the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
“Marjorie always came in at eight o’clock,” Mrs. Rice said. “I always came in at seven. It gave me time alone to get ready.” Then she was out the door.
Alone now in the bright summer light pouring through the glass doors that looked out on the campus, he realized he was still standing in the exact spot beside his desk where he rose to after being caught on his knees by Mrs. Rice. His face was still burning. So it’s not cool to pray! he thought, suddenly angry. “Well, you’ve never lost a child,” he whispered to the door. “How do you know what to be grateful for?” He moved to his desk and sat down, already feeling just a little childish, unheadmasterly, to have allowed the words. He recalled his wife’s reminder not to let their old wound tempt him to take elevated positions—as if losing a child makes one wiser than all the people who hadn’t.
The day had already lost some of the luster it had when he’d walked into this office fifteen minutes ago at a quarter to seven, two weeks before he was required. His contract called for him to start on the first of July, but when Marjorie moved out of the head’s house and cleaned out her office with surprising speed—“Who wants to die slowly?” she had asked—he was able to start earlier. He was too eager, too full of ideas, to sit around waiting. Now a piece of him wondered if he should have followed his wife’s advice—or was it a request?—and taken two weeks’ vacation. He shook his head, like a dog coming out of water. He would get on with his day.
His desk was bare, save for a framed photograph of his wife and the file of papers he had requested from Carl Vincent, the school’s elderly business manager. He opened the file, turning directly to the projected budget for the fiscal year, soon to begin on July 1, 1991. Attached to the first page was a note from Vincent, dated just two days ago, telling him these were the latest projections “which the board has not seen because I’m presenting them to you first, according to protocol.”
Fred felt a tickle of suspicion. Something was a little fishy about this note. But he put this aside and turned to the numbers. For several minutes the figures were a blur because his mind insisted on lingering over his awkward tête-à-tête with Mrs. Rice. Besides, he knew the gist of these numbers already; he’d been over them many times during his interviews and since his appointment.
He already knew there was a projected deficit of $245,000. So he didn’t look at the bottom line. Instead he went right to the revenue figures. That’s where the problem lay: The school had been under-enrolled for five years. And now there was a baby bust, a precipitous drop in the nation’s teenage population. And even if that were not the case, the appeal of single-sex education for girls had been declining for reasons that only consultants pretended to understand. Large deficits had increased in each of those five years, culminating in this latest, biggest one. So now the accumulated operating deficit, on top of the capital deficit caused by the failure to raise enough money to fund the new theater, the last of Marjorie’s pet projects, amounted to a total indebtedness of over two million dollars.
The way Carl Vincent had presented the numbers was hard to interpret. In fact, they were a mess. So it was a little while before Fred realized that these numbers were not the same as those he had studied so carefully just before he accepted the position, confident that the notion of single-sex education was so compelling to young women that all the school needed to fill again was a good marketing program. This budget he studied now, he realized, was keyed to nineteen fewer students than were predicted by the earlier version. Nineteen times the tuition of $18,600. That’s $353,400! He averted his eyes from the bottom line. Then he noticed that the line item for salaries was bigger than it was in the last version, by $77,000. Even though there were fewer students to teach! Either this number was wrong, or the previous number was wrong. So he pulled out the compensation charts for the upcoming year and confirmed what his intuition was already loudly declaring: The latest was the correct number.
He couldn’t keep his eye off the bottom line anymore, which he had already figured would show a deficit of $675,400 instead of only $245,000. He was right. If this rate of drain continued, the bank would surely call the loans, and there simply wouldn’t be enough cash to run the school. He’d thought he had four years to turn things around. Now, on his very first day in office, he discovered he would be lucky to have two.
When Fred had accepted the board’s offer, he did so on the basis of a very straightforward strategy that the board accepted: He would create an aggressive marketing campaign by which to rebuild the girls-only enrollment. He’d provided a schedule showing the targets for the addition of students each year. The board understood that failure to reach these targets even as soon as the first year was the signal to consider becoming coed, a strategy that some other singlesex schools and colleges were adopting. But it was best not to talk about this possibility, certainly not to write it into the formal plan. This specter looming in the background would enrage the alumnae, many of whom would rather the school close down than admit boys. In his own mind, though, Fred wouldn’t even think about the possibility of closing the school. He’d admit boys before he did that. He knew something about the grief that follows a school’s dying. That wasn’t going to happen to Miss Oliver’s. Not ever!
Fred spent the next half hour reviewing budgets for the previous five years, noting once again the consistent gap between the optimistic predictions and the disappointing results, and a few more minutes thinking very carefully about how he was going to handle his conversation with Carl Vincent. Then he remembered that Vincent had left for vacation. That was the reason for his timing in presenting the corrected budget: He didn’t want to be around when everyone got the bad news and learned how inaccurate his projections had been. Fred felt sad for the old man.
All right, so the next thing to do was to talk with Nan White, the admissions director, to see what the chances were of making up some of the lost enrollment over the summer. So, at exactly nine o’clock he was about to get up from his desk and walk down the hall to Nan’s office when Margaret Rice opened his office door (without knocking, he observed), stepped a very small distance into his office, and announced that his eight-thirty appointment had arrived.
“Eight-thirty? It’s already nine!”
“Hey, it’s summertime,” she said.
“From now on, Mrs. Rice—”
“Ms. Rice.”
“Ms. Rice. Right. Sorry. From now on, I need you to keep me informed about the appointments you’ve made for me. I’d like to know a day ahead of time if it’s possible.”
“All right,” she said. “Fine. From now on.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Who what?”
“Who is my appointment with? Whom, I mean.” “
Three teachers.”
“Mrs. Rice, please, who are the teachers? Ms. Rice, I mean.”
“I bet they’ll let you know when they get in here,” she said, flushing.
He felt his face get hot too. She looked surprised, maybe even a little chagrined. “We’re going to have to talk,” he said, very quietly, very slowly. His sudden anger, always surprising to him, was a relief.
“There’s just a way we do things around here, that’s all.” Ms. Rice’s voice was almost conciliatory now, embarrassed. “Marjorie Boyd—”
“All right, Ms. Rice,” he interrupted. “Later we’ll talk. Right now, who are they?”
“Melissa
