reading glasses still rested on her bosom, suspended from a black string around her neck. “You were Oliver girls,” they heard Marjorie say, and Francis reached to hold Peggy’s hand. They knew what she was going to say next, and when she said it—“Now you are Oliver women!”—giving the word a glory, Peggy started to cry. She was surprised at her sudden melting. For up to this moment she had managed to assuage her grief over Marjorie’s dismissal by reminding herself that she agreed with the board’s decision.
But Francis wasn’t crying! He was too angry to cry, wouldn’t give his new enemies the satisfaction—for that’s how he thought of those colleagues, old friends, whom he suspected of optimism over the dismissal of his beloved leader. He gripped Peggy’s hand, squeezed hard, made her wince. It’s her school! he wanted to shout. Marjorie’s! Not theirs! He didn’t want Peggy to cry; he wanted her to be angry, to be obstreperous at every opportunity, to express disgust at the notion that schools bore any resemblance to businesses, as he did; he wanted her to say rebellious things in faculty meetings, the way he’d been doing, surprising everyone, including himself, by seeming out of control.
Still sobbing, Peggy yanked her hand away. She’d been over this so many times before! You can be loyal without being stupid, she wanted to yell. She was your boss, not your daddy. But of course she didn’t. It wasn’t the time to tell her husband that maybe his ardent following of Marjorie was his way of escaping the dominance of a father who couldn’t have been more different from Marjorie—he would have fired her years before this! She kept her mouth shut. It was bad enough that people saw her sobbing.
Marjorie sat quietly after exactly four minutes during which she told her audience that now they must take care of the school. All of her thirty-five graduation speeches had been exactly four minutes long. She practiced them, first in her bathroom. “I love to hear the words bouncing off the tile,” she told Francis and Peggy every year when she started working on her speech weeks before the event. Francis and Peggy knew that she timed herself with the same stopwatch she brought to the track meets so that she could congratulate any girl who had improved her time. In this last year of her reign she had been taking the stopwatch to faculty meetings so she could time the windy ruminations of Gregory van Buren, head of the English Department, who, second in seniority only to Peggy and Francis, sat that day immediately to Peggy’s right in the front row of the graduation audience, smirking as if he had discovered a grammatical error in Marjorie’s speech. Gregory didn’t even try anymore to disguise his joy at what he loved to call “Marjorie’s expulsion”—or the “demise of the monarchy at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.”
There was a second of silence after Marjorie sat, and then, simultaneously, Francis and the graduating class stood up. In an instant Peggy was up too, taller than her husband. The audience rose. Their applause swelled. The block of undergraduates sitting right behind the faculty chanted, “Yay, Marjorie! Yay, Marjorie!” On the dais, the trustees stood too, their board chair, Alan Travelers, looking uncomfortable.
To Peggy’s right, Gregory rose too slowly. She turned to him, grabbed his elbow, pulled him upward. “Stand straight, windbag!” she whispered through her sobbing. “Stand straight and clap!”
Gregory was too smart; he didn’t even turn his head to her. He was gazing up over the podium as if he were watching a bird, his hands coming together so softly they didn’t make a sound, and Peggy was amazed to hear herself hissing: “Louder, you politician! Louder! Or I swear to God I’ll poke out both your eyes right here in front of everybody!”
For an instant as the words flew out, she felt wonderful, a prisoner released. But then stupid. This wasn’t her. She didn’t insult people, she had never been involved in the school’s politics. And she didn’t have Francis’s talent for effective goofiness. She thought maybe she was going to lose control permanently, wondered if everything was falling apart: Marjorie’s leaving and the resultant division in the faculty, and equally pressing, Francis’s leaving the next day on a trip that would last all summer, the first time in their thirty-three-year marriage they would be apart for more than a week. It was the final straw. So she made up her mind: She’d stay in control. Not just for herself. For Francis too—until he was able to control himself again.
Gregory still didn’t turn his face to her. He stared straight ahead, placed his right hand on Peggy’s, lifted her hand from his elbow, placed it at her side as if he were putting something back in a drawer, and whispered: “I thought you understood, unlike your husband, who only understands the past. Actually, I know you understand.”
Gregory was right. She did understand. It had been the newer members of the board who forced the issue. The era has passed, they had pointed out, when being a great educator is enough. No longer do certain kinds of families automatically send their children away to boarding school; and besides, just as boarding school grows too expensive for many families, single-sex education for women seems to be losing its allure. So pay more attention to the business side: to marketing scenarios, strategic plans, financial projections. That’s the road to survival.
Peggy had tried hard to persuade her friend to pay attention; and when rumors began to fly that the school was so strapped that it might have to make the one decision no one could even dare imagine, the one that would destroy the reason for the school’s existence—namely, to admit boys—to survive, she had barged right in to Marjorie’s office and told her that if she, Peggy Plummer, the school’s librarian for the past thirty-three years, were on the board, she would vote for Marjorie’s dismissal in spite of their ancient friendship unless Marjorie changed her ways and started to act as if her profession, for all it was a calling, were a business too. But nobody gave Marjorie advice. It was the other way around. So Peggy hadn’t been surprised when six months later the board, whose chair, Alan Travelers, was the first male board chair in the school’s history, screwed its courage to the sticking place and demanded Marjorie’s resignation.
Peggy stopped crying by the time she and her friend Eudora Easter, chair of the Art Department, had to go up front and confer the diploma on the first student. The order had been determined the night before when the president of the junior class picked the graduates’ names out of the tall silk hat that was brought out of safekeeping once a year, according to ritual. The hat was rumored to have belonged to Daniel Webster. At Miss Oliver’s it was a sign of loyalty to believe myths that lesser schools would scorn.
Facing the audience beside Eudora, Peggy was calm again. She was tall, slim, full breasted, her short black hair not covered by a hat, and she wore a trim business suit—librarian’s clothes. Eudora was much shorter than Peggy, very round, her beautiful African features shadowed under a huge red hat, and her red slippers were pointed upward at the toes like a genie’s. The students cheered her costume.
The ceremony went on for several hours. For the graduates the teachers recited poems, sang songs, performed dances, even put on little skits. Francis conferred the diploma on several girls by himself, and he and Peggy together did so for three girls who lived in their dorm. For each, Francis spun the amazing tale of their blossoming, thus blessing their parents. Gregory van Buren’s one girl got a long poem that nobody understood. She tried hard not to show her disappointment. When Gregory hugged her, he bent his middle away from her, sticking his butt out behind as if he were wearing a bustle.
LATER THAT DAY in the desolate silence that overcame the school, when the last girl had left for the summer, Peggy roamed her empty dormitory. For the past four years at exactly this time, their son, Sidney, would return from college and she and Francis would focus on him all summer, feasting on his presence. But Siddy, who had finished college a year ago in June, left for Europe in September to wander for an indeterminate time. He’s figuring out who he is, what he wants to do with his life, Peggy told herself over and over, seeking comfort. All the young ones do that these days. The mantra brought her no more comfort than knowing that young people didn’t bother getting married anymore before
