The Headmaster's Wife (2 page)

She walks by our table. The tray is full of ramekins of Jell-O, heading for a nearby table. I contemplate the shape of her beneath her clothes. She is full breasted but otherwise unremarkable. This is her peak, I think rather ungenerously. She will never be this beautiful again.

The headmaster’s house is a white Colonial that sits on the main road that runs through the quiet town of Lancaster, Vermont. Behind it are soccer fields and dorms, and beyond those runs the Connecticut River, slow and fat. The house is large and designed for entertaining, with tall, high-ceilinged rooms downstairs. The upstairs originally had four bedrooms, though it now has only three, as my father, when he was head of school, turned one of them into an office, which I still use.

After dinner Elizabeth and I go upstairs. It is early, but as is our pattern now, she stops at the top of the stairs and gives me her cheek. I lay a soft kiss on it. She goes to our bedroom, which has become her room exclusively. I sleep in the guest room. It was never anything we talked about, and I do not remember precisely when it first started. But we are happier this way. Married people often forget how nice it is to sleep alone.

The other bedroom was once mine, when I was a child, and later belonged to our son, Ethan. It is still Ethan’s room, I suppose, and Elizabeth has refused to take down any of his things. His clothes still hang in the closet, his athletic trophies are still on the bureau. Ethan wanted out of Lancaster. After graduation he spurned Yale (and by so doing, spurned me) and became a soldier. He went to Iraq, and Elizabeth does nothing but worry about him. He disappoints me. Not that there is anything wrong with serving one’s country. And despite what you may think, I do not need him to return here as I did, or as my father and grandfather did. I do not need him to, though it surprises me that he chose to impetuously close the door to that possibility. Though that is another story.

As is my habit, I go into my study. I pour several fingers of scotch from the fifth I keep in the bottom right drawer of the large wooden desk. I nurse the scotch and absentmindedly turn on the laptop and review the day’s e-mail. But something has me restless.

I drain the scotch and go downstairs to fetch my coat.

Outside, the fall air is cool but the night is clear and without moon. Full of stars. I like to walk at night. It is mandatory study hall time, and all the students are in their rooms or, with special permission, at the library.

Normally I head for the heart of campus, crossing the street and into the quadrangle, with its historic granite academic buildings and upper-class boys’ dorms. I like having this part of the campus to myself. Alone with the history of it all. But tonight I walk the other way, out across the soccer fields. The grass dewy on my shoes.

I walk toward the four squat brick buildings that were built in the late 1960s to accommodate the new type of Lancaster student: girls. I was a freshman the year Lancaster went co-ed. My father made the decision with the board, and it was controversial at the time, especially with alumni, though also with my classmates. I am still not sure what we feared would be lost.

The buildings themselves I have always found an eyesore. Out of character with the rest of the campus, which is a tasteful mixture of stately granite and early-nineteenth-century clapboard homes, they are brick and featureless and were built on the cheap. When I was a student we called them the projects, though it has been a long time since I have heard that particular terminology. Then again, as headmaster, you hear less and less.

I come down the small slope from the soccer field and then cross the pavement that separates the dorms and the field. The four buildings are in front of me, close together, separated by narrow alleys of grass. Each building is two stories, and the first-floor windows are close enough to the ground that years ago we put in place what we call the “one-foot rule.” Boys visiting from the upper campus must have at least one foot on the ground at all times when visiting the windows, which they do most evenings.

I walk between the first two buildings, Fuller and Jameson Halls. The windows are lit up, and the shades are all open. Inside are girls at their desks, girls lying facedown on their beds with books in front of them. Their doors open to the hallways inside, as they are required to do. I pause in front of each window and look in, and while part of me knows there is something entirely untoward about the headmaster staring into the windows of the upper-class girls’ dorms, I am unfazed by it tonight. Not a single girl as much as looks up. I am an apparition.

