The Headmaster's Wife(44)

Here there is the semblance of a beach, a sandy lip where the water ends and before the bank begins. Along it lie ribbons of detritus, branches and leaves and who knows what else the runoff has left there. Her father had a name for this, these ribbons, and for a moment she struggles to remember what he called them. Oh, yes, she thinks, the skins of winter. She always loved that term. The skins of winter. The winter sheds it skin every spring, her father explained. Just as we do at certain times in our lives. She thinks about this: people as snakes. She shed her skin when she first came to Lancaster. The day she became Betsy. And then again when she married, and then, of course, Ethan. Now, about to move into the big white house, she figures she is about to do it again.





She tries, sometimes, sitting up in Ethan’s room and staring out the back during this, the longest of winters, to remember this old house with fresh eyes, as it was to her the summer they moved in. She tries to remember how much happiness a physical space could once give her. Those evenings when they first moved in, when Ethan had been tucked in and Arthur was up sipping his scotch in his office and looking over his papers, when she would just wander through it, discovering something new each time. A big house is full of surprises, she thought, and suddenly there would a charming stretch of wainscoting that had somehow escaped her gaze before, or her eyes would settle on one of the crooked diagonal Vermont vernacular windows that all these old houses seemed to have, a way of addressing the eaves, and she would stop and marvel at it.

But often those memories are hard to summon, so she goes for the easier ones—that first Christmas when they cut down the tree themselves, hauled it in front of the fireplace, only to discover that it was still three feet too tall. By the time they sawed it down to size, it was a square tree, and for years this was a great family joke, the year of the square tree. But then it didn’t matter, for they had the annual Christmas party for all the faculty and staff, and she loved nothing more than seeing her house full of gay, flushed faces, the bounty of food filling the great dining room table, the fires roaring in the fireplaces, and the children running underfoot. Most of all she loved that this was her house, Arthur’s, yes, but hers, too, the first lady of Lancaster, though no one used that term. Maybe Karen had been right: She was aloof. But now, at least, she had good reason to be. They were deeply part of this place, at the heart of it, really, but also, because of their station, they could be reserved. Should be reserved, Arthur would argue. “They don’t all have to love us,” Arthur said, “but they will respect us. Especially if we keep a proper remove.”

She remembers, too, from that first Christmas, the look in her parents’ eyes when they first toured the house, her father sitting in front of the fireplace with a beer and watching Ethan scramble on the ground tearing open presents. Her mother taking in the large kitchen built for catering, the views of the fields out back. She loved that her whole family could stay with them, wake up in the morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, that she could sit like an equal until late at night with her own parents, sipping wine in the warm glow of the living room with its high ceilings and its soft light.

There was a sense then that she had arrived. For this was all she wanted, wasn’t it? This house, this school, this accomplished husband, this son of hers with handsome long lashes and perfect features. There was nothing for her to worry about other than what time she needed to be at the library. A perfectly scripted life, in other words, with regimented days and seasons defined as much by the rhythms of school as by the weather. It was beautiful to be part of something bigger than she. Something that stretched both backward, to generations that came before, and forward, purposefully, to generations that had not yet arrived. Her life had both symmetry and meaning and sometimes Elizabeth thought that was all one could possibly ask for.

And at the center of it all is Ethan. Is it possible to love anything more than she loves her son? She remembers her mother telling her that the day she stopped being selfish was the day Elizabeth was born. She never fully understood what this meant until Ethan came along. There are times when she looks at him—out on the soccer fields as an eighth-grader, running independently and fast, strong-thighed and muscular for his age—when the feelings that swell in her heart are so great she doesn’t know where to put them. She is proud of him; she fears for him; she adores him the way one adores a new lover, not the sexual part, of course, but the part where the rest of the world recedes and all of life is distilled into the most elemental of human relationships, where you would gladly trade your life so that the other person might live, and you would, as well, consent to die if they ceased to exist.

Ethan is a sweet boy, though not a perfect child by any stretch. There are the usual adolescent troubles. Though he is an athlete by the time he is a freshman at Lancaster, she suspects he is smoking. She takes to smelling his fingers when he comes in at night after study hall, which he spends, like the other faculty brats and day students, in the library. Now and again she suspects he has been drinking, too, perhaps out in the woods with some of the other kids, and once it is unmistakable, the beer thick on his breath, and Arthur grounds him for a week, nothing but study hall and meals, classes and sports. He does not take him to the Disciplinary Committee, though they discuss it briefly, and she is in agreement with him that because Ethan does not live in the dorms, it is different. They are like parents to a day student, so why would they turn him in? “It would only hurt his chances of Yale,” Arthur says. Which is not to say that Arthur isn’t hard on Ethan. He is. And this is where she and Arthur tend to differ.