The Headmaster's Wife

by Jane Haddam

  It was odd, but he’d spent the entire day thinking about the Mission of the School. He’d never done that before, not even when he was prepping for his interview back when he was only hoping he would get this job. By then he’d known all about Alice, of course. He’d known that she liked to sleep with students; and that if students were not available, and sometimes even if they were, she liked to sleep with faculty instead. He’d known she used sex as a means to politics and politics as a means to sex; and that politics for her meant not the day-to-day grubbiness of compromises on the Highway Transportation Bill and half measures in pursuit of Welfare Reform, but grand visions of apocalypse and redemption, the one sure cure for the boredom of a life in which there was no need to make much of an effort about anything. People thought it was only the rich who found themselves caught in the web of meaninglessness that came with not having to work for what they had, but it wasn’t true. There were dozens of upper-middle-class housewives just like Alice, with husbands who were doctors and lawyers and campus-star university professors, who didn’t need to work even if they decided they wanted to, who couldn’t think of anything to care about, who had to make it all up. Lots of them took to alcohol or children. They came to places like Windsor in droves, driven and furious, insisting that Susie or Johnny would be admitted to Harvard or they’d die trying. Peter had long ago learned to spot the haunted look of those adolescent stand-ins, the children who were supposed to be everything their mothers had not had the courage to be ambitious for themselves. It was the mothers, too, not the fathers. The fathers dealt with it differently. They absented themselves from home and family. They put their desperation into their work. There were a lot of people out there who had not found a place of peace or a plateau of satisfaction. It wasn’t only Alice.

  Maybe this was why he was thinking about the Mission of the School and about President’s House and what it looked like. He was standing on his own front steps—except that they didn’t really belong to him; they belonged to the school; headmasters only lived here while they were serving as headmasters—looking into the blackness of a sky whose details were obscured by the haze caused by the lights that were everywhere: coming from the houses, lining the quad, making the world safe on Main Street. Snow was coming down on him in thick, wet flakes. It had started falling an hour ago in the lazy way that made it seem as if no storm could be coming, and now it was gentle but relentless, the beginning of something far more serious. This house, he thought, was just like the house it had been meant to imitate, and just like the man who had once lived in that house, who had defined for all time the role of the American radical manqué. Peter had never had much use for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even the name grated on him. The idea that this fool—this utter dilettante with his third-rate mind and his enthusiasms, his wooly-headed flights into the nether reaches of incoherent antitheology—was supposed to be the very foundation of American literature made Peter angry to the point of violence. There had been a time when he had spent hours of work trying to prove that it wasn’t true. He’d done his master’s thesis on just that subject. Now he thought that there was nothing truer. Old Waldo’s spirit was alive and well and walking the Main Street of Windsor, Massachusetts, just as it had walked the Main Streets of Lexington and Concord and all the towns in between. Waldo would have liked Windsor Academy’s Mission Statement, with its dedication to educating “the whole person” and its paeans to creativity, intelligence, and “spiritual excellence.” He wouldn’t have known what it all meant any more than the trustees had, but Peter doubted if he’d known what half the things he’d written himself meant.

  President’s House was, indeed, a perfect replica. There was the hipped roof, the twin brick chimneys, the squared-off entry portico with its thin, Greek Revival columns. Peterwouldn’t have been surprised to find that this house had been built to scale. The three women who had founded Windsor Academy had been fond of that kind of historical voyeurism. They had been less interested in what Emerson had had to say than they had been in celebrating a peculiarly American standard. It was a time when being American was more fashionable than it had become now.

  He went up the front steps and let himself in the front door. He had seen Alice through the front windows, sitting at the desk in his study. He thought that if he got fired—which he almost surely would be—he would spend some time digging up the floor plans for the original Emerson house or even going down to Concord to visit it. He was pretty sure it was still standing. He’d be surprised if it wasn’t a shrine. Emerson had lived there for years, and Thoreau had taken over the place when Emerson went to Europe. Everybody from the Daughters of the American Revolution to hippies with an itch for civil disobedience ought to treat the place as if it were hallowed ground.

