“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Arthur, Betsy Pappas was your wife. You married her.”
EXPECTATIONS
Army specialist Ethan Winthrop, Lancaster School class of 2002, steps onto a dusty road and sees stars. His only crime is that he doesn’t mind being the first one out when the Hummer grinds to a halt, for while, outside, the midday sun is unrelenting, inside the crowded vehicle it is even hotter. Ethan opens the back door and climbs down. His rifle is slung over his right shoulder. Everything is quiet. Everything is still. It is whisper quiet. Ethan looks around. His eyes scan the cluster of small buildings and then beyond them to the open desert. Not a living thing moves, and this pleases him. Movement is what they train for. In truth, he loves this moment, being out front, sensing the men behind him without seeing them. All of it is right here for him, what he has been built for, he thinks. When he was first in-country, hearing a mortar land, the fear ran through him like water. Some men never get over that, but he has found this place where he can go where it all falls away, where things are simple: his footsteps, the heat, the weight of the rifle where it hangs off his shoulder like another arm.
He loves this realization about himself, that there is something in this world he’s good at, and just as he thinks this, he steps forward again, and now he hears something, a sound no more than a dull pop—confusing, really, this sound, the IED going off—and when he turns back to look at the men in his squad, there is that frozen-in-time moment when he sees something in their faces, surprise or horror, he cannot be sure. Everything is suddenly soupy. He wants to say, “Hey, fellas, what’s up? What is it?”
But Ethan Winthrop has no way of knowing that what they are looking at is vastly different from anything he can perceive. For the surreal truth is that half of Ethan’s face is no longer there, and unbeknownst to him as well, his right arm is skidding brightly across the dirt road like a cigarette butt someone has tossed.
From Basra they take Ethan Winthrop to Baghdad and then fly him to a hospital in Germany, where he lives nine long days made less miserable by pillowy morphine dreams. When the time comes, there isn’t a damn thing they can do for him anymore. He goes as quickly as smoke. His flag-draped casket joins others on a cargo plane, where it first goes to Andrews Air Force Base and then to Logan Airport, where it is taken by hearse to Lancaster, Vermont.
The funeral is held in the field house, and the crowd is tremendous. The entire student body is there, as are many alumni; the faculty, of course; the trustees; and then the full congressional delegation from Vermont and the governor, who has asked to say a few words. Chaplain Edwards leads the service and even delivers the eulogy, which surprises many, since when other students have died—a car accident, say—the headmaster became the willing repository for the community’s grief. This time is different, naturally, since it is the headmaster’s son, but they are so used to hearing from him on all matters great and small, it is a bit of a surprise that he sits with his head down in the front row during the entire service, and even more of a surprise when he is not in the receiving line afterward, but instead is spied walking out near the woods, his hands behind his back, his head hung low, like some country gentleman out for his afternoon constitutional. But since no one will try to measure a father’s grief, people keep their thoughts to themselves, and Mr. Winthrop is given a pass.
In the days that follow, the grand headmaster’s house fills with visitors. Trays of cold cuts and petit fours make their appearance on the large table in the dining room, get brought to the refrigerator, and then returned the next day as if they never left. Elizabeth is ever gracious with the visitors, and despite her lack of patience with being told to sit down or to relax—as if that were possible—she gives in to it for the most part, though it occurs to her that moments like these, the unfathomable trenches of life, are belittled by becoming excuses for people to indulge themselves. The whiskey and the gin and the vodka carafes are constantly in need of refilling, especially for her husband, who suddenly drinks scotch as if it were water. There is no blueprint for grief, she thinks, and Arthur is acting like a tortoise crossing a road: Sometimes his head is there, and then a moment later it is not. The only constant for him is that he now drinks with impunity, since no one dares give him an ounce of crap about it.
And for a week or so, Ethan Winthrop is the talk of campus. He is regarded, as the dead always are, more fondly than he was when he was alive.
Faculty members describe him as a sweet boy, someone who tried hard to fit in, always a challenge for the son of a headmaster. Some of them have been around long enough to remember his father as a boy, as a student, and against the shadow of a different war. His father, they say, was always quick to remind faculty of his station, of who his own father was. Not Ethan, who kept his head down and was, by all accounts, a pretty good kid.
Students and recent alums, classmates of Ethan’s, all seem to know him better than they did when he was alive, stories sprouting up out of nowhere, like the girl whom no one remembered throwing him so much as a bone claiming that he slipped it in her on the wrestling mats after the prom.
Then as a week passes and then two, the finely honed regimentation of the school takes over—the bells tolling, the classes, the athletics, the formal lunches and dinners—and suddenly no one talks about Ethan Winthrop anymore. He is confined to a distant memory, just someone everyone once knew, except in the great white Colonial on Main Street, where Elizabeth Winthrop has taken to spending all her free time in his old bedroom, still full of his life from just a year before, when he was a senior in high school. Here are his trophies from basketball and track, his posters, his prep school clothes still hung neatly in his closet.
