The Headmaster's Wife(6)

He stood back away from the window and ran his hand through his hair. Seen but not heard, he was every human being’s picture of the Complete New England Preppie. He had the fine features, the tall and slight body, the slightly too-long hair, the wire rims, the wool crewneck sweaters. He was as perfect as a model in a J. Crew catalogue, until he opened his mouth. He had been able to learn to dress at Williams, but he had not learned to talk. He thought he would die still issuing forth with that nasal western twang.

I sound like a hillbilly, he thought yet again, and for a split second he could see Alice Makepeace’s face the first time they had ever talked, that look of shock and the hasty attempt to suppress it. “You’re from the South,” she had said, after too long a pause.

“I’m from the West,” he’d corrected her, and then, “Wyoming,” knowing that he had nothing to fear from the lie. She wouldn’t know the difference between his accent and a Wyoming one any more than she would have known the difference between Kmart and Target. He didn’t think she had ever been to either, and he didn’t think she had ever spent time in the American West except at ski resorts and in luxury hotels, where somebody might be holding a conference. That was before he knew about her politics, of course, and for a while the revelation of her seeming passion for the Revolution had worried him a little. He’d known too many people who’d had a passion for the Revolution and meant it—although it had been a different revolution than hers. He soon realized he had nothing to fear, at least directly. She was no more interested in real poor people than she was interested in real revolutionaries. She lived in a bubble of self-regard that required nothing to feed it but the reflection of herself that she saw in the eyes of male students and male junior faculty, who took her to be the goddess Athena come to life—or something. Philip thought he ought to do something to prick that bubble one of these days when he was feeling as if he had nothing to lose.

There was movement on the path. Philip held his breath, and then let it out only seconds later. It was nobody, really, only Mark DeAvecca, weaving a little as usual, looking disoriented. If Philip had had to guess about Mark, he would have said a combination of speed and downers, something to rev him up in the morning and keep him up during the day, followed by something to bring him down again when the rev got too painful or too out of control or had just gone on too long. He had brought it up at a faculty meeting a month ago, and the usual things had been done. One of Mark’s dorm parents had searched his room while he was out at class. The school had a handy little rule requiring the dorms to be locked and off-limits to boarders during the school day. Nothing had turned up, even though it had been a very thorough search, with the head of Security present. They had looked between the slats, under the bed, and under the carpet, and tapped along the walls of the closet to find a hollow space. Philip wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened, but it turned out that Mark did have his act together in at least one respect. He hid his stuff with the ingenuity of a master criminal. He didn’t hide it in his backpack either because that was always lying on the floor of the breezeway with a hundred other backpacks, often overnight; and one night, after everybody else was in bed, Philip himself had gone through it. Nothing.

Mark stopped again, turned again, and shook his head. His entire body seemed to be trembling, but that could be the cold. Philip grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and went out into the hall and then onto the back porch. It was cold as hell. Philip could feel the pain of it in his hands, even though he had them stuffed into his pockets. Mark wasn’t moving.

“Mark?” Philip said.

Mark turned around, looking confused. “Mr. Candor?” he said. Then he blinked, shook his head slightly, and shrugged. “Philip,” he said. “Sorry.”

A lot of the kids who came from more traditional schools had trouble with this business of calling their teachers by their first names. Philip had trouble with it himself. Still, it had been over five months. Mark should be used to it by now.

“Are you all right?” Philip asked. “You look—” You look drugged to the gills, Philip thought, but he didn’t say it. He understood the concern about lawsuits, too.

“I’m all right,” Mark said. Then he turned back to look in the direction of the pond again. “I’m fine, really. I just thought I saw—”

“Saw what?”

“You’re going to think this is stupid.”

I think you ‘re stupid, Philip thought, but he didn’t say that either. Besides, it wasn’t true. Mark DeAvecca wasn’t stupid. He was just a mess.