The Headmaster's Wife (20 page)

She emerges on the other side, and at first she cannot see the river. She can see only the broad swath of land on the other side, snow-speckled, leading to the trees standing like rows of sentinels in the distance.

But, coming forward, stepping in deeper snow, up to her ankles in the lee of the building, she sees it now, a hint of blue caught in the sun. She walks until she reaches its banks and looks down at a winter’s worth of runoff. The river is high and fast and silty, swirling and swirling with quick-moving currents. She stares at them. They are violent and almost mesmerizing. As if an invisible hand were running sticks angrily across the surface of the water. Breaking the plane and then pulling up suddenly, the ripple disappearing as if it has run its course.

The wind coming off the fields in front of her blows directly at her and takes the thin cloth of her nightgown and presses it tightly against her skin. She raises her arms to her side and holds them out and then she closes her eyes.

Falling is the easy part, she tells herself. We think it’s not, but it is. We are just taught not to do it. All you have to do is say yes. Say yes, Betsy, she says. Just say yes.

She goes up on her tippy toes. She leans forward. She opens her eyes as gravity does its work, and the last thing she sees is the blue sky, and the brown of the fields, and the water rushing toward her. She closes her eyes as she tumbles underneath it, instinctively holding her breath for the smallest of moments before allowing the river to fill her, suspend her, take her and not let go.

AFTER

Russell Hurley turns toward one of the men.

He says, “Do you think I could have a few minutes alone with Mr. Winthrop?”

The man nods. The two of them get up and leave the room. Russell sits down across from Arthur. He studies his eyes for signs of sentience, but it is like looking in a mirror. All he sees is reflection, and he wonders if it will be possible for Arthur to be whole again or if he will live the rest of his life in the shadows.

“Arthur,” he says. “I don’t expect you to understand everything.”

“You can’t be who you say you are.”

“That’s one of the things that will take time.”

“I want to go now.”

Russell looks around the room. It’s windowless and positively Soviet. He doesn’t blame Arthur, and though Arthur’s crime is small, small compared to what he believes it to be, given his fractured, broken mind, it is unlikely he will just be released to take off his clothes in the park again. Instead, Russell thinks, the decision is more around where he will go. The police certainly don’t want him; they just want him to be somewhere else, off the streets and out of sight.

“I know,” Russell says. “I think I can help.”

Arthur’s head lifts slowly, and he looks at Russell. His narrow eyes squint. His head appears to be heavy on his shoulders, as if it’s hard to hold up.

“How?” he asks.

“I think I can get you out of here, but you can help yourself, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Arthur, I’m going to be straight with you. They are going to put you in Bellevue. Do you know what that is?”

“Of course. It’s a mental hospital. Why would they put me there?”

“Arthur, I know you don’t believe this. But you are not well.”

“I am fine.”

“I know. You are fine. Problem is
they
don’t know that.”

“Someone call Dick Ives. He will straighten this out. Lancaster’s attorney is Willard Bass from Bass, Frank, and O’Connor.”

“Arthur—you can’t win this. I’m sorry. I can get you out of Bellevue. But you need to agree to go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“A place in Connecticut. It’s a residential facility. Very different from Bellevue. If you go there and do well you’ll be home in no time.”

“A hospital?”

“Yes, but it’s not Bellevue. It looks more like a—it looks more like a boarding school.”

Arthur sinks in his chair. He begins to run his hands through his hair over and over. Russell says, “You don’t need to decide today. They will let you sleep now. Would you like that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Arthur. I’ll be back tomorrow morning, okay?”

Arthur nods, and Russell stands to leave. Arthur says, “Russell? You are Russell?”

Russell turns around and looks at the slender figure in clothes too big disappearing into the metal chair. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For everything.”

Russell nods. “Me, too,” he says.

