The Headmaster's Wife (9 page)

“All right.”

“I stopped in the library for a while. I talked to Marta Coelho. She was working.”

“Marta's always working.”

“I know.”

Peter shifted slightly on the couch. The PBS documentary, whatever it was, was going off. Alice hadn't paid any attention to it so all she knew was that it wasn't one of those awful evenings of swing or Liberace that all the PBS stations had become enamored of in the last decade. Peter had a bald spot on the top of his head. It was only the size of a nickel, but it would grow. She wondered if he would try to compensate with a comb-over.

“It's not a dirty word, you know,” Peter said, “work. I don't understand how you can spend so much time working for the causes you do and then look down on somebody like Marta, who takes her work seriously.”

“I don't look down on her for taking her work seriously.”

“But you do look down on her.”

“She's a cipher, Peter. She might as well be a voice program. HAL the computer had more personality. She was worrying about Mark DeAvecca by the way.”

“Ah,” Peter said. “Well, one of our mistakes.”

“She said something along the same lines. That he's irresponsible. Of course you think he's on drugs.”

“Don't you?”

Alice looked away. “I've talked to his roommate, Michael Feyre. Michael doesn't think he's on drugs.”

“Would he tell you if he did?”

Alice was still looking away. “He's got no reason to lie. I don't think they're friends, particularly.”

“Mark isn't really friendly with anybody. It's hard to know what he's doing here. And I remember his application, too. It was one of the best I've ever seen.”

“And he's Elizabeth Toliver's son and Jimmy Card's stepson, and that never hurts around here either.”

“No,” Peter admitted, keeping it pleasant, “it never does. It never hurts anywhere. That's life, Alice. It's been that way since the dawn of time. It's going to be that way tomorrow.”

“Yes, well,” Alice said. She got up. She couldn't sit in this chair any longer. She wanted a shower. She wanted her nerves to calm down. She wanted not to look at herself in the mass of pictures in their silver frames lined up on top of the television console. “I'm going to go get ready for bed. I want to read. And I think it's odd that you've never considered the obvious.”

“What's the obvious, in this case?”

“The obvious is that Mark DeAvecca is mentally ill. That he's, well, schizophrenic or paranoid. That doesn't always show up right away, you know. Many people have perfectly normal childhoods before it sets in. Then it does set in and they become … dangerous.”

“You think Mark DeAvecca is dangerous?”

“I think he could be,” Alice said. “He certainly isn't stable, is he? He wanders around as if he's half-dead most of the time. He can never remember anything. He mumbles to himself. I saw him do that once in chapel. He was just sitting by himself—twitching and mumbling under his breath.”

Peter had leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “What is this about, exactly? What are you trying to pull?”

“I'm not trying to ‘pull' anything.”

“Yes, you are. Mark DeAvecca is no more dangerous than I am. He doesn't have the energy to make his bed in the morning, never mind hurt anybody. What did you do?”

“What did I do about what, Peter?”

“I don't know,” Peter said. “I really don't know. I wish I did.”

“All I did was point out the obvious, Peter. Which is that that kid is definitely off, somehow, and none of you know for sure that he isn't dangerous. I'd think that was the first possibility you'd want to consider.”

“What did you do?” Peter asked again.

Alice turned away and walked out of the living room into the hall. The muscles in her neck felt as tight and hard and sharp as barbed wire. She thought she was getting a migraine or worse. The staircase was long but not steep. This was an old house, older than the United States itself. It was on the tour the Windsor Historical Society did every year to raise funds for architectural preservation. Alice was on the committee. She was on most of the committees that mattered. She raised funds for WGBH during pledge-drive weeks when even the people who were committed to public television didn't want to watch it. She served on the board of the Windsor Food Bank, which did its business in Boston and not in Windsor at all, since nobody who was poor enough to need a food bank could afford to live in Windsor. She had a subscription to the symphony and to the ballet. She contributed to an experimental dance company and a little magazine of women's poetry. She belonged to the National Organization for Women and People for the American Way. She was, she thought, a complete and utter cliché.

