The Headmaster's Wife(43)
“Drink your tea,” Philip said. “It’s going to get cold.”
Marta looked down into the cup and saw the tea bag still floating there. She hadn’t taken off her coat either. All of a sudden it felt heavy and hot on her shoulders. She stood up and shrugged it off.
“We all spend too much time thinking about Alice Makepeace anyway,” she said. “I don’t know why we do it.”
2
Cherie Wardrop had spent the first two days after Michael Feyre died doing what she was expected to do: staying in her apartment in Hayes House or in her office in Ridenour Library, waiting for students to come to see her and pour out their hearts. No students had, but she hadn’t expected them to. She thought that the school’s near mania on the subject of therapy was silly in the extreme. Most people grieved by doing something moronic in a spasm of emotion and then forgetting as much as possible the thing that had made themgrieve in the first place. Most of the students would not have been grieving for Michael Feyre in any case. He hadn’t been well-liked or even well-known. What they really felt was shock and titillation, the same emotions they would have felt if somebody had had to have an abortion or leave school because he’d been caught stealing from the campus store. The students weren’t upset or traumatized; they were excited. You could hear the revved-up energy in their voices wherever they gathered together, even when you couldn’t make out the words. They were excited and almost pleased, the way they would have been if the news had been about a celebrity instead of a fellow student. Or maybe not. These kids were not impressed with celebrities. Too many of them had celebrities for parents. Still, Cherie thought, their reactions would have been different if Michael had been murdered instead of the victim of suicide. Their reactions had been different in those short twenty-four hours when the cause of death had still been in doubt.
Now Cherie pulled into her parking space behind President’s House and shut off the engine. She’d done what she was expected to do for as long as she could, but today it had just been impossible. She’d gone to her office, sat waiting and staring out the window for half an hour, and then decided that she’d had enough. She’d packed up her things, gone back to the apartment, and gotten Melissa out of bed. Melissa was an anomaly, an artist without discipline. She maintained a schedule when Cherie maintained one, but as soon as Cherie was at loose ends, Melissa was sleeping in until noon. Cherie had had to pull the covers off her to get her to move, and even then she’d had to threaten a bowl of cold water. Only once she’d heard the sound of the shower going on had Cherie felt free to settle down in the living room. She was distressed to find that Melissa’s small stack of papers next to the computer—the collection of short stories she was writing under contract to Woman Vistas Press—hadn’t grown by a single sheet since the night Michael Feyre had died.
They were all too wound up, that was the problem. Theboy was dead. The administration was dealing with it by canceling classes and behaving as if they were all in a public service announcement about mental health maintenance, and nobody wanted to admit the level of anxiety they were feeling, not only about the trauma itself, but about the possibility that the school might not survive the firestorm. There was going to be a firestorm, and Cherie knew it. Even though it hadn’t happened yet, she could feel it coming. It made it impossible for her to do the petty housekeeping chores, the house accounts, the student accounts. Edith Braxner had scolded her more than once for the mess her accounts were in. She couldn’t make herself take them seriously, and today, trying to focus on them in the wake of Michael’s dying and the unbearable nervousness that affected everybody and anybody, she’d finally just given up on them and tossed them into the back of a drawer.
Cherie prodded Melissa, fast asleep in the passenger seat. It had been a very good day. They had gone into Boston and seen the first in a daylong film marathon of women’s independent productions. Then they had ducked out of that and gone to eat sushi at a little place they knew in Cambridge. Then they’d dropped in at the New Words Bookstore in Cambridge and melted plastic until they’d felt guilty about it. Then they’d gone back to the film marathon and seen a movie about a woman coming out in India, which in the end had been too bloody and violent for them to enjoy watching. They were, Cherie thought, completely American. They wanted their endings happy and their heroines’ quests triumphant.
Cherie prodded Melissa again. Outside the car, it was almost dark. Lights were on in President’s House. Cherie thought that if she were Peter Makepeace—or Alice—she might have been happier with all the lights on, too. She prodded Melissa for a third time. Melissa moved.