The Headmaster's Wife(8)

Philip looked around. He could see the catwalk window, still glowing from the light coming up from the main reading room. He could see the first corner that led to the office wing. He could not see the dorms. This was the most isolated edge of the pond, the place farthest away from people and buildings and cars. There was something about it he definitely didn’t like.

Stupid kid, he thought.

He dug his hands ever deeper into his pockets and started back to Martinson House and his apartment.





4


Peter Makepeace had been counting drops of water falling from the icicle on the porch, but if he was completely honest about it he would have to admit that he had started and stopped counting several times and had no idea how many drops of water had fallen. I’m going to have to do something about the leak in the porch roof, he thought, but it wasn’t his job to do anything about the leak in the porch roof, just as it wasn’t his job to be sitting in his own study on a Friday night thinking about his wife having an affair with a student. The words “having an affair” popped into his head unasked for. It wasn’t the way he put it to himself when he thought about it deliberately. She’s fucking a Student, that’s what he meant to say. More specifically, she was fucking a particular student, this year’s entry in Windsor Academy’s annual socioeconomic diversity sweepstakes. It was incredible just how cynical he had become in the few short years since he had taken this job. It was even more incredible to remember that Alice hadn’t wanted to come here or to any school. She had wanted to take a job in a factory or run away to Fiji or become an artist in Greenwich Village. It was either the wonderful, or the terrible, thing about Alice that her imagination had never progressed beyond the kind of thing most people gave up as silly when they graduated from college.

Up on the wall next to the big multipaned window that looked out onto the quad were the plaques and pictures and framed credentials that had always defined Peter Makepeace’s life—his diploma from Andover, his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, his Ph.D. from Princeton. There was a black and white of him in his uniform for the Knickerbocker Greys. There was another black and white of him as a six-year-old in the blazer and tie that had been required for his private day school in Manhattan. These were the memories of a life lived in absolute harmony with itself. At no point, at no time, had Peter Makepeace ever for a moment strayed out of the orbit into which he had been born and out of which he knew he would never be comfortable. Other people might have played with the idea of throwing it all over and becoming revolutionaries or shoe salesmen in Kansas, but Peter knew himself better than that. He knew them better than that. He did not have the gift of social mobility. He was uncomfortable trying to make conversation, not only with students on scholarships, but with the ones whose families, however well financed, had not been well financed for long. He had the kind of voice—the kind of accent, let’s be honest about that, too—that people from the outside routinely made fun of, convinced he had to be putting it on. He did not look right in clothes that were truly casual. Somehow his jeans always looked pressed, and his T-shirts always looked as if somebody had starched them. It was not his fault. He was who he was. It was just easier to be that than it was to try to pretend to be something else for the sake of—what?

The other picture on the wall that mattered, the one that always caught him first, was the one of Alice in her coming-out dress. It wasn’t a formal coming-out portrait, or one of those staged tableaux of flocks of girls meant to bow together at a mass presentation ball. Alice had thrown out the formal one years ago, and she’d been presented at half the mass presentation balls in the Northeast. She would have thrown this one out as well, except that it belonged to him. He had taken it himself at her private party, and it had come out so beautifully—that incredible cascade of bright red hair—that he had had it enlarged and framed to keep long before he was ever “going out” with her and certainly long before she had ever agreed to marry him. Those were in the days when she was declaring, along with half her class at Smith, that she would never marry at all. She had threatened to cut off her hair. She had wandered around her campus and the streets of New York in Birkenstocks and peasant blouses made by women’s cooperatives in Guatemala. It didn’t matter. Alice was Alice. She never had cut her hair. She never could have because image mattered to her far too much. She had given up the Birkenstocks and peasant blouses, too, and not because she had married him or because he had come here to Windsor Academy to be headmaster and make her the headmaster’s wife.