The Headmaster's Wife(15)

“Exactly.”

“And what’s at this Maverick Pond?”

“Nothing, really,” James said, “that’s the mystery. It’s just a water hole in the middle of a field. Everybody pretends to admire it because it’s part of nature, and there’s a demonstration out there every spring when the administration decides it has to spray to get rid of the mosquitoes. But there isn’t anything … there.”

“So what was she doing there?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. She has affairs with students. If the weather was somewhat warmer…” James shrugged.

David had picked up his coffee cup. Now he put it down again, interested. He taught at a university in Boston. James knew he looked on Windsor Academy as a kind of exercise in surrealism. He was always asking James why James didn’t just move to some place like Emerson, or even Tufts. James had his degree. He even had his publications. David, on the other hand, had tenure, and he had lost the sense of insecurity that was the inevitable accompaniment to being new and unknown in a strange school.

“Isn’t it funny?” David said. “Are you sure she’s having an affair with a student?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s not the first one she’s had either. I think she looks on it like a tradition.”

“Do other people know about this? Is it—common talk around the campus?”

James considered that. “Not exactly,” he said slowly. “She’s not blatant about it really. And I don’t think her husband knows.”

“Prep school headmasters are like college presidents; they never know anything.”

“Possibly. In this case, though, I think she’s made a certain amount of effort to keep him from finding out. But people do know. It’s hard not to know in a place as small as this.”

“And they don’t do anything about it?”

“What are they going to do?”

David picked up his coffee cup again. “Think about it. What do you think would have happened if it had been one of us with a student?”

“Ah,” James said.

“I know you don’t like to be political,” David said. “Even so, you do have to face reality some of the time. If it had been one of us with a student, we’d have been out with our luggage before we’d had time to pack. There wouldn’t even have been an inquiry. You know that as well as I do.”

“I supposè,” James said.

“Don’t just suppose,” David said. “It’s ever since the church scandals, and you know it. Especially here, this close to Boston, everybody’s walking on eggs. That’s a cliché. I know you don’t like them, but there it is.”

“Yes,” James said.

“The rumors don’t even have to be true,” David went on. “Nobody even bothers to investigate anymore, half the time. All you need is a student with an axe to grind, somebody you’re going to give a less-than-stellar grade to, and there it is. I’ve heard of three cases in the last two weeks. Oh, they didn’t happen all at once, or all in the same place, but it amounts to the same thing. You can’t be too careful. And you can never be sure.”

“I don’t have affairs with students,” James said stiffly. “What do you take me for?”

“It’s not what I take you for,” David said. “It’s what they take you for. All of them. Sometimes I understand the black separatists, I really do. Sometimes I wish we could go somewhere without them.”

“Who’s them? The entire straight world?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” James said. “Besides, I don’t know what you’re upset about. Aren’t you always telling me that it’s so much better at the university level, where they don’t have to worry about hysterical parents and homosexual men can be honest about who and what they are? I thought the university was a paradise for diversity, or however it is you phrase that on a day when you’re trying to get me to quit my job.”

“Nothing is a paradise when it comes to this,” David said. “It’s a witch hunt, literally. It’s the same sort of hysteria there was a few years back with satanic ritual abuse. It doesn’t matter what’s true. Doesn’t it bother you that that woman, what’s her name—”

“Alice Makepeace.”

“Alice Makepeace can have an open affair with a student, whom I presume is under eighteen—”

“I think he may be under sixteen.”

“Under sixteen!” David shook his head. “Think of that. Under sixteen. When it’s one of us with somebody under sixteen, it’s child rape, as if we’d set upon a toddler and buggered him brainless. More than half the cases of priest abuse were against girls, but you never hear about them. The head of the largest organization for priest abuse victims is a woman, but you never hear about her either. You only hear about us.”