“We have one day left of class, on Monday, but you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking we need to go outside, bring a few pieces of paper with us, and mess around. We only have forty minutes anyway. And I want to find out what kind of trouble you’re going to be getting into this summer.” The kids looked relieved, one whistled, and within moments, they were stationed in the shade of a maple tree, chattering about camp and internships, trips to Africa and boring summers at home in Westport. He did the same thing with the next class, and told both not to bother coming on Monday. They had done well, he told his students. They had worked hard and improved. It was time to free them for the year.
Finished with classes, he strode to the post office and, with only a moment’s hesitation, sent his package first class to Malcolm Smith. He imagined it bumping through the mail with all the other letters and boxes to Rhode Island, and he imagined, too, the man’s spotted hands fumbling at the envelope, then spreading Fred’s harsh discovery before him. For a moment, in the cool of the corridor where the P.O. was located, Fred stood still. He wanted nothing more than to go curl up in his bed and sleep away the next few days. But there was something else left to do.
She proved, especially compared to Edward Smith, remarkably easy to find. A yearbook from 1954 showed him that Naomi Beardsley had been Llewellan’s secretary—and that had been her title; the administrative assistant hadn’t been invented until the eighties. From the photo with the other office staff (prim, bespectacled women in dresses that might easily have passed for nuns’ habits, they were that black and unrevealing), it was impossible to say what sort of person she was. She looked quite grim with her cat’s-eye glasses, neatly pinned hair, and unsmiling mouth, all of which distinguished her from none of her colleagues.
The Internet even spat out her current location, about fifteen miles away, in an assisted living place called Fox Marsh, where, if the information on the screen was to be believed, she edited the community’s monthly newsletter, signing herself quite often as Old Fox on Thin Ice.
On the drive over, he called his mother in Connecticut illegally, no headset involved, and told her everything: the discovery about Llewellan, his decision to leave Armitage, the move to Brooklyn. His mother, sensitive, serious, a potter and an elementary school teacher, at first said nothing. He drove along, listening to her long pause, before she said, “Fred, you are doing the right thing. At every level,” and in her words, Fred heard the release of years of frustration. “Come home before you go to New York,” she said. “There’s lots more to talk about.”
Pulling in to Fox Marsh, he wondered what stories his mother might have to share. Reserved, collected in the face of her husband’s excesses, Fred’s mother had raised him and his younger brother with grace and care. But she had done so at a cost. Marrying a Naylor had brought drama into her life, and more than a certain amount of difficulty. He was looking forward to seeing her. Now there was Naomi to deal with.
A pleasant woman at the front desk told him Mrs. Beardsley could be found in the dining hall, but as he scanned the group of white-haired men and women, he saw no one who reminded him of that secretary in her black, enveloping clothes. He was conscious, too, of a kind of collapsed humanity that he noticed when groups of old people were gathered in one spot. It wasn’t only the bent backs and wandering minds that gave him this feeling but the compression of all their abilities and the need for the culture of the young to herd them into one place and pretend that they, diminished, weren’t really there. But the smell of institutional food was the same as that which floated through the Armitage Commons: cooking for too many at once bled out flavor and spice, no matter the age of those eating. Llewellan had had the luxury of avoiding this kind of residence; he had died in his own bed, of pneumonia, at ninety-two. But his mother’s parents had been less fortunate, and Fred remembered dutiful visits to see them at what had then been called a nursing home, trailing down corridors of gray carpets.
Then all of a sudden, a tiny woman was at his elbow and she was saying, “My goodness, you look exactly like him. You must be his grandson.”
She barely came to his chest, and she still wore dark, shapeless clothes. Her hands trembled and her voice as well, but her eyes were a clear hazel and awake. She leaned on a wooden cane and looked sharply at him. Fred startled and tried to explain what he was there for, but Naomi stopped him. “I can hazard a guess as to why you’re here. There’s probably only one reason. Just tell me your name, and we can go and talk somewhere that’s a bit more private. These old bats listen to everything.” She was right, Fred saw. Every head had turned in his direction and was busy now trading some speculation about who the new young man might be and what he had to do with Naomi Beardsley.
