Hawthorne stopped and looked around, almost surprised to find himself at Bishop’s Hill. Kate touched his shoulder, letting her hand rest there briefly before removing it. Hawthorne looked out across the front lawns toward the glistening water of the Baker River and beyond. He tried to focus on something but there was only the distance, the vastness. Again, he had left out part of the story.
“For weeks I could hear Meg calling my name. Other people spoke to me, of course, but her voice was loudest. And Lily too, I heard her voice. If I hadn’t waited so long. If I hadn’t stood holding her hand. If I hadn’t stayed to hear that jazz group. They played ‘Satin Doll,’ an Ellington-Strayhorn tune. Do you know it? It’s very sweet, and the woman on the clarinet played it beautifully. When I hear the song now, I feel horror. I’m amazed by its ugliness. After a while Meg’s and Lily’s voices became softer and my arm began to heal. I was almost angry that it was healing. I wanted it to stay raw and painful. But all that went away. At times I still hear their voices. I don’t mean that I remember them, I actually hear them. I hallucinate them. If I’m very tired or distraught or very sad. Or if something frightens me. But it’s softer, just a whisper. They were the only ones killed in the fire, which was Carpasso’s intention: to lock them up as he had been locked up. Most of the school was saved and I gather it’s been rebuilt or they’re working on it. I didn’t want to see it again.”
Hawthorne stretched out and touched the cold metal of the bell, let his hand slide down it to the rope. He had a sudden desire to ring it, swing it with all his strength so the clapper banged and banged. He was surprised by the violence of his emotion. Kate stepped away to the other side of the tower. She reached back and freed her hair from its ponytail, then shook her hair loose. From far away came the sound of a chain saw.
“Part of me was sorry that the whole place didn’t burn to the ground.”
“Is that why you didn’t want to work at a similar sort of place?” said Kate after a moment.
Tapping the bell with one knuckle, Hawthorne listened to its faint ringing. It was nearly as inaudible as the voices of Meg and Lily had become—nearly inaudible but not yet silent. Then he hit the bell harder, hurting his knuckle. Kate looked up at the sound.
“I failed at Wyndham School. I should have paid more attention to Carpasso, and maybe it was wrong to give the kids so much freedom, maybe they weren’t ready for it. I don’t know anymore. It’s as if I no longer have any credibility with myself. It’s as if I let my abstraction of the place—all my ideas and theories—take precedence over the physical reality. I came here to get back to that physical reality. Beyond that, there’s trouble in the whole field. Treatment centers are hugely expensive. Kids needing serious psychiatric care can be charged a thousand dollars a day—most of which comes from insurance companies, though they’re increasingly reluctant to cough up the money. More and more centers are being run privately, governed by the bottom line and the stockholders. For-profits, they’re called, as opposed to nonprofits. Some do good work, but a lot of the places exist only to milk the insurance companies. They talk about milieu therapy so everything that happens to the patient can be considered treatment and given a price. People do jobs they aren’t trained to do, and it’s far more profitable to hire two half-time or four quarter-time employees than one full-time. Dog groomers make more than child-care workers in this country. Emotionally disturbed children, retarded children, psychotic children—it’s a big business. There’s less public money and the funds available can only be used on the treatment itself. In Massachusetts, for instance, there’s no way to tell if a kid was helped or hurt by the treatment centers, no way to know what he’s doing a year after he’s left, five, ten, twenty years after. That’s considered research, and there’s no money for research. A large percentage end up in prison, but there’s no money to confirm the connection.
“I could get a job in a for-profit tomorrow and make four times what I’m making here. But it would mean betraying everything I believe in, at least everything I thought I believed in.”
“You sound angry.”
“I was angry. Maybe I’m still angry.”
“Why’d you come to Bishop’s Hill?”
“At best, I hoped I could do some good. At worst, I could hide and lick my wounds. It didn’t occur to me that I’d become public enemy number one.”
They continued to talk about the school: faculty who were difficult to work with, students who were troublesome. They walked from one side of the bell tower to the other, looking out across the playing fields or the Common or the front lawns. They could see sections of the Baker River, a glimmer of silver through the leafless trees. Now and then a car drove up to the school or another drove away. They saw students on their way to the gym or coming back. Several of the grounds crew were replacing a window in one of the dormitory cottages. Kate and Hawthorne were aware of the hundred and seventy or so students, teachers, and staff pursuing their various occupations far below, but they were separated from that. Perhaps they could have been seen from the ground or another building had someone looked carefully: one figure in a blue overcoat, one figure in a red mackinaw. They were careful not to get too close or touch each other.
Kate spoke about her ongoing difficulties with her ex-husband. George had called Hawthorne twice and accused him of sleeping with Kate. The second time he had been drunk and could hardly speak. Hawthorne had had a difficult day and was brusque. “One, I’m not having sex with her,” he said. “Two, if I did it’d be none of your business.” And the next morning, he asked Hamilton Burke to call George and remind him that his actions could have legal consequences. George hadn’t called again. As for who had sent George the anonymous note, that remained one of Bishop’s Hill’s little mysteries.
They talked about Evings and speculated about who had wrecked his office. Chief Moulton from Brewster had returned to ask more questions but Hawthorne had no idea whether he had learned anything. Hawthorne said nothing about the phone calls, the bags of rotten food hung from his doorknob, the reappearing image of Ambrose Stark. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t tell Kate, but it seemed part of his sense of isolation. He had even thought it was meant to happen, that these calls and bags of food and practical jokes were an aspect of his punishment. He linked them to his failure with Stanley Carpasso and Wyndham School. They were a result of the time he had spent with Claire in Croce’s and after. Sometimes he even wished these taunts would get worse, like a noise turned higher and higher till it became a scream, just so he would know how much he could take. And sometimes he wished he could strip away his emotional self, that part that still heard the voices of Meg and Lily, the part that was human.
Still, after one of the phone calls from the woman calling herself Meg, Hawthorne had dialed *69. Once he had the number, he called his caller back. The phone had rung and rung. Then a man answered, a postman in West Brewster—the phone was a public telephone outside the Brewster post office. And three times Hawthorne had hidden within sight of his door leading out to the terrace just to see if he could catch someone leaving a bag of food. He had waited about ten minutes and each time had felt like a fool.
These events were taking a toll. Hawthorne’s nerves were suffering; he had become jumpy—phobic, was how he described it to himself. And he knew that Kevin Krueger had looked at him with concern. Staring out over the fields, Hawthorne thought of Krueger’s suggestion that these pranks were bound to get worse. But how bad could they get, and wouldn’t they stop after people saw that the school was actually improving?