The Headmaster's Wife

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  Elizabeth says, “I heard today that your father has decided to retire.”

  “Yes,” Arthur says, taking a pull on a glass of wine and then putting it down on the bureau, not turning around to face her. He is straightening his tie in the mirror.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “Not the exact timing,” he says.

  “What happens now?”

  “There will be a search, of course.”

  “Are you a candidate?”

  He turns toward her now and gives her a quick smile, then back to the mirror and his Windsor knot. “They will want to talk to me, I am sure.”

  “They will want to? What aren’t you telling me, Arthur?”

  He finishes with his tie and spins around and smiles. “Betsy,” he says. “There is nothing to tell right now.”

  She looks toward the room where their son is now spinning in circles, dipping the plane in his right hand up and down above his bed. “Bullshit,” she says a little loudly.

  “Okay,” he says. “Look. I can’t have this around the school.”

  She might fall apart. “What do you know?”

  He looks toward the window and then, gratuitously, toward the door, like some student might barge in and reveal their secret. “Okay,” he says. “It’s mine to lose. I think you are looking at the next head of school.”

  A huge grin sweeps across her face. “Holy crap, Arthur! I don’t know what to say. This is unbelievable.”

  He likes this, her obvious happiness. He runs a hand through his hair. “Well, nothing is done now but…”

  “What does this mean?”

  He laughs. “No more living in a dorm, for one.”

  “Oh, that will be nice.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Won’t it? A fireplace? A big house? Are you ready?”

  “I’m going to explode.”

  “You can’t say anything.”

  She shook her head. “Who am I going to tell?”

  “I know you won’t.”

  “This is so amazing.”

  “And I didn’t even tell you about the salary.”

  “Tell me,” she says. “Tell me.”

  “Put it this way: Maybe we can get a place at the beach.”

  Elizabeth jumps to him then, jumps the few steps that stood between them, and he takes her in his arms. He gives her a stiffish hug, but it doesn’t matter to her. Nothing can get in the way of her happiness. Who wants this more, she or he? Before she can decide, Ethan is there.

  “Wash your hands,” she says to Ethan. “We need to leave for dinner.”

  Walking across the expanse of lawn to the dining hall and then, in the hall itself, sitting at their normal faculty table, she can hardly focus. She looks over to where her in-laws hold court at the most prestigious table at the far end, overlooking the entire room. She imagines sitting there. On the way back to the dorm, they pass the headmaster’s house. She has been by it thousands of times, inside it hundreds of times, but this time is different, and while the three of them walk past, she stares into the lit windows and in her mind she is moving through that great house, sitting in front of the large fireplace with the logs replenished daily by the maintenance staff, hosting parties in the high-ceilinged rooms. She looks over at her husband and for the first time in a while she sees him as she imagines others see him—this man who aspires to greatness, a man elevated above his peers, and she is proud of him.

  The following Monday, Arthur spends the entire afternoon with the trustees. She knows what they are discussing. She has no idea how it is going. By four she leaves the library and gets home, but there is still no word from him. She walks over to Fuller Hall, where one of the dorm parents is a woman her age who teaches math. Her name is Karen, and if she is surprised to see Elizabeth she doesn’t say anything.

  “Betsy,” she says. “Come in.”

  “You have a cigarette?”

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Today I do.”

  The students are all at athletics, and the two women smoke like teenagers. They open one of the apartment windows that looks out toward the river and they stick their heads out and smoke quickly and frantically, listening for voices coming around the corner of the dorms.

  Karen says, “Everything okay?”

  Elizabeth blurts it out. “Arthur might be the next headmaster.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. For real. We may know today.”

  Karen looks over at her. Their faces are inches away. “Well, that’s wonderful,” she says, though Elizabeth is not sure she means it. Something in the way she says it, the slightest hint of an edge. She knows many of the other faculty members don’t love Arthur. They admire him, sure, but there is always the sense that he hasn’t had to work as hard for his.

  “No one is supposed to know,” Elizabeth says.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” says Karen.

  “You’re a good friend.”

  “Oh, we’re not friends.”

  Elizabeth turns to Karen, and the hurt, or perhaps the surprise, must show on her face. They are close enough to kiss. Karen says, “Oh, shit. I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Really. I’m sorry, Betsy. That was stupid.”

  “Seriously, it’s okay.”

  “Fuck,” Karen says. “That was unartful. What I meant to say—oh, shit. I don’t know. I guess that you have always been aloof. Somewhat, you know? I mean, not in a bad way. Just that you keep to yourself. I should just shut up.”

  Elizabeth takes a final drag on her cigarette. She looks over at Karen and then out to the river. “No,” she says, “you are right about me.”

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Karen throws her cigarette stub out into the yard. Someone will think it belonged, illegally, to a student. It flips twice in the air before settling on the hard grass. “I still feel like a heel.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  Returning to her apartment, she can tell from the moment Arthur looks at her—there is no hiding it—that he will be named headmaster. He makes a token play at fooling her, but even he knows it is no good. Instead he stands there with a shit-eating grin on his face and he just shrugs.

