The Headmaster's Wife (23 page)

“This is drugs, Krekor?”

“He says not, and my instinct is to believe him. I don't know why, but it's not the kind of thing I think he'd lie about. The trouble is, if it's not drugs, he's got to be sick. Really sick. So I called his mother.”

“Why didn't he call his mother?”

“Because he's afraid she'll take him out of school, which would be giving up.”

There was a very long pause, no typing. Tibor said, “Krekor, that is not sensible.”

“I agree, but it's what he says. And I think I understand the basic thrust. Anyway, Liz will be up here tomorrow, first thing, if she's not up here late tonight. She made me book her a place at the inn where I'm staying. And I've been walking around. For some reason or the other, this place makes me think about Cavanaugh Street in the old days—before you'd ever heard of it. When Lida and Howard and Hannah and I were all children.”

There was more typing. Tibor must be on RAM. The typing stopped and Tibor said, “This is a poor place you are in, Krekor? A, what, inner city?”

“Hardly. It's one of the richest suburbs I've ever seen in my life. And it's precious to the point of being lethally so.”

“I don't understand 'precious,' except in 'precious metal.' That isn't what you mean.”

“No,” Gregor said. “It's hard to explain. It's a famous place in American history. Battles were fought here in the American Revolutionary War. In fact, next to Lexington and Concord, it may be
the
most famous place in that period of American history; and then in the fifty years or so immediately after, it was home to a whole pack of American writers and intellectuals, people we were all forced to read in school during the time when that sort of thing mattered.”

“I see. So this is a place precious to American culture.”

“No,” Gregor said. “‘Precious' in this sense means—quaint, but worse. I can't explain it. They've turned the town into a parody of itself, in a way, is what I suppose it means. It's not real. It's a theme park, except people live in it. The stores on Main Street are all in clapboard buildings that look like houses and might once have been houses. The dormitories at Windsor Academy are houses, too, real ones that have been here for two hundred years. Everything is verycarefully preserved, except it isn't. It's history cleansed of factuality.”

“Like history without the bad parts?” Tibor said. “This is why I do not like Walt Disney, Krekor, because he makes Disney World, and there are exhibits about history but it does not show the pain.”

“You've been to Disney World?”

“Twice, Krekor, yes. With Lida when I go to visit her at the house she has in Florida. I liked the roller coasters.”

Gregor tried to wrap his mind around Fr. Tibor Kasparian, an immigrant refugee from Yerevan, who had been tortured and imprisoned by the old Soviet government, whirling around on Space Mountain—and found that the vision was entirely believable. He left it alone.

“They'd show the pain here,” he said, “but it wouldn't be pain. They'd put it in a museum dedicated to the lives of people oppressed by gender, race, and class, and it wouldn't be pain anymore. It would be an ideological version of what you don't like about Disney World. The whole thing is staged.”

“And this made you think of Cavanaugh Street when you were a child?”

“Yes. And don't ask me why. I don't entirely know. I was thinking about Howard Kashinian.”

“We all think about Howard Kashinian sometimes, Krekor. We are all still in amazement about the miracle of the fact that nobody has indicted him yet.”

“Yes, well. The tiling is, Howard's father, Mikhel, was this huge man, this unbelievably huge man. Armenians aren't very tall, you know that—”

“Krekor, you yourself must be six three or four.”

“But they're not usually,” Gregor insisted, “but Mikhel was tall and broad. Built like an ox, people used to say then. He was also bone stupid.”

“Then Howard comes by it honestly, as Bennis would say.”

“Oh he was a lot stupider than Howard,” Gregor said, “and it wasn't just education. He was slow. It was Howard'smother who had the brains, but of course in those days and among those people it didn't matter if she did. He never adjusted. Mikhel, I mean. A lot of those men never adjusted. They were angry all the time. Mikhel used to blow up at least twice a month. There was a bill he couldn't pay. Something had gone wrong at work. He'd lost another job. No reason at all, maybe. When he blew up, he'd beat the hell out of Howard's mother—”

“Tcha,”
Tibor said.

