Hawthorne wished he could pray, but the sky looked especially empty, a black chasm disappearing above him. Lights burned in the windows of several buildings although it was past midnight. More lights lined the walkways. At the corner of the playing fields a security light cast a yellow tint across home plate. But between those lights and whatever existed overhead, Hawthorne sensed only emptiness. He zipped up his jacket and buried his hands in the side pockets.
If he could pray, what would he ask for? To see his wife and daughter once more? To gaze on their living faces? But if he believed in prayer, then wouldn’t he believe that he would see them again? And there unfolded in his mind all the possibilities of an afterlife, as if he were pushing through one after another, expecting their faces to emerge from the confusion. If only he could see Meg and Lily one more time, he would surrender himself to any belief, do anything to breach the dark wall that kept them from him. Hawthorne felt a constriction in his chest; his heaven was empty and he was sure that when he died his own particular light would simply blink out. Meg and Lily were dead. He had brought their ashes back to New England to bury in Ingram in western Massachusetts, where they had lived before moving to San Diego. He had thought of driving out to Ingram before coming to Bishop’s Hill to see if their stones were in place and how the cemetery looked at the beginning of fall. But he hadn’t gone. Perhaps he would go later; he lacked the courage now.
Hawthorne hoisted himself up on the balustrade, kicking his heels against the small columns supporting the railing. Before him rose three stories of Adams Hall with its ivy and crumbling brick. At the corners of the roof were dragonlike gargoyles, looking foolish by day but in the moonlight full of menace. His apartment—or “quarters,” in the idiom of the school—took up a sizable portion of the first floor and showed signs of having been lately vacated by Fritz Skander. Hawthorne had been willing to let him stay, but he understood the symbolism of the move: there was no way Skander could live in the headmaster’s quarters. Anyway, there was a house for him on the grounds. It amused Hawthorne. Here he wanted to make a clean break and give himself over to a labor that would completely fill his mind, but already he was restricted by the customs of the new place. Maybe he would have done better digging ditches or dedicating himself to the improvement of an Indian tribe deep in the Amazon jungle—but such a tribe would also have its rituals, no better or worse than those at Bishop’s Hill.
And Hawthorne was digging a ditch; or rather, bringing Bishop’s Hill back from the near dead was equally labor-intensive. Unhappily, it wasn’t intensive enough. It didn’t block his other thoughts, because here he sat recalling all those aspects of his wife and daughter that formed the major continent within his skull, until he wanted to hammer his head with his fists and shout, Stop! Was this why people went crazy, to keep something out of their brains? All his training as a psychologist denied such old-fashioned ideas. He was overcome with hatred for the language of his trade, its clumsy diagnoses and efforts to describe the human condition, because here he was and his sky was still empty. But how else could he shut down his thoughts if not by ferocious work? Even his own death he had rejected—not for moral reasons but for a logic that, Hawthorne felt, approached the absurd. Meg and Lily now existed only in his seemingly limitless memory—again and again they moved across the stage of his thoughts. Meg might be doing no more than arranging flowers in a vase or Lily might be putting a pair of tiny shoes on the feet of a Barbie doll. Were Hawthorne to die, wouldn’t it kill them once again since their only remaining life was in his head? Once he was gone, they would be nowhere.
As for the other distractions, the more common forms of self-medication—alcohol, drugs, women—he felt he knew too much to give them credence. Even if his heaven was empty, it held more than the illusion extended by alcohol, and this paradox almost made him smile—Hawthorne, a man to whom smiles no longer came easily. No, he had chosen himself a ditch to dig, though in the past week he’d found himself thinking more of Sisyphus shoving his boulder up the hill. Hawthorne wondered how long it had taken Sisyphus to realize he wouldn’t succeed, that it wasn’t a matter of working harder or of there being a right way or a wrong way. The boulder would never perch motionless on top of the mountain and allow Sisyphus to say, “I did it.”
Was Bishop’s Hill like that? Hawthorne couldn’t let himself think in such terms. He had chosen to come to a place where he wasn’t known, where the details about what had happened in San Diego remained vague. He wouldn’t have to talk about it and deal with people’s curiosity, whether kindly meant or not. He was well aware that taking the job at Bishop’s Hill after having been at Wyndham was like a colonel, even a general, voluntarily returning to the ranks, becoming at best a sort of staff sergeant. Krueger had asked him if he meant to write a book but Hawthorne had none of that left inside him. After all, his being an innovator in his field had been one of the causes of the fire. Better to be a sergeant and concern himself with daily chores, better to dig a ditch. He would fully give himself to Bishop’s Hill, and if that wasn’t enough, the trustees would close the school and that would be that. Whether he succeeded or failed was beyond his concern. Like Sisyphus, he thought, pushing for the sake of pushing, the very Zen of pushing, and again he almost smiled.
Yesterday he had talked to the faculty, this morning he had addressed the students. After lunch he had talked to the staff—secretaries, grounds crew, housekeepers, the people who worked in the kitchen. The faculty had looked at him with fear, the students with suspicion, and the staff with disbelief. But no, that wasn’t true, there were some who seemed to listen with open minds. And others might be convinced, although slowly.
That afternoon he had talked to the school secretary, Mrs. Hayes, about her computer skills. She had come into his office and refused to sit down, saying that she preferred to stand. In her self-presentation, not a single hair was out of place. Her old-fashioned dress, cameo brooch, string of artificial pearls, practical shoes—her display was seamless. It turned out she had no computer skills. The board had offered to buy her a computer but she had refused. Her old Underwood was good enough for her. Hawthorne told her that he had ordered several computers, a printer, and a scanner and would show her how they worked. In no time, Mrs. Hayes unraveled. One tear slid down her cheek, then another. She told Hawthorne that she knew he intended to let her go.
“I have no intention of firing you,” he had said.
“That’s what you say now, but I know differently.”
“Please believe me. I need you here.”
But she didn’t believe him. She had worked at Bishop’s Hill for more than thirty years but she understood that changes were necessary.
“I’m only asking you to familiarize yourself with a perfectly simple machine. It will make your job and mine far easier.” He hadn’t had the courage to mention the Internet and e-mail, all the things that could be done online.
In the end, Hawthorne spent his time reassuring her that her position was safe. “Has anyone told you that I mean to fire you?”
“People talk.” Mrs. Hayes had patted her nose with a handkerchief. “And I know I’m not young anymore. I’m a slow learner.”
Hawthorne wondered what would happen if Mrs. Hayes refused to use a computer. Well, then, she would stay on till her retirement; she provided valuable continuity. But what bothered him was that she didn’t believe him. No matter what he said, she remained convinced that he would force her out of Bishop’s Hill. And he again thought of the faculty members the previous afternoon, how they tried to conceal their doubts and fears—what would he have to do before they realized he was trying to save their jobs and not preparing to fire them?