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Tank had kept glancing furtively at the scar on Hawthorne’s wrist until Hawthorne wanted to roll back the sleeve and lay his arm down in the middle of the table for Tank’s inspection. How refreshing had been the response of the cook, who had simply asked to see it and for whom the matter had become a closed issue. Across the room, Hawthorne had seen Scott arguing passionately with two other boys, and Jessica—her hair loose and hanging forward to obscure her face—sitting alone in her baggy sweatshirt and jeans. Her roommate, Helen Selkirk, had been at another table with several girls, all of whom were eating cottage cheese and ketchup and talking together in whispers. Once again there was fresh bread, a small thing for which Hawthorne felt grateful. There had been a smattering of jokes about the boy who a few days earlier had claimed to have found a tack in his slice. No one believed he hadn’t supplied it himself, and the teacher at the head of his table had told him to stop making such a fuss.

Shortly before midnight the telephone rang. Hawthorne assumed that a friend in San Diego had forgotten the time difference. He put down his files and hurried to the phone.

“Hello?” He heard a deep breath, then a woman’s voice speaking quickly.

“Mr. Hawthorne, Jim, this is Kate Sandler.”

Hawthorne sat down on the chair next to the telephone. “Yes, how are you? Is something the matter?”

“I’m not sure. Well, yes, there might be. I guess I’m not sure how to talk about it.”

Hawthorne leaned back. “Any way you’d like. Does this have to do with school?”

“Not exactly. You see, I’m divorced. I’ve been divorced now for about a year. My husband, or ex-husband, lives in Plymouth. He has a sporting goods store . . .”

Hawthorne couldn’t guess what she was leading up to. He started to speak, then waited.

“The divorce was my idea,” continued Kate. “He didn’t want to. We have a son who’s seven. George is still very bitter.”

“Is that your son?”

“No, my son’s name is Todd. George, George Peabody is the ex-husband.” Kate laughed nervously. “George is very possessive. He keeps saying he wants us to get back together, though I can’t believe he means it. But he’s constantly afraid that I’ll get involved with someone else. When I went out once last spring with Chip Campbell, George actually called him up and shouted at him.”

“And what does this have to do with me?” Hawthorne asked, as gently as possible.

“I saw George late this afternoon in Plymouth when I was picking up our son. George sees him every week. Anyway, George said he was going to come over to the school and beat the shit out of you—those were his words. I didn’t want to call, but . . .”

Hawthorne sat up. “Me? What in the world for?”

Kate spoke in a rush. “Someone put a note in his mailbox that he found this morning. It said we were sleeping together. I mean, you and me. I feel terrible about it.”

“Why would somebody tell him that?” Hawthorne thought of how he had spoken to Kate briefly at Skander’s. He’d regretted not having the opportunity to talk to her again.

“A prank, a malicious prank,” said Kate. “But he was furious. He accused me of carrying on with Todd in the house. I thought of not bothering you, but George could easily come over, especially if he’s been drinking.”

It astonished Hawthorne to think that someone he’d never known about until this moment could harbor such anger against him.

“Do you have any idea who might have told him?” asked Hawthorne.

“Absolutely none. He showed me the letter. It was typed and unsigned.”

Four

T
he shouts and the sound of a basketball hitting a backboard drew Kate Sandler to her classroom window at the back of Emerson Hall. Half a dozen male students and several teachers were playing basketball in the small court between Douglas and the Common. Yellow leaves from a maple at the corner of Douglas floated through the sunlight and across the court, resembling gold doubloons drifting among the players. In the national forest to the north, Kate could see great bands of orange and red, with the color more fierce at higher elevations. The sky was intensely blue. The basketball players whistled and called to one another but Kate was too far away to hear more than the occasional word: a name or a shout of praise. The sound of the ball being dribbled across the blacktop echoed between the buildings.

With surprise, Kate saw that one of the adults was Jim Hawthorne. He had removed his coat and loosened his tie, which flapped over his shoulder as he ran. A second adult was Roger Bennett, whose pale blond hair would make him recognizable, Kate thought, from at least a mile. The third was Ted Wrigley, the other language teacher. It was shortly after three on Tuesday afternoon. Kate’s last class had ended ten minutes earlier and she was washing her blackboard with a wet sponge, a chore that teachers were expected to do themselves. At three-thirty the third of the faculty meetings meant to discuss the students was due to begin.

