Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  So, she asked herself, why did her husband insist on this trip that he would start tomorrow, the first day of summer vacation? He would be away not only from her for the entire summer but also from the new head who needed the senior teacher’s help in getting acclimated—and had every right to expect it. Francis had a big responsibility to fulfill right here this summer, one that he could fulfill better than anyone. So why did he choose to wander? He was not just out of college; he was fifty-five, for goodness sake!

  She knew Francis’s response would be that he wouldn’t be wandering. He’d be chaperoning a group of students from schools all over the East on an archaeological dig in California—what was wrong with that? Wasn’t Miss Oliver’s School famous for its anthropology courses; wasn’t that what made them different from all those other schools? “If our girls can learn to look objectively at other cultures,” he had reminded her, “then they can look at their own with open eyes, instead of the way they have been indoctrinated to see—by men. That’s how we change the world! We’re going to live in a reconstructed Ohlone Indian village on the shoulder of Mount Alma while we do the dig to find the real village they lived in,” he had told her—as if she hadn’t known!

  If he would just admit to himself the real reason, that he wanted to be like an Indian, she could object—and remind him that Indians made their vision quests when they were fourteen years old! For that’s what Francis and his students were trying to do: be like Indians. Otherwise, why not just live in tents?

  But chaperoning an exercise in anthropology? How could Peggy argue against that? She was the one who, thirty years ago, had started the tradition of cultural relativism that made Miss Oliver’s unique. For it was she who had discovered the jumble of Pequot Indian artifacts in a closet of the little house that then served as the school’s library, and it was she who had persuaded Marjorie to raise the funds for a new library in which the Pequot artifacts, and several small bones of a young Pequot woman unearthed when the library’s foundation was dug, were now respectfully displayed. It was lost on no one that the library—which many of the faculty thought of as Peggy’s Library—was situated exactly at the center of the campus.

  Peggy walked slowly down the hall of her dormitory, entering each girl’s room as if it were ten-thirty in the middle of the school year and she were saying goodnight. Even though she knew the girls wouldn’t be in their rooms to turn their faces to her as she stood in the door, she was surprised to discover how lonely she felt in the sudden barrenness where the sound of her footsteps echoed off the walls.

  She moved from room to room. It didn’t surprise her that Rebecca Burley had left the poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall; she and Francis had told each other more than once that this kid needed to try on lots of different coats before it was too late, but further down the hall, when she discovered a well-used bong sitting squarely in the middle of the desk of Tracy Danforth—who had just graduated and was president of the Honor Council—she wanted to get Francis, bring him here to show him how Tracy had been trying to show them who she really was. But she didn’t get Francis. Because he was too busy. Packing for his trip.

  She thought: He can’t possibly pack for a whole summer without my help, he’s helpless about such things, doesn’t know where anything is, he’ll go off with no underwear and ten pairs of pants. She turned away from the empty dorm.

  SHE FOUND FRANCIS in their bedroom. He was on the other side of the bed from where she stopped in the doorway the instant she saw him putting a big duffel bag on the bed. He was holding his hiking boots in his hands, about to stuff them in.

  “Oh!” she said. “I’ve never seen those before.”

  “They’re new.”

  “When’d you buy them?” They were ugly, she hated them.

  He shrugged. “The other day.”

  “Oh!” she said again. She took one step back, almost out the door. Why did seeing him pack disturb her so? She wondered if she were going to cry for the second time that day.

  He noticed the movement and stopped packing, his attention full on her. “I got them at Le Target.” He pronounced it “targay,” looking for her smile.

  It didn’t work. But his little joke did stop her retreat. “Maybe you should pack later, Francis,” she said, taking several steps back into the room. “The reception for the new headmaster starts in half an hour.” She knew it was dumb to think he’d change his plans and stay home where he belonged if he deferred packing until after the reception. Nevertheless, the thought flashed.

  “I’m not going to the new head’s reception,” he said.

  “Say that again.” She was standing perfectly still now.

  “I’m not going,” he said again. But already he was beginning to relent. He knew how foolish it was to stay away, how churlish it would seem. But in Marjorie’s house! It’s her home, he wanted to say, no one else’s. But of course it wasn’t her house; it was the school’s.

  “Yes, you are, Francis,” Peggy said. “You’re going. You’re not childish enough to stay away,” and immediately she regretted using that word.

  He dropped his gaze to the bed. Now he was tossing in his shaving things and his toothbrush and toothpaste. Loose. All jumbled up with everything else.

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” she said. “You can’t pack like this!” She reached in, pulled out a wad of shirts, tossed them over her shoulder. “Or this!” she said, tossing a crumpled pair of chinos in another direction. “Or this!” Three big paperback books went flying, their pages fluttering. She put her hand back in the bag again. She was going to empty the whole damn thing. She knew perfectly well she wasn’t helping him pack, she was unpacking him, and she was crying now, his clothes flying all over the room.

  “Peg! I said I’ll go!” He was gripping both her wrists now, one in each hand.

