The Headmaster's Wife

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  Inside they are led into a great room, and there is punch and Yale boys, and she is not one who draws them but she is also not threatening, either, pretty enough for them to want to talk to her but not one of those girls who gets noticed right away, which she has decided is okay by her. The ceiling is vaulted, held up by great pillars, and there are staircases that lead up from either side to a balcony, and it is on this balcony, an hour into the awkward soiree, that suddenly they hear the sound of singing, high-voiced and pretty, and quickly all other sound falls away, and Betsy cannot at first help but smile at the sight of them, fifteen or so Yale men, dressed identically in a uniform not so different from those she remembers from Lancaster: navy jackets and ties and pressed khakis. The song is funny and ribald, and contains a line about how punch delivers certain properties to extract the chaste from the women of Wellesley.

  She is smiling at this display, along with the others, when she notices Arthur. He is in the second row of the singing men. She does not know why it has taken her so long to see him, since he is unchanged, that tall, narrow countenance and the flop of brown hair falling over his forehead. He is staring right at her, and she knows then that he has seen her all along, and even though she is far below him, she can also see that he knows now that she has recognized him, and he allows himself the thinnest of smiles during the song’s last stanza.

  When they finish, her heart is in her throat, as she knows he will come to her, and she is determined to act surprised, her back to the staircases as if she is scanning the rest of the room, and it is his hand on her shoulder she feels first, and when she turns, he is in front of her.

  “Betsy,” he says.

  “Hello, Arthur.”

  “You look well,” he says.

  She smiles. “You, too.”

  And maybe it is the pull of Lancaster itself, the realization that even after eighteenth months at Wellesley she misses the old Vermont school. Things were simpler then, weren’t they? Or at least less formed. And seeing Arthur again, she feels somehow as if she knows him better than anyone else, better than the friends she rode the bus with, better than the boys from Harvard she opened herself up to on fall nights, doing the walk of shame out of brick dorms and into the gray, liquid air of dawn. Is there a way, she wonders, sitting on the granite steps with him, their backs against the cool stone wall, watching people mingle below them, to square what he did to Russell with this boy graciously making her laugh now? Could his actions be seen somehow as an act of chivalry? That, of course, she decides, is a stretch, but at a minimum she can put it away, store it like a yellowed letter in a small box deep in the closet of her mind.

  When the bus leaves at 11:15 for the ride back up to Massachusetts, she is not on it. Instead, she is in a nearby dorm, fully clothed, on her back on a bed next to Arthur Winthrop, talking in the half dark, staring at the ceiling, whispering stories with him as if the past were a long time ago.

  On weekends they burn up the highways from suburban Boston to New Haven, more she than he, since she can stay in his dorm. At Wellesley things change more slowly, and she has to sneak him in. The young Arthur is an ardent lover, and they fuck with abandon. His roommate—a nice, tall, skinny, long-haired kid from Exeter, of all places—is kind enough to find another place to stay on the nights she comes down.

  In that dorm room, with its fireplace and high ceilings and its view of the broad expanse of the quad, they try their hardest never to leave this space. They bring in pizza. They drink wine straight from the bottle. They smoke cigarettes. She studies, and he does not. This mystifies her about Arthur, how he never seems to study. She feels perpetually behind, like she will never catch up, but he doesn’t seem to give a shit, or at least that’s what he wants to show her. In the end, she decides it’s genuine: that he is just one of those people who can absorb books, never take notes, and show up and ace his tests. Plus, he has the advantage of knowing what graduation brings. Graduation brings a return to Lancaster. The point is to get the degree. No more, no less.

  College, as it turns out, is Lancaster unbridled, Lancaster without rules.

  They can sleep as late as they want. They can be in each other’s rooms. They can smoke and drink, and if they want to skip class—something he does but she cannot imagine, aware, as she is, of the dollars and cents of it all—they can do that, too. Most of all they can make love, and in those first months, those precious weekends when she arrives late and they fall into each other, they are as much scientists as they are artists.

  She is on the Pill now. It is a revelation, this thing she takes every day that says she can have as much sex as she wants and not worry about getting pregnant. Arthur loves it, too, for it is as if the last impediment to relentless fucking has been removed. Plus, she is all hormones. “Look at me,” she says to Arthur once, “my tits are bigger, aren’t they? I mean, I’m not imagining that, right?”

  “No,” he says, “you’re not.”

  And so she climbs on top of him; he climbs on top of her; they climb on top of each other and curl together like vines.

  All walls between them fall away, and they are willing to be naked with each other, not just in the narrow biblical sense, but in the larger sense of the word, opening their insides as well as their outsides without shame or remorse or fear. She lets Arthur see her with all her flaws and she sees all of his, and sometimes, when she is leaving him, a wave of inexplicable sadness comes over her. It is nothing specific that she can point to—not the leaving, for she likes her freedom, too—but come over her it does, and soon she is weeping.

  Arthur always mistakes this for her having to get back on Interstate 95 and leave him behind, and he invariably commits the one mistake he will compound throughout their lives: a failure to leave her alone. If he just let her be sad, just let her dwell in it for a moment, she would come out the other side and be fine.

