The Headmaster's Wife (19 page)

And then, a month later, it is Ethan’s birthday—a big one; he is eighteen—and they are out at the only okay restaurant in town, a place that, oddly, serves only pasta. It is just the three of them. They are halfway through their smoked chicken with pesto when Ethan looks up at the two of them and says matter-of-factly, “I’m not going to Yale.”

Elizabeth looks at Arthur. He swallows and then says, “No? There is someplace you like better.”

“I’m joining the army,” Ethan says.

Arthur snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Ethan shrugs and looks back to his pasta. Elizabeth shudders visibly and stares over at Arthur. This has to be a joke. This is something she and Arthur easily agree on. Not that they aren’t patriots in their own way, and not that they don’t love their country, etc., etc., but there are the usual caveats, and one thing they both know is that the army is not something their son would get involved in.

Ethan doesn’t say anything. Arthur stares at him. “You are serious, aren’t you?”

Ethan looks up again, for just a moment, then back to his plate. “It’s what I want to do.”

“Oh, don’t be self-indulgent,” Arthur says.

“Wouldn’t Yale be more self-indulgent, Dad?” Ethan says.

“Listen,” Arthur says, and Elizabeth can see he is deliberately restraining himself, though a flush has come over the back of his neck and there is a vein rising up on his forehead. “Look at me.” Ethan looks up. “If this army thing is something you really want to do, then for God’s sake go to college first. Go in as an officer. Be a leader of men. The army will still be there four years from now.”

This is precisely what Elizabeth would have said had she been able to say anything at all. This is her failure as a mother, she thinks: She is incapable of regulating the two men in her life.

Ethan says, “It’s done.”

“What do you mean ‘it’s done’?” Arthur says.

“I signed the papers today.”

“Oh, Ethan,” Elizabeth says, and she starts to cry. She does not want to be crying in this restaurant—there are other students, faculty—and it suddenly occurs to her that her son possesses the adult cruelty of a husband who tells his wife he wants a divorce in a crowded restaurant knowing she will not want a scene. There is a protocol the well bred always fall back on, even in the most trying of circumstances.

“Then unsign them,” Arthur says.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“You stupid boy. What do you want? To be a hero?”

“No,” Ethan says. “Nothing like that.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know,” her son says. “It’s just what I wanted to do, okay? I didn’t expect you to like it.”

“Honey,” Elizabeth says softly, “we love you, you know that. We just want the best for you. Your father and I—”

“Oh, shut it, Betsy,” Arthur says. “You stupid shit, Ethan. You know that. You’ve been given every gift and you throw it away. How can you be this dumb? Huh? My son? How can you be this fucking stupid?”

Ethan stands up then. Elizabeth realizes that, near them, the restaurant has gone still. She glances around—eyes averted at other tables; people pretend they are not listening, though you can suddenly hear a pin drop. Ethan stands up, and he towers over the two of them, this son, this person they made, and he glares at Arthur, and Arthur says, “Sit down.”

“I won’t,” Ethan says quietly, a steely whisper, and when Arthur goes to get up, Elizabeth, aware of the pregnancy of the moment, the need to get through it, pulls on his arm, and somehow, to her great relief, Arthur sinks into his chair.

Ethan turns and walks out. Six months later he will walk across the stage in the field house and accept his diploma from his father. They will shake hands, not like father and son, but like any other prep school kid fulfilling the time-honored Lancaster tradition of handing the headmaster marbles so as to see how he disposes of them. (Arthur is prepared, of course, with a bowl behind him on a table, having handed marbles to his own father a generation before.) Like his male classmates, Ethan is handsome and boyish with floppy hair.

And by September, when his friends are moving into dorm rooms at Yale and Middlebury and Dartmouth, he will be in Iraq.

