The Headmaster's Wife(39)
Time is stripped away. They are back where they were more than a year ago, sitting on the dewy fall grass and watching the stars together. For a moment it as if nothing happened. Time is malleable. Memory fails. Memory changes.
Graduation day comes, and the day, as it should be, is bright and beautiful, and one by one the newly minted Lancaster graduates fulfill the tradition by ringing the bell that sits on top of the small hill behind the main quad. The girls wear all-white knee-length dresses, while the boys wear navy blazers, tan khakis, and Lancaster ties. They are a sea of sameness, and when Arthur rings the bell, Betsy watches as he steps through this window in time like Winthrops have always done and she thinks that the uniform and the moment seem to suit him better than most, and then she washes it out of her head, since she figures she will never see him again. Over the past couple of days since her swim test they have talked a few times, but nothing significant. She has forgiven him for what she believes he did to Russell, and part of her feels tremendously guilty about this, as if she is giving in to the larger forces that are this old school, but she also knows that Lancaster moves forward with the force of a river and that once someone is gone it’s as if he were never there. Lancaster has a way of dealing only with the living.
In the fall Arthur goes to Yale, and she goes to Wellesley. That first year, there are a few boys, one-night stands, really, but nothing that ever evolves into a relationship. Boys who tell her all kinds of things to get her into bed—like the long-haired Harvard student who tells her after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms that he wants to f*ck her through rainbows.
She doesn’t know if he means it literally, and he cannot explain it when she presses him, but it turns out that, naturally, he is so high that the point is moot.
One January night Betsy rides a chartered bus from Wellesley to New Haven with a group of other girls. They are expected at a mixer at Scroll and Key, a prominent secret society, and when they arrive a soft snow is falling on the trees in front of a magnificent granite building that looks more like a monument or a tomb than a place you would actually enter. Betsy files off the bus with all the other Wellesley girls. It is her first time at Yale, and she wonders if she will see Arthur, but she assumes she will not, since after all it is a big school. There are some other Lancaster boys at Yale but none that she was close to, and that is not why she is here, anyway. Coming off the bus, she thinks maybe she has made a mistake. She has been to only one of these before, at Harvard, when she first got to college, and that feeling she had then comes back now, the feeling of being on parade for privileged boys, their eyes on her, sizing her up in the narrowest of ways, as if they, these Wellesley women, are little more than what they suggest in their blouses and skirts, when around them they face a rapidly changing world where every facet of their education speaks to another truth.
Inside they are led into a great room, and there is punch and Yale boys, and she is not one who draws them but she is also not threatening, either, pretty enough for them to want to talk to her but not one of those girls who gets noticed right away, which she has decided is okay by her. The ceiling is vaulted, held up by great pillars, and there are staircases that lead up from either side to a balcony, and it is on this balcony, an hour into the awkward soiree, that suddenly they hear the sound of singing, high-voiced and pretty, and quickly all other sound falls away, and Betsy cannot at first help but smile at the sight of them, fifteen or so Yale men, dressed identically in a uniform not so different from those she remembers from Lancaster: navy jackets and ties and pressed khakis. The song is funny and ribald, and contains a line about how punch delivers certain properties to extract the chaste from the women of Wellesley.
She is smiling at this display, along with the others, when she notices Arthur. He is in the second row of the singing men. She does not know why it has taken her so long to see him, since he is unchanged, that tall, narrow countenance and the flop of brown hair falling over his forehead. He is staring right at her, and she knows then that he has seen her all along, and even though she is far below him, she can also see that he knows now that she has recognized him, and he allows himself the thinnest of smiles during the song’s last stanza.
When they finish, her heart is in her throat, as she knows he will come to her, and she is determined to act surprised, her back to the staircases as if she is scanning the rest of the room, and it is his hand on her shoulder she feels first, and when she turns, he is in front of her.
“Betsy,” he says.
“Hello, Arthur.”
“You look well,” he says.
She smiles. “You, too.”
And maybe it is the pull of Lancaster itself, the realization that even after eighteenth months at Wellesley she misses the old Vermont school. Things were simpler then, weren’t they? Or at least less formed. And seeing Arthur again, she feels somehow as if she knows him better than anyone else, better than the friends she rode the bus with, better than the boys from Harvard she opened herself up to on fall nights, doing the walk of shame out of brick dorms and into the gray, liquid air of dawn. Is there a way, she wonders, sitting on the granite steps with him, their backs against the cool stone wall, watching people mingle below them, to square what he did to Russell with this boy graciously making her laugh now? Could his actions be seen somehow as an act of chivalry? That, of course, she decides, is a stretch, but at a minimum she can put it away, store it like a yellowed letter in a small box deep in the closet of her mind.