The Headmaster's Wife(12)
She says, “Walking pneumonia probably. Mostly I just wanted to disappear.”
“It’s a beautiful day. Do you want some light in here?”
“I like it dark.”
I am at a loss. “Well,” I say after a long pause, “we will speak again.”
Betsy rolls her head away from me on the pillow. She stares toward the dark wall and the windows with the shades drawn. I slowly rise and walk out of the room, past the nurses, who say, “Good-bye, Mr. Winthrop,” and back out into the bright light of my campus.
Work is palliative. For a time things are normal. The second weekend of October, our Board of Trustees arrives on campus for two days of meetings. There are thirty-four trustees, and many names you would recognize. The board meets four times a year, and for a head of school these are among the most important of events. Like it or not, the board is your boss. Its first and greatest responsibility is the hiring or firing of the head, and while I am the institution in many ways, I do not take this for granted.
The trustees come in on Saturday, and during the day they partake of sporting events and then they have committee meetings in the afternoon. I generally attend the Finance Committee and the Development Committee, which for mature schools are the most important meetings. Then we have a cocktail party and we dine together off campus. On Sunday we meet most of the day.
This meeting should not have been different from any other, except for the fact that Dick Ives schedules a meeting of the Executive Committee for Saturday afternoon, and this is most unusual indeed. The Executive Committee is made of up of the five most prominent members of the board. It meets by phone in between board meetings and has the authority to act on behalf of the board in unusual circumstances, though, for a school as stable as Lancaster, I cannot remember a time when this has happened. Mostly, it receives advance updates on all the critical things happening at school, and provides me with some general guidance on the broad issues of the day.
The fact that I am not aware of this meeting ahead of time has me nervous and, as it turns out, appropriately so.
We gather in the Oak Room, on the fourth floor of the academic building. It is traditionally the boardroom, with one long table, paneled walls, and portraits of many of the lions of the Lancaster School, including my father and my grandfather. The full board doesn’t meet there anymore, and has not in years. It is an austere and quiet room, and on this day, I join Dick Ives, Penny Wilton, Dave Tallmadge, Mark Saltonstall, and Brian Corcoran. These are the school’s largest benefactors. The men are all graduates, and from fine old families. The vice chair, Penny Wilton, is a woman with a great sweep of gray hair who vaguely resembles a late-in-life Anne Bancroft. She made her money in investments, some white-shoe Boston firm, and while her connection to the school is local rather than personal—she has a second home nearby—she has become an influential and powerful member of the board in recent years. I should also say she annoys me. I do not like how she constantly swipes that hair out of her face. And she has that particular affect that successful older women seem to develop: her accent cultivated and almost British, her words always far more measured than they need to be.
Dick Ives calls things to order. He was a class below me in school, though he seems older. To look at him, one finds it somewhat remarkable he is still going as strong as he is. He has a handsome, genial face but weighs somewhere north of three hundred pounds. His clothes fit him poorly, and the blue dress shirts he favors stretch around his awesome bulk. He is always eating. Mrs. LaForge has put out pastries and coffee for our meeting, and Dick thoughtfully chews on a Danish as he talks.
“Let me say, Arthur,” Dick begins, “That I for one have been very pleased to see you back in the classroom. As we discussed, I think you needed some sense of renewal. And it is good to see the school doing everything it should be. All the metrics are good, better than good, in fact. So I don’t think we’re talking about performance here per se.”
The very existence of this conversation angers me. “Then what are we talking about, Dick?”
“Perhaps I can answer that,” Penny Wilton says, and I know then that what I suspected is true. This is her meeting.
I turn my attention to her. She swipes her hair away from her forehead and then folds her hands on the table in front of her where they will stay for only a minute until the hair requires another swipe. “Arthur,” she says. “Look, we’re all grown-ups here. We know you have been having a difficult time. And none of this is meant to take away from anything you have done for the school, or all the challenges you have had recently. But we thought it was important to sit down and talk. While as board members we are not on campus every day, and therefore not privy to everything, we do hear things. And some of the things being talked about are, frankly, bizarre.”
“Well, bizarre is a strong word,” Dick Ives interjects.
“What word would you use, Dick?” Penny asks.
“I don’t know. Look, Arthur, I think you know what we are talking about, don’t you? Nothing here is fatal. A lack of focus is all. Completely understandable, right?”
I look around the room. Mark Saltonstall and Brian Corcoran and Dave Tallmadge haven’t said anything, and the three of them look like they would rather be anywhere else but in this room having this conversation. Like Dick, we were all at Lancaster around the same time, and they are peers. I consider them friends, though, as in all things like this, I am also aware of the differences between us, that they have the money to live and do whatever they like, while I have the name and the position, but that when you come right down to it, I serve at their pleasure. And that can be taken away at any time, of course, even though my name and pedigree would suggest that it cannot.