The Affliction Read online

  Dedication

  For Joseph Avery Gutcheon

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Beth Gutcheon

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Tuesday, April 21

  To say that things were tense on the Hudson River campus of the Rye Manor School for Girls would be to understate the case fairly recklessly. Its evaluation by the Independent School Association five years earlier had been a near-death experience; the school was in peril of losing accreditation, which would be the same as a bullet to the brain. Today, for its progress review, the very young head of school, Christina Liggett, was so anxious for things to go well as she waited for the visitors who would decide her fate that she had spent much of the time since lunch in the ladies’ room, her intestines in an uproar.

  Her entire board of trustees was also in town, currently meeting in executive session. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the room, their discussions had become uncivil when the treasurer revealed that he had on his own started “exploring” with bankers and others the nuts and bolts of selling the campus and merging what was left of the school with a third-rate boys’ academy in Connecticut. The president of the board, whose daughter was the fifth generation in her family to attend Rye Manor, was weeping with anger at this betrayal, especially egregious since the treasurer was a real estate developer himself, and thus had a shocking conflict of interest. A third trustee had made an emotional speech about protecting the loyal faculty who in some cases had spent their entire professional lives at the school. A fourth noted his daughters’ opinions that the longevity of the faculty was a very large part of the school’s problem.

  “It’s a school, it’s not a nursing home.”

  “They live in school housing! They have no equity! Where are they going to go?”

  “They should have thought of that themselves. They should have been saving.”

  “On what we pay them?”

  And so on.

  The school had once mattered very much in certain privileged circles of the United States. Prudence Milbank Culbertson, a society suffragist who had been force-fed like a goose during her famous prison hunger strike, was actually buried on campus in a grove of weeping birches. But by the time redoubtable educator Maggie Detweiler and her evaluation team set foot in Rye-on-Hudson, the days of commencement addresses delivered at Rye Manor by sitting vice presidents or justices of the Supreme Court in honor of their graduating granddaughters were long gone. Maggie had yet to measure the attitude of her two colleagues but was herself torn between sympathy and annoyance that such a valuable institution, a beacon in the history of women’s education, should have been allowed to flounder so spectacularly. As one who had for years faced the challenge of leading a famous school in a changing world, she was no sentimentalist. She saw Rye Manor as a textbook case of privileged people thinking that excellence was a birthright, not something that must be earned over and over. Now with scores of jobs and careers at stake, it would be up to Maggie either to give the place another chance or to recommend a final merciful shove. She expected to be about as welcome on campus as an Ebola outbreak.

  * * *

  Maggie and her colleagues made their way along paved paths across green lawns under ancient specimen trees and toward the administration building, observing everything from the trim of the grass to the slightly tattered edge of the American flag flopping fecklessly from the central flagpole, while in the board meeting the arguments raged. There was a faction that wanted to change the focus of the school entirely by recruiting heavily in Asia.

  “There’s plenty of money in China and Japan. Korea. The oligarchs want their kids to speak English like Americans. They want them to go to Harvard. They’ll send them as young as nine.”

  “That’s never been our measure of success, sending everyone to Harvard!”

  “Nine? Who would send a nine-year-old to boarding school?”

  “My parents did,” said Hugo Hollister. All heads turned to him. “It saved my life. Wonderful school. If I’d stayed home, with my family, I’d be, I don’t know. In prison by now.” He smiled beatifically. Hugo was a new trustee who had a tendency to throw the old guard off balance. Whether or not that was a good thing was another divisive question among them.

  After a brief silence, Emily George, the board chair, asked, “What school was that?”

  “Cummington. Closed now, I’m afraid.”

  After another pause someone else said, “And did you go to Harvard?”

  Hugo smiled again, as if abashed, before saying, “I did, actually.”

  Emily George felt that she had completely lost control of the meeting and was more relieved than distressed when Ms. Liggett’s secretary stuck her head in the door to say, “Excuse me, Mrs. George—the visitors are here.”

  The visitors were early. Emily George looked around at the chemistry lab where the board was holed up, at the Bunsen burners that were far from new, the shelves of beakers and Petri dishes and bottles of chemicals with peeling labels. She saw how dingy it would look to outside eyes, little changed from when she’d been a student here herself. The smudgy white board at the front of the room, the sepia photograph of Madame Curie hanging between two windows that overlooked the infirmary. On the top shelf, the room was ringed by jars holding specimens in formaldehyde. Rattlesnakes. Fetal pigs. Large mammal brains of unknown provenance. Hanging from a rack in a corner was a life-size skeleton made of yellowish plastic with which she felt a helpless sympathy.

  “Motion to adjourn?” she asked with resignation. Adjournment was moved and seconded. “The reception will be in the library at six o’clock. Best feet forward, everyone.” She stuffed her trustee portfolio into her carryall and swiftly left them.