“Are you going to try to tell me it doesn't happen in the old country all the time?”

“No, Krekor. It does happen in the old country all the time, and it is tolerated there far more than here. But not so much now as it was thirty or forty years ago.”

“And this was longer ago than that. So he'd beat her up, and a few times she'd end up in the hospital, and when she did she'd always land up a charity patient, and that would make everything worse. I remember one time when Mikhel came out of his apartment while she was coming up the stairs with the groceries, two big, brown paper bags in her arms, and when she got to the landing he swiped the bags onto the floor and punched her in the eye. Just like that. Right there. We lived underneath them for a while, and we'd hear it. He'd pick her up and throw her on the floor. He'd break furniture. My parents would sit in our living room and get very still. My mother would sew. My father would read the newspaper. They'd give no indication at all that they heard any of it.”

“Because you do not interfere between a husband and a -wife.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “And that was what I was thinking about with Howard. Because he got big, you know, as big as he is now, as big as his father was. And one day he was sixteen or so and not only just as big as Mikhel but twenty years younger, and he was playing football, so he was in shape. We were coming home from school together one afternoon in early May, a beautiful afternoon, even places like Cavanaugh Street was then looked good, and when we camearound the corner into the neighborhood, Mikhel and Howard's mother were standing out in front of our building. I have no idea what happened or what started the fight. With men like that there isn't much need to start one. I don't know that Howard knew what started it either. We came around the corner, and just as we did Mikhel grabbed Howard's mother by the front of her dress and hit her in the side of the head with his fist. It was insane. There had to be a dozen people on the street. Nobody did anything. Mikhel had a grip on her dress and he was pulling her toward him and then hitting her away over and over again, and there was blood coming out of her ear and her head was whipping back and forth—”

“Tcha,” Tibor said again.

“And Howard didn't run. He didn't shout. He just walked up to them, dropped his books on the ground, picked his father up from behind, by his belt and his shirt, just lifted him up into the air and threw him across the street—all the way across the street. Mikhel landed on somebody's stoop. It might have been the building where Lida's family lived. He slid down the stoop stairs to the sidewalk, and Howard walked over to him, picked him up, put him back on his feet, and said, ‘Enough.' That was it. ‘Enough.' We never heard Mikhel beat that woman up again, and we never saw her hurt again, ever.”

“That is the first creditable thing I have ever heard about Howard Kashinian,” Tibor said.

“There are lots of creditable things about Howard,” Gregor said. “You just don't want to let him near your stock trades. He's a crook. But the thing is, that's what Windsor reminded me of, the town of Windsor and what I've heard so far about the school. It reminded me of the day Howard Kashinian took on his father.”

“And this is supposed to make me feel better, as if you were making sense?”

“I think so,” Gregor said. “I think it's the key to what's wrong with Mark DeAvecca and what's wrong with this place and what's wrong with the country. How's that for megalomania?”

“I think you should get Bennis to talk to you again, Krekor; you are becoming a crank.”

“Maybe. But I do know that I've decided what I think I'm supposed to be doing up here. I've got a mission.”

“Which is?”

“Which is to get Mark DeAvecca to drop out of school. He can drop back in next fall. He needs to get away from here.”

“And do you think his mother will agree with you about this?”

“She will when she sees him,” Gregor said. “Celebrating diversity. That's the problem.”

“You are once again making no sense, Krekor.”

“Never mind. I'm glad you were in. It helped to talk to you.”

“It would help you more if you could talk to Bennis, Krekor. She would even understand the things you are saying.”

“She might, but she wouldn't talk back.”

