The Headmaster's Wife(22)

“And he’s Elizabeth Toliver’s son and Jimmy Card’s stepson, and that never hurts around here either.”

“No,” Peter admitted, keeping it pleasant, “it never does. It never hurts anywhere. That’s life, Alice. It’s been that way since the dawn of time. It’s going to be that way tomorrow.”

“Yes, well,” Alice said. She got up. She couldn’t sit in this chair any longer. She wanted a shower. She wanted her nerves to calm down. She wanted not to look at herself in the mass of pictures in their silver frames lined up on top of the television console. “I’m going to go get ready for bed. I want to read. And I think it’s odd that you’ve never considered the obvious.”

“What’s the obvious, in this case?”

“The obvious is that Mark DeAvecca is mentally ill. That he’s, well, schizophrenic or paranoid. That doesn’t always show up right away, you know. Many people have perfectly normal childhoods before it sets in. Then it does set in and they become … dangerous.”

“You think Mark DeAvecca is dangerous?”

“I think he could be,” Alice said. “He certainly isn’t stable, is he? He wanders around as if he’s half-dead most of the time. He can never remember anything. He mumbles to himself. I saw him do that once in chapel. He was just sitting by himself—twitching and mumbling under his breath.”

Peter had leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “What is this about, exactly? What are you trying to pull?”

“I’m not trying to ‘pull’ anything.”

“Yes, you are. Mark DeAvecca is no more dangerous than I am. He doesn’t have the energy to make his bed in the morning, never mind hurt anybody. What did you do?”

“What did I do about what, Peter?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I really don’t know. I wish I did.”

“All I did was point out the obvious, Peter. Which is that that kid is definitely off, somehow, and none of you know for sure that he isn’t dangerous. I’d think that was the first possibility you’d want to consider.”

“What did you do?” Peter asked again.

Alice turned away and walked out of the living room into the hall. The muscles in her neck felt as tight and hard and sharp as barbed wire. She thought she was getting a migraine or worse. The staircase was long but not steep. This was an old house, older than the United States itself. It was on the tour the Windsor Historical Society did every year to raise funds for architectural preservation. Alice was on the committee. She was on most of the committees that mattered. She raised funds for WGBH during pledge-drive weeks when even the people who were committed to public television didn’t want to watch it. She served on the board of the Windsor Food Bank, which did its business in Boston and not in Windsor at all, since nobody who was poor enough to need a food bank could afford to live in Windsor. She had a subscription to the symphony and to the ballet. She contributed to an experimental dance company and a little magazine of women’s poetry. She belonged to the National Organization for Women and People for the American Way. She was, she thought, a complete and utter cliché.

Peter had changed the channel on the television set. He would not be coming up after her anytime soon. She started up the stairs and wished she hadn’t worn these particular boots tonight. They always made her feel unsteady.

She was a complete and utter cliché … except that she wasn’t.





9


Once, when he was very small and his father was still alive, Mark DeAvecca had convinced himself that there was a dinosaur in the kitchen. They were still living in England then, in the house on Roslyn Avenue in Barnes, and the kitchen wasn’t big enough to contain a small pony, never mind a dinosaur. He was small enough so that he hadn’t started school yet, or at least not real school. Trying to fix it in his memory now, he thought he must have been about three, old enough to be beyond the toddler stage, not quite old enough for the nursery school he would later attend five days a week, three hours a day, at a small, brick building only a couple of blocks from home. The important thing was that he was too small to have any realistic concept of size. He became convinced that there was a dinosaur in the kitchen, and nothing his mother or his father said to him could change his mind or make him feel less afraid. He sat in the living room for long hours, reading a book in a chair or watching Blue Peter and Captain Scarlet on the television, and all the time he could hear the dinosaur moving heavily in among the table and chairs, in and out of the cabinets, in the crack between the refrigerator and the wall where the yardstick had fallen. He had just learned to read, and the books he picked up were very simple, mostly Dr. Seuss books his grandmothers sent him from the States. He liked to plow his way through them. It made him feel as if he’d done something very important when he’d managed to read every word in one of them. He would wait in the narrow entry hall for his father to come home, and then he would report. This was in the book today, and this and this.