The Headmaster's Wife(45)
Perhaps, she imagines, it is a question of expectations. The deep love for Ethan she feels translates for her into wanting to shield him from everything. He is an okay student, nothing exceptional, and in truth he struggles with math and science, which she thinks is fine, since she and Arthur were both English majors. But Arthur, whose own father drove him hard, wants nothing less than for Ethan to be at or near the top of his class, which for Lancaster is saying something. He wants him to excel on the field as well, and while Ethan is a decent athlete, he doesn’t start at soccer, and in lacrosse he doesn’t even play varsity. He is a normal boy, good-looking and sensitive, attuned to others, with high emotional intelligence, she tells Arthur. He is well liked, and isn’t that something?
“It’d be nice if he just had some high regular intelligence,” Arthur says dismissively.
His junior year, a Saturday night. She is upstairs in bed reading. This is in the winter. Outside her frosted windows a soft snow falls in the light from the back porch of the house. Arthur is in his office doing who knows what. Certainly sipping scotch. He drinks lots of scotch now. Downstairs she hears the door open and then the sound of something crashing. She sits up in bed and she hears Arthur’s footfalls on the staircase. Then she hears words, loud words, and she is out of bed in a flash, at the top of the staircase in her nightgown, and she sees her son and her husband grappling down in the front foyer. An antique lamp is broken on the ground in front of an end table.
“Hey,” Elizabeth shouts. “Hey.”
They both stop. She bounds down the stairs. They freeze and look up at her expectantly, as if she is about to do something. But as she gets closer, she sees in her son’s eyes a blankness she has not seen before. Ethan is as tall as Arthur, and stouter, and their arms are on each other, like they are holding each other up. She does not quite understand what she is seeing until Arthur says, “He’s really drunk.”
Ethan looks down at her. His head lolls to one side. “Fuck you,” he says. “Fuck both of you.”
Arthur doesn’t hesitate. He smashes Ethan across the face with his open palm and while she screams no, Ethan falls backward onto the hardwood floor.
Her heart rises in her chest, but he is fine, of course he is fine, it is a just a hard slap, but when he tries to get up, he stumbles and crashes into the wall.
He sleeps it off. And they don’t talk about it again, other than an awkward parent-and-child conversation in the living room, when they tell him he is grounded for two weeks. This is the next morning. He is hungover and contrite. Though now and again, when he looks over at his father, Elizabeth can see a hatred in his eyes that she has not seen before. It was a slap, nothing more, really, and she can justify it the same way Arthur does. He deserved it, didn’t he? He was belligerent and shitfaced and all that. Did Arthur really have a choice but to hit their son?
But at the same time, she knows something has been altered between the two of them. Or perhaps, she decides, it was there all along, a gulf just waiting to be explored by precisely this kind of incident.
At any rate, what is clear is that Ethan is not one who can drink. Some can hold it, and others cannot. What she saw in her son justifiably scared her. He was not there—no one was there. Just the brittle mask that, when lifted, showed only rage and anger. We all have it, she thinks, just some of us are better than others at burying it. It is a useful lesson to know that this is one thing her son does not excel at.
It is the second plane that does it. The first one is explainable, hearing it on the radio, an accident perhaps, maybe a small private plane, it is hard to know, in the confusion. But something in her gut tells her it is more than that—or was that later, with the benefit of hindsight?
But back at home, sitting on the couch with Ethan (Arthur still at the office), they watch the second plane go through the tower, and she no longer knows what she is looking at. She is grateful for Vermont. Nothing happens in Vermont. If this is the end of something, Vermont will be the last to feel it.
What she remembers from that day is the deep fear of the ineffable. The reports coming in on television of planes crashing everywhere. The Pentagon. Somewhere in Pennsylvania. It reminds her of the reports she read about when War of the Worlds was on the radio, and how people thought it was real. Here—the television cannot lie; there are the planes, there are the great plumes of smoke rising up over the city—there is no question it is real, but what are they looking at?
Soon Arthur is home, but he only adds to the alarm by saying that he heard that this is just the beginning. She shrieks in horror when the first tower collapses. She cries when the second tower collapses. Next to her on the couch, her son stares stoically at the television.
The worst part of this day for her, however, is before the towers collapse, when the television shows shadowy figures falling like stones down the sides of the building. The horror for her is unimaginable: people who know they are going to die and then choose the manner of their death. A world where falling from one of the tallest buildings possible is more desirable than being sucked into the fire behind you. She tries to imagine that choice for herself, but she cannot.
And then, a month later, it is Ethan’s birthday—a big one; he is eighteen—and they are out at the only okay restaurant in town, a place that, oddly, serves only pasta. It is just the three of them. They are halfway through their smoked chicken with pesto when Ethan looks up at the two of them and says matter-of-factly, “I’m not going to Yale.”