  “It’s done,” he says.

  Later, before they go to the dining hall for dinner, she takes a walk along the river. This is in April. The river has receded from its heights of a month ago, when it overflowed its banks tumescent from snowmelt. It is one of the first warm days of spring, and from the lacrosse fields behind her she can hear the cries of girls running up and down. She follows the river from where it runs narrow and flush to the banks to where it widens and flattens before heading into New Hampshire.

  Here there is the semblance of a beach, a sandy lip where the water ends and before the bank begins. Along it lie ribbons of detritus, branches and leaves and who knows what else the runoff has left there. Her father had a name for this, these ribbons, and for a moment she struggles to remember what he called them. Oh, yes, she thinks, the skins of winter. She always loved that term. The skins of winter. The winter sheds it skin every spring, her father explained. Just as we do at certain times in our lives. She thinks about this: people as snakes. She shed her skin when she first came to Lancaster. The day she became Betsy. And then again when she married, and then, of course, Ethan. Now, about to move into the big white house, she figures she is about to do it again.

  She tries, sometimes, sitting up in Ethan’s room and staring out the back during this, the longest of winters, to remember this old house with fresh eyes, as it was to her the summer they moved in. She tries to remember how much happiness a physical space could once give her. Those evenings when they first moved in, when Ethan had been tucked in and Arthur was up sipping his scotch in his office and looking over his papers, when she would just wander through it,
discovering something new each time. A big house is full of surprises, she thought, and suddenly there would a charming stretch of wainscoting that had somehow escaped her gaze before, or her eyes would settle on one of the crooked diagonal Vermont vernacular windows that all these old houses seemed to have, a way of addressing the eaves, and she would stop and marvel at it.

  But often those memories are hard to summon, so she goes for the easier ones—that first Christmas when they cut down the tree themselves, hauled it in front of the fireplace, only to discover that it was still three feet too tall. By the time they sawed it down to size, it was a square tree, and for years this was a great family joke, the year of the square tree. But then it didn’t matter, for they had the annual Christmas party for all the faculty and staff, and she loved nothing more than seeing her house full of gay, flushed faces, the bounty of food filling the great dining room table, the fires roaring in the fireplaces, and the children running underfoot. Most of all she loved that this was her house, Arthur’s, yes, but hers, too, the first lady of Lancaster, though no one used that term. Maybe Karen had been right: She was aloof. But now, at least, she had good reason to be. They were deeply part of this place, at the heart of it, really, but also, because of their station, they could be reserved. Should be reserved, Arthur would argue. “They don’t all have to love us,” Arthur said, “but they will respect us. Especially if we keep a proper remove.”

  She remembers, too, from that first Christmas, the look in her parents’ eyes when they first toured the house, her father sitting in front of the fireplace with a beer and watching Ethan scramble on the ground tearing open presents. Her mother taking in the large kitchen built for catering, the views of the fields out back. She loved that her whole family could stay with them, wake up in the morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, that she could sit like an equal until late at night with her own parents, sipping wine in the warm glow of the living room with its high ceilings and its soft light.

  There was a sense then that she had arrived. For this was all she wanted, wasn’t it? This house, this school, this accomplished husband, this son of hers with handsome long lashes and perfect features. There was nothing for her to worry about other than what time she needed to be at the library. A perfectly scripted life, in other words, with regimented days and seasons defined as much by the rhythms of school as by the weather. It was beautiful to be part of something bigger than she. Something that stretched both backward, to generations that came before, and forward, purposefully, to generations that had not yet arrived. Her life had both symmetry and meaning and sometimes Elizabeth thought that was all one could possibly ask for.

  And at the center of it all is Ethan. Is it possible to love anything more than she loves her son? She remembers her mother telling her that the day she stopped being selfish was the day Elizabeth was born. She never fully understood what this meant until Ethan came along. There are times when she looks at him—out on the soccer fields as an eighth-grader, running independently and fast, strong-thighed and muscular for his age—when the feelings that swell in her heart are so great she doesn’t know where to put them. She is proud of him; she fears for him; she adores him the way one adores a new lover, not the sexual part, of course, but the part where the rest of the world recedes and all of life is distilled into the most elemental of human relationships, where you would gladly trade your life so that the other person might live, and you would, as well, consent to die if they ceased to exist.

  Ethan is a sweet boy, though not a perfect child by any stretch. There are the usual adolescent troubles. Though he is an athlete by the time he is a freshman at Lancaster, she suspects he is smoking. She takes to smelling his fingers when he comes in at night after study hall, which he spends, like the other faculty brats and day students, in the library. Now and again she suspects he has been drinking, too, perhaps out in the woods with some of the other kids, and once it is unmistakable, the beer thick on his breath, and Arthur grounds him for a week, nothing but study hall and meals, classes and sports. He does not take him to the Disciplinary Committee, though they discuss it briefly, and she is in agreement with him that because Ethan does not live in the dorms, it is different. They are like parents to a day student, so why would they turn him in? “It would only hurt his chances of Yale,” Arthur says. Which is not to say that Arthur isn’t hard on Ethan. He is. And this is where she and Arthur tend to differ.

