what he called it—the only name he could come up with. He’d never told anyone about it, not even Peggy. That feeling that the poetry he was about to reveal to the students—or the novel, or the short story or essay—was expanding in his chest, pushing against his ribs. It would kill him if he didn’t get it out. It was like being hungry as you sat down to dinner—and yet much more than that. He hid his surprise and panic and plodded on, doing all those clever things he always did, well aware no charge was coming off him, no electric passion to ignite his students’ hearts.
By the time the class was almost over, the girls were exchanging looks that asked, Why is this so famous? And when, at last, the bell rang, they waited for a few seconds because maybe it happens now. But it didn’t. They trooped out, avoiding his eyes.
WHILE THOSE MYSTIFIED ninth graders were leaving Francis’s classroom, Rachel took a call from Bob. “Something terrible has happened in Chicago,” he said, “and I have to be there this weekend instead of with you.” Rachel was so disappointed that it didn’t occur to her to ask him what the terrible thing that had happened was. Their scheduled weekends together, each taking a turn at the traveling, were sacred contracts.
To make up for their disappointment, he asked her if she could accompany him to Cleveland on the following weekend where he was making a presentation at the annual conference of something or other, but she reminded him that she was to be in Greenwich at an alumnae gathering the Friday night and in New York at another on the Saturday afternoon, and there were a million reasons why she had to get right back to school that evening. Her tone of voice made it clear that he shouldn’t need to be reminded. She heard a woman say something in the background, something she thought was urgent from the tone, and she knew it was his secretary. “Just a minute,” he said, and now she could visualize him putting his hand over the phone. There was a moment of silence before he said, “I really have to go.”
“Then go!” she said and hung up on him.
AT LUNCH, ON that first day of classes, Gregory van Buren reminded the girls at his table that one does not start to eat until the host picks up a fork. “Or,” he added, precise as ever, “in the case of soup, a spoon. Today, and this evening at dinner, I will be the host.” His smile was almost beatific and his voice was gentle, but there was steel behind them. “Starting tomorrow at lunch, and for the next several days, our newest arrival will be the host,” he said, nodding his head toward a freshman girl across the round table from him. She looked surprised and scared, and pleased. “Thank you, Molly,” he said. “The duties are few. Simply decide when we are all settled comfortably and pick up a utensil. And if our conversation ever lags, or appears to exclude anyone, you might help me rejuvenate it.” He paused for an instant and then began again. “Now, we will all introduce ourselves and say a few sentences about our lives, starting with Molly, and then you will pass up your plates to my good friend Carmella,” nodding to the senior girl on his right, “and she and I will fill them, and pass them back, and then I will pick up my fork and we will commence to eat.” Carmella giggled, but she looked pleased too. Several other girls smiled behind their hands.
Gregory acknowledged their smiles with one of his own. “Do you know why I insist on this procedure?” he asked. “Because you are ladies and I am a gentleman and we care for each other. Therefore, we do not eat in animalistic bedlam as they do in lesser schools. This is a dining room, not a cafeteria.”
Gregory was quite pleased with the way they reacted. It was clear to him they enjoyed telling a little bit more about themselves than their names, and he noted that the older girls, who knew each other, chose things to tell he was sure they hadn’t told before. Almost everything they said, no matter how mundane, struck him as interesting and caused in him a surge of affection. It always did and it was always a surprise.
He spoke last, of course, being a gentleman. He told them he grew up in England. “No, I didn’t go to Oxford. It was what they call a red brick university,” he explained. And that he’d spent a summer vacation in New York City in the Seventies, taking an American history course in the daytime at NYU and going to the theater at night—and never went back to England. That part about going to the theater at night in New York City was the new part for the kids who already knew the rest. He didn’t tell them why he stayed in America: that he’d fallen in love with an American woman and they got married. Nor did he tell them that they divorced.
He was quite pleased with his performance in his classes this morning—with one regret. “Oh, Loreli! Why are you telling me how you feel? The question is how does Antigone feel?” She was terribly hurt. Next time he’d be more careful with the tone of his voice. And this evening during study hours, he’d seek her out and explain objectivity, how first we must discern, precisely, what is actually in the text. Once we assimilate that, then we can discern how we feel as a result. One of these days, he would design a course in which it was against the rules to use the first-person pronoun in class or in papers.
Now that the school year had actually started, he felt even more optimistic about the school’s prospects under its new young dynamic leader. Rachel Bickham was exactly the right person for exactly this moment. Nevertheless, he was feeling an itch. He despised tired metaphors, but that was the only way he could describe a new and persistent desire for more weight to carry. He wanted levers to pull to make things happen beyond the harangues he delivered in faculty meetings. Last year, Fred Kindler had helped him to understand that he’d been infantilized—such an ugly word—by Marjorie Boyd, who had made all the decisions. Fred had insisted that Gregory make the decisions in his own sphere, including the campus newspaper. If Gregory thought a story on the sexual activity of Miss Oliver’s girls inappropriate, then inappropriate it was. Gregory was grateful for this. But beyond his teaching, and his co-parenting with a female teacher of a dormitory, his sphere included only advising the school newspaper and the literary magazine. It was hardly a sphere. More like a dot. He wanted to lead, but the leadership area for which he was most qualified would go to Francis Plummer for obvious political reasons—the dean of academics. So Gregory thought to satisfy his itch, he might have to find another school where there was room for him to grow. Just to think such a thought made him sad. He loved Miss Oliver’s School for Girls and he wanted to work for Rachel Bickham.
EIGHT
If anyone had asked Rachel if she still thought she had all the right instincts for her job at this point or whether she was in over her head, she would have wondered why the question had even come up. Gaylord Frothingham had assured her that she was in good shape and that he’d taken care of everything. And even if she’d known about Francis Plummer’s experience yesterday, she would assume that his loss of mojo was an aberration. Yes, she was disappointed in herself for hanging up on her husband without getting the details of the terrible thing that happened in his Chicago office, but she trusted him to understand how disappointed she was. She hadn’t predicted that the job would be easy, only that she was the right person to get it done.
She would have felt less self-assured, though, if she had known who was waiting in her office as she as she hurried back from teaching the one course she had retained since being made head of the school. But she had no idea. The day was sunny, the sky an ethereal blue, the grass was green, still wet from dew, and she was pulsing with energy. She went through the front door of the Administration Building and down the hall toward Margaret’s anteroom. She and Margaret would plan the day, including setting an appointment with Francis Plummer for that afternoon.
But Margaret wasn’t at her desk. She was standing in front of the closed door to Rachel’s office. Her face was flushed, her hands clenched up by her shoulders, and her normally pleasant voice a whole octave higher. “I could kill the bastard!”
“Margaret!”
“Amy Michaels’s father is in your office. At least that’s who he says he is. I told him
