The Headmaster's Wife(35)

“He won’t care. I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming. I mean it, he’ll think you’re a godsend. They’re all holding their breath down there. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Right,” Gregor said. Then he thought to wonder what it was that Walter Cray wasn’t telling him.





2


It wasn’t only Walter Cray. It was Mark DeAvecca who wasn’t telling him things, although he thought that with Mark it might be the result of the confusion that seemed to have taken over his entire personality since the last time Gregor had seen him. He tried to discuss that with Bennis, too, but she never got interested. He would start and she would interrupt him with questions about the kind of trivialities she’d never bothered to think about before. Did they have enough toilet paper on hand or should she pick some up when she and Donna went out to the Costco warehouse store on Saturday? Did he think it made sense to switch the can shelf in the pantry with the jar shelf? Which did he prefer, the blue stoneware plates or the white china ones? It was like living with a lobotomized Martha Stewart before the indictment. Bennis talked about vegetables. She talked about cutlery. She talked about the drapes in the living room. She even managed to deliver a somewhat spirited monologue on the relative merits of paper versus cloth napkins. Other than that, she was oddly disconnected, as if all the things that would ordinarily matter to her—the people on Cavanaugh Street, the news, Gregor himself—had been wiped clean from her mind. It was eerie living with her. It was as if she had become a ghost.

“I thought she’d be glad I’m taking an interest in Mark’s problem,” he told Fr. Tibor Kasparian at the train station ashe was getting ready to board the Amtrak to Boston. “The day before yesterday, she was telling me she wanted me to go back to work. And here I am. Not exactly back to work, but at least doing something of the sort of thing she had in mind. And she still isn’t speaking to me.”

“I thought you said she was speaking to you, Krekor,” Tibor said, “only not in a very good way.”

“It’s like living with a robot,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what she expects of me. I don’t know what she wants anymore.”

“She wants you to say something about that remark about marriage,” Tibor said.

Gregor brushed it off. “She didn’t exactly leap for joy at it the first time I said it. I’d say that this relationship was just on the way out. It happens. Except that two days ago, it was fine. And I can’t see Bennis ending a relationship in less than thirty thousand words.”

“Your train is here, Krekor,” Tibor said.

His train was there. It had been there all along. He got onto it with his head still mired in confusion. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d started a case with this little interest in its outcome. Except that it wasn’t a case, he reminded himself. He was only going to Massachusetts because there was no danger it would ever become a case. He stowed his suitcase above his head in first class and thought about just how badly it was packed. Bennis usually packed for him. This time, she had barely glanced at the case lying open on the bed. The clothes had piled up in it without order or organization. Gregor had no idea how women got so many clothes into suitcases. When he packed, the damned things filled up before he had half of what he needed. He thought he might have been trying to look pitiful in the bedroom while he worked, but he wasn’t sure. Looking pitiful was not something he was good at. He was too tall, and he had spent too many years cultivating an aura of competence and decisiveness. Bennis, at any rate, did not seem to notice. She went in and out, back and forth, and ten minutes before he was due to leave, she left herself and wentdown the street to he knew not where. Maybe she had gone to Donna’s so that she wouldn’t be around to be forced to kiss him good-bye.

Gregor had brought the material he’d amassed on Windsor Academy to look over on his trip, but he couldn’t make himself concentrate on it. He had a nice little pile, both printed off the Web site and cadged from a friend of Bennis’s in Philadelphia who ran the guidance department of a private elementary school. It was a good thing he’d been introduced to the woman already. Bennis didn’t mention her when he mentioned Windsor Academy, and she didn’t offer to make a call and grease the wheels when Gregor mentioned her himself. Come to think of it, Gregor thought, Bennis herself probably knew something about Windsor Academy and half its Board of Trustees. She hadn’t mentioned that either.

New England went by in a blur of ice and dangerously weighted overhead wires. He had never really liked Connecticut, and he liked Massachusetts even less. They were both far too enraptured by their revolutionary past and far too little interested in being revolutionary. He tried to read through the copies of the Windsor Academy Chronicles Bennis’s friend had given him. They were copies of the kind of thing colleges sent to alumni to keep their interest up in contributing to their alma mater. The stories were all laudatory and studiously noncontroversial. The back of each issue was taken up by year-by-year class reports that all read as if their writers chirped when they spoke. Gregor got similar magazines from the University of Pennsylvania four times a year. He wondered what it was about class notes that nobody could ever tell the truth in them. They would announce that old Sheldon DeWitt had died suddenly in his home at the much-too-early age of fifty-four. They would not mention that Sheldon had drunk himself to death after being released from federal prison after serving a ten-year term for a stock-fraud scheme that had destroyed the venerable brokerage house where he’d worked for two decades. It was even odder when you realized that Sheldon’s story had been all over thenews when it happened and the subject of a true-crime book and a made-for-television movie.