Peter had changed the channel on the television set. He would not be coming up after her anytime soon. She started up the stairs and wished she hadn't worn these particular boots tonight. They always made her feel unsteady.

She was a complete and utter cliché … except that she wasn't.

Once, when he was very small and his father was still alive, Mark DeAvecca had convinced himself that there was a dinosaur in the kitchen. They were still living in England then, in the house on Roslyn Avenue in Barnes, and the kitchen wasn't big enough to contain a small pony, never mind a dinosaur. He was small enough so that he hadn't started school yet, or at least not real school. Trying to fix it in his memory now, he thought he must have been about three, old enough
to be beyond the toddler stage, not quite old enough for the nursery school he would later attend five days a week, three hours a day, at a small, brick building only a couple of blocks from home. The important thing was that he was too small to have any realistic concept of size. He became convinced that there was a dinosaur in the kitchen, and nothing his mother or his father said to him could change his mind or make him feel less afraid. He sat in the living room for long hours, reading a book in a chair or watching
Blue Peter
and
Captain Scarlet
on the television, and all the time he could hear the dinosaur moving heavily in among the table and chairs, in and out of the cabinets, in the crack between the refrigerator and the wall where the yardstick had fallen. He had just learned to read, and the books he picked up were very simple, mostly Dr. Seuss books his grandmothers sent him from the States. He liked to plow his way through them. It made him feel as if he'd done something very important when he'd managed to read every word in one of them. He would wait in the narrow entry hall for his father to come home, and then he would report.
This
was in the book today, and
this
and
this.

After the dinosaurs came, he could never remember what was in the books. He read them and read them, but they didn't make any sense. Part of his mind was always somewhere else, waiting for them to get out, waiting for the swinging door to the kitchen to glide forward and let one of them into the dining room, where they would move in and around the tables and chairs there. He was convinced he was going to die. He was even more convinced that he was not going to die, but that both his parents were, and he would be left on his own in this house with nothing but the dinosaurs for company.

Now he was in the little back hall of Hayes House, which had been a mansion once before it had become a dorm. It really was a large house, unlike the house in Barnes, which had only seemed large because he himself had been so small. He looked at the phone on one wall and the light coming from the crack under the door to Sheldon LeRouve's apartment.
Sheldon LeRouve was yet another teacher he didn't get along with, although he had the good luck not to have him for a class. Maybe it didn't matter. He didn't seem to get along with anybody, except a few of the kids, and even then he was odd man out most of the time, an interesting figure on the sidelines, not the kind of person anybody thought of first. He felt a little dizzy. He was definitely very tired. He tried to remember what had finally rid the house in Barnes of its dinosaurs, but he couldn't. They were there, and then one day they were not there. He wasn't afraid of the kitchen anymore. He could read when he wanted to read and watch television when he wanted to watch television, and his mother would let him. He could go into the kitchen by himself and get chocolate biscuits out of the cannister in the cabinet next to the refrigerator. He didn't think he had done anything, or that anybody had done anything, to make them go away.

Biscuits,
he thought now. That was a blast from the past. They called them “cookies” here. He'd been back long enough so that he nearly always remembered that. He thought of his first day at Rumsey Hall, where he had gone to school in Connecticut after his father had fallen ill and his parents had moved back to America to get his father's cancer treated. He had been in the second grade, and he had truly loved the look of the place, wide open on green lawns, lots of space, lots of low, white buildings. The problem was that they had spent the first part of the day singing, and he hadn't known any of the songs: “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “You're a Grand Old Flag.” He had grown more and more frustrated over the course of a long hour. He wasn't used to being out of things. He wasn't used to not knowing all the answers to all the questions either. He was growing desperate to do at least one thing that would prove to everybody that he was just as smart as everybody else, if not more so, and suddenly he had heard a strain of music that was completely familiar. That was when he had stepped forward and started singing, as confident as he had ever been in his life that he was about to get something right. Mrs. Seldenader set the pitch on her harmonica and started in on
the piano, and instead of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” he'd come out with, “God save our gracious Queen. Long live our noble Queen. God save the Queen.”

