Jeanne remembered Hilltop’s lean years when her parents taught every subject themselves and borrowed money to keep the school open. Nowadays Jeanne turned away dozens of prospective students for lack of space. According to the Hilltop Method, small classes were essential to good schooling—as were facing facts, standards of responsibility, and teaching boys to start at the beginning and move forward logically, step by step, sticking to the task until completed. A strong work ethic, Wade Hendrickson had often said, was more important than a college education.
It wasn’t a sophisticated pedagogical theory; in the Sixties and Seventies it had been derided as backward and stifling. But with the back-to-basics movement, Hilltop had actually become trendy. It didn’t hurt that Hilltop had the test scores and bank balance to prove its method worked.
Jeanne crossed the yellowed lawn to the flagstone path that entered the walled rose garden and divided the one hundred plants into concentric circles, a kind of simple labyrinth where once, Jeanne supposed, the nuns in their floating robes had strolled, whispering their rosaries. They had left behind, trapped within the walls, a meditative calm. In the midst of the garden crouched a lion-footed stone bench. She stopped beside it a moment and inhaled the fragrance of the blooms. Ragged Robin, Eglantine, Damask Rose, Etoile d’Hollande: she loved the old-fashioned names and blowsy cabbage blossoms that reminded her of buxom old ladies in silk. The roses in the cloister bloomed while the grass outside the wall yellowed and died.
In a photo taken when she was six or seven, still in pigtails, of course, and a dress with puffed sleeves—didn’t all little-girl dresses have puffed sleeves in those days?—her brother Michael stands at her side, his hand on her shoulder. He is so much taller than she, her head only reaches the middle of his chest.
Jeanne clearly remembered the occasion of the photo. Seconds before her father snapped it, she had been whining because her organdy dress scratched her arms and neck. The old black-and-white photo still shows, just above Jeanne’s smile, the slight shadow on one cheek where her mother slapped her.
Teddy and Jeanne’s home lay beyond the rose garden and through a hedge of pink oleander bushes that loved the drought. The single story frame-and-stucco house had been designed in what used to be called California ranch style. Judging from the French chateaux and Elizabethan fortresses now being built in the hills around Rinconada, the California ranch style was currently out of favor. But Jeanne loved the house and could walk through it blindfolded, for apart from college and the years when she and Teddy were in Manhattan, this house with its deep-silled, shuttered windows and cool rooms was the only one she had ever lived in. She walked toward the sound of a television blaring.
On the bed, Teddy Tate silenced the TV with the remote.
“If your head hurts, you shouldn’t watch the set. It’s a strain on your eyes.” Jeanne went into the bathroom and came out brushing her shoulder length brown hair. “I think you should see a doctor. There’s medicine for a sinus condition.” She twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck.
“You look like a schoolmarm,” Teddy said.
“That’s what I am.”
“Wear your contacts.”
“The air’s too dry.”
“You’re a good-looking woman, Jeanne. Why don’t you do something with yourself?”
Jeanne went back into the bathroom and wiped down the counter and basin.
Teddy called from the bedroom, “Have you seen my Waterman?”
“You shouldn’t be straining your eyes by writing.”
“That pen cost more than two hundred dollars.”
“Don’t lie flat. It’ll make the sinuses worse. You need extra pillows.”
“I haven’t seen it since last week.”
“Close your eyes.”
“You took the audiotapes.”
“I’m returning them to the library this afternoon when I take the littlies in the van.” She slipped a twisty around her hair and made a bun tight as a fist. “You could listen to music. Would you like me to find the classical station for you?”
Teddy mumbled that he would and closed his eyes.
Jeanne thought it was unfair of the Universe that men aged so handsomely. At fifty-two Teddy’s polished, preppy good looks had hardened, lost the sweetness that was there when he was young. Now he was just plain turn-around-and-gawk handsome. His strong chin and nose gave him the look of a man of character, someone to be relied upon in a pinch or a crisis. This no longer struck her as ironic.
She turned the radio dial. “I met Simon Weed this morning. He seems like a nice man. He told me his wife committed suicide. Hanged herself in the barn and the boy found her.”
“Another traumatized child.” Teddy groaned. “Lucky Hilltop School.”
“He noticed my diploma.”
“So? It’s on the wall.” The music was Wagner. “Turn it down, Jeanne. I can’t take Valhalla this morning.”
She looked at the telephone answering machine on the table next to the radio. She enjoyed talking on the phone, enjoyed being free to speak without being observed. But she resented the demands of the answering machine and would sometimes let twenty calls accumulate before pressing the play button. In her otherwise responsible personality, this was an aberration about which she could seem to do nothing. Did it signal something fundamentally unsound in her? A flaw she had been unable to eradicate?
Only one call today.
“Your sainted friend.” Teddy had never liked Hannah.
“What did she want?”
“I didn’t talk to her, Jeanne.”
“Did she leave a message?”
“I don’t know why we have an answering machine if you won’t use it.”
Jeanne touched the play button. The machine whirred and clicked and Hannah’s deep voice came over the line.
“Come over after school, okay?”
Jeanne pressed rewind.
Teddy thumbed the hollows on either side of the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I’m going to make it to that building committee meeting, Jeanne. You’re going to have to do it.”
“Teddy, I haven’t seen Liz—”
“Go tonight.”
“It’s board Thursday.”
“The building committee won’t go past five.”
“I promised Edith White I’d listen to the problems the housekeeping staff’s having. Those old bathrooms in Senior House are going to have to be replaced. The maids are sick of the mess. The least we can do is listen to their complaints. You want to do that for me?”
“You’re the one who speaks Spanish.” Teddy sat forward and Jeanne slipped a second pillow behind his head. “Besides, if they don’t like the work, they can quit. It’s not like there’s a shortage of wetbacks.”
Jeanne looked at her husband a long moment.
“Sorry, old girl,” he said. “It’s this headache.”
She returned to the dressing room; and, despite the drought, ran the cold water a few seconds and splashed her face until it tingled. She patted it dry and applied a light sheen of lipstick to her wide mouth. She noted that the lines on either side, the parentheses, were deepening and so were those between her green eyes—eyes like peeled grapes, her brother used to tease. She must frown more than she realized. A little foundation might conceal them but lipstick was the only makeup she wore. When she was a teenager, she’d come home with five dollars’ worth of Tangee cosmetics, and her mother’s inebriated scolding still