Riding the subway uptown, moving with the train as it shudders around the bends with the lights flickering, Russell thinks about the randomness of life. It was entirely arbitrary that he happened to hear the name Arthur Winthrop as he moved through the hallway of the D.A.’s office yesterday morning and decided to stop one of his younger colleagues, who told him the story of the headmaster in the park. It was hardly a serious crime and never would otherwise have come to his attention, if it hadn’t been for the station of the person involved, which made for good office gossip. Even though Russell had been at Lancaster for only four months, for some reason all these years they had kept him on the mailing list, and every three months or so the glossy magazine showed up at his apartment, pictures of Arthur everywhere, and sometimes pictures of Betsy, so in this way he has watched the two of them grow older, like a celebrity couple you follow in the newspapers. And sometimes, looking at Betsy, he got pangs of remembrance, but then he would stop and chastise himself, how silly it was, and how long ago. It doesn’t make any sense to mourn the loss of something that happened when you were a teenager, though there were other times when he thought in some ways everything that had happened since in his life traced back to that short time he had had on that campus.

But after he heard Arthur’s name and asked what was being done, it took only a moment for him to decide to involve himself. He placed the call to the school, and after a long pause he was talking to Betsy, and on the phone, things changed for him. There she was, telling him things like an old friend—that they had lost their son, that Arthur had lost his mind, that she had tried to take her own life. She said they had a horrible row when she was in the hospital recovering from hypothermia—a student had found her crawling toward the dorm after she came out of the river. She blamed Arthur for their son’s death and she knew it was unfair but she needed to say it and she did. After that, he disappeared. Until the call from the NYPD that he was in custody.

And so he found himself telling Betsy to have the lawyers hold on, that he would take care of it, all of it. And he heard the relief in her voice and the trust coming across the decades and through the phone. “Come down here,” he said. “It will be okay. I promise.”

He exits the subway and on Amsterdam he stops at Planet Sushi and orders two sushi dinners and an extra order of the hamachi. This is one of those nights when he wishes he knew how to cook, wishes he had one good dish he could execute, even if it was pasta with clams or something like that. But since he divorced ten years ago and moved to the one-bedroom with its view of the Hudson, he turned his refrigerator off and took the door off of it and filled it with books. The stove, also unplugged, holds in its oven his important papers, his birth certificate and passport and so on, since he figures if there is ever a fire, this is the one place that will withstand it. And New York allows you those possibilities, he thinks, the ability not to have to do anything for yourself.

Out on the avenue the night is dark and cold, and the streets are full of people walking huddled and faceless against it. Coming down Ninety-second, he can see the river now beyond in the icy dark and, as he enters his unassuming apartment building, he has this sudden sinking feeling that she will no longer be upstairs.

He rides the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and Mrs. Goldsmith, well into her eighties, is in the hallway, her groceries at her feet, her terrier looking up at him expectantly as she fumbles through her bag for her keys. Russell desperately doesn’t want to talk with her, not tonight, but she sees him and breaks into a wide smile, and he says, “Let me give you a hand with those.”

A moment later he has Mrs. Goldsmith safely in her apartment, her groceries on the kitchen table, and he opens the door to his own apartment and for a moment he thinks his fears are to be realized, as the kitchen is dark and in the small living room there is only the light from the reading lamp and there is no sign of her. But then he sees the bathroom door is closed, yellow light coming from underneath it. He goes to it and says, “Betsy?”

“Oh,” the voice comes back to him, and he is relieved. “Just finishing in the tub. Be out in a minute.”

Russell quickly hustles and turns on lights, cleans off the small dining room table in front of the best feature of his place, the large window that looks out over West End Avenue to the wide Hudson and the twinkling lights of New Jersey on the opposite shore. He considers candles—he knows he has them somewhere, in the kitchen perhaps—but that would be too much, he decides, deliberately romantic. That is not why she is here, though, from the moment he saw her yesterday, for the first time since they were in boarding school together so long ago, he has allowed himself the fantasy, and why not? He is single, and he suspects, from the few things she has said opaquely, that she has left Arthur for good. But more than that, standing in front of her for the first time in fortysomething years, he realized that she has aged, of course, as has he, but that the ineffable part of her beauty, the part he thought about all the time during that interminable six months after he left Lancaster and before he started as a freshman at Brandeis, had not changed one bit. Even with short gray hair and the furrowed lines of late middle age, he would have recognized her on the street. And, he thinks, she is even more beautiful now to him, if that is possible. She wears her sorrow like clothes, but with wisdom and loss and years of living come a different, particular beauty that no smooth-faced adolescent can possibly match.