  She let him hold her, keeping her hands still, and forced herself to stop crying. “You know,” she said, “sometimes I think we’re as married to the school as we are to each other.” It was the first time she’d dared to put the thought into words.

  “No,” he said. “No way, Peg.”

  “So when you risk your place here, I wonder what other seams will start to tear.”

  “Peggy, I said I will go.”

  She felt a huge relief growing, as if maybe she didn’t have so much to worry about after all. “You know, he’s been very considerate,” she said, speaking of the new head. She was looking at Francis again because now, with victory, she couldn’t resist explaining her point. “He refused the invitation to speak at graduation.” “

  I know all about it,” Francis said

  She saw Francis trying not to look irritated and persisted anyway. She wanted so much to convince! “He said it was inappropriate. He said it was Marjorie’s moment, not the new head’s. That’s pretty nice, you know.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him, “Francis said. “I’m not going to his reception for him. I’m going for you.” She realized that the other part of her relief was that of the mourner who doesn’t want the wake to end because then she’d be alone.

  FIVE MINUTES BEFORE they left for the reception, Francis stood in front of the mirror above his bureau, putting on his tie. Peggy came up beside him, kissed him on the cheek. Leaning against him, she felt his body soften. “Indians don’t wear ties,” she said, trying for a joke. Right away she wished she could take the joke back when she felt his shoulders stiffen. He turned his head just slightly away so that her kiss didn’t linger, and she stepped back, feeling her anger flame. Why right now? she suddenly wanted to ask again. To hell with jokes. On top of everything else! Don’t you know we’re too old to believe in different things? Francis moved away, leaving her framed in the mirror, and for an instant she didn’t recognize the tense woman who stared back at her.

  Francis still thought he was going on an archaeological dig, the face in the mirror told her. He’s not ready to admit he’s going on a vision quest. It’s much too far out for Francis, too over the
top, too embarrassing, to imagine himself, a middle-class white man in a tweed sports coat, a boarding school teacher, for goodness sake! chasing Indian visions. In California too, where everybody’s weird! But that’s what was happening. And she had thought for years that her vision and his were the same. She’d known almost from the day they met that Francis was a spiritual man. That was the deepest of the reasons she loved him so much. So it wasn’t hard to believe that the reason he had asked her to join in his family’s staunch Episcopal faith when they were married was that he believed in it. He thought so too, she understood, for the force of that belief was so strong in the family that he couldn’t believe he was different enough not to share it. But what she knew now, better than he did, was that the real reason he had asked her this favor was that he couldn’t imagine explaining to his father that he cared so little for his religion that he wouldn’t ask his wife to join it. Even though she had none of her own to relinquish if she did.

  I’ve been hoodwinked, she wanted to say, hoodwinked and deserted, thinking of how much she’d been rescued from the barrenness of her own disbelief by the religion she’d joined and now was nurtured by, how much she’d come to love her father-in-law for the belief she shared with him, how much she’d missed him since his death five years ago. When you don’t resolve things with your father, you live with his shadow until you die too, she wanted to lecture Francis. It makes you crazy. She didn’t say that either.

  AT THE FRONT door of Marjorie’s house, Francis hesitated. “This is Marjorie’s house,” he said. He’d walked through this door hundreds of times.

  “It’s the headmistress’s house,” she reminded him. Then corrected herself: “The headmaster’s.”

  He turned to her then, gave her a look as if she has just slapped his face.

  “Sorry.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “No way. Not in her house.”

  She took his hand, tugged it. “Come on, Fran, let’s go.”

  He resisted.

  “Grow up!” she said, tugging at his hand. “It’s time.”

  When he still resisted, she dropped his hand, turned from him, went through the door. He hesitated, then, surrendering, followed her. He always stayed close to her at parties, using her vivacity as a cover for his shyness, but this time they moved to separate rooms in Marjorie’s big house, which was loud with people talking.

  Francis moved through the people in the foyer into the living room. It seemed bigger somehow, empty of something he couldn’t put his finger on. He stopped walking. A surprising fear of the new largeness of Marjorie’s living room rose in him. While anxiety took hold of him, Marcia Holmes, his young friend in the History Department, moved across the rug to him.

  Smiling, she told him how much she liked hearing what he’d said about the girls he graduated. “You tell such wonderful stories,” she told him, and went on to say how much she wished more girls liked her enough to invite her to graduate them, and suddenly, while part of him told her not to worry because next year would be easier, the second year always was, and another part of him watched her face, still another part watched the scene that suddenly appeared inside his head for the second or third time that week while he began to sweat and went on talking to this lovely young woman in her sexy summer dress as if everything were normal: The stern of a ship was moving away, he saw the froth by the propeller, going away from him, no one had seen him fall overboard, no one heard his shouts. Marjorie’s big sofa was missing, he realized, coming back fully to his young friend, and the top three shelves of her bookcase were empty, and that was what he pointed out to her, as if it were a discovery of some amazing new scientific fact, interrupting her as she told him of her summer plans, and there was a funny look on her face—part worry and part a question, as if she were hoping that he was telling her a joke she didn’t understand. “She’s started to move out already,” he said in a very matter-of-fact way.

