The Headmaster's Wife(168)

“Right,” she said. “I’ll get you another one.”

Then she was gone again.

Gregor looked around the Ararat. It was filled with people he knew, most of them people he had known almost all his life. He could remember Lida and Sheila and Hannah as girls, walking home from school in wool jumpers with white blouses underneath them, wearing those thick-soled, black tie-up shoes that were supposed to be good for your feet. Bennis hadn’t even been born then; and when she was born, she wouldn’t have worn those shoes. While he was plugging away in graduate school, she had been wearing crinolines and white gloves and learning to be polite at dancing class. Did that matter? He didn’t know that it did. He wished he understood what made up identity and how much of it had to do with nothing but sheer idiosyncratic perversity.

“Women,” he told Fr. Tibor Kasparian, “are nuts.”





2


Three days later, out in the wilds of Litchfield County, Connecticut, Mark DeAvecca was bored. Everybody always said that they wished school was over, but he’d been around long enough to know that when school was over there was never anything to do. What was worse, he was feeling really good, and really restless, and yet his mother and his doctor both wanted him to “rest.” He had been resting for about a week, and he was in the mood where he understood why some people felt the need to do physical damage to furniture. His mother had gone into the city. His brother, Geoff, was asleep, spending his long spring vacation from Rumsey by staying up as late as he could get away with and then crashing for most of the day. Jimmy was in the big loft over the family room, banging away on the piano, composing something.

Mark left the house without telling anybody, half walked and half jogged the three and a half miles into the Depot, and bought a New York Times. Alice Makepeace’s picture was on the front page in a story telling how she’d left her husband in the row over “the events at Windsor Academy.” There was more coverage of the case on the inside pages, and Mark found himself thinking that it figured. Alice being Alice, even The New York Times thought she was more newsworthy than the discovery of what Edith Braxner had eaten that was full of cyanide, or the fact that Windsor Academy would be closed for the rest of this academic year but would open in the fall. Mark wondered who they would get to be headmaster. He thought if they had any sense, they would get one without a wife.

He jogged most of the way back home and came in to hear that there didn’t seem to be any piano pounding coming from the loft. He threw his jacket over a hook in the mudroom, went through the family room to the circular stairs, and ran up.

“Hey,” he said.

Jimmy was sitting at the piano, making furious notes on a sheet of lined music paper. Mark leaned against the nearest couch.

“Hey,” Jimmy said, looking up, “don’t you ever sit all the way down? You make me tired just looking at you.”

“I went into the Depot and bought the Times,” Mark said. “Don’t tell Mom. She’ll have a cow. They found out what Dr. Braxner ate.”

“What did she eat? Who’s Dr. Braxner?”

“The one who died at school, you know, while you were there. Didn’t you pay any attention at all?”

“Mostly I was paying attention to your mother, who wasn’t exactly in a good mood, and to you. Who’d almost died. I remember that part.”

“Yeah, well, they killed Dr. Braxner later when I was in the hospital. I was thinking, you know, that if this had been an Agatha Christie book, I’d have been the murderer. That would have been cool.”

“Somehow I can’t see you as a murderer.”

“I can’t either,” Mark said, “but I’m not in a novel. Anyway, they put the cyanide in a chocolate-covered cherry. That’s what the Times said, anyway. Dr. Braxner liked candy. She couldn’t have known that Cherie was stealing from the school if she took it though. The Times said somebody saw Cherie give it to her in the cafeteria at dinner that night. One of the kitchen staff, not somebody I know. I bet they can’t prove it though. I mean, they can show she had the cyanide, right, but how can they be sure it was in the chocolate-covered cherry? How do they do those things?”

“Don’t ask me,” Jimmy said, “ask Mr. Demarkian the next time you talk to him. Is it all that important?”

“I’d like to see them both go to jail,” Mark said, “preferably forever. I mean, I’m not for the death penalty, but I’d just as soon not have them wandering around loose where they can feed me more cyanide, if you know what I mean.”