The Headmaster's Wife Read Free

the windows of the upper-class girls’ dorms, I am unfazed by it tonight. Not a single girl as much as looks up. I am an apparition.
    I make it through the first set of dorms, and then the second alleyway. It is on the third and final pass that I finally see her. Hers is a corner room, with two windows, one that faces the alley and another that looks toward the river.
    She is at the desk closest to the alley window. Beyond her is her roommate, a girl I recognize, Meredith something or other, from New York. Her father is a prominent attorney specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Someone the board has targeted for cultivation.
    We are separated only by glass. She is reading for my class: Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time . Reading that is not even due for a week. She is ahead, which says something about her. She wears sweatpants and one of those tight white tank tops that all the girls seem to wear these days. The ones that don’t even attempt to cover their bellies. As if sensing me, she suddenly looks up and then toward the window. I quickly step back.
    She has not seen me. She stands and arches her back like a cat. Her breasts are indeed full beneath the tank top, and her belly has only the slightest of outward curves.
    What is this? I am the headmaster of the elite Lancaster School. I have been around young women my whole life and have never so much as given their bodies more than passing consideration. That part of my mind has been closed for a long time. And now here I find myself, on a cool fall night under the stars on the old campus that has been my home for fifty-three of my fifty-seven years, peering through a window at an eighteen-year-old girl.

 
    The following Monday I announce to my class that I will be providing office hours to any student who would like to discuss the assigned reading or who might have questions about the first paper I have asked them to write. I expect to see her. Her earnestness suggests she is the type to take advantage of office hours. I am getting a sense of her: She is grateful to be at Lancaster. Many take it for granted. She is not one of them.
    In the meantime, I’ve discovered what I can about her. She is different from what I thought. First, her name is Betsy Pappas. The name sounds Greek, not Jewish, but you can never be sure. She is not from New Jersey at all, but instead from Vermont, the small Northeast Kingdom town of Craftsbury. She is a scholarship student. She tested off the charts at some tiny Podunk school and is on a full ride. The family has no money to speak of. Her father teaches woodshop at a small college up there. What a thing to teach at a college. Last I checked, carpenters didn’t require a college education.
    Her mother makes jewelry. There is one sibling, a younger sister who still attends the Podunk school. Betsy has redone her junior year, which is a requirement at Lancaster. Transfers have to spend at least two years to get their degree. She turned eighteen in August.
    It’s an entirely different portrait from the one I imagined. Instead of new-money suburban Jews, they are no-money Vermont hippies. I picture an aging, run-down farmhouse, a pickup truck and a VW van in the driveway.
    With that bit of research settled, my workweek proceeds on in typical fashion. Mrs. LaForge, who has been the headmaster’s secretary for close to forty years, keeps the schedule moving. Meetings come in half-hour increments, and there are set-aside times for me to make calls to the heavy hitters who keep the wheels of Lancaster greased. In between, I deal with discipline cases. This week there is a sophomore boy who was found to have an ounce of marijuana in a cigar box hidden in his bureau during a room inspection. Drug cases are normally a swift exit from the school, but as with all things, there are nuances at play. The boy is a Mellon, of the Pennsylvania Mellons, and the boy, an arrogant, chubby kid with a mop of brown hair, knows this makes an easy decision