The Headmaster's Wife(47)

“I need to quit that,” he’d say.

She’d smile. “Yes, you do.”

But after the funeral it becomes more common, and not tied to public speaking. He mutters around the house, and from her perch in the library, for the first time, she hears others comment on it. The headmaster is talking to himself, they say. And she is embarrassed for him, for the two of them, and she doesn’t know what to say to him or to others. It is no longer just the charming quirk of another Lancaster academic, the old man in his tweed and his school tie. It contains the husk of madness.

One evening, with the snow falling outside the windows, she cannot stand it anymore. She goes to him in his office, and there he is, dropping the legal pad and his endless and mindless doodles and pretending to absentmindedly look at his e-mail on the laptop in front of him. She loathes him and loves him at the same time. How can it be both? Maybe it is because he has decided to fall away just when she needs him the most. Things like this can go one of two directions, she thinks, and he has chosen to leave. He is a coward.

“Arthur,” she says. “You cannot pretend.”

“Elizabeth,” he says. “What is it?”

“You know what it is.”

“Is this about Ethan?”

She goes at him then. “Goddamn it, Arthur, will you wake up? Will you?”

“Come here,” he says. “Just come here.”

Somehow he coaxes her into his lap. He looks into her eyes, like he has always done. “There, there,” he says.

“Wake up,” she says.

“I know, I know.”

“No, you don’t,” she says. “You can’t pretend, Arthur. You know this, right?”

“Shush,” he says, and it is patronizing, but he does have this way with her, and she looks into his brown eyes and she wants to believe whatever he says.





The craziest thing about grief, she decides in those moments when she is capable of such reflection, is how it numbs you. Nothing tastes good anymore. Nothing smells pretty. Sleep is elusive. She no longer dreams and she thinks this might be because the dreams come when she is awake. They are the only things that are vivid to Elizabeth, and not even the rare early spring day, when she feels the sun warm on her face, can take her out of this. Maybe if she had someone to talk to it would be better. But what can anyone possibly tell her that she cannot figure out on her own? Yes, others have grieved, but it is also so particular. She’s not going to join some group so she can realize she is not alone. Nothing she feels surprises her, other than this: It does not get better. In fact, it gets worse. When they arrived at her door to let her know her son was dead, she thought, I can handle this; this isn’t that bad. And then, in the days that followed, she thought, Look at me, I am handling it. I am strong and capable, as stout as a mother with a dead kid can be. But then it doesn’t recede like the spring water. Instead it grows in intensity, like a virus that takes over her body, until it seems it is all she is. There is no more her any longer; there is just this thing that happened, the place in the world where her son used to be.

She spends a weekend up at her parents’, and it is strange to be back in her childhood house, and at night she drinks tea with her mom and dad, and it is the same table where they once sat and talked for the first time about Lancaster School. They want her to talk, and she will not. So they sit in silence, and the windows rattle as they always have, with the wind coming across the highlands. Her parents sadden her. Her father’s hands shake. Her mother doesn’t hear well anymore, and makes a good show of pretending to listen to Elizabeth, to put together what it is she is saying, but Elizabeth knows that her own words come out of her mouth and just hang in the air before disappearing.

She wants to tell them that there is nothing left that matters to her. But she realizes that they still have her, and her sister, who has twins in middle school, and while her father still cannot hear Ethan’s name without his eyes misting over, it is different for them. You get a second life as a parent when your children have children, your lifeblood flowing through a new generation, and this is something she will never know. She blames herself. They could have had a second child back then, and she did not want one. Maybe the ancient logic of multiple children is a guard against just this reality. The knowledge that if you lose one, there is always another to carry on for you. Some amount of love that will reflect back.

“You need to take care of yourself,” her mother is telling her. “I am worried about you. You are so thin.”

“I am fine,” she says, though she knows that is not true.

“She’s fine,” her father says, still believing in her all these years later. “Leave her alone, will you? She’s fine.”

That night, she lies in her childhood bed and does not sleep. She watches the light of the full moon play off the pastureland and she lies there in the dark and in her mind she sees the entirety of the life her son did not have. She imagines the pretty girl he would have married. She imagines the children they would have had. She sees him, tall and strong and kind-eyed, holding a baby in his arms, bringing the baby over to her, looking down on its dewy eyes. She imagines the goodness he might have brought to their lives, holidays with his family that would have made the pain of getting old bearable. Summers on the Cape watching grandchildren dance in the breaking surf. It is the marrow of life, she thinks, family, and it has been taken away from her.