I make it through the first set of dorms, and then the second alleyway. It is on the third and final pass that I finally see her. Hers is a corner room, with two windows, one that faces the alley and another that looks toward the river.

She is at the desk closest to the alley window. Beyond her is her roommate, a girl I recognize, Meredith something or other, from New York. Her father is a prominent attorney specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Someone the board has targeted for cultivation.

We are separated only by glass. She is reading for my class: Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
. Reading that is not even due for a week. She is ahead, which says something about her. She wears sweatpants and one of those tight white tank tops that all the girls seem to wear these days. The ones that don’t even attempt to cover their bellies. As if sensing me, she suddenly looks up and then toward the window. I quickly step back.

She has not seen me. She stands and arches her back like a cat. Her breasts are indeed full beneath the tank top, and her belly has only the slightest of outward curves.

What is this? I am the headmaster of the elite Lancaster School. I have been around young women my whole life and have never so much as given their bodies more than passing consideration. That part of my mind has been closed for a long time. And now here I find myself, on a cool fall night under the stars on the old campus that has been my home for fifty-three of my fifty-seven years, peering through a window at an eighteen-year-old girl.

The following Monday I announce to my class that I will be providing office hours to any student who would like to discuss the assigned reading or who might have questions about the first paper I have asked them to write. I expect to see her. Her earnestness suggests she is the type to take advantage of office hours. I am getting a sense of her: She is grateful to be at Lancaster. Many take it for granted. She is not one of them.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered what I can about her. She is different from what I thought. First, her name is Betsy Pappas. The name sounds Greek, not Jewish, but you can never be sure. She is not from New Jersey at all, but instead from Vermont, the small Northeast Kingdom town of Craftsbury. She is a scholarship student. She tested off the charts at some tiny Podunk school and is on a full ride. The family has no money to speak of. Her father teaches woodshop at a small college up there. What a thing to teach at a college. Last I checked, carpenters didn’t require a college education.

Her mother makes jewelry. There is one sibling, a younger sister who still attends the Podunk school. Betsy has redone her junior year, which is a requirement at Lancaster. Transfers have to spend at least two years to get their degree. She turned eighteen in August.

It’s an entirely different portrait from the one I imagined. Instead of new-money suburban Jews, they are no-money Vermont hippies. I picture an aging, run-down farmhouse, a pickup truck and a VW van in the driveway.

With that bit of research settled, my workweek proceeds on in typical fashion. Mrs. LaForge, who has been the headmaster’s secretary for close to forty years, keeps the schedule moving. Meetings come in half-hour increments, and there are set-aside times for me to make calls to the heavy hitters who keep the wheels of Lancaster greased. In between, I deal with discipline cases. This week there is a sophomore boy who was found to have an ounce of marijuana in a cigar box hidden in his bureau during a room inspection. Drug cases are normally a swift exit from the school, but as with all things, there are nuances at play. The boy is a Mellon, of the Pennsylvania Mellons, and the boy, an arrogant, chubby kid with a mop of brown hair, knows this makes an easy decision complicated. The boy shows no fear in the headmaster’s office. He sits comfortably, sunk back in one of the leather chairs like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

When I was younger, I might have just gone by the book, but with age you come to terms with the fact that not everyone arrives into this world on an equal footing. There is no real equity at boarding school. There are the Mellons, and then there are the Betsy Pappases from Craftsbury, Vermont. Justice is not blind at Lancaster. I call the boy’s father and let him know I will make an exception to the normal policy, but that if it happens again I will not be able to be so generous. The father says he understands and will have a difficult talk with Junior. It goes without saying that a check will arrive in the coming week. History says it will be significant.

