told you? When?”
“This morning.”
“This morning! That’s wonderful.”
“Wonderful?”
“Because last January when you admitted her is a long time ago. Which means when you admitted her you didn’t know. Rachel, you’re in good shape. And besides, I’ve taken care of everything. Everything. Our school is in Manhattan, you know. New York City. Right, Rachel? Believe me, we’re way ahead of you on stuff like this. She’s a good girl. She needed to confess. Fine, she did, and that’s the end of it. Because she’s also very smart.”
Rachel didn’t say anything. She agreed: the less she knew, the better.
“I’m going to walk to the Louvre to get my wife, now,” Gaylord Frothingham said. “Whether or not she’s through. It’s aperitif time in Paris. She’ll have the goose liver. I’ll have a glass of wine and forget this conversation ever happened. All right, Rachel?” Before she could answer, he hung up.
RACHEL CALLED MILTON Perkins to share this news with him—without, of course, identifying Claire. She knew he could figure out who the student was, but she also knew the people you can trust with a secret are the same people who don’t ever want to know what they don’t need to know, and they had agreed that when it wasn’t clear whether to share information or not, they would. No surprises between them, ever.
He was silent for a long time when she finished telling him. He had three daughters who had graduated from the school. That they loved Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was the reason he did too. No one would be more determined than he to protect the school’s reputation. “Thank you for telling me,” he said at last. “The rest of the board doesn’t need to know—unless something happens, which I don’t think it will.” Then, after a pause, he added, “But they will want to know why you started a post-graduate program on your own. That’s a board decision.”
Rachel was stunned. It hadn’t occurred to her.
“You’ll remember next time,” Milton Perkins said.
SEVEN
The next morning, the first day of classes, Francis Plummer awoke to a big surprise: the air around him was not aglitter, shimmery with expectation the way it always had been on the first day of classes. It was simply air. He sat up straight and leaned back against the headboard.
He wanted to tell Peggy, but even if he didn’t feel shy in their bed after months of not being allowed in it, he wouldn’t. She might think he was having another crack-up. Or the second chapter of the same one. And anyway, she was still asleep, her arm across her eyes.
So he got up and went into their bathroom, took a shower, shaved, and brushed his teeth. When he came back naked into their bedroom and put on his new khaki trousers and new shirt and tie, laid out for him last night in readiness for this day, Peggy had turned over, facing the other way, still asleep. He went into the kitchen and made the coffee, where Levi, their dog, greeted him with less effusiveness than usual, it seemed: just one thump of his tail on the floor and a return to sleep.
Right after the electric percolator had its little orgasm and the coffee was ready, he heard the shower going. At last, Peggy was up. He went to the front door, opened it and bent to pick up her New York Times, and brought it back and placed it on the kitchen table for her. She practically memorized it every morning, and she ate breakfast too. He never did. He liked to start the morning’s classes caffeinated, empty, like a jock before a game, not satisfied. And he never read the Times until after lunch. To go to class stuffed with random irritations and bits of passing interest would be like trying to pray, or meditate, while someone was screaming in your ear.
He turned on the front stove burner, the medium one, as she had instructed him about four billion times, and heated the pan slowly as the manufacturer instructed—even though that was bullshit just to make the pan special, which it wasn’t—it was a frying pan, for crying out loud—and broke two eggs in it scrambling with a fork, the way she liked it. He sliced a bagel, plain, without poppy seeds, because after you’ve reached fifty you could get diverticulitis if little things like poppy seeds got stuck in your intestines.
She appeared just as he was sliding the eggs for her onto a plate next to the bagel, wearing a green terrycloth bathrobe he’d never seen on her before. It looked like a big towel with sleeves. Its unfamiliarity made him sad. Her hair, still wet and shiny from the shower, had thin strips of gray against the black. She’d pin it up before she went to her library. “Good morning,” she murmured.
Good morning. Like what you might say to the mail carrier? Or two strangers passing in an office doorway? “Good morning,” he answered, and she sat down at the table and ran her fingers through her hair. He put the plate down before her.
She looked down at it, unmoving. Then she looked up at him. “Like old times,” she said. It sounded more like a question than a statement. He poured her coffee. She began to eat. He sat down across the table and watched.
The sound of several showers going at once, of adolescent murmurs and soft footfalls on the other side of the wall telling him the girls were getting up, brought him the same neutral feeling that had surprised him awakening. He wondered if this would happen again tomorrow. He knew Peggy had heard the girls getting up too; she’d been listening for it just as unconsciously as he had. If she hadn’t heard the sounds, she would be up from the table by now, gone through the door into the dorm, still in her new green robe, making sure they all got up. Old times for sure.
He wanted even more now to tell her about how he’d felt when he woke up. But he didn’t know how such a sense of loss could be described when September’s air rushed at them through the open windows. It heralded autumn’s gold and hung on to summer all at once, distilling what he most loved about the world. He stood from the table, took Peggy’s finished plate to the sink, then came back to her, bending down to kiss her goodbye—until they’d meet again at noon in the dining room. He looked down her robe at her breasts, even more mysterious to him now than when he’d touched them as a teenager late at nights in lovers’ lanes in his father’s car. She offered him her cheek. Then he left her and went out the door and walked the paths toward his classroom on this very first day of school, when the world was all fresh and new, a tabula rasa, swept clean of fault. He still wondered where the glitter had gone.
All nineteen faces of his ninth grade class were turned to him as he came through the door of his classroom five minutes later. They had heard from their parents and other alumnae and from the current sophomores, juniors, and seniors about Francis Plummer, also known as Clark Kent—because he was so mild and unobtrusive when he wasn’t teaching—and how the very first class his freshmen experienced at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was always on “The Death of a Hired Man,” by Robert Frost. Since time began. Every one of them had read it over the summer, some more than once.
None of the girls were surprised when Francis ambled toward the front of the room where he looked up and pretended to be shocked to find them sitting around the table. They’d been told over and over that’s how he always started the year. He smiled and introduced himself. A stack of Famous Little Green Books, otherwise known as the Modern Library Collection of Robert Frost, was on his desk. He opened the one on the top, read out loud the name of the freshman girl he’d inscribed in it, and then looked up to see who raised her hand, and then he crossed the room and handed it to her. He did this nineteen times while everyone waited. Who would get to be the narrator? And who would be Mary, the farm wife who wanted to welcome Silas, the hired hand, home to die, and who would be Warren, the unwilling husband?