She lost Ethan and she thinks she might be losing Arthur. He sits up in his study and drinks all the time. He says he is working. Once, after he retires to his room—he has begun sleeping in the guest room—she walks into his office, and on his desk is one of the yellow legal pads he is always using to take notes for work. He has been writing on it, but instead of the usual notes about strategic planning or prospective donors or the other things that make up his work life, he has doodled all over the page like a high school student would. There are some immature sketches—one that looks like a penis; another a drawing of, of all things, a thumb. But the rest of the page is her name, scribbled all different ways, a hundred or so
Betsy
s, and now and again, in the corners mainly, it reads, “Betsy and Arthur,” like what a fourteen-year-old boy might write if he thought no one was looking. Something that should be carved into the bark of a tree.

And then there is the talking to himself. Arthur has always mumbled to himself. He has always had this disconcerting habit, especially when he is preparing for public remarks, of walking around practicing out loud. Times when she would walk in the kitchen and catch him saying, “My dear students,” and then seeing her and stopping. “Was I saying that out loud?” he would ask.

“Yes,” she would say.

“I need to quit that,” he’d say.

She’d smile. “Yes, you do.”

But after the funeral it becomes more common, and not tied to public speaking. He mutters around the house, and from her perch in the library, for the first time, she hears others comment on it. The headmaster is talking to himself, they say. And she is embarrassed for him, for the two of them, and she doesn’t know what to say to him or to others. It is no longer just the charming quirk of another Lancaster academic, the old man in his tweed and his school tie. It contains the husk of madness.

One evening, with the snow falling outside the windows, she cannot stand it anymore. She goes to him in his office, and there he is, dropping the legal pad and his endless and mindless doodles and pretending to absentmindedly look at his e-mail on the laptop in front of him. She loathes him and loves him at the same time. How can it be both? Maybe it is because he has decided to fall away just when she needs him the most. Things like this can go one of two directions, she thinks, and he has chosen to leave. He is a coward.

“Arthur,” she says. “You cannot pretend.”

“Elizabeth,” he says. “What is it?”

“You know what it is.”

“Is this about Ethan?”

She goes at him then. “Goddamn it, Arthur, will you wake up? Will you?”

“Come here,” he says. “Just come here.”

Somehow he coaxes her into his lap. He looks into her eyes, like he has always done. “There, there,” he says.

“Wake up,” she says.

“I know, I know.”

“No, you don’t,” she says. “You can’t pretend, Arthur. You know this, right?”

“Shush,” he says, and it is patronizing, but he does have this way with her, and she looks into his brown eyes and she wants to believe whatever he says.

The craziest thing about grief, she decides in those moments when she is capable of such reflection, is how it numbs you. Nothing tastes good anymore. Nothing smells pretty. Sleep is elusive. She no longer dreams and she thinks this might be because the dreams come when she is awake. They are the only things that are vivid to Elizabeth, and not even the rare early spring day, when she feels the sun warm on her face, can take her out of this. Maybe if she had someone to talk to it would be better. But what can anyone possibly tell her that she cannot figure out on her own? Yes, others have grieved, but it is also so particular. She’s not going to join some group so she can realize she is not alone. Nothing she feels surprises her, other than this: It does not get better. In fact, it gets worse. When they arrived at her door to let her know her son was dead, she thought, I can handle this; this isn’t that bad. And then, in the days that followed, she thought, Look at me, I am handling it. I am strong and capable, as stout as a mother with a dead kid can be. But then it doesn’t recede like the spring water. Instead it grows in intensity, like a virus that takes over her body, until it seems it is all she is. There is no more
her
any longer; there is just this thing that happened, the place in the world where her son used to be.

She spends a weekend up at her parents’, and it is strange to be back in her childhood house, and at night she drinks tea with her mom and dad, and it is the same table where they once sat and talked for the first time about Lancaster School. They want her to talk, and she will not. So they sit in silence, and the windows rattle as they always have, with the wind coming across the highlands. Her parents sadden her. Her father’s hands shake. Her mother doesn’t hear well anymore, and makes a good show of pretending to listen to Elizabeth, to put together what it is she is saying, but Elizabeth knows that her own words come out of her mouth and just hang in the air before disappearing.

