The Headmaster's Wife(42)

“He’ll be smart enough,” Elizabeth says.

“No, I mean, he’s got a gift. Look how quickly he’s learning. He’s so curious. He’s like a scientist.”

“All children are scientists,” she tells Arthur.

And as Ethan grows, each year passing more quickly than the last, this is the only time there is any acrimony between the two of them. It is a question of expectations. She wants to build a shield around Ethan and protect him from his father’s desires. Arthur sees his son’s life with such narrative precision. He will become tall and handsome, a star athlete and accomplished student (in his field of choice, of course, as long as it is something traditional), and then Yale awaits after Lancaster, and then the return to Lancaster to take his rightful place in the classroom and wait his turn to move into the big white Colonial.

Maybe, Elizabeth thinks, she should have considered all this before she married Arthur. After all, it was pretty clear what came with Arthur, this explicit sense of primogeniture, but wasn’t it also what she loved about him? That she could wear this old school like a blanket? Grow old inside its woolly warmth?

It is only through Ethan’s eyes that it gives her pause. Ethan’s eyes—brown as a doe’s, heavy-lidded—do not have her husband’s sharpness. Even in childhood pictures she has seen of Arthur there is a beady-eyed awareness in his brown eyes. But Ethan is an innocent, she thinks, surprised by anything other than straightforward benevolence. As for all children, the world is created for him every day anew, but unlike other children, he does seem open to this idea’s being shattered, even when cruelty intrudes and does it for him.

Once, when he is four, at a July 4 faculty party, they set up a bike race for the kids. It is in front of the girls’ dorms, and the kids race in groups by age. Ethan has his bike with the training wheels, and to the back of it he has attached, all on his own, a winter’s plastic sled, and in it is his stuffed rabbit, Bun, which he carries everywhere with him under his arm. When the four-year-olds get their turn, Elizabeth approaches Ethan to help him, but he says, “Mama, I want to do it myself.”

And he does. Down the road he goes with the other kids, pedaling his little heart out, the sled dragging noisily on the pavement. But when he gets close to the finish line, an older kid, maybe twelve and large for his age, steps in front of Ethan and impedes his progress. Elizabeth sees this blurrily, and she glances around for Arthur, but he has his back to the race, chatting with some of the men. Right then the larger boy throws Ethan off his bike and onto the ground.

Elizabeth bounds toward them, and Ethan is crying like mad, and the bigger boy is standing over him saying, “You can’t have anything attached to your bike,” like this is a race with rules.

It takes everything for Elizabeth to refrain from striking this boy who has pushed her son off his bike. Some big dumb kid standing in front of her shirtless, with downcast eyes, and she wants to run a knife through him.

She says to him, “Jesus, what’s wrong with you? He’s only four.”

Ethan is wailing. “Mama, Mama, why did that boy do that?”

And the truth is Elizabeth has no idea. It is no big deal, a bully. There are bullies everywhere. But in that moment, she wants to tuck Ethan back in her womb, where he will always be warm and no one will try to hurt him again.





Arthur’s father announces his resignation on a Friday in the spring. Elizabeth hears about it as a buzz that hums through the library.

“Did you hear about Mr. Winthrop? He is finished at the end of the year.”

Elizabeth waits until before dinner, when they are in their dorm apartment, readying themselves to make their way as a family for their nightly trek to the dining hall, before she asks Arthur about it. Six-year-old Ethan is in his room playing with a model airplane. She can see him if she turns her head, carrying the small model over his head, making whooshing sounds.

Elizabeth says, “I heard today that your father has decided to retire.”

“Yes,” Arthur says, taking a pull on a glass of wine and then putting it down on the bureau, not turning around to face her. He is straightening his tie in the mirror.

“Did you know about this?”

“Not the exact timing,” he says.

“What happens now?”

“There will be a search, of course.”

“Are you a candidate?”

He turns toward her now and gives her a quick smile, then back to the mirror and his Windsor knot. “They will want to talk to me, I am sure.”

“They will want to? What aren’t you telling me, Arthur?”

He finishes with his tie and spins around and smiles. “Betsy,” he says. “There is nothing to tell right now.”

She looks toward the room where their son is now spinning in circles, dipping the plane in his right hand up and down above his bed. “Bullshit,” she says a little loudly.

“Okay,” he says. “Look. I can’t have this around the school.”

She might fall apart. “What do you know?”

He looks toward the window and then, gratuitously, toward the door, like some student might barge in and reveal their secret. “Okay,” he says. “It’s mine to lose. I think you are looking at the next head of school.”

A huge grin sweeps across her face. “Holy crap, Arthur! I don’t know what to say. This is unbelievable.”