The Headmaster's Wife(14)

Okay, we have no business loving each other. But love has no master. Love has no head of school. It is as fickle as the wind.

Somehow I make it through dinner without further incident. I even contribute to the conversation in ways that to me feel positive. Afterward, we spill out of the old inn on Main Street and disperse, the trustees to the various hotels and vacation homes near campus and I back to the headmaster’s house. Tomorrow is a big day for all of us. The quarterly board meeting.

And while I should go home, say good night to Elizabeth and do something to sober myself for the morning, I do not. On the walk back to campus I hear the bells in the clock tower tolling, signaling that it is ten o’clock and the end of study hall.

The students at Lancaster have a half hour between the end of study hall and check-in with their dorm parent in preparation for lights-out at eleven. Many of them take advantage of this small window of freedom by gathering in the student union, or taking walks with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Coming onto the main walks of campus, I encounter many such students, and they greet me cheerily, with a “Hello, Mr. Winthrop,” but I just barrel along, my head full of wine, my feet unsteady as I trudge.

It is a beautiful night. Unseasonably warm, and above the flatlands of the campus that border the river the stars look close enough to touch. At one point I stop just to drink in the sky. I am on the central path that runs from the girls’ dorms up to the main campus. I am so fixated on the magnificence of the sky that I do not see the couple moving hurriedly toward me until they are on top of me, and I hear the girl say, “Keep going.”

But the boy says, “Good evening, Mr. Winthrop,” and as he does I pivot my head toward them and watch as they pass me. To my great horror, the girl is Betsy Pappas, her arm locked in the crooked arm of Russell Hurley, the tall new basketball star. He gives me a great cocky smile, as if he knows all about me and Betsy.

“Hey,” I say, somewhat drunkenly, but they are moving swiftly toward the main campus. I say it again, more of a growl than actual words, but their young legs have already taken them out of range. I can no longer see them. Then, for a moment, near the road, the yellow light of a streetlamp picks up their silhouette. I can see his tall figure, and the shorter one next to him. In the black night it is hard to tell where he ends and she begins.





I wake with a huge head. A pounding headache from all the wine. Lying in bed, I recall a shameful memory from the night before. I returned to the house, drunk and full of misplaced aggression from seeing Betsy with Mr. Basketball, to find Elizabeth curled up in the fetal position on her bed, her eyes open and staring blankly at the wall. She did not look up when I came into the room. I stood there, swaying slightly, and still she did not look up at me. It occurred to me that the catatonia she had been flirting with for months had finally taken hold, and rather than speak to her softly, try to bring her out, try to bring my wife back, I instead spoke to her in anger.

“Are you going to spend your life in this bed? Is that what you are now? It’s very nineteenth century, Elizabeth. You know that, don’t you? Should I fetch the doctor to look in on your consumption?”

She glanced up at me briefly, then back to the wall.

“You have nothing to say?” I ask.

This finally gets her attention. “No, it’s you who has nothing to say,” she says.

“Oh, is that right?” I say, eager to engage. “If you haven’t noticed, I have a school to run. Not that you would know anything about that. There was a time when that was important to you, though it has been so long I can hardly remember.”

“Go to sleep, Arthur.”

I stomped my foot. “Do not tell me what to do. I am not a child. Speak to me, Elizabeth.”

“Go to sleep,” she says again, and perhaps because she refuses to look up at me, or perhaps because even in my drunkenness I see something in the emptiness of her eyes, something that says I will not reach her, not this night, anyway, I give up.

I go to the guest room and pass out with my clothes on. And this is how I wake: starfished in my suit on top of the covers, mouth dry, full of shame.

I muddle through a seven-hour board meeting, and there are times I think I will not make it. I am soupy with hangover, and when I present my report to the board—an hour of straight talking—it is as if someone else were speaking. My words come automatically, and from somewhere else. I hear them linger in the air, and it feels like magic that they keep coming. Someone else is in control of my mind.

I am grateful for the committee reports, which drone on and on, but at least it is the board members talking and not me. Finally, it is over. Back at the house, I collapse on the bed, and the last thing I remember before I fall asleep is seeing Elizabeth getting dressed in the shadows near my closet, putting on her tennis clothes. No doubt heading back to the courts to hit another hundred or so serves. At least she has left the bed, but what is she playing for?

In the week that follows, I suddenly see Betsy everywhere. In class she is sullen and doesn’t participate unless called upon, but it seems not to matter where I walk on campus, I see her smiling, knowing face. Standing in a pack of students outside the dining hall, she beams as she looks up at the tall Russell, and when I walk by I see that their hands are clasped.

She is torturing me. It is as if nothing ever happened between us. In fairness to her, she was clear with me about not falling in love with me. Drinking in my study late at night, I find the images coming to me, and I want both to turn them away and to invite them in. I see Betsy and Russell entwined on the wrestling mats in one of those back rooms in the gym, long a chosen place for illicit lovers. Russell is on top of her. Her hands are up in his hair; her hands are all over his long, sinewy body. Betsy takes him in her mouth. She gives him the gift that is her. She gives it to him over and over and without a care for what it all means. I hate her for it. I hate him for it. I hate both of them.