The Headmaster's Wife (26 page)

“He'll need to take a post-grad year if he wants to get into USC now,” Liz said. “His grades are mediocre at best. Grades. My God. What am I thinking of? My grades sucked most of the way through high school. Tell me what he was like when you found him. Tell me what it was that got you to make them bring him here.”

Gregor was very careful. Liz had a good memory. He knew that if he elided too much, it would come back to haunt him. She would find out what needed to be known. She would bring it back to him. He told her about Mark's coming to the Windsor Inn to meet him and taking a shower and falling asleep on the bed. He told her about walking through the Windsor Academy campus and going to Mark's dorm on a whim. He told her about the convulsions.

Liz listened in eerie stillness, only her arm and hand moving as she stroked Mark's hair. When Gregor was done, she shuddered.

“They're right,” she said, “it does sound like drugs.”

“It does and it doesn't,” Gregor said. “I didn't see him for long, Liz, but the fact is that all it took to make him look almost infinitely better was a shower and some Perrier. That doesn't sound like any drug I've ever heard of. And he went to sleep. He didn't pass out.”

“But something must be wrong with him,” Liz said. “He was shaking and sweat was pouring off him. That doesn't sound psychological. I suppose it could be, but—”

“I think it might be a good idea to at least consider the possibility that he's ill,” Gregor said. “I doubt if he has Huntington's chorea—”

“What?”

“I think he found it in a medical book. He says it fit his symptoms. He can't have it since neither you nor his father did. But those symptoms might be typical of something else, maybe of several something elses. And I'd think that it would be a very good idea to find out what because Mark was not well when I saw him.”

“You mean the shaking and the sweat.”

“I mean the inability to remember anything and the blackouts, or what might be blackouts, and the problem he has with reading.”

“Mark has a problem with reading? My Mark?”

“He says he reads a page and when he gets to the end of it he has no idea what it says.”

“For God's sake,” Liz said, “the kid could read before he was three.”

At the other side of the room, the door slid open, and the South Asian doctor came in, a small, rigidly formal, very young man in a white coat. Gregor tried to read the name on his identification tag, but could only make out the last one, which was spelled “Niazi.” He had no idea how to pronounce it and an uncomfortable tendency to misread it when he saw it as “Nazi.”

Liz left Mark's side and crossed the room with her hand held out. “Doctor, thank you so much for coming. I'm very sorry to be so insistent, but I don't know what's going on, you see, and I'm his mother.”

Dr. Niazi took Liz's hand and shook it. “There is no difficulty,” he said, just as formal in expression as in looks. “You have an understandable concern, and I am about to go off duty now in any case. If you could come down the hall to the conference room where we could talk? Your son is sleeping, but he is not unconscious.”

“All right,” Liz said. “I'd like to have Mr. Demarkian here come with us.”

“Of course,” Dr. Niazi said. “And the gentleman in the waiting room? Should he be asked to come, too?”

“No,” Liz said.

If Dr. Niazi found this strange, he didn't indicate it. He went back to the door and held it open while Liz and Gregor walked out. Then he motioned them farther down the hall in the direction away from the nurses' station and the waitingroom. Moments later he was ushering them into a small room almost entirely occupied by a square conference table and its attendant chairs, each chair upholstered in a nubbly fabric that was hideously, relentlessly purple.

Dr. Niazi motioned for them to sit down. Liz sat in the chair nearest the door. Gregor sat beside her. Dr. Niazi sat at what could arguably have been called the head of the table and put down a thin manila folder Gregor hadn't noticed he was carrying.

“So,” Dr. Niazi said, “the first of what I have to say is to reassure. Your son is not in danger. He will not die. He will not have permanent brain damage or damage to his organs. I should not be so confident so soon, but I am confident. I have had a chance to speak to him. He is normal.”

“He spoke?” Gregor said.

“For a few moments after we had pumped his stomach and given him some water to drink. He is not in a coma. He is not incoherent. We have given him a very mild sedative to help him sleep.”

Liz took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “then there are the obvious questions. What happened to him? Why did he go into convulsions? Was he using drugs?”

Dr. Niazi shot her an odd look. Gregor caught it, but he didn't think Liz did. “Was he using drugs?” Gregor asked. “Everybody at the school seems to assume so.”

