going to an assignation. He couldn't imagine what kind of assignation she could be having at Maverick Pond in the middle of a cold February night, when even the squirrels weren't interested in making love in the out-of-doors.

He put the teaspoons down on the tray. He watched Alice Makepeace reach the top of the hill near the west door of the library and then begin to move along the path toward the quad. She was wearing that floor-length black wool cape she'd affected since the day he'd first met her. She looked like she was auditioning for a part in an all-female remake of
Zorro.
The way things were these days, somebody probably
would make a female
Zorro,
and then all the girls in the English Department would write essays full of torturously complicated language for the
Publication of the Modern Language Association
saying, basically, that it was a Very Good Thing to show women in nontraditional roles, and that the movie would probably result in the death of capitalism and the coming of a Utopia built on nurturing, cooperation, and classically female values.

Alice Makepeace had disappeared out of sight in the quad. James picked up the tray and began to carry it into the kitchen, thinking that he ought to put something sensible on the CD player before the night got too quiet for either his comfort or David's. He didn't know when that had started—the uncomfortable feeling they both had when there was too much silence between them—but it
had
started, and James had been through enough of these things to know that it meant the relationship was winding to a close. It was too bad really. He didn't love David. He didn't have much use for all this new talk of love and relationships and permanency that characterized this phase of the “gay” movement. He refused even to call himself “gay.” Still, it was too bad. He and David were companionable. They had been together a long time.

David was sitting in the wing chair with his feet up on the ottoman going through the illustrated catalogue for the Turner show at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an old show, years in the past. James couldn't believe David was really interested.

James put the tray down on the coffee table and sat in front of it on the couch. You
could
see out the window here to the quad, but there was no sign of Alice Makepeace trudging her way to the headmaster's house. He wondered where she had gone.

David put down the catalogue and reached for his coffee. “Where have you been? You're not usually any more than a couple of minutes in the kitchen.”

“I was watching someone out the window, a mystery.”

“Oh?”

James shrugged. “Not really. An anomaly, really, that there's probably some stupidly simple explanation for. I saw Alice Makepeace coming up from Maverick Pond.”

“Alice Makepeace is who—the headmaster's wife?”

“Exactly.”

“And what's at this Maverick Pond?”

“Nothing, really,” James said, “that's the mystery. It's just a water hole in the middle of a field. Everybody pretends to admire it because it's part of nature, and there's a demonstration out there every spring when the administration decides it has to spray to get rid of the mosquitoes. But there isn't anything … there.”

“So what was she doing there?”

“I haven't the slightest idea. She has affairs with students. If the weather was somewhat warmer…” James shrugged.

David had picked up his coffee cup. Now he put it down again, interested. He taught at a university in Boston. James knew he looked on Windsor Academy as a kind of exercise in surrealism. He was always asking James why James didn't just move to some place like Emerson, or even Tufts. James had his degree. He even had his publications. David, on the other hand, had tenure, and he had lost the sense of insecurity that was the inevitable accompaniment to being new and unknown in a strange school.

“Isn't it funny?” David said. “Are you sure she's having an affair with a student?”

“Of course I'm sure. It's not the first one she's had either. I think she looks on it like a tradition.”

“Do other people know about this? Is it—common talk around the campus?”

James considered that. “Not exactly,” he said slowly. “She's not blatant about it really. And I don't think her husband knows.”

“Prep school headmasters are like college presidents; they never know anything.”

“Possibly. In this case, though, I think she's made a certain amount of effort to keep him from finding out. But people
do know. It's hard not to know in a place as small as this.”

“And they don't do anything about it?”

“What are they going to do?”

David picked up his coffee cup again. “Think about it. What do you think would have happened if it had been one of us with a student?”

“Ah,” James said.

“I know you don't like to be political,” David said. “Even so, you do have to face reality some of the time. If it had been one of us with a student, we'd have been out with our luggage before we'd had time to pack. There wouldn't even have been an inquiry. You know that as well as I do.”

“I supposè,” James said.

“Don't just suppose,” David said. “It's ever since the church scandals, and you know it. Especially here, this close to Boston, everybody's walking on eggs. That's a cliché. I know you don't like them, but there it is.”

“Yes,” James said.

“The rumors don't even have to be true,” David went on. “Nobody even bothers to investigate anymore, half the time. All you need is a student with an axe to grind, somebody you're going to give a less-than-stellar grade to, and there it is. I've heard of three cases in the last two weeks. Oh, they didn't happen all at once, or all in the same place, but it amounts to the same thing. You can't be too careful. And you can never be sure.”

“I don't have affairs with students,” James said stiffly. “What do you take me for?”

“It's not what I take you for,” David said. “It's what
they
take you for. All of
them.
Sometimes I understand the black separatists, I really do. Sometimes I wish we could go somewhere without
them.”

“Who's
them?
The entire straight world?”

“Maybe.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” James said. “Besides, I don't know what you're upset about. Aren't you always telling me that it's so much better at the university level, where they don't have
to worry about hysterical parents and homosexual men can be honest about who and what they are? I thought the university was a paradise for diversity, or however it is you phrase that on a day when you're trying to get me to quit my job.”

“Nothing is a paradise when it comes to this,” David said. “It's a witch hunt, literally. It's the same sort of hysteria there was a few years back with satanic ritual abuse. It doesn't matter what's true. Doesn't it bother you that that woman, what's her name—”

“Alice Makepeace.”

“Alice Makepeace can have an open affair with a student, whom I presume is under eighteen—”

“I think he may be under sixteen.”

“Under
sixteen!”
David shook his head. “Think of that. Under sixteen. When it's one of us with somebody under sixteen, it's child rape, as if we'd set upon a toddler and buggered him brainless. More than half the cases of priest abuse were against girls, but you never hear about them. The head of the largest organization for priest abuse victims is a woman, but you never hear about her either. You only hear about us.”

“Yes,” James said.

“I wish you'd come to your senses,” David said. “I wish you'd think about what you're doing. I know you don't like to get involved in causes, but there's a good reason to get involved in this one: self-preservation. What are you going to do if somebody turns on you in this place? You don't even have a pension.”

“Yes,” James said again. His coffee cup was empty. He couldn't remember drinking what was in it. There didn't seem to be any reason to argue with David since he didn't really disagree with him. Yes, it was a jungle out there. Yes, he could be betrayed and crucified at any moment. Yes, he could lose all he had, which was—what?