On Wednesday, Deerfield, one of our fiercest rivals, comes to campus, and I spend the afternoon touring the sporting events. Mrs. LaForge maps them out for me on my phone, one of the many clever things she does to make me look good, and a beep goes off when I am supposed to move to the next event. A quarter of the football game, off to boys’ soccer for fifteen minutes, then to girls’ soccer, and finally to the finish line of the cross-country race. A light rain falls on a dull gray day, and not many parents make the trip. Nevertheless I do my best to summon the slick enthusiasm my role as chief booster demands, moving up the sidelines under my umbrella, shaking hands, talking to parents about their children, patting faculty on the back.

Everyone is happy to see me, or pretends to be. Whatever they think of me personally, they respect the office. That is one thing I have learned. Like it or not, I am the face of Lancaster, and they are suitably pleased that I have graced their particular game with my presence, which is entirely the point.

On Friday, I hop a flight from Lebanon, New Hampshire, to Manhattan, and that evening, at the Lancaster Club, I move among the well-heeled alumni who have come out to hear me speak. In the large wood-paneled room with its deep-set leather furniture, I rise to speak, glass of wine in hand, and for a moment the old doubt comes over me. I have been doing this a long time, you see, but sometimes I still feel like a fraud. I do not know if I really ever wanted to be head of school. I am not my father, as my son is not I. The older alums still compare me to my father, and I know they find me wanting. I am not starchy enough, perhaps, a pale imitation of the old man’s greatness. I do not have his stentorian voice. But tonight I do a reasonable job of bringing forth that old love of school. I give my stump speech. I tell them about the cantilevered glass addition to the library, the new tech center, the field house under construction that will be the envy of all the great New England schools. I have facts at the tip of my tongue: the percentage of graduates who will go on to Ivies next year (53 percent, best among the competition), the accomplishments of faculty, and of course all the news on the beloved sports teams.

I wear my Lancaster tie, black and gold with small crests on it, and for a moment it is as if nothing has changed. I am doing what I have always done, what you could say I was born to do. The old school has given me my life.

Mrs. LaForge brings her into my office and then closes the door on her way out. The girl sits in one of the tall wingback chairs in front of my desk. I take in her clothes and see she is in full compliance of the dress code. White blouse buttoned appropriately, knee-length skirt, close-toed shoes fully laced. On her lap are three of the novels from my class.

“Betsy,” I say, saying her name for the first time, feeling it in my mouth.

She looks up at me expectantly. “Yes?”

“You are enjoying the Russians?”

“I like the realists.”

I nod. “Which of the books we have read speaks to you the most?”

“Turgenev. It seems … relevant.”

“Expand on that, please.”

“His view of love. Of marriage. He seems to be constantly questioning the importance of institutions while reaffirming them at the same time. And the struggle of the two brothers to find their place in the world seems similar to my own experience.”

I smile. “Are you struggling to find your place in the world?”

“We all are,” Betsy says.

She shifts in her chair now and crosses her legs. There is the sense of white flesh beneath her skirt.

“Surely the struggle is different now than in nineteenth-century Russia.”

“I don’t know about that. The trappings are different. Technology and so on. Ways of travel. But those are all surface things. The elemental truths are the same.”

“The elemental truths?” I lean back in my chair and stroke my chin thoughtfully.

“Love and family. Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters.”

“What about economics?”

“Like serfdom?”

“Yes.”

“It still exists, just under different names.”

“Are we a young Marxist, Ms. Pappas?”

“No. It’s just that the idea of America as a meritocracy is an illusion designed to make the elite feel better.”

“Designed?” I say. “That implies someone is calling the shots.”

“It’s self-perpetuating,” she says.

“What about a black president who was born poor and raised by his grandmother in a Hawaii apartment? Doesn’t that refute your premise?”

“Not at all,” Betsy says. “To maintain the illusion, a few have to be allowed through. Anyway, the presidency isn’t a good example.”

This makes me laugh. “The presidency? The leader of the free world?”

She shrugs. “Presidents still work for others.”

I look beyond her to the wide windows that line my office. On the quad the large maples have turned the brightest of red, their leaves catching the afternoon sun and lifting their color as if they are on fire.