“I don’t much like it here,” Naomi said as she walked him, quite briskly given her cane, out of the dining hall and toward a garden generously dotted with benches no more than twenty feet apart. “But I didn’t want to smash my hip and wind up being a burden to my son. And if I don’t have privacy, as least I have the knowledge I’ve spared him that.” She had been at the Swamp, as she called Fox Marsh, for two years, “long enough so that if I have some ghastly stroke, they have to take care of me.” It wasn’t far from what family she had, and she admitted the staff were friendly sorts. No drinking allowed in the dining room, but it didn’t mean you couldn’t have your peg of Canadian Club in your own apartment.
She settled herself on a bench below a linden tree. She gave off no smell of the old, nothing mentholated or medicinal, just a fragrance of soap and health. Fred sat next to her, trying to guess her age. Given her general forthrightness, he didn’t think she’d mind if he asked. “I’m eighty-seven,” she said, “but everyone in my family lives to be about a million years old, so I’m not ready to buy the farm just yet.” She looked at him more closely. “You’re here of course about Edward Smith. I wondered if anyone would ever find that file. I didn’t destroy it, but I didn’t make it easy to locate, either. It really is striking how much you look like your grandfather.”
Fred thought of what he might say, but he reflected that he owed Naomi this moment to describe what had happened, what she had seen, and what she had done. “I always regretted not being more forthcoming about that poor boy. But I tried to convince myself that I’d done what I could,” she said simply. She was a widow with two children when she worked for Llewellan Naylor, she explained. Her husband had been killed in Europe, a member of a U.S. engineering team that had gone to France to implement the Marshall Plan. “Run over by a French truck. Not even a casualty of war,” she told Fred. But whether he had died through glory or mere happenstance, she still had the children to take care of. She had needed that job, she explained, and at the time, Armitage had paid better than anything else in the area. She had also looked after her aging parents. Her father had been a laborer in the Greenville mills, her mother a finisher of seams in a Westerfield factory.
She talked rather haltingly but with some small pleasure. Fred didn’t think she had the chance to speak much about her past and to discuss how she had spent her life. He was struck, too, with the sober acceptance of her fate. The dedication with which she had earned her living. Her evident devotion to family. Her decision to eschew ambition in favor of doing what she needed to to protect and sustain those closest to her.
“But he fired me anyway,” Naomi continued, almost as if Fred weren’t there, “because I’d typed those letters and seen what he had done, and he could tell, though I said nothing, that I disapproved.” And she had, she said. She didn’t know if any of the allegations were true. It was such murky territory. Unimaginable in those days that someone would do that to a child and, even more, bring it to light. But given what had been revealed about the Catholic Church the last few years, abuse might have been rampant for all she knew. She had been acquainted and worked with all three of the men Edward’s father named in the letter. “And to be honest, I never liked them. But the masters were like gods then. What they said had to
happen, did. No one rebelled against them.” She paused for a moment. “So even having a feeling about them one way or another wasn’t tolerated, and certainly your grandfather wasn’t one to stand for that kind of independence.” Even now, more than fifty years after the event, she was evidently still bitter about what had happened, in somewhat the same way, Fred thought, as Malcolm Smith, though his loss was surely the more devastating.
Llewellan, whom she called Mr. Naylor even now, had sacked her in March 1955, and she had gotten a job as a manager at an electric plant in Greenville and never seen him again, though for the rest of their working lives they had resided no more than three miles apart. She had been ejected from that universe, and Armitage had closed its gates against her. “He wasn’t always like that,” she told Fred. “I worked for him for seven years. He was usually honest when dealing with problems. He could admit that things didn’t go as planned, that people didn’t always behave as you’d hoped. But this stung him. He couldn’t accept it.” She appeared to have finished, Fred thought. But he was wrong. “So on the day he fired me, I gathered up what I could of Edward’s records, which were all in our office, and I got the carbon of the letter I typed and then I filed the entire packet in the archives, with one small card in the old catalog for someone to discover years from then. A time capsule of secrets, I saw it as. I decided I’d let history do the work for me. And it did.”