In the afternoons, she sits in a rocking chair and moves back and forth, like some young girl in a group home soothed by the motion. She looks out the back to the soccer fields and the girls’ dorms and the woods of spruce and white pine that line that far side of campus before the river.
On the rare times she ventures out, no one talks directly to her; they only whisper around her about how tragic it all is. A man cut down in his early prime. Such promise! His whole life unfolding in front of him like a gilded path, if only he had chosen to take it.
The one other place Elizabeth finds solace is on the tennis court. She took up the game recently, and there are a few other women she plays with regularly, women on the same level, content to get the ball back across the net—each good shot a tiny miracle. But now she only wants to play by herself, and for hours at a time she stands next to a bucket of balls and strikes serve after serve. It is the metronomic thwack of ball against racket that she likes, the idea that her ancient, tired arm can still summon the strength to go high above her head and catch that ball in midair, stopping time for just a moment.
But mostly she sits in Ethan’s room, and when she does, she thinks of him not as the young man who went to war, but as the baby she carried inside her, the little kicker he was that whole nine months, always against her rib cage, rat-a-tat-tat over and over. “He’s got some left foot, Arthur,” she told her husband at the time, and that was enough to draw a hearty laugh from the normally taciturn Arthur, and that little boy fought to stay in her like he wanted nothing to do with this world, fourteen hours of relentless labor. And Elizabeth couldn’t blame him, coming out into all that noise and light, for who would choose that if they could?
But then, after they cut the cord, the nurse brought him close to her face, and Elizabeth just looked at him—his little features, his tiny nose, and his eyes with the glue all over the lids—and who cared that he was all purply from birth, she knew her own when she held him to her breast. He was a part of her more than anything else had ever been.
And Elizabeth desperately wants to believe that she was better for the time she had with him, watching him take those first tottering steps, and then seeing him rushing through the door as a boy and later as a man when sometimes she caught herself staring at h
im, surprised that this big, strong person was once a tiny peanut in her arms. But the truth is, she’s not sure. If she had never had him she would not hurt like she does, and maybe someday it will become a dull ache, but it will always be an ache, and sometimes, in those moments when the slightest of things reminds her of Ethan—a snowy afternoon on the quadrangle with boys playing touch football, their carefree voices melding into one youthful immortal cry—the ache becomes a deep hole in her chest, and she wants to die.
Sometimes she thinks of her life as a series of halting changes, as if she were a train that was suddenly moved to another set of tracks. She has this idea that other people—Arthur, for instance—live lives that follow more or less a straight narrative, as straight as a walk across a field. Hers, instead, plods along. Then something dramatic happens, a monumental decision, and everything changes until the plates shift underneath her again. It is not until the next rerouting occurs that she realizes she has been bracing for it the whole time.
Craftsbury, Vermont, where her family moved when she was five, is, even now to Elizabeth, a place of both singular beauty and stifling insularity. The decision her parents made—well, her father, to be precise—to leave the security of the family business in New York to make life anew among these highlands of sloping hills and grassy valleys in Northern Vermont is the first of these changes.
Her grandfather had started an air-conditioning company on Long Island that soon grew to the point that he was the go-to guy for air-conditioning systems in the city. The company even installed one for the Empire State Building. Her grandfather became quite wealthy, and it was always assumed that her father would eventually take over the family business. He, however, was as stubborn as her grandfather. He was stubborn and brilliant, and he went to Harvard with the bright-eyed idea that he would come back to Long Island and live the comfortable life of a corporate executive. This was in the placid fifties, but things, at least in the underground of America, were beginning to change. Her parents met in Boston. Her mother was at a small finishing school called Pine Manor, in Chestnut Hill. They fell in love. Her mother got pregnant with her that first year, and they decided to have the child. Her grandfather implored her father to get it taken care of, and to get rid of this girl who clearly had no morals. In the end he threatened to cut him off, and her father said to go ahead.
Her parents got married at City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and with no means of support, they dropped out of school and her father taught himself to be a carpenter, and five years later, with her younger sister now in tow, they moved on a whim to Northern Vermont, where a thousand dollars got you an old farmhouse and a piece of green earth with views of mountains. They had romantic ideas of growing their own food and living off the land. He would build and repair houses. She might get a pottery wheel and learn how to throw pots.
As with all romantic ideas, theirs was short-lived. That first winter, they ordered five cords of wood for the stove that was the old house’s only heat and failed to stack it right away. When the frost came, the wood froze solid in the pile where it sat in the yard. Her father would chip away at it piece by piece, removing the blanket of snow to get at it, but no matter what they did, the wind whistled through the old windows and, on some nights, when the mercury dropped below zero, they huddled in blankets in the main room and were lucky if it got above fifty degrees inside. There was no work for carpenters in Northern Vermont. For a time her proud father, who had spent a year at Harvard, cleaned toilets at a local hotel so they could eat. The cars they owned, an old Saab and a Peugeot that refused to run in the rain, more often than not sat idle in the driveway covered with snow or, in the summer, up on cinderblocks with the hoods propped open.
