The Headmaster's Wife(5)

“I will,” Marta said.

Alice shrugged a little and walked away, in the same direction Mark had gone, and Marta stood in the hall and watched her leave. The doors at both ends of this corridor were fire doors. They had air closures. They made a hissing sound when they fell back into place, if you listened for it.

Marta went back to her desk and sat down again. The first paper on the stack belonged to Sue Wyman. It would be serviceable and unimaginative, but it wouldn’t require much correcting. She took the paper clip off and spread the sheets across her desk. She picked up her red pen and adjusted the glasses on her nose. She thought that she really should do something about getting contact lenses.

It was minutes later, when she had gotten to the point where Sue was arguing doggedly in favor of an “expanded understanding of the role of women in the American Revolution,” when it suddenly occurred to her: it made no sense at all for Alice Makepeace to come in the door she’d come in and go out the door she’d gone out if what she was doing was coming in from the outside to go to the library. You could get in from the outside from that end of the hall. Just beyond the fire door, there was a breezeway that connected the office wing of the library to the main part, but the main part was over there in that direction. If you went out the door on the other end, the only way to get into the library was to go around the pathways to the front. It was like going from Boston to New York by way of Philadelphia. It made no sense.

Marta took off her glasses and put them down on Sue Wyman’s paper. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and then her forehead, as if rubbing would wake up some faculty of discernment she’d never yet possessed. Did Alice Makepeace ever make sense? Was she supposed to? The answer was “probably not,” to both, and it was all beyond anything Marta was capable of understanding anyway. If there were different kinds of intelligence, then she lacked the kind that fit well in a place like this.





3


Philip Candor did not work on Friday nights, or on Saturday nights either, not even to the extent of correcting papers or hosting dorm students in his apartment. He didn’t go to Boston or go to clubs. He didn’t drink, and he didn’t feel comfortable sitting in cramped little rooms where the music was loud enough to drown out thought when he wouldn’t even be allowed to smoke. That had been a big issue, a few years ago—the fact that he smoked and wouldn’t give it up. They couldn’t very well fire him for smoking when they’d known he was a smoker when they hired him, but they had hired him over a decade ago. Times change, ideas change, people do not change. Sometimes Philip understood his father almost well enough to accept that the man had been, legitimately, who and what he was. It wasn’t always paranoia when you felt civilization closing in on you like one of those trick rooms in an old Outer Limits episode where what you thought was your hotel room was really an alien device for crushing you to death. There was the fact that so many people needed nothing more or less than control, control of themselves, control of their property, control of you. There were times when he missed what he had grown up with. He surely missed the openness and emptiness. There was nowhere in the entire state of Massachusetts where you could go to be completely and irrevocably away from people. Here, even in the national parks, you were never more than half an horn-away from truth, justice, and the American Way.

He adjusted his thin, gold wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose and moved slightly to get a better look at Maverick Pond. This was not a good window from which to see the water. He was on the side of it with the stand of evergreen trees blocking off the view, and he was in Martinson House besides, which meant that he was at the wrong angle to see it without making an effort. He didn’t usually bother to watch what went on out there because it was usually the same old same old. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll were everywhere, it seemed, even in fancy New England prep schools where the tuition ran to thirty thousand dollars a year. He wondered if their parents had any idea at all what their kids got up to when they were left on their own on a campus like this. He wondered if their parents cared—but that was an issue for another night with a different theme song. He shifted a little on the edge of his big leather club chair and tried to see more clearly across the pond to the library. All the security lights that were supposed to be on were on. The paths that ran along the library and through the quad were well lit. Everything was empty. He could swear he’d seen Alice Makepeace’s bright red hair, but there was no sign of it anymore.

Shit, he thought, half falling onto the hardwood floor that had been so big a selling point for the dean of faculty when he had first been recruited out of Williams College to come and teach. He straightened up and stretched. This window was not supposed to have a view of the pond. He got to his feet and tried pressing his body against the glass. There was nothing out there, no matter what he had thought at first. The campus was dark and quiet. The carillon had rung nine just a few minutes ago. In another hour it would be weekday curfew, and everybody would be expected to be back in their dorms and ready to pretend that Windsor was a school just as strict, with students just as unsophisticated, as the one in The Trouble with Angels.