  He went through the hall to the door of the study and stopped. The door was not locked. Alice would not hide what she considered to be something she deserved to do by right. He looked in on her seated at the desk, jimmying the lock on the long center drawer. Then he cleared his throat and waited until she looked up.

  “You could always just ask me for the key,” he said. “It would be easier.”

  “Would you give me the key?” Her red hair shone in the muted light from the desk lamp. It was such an improbable color, and yet Peter knew for certain that there had been a time when it was completely genuine.

  He came forward with the key in his hand. “I won’t give it to you, but I’ll open the drawer,” he said. He half expected her to grab it out of his hand while he bent forward to slip it into the lock, but she didn’t. He opened it up and stepped back. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

  She sat staring at him for a moment, emotionally blank. Then she pulled out the drawer, found the manila envelope, and pulled that out, too. She was, he thought, curiously without affect. She showed only those emotions she wanted to, meaning none of the ones she actually had. She dumped the contents of the manila envelope on the green felt desk blotter and spread them out under her hands.

  “Well,” she said.

  “You can keep them if you want to,” he told her. “For a long time I thought of them as insurance. I’d use them if I ever had the guts to divorce you, and you wanted to make trouble over it. But I’ve realized, these past few days, that I don’t want to divorce you.”

  “Worried about your reputation in the field?” Alice said.

  “No,” Peter told her. He thought he ought to sit down. It would have a better effect. He couldn’t make himself do it. “My reputation in the field is shot, and you know it. There isn’t going to be another headmaster’s job after this one. I’ll have to retire to New Hampshire and live on what’s left of my trust fund. You’ll have to do what you want.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t want to divorce me.”

  “I don’t. But I don’t intend to force you to stay with me either. You can do what you want to do. You can take those with you.”

  “They’re a form of pornography, aren’t they?” Alice said. “Did you masturbate to them?”

  Peter went over to the window and looked out onto the quad. The snow was beginning to come down very heavily. People were walking along the paths in the direction of the Student Center and the cafeteria. They both ought to be on their way over right now.

  “I want to know the truth,” he said. “I want to know if you tried to kill Mark DeAvecca.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No, Alice, I’m not crazy. I’ve been cut out of the loop on the official end. His mother can’t stand me, which under the circumstances I think makes a good deal of sense. Even so, it’s not that easy to keep me from getting the information I want, and I do know what’s been going on at the hospital all this afternoon. Somebody poisoned Mark with arsenic. Nota single dose of arsenic, apparently, but several weeks’ worth of smaller doses—”

  “You don’t necessarily die of arsenic.” “True enough,” Peter said. “That’s another of the possibilities they’re considering, that somebody was just trying to mak
e Mark ill. If that was what they were looking for, I’d say they got it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Alice said. “He hasn’t been sick. He’s been doped to the gills—”

  “Not according to the lab tests.” “—and treating this place like it was a residential party. He’s all wrong for Windsor, Peter, and you know it. He’s not serious.”

  “He may not be serious, Alice, but what has happened to him is; and there’s no way around it, at least not from what I’ve heard. He was found with arsenic in his body as well as enough caffeine to have killed him. There’s arsenic in his hair. A lot of it, apparently. Which means he was being poisoned for weeks at least—”

  “Or poisoning himself,” Alice said quickly.

  “What for? Alice, let’s leave the realm of the ridiculous here for a moment. Let’s leave the realm of that Hustler centerfold you like to turn yourself into when the occasion arises and look at what we have here. We were nearly out from under the problem caused by Michael Feyre’s suicide, a suicide you almost certainly had something to do with—”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “I’m not. I’m being practical. If you weren’t the reason Michael committed suicide, you could be made to look like the reason. But that was all right. We were almost clear from that one. Now we have this. And we aren’t dealing with Dee Feyre anymore, somebody with a lot of money but without sophistication or education or connections, we’re dealing with Liz Toliver. And I’ve seen her, Alice. She’s on the warpath.”