Tibor said something that sounded like
tcha
once again, except that his tone was even more negative. Gregor hung up and stared at the phone for a moment. He should call Bennis. He knew he should. He should call precisely because she wasn't talking to him, and he didn't know why. There was something deeply dangerous about letting this go. He tried, one more time, to consider the possibility that Bennis would leave Cavanaugh Street, put all her things into boxes, call for a moving company, buy a train ticket to Bryn Mawr or a plane ticket to Paris. He thought of the other side of the bed empty and the apartment under his feet with nobody but Tibor in it, ever, or a stranger to replace Tibor when the church and its rectory apartment were rebuilt. He got a pain in his stomach again but no answers. He wished he knew what Bennis wanted of him. He couldn't make himself ask.

He put his hand on the phone, picked up the receiver, listened to the dial tone in his ear. He put the phone back and stared at it. It was a green phone, “avocado” in decorating terms. It matched the wallpaper and the quilt spread out on the bed. It did not match the pen holder, which was made outof wood and not plastic, as it would have been in any ordinary hotel. He got up and walked over to the window.

“Bullshit,” he said, out loud.

He had no idea if he was talking about Windsor, Massachusetts, or himself.

In the end Gregor went out because he had nothing else to do and because he was not the kind of person who took pills or drank seriously in order to calm his nerves. It was only half past eight, and he was as revved up and restless as he had been after breakfast this morning. He was not tired. He thought he ought to be exhausted, considering the day he'd had, all the traveling and all the stress. He couldn't stop moving. He paced back and forth across his room until he began to worry that whoever had the room under him would call the desk to complain. His mind jumped from Windsor to Howard to Mark to Bennis and back to Mark again. He tried to stand still looking out on Main Street at the traffic moving slowly, bumper to bumper, from one end of the area he still thought of as “precious” to the other. He found himself craning slightly to his left to catch the start of the Windsor Academy grounds, as if he expected something revelatory to happen there: Mark bursting out of one of the gates screaming, “Free at last!” at the top of his lungs; Brian Sheehy finally giving in and torching the place; Liz Toliver showing up on her white charger to do … what? He didn't know what he expected Liz to do when she got here. He only hoped she'd take her son home, whether he wanted to go or not.

Gregor got his coat, put it back on, and went out into the hall again. He wanted to walk. It would clear his head. He went downstairs, left the key at the desk for the second time since he'd checked in less than five hours ago, and went back out onto Main Street. This time, though, he didn't stay on theinn's side of the street. He crossed at the nearest crosswalk, which was not hard, because the people in cars seemed to assume that the pedestrian right-of-way was absolute. As soon as he stepped into the zebra walk, traffic came to a halt. He crossed without having to wait.

On the other side there was a pharmacy, then a video store, then the first of the enormous Colonial houses that were the town-side face of the Windsor Academy campus. He tried to count along the street to see how many there were, but he couldn't see far enough. Windsor was curiously flat for a New England town. Some of the houses were Greek Revival and had pillars meant to mimic the facade of the Parthenon. Some of the houses were older than that and as plain as the plain thinking that the old Massachusetts Unitarians had put so much store in. Most of the windows in the houses were lit up. Gregor supposed that most students would be in their rooms studying at this time of night.

He came to a wrought-iron fence and a sign that said
EAST GATE,
but it wasn't a gate. There was only an opening in the bars beneath a wrought-iron arch, a stylized gate, not a real one. That seemed terribly symbolic in some way he couldn't figure out. He let it go and went through into a small parking lot along one side of a large, gray building discreetly marked with a sign that said
ADMISSIONS.

He went through the parking lot into what was obviously a standard campus quadrangle and waited. Surely there were guards here somewhere. There didn't appear to be. Nobody came out to challenge his presence on campus. Nobody stopped him from walking into the quad's center and looking around. He looked at the buildings on every side. It was their backs that fronted the quad, which he found very odd. He wasn't all that familiar with campuses—he'd been a commuter student at the University of Pennsylvania, and too overloaded with work at Harvard Business School to pay much attention to Harvard Yard—but he'd always had the impression that buildings faced quads. The arrangement here felt slightly off. So did the big Gothic building to his right, which didn't look as if it belonged on the same campus.