They sat for a moment without speaking. The linden released its honey-sweet smell, and bees buzzed among its leaves. A few of the other residents of Fox Marsh were shuffling through the grounds. Clouds were gathering for another burst of rain.
Then, slowly, Fred told her what had prompted his search. He told her how Malcolm had come to find him and how, at first, he had wanted nothing more than to ignore him. Naomi listened, her hands quivering. He told her that she had made it difficult to find the papers, but that eventually he had. “What are you going to do with them?” she asked.
“I’ve already sent the whole file to Malcolm. And I’m going to resign, too.” He started to shift, ready to leave now. He needed to find Porter immediately.
“Well, if you’d like to stay in touch, I would appreciate knowing if anything happens.” She pulled a pen from a pocket and asked if he had a scrap of paper. He offered her the back of an ATM receipt and noticed that the handwriting whose faint trace he had followed was almost the same. Not quite as firm, but just as distinct. She stood and steadied herself and then said, “Yes, that’s wise to leave. I should think you need time out of his shadow. It was very long.” He walked her back to the entrance. He had one last question, he said. Why did she sign her editorials for the newsletter Old Fox?
She smiled then, the first time she had, he realized. “You’re forgetting the second part. On Thin Ice,” she said. “It’s from the I Ching, a symbol that means walk carefully. Exercise caution.” She turned then, wished him a quick good-bye, and walked back to the Marsh where she now presided.
Fred drove to campus quickly. He had to see Porter before Last Tea, which was where announcements about faculty departures were always made. He also, he confessed to himself, needed to tell the head he was leaving before he changed his mind.
He was in luck. He parked his car and saw Porter striding across the Quad. He looked wrung out, but that distinguishes him from no one right now, Fred thought. Appropriately enough, Fred asked if he could talk with him about next year in the shadow of the statue of the school’s founder, the old warlord. Porter said, “Well, at least you don’t want to talk to me about Tamsin.” Why would he need to do that? Fred asked, surprised, and Porter said, “I don’t have time to explain. Check your e-mail, and tell me what’s going on. You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Fred.”
“I’m resigning, Porter. I’m moving to Brooklyn to paint again,” Fred told him, and he explained that he had an unprecedented opportunity and he was going to take it. As he spoke, he noticed how the season had ripened into luscious fullness: the leaves had turned a thick green, the lawns were dense as horses’ manes. Every twig, blade of grass, and rock seemed outlined in rich, tender light. Fred had never felt so attached to the academy. And attached was the word his mind selected because it had to settle on one, but his body felt the loss of his connection to this world in a hundred places.
Below a gray layer of fatigue, Porter looked as he always did: at ease in his height and handsomeness, his voice as full and round and soothing as it had always been. “What the hell is going on, Fred?” he asked gently. Was it this investigation and the situation Armitage was facing? Was it his load of courses? He launched in on ways that he might keep Fred at the academy. A reduced teaching schedule, support for his work during the summer. A new dorm? Fewer advisees? He deployed all the usual blandishments: the excellence of Fred’s teaching, the art program couldn’t sustain his loss, did Fred know how many students and parents had identified him as the teacher who had made the most difference to their or their children’s education at Armitage? Fred did know, because Porter had assiduously made sure to pass on praise, knowing how useful it was to feel known and visible in what one did.
But as Porter wheedled and badgered, Fred observed two things. The first was that none of the lures Porter dangled reached him anywhere that mattered. It was when he thought about painting that he actually felt alive, and the feeling wasn’t precisely a good one: it was a tingle, close to pain and a near relation to panic. It made his skin crawl and his heart thrash in his chest, and it was as vibrant as he had felt in years.