  Perhaps, she imagines, it is a question of expectations. The deep love for Ethan she feels translates for her into wanting to shield him from everything. He is an okay student, nothing exceptional, and in truth he struggles with math and science, which she thinks is fine, since she and Arthur were both English majors. But Arthur, whose own father drove him hard, wants nothing less than for Ethan to be at or near the top of his class, which for Lancaster is saying something. He wants him to excel on the field as well, and while Ethan is a decent athlete, he doesn’t start at soccer, and in lacrosse he doesn’t even play varsity. He is a normal boy, good-looking and sensitive, attuned to others, with high emotional intelligence, she tells Arthur. He is well liked, and isn’t that something?

  “It’d be nice if he just had some high regular intelligence,” Arthur says dismissively.

  His junior year, a Saturday night. She is upstairs in bed reading. This is in the winter. Outside her frosted windows a soft snow falls in the light from the back porch of the house. Arthur is in his office doing who knows what. Certainly sipping scotch. He drinks lots of scotch now. Downstairs she hears the door open and then the sound of something crashing. She sits up in bed and she hears Arthur’s footfalls on the staircase. Then she hears words, loud words, and she is out of bed in a flash, at the top of the staircase in her nightgown, and she sees her son and her husband grappling down in the front foyer. An antique lamp is broken on the ground in front of an end table.

  “Hey,” Elizabeth shouts. “Hey.”

  They both stop. She bounds down the stairs. They freeze and look up at her expectantly, as if she is about to do something. But as she gets closer, she sees in her son’s eyes a blankness she has not seen before. Ethan is as tall as Arthur, and stouter, and their arms are on each other, like they are holding each other up. She does not quite understand what she is seeing until Arthur says, “He’s really drunk.”

  Ethan looks down at her. His head lolls to one side. “Fuck you,” he says. “Fuck both of you.”

  Arthur doesn’t hesitate. He smashes Ethan across the face with his open palm and while she screams no, Ethan falls backward onto the hardwood floor.

  Her heart rises in her chest, but he is fine, of course he is fine, it is a just a hard slap, but when he tries to get up, he stumbles and crashes into the wall.

  He sleeps it off. And they don’t talk about it again, other than an awkward parent-and-child conversation in the living room, when they tell him he is grounded for two weeks. This is the next morning. He is hungover and contrite. Though now and again, when he looks over at his father, Elizabeth can see a hatred in his eyes that she has not seen before. It was a slap, nothing more, really, and she can justify it the same way Arthur does. He deserved it, didn’t he? He was belligerent and shitfaced and all that. Did Arthur really have a choice but to hit their son?

  But at the same time, she knows something has been altered between the two of them. Or perhaps, she decides, it was there all along, a gulf just waiting to be explored by precisely this kind of incident.

  At any rate, what is clear is that Ethan is not one who can drink. Some can hold it, and others cannot. What she saw in her son justifiably scared her. He was not there—no one was there. Just the brittle mask that, when lifted, showed only rage and anger. We all have it, she thinks, just some of us are better than others at burying it. It is a useful lesson to know that this is one thing her son does not excel at.

  It is the second plane that does it. The first one is explainable, hearing it on the radio, an accident perhaps, maybe a small private plane, it i
s hard to know, in the confusion. But something in her gut tells her it is more than that—or was that later, with the benefit of hindsight?

  But back at home, sitting on the couch with Ethan (Arthur still at the office), they watch the second plane go through the tower, and she no longer knows what she is looking at. She is grateful for Vermont. Nothing happens in Vermont. If this is the end of something, Vermont will be the last to feel it.

  What she remembers from that day is the deep fear of the ineffable. The reports coming in on television of planes crashing everywhere. The Pentagon. Somewhere in Pennsylvania. It reminds her of the reports she read about when War of the Worlds was on the radio, and how people thought it was real. Here—the television cannot lie; there are the planes, there are the great plumes of smoke rising up over the city—there is no question it is real, but what are they looking at?

  Soon Arthur is home, but he only adds to the alarm by saying that he heard that this is just the beginning. She shrieks in horror when the first tower collapses. She cries when the second tower collapses. Next to her on the couch, her son stares stoically at the television.

  The worst part of this day for her, however, is before the towers collapse, when the television shows shadowy figures falling like stones down the sides of the building. The horror for her is unimaginable: people who know they are going to die and then choose the manner of their death. A world where falling from one of the tallest buildings possible is more desirable than being sucked into the fire behind you. She tries to imagine that choice for herself, but she cannot.

  And then, a month later, it is Ethan’s birthday—a big one; he is eighteen—and they are out at the only okay restaurant in town, a place that, oddly, serves only pasta. It is just the three of them. They are halfway through their smoked chicken with pesto when Ethan looks up at the two of them and says matter-of-factly, “I’m not going to Yale.”

  Elizabeth looks at Arthur. He swallows and then says, “No? There is someplace you like better.”

  “I’m joining the army,” Ethan says.