The Headmaster's Wife(49)

“You can’t be who you say you are.”

“That’s one of the things that will take time.”

“I want to go now.”

Russell looks around the room. It’s windowless and positively Soviet. He doesn’t blame Arthur, and though Arthur’s crime is small, small compared to what he believes it to be, given his fractured, broken mind, it is unlikely he will just be released to take off his clothes in the park again. Instead, Russell thinks, the decision is more around where he will go. The police certainly don’t want him; they just want him to be somewhere else, off the streets and out of sight.

“I know,” Russell says. “I think I can help.”

Arthur’s head lifts slowly, and he looks at Russell. His narrow eyes squint. His head appears to be heavy on his shoulders, as if it’s hard to hold up.

“How?” he asks.

“I think I can get you out of here, but you can help yourself, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Arthur, I’m going to be straight with you. They are going to put you in Bellevue. Do you know what that is?”

“Of course. It’s a mental hospital. Why would they put me there?”

“Arthur, I know you don’t believe this. But you are not well.”

“I am fine.”

“I know. You are fine. Problem is they don’t know that.”

“Someone call Dick Ives. He will straighten this out. Lancaster’s attorney is Willard Bass from Bass, Frank, and O’Connor.”

“Arthur—you can’t win this. I’m sorry. I can get you out of Bellevue. But you need to agree to go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“A place in Connecticut. It’s a residential facility. Very different from Bellevue. If you go there and do well you’ll be home in no time.”

“A hospital?”

“Yes, but it’s not Bellevue. It looks more like a—it looks more like a boarding school.”

Arthur sinks in his chair. He begins to run his hands through his hair over and over. Russell says, “You don’t need to decide today. They will let you sleep now. Would you like that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Arthur. I’ll be back tomorrow morning, okay?”

Arthur nods, and Russell stands to leave. Arthur says, “Russell? You are Russell?”

Russell turns around and looks at the slender figure in clothes too big disappearing into the metal chair. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For everything.”

Russell nods. “Me, too,” he says.





Riding the subway uptown, moving with the train as it shudders around the bends with the lights flickering, Russell thinks about the randomness of life. It was entirely arbitrary that he happened to hear the name Arthur Winthrop as he moved through the hallway of the D.A.’s office yesterday morning and decided to stop one of his younger colleagues, who told him the story of the headmaster in the park. It was hardly a serious crime and never would otherwise have come to his attention, if it hadn’t been for the station of the person involved, which made for good office gossip. Even though Russell had been at Lancaster for only four months, for some reason all these years they had kept him on the mailing list, and every three months or so the glossy magazine showed up at his apartment, pictures of Arthur everywhere, and sometimes pictures of Betsy, so in this way he has watched the two of them grow older, like a celebrity couple you follow in the newspapers. And sometimes, looking at Betsy, he got pangs of remembrance, but then he would stop and chastise himself, how silly it was, and how long ago. It doesn’t make any sense to mourn the loss of something that happened when you were a teenager, though there were other times when he thought in some ways everything that had happened since in his life traced back to that short time he had had on that campus.

But after he heard Arthur’s name and asked what was being done, it took only a moment for him to decide to involve himself. He placed the call to the school, and after a long pause he was talking to Betsy, and on the phone, things changed for him. There she was, telling him things like an old friend—that they had lost their son, that Arthur had lost his mind, that she had tried to take her own life. She said they had a horrible row when she was in the hospital recovering from hypothermia—a student had found her crawling toward the dorm after she came out of the river. She blamed Arthur for their son’s death and she knew it was unfair but she needed to say it and she did. After that, he disappeared. Until the call from the NYPD that he was in custody.

And so he found himself telling Betsy to have the lawyers hold on, that he would take care of it, all of it. And he heard the relief in her voice and the trust coming across the decades and through the phone. “Come down here,” he said. “It will be okay. I promise.”

He exits the subway and on Amsterdam he stops at Planet Sushi and orders two sushi dinners and an extra order of the hamachi. This is one of those nights when he wishes he knew how to cook, wishes he had one good dish he could execute, even if it was pasta with clams or something like that. But since he divorced ten years ago and moved to the one-bedroom with its view of the Hudson, he turned his refrigerator off and took the door off of it and filled it with books. The stove, also unplugged, holds in its oven his important papers, his birth certificate and passport and so on, since he figures if there is ever a fire, this is the one place that will withstand it. And New York allows you those possibilities, he thinks, the ability not to have to do anything for yourself.