back, feeling her anger flame. Why right now? she suddenly wanted to ask again. To hell with jokes. On top of everything else! Don’t you know we’re too old to believe in different things? Francis moved away, leaving her framed in the mirror, and for an instant she didn’t recognize the tense woman who stared back at her.
Francis still thought he was going on an archaeological dig, the face in the mirror told her. He’s not ready to admit he’s going on a vision quest. It’s much too far out for Francis, too over the top, too embarrassing, to imagine himself, a middle-class white man in a tweed sports coat, a boarding school teacher, for goodness sake! chasing Indian visions. In California too, where everybody’s weird! But that’s what was happening. And she had thought for years that her vision and his were the same. She’d known almost from the day they met that Francis was a spiritual man. That was the deepest of the reasons she loved him so much. So it wasn’t hard to believe that the reason he had asked her to join in his family’s staunch Episcopal faith when they were married was that he believed in it. He thought so too, she understood, for the force of that belief was so strong in the family that he couldn’t believe he was different enough not to share it. But what she knew now, better than he did, was that the real reason he had asked her this favor was that he couldn’t imagine explaining to his father that he cared so little for his religion that he wouldn’t ask his wife to join it. Even though she had none of her own to relinquish if she did.
I’ve been hoodwinked, she wanted to say, hoodwinked and deserted, thinking of how much she’d been rescued from the barrenness of her own disbelief by the religion she’d joined and now was nurtured by, how much she’d come to love her father-in-law for the belief she shared with him, how much she’d missed him since his death five years ago. When you don’t resolve things with your father, you live with his shadow until you die too, she wanted to lecture Francis. It makes you crazy. She didn’t say that either.
AT THE FRONT door of Marjorie’s house, Francis hesitated. “This is Marjorie’s house,” he said. He’d walked through this door hundreds of times.
“It’s the headmistress’s house,” she reminded him. Then corrected herself: “The headmaster’s.”
He turned to her then, gave her a look as if she has just slapped his face.
“Sorry.”
“I can’t,” he said. “No way. Not in her house.”
She took his hand, tugged it. “Come on, Fran, let’s go.”
He resisted.
“Grow up!” she said, tugging at his hand. “It’s time.”
When he still resisted, she dropped his hand, turned from him, went through the door. He hesitated, then, surrendering, followed her. He always stayed close to her at parties, using her vivacity as a cover for his shyness, but this time they moved to separate rooms in Marjorie’s big house, which was loud with people talking.
Francis moved through the people in the foyer into the living room. It seemed bigger somehow, empty of something he couldn’t put his finger on. He stopped walking. A surprising fear of the new largeness of Marjorie’s living room rose in him. While anxiety took hold of him, Marcia Holmes, his young friend in the History Department, moved across the rug to him.
Smiling, she told him how much she liked hearing what he’d said about the girls he graduated. “You tell such wonderful stories,” she told him, and went on to say how much she wished more girls liked her enough to invite her to graduate them, and suddenly, while part of him told her not to worry because next year would be easier, the second year always was, and another part of him watched her face, still another part watched the scene that suddenly appeared inside his head for the second or third time that week while he began to sweat and went on talking to this lovely young woman in her sexy summer dress as if everything were normal: The stern of a ship was moving away, he saw the froth by the propeller, going away from him, no one had seen him fall overboard, no one heard his shouts. Marjorie’s big sofa was missing, he realized, coming back fully to his young friend, and the top three shelves of her bookcase were empty, and that was what he pointed out to her, as if it were a discovery of some amazing new scientific fact, interrupting her as she told him of her summer plans, and there was a funny look on her face—part worry and part a question, as if she were hoping that he was telling her a joke she didn’t understand. “She’s started to move out already,” he said in a very matter-of-fact way.
“Yes,” Marcia said. She was waiting for a punch line, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. She patted his arm—he couldn’t tell if it was sympathy or just her way of excusing herself—and moved away.
FRED KINDLER, THE new headmaster, was standing by the fireplace in the center of Marjorie’s living room. Marjorie stood next to him, a good six inches taller. They were talking calmly together—as if nothing had happened, as if everything was the same, and Francis remembered Marjorie telling him of her resolve to hide her bitterness. “These people, who wouldn’t even have a school to be on the board of if it weren’t for me, want me to pretend I yearn for retirement,” she had told him. “Well, I’d rather yearn for death. But all this is for your ears only,” she went on after a pause. “The last bitter statement I’m going to make. I’ll take their advice. I’ll say I want the time to take up—what, golf? My grandsons? You know, the truth of the matter is I’m not remotely interested in my grandsons,” she murmured, speaking half to herself and half to Francis as if she’d just discovered this about herself. “This school is what interests me.”
Francis was surprised again at the new head’s red hair, the big red mustache, and the short, stocky, powerful body. For an instant, Francis, in his mind’s eye, observed his own short, almost pudgy body, as if in a mirror, his round mild, unobtrusive face. He couldn’t resist staring across the room at Kindler. He’s so male! Francis thought, and then registered what he had seen instantly when he first saw Kindler standing next to Marjorie: that he was wearing the same brown polyester suit that he’d worn during his interviews. Polyester! Francis thought, shocked at himself that he even noticed. He’d always been proud that in the world of preppydom of which it was a part, Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was studiously unpreppy, so why did he care what the man wore?
Kindler and Marjorie both noticed him. Francis saw Marjorie put her hand lightly on Kindler’s wrist and Kindler move across the room toward him. He had an awkward gait; his feet pointed outward like Charley Chaplin’s. For an instant, Francis felt sorry for him, imagined girls imitating that walk, every girl on campus walking like that everywhere they went, day after day, until the poor man had to leave.
Kindler’s right hand was out. His left hand patted Francis on the shoulder. All Francis could see was the red of Kindler’s hair and mustache. “Come see me tomorrow,” Kindler said. “I’m here all day. Mrs. Boyd’s lending me her office. I need all the advice I can get, and I want to start with the senior teacher. Want to collect the best ideas and get a running start when I come back.”
Francis was appalled at the boyishness. He felt suddenly like a tutor. That’s not what he wanted—parenting his own boss. “I’m leaving for the summer dig project tomorrow. Six a.m.,” he said.
A waiter from the caterers came by with a tray of drinks. Francis plucked a glass of white wine. Without taking his eyes off Francis, frowning slightly, Kindler murmured to the waiter, “No, thank you,” and then to Francis: “Oh? That so? You’re going on that dig? Somebody told me that one of the teachers was going. I didn’t realize it was you.”
“I signed up way back in February,” Francis said. He almost added before you were appointed, but he didn’t feel like explaining