But the second year, her father got a job teaching woodworking at the small private college in town, and things began to look up. In hindsight, it was a happy country childhood for Elizabeth. There were some neighborhood friends and fields to run and play in, and long, sloping hills to sled down in the winter.
There were also books. Books were her great escape, and Elizabeth had her father’s mind. Early on, her father made a house rule that as long as you were reading you could stay up as late as you wanted, provided you were in your own bed. She read everything she could get her hands on. Her parents traveled to used-book stores just to feed her growing appetite. The public school in town, where she and her sister both went, had only forty-six students, from kindergarten through grade twelve. School could not keep up with her. She was bored and got little out of it. Instead, she learned from the books that gradually filled her house, and the math and science her father taught her at the kitchen table on cold winter nights, when outside the wind swept across the highlands and buffeted the windows.
The summer she turned fifteen, she listened late at night in her bed while her parents argued. They did not know their words carried so easily from the kitchen to where she lay with her knees up, her head on the pillow, a novel rested, as always, on her thighs. They fought about her. Her dad said she was dying here, that there was nothing for her, and her mother took the position that anything she needed she could get from him.
“She’s already outgrown me,” her father said. “She runs fucking circles around me. Do you get what kind of mind she has? It’s time for her to move on.”
It was an argument her father won, as he won all important arguments in their family, and the following morning, for the first time, the subject of boarding school was presented to her.
She imagined it. She thought about being away from here, this place she both loved and loathed. She thought about her friends—in truth there were not many. A few that mattered to her, but this was a town impervious to change, and they would be here. This much she knew. She had lived long enough to know that some would leave Craftsbury and some would not, and it was pretty much predetermined which camp you were in. She knew she belonged to the former and while she did not think she would leave so soon, she had to admit it held an attraction for her. The new. A chance to begin again. To be something else than what she had always been.
She looked from her father to her mother. “I want to,” she said.
“We don’t know that we can afford it,” her mother said.
“You need to take some tests,” her father said.
“Okay,” she said.
That fall, her father took her to Andover, to Exeter, to St. Paul’s, to Groton, to Miss Porter’s and Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, and, finally, to Lancaster, which was the closest of the bunch. She took the SATs and focused her energy on each question, and when the test scores came back and she was four questions off from being perfect, her father gave her a hug, for it had confirmed what he felt: that her mind was as sharp as any around.
Walking around those old campuses, seeing the students, handsomely dressed and put together, she thought, This is a world I want to belong to. In the end, she favored Exeter and Choate, though her mother insisted she apply to them all, but especially Lancaster, so it would be easy to come home on weekends. Exeter and Lancaster offered full scholarships, and from there the decision was easy. One was an hour away. The other was four. This would be her mother’s victory.
In the fall of 1973, she left Craftsbury and enrolled at the Lancaster School. Her life had switched tracks again.
Her mother called her Elizabeth. Her father called her Boo, after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird, his favorite novel. Some of her friends called her Lizzy. As a child, she did not like her name. It felt stuffy to her, like an old lady’s name. A name for queens, not small-town Vermont girls. Her first act upon going to Lancaster was to change it—well, partially. She chose a new derivative. She had settled on this new name the July before she went away to school and she kept it a secret. She wrote the name over and over in her notebook, practicing how it looked. Sometimes she stood in the mirror and said it out loud, and when she did, she imagined herself at the fancy prep school, moving along the walks, beside the manicured lawns, sitting in classe
s and arguing with boys who thought they were smarter than she just because they were boys. This was the part of going away she liked the best: She could reinvent herself. She could be whatever she wanted. She no longer had to be this girl who lived in a Podunk Northeast Kingdom town in a drafty house with a driveway full of cars that worked only on sunny days.
And so on her first day, after a tearful good-bye with her parents during which she both wanted them to stay and could not wait to see her dad’s Peugeot leave campus before it sputtered to a halt, she corrected Mr. Crane, her dorm parent, when he called out her name at the first dorm meeting.
“It’s Betsy,” she said, and from then on it was. It was that easy.
Those first nights, she was homesick. She cried in her bed after lights-out, sobs she hoped the pillow muffled so that her roommate, some rich girl from New Jersey with clothes she could only dream about, would not hear. She felt unmoored suddenly and thought that perhaps she had made a terrible mistake. In Craftsbury she had been the smartest girl in town, and while there were lots of smart kids here, there were also dozens of rich kids, and this she was less prepared for: how much money meant. From the moment she arrived she saw that the culture was different. She didn’t have the right stuff. Not only the right clothes, but also the right albums and the right posters. She had nothing she should have had, and for a day or two this was enough to cause her face to break out in a way it never had before, and this only exacerbated her sense of loneliness, and she wanted to go home.
But then classes started, and she liked the small classes, and it was different from Craftsbury—students spoke out, and soon she did, too. Sports were mandatory, and she signed up for field hockey and she was not much for sports, but she liked that the choices were made for her. In other words, it was not a question of whether she would play sports or whether she was good at sports, but instead which one she would choose.
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