The Headmaster's Wife(29)

She looked from her father to her mother. “I want to,” she said.

“We don’t know that we can afford it,” her mother said.

“You need to take some tests,” her father said.

“Okay,” she said.

That fall, her father took her to Andover, to Exeter, to St. Paul’s, to Groton, to Miss Porter’s and Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, and, finally, to Lancaster, which was the closest of the bunch. She took the SATs and focused her energy on each question, and when the test scores came back and she was four questions off from being perfect, her father gave her a hug, for it had confirmed what he felt: that her mind was as sharp as any around.

Walking around those old campuses, seeing the students, handsomely dressed and put together, she thought, This is a world I want to belong to. In the end, she favored Exeter and Choate, though her mother insisted she apply to them all, but especially Lancaster, so it would be easy to come home on weekends. Exeter and Lancaster offered full scholarships, and from there the decision was easy. One was an hour away. The other was four. This would be her mother’s victory.

In the fall of 1973, she left Craftsbury and enrolled at the Lancaster School. Her life had switched tracks again.





Her mother called her Elizabeth. Her father called her Boo, after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird, his favorite novel. Some of her friends called her Lizzy. As a child, she did not like her name. It felt stuffy to her, like an old lady’s name. A name for queens, not small-town Vermont girls. Her first act upon going to Lancaster was to change it—well, partially. She chose a new derivative. She had settled on this new name the July before she went away to school and she kept it a secret. She wrote the name over and over in her notebook, practicing how it looked. Sometimes she stood in the mirror and said it out loud, and when she did, she imagined herself at the fancy prep school, moving along the walks, beside the manicured lawns, sitting in classes and arguing with boys who thought they were smarter than she just because they were boys. This was the part of going away she liked the best: She could reinvent herself. She could be whatever she wanted. She no longer had to be this girl who lived in a Podunk Northeast Kingdom town in a drafty house with a driveway full of cars that worked only on sunny days.

And so on her first day, after a tearful good-bye with her parents during which she both wanted them to stay and could not wait to see her dad’s Peugeot leave campus before it sputtered to a halt, she corrected Mr. Crane, her dorm parent, when he called out her name at the first dorm meeting.

“It’s Betsy,” she said, and from then on it was. It was that easy.





Those first nights, she was homesick. She cried in her bed after lights-out, sobs she hoped the pillow muffled so that her roommate, some rich girl from New Jersey with clothes she could only dream about, would not hear. She felt unmoored suddenly and thought that perhaps she had made a terrible mistake. In Craftsbury she had been the smartest girl in town, and while there were lots of smart kids here, there were also dozens of rich kids, and this she was less prepared for: how much money meant. From the moment she arrived she saw that the culture was different. She didn’t have the right stuff. Not only the right clothes, but also the right albums and the right posters. She had nothing she should have had, and for a day or two this was enough to cause her face to break out in a way it never had before, and this only exacerbated her sense of loneliness, and she wanted to go home.

But then classes started, and she liked the small classes, and it was different from Craftsbury—students spoke out, and soon she did, too. Sports were mandatory, and she signed up for field hockey and she was not much for sports, but she liked that the choices were made for her. In other words, it was not a question of whether she would play sports or whether she was good at sports, but instead which one she would choose.

But when the clear structure of the weekdays dissipated in the evenings and on the weekends, she felt exposed, and she was painfully aware of how she stood on the outside of things at Lancaster. She joined the other girls who didn’t have boyfriends—or invites to the city or ski houses or wherever the campus emptied to on weekends—in the sad TV room with its tired furniture, where they ate ice cream in their pajamas and watched whatever dreck the television spat out. She saw girls on her hall readying themselves for that half hour of freedom after study hall when some cute boy waited for them outside and the two of them would move out together into the darkness. She longed to be one of them. But instead the TV room became her room outside her room, and she couldn’t help but notice that the girls in her position were also the outsiders—the foreign girls; the scholarship girls; the girls who had decided, or had had it decided for them more likely, that their Lancaster would be limited to the classroom and the athletic fields.

But then, after she was there a month, something extraordinary happened. She was invited to an off-campus party. A girl, the daughter of faculty members, hosted it. Her parents were away, and the invitations were exclusive, hers whispered to her by a senior girl in her dorm who had never spoken to her before, with the message that if she were to tell anyone else, her invite would be rescinded.

“Why me?” she asked.

The girl smiled. “Someone wants you there.”

It was a Saturday night, and curfew was not until eleven. She kept the secret and did not know who else who would be at the party, beyond the girl who had whispered the invite to her. The house was one of the white Colonials down on the main street, and she arrived at seven, just as the dusk was settling on the early fall night. The girl whose parents owned the house opened the door for her, and she was led into the back living area, where about fifteen students were sitting around on sofas drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. They looked up when she came in, but the conversation continued. She felt awkward and unsure what to do with herself. Then one girl whom she had seen around campus, tall and pretty with long, straight black hair, came over to her and said, “You’re Betsy?”