  * * *

  Christina Liggett looked to Maggie Detweiler barely old enough to drive. But in a situation like Rye Manor’s, the board would have to hire someone who didn’t know what she was doing. No experienced leader wanted to preside over the death of a school that had once been a legend. From what Maggie had seen in the school’s self-study, Ms. Liggett was making actual progress. She’d replaced the business manager, an elderly great-great-nephew of the founder, with a young woman who at least knew how to use a computer. Enrollment was up—slightly, but still. Christina seemed to have the support of the faculty, and everyone agreed that the food had gotten better. Maggie’s initial response was an impulse to protect her.

  In her office, Christina was passing a plate of shortbread cookies to Maggie’s team and making brittle chatter about the schedule for the visit. Meanwhile Maggie was taking note of the office itself. The room was a testament to past glory and august by any measure, which made Christina look even slighter and younger than she really was. There was an oil portrait of the founder in a massive gold frame over the desk. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with worn editions of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Tennyso
n and Scott, Trollope and Dickens. Maggie studied what looked like the full set of the Loeb Classical Library in the shelf next to her, the Ovid and Virgil showing particular signs of use. Real scholars had worked in this room and led this school.

  Mrs. George arrived. She was a stout woman in a cherry-colored pant suit, her blond-gray hair in a pageboy held back by a tortoiseshell band. Her purse was hanging from one shoulder, her heavy-laden carryall from the other, and the carryall slipped and crashed to the ground as she moved to avoid knocking into the cookie tray. Everyone stared at it splayed on the floor. Mrs. George said to the group, while trying to pretend the crashing bag wasn’t really hers, “So nice to meet you, I’m Emily George,” and offered her hand first to Maggie, and then to her colleagues. “Our board chair,” said Christina, sounding as if the cavalry had arrived.

  Maggie’s team consisted of Sister Rose, who was a senior math teacher from a Catholic girls’ school in the Bronx, and Bill Toskey, head of the upper school at a small coed academy on Long Island. The sister wore neat black shoes, a navy skirt and white blouse with only her title to indicate she was a religious. Her glasses had clear plastic frames and she wore no makeup, which made her look deceptively severe. Bill Toskey had a lanky body and bruised-looking liverish half circles under his eyes. He wore an unfortunate beard, something like a Van Dyck but mostly emanating from the underside of his chin, which made him look like a goat.

  Afternoon sunlight from a tall French window slanted across the blue of the room’s worn Isfahan carpet. Through the window, Maggie had a view of sloping lawns, of huge oaks and beeches arched over pathways in the late afternoon light. The famous weeping birch grove could be seen in the middle distance. Beyond that were the tennis courts and playing fields and the New Gym, which was now sixty years old. Here and there a girl could be seen hurrying across the campus.

  “Have you settled in all right?” Emily George asked. “Christina has found you a room for your work?”

  “They’re using the Katherine Jones room in the library,” said Christina.

  “Lovely,” said Emily, who didn’t actually seem to be listening. Maggie could see that her nerves were like an electrical system with an intermittent short circuit. “They haven’t toured the campus yet?” she asked Christina.

  They hadn’t.

  “Well, shall we?” They agreed they should. Emily led the way.

  * * *

  The new indoor swimming pool was first stop on the tour. Landscaping around the building still looked raw, the plantings like little girls at dancing school, their skinny bare legs insubstantial, as they hopefully dreamed of the mounded bosomy flowering shrubs they had it in them to become. Maggie wondered what Sister Rose was thinking of the expense of this facility, knowing that she taught at a school that would be lucky to find space in their overcrowded building in which to nurture a chess team. Maggie privately thought that the money spent here would have been much better applied to improving teachers’ salaries, but she knew the problem from experience. Donors wanted to give what they wanted to give, and they particularly liked it to be concrete, with room for their names carved in stone in large font above the front door.

  The vast echoing space for the pool itself was warm and thickly humid and reeked of chlorine. There were bleachers and a scoreboard and high and low diving boards, everything you would need for training Olympic hopefuls. Emily led them through the locker rooms, a far cry from the grim metal lockers and detested communal shower room that Maggie remembered from her school days in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. There had been showerheads around the walls of a tiled room that was too large to be heated by the water, as a shower stall might be. Cold and miserably self-conscious naked adolescents had dashed in and gotten just wet enough that the P.E. teacher wouldn’t send them back to do it again, and then made a long wet run across the cold slippery room to their towels and clothes. Here, by contrast, all was bright and squeaky clean, designed for comfort and privacy. Emily chattered somewhat desperately about her hope that the pool would become a draw for young athletes as well as a boon to the wider community. They were already opening it to local groups for after-school and weekend programs.

  Back outside, they were invited to admire the outlines of the library where they would meet for the evening reception. They toured the dining hall, lined with portraits of previous heads of school, dour ladies in wire-rimmed glasses. They moved stealthily through a classroom building to avoid disturbing afternoon study halls.

  Shadows of the late afternoon were beginning to lengthen as Emily led them up the hill toward the arts building.

  “What’s that?” Bill Toskey asked. He gestured toward a sandstone building from the Gilded Age, with a vast arched door in the facade, large enough for a carriage to drive through.

