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“Then no wonder she’s angry. I’d be angry myself.” Glancing around the room, Kate saw several of the faculty watching them. She realized that Hawthorne knew nothing about the news clippings. She wanted to tell him but the moment seemed awkward.

Fritz Skander came out of the kitchen and quickly rejoined Hawthorne. “Come and say hello to Hilda. She’s eager to see you.” Hawthorne smiled and shrugged his shoulders at Kate as Skander led him away.

In the next few minutes Hawthorne made his way around the room, shaking hands and greeting the teachers who were under his charge. Despite his courtesy, there was a coolness that Kate attributed to shyness. She found herself next to the nurse, Alice Beech, who had arrived just before Hawthorne.

Alice was watching Hawthorne talk to Gene Strauss. “He doesn’t know those clippings were put in our mailboxes,” she told Kate. “I’d like to shake whoever did it.”

“What do you think’s going to happen?” asked Kate.

The nurse crossed her arms over her chest. She wore jeans and an orange sweater. “I think somebody’s going to tell him, but it’s not going to be me.”

“People are saying that he means to write a book about Bishop’s Hill,” said Kate, then blushed a little at finding herself repeating the current gossip.

“I wish him luck.”

It seemed to Kate that the room had grown quieter, that the men and women, while continuing their conversations, were more intent on Hawthorne than on whomever they were talking to. They were watching him while pretending not to watch him. She wondered if he would notice and how long it would take. And she realized that whoever had put the clippings in the mailboxes was most likely somebody in the room at this moment.

As it turned out, it was the Reverend Bennett who told Hawthorne about the clippings. Kate didn’t hear all that was said, but she heard Harriet say, “I think you should know . . .” It seemed that everyone in the room was trying to follow their conversation. A few more people had arrived and now some eighteen members of the Bishop’s Hill community were gathered in the Skanders’ living room and dining room. Kate stood with Alice Beech, who looked depressed.

“In everybody’s mailbox?” asked Hawthorne.

The chaplain nodded brusquely. They stood by the fireplace. “That’s what I gather.”

Hawthorne pushed his glasses up his nose with the knuckle of his thumb. He was smiling slightly, or rather, thought Kate, in his surprise he had forgotten to unsmile. He stood very still and it occurred to Kate that he wanted to flee, that it was only with great effort that he was keeping his body motionless as he thought about what it meant that the articles had become common knowledge. Watching him, Kate felt drawn to him. Along with sympathy, she felt admiration.

“What an odd thing for someone to have done,” said Hawthorne.

“In rather bad taste, I thought,” said Harriet Bennett.

Skander came across the room to join them. “I’m terribly sorry about it, Jim. If I’d known about it in time, I would have put them in the trash. It’s nobody’s concern what happened in San Diego.” Skander looked indignant and shook his head.

Standing next to Kate, Alice made a small, exasperated groan. “I wish he’d shut up. He’s going to make it worse.”

“It’s public information,” said Hawthorne quietly. “There’s nothing to hide. And the articles, I expect, were accurate, for the most part . . .”

But not entirely, thought Kate. And she knew that Hawthorne wanted to tell the whole story of what had happened, to correct their misapprehensions, but she also knew he would say nothing. She realized that Hawthorne was now looking at them as a single group, that for him
they
had become Other. And Kate was surprised to find in herself a wish to tell him that she wasn’t part of them, that she had only recently come to Bishop’s Hill, that she wasn’t allied with anybody.

“This is awful,” Alice told Kate.

Hawthorne was asking Harriet Bennett which articles they had been and Harriet said they were four stories from the
Union-Tribune.
Chip Campbell made his way across the room. He still had a beer but Kate didn’t think it was the same one he had had earlier. He was grinning.

“Tell me,” said Chip, “who was that cute psychologist? What was her name? Claire something. Claire de Lune.”

Somebody laughed. Alice Beech flushed deep red. “He’s drunk.”

“She was a former colleague in Boston.” Hawthorne began to go on, then didn’t. He turned back to the chaplain, looking for something else to say. Alice Beech was halfway to the fireplace before Kate realized that she had moved from her side. She was solid and businesslike and people got out of her way.

