The Head Of Farnham Hall

The Shape Of The Past

Game Farm

THE HEAD OF FARNHAM HALL is a story brought home by the author’s daughter from a troubled semester at a boarding school, and the missteps of the headmistress of the all-girl academy. Proud and willful in her control of faculty and students, the Head must deal with a panic caused by death threats received by a student. Relying on an investigation by outside experts, she’s then compelled to act on their finding.

In the decade between 1985 and 1995 mischief was done by recovered memory enthusiasts and their friends in the psychotherapy establishment. Zealous investigators from Boston to Washington State, coaxed accusations of sexual abuse from children as young as three, destroying the lives of a number of day-care workers and innocent parents.  This is context for the story of an older man accused many years after the fact of abusing the children next door who came to live with him for a season when their house burned down. In the same decade a house fire recreated in the author’s county seat for an insurance company’s commercial gives structure for the climax.

The setting for this story is a game farm on the banks of the Potomac River in Northern Virginia, where mallards are hatched, raised in captivity, taught to fly, and then released for the pleasure of hunters who pay a fee for their rigged sport.  It’s not about hunting though, rather about pretension and hypocrisy in a family circle of eccentrics and prigs, a society as confused about their purpose as the surviving ducks who return to their pens each evening only to be shot at another day.  This human comedy is observed by the young first cousins Michael and Grace, who won’t be denied their own sport. The story first appeared in The New Yorker in September of 1987.