THOUSAND MILES away on the outskirts of Denver, Lila Smythe and her mother, Tylor, waited at Tylor’s house for Francis to pick up Lila for the trip to California and the dig. He’d been expected over an hour ago.
Mother and daughter were drinking their morning coffee at a little table on the patio. They were very much alike: tall, sturdy, their blond hair cut short. Tylor’s was fading. She wore dark glasses against the glare. She glanced at her watch. “Where do you think he is?” she asked, hoping that Francis was still miles away so that she could extend this time with her daughter.
“He’ll be here,” Lila answered. She felt a rush of tenderness for her mother, knowing how lonely she was going to be. She kept her voice casual to hide her eagerness to get going. “He’s absentminded. He’s probably lost the directions.”
“What do you think he’ll do if—?” Tylor started to ask, and then stopped. She knew this worry irritated her daughter, but she couldn’t leave it alone.
It was true. Lila had been home for two weeks, and almost every day her mother had brought up her worry that Miss Oliver’s would abandon its single-sex mission. She’d never thought of her mother as a worrier before, and it was making her impatient. “Don’t worry, Mom, we’d never let the school go coed,” she had insisted each time. This time she didn’t. She was tired of the subject, so she changed it. “Look, Mom.” She moved her chair around the table, put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, and turned her. Now they both stared at the side of the house. It caught the fierce light of the morning sun. The stucco glowed. “Light’s so different out here!” she said. “You taught me that. Back east it’s—”
“Pastel,” her mother supplied the word. She turned her head back to Lila, grazing her daughter’s cheek with her lips. “Thinner. Watery and vague. It’s the first thing I noticed when I escaped out here.”
That word: escape. Sometimes Lila envisioned her mother as if she were emblazoned with a sign: I escaped. That’s who I am. Her mother’s refrain: that she had divorced her husband fifteen years ago when she realized he would never think of her painting as anything more than a nice weekend hobby for a wife, and then picked Denver off the map as the place to live because she didn’t have any family there to criticize her, especially not her father, who had refused to send her to college. He had paid her tuition to Katherine Gibbs instead so she could be a secretary. “Yes, I know,” Lila would say. “But you refused to go. You got yourself a full scholarship at Smith instead. And now you’re a painter. A professional.” What she didn’t say anymore to her mother—now that she knew how much it hurt—was that she wished she had a father.
Lila was grateful to her mother for sending her to a school where there were no males to paint over the picture of what she chose to become. Now she knew that when you can choose what to do with your life, then what you do is who you are. It scared her to know that. And made her happy. It was why she sucked up all the biographies of women that Gregory van Buren kept giving her to read, one after another. How did he know this was exactly what she needed?
And here was Francis Plummer coming around the corner of the house. He must have heard their voices. “Hello,” he said. “Sorry I’m late. I got a little lost.” Tylor was surprised to see how tired he looked.
He joined them at the table and told them what he’d seen on his journey, how flat the middle of the country was, how stunning his first sight of the Rockies was—but nothing of what he’d been thinking about.
Then there was a little silence, and Tylor said, “We were just wondering what you would do if Miss Oliver’s went coed.”
“You were, Mother. I wasn’t,” Lila said. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
“All right,” Tylor acknowledged “I was. And I pay the tuition.” She was looking intently at Francis, waiting for his answer.
“Well?” Tylor persisted, and Francis still didn’t answer. “Evidently, I’ve hit a hot spot,” Tylor said.
“Mother, please, it’s not going to happen,” Lila said, but Tylor’s eyes were still on Francis.
“It’s not a hot spot for me,” Francis finally said. “Because Lila’s right. It won’t happen.”
“A school can’t change its mission?”
“It’s not a mission; it’s what we are,” Francis said. “The alumnae won’t let it happen.” What was going to happen already had: Marjorie’s being thrown out. The rest he couldn’t imagine.
Tylor shook her head, not convinced.
“The students wouldn’t either,” Lila said, looking at Francis now, chastising him with her eyes for not including the students in the saving of the school.
“Don’t be naive,” her mother warned.
Lila smiled. Naive is what I’m not, she wanted to say, feeling a slight resentment that her mother couldn’t see how much she’d changed. She wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone at school. “I mean it, Mom, we’d burn the school down first.”
Tylor wasn’t going to answer hyperbole. Instead, she turned to Francis and asked her other question. “Why didn’t they make you the headmaster?”
“Mother!” Lila exclaimed “For God’s sake!”
Francis was too surprised to speak. The idea of his being the head had never crossed his mind. Tylor Smythe leaned slightly forward, waiting for an answer. Her dark glasses masked her eyes.
“Mother, he’s a teacher!” Lila said.
Tylor kept her eyes on Francis. “Is that the answer?” she asked him.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a head,” he answered, stunned to realize it.
“Shouldn’t the best, most experienced teacher be the head? The one who understands the school the best?” Tylor’s question was perfectly logical—for one who didn’t understand how proud many teachers were to think of themselves as labor, and how preferable the act of teaching was to sitting, removed from students and the subject that you love, in an office worrying about diplomacy, budgets, trustees, and strategic planning. As if a school were merely a business!
Francis was still too stunned to answer. Tyler leaned back in her chair. “All right, I won’t go there,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Mother,” Lila said. “It’s just not who he is, that’s all. It’s hard to explain.” Then she looked at her watch, glanced at Francis. “I’ve had enough coffee,” she told him, getting up to leave. “I’m going to put my backpack in the car.”
Tylor watched her daughter walk away. Francis saw the longing in her face. Lila disappeared inside the house, and Tylor turned her eyes back to Francis. “Did you notice how she said that?”
“What?” he asked, jolted by the sudden change of subject. He needed to linger over her question, why he wasn’t the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. It seemed that everything was happening much too fast.
“The car. If it were my car she would have said your car.”
“Oh, I don’t