  But he is a man and he wants to fix her. She tells him not to, she tells him he cannot, but he doesn’t stop. He tries humor at first, as if he can jolly her out of this mood, and when that doesn’t work he tries anger.

  “For Christ’s sake, Betsy, knock it off, will you?”

  On her birthday he takes her to New York City and surprises her by securing Dick Ives’s apartment. Dick is a friend of theirs from Lancaster, and the apartment has been in his family. She has heard of it before, this grand place that Dick sometimes lets his friends use, but she has never seen it.

  As a consequence, Betsy finds herself in the most remarkable apartment she has ever seen, the penthouse of Halvorsen Hall on West Sixty-fourth and Central Park West. The place is huge by New York standards, two floors with a swooping staircase that leads up to the bedrooms and, most magnificently, a balcony—can you call it balcony if it fits fifty people?—with marble railings that looks out over Central Park to the towers of the Upper East Side.

  This is in the fall. The city is gorgeous in autumn color, and they catch a Broadway show, eat dinner at a French restaurant, where a duck is carved at the table for them and a sauce is ladled out of a copper pan and onto their plates.

  They drink bottles of wine and afterward they walk down the busy city streets with their arms locked, strolling while the bustle flows over and around them. Everyone, it seems, is in a hurry except for the two of them.

  That night, when they are both high from the wine, she dances for Arthur. It begins as a lark, something funny to do, though she admits she likes his gaze on her as she takes off her clothes in front of the window, not giving a shit who might be looking in from the big city. She likes his gaze as she begins to move for him, closing her eyes and letting her body go, truly go, for the first time in her life.

  They make love in the huge shower with water spilling over them, and afterward, now on their third bottle of wine, she breaks down again, this time even more unexpectedly—it comes over her faster than a cold—and maybe it is because it happens after a magical night in the city, the gift of it that he has given her on her birthday, and while A
rthur wants to deliver her from this moment, she knows that he cannot and that, like a cold, it will have to run its course.

  He goes silent, and she rolls away from him on the bed, toward the wall, toward the window that looks west between the buildings to the Hudson. A few minutes later, she hears him leave the room.

  At one point she falls asleep, and when she wakes he is nowhere to be found. She moves through the apartment until she finds him on the balcony. He is naked with his hands on the top of the ornate balustrade. She comes up behind him, and now he is the one who is weeping. The air is cool this high up, and the breeze stiffens her nipples and blows her hair off her shoulders. She does not say anything, but follows his eyes to the ground far below. It is late at night, but the street is full of people. Cars stream down Central Park West toward Columbus Circle.

  He turns and looks at her, his eyes fat with tears.

  “What are you thinking about?” she says.

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am thinking I would like to walk in the park naked. Disappear into its trees and not come back.”

  And then she realizes that they are more alike than she has imagined. Like her, he is broken. And she thinks perhaps this is what love is: letting someone else see that part of you that shatters like glass. All of us are broken in our own way. And in that moment, on her birthday, looking over the black trees to the bright lights of the other side, she knows she will marry Arthur. They will grow old together, broken together, and as long as they both don’t completely shatter at the same time, they might find a way to pick each other off the ground.

  One night they are at a faculty dinner at one of the houses on the row. It is early September but might as well be midsummer for there is a heat wave, and while the wife offers gin and tonics, the husband lights the grill for steaks. They could be anywhere, Betsy thinks, at any old cookout, except that the white clapboard is so classically New England and in the walled-in garden the faculty chatting in small groups are mostly in their late twenties and thirties, a particularly handsome group of people, she thinks, especially in the bright sunlight and against the pale blue sky.

  She is standing with Arthur and with James Booth, the new art teacher, and his wife, Ella, who has been hired into music. They are a little different, more bohemian, she supposes, and this is partly on her mind, but mostly she is not listening, for behind them she sees the host’s daughter, a girl of about thirteen, sitting cross-legged near the rosebushes in the far corner of the garden. The girl is beautiful, with long, straight flaxen hair, and she is shucking corn for dinner. She has on a sundress and is barefoot. In front of her is a large pot, and as she shucks she takes the freshly cleaned cobs and places them in it. For some reason this moves Betsy, and she can’t keep her eyes off the girl.

  For the remainder of her life she will remember this simple moment, a pretty girl shucking corn, and she will never tell anyone about it. And she does not know why this moves her so—could it be because it was something she did as a child when her parents had summer cookouts? No, it’s bigger than that, it’s more what the girl represents, this idea of family, and for the first time she sees herself as someone who should carry a legacy to a new generation. And that night, when they return to their apartment, the two of them gilded from gin and tonics in the sun, it is she who initiates the lovemaking, first with passionate kissing in the living room and then when they move to the bedroom and undress each other. In the dim light she looks up at Arthur, and he smiles warmly at her and brushes her hair off her forehead before he lifts her shirt up and over her head. And when Arthur reaches for the condoms in the top drawer of the nightstand next to the bed, she stops him.

  “Not tonight,” she says.

  “No?” he says, surprised.

  “No,” she says.