The six boys were upper classmen, and though quicker than the adults, they were too hasty, more exuberant than efficient. Hawthorne was on one team, Bennett and Wrigley on the other. A boy passed the ball to Hawthorne, who dribbled in for a layup. People cheered. Another boy took the ball out, then passed it to Bennett, who dribbled it behind his back, then between his legs, laughing and showing off till Tank Donoso snatched it away, none too gently. In his shape and size, Kate thought, the boy was indeed tanklike, a tank with a square face and a fuzzy colorless crew cut.

From her third-story vantage point, Kate watched the players weave among one another, passing the ball, going in for a shot, competing for the rebound. One boy fell to the blacktop, lay still for a moment holding his stomach, then scrambled to his feet again. On a patch of the Common, about ten boys and girls sat watching. Several were students of Kate’s, including Jessica Weaver, who sat to one side of the others with two yards between her and the nearest person, as if she was both in the group and pointedly not in the group. And she looked up into the maple tree instead of at the game, seemingly lost in the splendor of the leaves. Also standing to the side was Harriet Bennett, the chaplain, in a dark gray suit. She wasn’t close enough for Kate to see her expression. Usually it was severe, which made her marriage to Roger a source of speculation, since he seemed to have the emotional makeup of an adolescent setter. Where she would walk stolidly, he bounced. Still, Roger had sometimes struck Kate as watchful and even guarded, as if his youthful fervor were no more than a convenient persona.

Kate leaned against the windowsill, holding the wet sponge. It seemed to her that Hawthorne was the best player, better even than the teenagers. At least Kate hadn’t seen him miss a shot. His play had a seriousness that the others lacked. The court extended behind the far end of Douglas, which stood to the left of Emerson, so the two buildings made an L shape. Kate wondered what it meant for the school’s headmaster to engage in a pastime that many would think beneath his dignity, but she was impressed by how Hawthorne was involving himself with so many aspects of the school. Not that he could do this unscathed. Two weeks earlier the gossip had concerned what he might do—jobs lost, positions changed, even turning the school into a home for the retarded. Now the gossip focused on his behavior—the people he liked and those he didn’t, how he could be seen past midnight standing on the terrace behind his quarters, the speculation that he might be writing a book. Shortly the sexual gossip would begin. Indeed, given the anonymous letter that George had received and his subsequent anger, it had begun already. Was she the one whose name was going to be linked with Hawthorne’s? It was a tiresome thought.

Hawthorne again had the ball and Bennett was trying to bat it out of his hands. Briefly the game shrank to a rivalry between them as Hawthorne hugged the ball to his body and Bennett tried to pull it away. Then Hawthorne passed the ball to a senior by the name of Rudy Schmidt, who shot from the foul line. The ball chimed against the rim and bounced into the grass. Wrigley took the ball out. In the bright sunlight his old acne scars gave his face a mottled appearance. He passed the ball to Bennett, who drove toward the hoop. Bennett’s blond hair was perfectly straight and combed back over his head so it leapt up with every running step. It reminded Kate of English public school boys of the Evelyn Waugh era, or at least how such students were depicted on public television. Two boys ran in to block Bennett, waving their arms like passionate windmills, and he passed the ball back to someone behind him.

Kate hadn’t spoken to Hawthorne since she had phoned late Sunday night, though she had seen him earlier in the day at lunch. He had smiled at her across the room. Just the smile had been a relief since Kate still felt embarrassed about the call. Her ex-husband hadn’t contacted Hawthorne—not yet, at any rate—but she kept thinking of how George had accused her of having sex with another man while Todd was in the house.

“I bet he even heard you,” George had said. “For all I know, he saw you. Don’t you have a shred of self-respect?” He went on to tell Kate that his lawyer had been waiting for information like this. “Who knows what kind of damage it’s caused Todd.” His words had been slurred and Kate guessed that he had spent the earlier part of the afternoon watching football and drinking beer from his favorite mug—an elaborate German stein he had bought in Munich ten years earlier, as if drinking from it was not simply getting drunk but engaging in a culturally significant ritual. It had amazed Kate that he could talk like this and still claim to want her back, to make a life with her and have more children.

The faculty meeting at three-thirty would focus on the students in the lower school, grades seven through nine. Kate, like many other teachers, had students in both the upper and the lower schools and had to attend the meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At lunch Chip had told her that he wouldn’t be there, which meant missing his third meeting. Kate didn’t know if he had prior business or was “taking a stand,” as he might say. She wondered if others would cut the meeting and if Hawthorne would notice. But she knew he’d notice. He was making it his business to pay attention to everything that went on. Even now he was working with students who had been sent to the office because they had acted up or failed to do their class assignments. The previous day he had talked to an eighth grader in Kate’s first-year Spanish class who refused to bring his book to class. Kate had spoken to the boy that morning to see if Hawthorne had scolded him.

