The Headmaster's Wife(46)

Elizabeth looks at Arthur. He swallows and then says, “No? There is someplace you like better.”

“I’m joining the army,” Ethan says.

Arthur snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Ethan shrugs and looks back to his pasta. Elizabeth shudders visibly and stares over at Arthur. This has to be a joke. This is something she and Arthur easily agree on. Not that they aren’t patriots in their own way, and not that they don’t love their country, etc., etc., but there are the usual caveats, and one thing they both know is that the army is not something their son would get involved in.

Ethan doesn’t say anything. Arthur stares at him. “You are serious, aren’t you?”

Ethan looks up again, for just a moment, then back to his plate. “It’s what I want to do.”

“Oh, don’t be self-indulgent,” Arthur says.

“Wouldn’t Yale be more self-indulgent, Dad?” Ethan says.

“Listen,” Arthur says, and Elizabeth can see he is deliberately restraining himself, though a flush has come over the back of his neck and there is a vein rising up on his forehead. “Look at me.” Ethan looks up. “If this army thing is something you really want to do, then for God’s sake go to college first. Go in as an officer. Be a leader of men. The army will still be there four years from now.”

This is precisely what Elizabeth would have said had she been able to say anything at all. This is her failure as a mother, she thinks: She is incapable of regulating the two men in her life.

Ethan says, “It’s done.”

“What do you mean ‘it’s done’?” Arthur says.

“I signed the papers today.”

“Oh, Ethan,” Elizabeth says, and she starts to cry. She does not want to be crying in this restaurant—there are other students, faculty—and it suddenly occurs to her that her son possesses the adult cruelty of a husband who tells his wife he wants a divorce in a crowded restaurant knowing she will not want a scene. There is a protocol the well bred always fall back on, even in the most trying of circumstances.

“Then unsign them,” Arthur says.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“You stupid boy. What do you want? To be a hero?”

“No,” Ethan says. “Nothing like that.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know,” her son says. “It’s just what I wanted to do, okay? I didn’t expect you to like it.”

“Honey,” Elizabeth says softly, “we love you, you know that. We just want the best for you. Your father and I—”

“Oh, shut it, Betsy,” Arthur says. “You stupid shit, Ethan. You know that. You’ve been given every gift and you throw it away. How can you be this dumb? Huh? My son? How can you be this f*cking stupid?”

Ethan stands up then. Elizabeth realizes that, near them, the restaurant has gone still. She glances around—eyes averted at other tables; people pretend they are not listening, though you can suddenly hear a pin drop. Ethan stands up, and he towers over the two of them, this son, this person they made, and he glares at Arthur, and Arthur says, “Sit down.”

“I won’t,” Ethan says quietly, a steely whisper, and when Arthur goes to get up, Elizabeth, aware of the pregnancy of the moment, the need to get through it, pulls on his arm, and somehow, to her great relief, Arthur sinks into his chair.

Ethan turns and walks out. Six months later he will walk across the stage in the field house and accept his diploma from his father. They will shake hands, not like father and son, but like any other prep school kid fulfilling the time-honored Lancaster tradition of handing the headmaster marbles so as to see how he disposes of them. (Arthur is prepared, of course, with a bowl behind him on a table, having handed marbles to his own father a generation before.) Like his male classmates, Ethan is handsome and boyish with floppy hair.

And by September, when his friends are moving into dorm rooms at Yale and Middlebury and Dartmouth, he will be in Iraq.





She lost Ethan and she thinks she might be losing Arthur. He sits up in his study and drinks all the time. He says he is working. Once, after he retires to his room—he has begun sleeping in the guest room—she walks into his office, and on his desk is one of the yellow legal pads he is always using to take notes for work. He has been writing on it, but instead of the usual notes about strategic planning or prospective donors or the other things that make up his work life, he has doodled all over the page like a high school student would. There are some immature sketches—one that looks like a penis; another a drawing of, of all things, a thumb. But the rest of the page is her name, scribbled all different ways, a hundred or so Betsys, and now and again, in the corners mainly, it reads, “Betsy and Arthur,” like what a fourteen-year-old boy might write if he thought no one was looking. Something that should be carved into the bark of a tree.

And then there is the talking to himself. Arthur has always mumbled to himself. He has always had this disconcerting habit, especially when he is preparing for public remarks, of walking around practicing out loud. Times when she would walk in the kitchen and catch him saying, “My dear students,” and then seeing her and stopping. “Was I saying that out loud?” he would ask.

“Yes,” she would say.