The Headmaster's Wife (16 page)

And so she puts it off. And a week before graduation she gets a note in her mailbox from the registrar that she needs to report to the pool at 4:00
P.M.
on Friday and pass the test or not walk in the commencement ceremony.

Coming into the steaming warmth and chlorine-soaked air of the Olympic-size swimming pool, she thinks for a moment she might pass out. This feeling only grows when, approaching the pool, she sees that the only other person in the entire domed space is none other than Arthur, sitting on the lifeguard stand with a clipboard in his hand. He is proctoring this. She considers turning and leaving, as he has not seen her yet, but then he looks up and his eyes pass coldly over her standing there in her black one-piece bathing suit.

It has been more than a year since Russell Hurley was kicked out of Lancaster, and she has not been alone with Arthur since. The times she has been at parties and he walked in, she left. The school is small enough that they cannot avoid each other entirely, though they have not spoken in that amount of time. She has not dated since Russell, and while Arthur has—some bubbly, curly-haired sophomore she has seen him with—she doesn’t think it was serious. A few times she found herself confronted with him coming down the stairs in one of the academic buildings, and they did not acknowledge each other. Her heart beat fast as she looked away until he clattered past her.

But now there is nowhere to go. She breathes deep—all that hot chemical air—and walks toward him. He does not climb down off the stand. She speaks first.

She says, “I need to do the swim test.”

He looks again at his clipboard. All business. “Yes, I see your name here,” he says.

“So what do I do?”

“You need to go from one end of the pool to the other. You cannot stop or hang on to the side until you get to the other end. Then you can take a break. There is no time limit.”

At the shallow end, she climbs into the pool. She is almost dizzy from the heat and the silly fear she has of water, and the stress of looking over at Arthur, smug on the lifeguard stand, looking down at her, at the water rising up around her and soaking her bathing suit.

She stands for a moment and looks down the length of the pool. It feels like a great distance, a near-impossible task. It is also humiliating, the fact that she isn’t a good swimmer, can’t swim, and that Arthur is here to witness it. She takes one last look up at him. One last glance to the other side. Then she takes a deep breath and goes for it.

She does a modified doggie paddle, her arms and legs flailing under the water, propelling her forward, her head barely above the water, like a retriever cutting through a pond.

It is beyond humiliating, and she tells herself just to keep moving, push and kick, push and kick, over and over, and finally she looks up, thinking she must be nearing the end, only to realize she has not traveled more than a third of the way. She puts her head down and presses on, and a moment later, she is in trouble.

Her legs, which had been behind her, are now surprisingly below her, as if she has lost her natural buoyancy. The water is in her nose, and she tries to compensate by whirling her arms faster, but this seems to make it worse, and now she is under, closing her eyes and trying to push toward the top.

She doesn’t so much hear Arthur, other than as some distant swoosh, as feel him, his arm around her waist, his hands up over her breasts, her neck, pulling her up and sputtering out of the water.

“Easy now,” he says in her ear. “Easy now.”

At the pool’s wall she hangs on to the edge, and he is behind her, saying, “You okay, Betsy? You okay?”

She pulls herself up and out of the water. On her knees, she completes the humiliation by throwing up.

And Arthur is there, whispering to her kindly, sliding her hair away from her face. She turns toward him, and the nausea has passed, and now she starts to laugh, uncontrollably, some great release of tension, and Arthur laughs, too, and when she says, “Oh, fuck, now I’m not going to graduate,” he says, “Not to worry. I mean, you went back and forth the whole length from what I could see,” and they laugh even harder now, and she is grateful to him.

Time is stripped away. They are back where they were more than a year ago, sitting on the dewy fall grass and watching the stars together. For a moment it as if nothing happened. Time is malleable. Memory fails. Memory changes.

