“Dead,” Liz said, looking stunned.
Gregor sat back and watched Dr. Niazi gather up the folder and get to his feet. He looked exhausted and more than a little disapproving.
“It is not a shameful thing,” he said suddenly, bending over Liz. “It is not these drugs that are such a waste, such a moral disaster. It is only a student too conscientious for his own good. You should not forget that. You should not punish for what was only an attempt to achieve what would bring respect to himself and his family.”
Gregor bit his lip. It was the first note of levity in whathad been a long and depressing day, but he knew better than to let the solemn Dr. Niazi know he found anything about the situation funny.
Liz then stood up herself. “I’m not going to punish him,” she said, “I’m going to kill the bloody idiot.”
Chapter Two
1
Alice Makepeace knew there were 101 things she ought to do this morning, 101 things required by her “position,” which Peter had been reminding her of ever since he came back from the hospital at one in the morning, looking exhausted and annoyed and, underneath it all, scared to death. Alice was not scared, although she knew she had good reason to be. The conscious side of Peter thought that he would be able to come through to the other side of this thing unscathed. Even if he was not able to stay on at Windsor—and he must have known, as soon as he heard that Mark DeAvecca had been taken to Windsor Hospital, that that would be impossible—he would be able to move on to another school in another state, another part of the great network of private schools where everybody knew everybody else and the man who was headmaster in one place one year was the man at the head of the History Department in another the next. There was a usefulness to those networks. Alice knew that. Schools were odd places, and parents were odd people to have to deal with. Colleges and universities had much more latitude. By then the students were mostly over eighteen, and the policy of in loco parentis had ended decades ago. College administrations did not, and did not have to, placate hysterical mothers convinced their precioussons were reincarnations of Galileo, both great geniuses and the victims of persecution. The best colleges didn’t have to do that even for the children of their biggest donors. It was a great advantage to have an endowment in excess of a billion dollars. It was, Alice thought, a great advantage to be Harvard.
Windsor, of course, was not Harvard. It was not even Andover, where the endowment was almost as large. It was one of those places, one of about two dozen, that took only the best candidates in an ever-widening pool made up not only of the children and grandchildren of those people who had themselves been to boarding schools, but the children and grandchildren of what Alice persisted in thinking of as the New Incredibly Rich. There were lots of them out there. Not all of them were Incredibly Rich, although so many were that she found it disorienting when she encountered them. A combination of the rise of new industries like computer hardware and a Republican tax policy that seemed to be a repeat of Herbert Hoover’s had thrown up hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, who thought nothing of buying Hummers as second cars and vacationing for six weeks in the winter on private islands in the South Pacific. There were other people though, the people who worked for those people, the lawyers in firms that had once been white-shoe and restricted to candidates with all the right bells and whistles, the accountants in the big national firms that had once been the same people who had grown up in small towns and middle-class suburbs in midwestern cities and made it into a “good” university and from those “good” universities to “good” jobs, and who now wanted to mark their distinction with something palpable. What they chose to mark their distinction with was their children, who were expected to “get into” the right boarding school and then the right college, to provide stickers to put on the backs of cars. A Range Rover looked good with “Windsor Academy” and “Yale University” on the back of it. It looked less good with “Local High School” and “State College.” These were people who came to schools like Windsor and expected to get results. The onlyresults that mattered were the ones that came in college admissions packets around the fifteenth of March every year.
What Alice knew she should do was go to the hospital and visit Mark DeAvecca. It was the kind of thing the headmaster’s wife was expected to do, and in this case it was triply important because Mark was the son of a prominent person who could be expected to contribute significantly to the general fund. Windsor was not Andover. Its endowment was fair, not spectacular. There was a hundred million dollars or so in the bank, not enough to ensure the school’s survival if the tides ever turned and the numbers of applicants were greatly reduced. Things were already a little dicey because of the stock market collapse. People who might have considered Windsor when they had more money than they knew what to do with sometimes decided to learn to live with the public school in town when not to would mean giving up something they considered more important, like vacations in the Bahamas or a new Porsche. There were times when Alice thought her head would explode. When she was growing up, she had decided that the people among whom she had been born were the worst in the world. They were handed power and privilege and money for no effort of their own, and they thought they somehow deserved it. She had since decided that these other people, the ones who started without but made the climb by themselves, were far worse. They thought their money gave them a halo. They expected to control the world. Worse yet, they had no respect for the things that ought to be respected, for art and music that wasn’t mass-produced and mindless, for films that challenged the mind and soul instead of movies that provided two hours of special effects after dinner at a chain restaurant, for the well made instead of just the expensive.