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TWENTY-EIGHT
ONE
Gregory van Buren, teacher of English, was more respected than beloved. His students would no more dare to be one minute late for his class than write different when they meant various, or use annihilate for destroy, and when someone used lay for the act of reclining in the present tense, he would actually lie down on the floor and deliver a lecture about transitive and intransitive verbs.
So Gregory’s heart sang when Rachel Bickham, his brand-new boss, started the first faculty meeting of the 1992 school year exactly at nine. It sang still more when she paused, mid-sentence in her start-of-year speech, and gave a look with precisely the right amount of amazement in it at the several teachers who straggled in at one minute after. It seemed an eternity before they found their seats and she resumed her sentence. Oh how he did enjoy their discomfiture! This is Miss Oliver’s School for Girls! he wanted to shout, not a used car lot.
He was also delighted by the way Rachel dressed: in a red silk blouse that set off her brown skin, a silver necklace, a gray skirt, and stockings. Stockings! Half the faculty were wearing shorts, some not even socks. Yes, he knew it was still summer—the Monday before Labor Day weekend—and the girls wouldn’t arrive until a week from Wednesday, but don’t try to convince him that people in sloppy clothes don’t do sloppy work. He was wearing his summer-weight blue blazer, the single-breasted one, a tie, and freshly pressed khaki trousers. He liked it too that Rachel stood up to make her talk, that she was tall—an asset for a leader—and that she moved her hands through the air as she talked—comely, long-fingered hands, the palms lighter in color than the rest of her.
Please, don’t say how grateful to have been appointed you are, he thought, and she didn’t, and his heart lifted still more. Why should she be grateful? It was the other way around. So what if she was only thirty-five? As the chair of the Science Department and director of Athletics, she had proven to be the best leader available at the end of last school year, just two months ago, when Fred Kindler, that honorable man, suddenly resigned after only one year in office.
Just thinking about how Fred Kindler had been treated made Gregory feel ashamed. Fred had been appointed to save the school from imminent financial collapse. Parents, and even some of the alumnae, were not sending their daughters because they had heard the school was so broke it might actually have to close—so the under-enrollment grew worse. When under-enrollment had caused the problem in the first place. The possibility of closing grew even more probable, and then rumors flew around that Fred Kindler planned to solve the problem by admitting boys. So he challenged the alumnae to save their beloved school and its sacred mission of empowering young women by raising the necessary money and persuading the parents of every high school girl they knew to send their daughter to Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. The alumnae’s response was clear: not until you go away. So he resigned, and right away the alumnae started to raise money and recruit girls—enough to keep the school alive.
But Gregory’s shame over the way the school had behaved was matched by his pride in Rachel for her response when the board chair offered her the position of interim headmistress while they looked for a permanent one. Oh, but didn’t she surprise them! “I won’t be your head just because I’m convenient,” she had said. “You’ve got to want me enough now to want me permanently.” How about that for nerve? And if anyone tried to mess with her the way they messed with Fred Kindler, they’d have Gregory van Buren to answer to.
Rachel sat down and turned the meeting over to Gregory’s colleague, Francis Plummer, who seemed rather pale and tired for a man who’d been on vacation all summer. Gregory, who remembered how he’d felt when his wife divorced him years ago, was sure Francis was grieving over the separation from his wife, Peggy, the school’s librarian. The rumor was she’d kicked him out of the apartment next to the dorm they parented. It made everybody sad, especially the girls in the dorm, to think of them living apart. Gregory didn’t believe they’d ever get back together. Francis had rebelled against the leadership of Fred Kindler, and Peggy had gone out of her way to support Fred. In Gregory’s view, that was enough to rend them asunder forever.
But Francis maintained his involved presence, no matter the state of his marriage. Indeed he drew all faculty eyes to him now as he stood up, seeming quite small after Rachel’s tall presence. He looked directly at Gregory. Almost everybody thought Francis was the best English teacher in the school, if not the world, and Gregory the second best by just a little.
“I do hope this satisfies your questions about our young artist Claire Nelson’s academic schedule,” Francis said to Gregory, referring to a student who had transferred last year for mysterious reasons into Miss Oliver’s from her school in New York City in the middle of her senior year. Right away some of the faculty had felt that was going to be trouble. Within days of attending the chair of Art Eudora Easter’s painting class, Claire had discovered a prodigious artistic talent. Rachel invited her back for another year in order to build a sufficient portfolio to gain entrance to the Rhode Island School of Design. Not everyone thought that was a good idea.
“Yes, I do hope to be satisfied,” Gregory said, returning Francis stare.
Francis looked surprised. He’d expected a long speech in ponderous syntax from Gregory. He didn’t know that his colleague had resolved to be as self-disciplined in his speech as he was sure Rachel would be in everything.
Eyes went back and forth between him and Gregory. “We have decided that almost her entire time will be spent on her art,” Francis said. “She’ll elect two other courses from English and history.”
“But she’s abysmal in math.”
Francis smiled. “If she needs an accountant to register sales of her pictures, she’ll hire one.” Some of the faculty laughed.
“We?” Gregory said. “Shouldn’t we have conferred?”
“I thought about that,” Francis said, smiling more broadly now.
“And?”
“I decided it wasn’t necessary.”
Gregory smiled too. He’d made his point. “I thought so,” he said, and Francis sat down.
IT WAS A wonder that two so different models for students of how to be in the world could be contained in so small an institution as Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. Gregory was tall, always impeccably dressed, and formal, a believer in authority. Francis Plummer was short, slightly pudgy, and indifferently