“Yes, we do understand that that is always an issue with adolescents,” Dr. Niazi said. “But I can say with some certainty that this is not the case here. We have tested for several drugs, including marijuana, a few forms of amphetamines, heroin, cocaine.”

“Some of those leave the body fairly quickly and without a trace,” Gregor said.

“This is true, but they do not leave the body in an hour or two, and it was less than an hour before we took his blood. There were no signs of drugs. We still have out some tests that take longer to read, but I do not expect to find positive results there either.”

“But,” Liz said.

Dr. Niazi nodded. “Yes, I do know. But. I spoke to Mr. Demarkian here and to several other people when the boy was admitted, and based on some things they said I did a test for caffeine toxicity. You know what caffeine is? It is in—”

“Coffee,” Liz said. “Drinking coffee could give him convulsions?”

“No,” Dr. Niazi said. “Sensitivity to caffeine varies among people, but even for those especially sensitive to it it does not cause convulsions or death from the amounts found in drinks, no matter how much the patient drinks. You must understand this. Most people eliminate caffeine very quickly. Some small group of people retain it much longer, and there is a tendency then for the caffeine to build up in the system and to cause symptoms, difficulty concentrating, difficulty sitting still, high levels of anxiety.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

“Yes,” Dr. Niazi said. “From what I have here, I would have expected him to show such symptoms. They occur even in people who eliminate caffeine normally if such people drink more than they are used to or drink coffee or tea that is stronger than what they are used to. In someone with a particular sensitivity, the symptoms would be pronounced, and they would extend longer than the few hours they would in people who eliminate normally. A single cup of coffee could cause symptoms for most of a day. I am under the impression that this boy was drinking more than a single cup of coffee a day?”

“He said he was mainlining it,” Gregor said.

Dr. Niazi looked puzzled.

“It means he was practically living on the stuff,” Liz said. “I know just what he means; I was like that in college. I almost didn't eat. And I couldn't ever seem to stay awake for the amount of time I needed to work. So I drank tea practically all day, except I used to steep each cup for twenty minutes, so it probably had more caffeine in it than coffee. I mean, that was the idea. I just didn't like the taste of coffee.”

“In this boy's case,” Dr. Niazi said, “he liked the taste of coffee. Mr. Demarkian, and Mr. Makepeace, and severalother people have said to us that he was drinking coffee before he began to convulse, so I decided to check. It is not as uncommon as you might think in students, although we do not usually see high school students in this state. It's more often college students. Especially here. In Greater Boston. And in Boston itself. Because of the universities, and the level of the work required of them.”

“But you said that he couldn't have had convulsions from drinking coffee,” Liz said, “but he did have convulsions. Mr. Demarkian saw him.”

“Yes,” Dr. Niazi said, “we understand that. However, he did not have convulsions here. The convulsions seem to have come and gone in a very short time, and that in itself would be consistent with caffeine poisoning.”

“Caffeine poisoning,” Liz said. “It's possible to be poisoned by caffeine. That's new to me. But you're still contradicting yourself. You said he couldn't have gotten convulsions from drinking coffee. Or tea or Coca-Cola, I'd expect.”

“He could not have gotten convulsions from drinking, no,” Dr. Niazi said, “but there are other ways to ingest caffeine. There are caffeine pills.”

Gregor sat up a little straighter. “Tablets,” he said, “caffeine tablets. Like NoDoz. I remember those.”

“So do I,” Liz said. “Was Mark taking NoDoz?”

Dr. Niazi flipped through the folder. “He had most certainly had some kind of caffeine tablet or pill in the last several hours before his convulsions,” he said. “We analyzed the contents of his stomach from the pump, and also some of the matter from the vomit on his clothes. In the vomit on his clothes there were pieces of these tablets. Many pieces. It will be a day or more before we can have an understanding of how many of these tablets he might have ingested during the evening before his trouble. When the attending physician takes over, I will give him a complete report, and I will put him in touch with the laboratory people for the complete analyses. I will tell you what I can. The level of caffeine in his blood when he was admitted here was close to fifty times higher than is considered safe—”

“Fifty times?” Liz said.

Dr. Niazi gave no sign that he'd heard. “That in and of itself could have caused him difficulty and might have brought on convulsions. It is not unknown for elevated levels of caffeine to bring on stroke or heart attack in people susceptible to such things. Your son is young and healthy and without any known family medical history of these illnesses, and he is not considered at risk. Unless the medical records are incomplete? Unless you have something to add?”