He knew, too, that it wasn’t only the thought of painting again. He had the discovery of Llewellan’s hatefulness to thank as well, and that he couldn’t face discussing with Porter. He kept saying, “Porter, I really appreciate your concern and I am sorry to leave you and the department in the lurch, but I have made up my mind.” He was done with this institution and with institutions like this.
The second thing he noticed about Porter was that his heart wasn’t in the coaxing. He sounded and looked the same; he was as articulate as always. He looked Fred earnestly in the eye. But he doesn’t mean it, Fred thought and felt a burst of pity for the man. Was this hesitation new? Had Claire’s death revealed Porter to be as human as the rest of them? Was it, Fred thought, just that we needed him to be better than we were so we stopped being able to see what was actually there?
Then all of a sudden, Porter stopped talking. He peered a little more closely at Fred and said, with some surprise, “I’m not making one bit of difference, am I? You just don’t want to do this anymore. I could offer you two years off and a chance to come back at double the pay and you wouldn’t take it. You’re done, aren’t you, Fred?” And as he said this, he stood to his full, patrician height and shook his head, not with amazement or scorn, Fred saw, but with envy. Porter, too, wanted to be done with Armitage, with the life he had made for himself and his family. He, too, yearned for something different. Fred was nearly as tall as Porter, he realized all of a sudden. How funny, he thought, he had always assumed Porter was so much bigger than he was.
He went back to his apartment and collapsed on his bed. When he woke, it was 5:45. He had only a short time before he had to get ready. He buttoned his shirt slowly and dragged a comb across his unruly hair and pulled on a battered blue sport coat, reserved exclusively for events like this and the Christmas concert. Just as the clock in the chapel struck six, he walked out the door. He’d be slightly late. When he had been a student, and in Llewellan’s time as well, Last Tea had taken place at three and was literally that, a decorous tea party complete with the wife of the headmaster serving as mother over a heavy Victorian set and greasy petits fours. Fred’s grandmother said her wrist used to ache after Last Tea, the pot was so heavy. The thought of Lucinda serving in that capacity was ridiculous. And it might well have been her suggestion that Porter shift the ritual’s tone. He had scheduled it three hours later and added alcohol and decent hors d’oeuvres to the offerings, and everyone had enjoyed themselves a great deal m
ore. The tea set had vanished into a storage room, replaced by tall, utilitarian urns of coffee.
The party was held in the Head’s House, and Fred joined the stream of his colleagues at the tall white door. Usually, Lucinda presided over this part of the gathering, but it was Porter this year who took each faculty member’s hand and shook it warmly. Glad you could make it, he kept saying. So glad to see you. Wonderful of you to come. Such a terrible way to end the year. So confusing. But it’s important to honor certain traditions. He was just as warm with Fred as all the others and, Fred thought, just as distant as before.
Fred immediately poured himself a large glass of Merlot and glanced around for Madeline. He had avoided her since he’d returned from New York. He wasn’t proud of that, but she had done just as good a job of sidestepping him. Still, over the past two days, he’d half-hoped to find a note or message or e-mail from her, but there had been nothing.
Then, all of a sudden, she arrived. Long, tangly hair, bright cheeks, mildly, sexily unkempt. She was pumping Porter’s hand enthusiastically and taking just a little too long to talk to him. Right behind her, Marie-France Maillot stood there impatiently in her narrow gray skirt and prim white blouse, her face pruning up even more than usual. Everyone knew she harbored a huge and harmless crush on Porter, who almost always spoke his more than serviceable French with her. Marie-France loved correcting his mistakes in gender. Fred smiled but was dismayed to find his stomach contracting heavily at the sight of Madeline.
Then she saw him, too, and on her face was her usual unguarded expression: Fred could see that today it combined anger, attraction, impatience, irritation. And he smiled because even though those angular New Yorkers had her beaten hands down in terms of sophistication, Madeline was ten times more alive than they would ever be. A brimming handful of energy and warmth. And he was leaving her here, where someone was going to scoop her up in a matter of minutes.
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