When she comes out finally, flushed from the heat of the bath, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans, he smiles at her. The table by the window is set. It is hardly elegant, with the containers of sushi simply opened, but he does have small plates and wineglasses and an open bottle of rosé, more of a summer thing than winter, but he couldn’t think what else made sense with the fish.

“Oh, lovely,” she says.

“I hope you like sushi.”

“I do,” says Betsy.

And she sits down across from him, and when she does he looks her in the eye and he thinks how much time can steal from us, what a goddamn thief it is, that an entire lifetime could be lived since he last sat with her. They should be strangers but he does not feel that way. He is comfortable with her, and he has been alone so long he decided a few years ago that he might never be comfortable with someone again. But here he is, the great irony, sitting across from Betsy Pappas (for, in his mind, that is what he will call her), and the years have stripped away. He permits himself to imagine that maybe this is just another Wednesday at their city apartment. Their kids are out and about in the world, living splendid lives. They will small-talk about what each of them did that day, about the children, who might have called with some new bit of news. Perhaps a new boyfriend or girlfriend or something they can collectively worry about.

She jars him out of this. “How is Arthur?”

Russell shrugs. “He’ll be okay.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Are they going to keep him?”

“They don’t want to. I proposed a solution.”

“Oh?”

“Stamford Hills. A facility in Connecticut. He’ll get the help he needs. But it won’t be Bellevue. He may even like it there.”

Betsy raises her glass. She leans it toward Russell’s. “Thank you.”

He tips his glass into hers. “He still needs to agree.”

“He will, won’t he?”

“I think so,” says Russell.

They eat. Russell watches as she takes a piece of slender fish into her mouth, dipping it first into soy, and he follows. She is skillful with the chopsticks—smearing wasabi on the fish, and all of it is seamless, and for a few moments they eat in silence.

“This is wonderful,” she says.

He shrugs. “I wish I could cook, but New York always has sushi.”

She smiles, and in the smile he sees her younger self once again and suddenly he is insecure for all the years he has worked and lived. What does he have to show for it? This apartment? He doesn’t even have a tiny spit of land. All he has is this apartment on the Upper West Side, a failed marriage, but at least there are children who think fondly of him. He has his job as an assistant district attorney, one of many. He will never be district attorney, for this is Manhattan, and he is not that person. Perhaps in a small town, where he came from, but he always had different aspirations, didn’t he? Otherwise he would not have gone to Lancaster, which is not the place for the son of a plumber from Western Mass.

They eat. For a moment there is only the sound of chopsticks picking up shiny pieces of fish on rice, dipping them into soy sauce and wasabi and then lifting up to their mouths. He watches her. She enjoys eating, and though he has no right to do so, he loves her for this.

Finally, he says, “I have to ask you. I am sorry.”

“Say it,” she says.

He hesitates. He sips from his wine. “Okay,” he says. “Shit, I don’t know how to say it.”

“Just say it. You can ask me anything.”

He breathes deep. “It’s none of my business.”

“Go ahead.”

“You tried to kill yourself.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why?”

She puts down her chopsticks. She looks out the window.

He says, “You don’t have to say anything.”

“No,” she says, turning back to him. “I want to. This is important.”

“Okay,” he says.

“I couldn’t.”

“Okay.”

“I mean: I couldn’t. Something happened. I jumped, right? Jumped into the frozen water. I wanted to die, I did. I wanted it all to go away. I wasn’t well. I really wanted it to go away. But then something happened.”