“Well, his father's family had a lot of heart disease,” Liz said, “but they didn't have it young. And they weren't like Mark. They were mostly very overweight.”

“As so,” Dr. Niazi said. “The level of caffeine toxicity in the material analyzed from the vomit on his clothes was two hundred and fifty times higher than is considered safe.”

“What?” Liz said.

“Jesus Christ,” Gregor said.

“Precisely,” Dr. Niazi said. “There is no question that the level of caffeine toxicity found could have brought on convulsions. The same is the case for the vomiting. One has to assume the logical result of such ingestion to be at least both and possibly something much worse. It is my opinion that your son will be found to have a particular sensitivity to caffeine, and that that is what saved him. His system could not handle the caffeine he had taken in, and so it got rid of it in vomit. It is a very good thing. If those caffeine tablets had been able to dissolve fully and get into his bloodstream, he would now be dead.”

“Dead,” Liz said, looking stunned.

Gregor sat back and watched Dr. Niazi gather up the folder and get to his feet. He looked exhausted and more than a little disapproving.

“It is not a shameful thing,” he said suddenly, bending over Liz. “It is not these drugs that are such a waste, such a moral disaster. It is only a student too conscientious for his own good. You should not forget that. You should not punish for what was only an attempt to achieve what would bring respect to himself and his family.”

Gregor bit his lip. It was the first note of levity in whathad been a long and depressing day, but he knew better than to let the solemn Dr. Niazi know he found anything about the situation funny.

Liz then stood up herself. “I'm not going to punish him,” she said, “I'm going to kill the bloody idiot.”

Alice Makepeace knew there were 101 things she ought to do this morning, 101 things required by her “position,” which Peter had been reminding her of ever since he came back from the hospital at one in the morning, looking exhausted and annoyed and, underneath it all, scared to death. Alice was not scared, although she knew she had good reason to be. The conscious side of Peter thought that he would be able to come through to the other side of this thing unscathed. Even if he was not able to stay on at Windsor—and he must have known, as soon as he heard that Mark DeAvecca had been taken to Windsor Hospital, that that would be impossible—he would be able to move on to another school in another state, another part of the great network of private schools where everybody knew everybody else and the man who was headmaster in one place one year was the man at the head of the History Department in another the next. There was a usefulness to those networks. Alice knew that. Schools were odd places, and parents were odd people to have to deal with. Colleges and universities had much more latitude. By then the students were mostly over eighteen, and the policy of in loco parentis had ended decades ago. College administrations did not, and did not have to, placate hysterical mothers convinced their precioussons were reincarnations of Galileo, both great geniuses and the victims of persecution. The best colleges didn't have to do that even for the children of their biggest donors. It was a great advantage to have an endowment in excess of a billion dollars. It was, Alice thought, a great advantage to be Harvard.

Windsor, of course, was not Harvard. It was not even Andover, where the endowment was almost as large. It was one of those places, one of about two dozen, that took only the best candidates in an ever-widening pool made up not only of the children and grandchildren of those people who had themselves been to boarding schools, but the children and grandchildren of what Alice persisted in thinking of as the New Incredibly Rich. There were lots of them out there. Not all of them were Incredibly Rich, although so many were that she found it disorienting when she encountered them. A combination of the rise of new industries like computer hardware and a Republican tax policy that seemed to be a repeat of Herbert Hoover's had thrown up hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, who thought nothing of buying Hummers as second cars and vacationing for six weeks in the winter on private islands in the South Pacific. There were other people though, the people who worked for those people, the lawyers in firms that had once been white-shoe and restricted to candidates with all the right bells and whistles, the accountants in the big national firms that had once been the same people who had grown up in small towns and middle-class suburbs in midwestern cities and made it into a “good” university and from those “good” universities to “good” jobs, and who now wanted to mark their distinction with something palpable. What they chose to mark their distinction with was their children, who were expected to “get into” the right boarding school and then the right college, to provide stickers to put on the backs of cars. A Range Rover looked good with “Windsor Academy” and “Yale University” on the back of it. It looked less good with “Local High School” and “State College.” These were people who came to schools like Windsor and expected to get results. The onlyresults that mattered were the ones that came in college admissions packets around the fifteenth of March every year.