  “She can be on the warpath all she likes. She can’t do anything. You’ve said yourself that we’re not going to beasked to stay on after all this. What difference does it make what she does?”

  “It makes a difference if she lands you in jail, Alice. I don’t think you’re going to like the women’s correctional facility in Concord.”

  “She can’t land me in jail,” Alice said. “I haven’t done anything to get landed in jail.”

  “You were sleeping with a minor and a student, that could land you in jail.”

  “He was sixteen.”

  “It doesn’t matter; he was under eighteen. That’s the law, whether you intend to recognize it or not.”

  “Those laws were passed to prosecute male predators who abused female children,” Alice said. “They have nothing to do with teenaged sex, for God’s sake. Teenagers have sex with each other all the time; they don’t get prosecuted.”

  “They don’t get prosecuted if they have sex with each other. But never mind. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not you’re going to find yourself arrested for attempted murder, and the possibility does exist. You were feeding Mark coffee last night. You were seen. In the cafeteria.”

  “I wasn’t feeding him,” Alice said. “I just got him a cup. He asked for it.”

  “Two cups.”

  “Whatever. We were talking.”

  “About what?”

  “About Michael. Why shouldn’t we talk about Michael? For God’s sake, Peter, everybody has been talking about Michael since it happened. Until today, I mean. It’s only natural. It’s a small community.”

  It was the word “community” that stopped him, that catchall word meant to impose order and cohesion on random collections of people. Windsor was a “community.” They said it all the time. He went back to the desk and swept up the photographs and the manila envelope. The photograph on the top was of Alice sitting astride some boy whose name Peter no longer remembered. It was a younger Alice.

  Even in black and white, her hair looked thicker and more glossy; her breasts looked firmer. They had no children and because of it, and of the fact that they were small, Alice’s breasts had lasted much longer than women’s ordinarily do. Still, it was coming to her as it came to all women everywhere. That was the problem for a woman who had based her life on sex.

  Peter walked across the room to the fireplace and threw the envelope and photographs inside. It was a gas fireplace, easy to turn on and just as hot as one that burned with wood. He flipped the switch and watched the flames leap, instantaneous and deadly.

  “I’d have thought you would want to keep those,” Alice said.

  Peter was watching it all bum. “I was thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, did I tell you that? This house is a replica of Emerson’s house in Concord.”

  “That was in the material they gave us when you were applying for this job.”

  “I know. I was thinking about it. And about Emerson himself and all those people—the New England transcendentalists. The original American ‘radicals’: Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. I was thinking that Windsor was just their kind of place. They would have liked it here.”

  “Thoreau didn’t even like schools.”

  “He didn’t like the schools he was used to. He wanted to encourage creativity and expressiveness and getting in touch with the greatness of the universal spirit, or however he put it. It was all very vague. We’re like that, aren’t we, Alice? We’re very vague. We don’t know what we’re talking about; we only want to feel special.”

  “I don’t think it’s a small thing to celebrate diversity, do you?”

  “No,” Peter said. The photographs were almost gone. Nobody would be fooled if they came to look, however. There were ashes in the grate now, and gas fires didn’t leave ashes. He stood up. “It’s not a small thing to ’celebrate diversity.’ It’s just that to the extent that we know what it means, wedon’t do it; and to the extent that we don’t know what it means, it doesn’t matter. We haven’t got the faintest idea of what it means to live with the differences in people. We’re very careful, every year, to make sure we have the right number of African Americans and the right number of Hispanic Americans and the right number of students from abroad, and we pick them all very carefully to make sure that they fit this place just as much as we do. When we’re faced with someone we really don’t understand, we don’t behave too well. Do you know how I know that?”

  “Please,” Alice said.