“I wanted to ask about the Miller girl,” Alice began. “You know she’s in the infirmary . . .” Apparently Peggy Miller had the flu. Alice had talked to the girl’s parents. She was wondering whether Peggy shouldn’t be kept in a far room in the infirmary so that others who might come in wouldn’t be infected, but that would require getting another bed out of the storage area in the attic of Emerson Hall. They discussed the logistics for a moment. Hawthorne said he would make sure that a bed was moved first thing in the morning.

People began to return to their conversations. Emily Strauss spilled her mulled cider and Hilda hurried to clean it up. Skander put a log on the fire. Bill Dolittle sought out Hawthorne with some pressing concern. Chip drank his beer and looked pleased with himself. Kate continued to watch Hawthorne, who had obviously been relieved by Alice’s appearance. Kate envied her slightly. Why hadn’t she herself been quick enough to change the topic of conversation? It always seemed that she had to think something through before she acted on it. She found herself drawn to Hawthorne’s angularity and watched how his mouth moved and the quality of his smile. And she looked at his right hand, where it extended from the green sleeve of his sweater. The scar had a sort of plastic pinkness and the skin between the ridges seemed smooth. Kate imagined what it would be like to be touched by that hand.

—

On Sunday a wind blew in from the south and the day was unexpectedly warm for October. Hawthorne had spent much of the afternoon meeting with students, but late that evening he was again on the terrace outside his quarters. The night was clear and there were a million stars but the sky felt just as empty. It was odd picking out constellations that he had seen in fifty different places and to see them now at Bishop’s Hill. The last time he had looked at the Big Dipper he had been walking along the beach in Coronado in early August listening to the surf. He had taken a woman out to dinner, which had been a mistake. Even though she was friendly, her presence made Hawthorne think of his dead wife and the times he had been with her in similar circumstances. Dinner at the Del, a walk along the beach. Men from the navy base jogging along the esplanade. Hawthorne had looked up at the Big Dipper, just as he was doing this evening, and wished he could be lost in the midst of its stars.

Now that Hawthorne was taking a break from his day’s labor, thoughts of his wife and daughter returned to him, though their features were indistinct. Only in dreams did he see them exactly. His daughter had had light blond hair so bright that it sparkled, and when Hawthorne thought of her, it was the hair that he saw clearly, then a vagueness of face and features. He remembered combing her hair after her bath, easing the comb through the tangles so it wouldn’t pull, and her clean smell and the apple fragrance of her favorite shampoo. Then her death once again swept over him and he felt lost.

Hawthorne’s meetings during the day had been with the class officers and had dealt with setting up a buddy system between upper and lower classmen, getting juniors and seniors to volunteer as tutors and organizing student discussion groups. The president of the student body was a rather lummoxy football player by the name of Sherman “Tank” Donoso, who referred to his fellow students as “homeboys.” Although the football team had yet to win a game, Tank maintained authority among his teammates and the students in his dormitory cottage by “dope slaps.” “I just give them one across the back of the head,” Tank explained.

Tank had gathered the other class officers and they had met in Hawthorne’s good-sized living room. Frank LeBrun had brought over a tray of freshly baked oatmeal cookies and a case of soft drinks. The students had been mildly interested in Hawthorne’s plans, though several objected to Hawthorne’s refusal to permit physical force.

“If you don’t give ’em a knock,” said Tank reasonably, “they don’t shut up.” Others had agreed, though Hawthorne had wondered if they hadn’t worried that their disagreement might lead to getting dope slaps themselves.

“Then perhaps one of our discussion groups can be on the supposed necessity and the response to violence,” Hawthorne had suggested.

The meeting had gone on until dinner. Afterward, Hawthorne had studied student files, learning that Tank was at Bishop’s Hill after being shunted between stepparents who seemed to despise him. This had kept Hawthorne busy until late in the evening and he felt ready for bed. Yet once he stopped, he again felt alert as his mind filled with thoughts of Meg and Lily, as well as problems at the school.

Hawthorne had been stunned that someone had put the news clippings in the faculty mailboxes. He had hoped to remain a sort of blank slate whom the faculty could approach with little or no prejudice. As he thought about Skander’s party, he again experienced the shame he had felt when he learned that everyone had read about what had happened in San Diego, or a version of it. Claire de Lune, Chip had said. How awful! Now they all had some fantasy of what Hawthorne had or hadn’t done and he understood that his stock with the faculty—not very high to begin with—had fallen even lower. Hawthorne was certain that it hadn’t been a student who had distributed the articles; students weren’t that sophisticated. And he realized that the appearance of Ambrose Stark hadn’t been the work of a student, either. Hawthorne had an enemy, someone who wanted to drive him away. This recognition upset him and also surprised him. And who knew how many of the faculty were on his enemy’s side? Hawthorne wished he could convince them of his good intentions. Not even at the treatment centers where he worked had he been subjected to such scrutiny. Here even his smiles were looked at with mistrust.