“He wanted to help me study,” said the boy, struck by the oddness of it. “We went over vocabulary after dinner. He wanted to make a game of it.”

Kate was impressed by Hawthorne’s willingness to devote all his waking hours to school business. Was this the man that George accused of going after his ex-wife? When would he have time? And in her question to herself Kate saw that becoming involved with Hawthorne didn’t strike her as strange or inappropriate, which was followed by the feeling she sometimes got from too much caffeine or when her car swerved suddenly on wet leaves. It almost frightened her.

Tank and another boy were wrestling on the blacktop for the ball. Hawthorne knelt beside them with a hand on each and talking calmly, or at least his face appeared calm. Tank gave the other boy a shove as he stood up, and the ball rolled away. Grabbing it, Hawthorne tossed it to Rudy Schmidt and the game resumed. Several onlookers wandered off and others appeared, but Jessica was still among them, sitting with her arms around her knees and looking toward the mountains. Harriet Bennett also continued to watch with folded arms. Even from this distance Kate could see her big black shoes. On Sundays the Reverend Bennett preached about moderation and the need for equilibrium, as if her enemy were not Evil but Excess. In her vestments and with her bulk and wispy gray hair, she looked very eighteenth century. Kate had attended chapel a few times in the spring but had yet to go this fall. She wasn’t a believer but it was expected of faculty to set an example for the students.

Kate happened to glance over at Douglas Hall, diagonally across the Common. There, at a second-story window, Fritz Skander stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the game. Kate recalled he had a geometry class that met in the afternoon. Skander had a faintly benign smile but there was a concentration about him, especially in the way he leaned forward as if listening for some delicate noise far in the distance. He was below Kate and to her left. For no reason she could think of, she moved back so he wouldn’t notice her. To Kate, Skander’s actions always seemed as if they were in fact reactions to the people around him, unspontaneous outbursts followed by small jokes and a sort of delayed ebullience. Now, framed by the window, he appeared unusually expectant, almost eager.

Bennett was trying to get the ball from Hawthorne, pressing him close and waving his hands in Hawthorne’s face. Hawthorne passed the ball back between his legs to Tank, then dodged around Bennett, who turned quickly and stumbled. Tank passed it back to Hawthorne, who jumped and scored with a hook shot. Bennett got to his feet, then took the ball out again, his hair bouncing as he ran. Hawthorne’s white shirt was pulled from his waist and the top buttons were undone. He wore black leather shoes that didn’t seem to interfere with his game.

Kate noticed that a new person had sat down next to Jessica and was chatting with her. It was the assistant cook. Whatever he said, Jessica began to laugh. It made her look quite pretty. Kate recalled Chip Campbell’s suggestion that Hawthorne was sexually involved with the girl—“doing the dirty with that little ex-stripper.” Seeing Jessica laugh, Kate found it not quite so impossible. Jessica’s roommate had continued to complain about Jessica whenever she and Kate happened to talk—how Jessica ignored her and refused to respond to the name Jessica, saying instead that her name was Misty. In Spanish, though, the girl was turning out to be the best in the class.

Hawthorne was running in for another layup and Bennett was trying to catch up, sprinting across the court as several students got out of his way. Hawthorne jumped and Bennett jumped after him, attempting to block the shot, but he was too late and the basket scored. But in jumping Bennett collided with Hawthorne in midair, knocking him sideways so he fell. Bennett landed on his feet but Hawthorne was twisting, trying to regain his balance. He went down, slid on the blacktop, and rolled onto his back. Kate could see he was in pain, then she noticed that the fabric of his khaki pants was torn at the knees. He sat up, holding his legs. Bennett stood for a moment, watching, then he and Tank leaned in closer to him. The nurse, Alice Beech, was in the small crowd of onlookers and she ran onto the court, as did the assistant cook. Hawthorne was pulling up his pant leg and Kate thought she could see blood, but she was too far away to be sure. The game had stopped. The students were talking among one another and looking uncomfortable, as if they were afraid of being yelled at. Hawthorne’s face was white. Gravel must have gotten embedded in the cut because he was picking at a spot on his left knee. Alice Beech knelt down beside him. The cook was saying something and helping him roll up his other pant leg. Bennett was talking to Ted Wrigley. His face was very earnest.