  “I know that because I realized, in the middle of this afternoon, while I was panicking about what was going to happen now that Jimmy Card has arrived and Liz Toliver would very much like to shut us down—realized that Mark DeAvecca is the first student we’ve had here for years whom I cannot anticipate. I have no idea what he’s going to do next I have no idea what he thinks. I have no idea what he’s going to say. And I further realized that there are lots of people out there whom I do not understand, but none of them are connected to this school in any way. Unfortunately, a lot of them are essential to this school’s surivival.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Alice said.

  “It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s two hundredth birthday this May twenty-fifth. We ought to get the school to celebrate it, if we’re still here and the school’s still here. We can mount events around the lives of Emerson and Thoreau. We can stage readings from Emerson’s essays. We can show the world how little we’ve changed since that man was bleating on about all the drivel we’ve since adopted as dogma. Back to nature. Eastern religions. The all-compassing wisdom of the Oversoul. We even use the same language.”

  “You really aren’t making any sense,” Alice said, and now she was finished. She pushed the drawer back into place and stood up. “We’d better get over to dinner. We’ve both been ducking appearing in public for days. Wouldn’t you usually call that irresponsible?”

  Peter didn’t know if he was being irresponsible or not. Hedidn’t think he cared. She had been really beautiful, Alice. When he’d first known her, she’d been as perfect as the miniature Renaissance madonnas he had loved to go to see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Exquisite and rare, she had been her own reason for existing; and like all truly beautiful people she had been almost a force of nature, like a hurricane or a tornado. Beauty is a compelling thing, and he had been compelled, unable to look at anything or anybody else, unable to reason calmly about who and what she was under that flawless exterior shell. Now
the shell was no longer flawless, and it stunned him to see just how small the imperfections needed to be to wreck the majestic power of the whole. She was still a beautiful woman, in the sense that the lines and angles and shadows of her face and body made up an aesthetic ideal, intellectual and cold. She was no longer a beautiful woman in the sense of beauty as power. In the half-light cast by the study’s lamp, he could see darkness and hollowness under her eyes, under her cheekbones, along her jaw. Even surgery could not replace what she had lost because it depended so heavily on the impression that she carried within herself the secret to eternal life, lived as someone forever young.

  If she wondered what he was thinking, she gave no indication of it. She just brushed by him and went out the door, into the hallway and the rest of the house. He thought she might be going to the cafeteria. He didn’t care.

  2

  The first thing James Hallwood had done after his conversation with Marta Coelho was to take the rest of the crystal meth out of its hiding place behind the medicine cabinet and flush it down the toilet. There wasn’t much of it left, and for the time being it would be safer to indulge in that sort of thing at David’s apartment rather than here. David would have said it served him right for insisting on staying here, where he was treated as a child almost as much as the students were. For James, the issue was more complicated. He’d seen his share of true crime documentaries. If there was an investigation and he became the target of it, they would surely find traces of crystal meth in his apartment and probably traces of cocaine, too. It was nearly impossible to erase all evidence of the stuff once you had used it because powders scattered. Their individual grains were too small to be seen, but not so small they couldn’t be discovered by chemical tests. At first this seemed to be his biggest and most important problem: the possibility that they might find the drugs and along with the drugs the things he was not so proud of, the things that he at once associated with his own homosexuality and rejected on account of it. This was not something he could talk to David about because this was not something David had much sympathy with. David’s tastes in sex were strictly vanilla, the way his tastes in music were strictly for the bourgeois classical. If he had been born in England instead of the United States, he might have ended his life as an Anglican bishop. James had never had vanilla tastes in much of anything. The homosexuals he had sympathized with, in literature, while he was growing up had been the ones like M. de Charlus in Proust, who had been first and foremost men of great dignity and culture. There was something to be said for those Anglican bishops. The world was not worse off for having men in it who understood the human drive for perfection in form and language. The problem was, he himself could never have been one of those men because he himself could never force himself to be attracted only to the nobility of the human being. In private, what he was attracted to was anything but nobility. He thought he might be the only man in history to suffer from a madonna/whore complex about himself.