And all this business about writing a book. Had Skander started that unfortunate rumor? The irony was that never in his life had Hawthorne felt so far from writing, from turning his professional eye toward a clinical analysis of his environment. But if the faculty felt that he was observing them as part of some peculiar experiment, then that was just as bad as seeing him as a villain.

But perhaps, Hawthorne thought, there was no way to avoid being a villain. He had told the faculty they could no longer park in front of Emerson Hall. And he had sent out memos on other new . . . he hated to call them rules. Faculty and staff were used to taking leftovers from the kitchen: desserts, cookies, fruit, pieces of fried chicken. Hawthorne had stopped that. About $2,400 was spent on food each day for 250 days, for a total of slightly more than $600,000. The pilfering probably added up to 1 percent of that, or $6,000. A few faculty were in the habit of using vehicles owned by the school; one teacher—Herb Frankfurter—actually kept one of the cars, admittedly an old one, in his garage at home. Hawthorne stopped that as well. And he asked faculty to return the lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, weed cutters, even a chain saw that had been borrowed from the grounds crew. And talking to Mrs. Grayson about her cat, Hawthorne learned that towels, sheets, pillowcases, and blankets also had a way of disappearing into faculty homes.

These were the perks of teaching at Bishop’s Hill, business as usual. Hawthorne couldn’t bring it to a halt right away but he’d make a start. Perhaps I
am
a tyrant, he thought. But with the money spent on pilfered food, garden tools, and the whole business, he could hire a second psychologist. Was he simply going to look at Jessica and futilely wish to make her life better? How long before she went back to the strip clubs and eventual prostitution? If it was a choice between letting Frankfurter keep that old Chevy and helping Jessica, Frankfurter didn’t have a prayer. It shocked Hawthorne that Skander had let these perks build up. But then Skander wasn’t really an administrator; he had preferred being liked. And don’t I wish that too? Hawthorne asked. To have the faculty, staff, even the students see me as a friend?

Hawthorne went back inside to the living room, where he had a stack of student files left to read. The room was twenty feet long, had three shabby couches, and was intended for entertaining. He should probably institute some social events—student discussions and faculty chats—but the furniture was falling apart and the wallpaper peeling. At least he would buy a new chair, something comfortable to read in. All the old chairs had broken springs or smelled of cat urine and the only good place to read was in bed.

Hawthorne opened the top file and tried to concentrate, but his mind wandered. After dinner, Bill Dolittle had asked if he could move into the empty apartment above the Bennetts in Stark Hall and give up being the faculty resident in Latham, one of the student cottages. Dolittle wanted to have a place where his son could stay when he came home from Plymouth State. The difficulty with Dolittle’s request was that somebody else would have to move into Latham. Still, if he could help Dolittle, then he would.

But the students were Hawthorne’s main concern. He had to keep repeating that to himself. At dinner he had sat with eight members of the Bishop’s Hill football team, including Tank Donoso. Hawthorne was sure that two were stoned. Before he had come to Bishop’s Hill there had been a rule that a student could speak only if he or she first asked permission of the faculty member or prefect who sat at the head of the table. Hawthorne changed that and the result was cacophony. At least it was happy cacophony.

Tank had asked Hawthorne if he liked professional wrestling and Hawthorne had to say that he had never seen any. Then Tank asked what Hawthorne thought about Stephen King’s novels. Tank had written several reports on them for class. Hawthorne had to admit that he had never read any. The football players had been generally suspicious, as if Hawthorne meant to win them over in some unsportsmanlike manner. Tank and two others wanted to go into the armed forces after graduation and expressed a hope that the future might hold another Gulf War or trouble in Panama when the canal was turned over. Hawthorne was reminded of the alumni of residential treatment centers who often made their most successful adaptation to the adult world in the military service, where they never experienced insecurity or doubt and their every action was planned in advance.