The Headmaster's Wife(15)

I am a teenager again. You think this door is closed to you. You think you will never feel the hurt of first love again, and then here it is, a kick to your groin so swift it takes your breath away. Now, I am not a violent man, but I will confess that I have some awful thoughts. I want Russell to disappear. I take that back—I only want Betsy, the promise of what we started that night in the hotel room. I want to make love to her again, to taste her skin on my tongue, to feel the warmth of her breath, her mouth.

So it is not that I want Russell to disappear, though it is hard to see how I can have Betsy while he is around. Late at night, with a head full of scotch, I have this macabre fantasy. There is Russell floating facedown in the river, his body caught in a small eddy, being repeatedly thrashed against a fallen tree on the riverbank. It will be tremendously sad for our community, but when the school grieves, the head of school must lead. There will be services to preside over. Individual students to console. Most of all there will be Betsy. She will need to heal, of course, though healing can require a guide. I could be there for her. I could commiserate, lift her through this tragedy. A shoulder to cry on, a warm embrace to take away the chill of the dark nights.

The macabre fantasies fueled by scotch and the lateness of the hour give way eventually to the reality of the day. One morning I ask Mrs. LaForge to pull Russell’s file and, in my office while a cold rain falls outside the window, I open it and dive in.

Russell Hurley is from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, though not from the money that has moved into that Berkshire town in recent decades. His father is a plumber; his mother works as a secretary at the high school where Russell was a relatively average student. Certainly not Lancaster material, except for one thing.

Russell Hurley shattered every scoring record for boys’ basketball in the western part of the state. While Western Massachusetts is hardly a basketball mecca, the sheer numbers are impressive even for those who, like me, have a halfhearted understanding of the game. In his file is a DVD. I take it out and put it into the television. It contains the footage of Russell scoring his two thousandth point in his junior year. It shows a packed house of a small basketball court. He dribbles the ball up the court, and the defenders swarm around him, but he dekes one way, and the ball is like a yo-yo on a string off his fingers. He splits two members of the other team with his dribble, and at the top of the key he pulls up and, with one graceful motion, his body springs into the air and the ball leaves his fingers and spirals toward the basket in one great arc. It swishes through the net, and the game is stopped.

What follows is the stuff high school dreams are made of. A banner is brought out by earnest-looking cheerleaders. It has the number 2,000 on it. Russell, with a big grin on his face, jumps through it. The crowd goes bananas. The mayor of the small town comes out with a microphone and addresses the crowd about Russell while Russell stands off to the side, the timeless athlete. When it is his turn, he says all the right things, thanks his teammates, thanks the fans, and sounds like someone who was born to be worshipped, as he clearly has his whole life.

I turn off the television and read his admission essay. It talks about basketball mostly, though he does say that he knows that the NBA is not in his future and that, despite the interest he got as a senior in Great Barrington, his goal is to go to Dartmouth, and to do that, a postgrad year could make the difference for him.

His references all paint the same portrait: a good, humble kid with a preternatural gift. A natural leader. Someone his classmates all look up to. And on and on.

I am no match for Russell Hurley, and not just on the basketball court. I am haunted by the image of him jumping through the banner made to honor him. While I have never been the sports enthusiast that many of my peers are, I do know the grip it has on the high school imagination, even at Lancaster. Russell Hurley is instantly the most popular boy on campus, and not just among the students. Suddenly conversations come back to me: the admissions director and Mr. Peabody, the basketball coach, raving about this new boy, maybe the strongest player we’ve had in a generation. We’re talking New England championship, Arthur, he’s that good, they say. Pencil in thirty-five a game, they say. And they couldn’t understand my lack of excitement, but then again, that was before Betsy and during the time I found it difficult to get excited about anything.

I return Russell’s file to Mrs. LaForge and walk outside into a raw Vermont day. It is late October, and the leaves have mostly fallen off the trees, except for a few that cling to the bare branches like lifeless birds. It is gray and overcast, and as I walk, the first snowflakes start to fall. They won’t mean a thing when they hit the ground, but it is always significant, a harbinger, when you first see snow in the sky. Turns a page on a part of the year. The long dark winter lies in front of us now.

I walk to the river. It is not often I come here anymore. Across are the barren fields of New Hampshire. The river runs slow and fat and black on this gray day. I stare at the inky water. A big stick comes down the heart of the river, spinning as it goes, caught in the current. This part of the river never fully freezes, though it can be deceptive when a membrane of gray-white ice forms over it on the coldest of days. I follow the stick with my eyes. It spins one more time, then rolls toward the riverbank. It comes to rest at my feet and stops moving.





“Tell us about the river.”

“What about it?”

“You talk about it, but not directly.”