“And what does this have to do with me?” Hawthorne asked, as gently as possible.
“I saw George late this afternoon in Plymouth when I was picking up our son. George sees him every week. Anyway, George said he was going to come over to the school and beat the shit out of you—those were his words. I didn’t want to call, but . . .”
Hawthorne sat up. “Me? What in the world for?”
Kate spoke in a rush. “Someone put a note in his mailbox that he found this morning. It said we were sleeping together. I mean, you and me. I feel terrible about it.”
“Why would somebody tell him that?” Hawthorne thought of how he had spoken to Kate briefly at Skander’s. He’d regretted not having the opportunity to talk to her again.
“A prank, a malicious prank,” said Kate. “But he was furious. He accused me of carrying on with Todd in the house. I thought of not bothering you, but George could easily come over, especially if he’s been drinking.”
It astonished Hawthorne to think that someone he’d never known about until this moment could harbor such anger against him.
“Do you have any idea who might have told him?” asked Hawthorne.
“Absolutely none. He showed me the letter. It was typed and unsigned.”
Four
The shouts and the sound of a basketball hitting a backboard drew Kate Sandler to her classroom window at the back of Emerson Hall. Half a dozen male students and several teachers were playing basketball in the small court between Douglas and the Common. Yellow leaves from a maple at the corner of Douglas floated through the sunlight and across the court, resembling gold doubloons drifting among the players. In the national forest to the north, Kate could see great bands of orange and red, with the color more fierce at higher elevations. The sky was intensely blue. The basketball players whistled and called to one another but Kate was too far away to hear more than the occasional word: a name or a shout of praise. The sound of the ball being dribbled across the blacktop echoed between the buildings.
With surprise, Kate saw that one of the adults was Jim Hawthorne. He had removed his coat and loosened his tie, which flapped over his shoulder as he ran. A second adult was Roger Bennett, whose pale blond hair would make him recognizable, Kate thought, from at least a mile. The third was Ted Wrigley, the other language teacher. It was shortly after three on Tuesday afternoon. Kate’s last class had ended ten minutes earlier and she was washing her blackboard with a wet sponge, a chore that teachers were expected to do themselves. At three-thirty the third of the faculty meetings meant to discuss the students was due to begin.
The six boys were upper classmen, and though quicker than the adults, they were too hasty, more exuberant than efficient. Hawthorne was on one team, Bennett and Wrigley on the other. A boy passed the ball to Hawthorne, who dribbled in for a layup. People cheered. Another boy took the ball out, then passed it to Bennett, who dribbled it behind his back, then between his legs, laughing and showing off till Tank Donoso snatched it away, none too gently. In his shape and size, Kate thought, the boy was indeed tanklike, a tank with a square face and a fuzzy colorless crew cut.
From her third-story vantage point, Kate watched the players weave among one another, passing the ball, going in for a shot, competing for the rebound. One boy fell to the blacktop, lay still for a moment holding his stomach, then scrambled to his feet again. On a patch of the Common, about ten boys and girls sat watching. Several were students of Kate’s, including Jessica Weaver, who sat to one side of the others with two yards between her and the nearest person, as if she was both in the group and pointedly not in the group. And she looked up into the maple tree instead of at the game, seemingly lost in the splendor of the leaves. Also standing to the side was Harriet Bennett, the chaplain, in a dark gray suit. She wasn’t close enough for Kate to see her expression. Usually it was severe, which made her marriage to Roger a source of speculation, since he seemed to have the emotional makeup of an adolescent setter. Where she would walk stolidly, he bounced. Still, Roger had sometimes struck Kate as watchful and even guarded, as if his youthful fervor were no more than a convenient persona.
Kate leaned against the windowsill, holding the wet sponge. It seemed to her that Hawthorne was the best player, better even than the teenagers. At least Kate hadn’t seen him miss a shot. His play had a seriousness that the others lacked. The court extended behind the far end of Douglas, which stood to the left of Emerson, so the two buildings made an L shape. Kate wondered what it meant for the school’s headmaster to engage in a pastime that many would think beneath his dignity, but she was impressed by how Hawthorne was involving himself with so many aspects of the school. Not that he could do this unscathed. Two weeks earlier the gossip had concerned what he might do—jobs lost, positions changed, even turning the school into a home for the retarded. Now the gossip focused on his behavior—the people he liked and those he didn’t, how he could be seen past midnight standing on the terrace behind his quarters, the speculation that he might be writing a book. Shortly the sexual gossip would begin. Indeed, given the anonymous letter that George had received and his subsequent anger, it had begun already. Was she the one whose name was going to be linked with Hawthorne’s? It was a tiresome thought.
Hawthorne again had the ball and Bennett was trying to bat it out of his hands. Briefly the game shrank to a rivalry between them as Hawthorne hugged the ball to his body and Bennett tried to pull it away. Then Hawthorne passed the ball to a senior by the name of Rudy Schmidt, who shot from the foul line. The ball chimed against the rim and bounced into the grass. Wrigley took the ball out. In the bright sunlight his old acne scars gave his face a mottled appearance. He passed the ball to Bennett, who drove toward the hoop. Bennett’s blond hair was perfectly straight and combed back over his head so it leapt up with every running step. It reminded Kate of English public school boys of the Evelyn Waugh era, or at least how such students were depicted on public television. Two boys ran in to block Bennett, waving their arms like passionate windmills, and he passed the ball back to someone behind him.
Kate hadn’t spoken to Hawthorne since she had phoned late Sunday night, though she had seen him earlier in the day at lunch. He had smiled at her across the room. Just the smile had been a relief since Kate still felt embarrassed about the call. Her ex-husband hadn’t contacted Hawthorne—not yet, at any rate—but she kept thinking of how George had accused her of having sex with another man while Todd was in the house.
“I bet he even heard you,” George had said. “For all I know, he saw you. Don’t you have a shred of self-respect?” He went on to tell Kate that his lawyer had been waiting for information like this. “Who knows what kind of damage it’s caused Todd.” His words had been slurred and Kate guessed that he had spent the earlier part of the afternoon watching football and drinking beer from his favorite mug—an elaborate German stein he had bought in Munich ten years earlier, as if drinking from it was not simply getting drunk but engaging in a culturally significant ritual. It had amazed Kate that he could talk like this and still claim to want her back, to make a life with her and have more children.
The faculty meeting at three-thirty would focus on the students in the lower school, grades seven through nine. Kate, like many other teachers, had students in both the upper and the lower schools and had to attend the meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At lunch Chip had told her that he wouldn’t be there, which meant missing his third meeting. Kate didn’t know if he had prior business or was “taking a stand,” as he might say. She wondered if others would cut the meeting and if Hawthorne would notice. But she knew he’d notice. He was making it his business to pay attention to everything that went on. Even now he was working with students who had been sent to the office because they had acted up or failed to do their class assignments. The previous day he had talked to an eighth grader in Kate’s first-year Spanish class who refused to bring his book to class. Kate had spoken to the boy that morning to see if Hawthorne had scolded him.