It was, he thought now, a metaphor for something, a prophecy of this year. There were dinosaurs in the kitchen again, and nothing he did was right. Except that it was worse, really. That first day at Rumsey Hall, his teachers had liked him and considered him bright. He just hadn't known enough about how America worked to fit right in. In this place he knew that most of his teachers had no use for him at all. They thought he was stupid. They thought he was a slacker. They thought he was a liar. He sometimes felt as if he'd wandered into a dystopian Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter's tea party took place in the Spanish Inquisition's best dungeon and the White Rabbit had fangs.

He went out into the main hall and across it into the large, high-ceilinged living room. There was a small clutch of Korean students watching something on television, maybe a DVD or a tape. He looked up the long flight of stairs and thought that it was just too much, right this second, to climb it. He didn't understand why he was so tired all the time or why he couldn't eat. He thought he must have lost twenty pounds since he first came to Windsor, but he was getting almost no exercise at all. He didn't like exercise all that much. He wasn't a sports person. He just didn't usually feel right unless he was moving around a little, and this year he moved less and less. It felt more and more difficult to move. He wished, suddenly, that he could be back in Connecticut. He had been chafing at that routine by the time it was over. Now it seemed to him like a haven of sanity, a time when he had been somebody else, when he had been himself.

He started up the stairs—there was nothing for it; he wanted to lie down, and he had to go up to the third floor to do it—and as he did he heard Mr. LeRouve's door open and Mr. LeRouve himself step out into the hall.

“Mark? Is that you?”

“That's me.”

“Did you sign in?”

Mark had not signed in. He had signed in every other night of his life in this place, but tonight he had not signed in. He had no idea why.

“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

Mr. LeRouve made a noise—Mark wondered why he always thought of him as Mr. LeRouve, instead of Sheldon; he was supposed to call him Sheldon, but he couldn't ever quite believe that was the case with any of his teachers, and he didn't really like it—and Mark turned away from the stairs to go on to the back and fill in the sign-in sheet. It seemed to be about ten o'clock, but that didn't make much sense. He couldn't remember what he had been doing for the past hour. He couldn't remember where he had been. He tried to fix himself in time, but all he could remember clearly was being in the library with the family medical book reading up on Huntington's chorea. He had come to the conclusion that it was just another excuse. He wanted an explanation for why he was the way he was, but there was no explanation. Maybe he had always been like this; maybe he hadn't. But this was the way he was now, and there was nothing he could do about it. He wondered, sometimes, if his mother would like this person he had become.

Mr. LeRouve was standing next to the sign-in sheet. Mark had to brush against him to get at the pen tied to the wall with a piece of fraying string.

“You don't smell like liquor,” Mr. LeRouve said. “There's that.”

“I don't drink liquor,” Mark said. He picked up the pen and tried to sign his name in cursive. He couldn't make it happen. His hands didn't work right. His hands hadn't worked right for months. He went to printing, which wasn't much better—
I print like I've had a stroke,
he thought—and when he was done it occurred to him that Mr. LeRouve thought he was lying.

He let the pen drop and stepped back. “Sorry,” he said. He thought he'd said it before, but he wasn't really sure.

Mr. LeRouve shrugged. Mark turned away and went back into the hall, to the stairs. When this had first started happening,
when he had first realized that people did not believe the things he said, he had tried to fight it. He had staged knock-down fights on a couple of occasions, with teachers skeptical of even the smallest things—that he had lost a book, that he had forgotten an appointment, that he wasn't feeling well. Especially that last thing. Nobody here believed him when he said he was ill, no matter how ill he felt, and he'd felt ill often these last few months. He went to the infirmary and they took his temperature and told him he was all right. He felt so weak he could barely stand up straight, and they told him he looked well enough to them. He didn't know what to believe anymore. He thought it might all be psychological. He was homesick. He was somehow getting around to punishing himself for his father's death—although that was ridiculous, considering the fact that he had never felt guilty about his father's death before. Whatever it was, he had learned not to tell people when he felt unwell, not even when he felt sick enough to pass out, which was something he had done at least once, fortunately only nominally in public. He had been sitting in the cafeteria in the off-hours trying to study for his American History class, and the next thing he knew he'd just—not been there.