Graduation day comes, and the day, as it should be, is bright and beautiful, and one by one the newly minted Lancaster graduates fulfill the tradition by ringing the bell that sits on top of the small hill behind the main quad. The girls wear all-white knee-length dresses, while the boys wear navy blazers, tan khakis, and Lancaster ties. They are a sea of sameness, and when Arthur rings the bell, Betsy watches as he steps through this window in time like Winthrops have always done and she thinks that the uniform and the moment seem to suit him better than most, and then she washes it out of her head, since she figures she will never see him again. Over the past couple of days since her swim test they have talked a few times, but nothing significant. She has forgiven him for what she believes he did to Russell, and part of her feels tremendously guilty about this, as if she is giving in to the larger forces that are this old school, but she also knows that Lancaster moves forward with the force of a river and that once someone is gone it’s as if he were never there. Lancaster has a way of dealing only with the living.

In the fall Arthur goes to Yale, and she goes to Wellesley. That first year, there are a few boys, one-night stands, really, but nothing that ever evolves into a relationship. Boys who tell her all kinds of things to get her into bed—like the long-haired Harvard student who tells her after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms that he wants to fuck her through rainbows.

She doesn’t know if he means it literally, and he cannot explain it when she presses him, but it turns out that, naturally, he is so high that the point is moot.

One January night Betsy rides a chartered bus from Wellesley to New Haven with a group of other girls. They are expected at a mixer at Scroll and Key, a prominent secret society, and when they arrive a soft snow is falling on the trees in front of a magnificent granite building that looks more like a monument or a tomb than a place you would actually enter. Betsy files off the bus with all the other Wellesley girls. It is her first time at Yale, and she wonders if she will see Arthur, but she assumes she will not, since after all it is a big school. There are some other Lancaster boys at Yale but none that she was close to, and that is not why she is here, anyway. Coming off the bus, she thinks maybe she has made a mistake. She has been to only one of these before, at Harvard, when she first got to college, and that feeling she had then comes back now, the feeling of being on parade for privileged boys, their eyes on her, sizing her up in the narrowest of ways, as if they, these Wellesley women, are little more than what they suggest in their blouses and skirts, when around them they face a rapidly changing world where every facet of their education speaks to another truth.

Inside they are led into a great room, and there is punch and Yale boys, and she is not one who draws them but she is also not threatening, either, pretty enough for them to want to talk to her but not one of those girls who gets noticed right away, which she has decided is okay by her. The ceiling is vaulted, held up by great pillars, and there are staircases that lead up from either side to a balcony, and it is on this balcony, an hour into the awkward soiree, that suddenly they hear the sound of singing, high-voiced and pretty, and quickly all other sound falls away, and Betsy cannot at first help but smile at the sight of them, fifteen or so Yale men, dressed identically in a uniform not so different from those she remembers from Lancaster: navy jackets and ties and pressed khakis. The song is funny and ribald, and contains a line about how punch delivers certain properties to extract the chaste from the women of Wellesley.

She is smiling at this display, along with the others, when she notices Arthur. He is in the second row of the singing men. She does not know why it has taken her so long to see him, since he is unchanged, that tall, narrow countenance and the flop of brown hair falling over his forehead. He is staring right at her, and she knows then that he has seen her all along, and even though she is far below him, she can also see that he knows now that she has recognized him, and he allows himself the thinnest of smiles during the song’s last stanza.

When they finish, her heart is in her throat, as she knows he will come to her, and she is determined to act surprised, her back to the staircases as if she is scanning the rest of the room, and it is his hand on her shoulder she feels first, and when she turns, he is in front of her.

“Betsy,” he says.

“Hello, Arthur.”

“You look well,” he says.

She smiles. “You, too.”

And maybe it is the pull of Lancaster itself, the realization that even after eighteenth months at Wellesley she misses the old Vermont school. Things were simpler then, weren’t they? Or at least less formed. And seeing Arthur again, she feels somehow as if she knows him better than anyone else, better than the friends she rode the bus with, better than the boys from Harvard she opened herself up to on fall nights, doing the walk of shame out of brick dorms and into the gray, liquid air of dawn. Is there a way, she wonders, sitting on the granite steps with him, their backs against the cool stone wall, watching people mingle below them, to square what he did to Russell with this boy graciously making her laugh now? Could his actions be seen somehow as an act of chivalry? That, of course, she decides, is a stretch, but at a minimum she can put it away, store it like a yellowed letter in a small box deep in the closet of her mind.

