The Headmaster's Wife(42)

“What about?”

Marta shrugged. “Not anything, really. I’d just seen Mark, you see, and I was in a bad mood, so I was talking about Mark. And she was making excuses for him or some-tiling. I don’t know. That kid ought to be expelled.”

“Maybe. What about Alice? It doesn’t sound like she was doing much of anything.”

“Oh, she wasn’t,” Marta said. “It wasn’t that. It was after she left. She left by the wrong door.”

“What do you mean, the wrong door?”

“She said she was going home. But to get home, it makes the most sense to go into the library proper and through the library foyer and out the front door. I mean, President’s House is right across the quad. But she went out the other door, out the back.”

“Out the back or out the side?”

“Out the back,” Marta said. “To get to the side door, she’d have had to go down the corridor the same way from my office as she would to get out the front, she’d just have had to stop earlier. But she went the other way. There isn’t anything there but the back way out. And I couldn’t help but think it was odd, and I didn’t know about Michael Feyre then, that he was dead.”

“What time was it?”

“It was about nine, or maybe nine fifteen or nine thirty. I don’t really remember, but somewhere in there, because when the carillon rang ten I came back home. But the carillon had rung nine. I stopped to listen to it. And the whole thing was nuts, really. It was below zero.”

“It was minus nine,” Philip said.

“Well, then,” Marta said, “why would she want to go out the back door like that? There’s nothing out there except Maverick Pond, and she couldn’t have been going skating at that time of night But that’s the way she went, looking like Batgirl in that ridiculous cape.”

“She wasn’t with anybody?”

“Not when she was in my office, no. Oh, I don’t know,” Marta said. “I feel completely stupid. I mean, who cares what she did. Maybe she’s got another boy. Maybe that’s why Michael killed himself, because she’d thrown him over—”

“I don’t think I’d say that if I were you,” Philip said. “Peter would go crazy, and so would the newspapers if they ever heard a rumor like that. It’s a damned miracle the newspapers haven’t gone crazy yet.”

“But it doesn’t matter, right?” Marta said. “It doesn’t matter where she was or why she was there. Maybe she wasn’t anywhere. Maybe it was all part of the mystique, or maybe she made a mistake about which way to go and didn’t want to admit it to me. Who knows why she does what she does? And if it doesn’t have anything to do with why Michael died, there’s no point in being all worked up about it.”

“But you are worked up about it.”

“Yes,” Marta said, “yes, I am. I’m worked up about her. I’m worked up about Mark DeAvecca. I’m worked up about being here. I have no idea what I’m doing here. Did I tell you that? Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don’t even know where I am. I sit up in bed and for half a minute I think I’m back in my apartment in New Haven.”

“Would you rather be?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t too pleasant at the end there. Everybody was getting jobs, but I wasn’t. I’ve got to ask myself about that, too. Why I wasn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I’m obsessing about Alice because I don’t want to admit that I’m sitting here in February without a hope in hell of being anywhere but here next year—if I’m even asked back next year.”

“You’ll be asked back.”

“Don’t you hate it though? Don’t you hate the uncertainty of it? It’s that way for the students, too. You never know from one year to the next whether you can stay on. They don’t either. It’s all so up in the air. And the standards are all so—fuzzy. In graduate school it was just a matter of grade-point averages. As long as I maintained a B average, I couldstay. Here it’s about things and I don’t even know what they mean: meaningful interaction, dedication to the mission of the school. Nonsense.”

“You’ll get asked back,” Philip said again. “Maybe you shouldn’t come back. Maybe you ought to go out and do something else, something besides teaching, something besides academia.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do. This is what I’ve always been good at.”

“Teaching?”

“No,” Marta said. “School. Even when I was very little, that was what I was good at. I don’t think I’ve ever been really uncomfortable in a school before, not even in my freshman year at Wellesley. And I don’t understand it. If I could have invented a place for myself, if I could have put together a group of people, it would have been just like here. And I hate it. And all I can think of is that it’s all about the job. I don’t know.”