  And when he is inside her, she presses her face into the pillow, and her mind empties until there is only the simple feel of him, his hands on her hips, the strength of him, of her, of both of them.

  The thing she imagines, before having a baby, that she will dislike the most, breastfeeding, she falls in love with. Seeing it from a distance, other women sneaking into the coatroom and sliding up their shirts, holding a screaming baby like a football, there was a primalness to it she found entirely unappealing: women as cows. But now, with Ethan, once she gets over the initial soreness and they figure it out together, how to latch, the two of them a team, she finds herself looking forward to it, the tug, the release of milk into his eager mouth. It is almost sexual, this feeling—but of course that cheapens it. It is more complex and nuanced than sex, more as if a fifth chamber in her heart has suddenly revealed itself.

  He is more beautiful than other babies, she thinks, not one of those weird old men. He has perfect features, and when he is nursing, she stares down at his beatific face and she loves him more than she thought it possible to love any living thing. Most of all she loves that she can give him this, the milk. The fact that she has this ability innately is as close as she has come to believing in God.

  Later she will look back on this as the time in her life she was happiest. Ethan grows like a tree. Motherhood suits her. Arthur is a rising star in the classroom and even more so in the school at large. They have found their place fully in the world, and when that happens, you cannot help but feel it. It is as if their lives were locks that needed to be calibrated. Suddenly everything fits.

  Soon Ethan is walking, banging into everything, muttering his first words. He is verbal early, and this pleases Arthur to no end, and when Arthur tells her excitedly, “I think he’s smart. He looks smart, doesn’t he? I mean, look at him.”

  “He’ll be smart enough,” Elizabeth says.

  “No, I mean, he’s got a gift. Look how quickly he’s learning. He’s so curious. He’s like a scientist.”

  “All children are scientists,” she tells Arthur.

  And as Ethan grows, each year passing more quickly than the last, this is the only time there is any acrimony between the two of them. It is a question of expectations. She wants to build a shield around Ethan and protect him from his father’s desires. Arthur sees his son’s life with such narrative precision. He will become tall and handsome, a star athlete and accomplished student (in his field of choice, of course, as long as it is something traditional), and then Yale awaits after Lancaster, and then the return to Lancaster to take his rightful place in the classroom and wait his turn to move into the big white Colonial.

  Maybe, Elizabeth thinks, she should have considered all this before she married Arthur. After all, it was pretty clear what came with Arthur, this explicit sense of primogeniture, but wasn’t it also what she loved about him? That she could wear this old school like a blanket? Grow old inside its woolly warmth?

  It is only through Ethan’s eyes that it gives her pause. Ethan’s eyes—brown as a doe’s, heavy-lidded—do not have her husband’s sharpness. Even in childhood pictures she has seen of Arthur there is a beady-eyed awareness in his brown eyes. But Ethan is an innocent, she thinks, surprised by anything other than straightforward benevolence. As for all children, the world is created for him every day anew, but unlike other children, he does seem open to this idea’s being shattered, even when cruelty intrudes and does it for him.

  Once, when he is four, at a July 4 faculty party, they set up a bike race for the kids. It is in front of the girls’ dorms, and the kids race in groups by age. Ethan has his bike with the training wheels, and to the back of it he has attached, all on his own, a winter’s plastic sled, and in it is his stuffed rabbit, Bun, which he carries everywhere with him under his arm. When the four-year-olds get their turn, Elizabeth approaches Ethan to help him, but he says, “Mama, I want to do it myself.”

  And he does. Down the road he goes with the other kids, pedaling his little heart out, the sled dragging noisily on the pavement. But when he gets close to the finish line, an older kid, maybe twelve and large for his age, steps in front of Ethan and impedes his prog
ress. Elizabeth sees this blurrily, and she glances around for Arthur, but he has his back to the race, chatting with some of the men. Right then the larger boy throws Ethan off his bike and onto the ground.

  Elizabeth bounds toward them, and Ethan is crying like mad, and the bigger boy is standing over him saying, “You can’t have anything attached to your bike,” like this is a race with rules.

  It takes everything for Elizabeth to refrain from striking this boy who has pushed her son off his bike. Some big dumb kid standing in front of her shirtless, with downcast eyes, and she wants to run a knife through him.

  She says to him, “Jesus, what’s wrong with you? He’s only four.”

  Ethan is wailing. “Mama, Mama, why did that boy do that?”

  And the truth is Elizabeth has no idea. It is no big deal, a bully. There are bullies everywhere. But in that moment, she wants to tuck Ethan back in her womb, where he will always be warm and no one will try to hurt him again.

  Arthur’s father announces his resignation on a Friday in the spring. Elizabeth hears about it as a buzz that hums through the library.

  “Did you hear about Mr. Winthrop? He is finished at the end of the year.”

  Elizabeth waits until before dinner, when they are in their dorm apartment, readying themselves to make their way as a family for their nightly trek to the dining hall, before she asks Arthur about it. Six-year-old Ethan is in his room playing with a model airplane. She can see him if she turns her head, carrying the small model over his head, making whooshing sounds.