When the bus leaves at 11:15 for the ride back up to Massachusetts, she is not on it. Instead, she is in a nearby dorm, fully clothed, on her back on a bed next to Arthur Winthrop, talking in the half dark, staring at the ceiling, whispering stories with him as if the past were a long time ago.

On weekends they burn up the highways from suburban Boston to New Haven, more she than he, since she can stay in his dorm. At Wellesley things change more slowly, and she has to sneak him in. The young Arthur is an ardent lover, and they fuck with abandon. His roommate—a nice, tall, skinny, long-haired kid from Exeter, of all places—is kind enough to find another place to stay on the nights she comes down.

In that dorm room, with its fireplace and high ceilings and its view of the broad expanse of the quad, they try their hardest never to leave this space. They bring in pizza. They drink wine straight from the bottle. They smoke cigarettes. She studies, and he does not. This mystifies her about Arthur, how he never seems to study. She feels perpetually behind, like she will never catch up, but he doesn’t seem to give a shit, or at least that’s what he wants to show her. In the end, she decides it’s genuine: that he is just one of those people who can absorb books, never take notes, and show up and ace his tests. Plus, he has the advantage of knowing what graduation brings. Graduation brings a return to Lancaster. The point is to get the degree. No more, no less.

College, as it turns out, is Lancaster unbridled, Lancaster without rules.

They can sleep as late as they want. They can be in each other’s rooms. They can smoke and drink, and if they want to skip class—something he does but she cannot imagine, aware, as she is, of the dollars and cents of it all—they can do that, too. Most of all they can make love, and in those first months, those precious weekends when she arrives late and they fall into each other, they are as much scientists as they are artists.

She is on the Pill now. It is a revelation, this thing she takes every day that says she can have as much sex as she wants and not worry about getting pregnant. Arthur loves it, too, for it is as if the last impediment to relentless fucking has been removed. Plus, she is all hormones. “Look at me,” she says to Arthur once, “my tits are bigger, aren’t they? I mean, I’m not imagining that, right?”

“No,” he says, “you’re not.”

And so she climbs on top of him; he climbs on top of her; they climb on top of each other and curl together like vines.

All walls between them fall away, and they are willing to be naked with each other, not just in the narrow biblical sense, but in the larger sense of the word, opening their insides as well as their outsides without shame or remorse or fear. She lets Arthur see her with all her flaws and she sees all of his, and sometimes, when she is leaving him, a wave of inexplicable sadness comes over her. It is nothing specific that she can point to—not the leaving, for she likes her freedom, too—but come over her it does, and soon she is weeping.

Arthur always mistakes this for her having to get back on Interstate 95 and leave him behind, and he invariably commits the one mistake he will compound throughout their lives: a failure to leave her alone. If he just let her be sad, just let her dwell in it for a moment, she would come out the other side and be fine.

But he is a man and he wants to fix her. She tells him not to, she tells him he cannot, but he doesn’t stop. He tries humor at first, as if he can jolly her out of this mood, and when that doesn’t work he tries anger.

“For Christ’s sake, Betsy, knock it off, will you?”

On her birthday he takes her to New York City and surprises her by securing Dick Ives’s apartment. Dick is a friend of theirs from Lancaster, and the apartment has been in his family. She has heard of it before, this grand place that Dick sometimes lets his friends use, but she has never seen it.

As a consequence, Betsy finds herself in the most remarkable apartment she has ever seen, the penthouse of Halvorsen Hall on West Sixty-fourth and Central Park West. The place is huge by New York standards, two floors with a swooping staircase that leads up to the bedrooms and, most magnificently, a balcony—can you call it balcony if it fits fifty people?—with marble railings that looks out over Central Park to the towers of the Upper East Side.