The Headmaster's Wife(13)

Cherie bit her lip. The carillon was marking a quarter hour. She’d noticed the clock in the kitchen at nine fifteen just a little while ago. It had to be nine thirty. The quad was empty. She’d always hated the cold. Back in Ann Arbor, she’d promised herself that as soon as she had the chance she’d go somewhere warm. She’d do her graduate work in Florida or Hawaii. She’d move to Texas or South Carolina and civilize the Bible Belt. Instead, she’d done her graduate work in Wisconsin and then moved to New Jersey, to the first of the boarding schools. The only way she could have managed to get any colder would have been if she’d gone to Alaska, or if they had boarding schools at the North Pole.

She turned away from the window. Melissa was still sitting in the big leather chair and still sipping her tea, black tea, the strong kind.

“There’s one other thing,” Cherie said.

“What’s that?”

“Alice Makepeace doesn’t like him.”

“Doesn’t like Mark DeAvecca?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s just because he’s Michael’s roommate, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Cherie said. “I know he must be in the way, but that hardly seems like enough of a reason. She really doesn’t like him. Not at all.”

“Then that’s one more reason for you to stay away from him,” Melissa said.

“He’s my student.”

“I mean stay away from his problems,” Melissa said. “I really hate to be the heavy here, Cherie, but the simple fact is that that woman is dangerous, and you know it. She’s dangerous in ways I can’t begin to count. She’s dangerous to anybody who gets in her way—”

“You’d think somebody would catch on to what she’s doing,” Cherie said. “This is the third student in three years. One of them is going to file a complaint one of these days. And don’t say she’ll just talk herself out of it. People don’t just talk themselves out of it these days. Think of the priest scandals. She’ll go down, and she’ll bring the school down with her.”

“Maybe. My only concern is that she doesn’t bring us down first. She—does things to people, Cherie, you know she does. She can get almost anybody fired if she wants to, and she isn’t brutal about it. She’s got a lot of finesse. But you’re just as fired with finesse. And you don’t want to be fired—or in jail.”

“No,” Cherie said. “That’s true enough.”

“The only way to survive in these places is to do what we originally planned. It’s worked so far and no fuss. Alice Makepeace is one of those women who gets what she wants the way she wants it. She’s got the conscience of a Roald Dahl villain. Don’t get in her way. If it’s true and she really doesn’t like Mark DeAvecca, then Mark DeAvecca will get shown the door and you won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

“But I will worry about him,” Cherie said. Then she turned back around and looked out the window one more time. Everything looked dead, or worse. She wished that spring would come. Everything always felt better in the spring. That had been true even back in Michigan.

Maybe what was really wrong with her, and with Melissa, was the obvious—that Alice Makepeace was exactly the sort of woman both of them wanted so very much to be. It was terrible to think that people couldn’t be happy no matter how much they worked at it. It was terrible to think that people, even women, would choose danger over safety, intensity over security, flash and dash over the solid day-to-day of love. It was terrible to think it, but it was probably true, and it was especially true of both of them. Now she had a whole raft of student accounts to rectify, and the house accounts to do. She should have a stack of student IDs to verify, too, but they were gone, and she hadn’t had a chance to get them back again. One of them belonged to Mark DeAvecca. It was the third one he’d lost this year.





6


James Robert Hallwood should have been a professor in an Ivy League English department in the 1950s or even earlier, when erudition and elegance were assumed to be the goals of anyone with half a brain in his head and nobody laughed at Clifton Webb. Well, James admitted, probably everybody laughed at Clifton Webb; they just didn’t come out and say what they were thinking because in those days homosexual men were not only supposed to be in the closet but invisible. They were not invisible, of course. James may never have been a professor in an Ivy League English department, but he was old enough to remember the 1950s. He’d had an uncle whom everybody had referred to as a “confirmed bachelor,” as if a taste for going into New York and hanging out in Greenwich Village bars was the sign of a man too dedicated to chasing girls to ever settle down. People sniggered—that was the word, too, sniggered, something different from “laughed” or “chuckled” or even “derided,” a word with a world of meaning in it, a sense of time and place. James had not sniggered. Even then he had been plotting a path, and although it included confirmed bachelorhood—he’d known that much before he was twelve—it did not include Greenwich Village bars. The real difference between the young and the old was that the young had no sense of the realistic. What looked to rational people like insurmountable obstacles seemed, to a teenaged boy with a true spirit of invincibility, just a few silly details to be ignored more than to be overcome. Now he wasn’t sure if he had been lucky or unlucky. He would not have found it easy to live in a time when being what he was could get him arrested and sent to jail. He wasn’t good at dissimulation, and he didn’t have the patience for pretense that surely had been required of men like Clifton Webb. The problem was, he had no patience for so much of what had come in the same boat that had brought the need for pretense to an end: victim’s studies, feminist criticism, gender-race-and-class. There was something truly obscene about holding the Pietá up to the light and seeing only the basis for a diatribe on capitalist retrogressions or the triumph of hegemonic male privilege.