The Headmaster's Wife(21)

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

“I am.”

“The answer is an easy one. It’s the only answer. Make sure your children live longer than you do. Do that and you’ve really done something, okay? The rest is filler.”





I return from the city to find Elizabeth alone in Ethan’s room, sitting in the rocking chair, staring out the window. It is dusk, and there is not much to see. I do not like being in Ethan’s room, and frankly I wish we could acknowledge somehow that he is not here, and therefore this room should return to utility as a guest room. But Elizabeth prefers that it appear as it did when he was a student. It is virtually unchanged from then. His navy sport coats and tan chinos, the uniform of the Lancaster boy, still hang pressed in the closet. There is a Michael Jordan poster above the twin bed. I do not like this room and I do not like that this is how Elizabeth chooses to spend her time now, this and the obsessive tennis that makes no sense to me, either. There is no future in it.

But if you learn anything in a marriage it is when to give up. I used to think that all marriages ran the same trajectory. They start with wanting to climb inside the other person and wear her skin as your own. They end with thinking that if the person across from you says another word, you will put a fork in her neck.

That sounds darker than I mean it to, for it is a joke. The truth usually lies in between, and the most one can hope for is accommodation, that you learn to move around each other, and that when the shit hits the fan, there is someone to suffer with. That sounds dark, too, but I am sure you understand. There are few things in this life we are equipped to do alone is all I am trying to say.

This week I learn that Russell Hurley is, despite his youth, both a better man and a more promising human being than yours truly. He is given every chance to confess to a crime he did not commit, in exchange for leniency, for really nothing more than a handful of demerits that may mean washing the floor in the common areas one winter Saturday morning, but he will have none of it.

Discipline Committee is a crucible. For many kids it is the first major test of their young lives. But Russell Hurley is so sincere in his denial, so unyielding in his belief in himself, that I can see the entire committee bending under his indomitable will, though they have no idea what to do with evidence that is more damning than most of what we see. Not a thing circumstantial about bottles under one’s bed.

He is also a big, good-looking kid, and this doesn’t hurt, either. Nevertheless, the facts are the facts and promises are promises. Knowing what I have committed to Betsy, I ask to see him in my office after the Discipline Committee meets. There is still time to turn this around, but I need his help. You would suppose that, as head of school, I could just wave my wand and it is fixed. Perhaps that is true, and perhaps I should take this opportunity to right this wrong, but once we are into the committee it is more complex than that. Russell has testified in front of his peers and in front of the faculty members and Dean Marx and, not least of all, me.

Outside it is snowing. One of the first substantial snows is anticipated, and what falls as we talk are fat, slow flakes that stick to the bare limbs of the trees. I plead with him.

“Russell,” I say, “Think about your future here. We are not Deerfield. There is no second chance. You can end this now.”

“By admitting I did something I didn’t do?”

“If that’s how you choose to look at it.”

“So you are encouraging me to lie, then?”

“Of course not. I am telling you to be practical.”

“Even at the expense of the truth?”

“Life is a series of trade-offs. Surely you have figured that out by now.”

He goes to the window. I watch him take a deep breath. He stares out at the falling snow as if the answer he seeks were somewhere out there. He turns, and I see him in profile, and it is there that, for only a moment, I see the man he will become someday. An attorney perhaps, thicker around the middle, sallow-eyed, tall but slightly stooped. No longer the lean, young athlete.

I think I have him, but he is resolute. “I won’t lie,” he says.

“So you refuse to admit anything?”

“I won’t lie,” he says again.

“Just to be clear, you know what this means? That you give me no choice? There is only one way I can vote, you do understand that?”

He sighs. “You do what you need to.”

He leaves me alone in my office.

Have you ever wished you could just get out of your own way? That the very moment when things feel inevitable is precisely the moment when you should question their inevitability?

I know this is a trap. This is a mistake, but there are those who live by principles and those who live by nothing at all. And at Lancaster you have no choice—gratefully, despite the hardship that can come with the consistent application of principle—but to be in the former group.





I get Russell’s father on the phone. He is a plumber, and I do not expect this to be a difficult conversation, and it is not. There is no nice way to say it, but men like Russell’s father are not accustomed to questioning men like me, and when I am done talking he says, “When should I get him?”

“Russell?”

“No, some other kid. Yes, Russell. Is he done now? Or is there something else he’s got to do?”