“You have any idea what bothered you so much about it that you thought you needed me here?”
“Was it wrong to call?” Mark said. “I thought it was pushing it myself, but I was scared to death. I thought I was going crazy.”
“No, I’m glad you called me,” Gregor said. “I’m just wondering what it was about that particular incident that bothered you so much.”
“I don’t know.” Mark yawned. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I’m falling apart here. At least I don’t feel like I’m going nuts. But I don’t know what it was. You might talk to Mr. Candor about it. I saw him on my way back to Hayes House and told him all about it. He probably remembers what I said better than I do.”
“All right,” Gregor said, but Mark was already asleep, sitting up in bed and yet completely relaxed, asleep the way children sometimes fell asleep, with complete and unreserved abandon.
Gregor got his coat and made some calculations in his head about just how hard it was going to be to get Brian Sheehy alone in the next forty five minutes.
Chapter Six
1
Peter Makepeace had lived at President’s House for a decade, but he’d never taken the time to really look at it before. It was, as headmasters’ houses went, neither all that large nor all that impressive. At some of the more prestigious boys’ schools, the headmaster got a house made of stone and built to resemble an Oxford University college. Windsor, on the other hand, had started its life as a girls’ school, and it suffered from many of the things that had made the girls’ schools less impressive and imposing than the institutions the very same parents had supported for their sons. There was, for instance, the conceit that the dorms were really houses, and the school itself really a home. The only building on the entire campus that was not built to ape domesticity was the library, which had been given by Margaret Milbourne Ridenour, who had bitterly resented her exile to Windsor in the days when no coeducation was available and children were shipped off to boarding schools whether they liked it or not. There was a portrait of old Margaret in the library’s foyer. Peter honestly believed he had never seen a more sour, less satisfied human being. He didn’t think she’d be any less sour if she were sent to Windsor today, with its commitment to progressive education, its self-conscious egalitarianism, its pride in the interest its students took in allforms of political causes. Old Margaret was something of a fascist and even more of a traditionalist. She had wanted Windsor to look like, and be like, the Exeter her brothers had been sent to. It hadn’t then. It didn’t now. It never would.
It was odd, but he’d spent the entire day thinking about the Mission of the School. He’d never done that before, not even when he was prepping for his interview back when he was only hoping he would get this job. By then he’d known all about Alice, of course. He’d known that she liked to sleep with students; and that if students were not available, and sometimes even if they were, she liked to sleep with faculty instead. He’d known she used sex as a means to politics and politics as a means to sex; and that politics for her meant not the day-to-day grubbiness of compromises on the Highway Transportation Bill and half measures in pursuit of Welfare Reform, but grand visions of apocalypse and redemption, the one sure cure for the boredom of a life in which there was no need to make much of an effort about anything. People thought it was only the rich who found themselves caught in the web of meaninglessness that came with not having to work for what they had, but it wasn’t true. There were dozens of upper-middle-class housewives just like Alice, with husbands who were doctors and lawyers and campus-star university professors, who didn’t need to work even if they decided they wanted to, who couldn’t think of anything to care about, who had to make it all up. Lots of them took to alcohol or children. They came to places like Windsor in droves, driven and furious, insisting that Susie or Johnny would be admitted to Harvard or they’d die trying. Peter had long ago learned to spot the haunted look of those adolescent stand-ins, the children who were supposed to be everything their mothers had not had the courage to be ambitious for themselves. It was the mothers, too, not the fathers. The fathers dealt with it differently. They absented themselves from home and family. They put their desperation into their work. There were a lot of people out there who had not found a place of peace or a plateau of satisfaction. It wasn’t only Alice.
Maybe this was why he was thinking about the Mission of the School and about President’s House and what it looked like. He was standing on his own front steps—except that they didn’t really belong to him; they belonged to the school; headmasters only lived here while they were serving as headmasters—looking into the blackness of a sky whose details were obscured by the haze caused by the lights that were everywhere: coming from the houses, lining the quad, making the world safe on Main Street. Snow was coming down on him in thick, wet flakes. It had started falling an hour ago in the lazy way that made it seem as if no storm could be coming, and now it was gentle but relentless, the beginning of something far more serious. This house, he thought, was just like the house it had been meant to imitate, and just like the man who had once lived in that house, who had defined for all time the role of the American radical manqué. Peter had never had much use for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even the name grated on him. The idea that this fool—this utter dilettante with his third-rate mind and his enthusiasms, his wooly-headed flights into the nether reaches of incoherent antitheology—was supposed to be the very foundation of American literature made Peter angry to the point of violence. There had been a time when he had spent hours of work trying to prove that it wasn’t true. He’d done his master’s thesis on just that subject. Now he thought that there was nothing truer. Old Waldo’s spirit was alive and well and walking the Main Street of Windsor, Massachusetts, just as it had walked the Main Streets of Lexington and Concord and all the towns in between. Waldo would have liked Windsor Academy’s Mission Statement, with its dedication to educating “the whole person” and its paeans to creativity, intelligence, and “spiritual excellence.” He wouldn’t have known what it all meant any more than the trustees had, but Peter doubted if he’d known what half the things he’d written himself meant.