away in a boring suburb and devoid of boys, was the right environment for Claire. After only a few days at her new school, Claire, like a child bringing her artwork home from school for her mother to post on the refrigerator, had invited Rachel to the Art Building to see one of the very first paintings she had made. It was of two little girls on a beach, holding hands, clinging to each other, an endless ocean behind them. To Rachel, it spoke so powerfully of loneliness, she had to look away.
Now Rachel lingered in her office, her eyes focused on the picture of the copper beech, for once obeying her mother’s dictum: Be still! How long do you think you will be here? And it came to her that because Claire hadn’t touched a paintbrush before enrolling in the school, she could stand for every student the school had ever taught. Rachel would never say in public such a thing about one girl out of so many, but just the same it felt like truth. Nor would she say in public—she would barely confess it to herself—that her hunger to be a mother had focused on Claire whom she had allowed deeper into her heart than any other girl in the school. Rachel’s mother had clung to her family through unspeakable pain, as long as she could. But here was a child whose mom had walked away on purpose.
Rachel sat down at her desk and reached for the phone.
THREE
Well, has the shoe dropped yet?” Rachel’s father asked. He’d picked up the phone on the very first ring.
“No, Dad, it’s only August,” she reminded him. She knew better than to claim that shoes don’t always have to drop.
“When it does, it will be some issue you didn’t know was out there,” her father said. He felt a powerful empathy for Fred Kindler and was sure that the brevity of his tenure was the result of the latest dogma: everybody gets to have an opinion whether they know anything or not. He should know. He’d lost the presidency of a small liberal arts college in Ohio because he hadn’t been sufficiently eager to lead by persuasion in an institution where the faculty had tenure and he did not.
Rachel had had a lot of practice leading her father away from subjects she didn’t feel like talking about, so it was easy to get him to ask for news about her husband’s career. One of the many things in her life she was grateful for was the respect and affection her husband and her father felt for each other and how they always seemed to agree. Bob happened to be a white person—generating casual, indeed pleased, acceptance by most of the community of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls while, to no one’s surprise, in the larger community the reaction was far from universal. Rachel told her father about Bob’s plan to expand Best Sports and how hard he was working.
“Good news,” her father said. “I’m happy for him.”
“I am too, Dad,” Rachel said just as Margaret opened the door and poked her head inside. Rachel assumed she was going to tell her Milton Perkins was on the phone. “Dad, I have to go,” she said.
“Well, then go,” he said huffily into the phone. “But remember, it’s only August—not too late to tell the board you’ve changed your mind.” Then he hung up.
Margaret told Rachel that Milton had decided to come to school to talk with her face to face rather than just on the phone, and that he’d be here in just a few minutes. “Good,” Rachel said, her prospects for the morning brightening still more. “When’s my meeting with Francis?”
“Not today.” Margaret flushed, as if slightly embarrassed, or feeling a surge of happiness. Rachel couldn’t tell. “He left. He’ll be back for the first day of classes.”
“Left?”
Margaret nodded. “He and Peggy. To the Cape. They’ll be with their son, Sidney. A family celebration, I guess. He wants you to know, he’s moving back in with Peggy. Isn’t that wonderful? What a great way to start the year!”
Rachel agreed that it was. So what if she had to wait till the first day of classes to appoint Francis? Everybody had been afraid the Plummers were going to divorce. The hot contention between them as leaders of the pro- and anti-Kindler factions had brought to the surface the grievance of their religious differences they had been burying in years of overwork. Everybody knew Peggy was a devout Episcopalian, deeply involved in the local parish, and that Francis never accompanied her to church. He didn’t hide the fact that he saw divinity differently from his wife: in nature, “just like the Pequot People who once lived right here.” Every once in a while in class he would talk about a transcendent, egoless moment when he was a little boy fishing with his father and an ancient turtle had swum up from the bottom of the lake and presented itself to just him. “My father saw him but didn’t see,” he would say. “Here I am, the turtle’s message was as we stared at each other, and I felt myself melt into him and him into me and both of us into everything. Then the turtle sank back down out of sight and I was me again, though I didn’t want to be, and my father was my father, an other, and everything was else.”
When Fred Kindler arrived early in the summer one year ago and Francis fled to California ostensibly as the faculty advisor to a school-sponsored archaeological dig on an ancient Native American village where a housing tract was about to blossom, Francis had claimed he was on a vision quest. But Peggy had claimed it was part of a crack up, a mid-life crisis, which, if he weren’t so immature, would have happened earlier. What he was really doing was running away from his responsibility to show Fred Kindler where all the rocks and shoals were. God knows there were plenty of them.
Rachel remembered the sudden silence that had come over the faculty room last year, soon after a mysterious fire had destroyed the library, when Fred Kindler announced that there would be a substitute co-dorm parent, named Patience Sommers, to partner with Peggy in what had been the Plummers’ dorm for thirty-four years. Everyone had looked down at the floor rather than let their eyes meet either Peggy’s or Francis’s, who were sitting as far apart from each other as they could get. It had just become clear that there was too much bitterness between them to work together. Peggy believed that Francis agreed with the opinion, widely expressed by the student council, to which Francis was the advisor, that the fire that consumed the library was a sacred fire because it also consumed the Pequot Indian artifacts which Peggy had reverently curated. It was Peggy who had created the display and provided it the most prominent space in her library. She also collaborated with interested members of the faculty to use the display as stimulus for creating the school’s celebrated comparative anthropology course. Paradoxically, it was the respect for other cultures engendered by that course that inspired the student council’s assertion to the board, signed by almost every student in the school, that Miss Oliver’s had no right to possess what rightfully belonged to conquered Native Americans. Francis didn’t deny that he agreed with the recommendation. It was the last straw for Peggy. She told him to leave. He moved off campus. Thanks to Fred Kindler’s sensitiveness, the announcement that Patience Sommers would replace Francis was the last item on the agenda. The faculty room had never emptied so fast.
Now, thanks largely to the imagination and skillful work of Fred Kindler and Peggy Plummer, there was a new library with a wing owned jointly by the Pequot Nation and Miss Oliver’s arraying a more extensive, richer display of artifacts owned by the Pequot Nation, one of whose officials sat on the board of Miss Oliver’s. Rachel was as happy for herself as for the Plummers. Francis would be even more powerful in his new position with his marriage on the mend.
“All right then, please set up a meeting with Patience Sommers,” Rachel said.
“Not necessary,” Margaret said. “The Plummers already told Patience she wouldn’t be needed anymore. They hoped you wouldn’t mind. They felt it should come from them.” “Of course I don’t mind,” Rachel said, but as soon as the words were out, she knew she
