appointed specifically to help kids and their families negotiate situations like Claire’s. Rachel needed to put Claire under Kevina Rugoff’s attention and focus on the care of the school.
That realization should have left her the mental room to consider the media’s delight in finding nasty stories about scandals at “elitist” private schools, a head of school’s nightmare: the baby aborted in a dorm, for instance, found in a plastic bag under the would-be mother’s bed; the teacher who invited the students in his dorm to his apartment for pizza—and pornographic movies.
But her feelings for Claire blinded Rachel. Claire needed a mom more than she needed a shrink, and Rachel was the closest thing to a mom Claire would ever have.
Rachel would have to call the head of Central Park Academy, Claire’s New York City school. Is it true that one of your teachers had sex with your former student, Claire Nelson? She could think of a million people to whom it would be easier to pose the question to which she already knew the answer than to this sixty-year-old man. She did! Then why didn’t you tell me? As if she didn’t know. The only time she’d spent with Gaylord Frothingham was when they had served together on an ad hoc committee of the National Association of Independent Schools. During lunch, he had assumed that everybody was as fascinated by his detailed analysis of the last two centuries of Harvard-Yale football games as he was. Nevertheless, she was sure he would be more ahead of the times than she was about the problem she was calling him about, much less easily perturbed. She turned around and hurried back to her office. When she got there, Claire had left.
CLAIRE HAD STOPPED crying right after Rachel left her alone. That didn’t mean she’d been faking the tears, she told herself. No, she stopped crying because, as she watched Rachel pass under the copper beech and across the lawns toward the river, it sank in that Rachel hadn’t seemed worried that the story would come out and hurt the school. So if Rachel wasn’t worried, why should she be, and how did she ever get up the nerve to say, Maybe I should find a school in London? No school in London, or anywhere else, would ever have a teacher like Eudora Easter. And now she didn’t have to feel guilty anymore about not telling. That was for her dad and old Mr. Gaylord Frothingham to feel.
She stood up from the sofa and went out the way she came, grateful for the privilege. She’d known all along she did what she did with poor Mr. Alford because she needed to prove she could.
He was just out of college, twenty-three years old, only five years older than she had been—and everybody knows girls mature faster than boys. She was still wondering how dumb can a school administration get, to give a brand-new teacher seniors to teach. He’d ask a question and all the class would raise their hands and wave them as if they were going to die if he didn’t give them a chance to show how deeply they were reading his assignments, and whoever he called on would give the dumbest possible answer, and they’d all agree, talking all at once, shouting at each other, going on and on, sometimes for the whole period. Claire began to feel sorry for him. One day she gave him a good answer. Everybody stared at her. She stared right back. One of the boys said that was the wrong answer and started to propose an absurd one. “Stop,” she told him. “You’re boring me.” He stopped and looked around the room. No one said anything, and they never played that game on poor Mr. Alford again. Claire relived that moment over and over. She’d discovered something about herself she hadn’t known was there. After class Mr. Alford thanked her, apologizing for not controlling her classmates.
That afternoon, walking home after school, she discovered that his route to where he lived was the same as hers when she saw him walking in the same direction ahead of her. The oh-what-the-hell feeling rushed up in her and she walked fast and caught up with him just as he turned from the sidewalk onto the steps of the brownstone house where he lived. “Remember that book you said you’d lend me? Can I pick it up now?”
That was the first time. They both regretted it and agreed it would never happen again. But her power over his resistance was intoxicating. It was the same newly discovered power that made the boy shut up. So it happened again. And then again. For six weeks, on Friday afternoons, after they thought everyone had left the school—until old Mr. Gaylord Frothingham discovered them. He’d stayed late and was going around making sure all the lights were off. If only they had gone to Mr. Alford’s house, like the first time. But that would have required planning, an admission of intention, instead of pretending, each time, that they were caught in a spontaneous whirlwind they never would have submitted to, if they’d had time to think.
Claire shook her head. She’d think more about all this later. Right now she had to hurry to get to class.
But passing under the branches of the copper beech as Rachel had, she couldn’t keep herself from slowing down. What would the tree look like, she suddenly needed to know, if she were sitting down, looking up at it, the way Rachel said she thought the Pequots must have done? The question made her sad, wondering if those people knew what was going to happen to them. She’d find the answer by coming back in the winter and sitting down on the ground and painting what she felt when all the leaves had fallen off and died and the branches were bare against the sky. It would be a different painting from the one she’d painted for Rachel.
Thus decided, she hurried on, looking back only once to see how the morning light washed across the coppery leaves.
“YES, IT’S IMPORTANT,” Rachel told Gaylord Frothingham’s secretary. “Very.”
“Important enough to interrupt his vacation? He’s in Paris. It’s his last day. Our school starts next week.”
Rachel hesitated, knowing how much she would hate to have her vacation broken into with the kind of questions she needed to ask. “Well, I guess it is,” the secretary said, interpreting the silence. Rachel gave her direct number, and not five minutes later her phone rang.
“Rachel?” he said. “Rachel Bickham?” The wariness in his voice was louder than his words.
“Hello, Mr. Frothingham. Sorry to interrupt your vacation.”
“That’s all right. I’m here in our hotel room, resting. My wife’s at the Louvre looking at pictures. She can look at them forever. Museums exhaust me right away. They’re worse than faculty meetings. How’s everything in Connecticut?”
“Fine, Mr. Frothingham, everything’s fine. But there’s one thing I want to talk about.”
“Well, good. Because if everything’s fine then perhaps we should both hang up.”
“Mr. Frothingham—”
“I’m Gaylord. And you’re Rachel, and please, let’s both hang up.”
Rachel shook her head as if he could see her from across the ocean. “I have a question. It’s about Claire Nelson.”
“Oh Rachel, I wish you were better at taking hints!”
“Is there anything about her I should know that I don’t?”
“Please. Don’t ask that question.”
“Mr. Frothingham! I already have.”
“Well, let’s just pretend you didn’t. It would be so much better for you and your school. She’s graduated. She’s gone. Why in the world do you want to know?”
“She isn’t gone. She’s back for a post-graduate—”
“She is! Oh my! Then you really don’t want to know.”
“But