She wants to tell them that there is nothing left that matters to her. But she realizes that they still have her, and her sister, who has twins in middle school, and while her father still cannot hear Ethan’s name without his eyes misting over, it is different for them. You get a second life as a parent when your children have children, your lifeblood flowing through a new generation, and this is something she will never know. She blames herself. They could have had a second child back then, and she did not want one. Maybe the ancient logic of multiple children is a guard against just this reality. The knowledge that if you lose one, there is always another to carry on for you. Some amount of love that will reflect back.

“You need to take care of yourself,” her mother is telling her. “I am worried about you. You are so thin.”

“I am fine,” she says, though she knows that is not true.

“She’s fine,” her father says, still believing in her all these years later. “Leave her alone, will you? She’s fine.”

That night, she lies in her childhood bed and does not sleep. She watches the light of the full moon play off the pastureland and she lies there in the dark and in her mind she sees the entirety of the life her son did not have. She imagines the pretty girl he would have married. She imagines the children they would have had. She sees him, tall and strong and kind-eyed, holding a baby in his arms, bringing the baby over to her, looking down on its dewy eyes. She imagines the goodness he might have brought to their lives, holidays with his family that would have made the pain of getting old bearable. Summers on the Cape watching grandchildren dance in the breaking surf. It is the marrow of life, she thinks, family, and it has been taken away from her.

One spring morning she wakes to sunlight coming through the tops of the windows where the blinds don’t reach. She gets a sense of blue sky. She rolls over and she does not know what time it is. Arthur is gone, of course, already left for the administration building. He might be mad but he is somehow still remarkably punctual. It is probably midmorning, and soon she will be expected at the library, though she is not thinking about that, not thinking about it at all.

She rises and considers her closet. All this waste, she thinks, looking over the array of dresses that have been worn only a few times, the piles of sweaters on the shelves, the shoes stacked neatly against the far wall. She was never much of a clotheshorse, but that is not what she is looking at. What she is looking at is the accrual of a life, things bought, things discarded, and somehow this is what has survived. All these sensible clothes.

She cannot be decisive, not today, and she turns away from them, and once again she is drawn to the blue sky sliding through the crack of sky. She goes to the hallway and for a moment she lingers at the top of the stairs—so grand, these stairs, swooping down and then around like something out of an old movie. The kind of stairs that women are carried up. She lingers there for a moment in her nightgown, and down below she can see the windows that line the front door, and the sunlight, the sunlight of spring, streams through them with a warmth that draws her.

Then down the stairs she goes, and instead of to the kitchen and to coffee, she goes to the door, opens it. The day is warm. The campus in front of her is silent. She watches a car make its way down the rural highway between their house and the other side, where the quad and the old part of Lancaster School are. Even though the day is warm, it is early spring and the grass on their front lawn still has patches of dirty snow in the corner, and the grass that is exposed is pressed down, brown and wet.

She can see between the buildings on the other side, and the walkways are all empty; no one is coming in and out of the doors. It must be second or third period, and everyone is in class. This brings a smile to her face for some reason, the clear regimentation, students and faculty moving with the synchronicity of swallows.

She steps onto the lawn and she grins again, this time from the cold and squish of the soft lawn on her bare feet, surprisingly pleasant, and then the feel of the slightly crunchy snow at the edges as she begins to walk. She walks around the house and then makes her way down the slight slope to the flat of the soccer field, and soon she is halfway across it, walking with purpose now, the sun warm on her face, though the breeze on her legs and ruffling her nightgown still has some of winter’s breath.

In front of her are the girls’ dorms, the low-slung brick buildings where she lived as a student almost forty years ago, and where she lived as a dorm parent ten years after that. They, too, look deserted, since everyone is on the other side of the campus.

She comes off the raised soccer field and onto the cold asphalt of the access road that runs in front of the dorms. She crosses it and then between her old dorm, Fuller, with Jameson to her right. On the left corner she passes the room she lived in her junior year and instinctively she looks toward the window, and because the shade is drawn, the only thing she sees is her reflection staring back at her, her hair wild, her face haggard with age and a morning without a shower or makeup. She looks like a ghost, she thinks, which in some ways she is.