go when I called,” Margaret said. “They want to get to know each other again, I guess. They’ve done all their prep for starting school. They’ve been here for years, they don’t need the time.”
Rachel frowned. “Even so, don’t you think they should have asked me if they could leave?”
Margaret flushed again. “Yes, and I told them so, but obviously they didn’t agree,” she said, and in the heavy silence that followed, Rachel wondered if Margaret was embarrassed for her new boss’s lack of authority or for the Plummers’ behavior. Then Margaret’s face lighted up with relief: the subject was about to be changed. She gestured toward the French doors and said, “Here comes Milton now.”
Rachel turned, relieved too, and watched Milton Perkins’s thin, slightly stooped frame come toward her across the lawn, wearing a shirt and tie even on this warm summer day. She went out through the doors to meet him. He already knew she liked to walk by the river. They headed that way together.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, sparing her the usual how-are-you exchange. She told him the good news about the Plummers.
“Really? Back together? I didn’t think that was going to happen.”
“Neither did I, and neither did Margaret.”
“Well, I have to say I’m glad we were wrong,” he said.
“The whole school’s going to be glad, especially the girls in their dorm,” Rachel said. “I was going to appoint him today, but he and Peggy went to the Cape. They want to get to know each other again,” she added, quoting Margaret.
He didn’t answer, just nodded his head. She was surprised. She wondered if he’d guessed that the Plummers hadn’t sought her permission to leave before the weekend began.
When they had reached the trail along the river, he put his hands on his hips. “This is a nice place to walk.” Indeed it was. The trail followed the edge of a bluff into an open field, high above where the river broadened. There was no wind that day, and the water below them was placid, a big, smooth heave on the way to the Sound. It always settled Rachel’s mind to walk along there where the river would still be running long after she was gone.
“We ought to sell this waterfront land,” Milton Perkins said out of nowhere. Rachel couldn’t tell whether he was actually serious. Maybe he was just pushing her buttons. There was a wide streak of irreverence in the man. There had been glee in his eyes when he had talked to the faculty and made up a story of a survey he’d recently read that showed that the IQs of liberals averaged twenty-five points lower than those of conservatives did.
She turned to him and said, “If we sold this land, every girl in this school would leave here straight for Hotchkiss. And the alumnae would give all their money to Wellesley and Smith.”
He grinned. “Then we’d fill the school with girls who wouldn’t miss it. We’d have enough money to pay off the accumulated deficit.”
She didn’t answer. She was right and so was he. The school had failed to make budget for the last four years of Marjorie Boyd’s tenure. The total accumulation was one million and two hundred thousand dollars. The board had pledged to find the money to pay down the loan that covered it. The deadline was in three years, four hundred thousand dollars a year. If they failed to meet it, the bank would raise the interest rate, maybe even call the loan. The school would be out of cash.
They came to where the trail ran down off the bluff to a little beach. She sensed that it was too steep for his old legs, so she pretended she’d had enough walking. They turned around and started back, and just before they arrived at his car, he told her to make sure she dropped everything over the Labor Day weekend so she’d be rested up “when school starts and everything hits the fan.” She told him she would. She and her husband and siblings and dad were going to spend the weekend at their family place on Martha’s Vineyard.
Just as he was about to get in his car, she remembered what she’d had Margaret call him for.
“You really care what your title is?” His tone was incredulous.
“I do,” she said. She wasn’t about to try persuasion. There wasn’t a PC bone in his body.
“Well then, I’ll take care of it.” He was looking over her shoulder at something behind her. She turned around. Gregory van Buren, still in his blue blazer, was just disappearing into the library. “What about him?” Milton Perkins said.
Rachel didn’t answer.
“I understand,” Milton Perkins said. “Plummer’s the one with the most charisma—and the alumnae expect it.” Then he got in his car and drove away.
FOUR
It was three o’clock in the morning and Mitch Michaels was wide awake.
Ordinarily, the two Vicodins he had swallowed at midnight would have taken him all the way to six o’clock, and then there would be the limo ride to the studio where, as soon as he leaned forward into the mike, he’d imagine all those people nodding their heads, guys mostly, driving to work all over the country, their shoulders relaxing because they were hearing what they already believed, and his pain would melt away. But there was no show today because it was a holiday weekend and he was not in his New York apartment. He was in his summer house on the beach in Madison, Connecticut, and without the daily morning rage vent to look forward to, and with the disturbing presence of Claire Nelson, his daughter’s long-legged, willowy guest with the raven hair and deep-set innocent eyes, who was sleeping just down the hall, he knew that if he didn’t take another pill in another half an hour, the electricity that was then a mounting tingle at both sides of his lower back would pulse down through his buttocks and explode in his hamstrings and toes like bombs going off every minute and a half. Ninety seconds exactly. He’d counted them. It never varied. The worst part was waiting in between.
He didn’t need to turn the light on to find his way down the hall to the bathroom past the room where his daughter Amy and Claire were sleeping, because it was just a little shingled cottage, which he and his wife had bought for seventy-five thousand dollars when he was still a sportscaster. Seventy-five thousand! It was worth six hundred thousand now. He knew because he’d had to pay her half that to buy his half from her when they divorced—which he was happy to do—until he figured out that it made her rich enough to enroll their daughter in that school. “How would you feel,” he’d asked on his show, pretending he was talking about some other family, “if you had no say in what kind of a school your daughter goes to?”—forgetting that most of his listeners sent their kids to public schools and didn’t have any say either. The more he’d learned about Miss Oliver’s School for Girls in Amy’s freshman year—how the students address their teachers by their first names (or even nicknames!), how the kids are allowed to dress like savages and read books like Catch-22 (as if they knew enough by then to know why we fought that war and what guys died for)—the more cheated he felt. It didn’t help that his ex-wife, as sole guardian of his daughter, in total control of when and if he could visit with her, had obtained a court order prohibiting him from stepping foot on the campus.
In the bathroom, he opened the medicine cabinet and reached behind the row of bottles containing aspirin and ibuprofen and vitamin C and Barbasol shaving cream to where the one containing the Vicodin pretended to hide, and he opened it and shucked two into his palm. Only ten left. He put one back and swallowed the other. He’d learned to take them without water because water was not always handy, and besides, if he drank water now, he’d have to get up and pee when what he needed
