The Headmaster's Wife(2)
It was the chair of the board’s idea that I step back into the classroom. At first the suggestion angered me. Especially how it was framed. You seem distracted, Arthur, Dick Ives said to me after the last board meeting.
“Just didn’t bring my A game, Dick,” I said.
“It’s not just that,” said Dick. “More of a general feeling the board has.”
“This isn’t about golf again, is it?” It is well known that I hate golf. It is a silly game. Hitting a tiny ball with a stick for hours on end, and the board has been after me to do more of it. That donors expect it. For the life of me I have never been able to figure out what golf has to do with education at the Lancaster School.
“God, no,” Dick said. “It might benefit you to get back to your first love. Dip your toe in. Get closer to the mission. The capital campaign is done. Couldn’t be a better time.”
And so in the fall I return to my old discipline, English, by teaching one class. I choose the Russians. I always loved the Russians—Pushkin and Lermontov; Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov; Dostoevsky and the great Tolstoy. The atmosphere, the ethos of their work. They remind me of Vermont in November. Dark moors and muted colors, landscapes awash in brown. Lives determined by birthright and accidents of fate.
Anyway, immediately I see the wisdom of Dick’s advice. Standing in the classroom with the fall sun streaming through the windows, looking out over my charges, hearing the rise and fall of my voice—it is like I am transported back in time. I am twenty-four again, a year removed from Yale. In the classroom, where I belong. Literature matters. Literature is important. This, I think, is why you raise money, why you build buildings, why you endure endless bus travel over these hills for Wednesday and Saturday sporting events. Because in few corners of the world can you find the deeper human truths still being taught as they should be. The kind of truths that mold minds and create leaders. Lancaster has yet to produce a president, though it has come close. Perhaps in this room in front of me, I imagine, sits one of them.
I turn my attention back to the classroom. Handsome, preppy teenagers, the lot of them. The chosen ones. I pose a question, and it pleases me. The way it is constructed, grand enough to be rhetorical but also grounded.
I look around. A few hands go up. I look over at her. Her hand is raised. She looks confident. Something about her speaks to me, and I cannot figure out what. I call on her and I don’t fully hear what she says, though she has a nice voice. Instead I am fixated on her face, as if somewhere in those sad eyes resides a clue as to why her pulling her hair behind her ears has made me notice her in a way that tells me that it has been a long time since I have noticed anything at all.
That night at dinner I look for her. My table, the headmaster’s table, is at the far end of the great dining room with its high ceilings and chandeliers. My own chair always faces the entirety of the room, the great arched windows behind me. Every three weeks the students rotate tables. The idea is that, in time, they get to know the entire faculty and their families. It is a good system, I guess, though sometimes I wish we could follow other schools and move away from formal dining. My father would disagree, but I never liked the small talk.
I look over at my wife, Elizabeth. She has decided to come to dinner tonight. She does not appear all the time anymore, which is unusual for a spouse at Lancaster, especially for the wife of the head of school. Elizabeth is wearing tennis clothes. I frown. Hardly appropriate. Tennis is her new and overwhelming obsession these past years. She plays as soon as her work at the library ends, and often rises before I do to hit serve after serve from a raised bucket on one of the indoor courts. This I cannot understand, though she tells me she finds it hypnotic and therapeutic.
“Just serving over and over to no one?” I say to her once.
“Yes,” she says.
“I don’t get it.”
“There are lots of things you don’t get about me,” she says.
As I am remembering this, one of the students at the table, a redheaded sophomore boy who fancies himself a clown, is telling a story. He is from a well-known family, and this adolescent clownishness I have seen dozens of times. It is his way of drawing attention to himself, and while not particularly endearing to adults now, it will serve him well later. I half-listen to his story, something about Mr. Linder’s math class, though the other kids laugh heartily, as does Elizabeth.
And then I see her. She comes out of the kitchen with a tray in her hand. She is waiting tables, which isn’t what it sounds like, since all the students at Lancaster are required to have campus jobs. Though any jobs associated with the cafeteria are among the least desirable, and at the minimum she is not a star athlete. All the athletes get simple jobs, like cleaning the basketball courts, which is done by the maintenance crew anyway.
I turn to Elizabeth and whisper, “This girl, coming by with the tray, do you know her?”
Elizabeth looks up. “She’s new. Why?”
“She’s in my class. Said something interesting, that’s all.”
“Jewish,” says Elizabeth softly.
“Interesting.”
“What’s interesting about that?”
“Nothing,” I say, though a picture begins to form in my mind. She is new and a junior, which is rare at Lancaster, and suggests she is smart. An overachiever from a suburban high school, Westchester perhaps, or even New Jersey, Short Hills or some such place. New-money parents. Dad an ambulance-chasing attorney or in middle management at Morgan Stanley. Commutes into the city. Mom who favors yellow gold, lots of it.