The Headmaster's Wife by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page B

and nobody laughed at Clifton Webb. Well, James admitted, probably everybody laughed at Clifton Webb; they just didn’t come out and say what they were thinking because in those days homosexual men were not only supposed to be in the closet but invisible.They were not invisible, of course. James may never have been a professor in an Ivy League English department, but he was old enough to remember the 1950s. He’d had an uncle whom everybody had referred to as a “confirmed bachelor,” as if a taste for going into New York and hanging out in Greenwich Village bars was the sign of a man too dedicated to chasing girls to ever settle down. People sniggered—that was the word, too, sniggered, something different from “laughed” or “chuckled” or even “derided,” a word with a world of meaning in it, a sense of time and place. James had not sniggered. Even then he had been plotting a path, and although it included confirmed bachelorhood—he’d known that much before he was twelve—it did not include Greenwich Village bars. The real difference between the young and the old was that the young had no sense of the realistic. What looked to rational people like insurmountable obstacles seemed, to a teenaged boy with a true spirit of invincibility, just a few silly details to be ignored more than to be overcome. Now he wasn’t sure if he had been lucky or unlucky. He would not have found it easy to live in a time when being what he was could get him arrested and sent to jail. He wasn’t good at dissimulation, and he didn’t have the patience for pretense that surely had been required of men like Clifton Webb. The problem was, he had no patience for so much of what had come in the same boat that had brought the need for pretense to an end: victim’s studies, feminist criticism, gender-race-and-class. There was something truly obscene about holding the
Pietá
up to the light and seeing only the basis for a diatribe on capitalist retrogressions or the triumph of hegemonic male privilege.
    Outside, the carillon was doing one of its minor jiggles. It was a terrible carillon, politically correct, like everything else at Windsor Academy. James checked the clock on the wall behind him and saw that it was ten thirty Then he turned back to what he was doing at the counter and looked out the window. It was not a good view from this kitchen. There was a good one, out on the quad, in the living room; but faculty apartments being what they were, one view perunit seemed to be the best that could be expected. This window looked out on the long stretch from the library to Maverick Pond. In the winter, with the snow piled high, it looked like a wasteland.
    He poured black coffee into large, bone china cups and put the cups on his best serving tray. He put the silver sugar bowl there, too, but not the cream pitcher, because neither of them used cream. It fascinated him a little. They were both “effeminate” men, in a way of being “effeminate” that had gone out of style many years ago; but neither one of them had women’s tastes. The coffees were plain black brews, good Colombian, and imported, but without the bells and whistles of the kind of person who found Starbucks a personal affront to aesthetics. There was no cinnamon or French vanilla. There was no sales slip in the utility drawer indicating a buying trip into Boston to the place where a pound of ground coffee beans cost as much as a small car.
    Out in the wasteland, there was movement. James stopped what he was doing, his hands full of silver teaspoons, and watched the figure in black walking away from the pond with her head bent into what must have been wind. There were no lights out there, but he knew who it was, knew it as surely as he would have if he had seen her red hair flashing under one of the security lights. He wondered what she was doing out there at this time of night, and alone. Alice