The Headmaster's Wife(27)

The funeral is held in the field house, and the crowd is tremendous. The entire student body is there, as are many alumni; the faculty, of course; the trustees; and then the full congressional delegation from Vermont and the governor, who has asked to say a few words. Chaplain Edwards leads the service and even delivers the eulogy, which surprises many, since when other students have died—a car accident, say—the headmaster became the willing repository for the community’s grief. This time is different, naturally, since it is the headmaster’s son, but they are so used to hearing from him on all matters great and small, it is a bit of a surprise that he sits with his head down in the front row during the entire service, and even more of a surprise when he is not in the receiving line afterward, but instead is spied walking out near the woods, his hands behind his back, his head hung low, like some country gentleman out for his afternoon constitutional. But since no one will try to measure a father’s grief, people keep their thoughts to themselves, and Mr. Winthrop is given a pass.

In the days that follow, the grand headmaster’s house fills with visitors. Trays of cold cuts and petit fours make their appearance on the large table in the dining room, get brought to the refrigerator, and then returned the next day as if they never left. Elizabeth is ever gracious with the visitors, and despite her lack of patience with being told to sit down or to relax—as if that were possible—she gives in to it for the most part, though it occurs to her that moments like these, the unfathomable trenches of life, are belittled by becoming excuses for people to indulge themselves. The whiskey and the gin and the vodka carafes are constantly in need of refilling, especially for her husband, who suddenly drinks scotch as if it were water. There is no blueprint for grief, she thinks, and Arthur is acting like a tortoise crossing a road: Sometimes his head is there, and then a moment later it is not. The only constant for him is that he now drinks with impunity, since no one dares give him an ounce of crap about it.

And for a week or so, Ethan Winthrop is the talk of campus. He is regarded, as the dead always are, more fondly than he was when he was alive.

Faculty members describe him as a sweet boy, someone who tried hard to fit in, always a challenge for the son of a headmaster. Some of them have been around long enough to remember his father as a boy, as a student, and against the shadow of a different war. His father, they say, was always quick to remind faculty of his station, of who his own father was. Not Ethan, who kept his head down and was, by all accounts, a pretty good kid.

Students and recent alums, classmates of Ethan’s, all seem to know him better than they did when he was alive, stories sprouting up out of nowhere, like the girl whom no one remembered throwing him so much as a bone claiming that he slipped it in her on the wrestling mats after the prom.

Then as a week passes and then two, the finely honed regimentation of the school takes over—the bells tolling, the classes, the athletics, the formal lunches and dinners—and suddenly no one talks about Ethan Winthrop anymore. He is confined to a distant memory, just someone everyone once knew, except in the great white Colonial on Main Street, where Elizabeth Winthrop has taken to spending all her free time in his old bedroom, still full of his life from just a year before, when he was a senior in high school. Here are his trophies from basketball and track, his posters, his prep school clothes still hung neatly in his closet.

In the afternoons, she sits in a rocking chair and moves back and forth, like some young girl in a group home soothed by the motion. She looks out the back to the soccer fields and the girls’ dorms and the woods of spruce and white pine that line that far side of campus before the river.

On the rare times she ventures out, no one talks directly to her; they only whisper around her about how tragic it all is. A man cut down in his early prime. Such promise! His whole life unfolding in front of him like a gilded path, if only he had chosen to take it.

The one other place Elizabeth finds solace is on the tennis court. She took up the game recently, and there are a few other women she plays with regularly, women on the same level, content to get the ball back across the net—each good shot a tiny miracle. But now she only wants to play by herself, and for hours at a time she stands next to a bucket of balls and strikes serve after serve. It is the metronomic thwack of ball against racket that she likes, the idea that her ancient, tired arm can still summon the strength to go high above her head and catch that ball in midair, stopping time for just a moment.

But mostly she sits in Ethan’s room, and when she does, she thinks of him not as the young man who went to war, but as the baby she carried inside her, the little kicker he was that whole nine months, always against her rib cage, rat-a-tat-tat over and over. “He’s got some left foot, Arthur,” she told her husband at the time, and that was enough to draw a hearty laugh from the normally taciturn Arthur, and that little boy fought to stay in her like he wanted nothing to do with this world, fourteen hours of relentless labor. And Elizabeth couldn’t blame him, coming out into all that noise and light, for who would choose that if they could?

But then, after they cut the cord, the nurse brought him close to her face, and Elizabeth just looked at him—his little features, his tiny nose, and his eyes with the glue all over the lids—and who cared that he was all purply from birth, she knew her own when she held him to her breast. He was a part of her more than anything else had ever been.

And Elizabeth desperately wants to believe that she was better for the time she had with him, watching him take those first tottering steps, and then seeing him rushing through the door as a boy and later as a man when sometimes she caught herself staring at him, surprised that this big, strong person was once a tiny peanut in her arms. But the truth is, she’s not sure. If she had never had him she would not hurt like she does, and maybe someday it will become a dull ache, but it will always be an ache, and sometimes, in those moments when the slightest of things reminds her of Ethan—a snowy afternoon on the quadrangle with boys playing touch football, their carefree voices melding into one youthful immortal cry—the ache becomes a deep hole in her chest, and she wants to die.