The Headmaster's Wife(11)

There was no such thing as a Working-Class Genius, Peter thought. There was only one mediocrity after the other, each given a glow by rich people like Alice who preferred their romances written by Dreiser rather than Barbara Cartland.





5


For the first six months Cherie Wardrop was at Windsor Academy, most of the rest of the faculty had insisted on pronouncing her name as if it were the French endearment: “Che-RIE,” people would say, passing her on the walks in the quad or coming up behind her in the line in the cafeteria, proud of their boarding school French, and she would go along with them. Windsor was a miracle, as far as Cherie was concerned. It was hard enough to find a job of any kind these days. To find one just outside Boston was a near impossibility, and to find one in a boarding school that served the children of the very people she had admired so much as a child was—well, impossible, that was all. It was worse than impossible; it was silly. There were days when she woke up, looked at the bedroom around her, and thought she had somehow been transported from the kind of novels she used to write in secret in the eleventh grade. She’d been careful with those novels at the time. She’d known better than to write them so that the characters had the kind of names she was so fascinated with because she’d known that if she did somebody would be sure to find them, and then everything would go completely to hell. She wondered if it would have been different if she’d grown up out here instead of in the Midwest, if her parents had been rich and sophisticated instead of middle-class and midwestern. People here certainly liked to think they were different. They liked to think of themselves as “citizens of the world.” It was one of those things Cherie still hadn’t managed to understand. On the other hand, Melissa had been born and brought up around here. She had even gone to a boarding school like this one called Miss Porter’s, where Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had actually been a student. Melissa was just as fascinated by all these people as Cherie was and just as determined to stay part of the world they lived in.

The truth was, Cherie’s name was not pronounced like the French endearment. It was pronounced “cherry.” Her mother had named her after Cherry Ames, the heroine of a series of books for girls that had been popular when her mother was still in grade school. Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, the first one was called, and then the series went from there. Army Nurse, that was one—Cherry Ames went off to fight the good fight in World War II. Dude Ranch Nurse. Private Duty Nurse. Jungle Nurse. Boarding School Nurse. She should have read that last one, except that she couldn’t have. She couldn’t read any of them because the books were arranged carefully on a built-in bookshelf in the living room protected behind a thin sheet of soft plastic, preserved for all time. The closest Cherie had ever come to reading any of the books was listening to her mother tell her the stories, which happened several times a week from the age when she might have been interested in fairy tales. Other mothers read Dr. Seuss to get their children to sleep. Cherie’s told the stories of Cherry Ames.

I wonder what she wanted? Cherie thought now. It was one of the great questions of her life. Maybe her mother had wanted to be a nurse, but, if so, it was hard to understand why she hadn’t just become one. One of her mother’s sisters was a nurse. It wasn’t as if Cherie’s grandparents would have put barriers in Cherie’s mother’s way. It wasn’t as if Cherie’s mother had the usual excuse either. She hadn’t become pregnant out of wedlock, and if she had she would have been able to get an abortion, if that was what she’d wanted, and go ahead with her plans. An abortion is what Cherie’s mother said she’d wished she’d had when she found out that Cherie was not only not interested in being a nurse but was actually going to leave home for the Northeast and become a liberal and a member of the Democratic Party on top of it. Even worse than that, Cherie insisted that everybody know she had become a member of the Democratic Party.

“I’m not insisting on their knowing,” Cherie had said, trying to be patient, trying to be calm. “It’s not like that. I just think people should stand up for what they believe in—”

“How can you believe in a perversion?” her mother had said. “The Democrats are no better than Communists, that’s all they are. And they’re atheists. You were brought up to believe in God.”

That was her junior year at the University of Michigan, and of course her mother thought it was all the university’s fault—the entire state thought that Ann Arbor was nothing but a collection of Commies and perverts. Maybe it would have been different to grow up out here. At least people didn’t call other people “Commies,” and only ignorant people used the word “pervert.” Maybe words made a difference in the long run.