  “Yes,” Marcia said. She was waiting for a punch line, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. She patted his arm—he couldn’t tell if it was sympathy or just her way of excusing herself—and moved away.

  FRED KINDLER, THE new headmaster, was standing by the fireplace in the center of Marjorie’s living room. Marjorie stood next to him, a good six inches taller. They were talking calmly together—as if nothing had happened, as if everything was the same, and Francis remembered Marjorie telling him of her resolve to hide her bitterness. “These people, who wouldn’t even have a school to be on the board of if it weren’t for me, want me to pretend I yearn for retirement,” she had told him. “Well, I’d rather yearn for death. But all this is for your ears only,” she went on after a pause. “The last bitter statement I’m going to make. I’ll take their advice. I’ll say I want the time to take up—what, golf? My grandsons? You know, the truth of the matter is I’m not remotely interested in my grandsons,” she murmured, speaking half to herself and half to Francis as if she’d just discovered this about herself. “This school is what interests me.”

  Francis was surprised again at the new head’s red hair, the big red mustache, and the short, stocky, powerful body. For an instant, Francis, in his mind’s eye, observed his own short, almost pudgy body, as if in a mirror, his round mild, unobtrusive face. He couldn’t resist staring across the room at Kindler. He’s so male! Francis thought, and then registered what he had seen instantly when he first saw Kindler standing next to Marjorie: that he was wearing the same brown polyester suit that he’d worn during his interviews. Polyester! Francis thought, shocked at himself that he even noticed. He’d always been proud that in the world of preppydom of which it was a part, Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was studiously unpreppy, so why did he care what the man wore?

  Kindler and Marjorie both noticed him. Francis saw Marjorie put her hand lightly on Kindler’s wrist and Kindler move across the room toward him. He had an awkward gait; his feet pointed outward like Charley Chaplin’s. For an instant, Francis felt sorry for him, imagined girls imitating that walk, every girl on campus walking like that everywhere they went, day after day, until the poor man had to leave.

  Kindler’s right hand was out. His left hand patted Francis on the shoulder. All Francis could see was the red of Kindler’s hair and mustache. “Come see me tomorrow,” Kindler said. “I’m here all day. Mrs. Boyd’s lending me her office. I need all the advice I can get, and I want to start with the senior teacher. Want to collect the best ideas and get a running start when I come back.”

  Francis was appalled at the boyishness. He felt suddenly like a tutor. That’s not what he wanted—parenting his own boss. “I’m leaving for the summer dig project tomorrow. Six a.m.,” he said.

  A waiter from the caterers came by with a tray of drinks. Francis plucked a glass of white wine. Without taking his eyes off Francis, frowning slightly, Kindler murmured to the waiter, “No, thank you,” and then to Francis: “Oh? That so? You’re going on that dig? Somebody told me that one of the teachers was going. I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “I signed up way back in February,” Francis said. He almost added before you were appointed, but he didn’t feel like explaining himself.

  “Well,” said Kindler, “I could have used you around here this summer. But that’s the way it has to be.” His face brightened. “California, right?” Francis had the impression that the man had changed his expression on purpose to make him more comfortable.

  Francis sensed Peggy watching him from across the room. “Right, California.” He took a sip of his drink, noticed that several people were watching him and Kindler. We’re on stage, he thought. It’s a big scene, and now he was seeing himself as some kind of fulcrum. Took another sip, his hand was shaking, spilled some wine on his shirt, felt its cold.

  Kindler handed him a napkin. “Mount Alma, right?” “

  Yes,” said Francis. “Mount Alma.” He saw himself driving out across the flat Midwest, lonely without Peggy in the car. Then he saw the mountains, felt a little surge of joy,
but his hand was still shaking, and he spilled some more.

  “You all right?” Kindler asked.

  For an instant, thinking the question was sardonic, the new head’s first spear thrust, and Francis was relieved. Then looking at the man’s too youthful face, he realized the question was sincere, uncomplicated, devoid of subtlety, and he was panic-stricken. “I’m all right,” he managed. By now he was sure everybody was watching them.

  “Look,” Kindler said. “I understand.” He was talking now very quietly so no one else could hear. “Why wouldn’t you feel that way? You’ve served her for years. I’ve admired her too—just from a greater distance. Just the same, I’m sure we can work together.”

  “Well, as long as you don’t change anything,” Francis blurted. Then he realized what he’d said, how dumb it was. He managed a grin, a little chuckle, as if he’d been joking, as if he hadn’t meant exactly what had come out of his mouth.

  His camouflage seemed to work. Fred Kindler smiled. Francis saw the red mustache move. “Good,” said Kindler. “I look forward to working with you.” Then he moved away to mix with the others.

  THERE! FRANCIS THOUGHT, I’ve managed to get through it. Now I can go home! He looked for Peggy, saw her across the room, stared at her back until she turned. He signaled her with his eyes that he wanted to leave. But she turned her back to him to show she was engaged in the conversation. He felt empty, moved across the room to leave the house.

  He figured if he could just get out the door …