by an equal measure of affinity to the way he thought Native Americans viewed the world and a strong dose of rebelliousness. Gregory kept a discernible distance from his students—and, some would say, from the literature he presented to them. He thought of it as the world’s possession, not his, and he showed it to them analytically, letting them decide for themselves if they would fall in love with it, as he had so long ago that he couldn’t remember. At graduation time, more girls asked Francis to confer their diplomas on them than all the other teachers combined, but only one or two girls would ask Gregory. The poems he chose to honor them were never easy to understand, and when he hugged them, which he did only because graduation hugs were a sacred tradition at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, he was so shy of contact, he’d stick his butt out so far behind himself that people laughed and said he looked like he was wearing a bustle.
Everything that happened in Gregory’s classes was an exercise in critical thinking, and everything in Francis’s an exercise in engagement. Francis was passionate and demonstrative, and he wasn’t about to let the students decide whether they would fall in love with literature. The alumnae loved him for this as fervently as they disliked Fred Kindler for coming in from the outside, a perfect stranger. Every move Fred Kindler had made seemed to generate the same question: how dare you think you could understand us?
Francis Plummer was the face of the school. In the classroom he was as powerful and larger than life as Superman; outside the classroom, quiet, small, and unobtrusive. Many years ago, the students took to calling him Clark Kent, generating a mystique that’d been building for decades. That this very unathletic man spent weekends running dangerous rapids in the springtime when the water was high only added to the legend.
Thus Francis Plummer was vastly more powerful than Gregory van Buren in the school’s fraught politics that Rachel Bickham would have to manage. Gregory had arrived thirty-three years ago, right after his wife divorced him, and proceeded to live a monkish life on campus. But Francis and his wife Peggy, the school’s beloved librarian, had come a year earlier, directly from their honeymoon, and right away the then-headmistress, Marjorie Boyd, a brilliant, charismatic educator, admired by all, feared by many, beloved by some, put Francis Plummer at her right hand—though only unofficially, for she was too authoritarian to delegate officially anything to anybody. Francis was passionately loyal to her. Some would say he’d made her his surrogate parent, and when the board finally dismissed her after her own thirty-five-year tenure, for paying too little attention to the school’s increasingly precarious financial condition, Francis’s resentment over her dismissal led to his rebellion against her successor, Fred Kindler, until, too late, he realized how unwisely he had been acting. Francis felt guilty for this now, and though he was worried that Rachel was too young and inexperienced to succeed in so difficult a job, he was resolved to do everything he could to support this new headmistress, including, as everyone expected, taking the leadership of the academic program off her hands to lighten her load. Francis would be the first dean of academics in the history of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
Near the end of the meeting, Rachel announced that the evening study-time supervision in the dormitories would be extended by a half hour, as Gregory and Francis had both advised. The chair of Foreign Languages, well known for her defense of workers’ rights, didn’t think it was fair to add to the teachers’ duties after the contracts had been signed. “All the assistant dorm heads would like to have a meeting with you this afternoon,” she said to Rachel.
“Oh, I never meet people in groups,” Rachel responded without a second of hesitation, and everyone looked at each other, and Gregory said quite loudly while pretending to murmur, “Hear, hear.” And right then and there Rachel adjourned the meeting at precisely the scheduled time, a first in years.
Gregory wanted to stand up and cheer. He was sure Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was back on course.
And Francis was grateful for this promptness. He often joked that when it came to his time to die, he hoped the passing would occur during a faculty meeting so the transition between being alive and being dead would be imperceptible.
What Francis and Gregory didn’t know was that there was another reason, beyond her ingrained punctiliousness about schedules, for Rachel’s adjourning the meeting right on time: she had a powerful desire to her to talk to her husband. And he was about to leave for Chicago.
TWO
Rachel Bickham didn’t wait long enough to cross the campus from the faculty room to her office to call her husband so that the conversation would be private. She was afraid she would miss him if she did. So she called him from the faculty room the instant the meeting was over, while the teachers were still there. She’d talk quietly so they wouldn’t hear. And anyway, she didn’t have anything really private to tell him. She just wanted to hear his voice.
She had gotten up at dawn that morning because her husband, Bob Perrine, the CEO and founder of Best Sports Inc., with stores in New York City and Chicago, had begged her not to leave him alone yesterday in their New York City apartment, which he kept to be near his office and where they’d spent the weekend together. Then, after four hours of driving through the Bronx into Connecticut and north along the Connecticut River, she had returned to Miss Oliver’s School for Girls on the bank of that river, bursting with eagerness to get to work. She’d gone straight to the faculty meeting.
The first thing she would tell Bob, as she had promised him she would even though he hadn’t asked her to, was that she had arrived safely. She was feeling a little remorse for having been so preoccupied by the faculty meeting that was about to start—her very first one—that she’d forgotten to call him when she’d arrived on campus. First she would apologize, and then he’d forgive her and tell her he was glad he didn’t need to worry anymore, and then she’d tell him how lovely the white clapboard buildings of the campus looked in the morning sun, how the dew sparkled on the lawns, and how the mist was rising off the river.
She didn’t realize she was holding her breath, praying she wasn’t too late while the phone rang on the other end of the line. After what seemed to be forever, his secretary answered, and Rachel knew he’d already left to catch his plane. It was his private number. His secretary never picked it up unless he wasn’t there, and when she did, Rachel always felt resentful of her, though she knew that made no sense. “Oh well, I’ll call him later,” she told the secretary, but the morning that had seemed so bright had lost its luster.
So instead, the first thing she would do would be to call the new board chair Milton Perkins and get everything squared away by doing what she should have done on the day she was appointed. She would ask him to propose to the board that her title Headmistress be changed to Head of School. Certainly, Milton Perkins would understand how dated mistress was, and that, for a girls’ school with a newly appointed African American head, the term had an especially nasty ring. A year ago she had been on the verge of advising her predecessor, Fred Kindler, to make the same request, headmaster being even more out of tune than headmistress, but she refrained because she thought him too preoccupied trying to win over a disapproving community, busily traveling around the country and assuring the alumnae that he had not been brought in specifically to build up the enrollment by allowing boys into the school, the mere idea of which drove everybody crazy. And of course another damning issue for Fred had been his gender. Rachel had begun to think that if she had persuaded her friend to change his title, it might have changed attitudes just enough to save him his job. He would still be the head of the school and she still the chair of Science and director of Athletics.
But Fred wasn’t the head anymore because he’d offered his resignation when he realized which way the wind was blowing—and Milton Perkins had said, “You’re a hell of a guy, Fred. Almost everybody else would have to be told.”
What happened next was a secret that Rachel and