  “Well that,” said Emily, puffing slightly, “is either the stable, or a bone of contention, depending on your point of view.”

  Bill Toskey looked at her.

  Mrs. George soldiered on. “Many feel that the riding program has always been a part of the school’s history, and should remain, but others feel it’s an anachronism, and one we can’t afford. We do have some serious dressage students at the moment who chose us because they could bring their horses, so for now . . .” She flapped a hand to finish the sentence.

  “Handsome building,” Bill Toskey commented grimly.

  She looked at her watch. “Would you like to see it?”

  The answer was unclear, so Emily assumed a yes and led the way.

  “Back in the day, many of our girls would hunt with the Rye hounds,” said Emily. “And some of them drove, too. Little carriages, whatever they’re called.” She was trying to play to Bill Toskey’s apparent interest, but Maggie sensed, and was pretty sure Emily could too, that the whole subject was instead annoying him. Too late to change course, they had reached the entrance to the stable, a great high-ceilinged shell with box stalls along the sides and haylofts above them. Barn swallows swooped across the upper spaces. The empty dirt-floored central space held a mounting block at one end, and a post and rail jump in the middle with a single bar on the lowest pegs, for practice by beginners. The air was filled with floating dust motes, thick in slanting beams of light from high dusty windows. They breathed the rich dense smell of hay, sweat, and horse manure.

  As they took it in, none of them sure what to say, they heard raised voices, an argument reaching full throttle suddenly audible. A man and a woman, voices layering each other, the tone strident and angry. A door behind the mounting block crashed open and a man strode out, followed by a woman who paused, silhouetted against light, watching him go. Silence fell as these two saw the little group standing in the great arched doorway.

  The man was middle-aged, in khaki pants and a bomber jacket. He had a large, mostly bald head that bulged forward at the top giving it the shape of an upside-down butternut squash. The woman was younger, with hair pulled into a disheveled knot at the back of her head. She wore slim jodhpurs and a hacking jacket.

  Emily said, “Oh, honey, there you are. These are our visitors, you know, our visiting committee. I just thought I’d show them your operation.”

  The surprised pair were now moving smoothly toward them, as if they’d come in expressly to be introduced. The jodhpur woman went straight to Bill Toskey and offered her hand. “Welcome,” she said. “Honey Marcus.”

  Maggie realized that Honey was her name, not a term of endearment. And also of course that Ms. Marcus had assumed that Bill, the one with the Y chromosome, must be the leader of the team.

  “Honey is our horse master and riding instructor,” said Emily. She turned then uncertainly to the butternut man, and Honey said, “Ray Meagher.”

  After a second Emily said, “Oh of course, Florence Meagher’s husband. Florence teaches history of art. She’s one of our stars.”

  Ray Meagher claimed to be glad to meet them.

  “The Meaghers are dorm parents,” said Emily. She evidently didn’t quite know how to extric
ate her charges from this unwanted encounter. “Some of our teachers live in the dorms with the girls. It creates a sense of family, gives the girls a place to go when they need advice or comfort. Florence is famous for her brownies, isn’t she? Makes little tea parties for the girls, if I remember right?”

  Ray said, “Banana bread. We’re up in the Cottage in the Woods, now.”

  “Ah,” said Emily. “That’s a lovely place.” She turned to the visitors. “A dear little house that a neighbor couple left to the school when they passed on. So. We’ll let you two get on with your day, we’re just on our way to the art studios.”

  * * *

  Christina Liggett was waiting in the lobby of the library at six o’clock sharp. She had changed into a long skirt and ballet flats and stood with her hands clasped before her, looking like someone giving a party while facing a firing squad. Behind her in the open-stack reading room, white-jacketed waiters passed trays bearing wine or water, while prettily dressed students trailed them with platters of hors d’oeuvres. Maggie could see that the room was already well filled with people wearing name tags. How many of these bunfights had she been through in her time? Scores, she guessed, if not hundreds. They were all the same and all different. In Washington, Maggie had grown accustomed to trustees with Secret Service details. In New York City, the glamour factor was different, with the expensively dressed captains of industry serving as the little brown wrens of the gathering while people tried not to notice the network TV anchor, the movie star couple, the famous rapper, and the ice hockey star. Maggie had met her late husband at one of these, unlikely though it seemed. He had had children in the school where she’d taught before she was hired away for her first headship. Maggie had been the star English teacher, the woman who made all the children love Shakespeare. He was the recent widower, the only one who got the joke when Maggie described a politician’s fall from grace as “Exit, pursued by bear.”

  “I’m Florence Meagher,” said the woman beside Maggie, unnecessarily as her name was written in large letters on a white tag stuck to her navy wool jacket. The weather was too warm for wool; Maggie deduced that the jacket was Florence’s Sunday best. Florence had an eager smile, a slender figure, and a face that just missed being beautiful. There was somehow too much space between her eyes and her mouth, and her eyebrows were shaped like McDonald’s golden arches, giving her an unusual look of constant surprise.