Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  “Of course. But what has that got to do—?”

  “We save the school, we save everything.”

  “I already gave him some advice,” Peggy murmured.

  “And that’s all you’re going to do?”

  Now Peggy was too restless to sit. She got up, moved around the room, stopped next to a larger-than-life sculpture, the one she loved best. It was Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall, and in the center of his round, white stomach was a door that let you inside to sit on a bench where, when you pulled a lever, Humpty fell off the wall and came apart into exactly fifteen pieces. The students who had thought it up, designed it, and built it named the piece Undefeated because they, unlike the king’s men, could put Humpty back together again—in a jiffy.

  Peggy rubbed her hand over Humpty’s smooth surface. She thought she knew what Eudora was going to say; it brought a little surge of joy.

  “You can help him recruit,” Eudora said. “Travel around the country selling the school with him and Gail and Nan. You’ll be good at it. You’ll be wonderful.”

  Peggy had no doubt that she could speak for the school, and she wanted to. But that’s not what she needed to hear. For on the heels of her excitement about it came her anger. “That’s what Francis should do!” she exclaimed. “It’s his job.”

  “So you do it,” Eudora said. “You’re just as senior as Francis is. You be the head’s right hand.”

  “Me?”

  “Oh, baby!” Eudora murmured. “I’ve been counting on it.” It was true; she’d seen this coming, as soon as she learned that Marjorie was fired.

  Peggy knew how striking this exchange of roles would be. “What place will Francis have when he comes back?” she wondered aloud.

  Eudora studied her and smiled. “You’re catching on,” she said.

  “I don’t want to catch on. I’m no politician.”

  “Yes, you are. Everybody is.”

  “It will create an even bigger separation between me and Francis.”

  “And this is the way to heal it. How else? Run after him and drag him back? Go out there with him and pretend to be an Indian?”

  This was too much for Peggy all at once. She needed to be alone now. She needed time to think.

  And besides, here came Mary Bradford, a tall, blond kid with coltish legs, a summer student, into the studio. Mary had been so eager to get away from her family in San Francisco, where she’d been for only a week since the school year ended, that here she was back on campus two days before summer school began. She was carrying a big black portfolio case. In spite of the bounce in her step, she had the drawn look teenagers get when they are tired and won’t admit it. After flying in from the West Coast yesterday, she had stayed up most of the night to finish her drawings and couldn’t wait to show them to Eudora.

  “Hello, Mary,” Peggy said, then turned to Eudora, smiled her goodbye, and started to move away. Mary was Eudora’s business, not hers. Besides, she couldn’t wait to be alone.

  “No,” Eudora urged. “Stay here with us.” She wanted Peggy to see the drawings.

  Eudora revered Mary’s talent, which she knew was greater than her own; she was using all her skill and passion in nurturing it. That was what Miss Oliver’s was all about. She wanted to confront Peggy with the result of her teaching, so clear in the blossoming of Mary’s work. Maybe that would stir Peggy to acknowledge that if they save the school, they save everything she cared about, including her marriage. After all, the Plummers were as much married to the school as they were to each other—and what was wrong with that? She turned to Mary. “Let’s show your work to Mrs. Plummer too.”

  Mary hesitated

  “Mary, Mrs. Plummer is my friend.”

  That was all Eudora needed to say. For Eudora’s claim to an adult affection, to loyalty and trust, named exactly what was absent in Mary’s family—and the original reason for her having been sent away from home. “I’d love to have you see them,” Mary said to Peggy, and now Peggy had no choice. Later, she would realize how clever Eudora was being.

  Mary took her drawings out of the case and laid them side by side on a big table. Eudora studied them. A year ago, she would have praised all of Mary’s work. But now, a year of hard work later, the stakes were up; she’d award no easy praise. She said nothing for the longest time, merely looked.

  “It’s a joke,” Mary told Peggy, breaking the silence—and Eudora’s rule: Never explain. If it’s not clear on the paper, do it again. But she couldn’t help it, she loved her idea too much to chance Peggy’s not getting it. “It’s a double computer,” she said. “The place you put your feet is one keyboard—we’ll use organ pedals with the letters painted on them—and the other’s a wrap-around, so you can type with your feet and your hands at the same time, write two different books. And that’s not all. We’ll start with a hairdresser’s chair. It’ll have one of those weird old-fashioned hair dryer hoods so you can write two books and get a shampoo all at once!”

  Eudora was still looking at the drawings, frowning now. It was as if she hadn’t heard a word. “I’m sorry,” Mary said to Eudora’s back. “I broke the rule. But my parents are always bragging about how busy they are. Multitasking,” she added. “How’s that for a stupid word?”

  Eudora ignored Mary’s excuse and kept her back to her, still staring down at the drawings. She pointed with her left hand to the first picture in the sequence. “This one’s good,” she said. “Very good. These are even better.” She pointed with her right hand to the next three in the sequence.

  “Thanks,” Mary said.

  “Don’t thank me, dear,” Eudora answered. Then abruptly picking up the fifth drawing, holding it with both arms extended in front of her, she said, “What about this one?”

  Mary hesitated.

  “What about this one?” Eudora insisted.

  “I was in a hurry.”

  “Do it again.”

  A tiny smile appeared on Mary’s face. Peggy thought she looked relieved.

  “Tomorrow?” Eudora asked.

  “All right. I’ll bring it in tomorrow,” Mary said. Then, pointing to the sixth drawing: “What about this one?”

  Now it was Eudora who was smiling. She shook her head back and forth and didn’t answer. She knew that Mary understood: We’ll look at the sixth when the fifth one’s as good as it can get.

  “That’s what I thought,” Mary said. She gathered her drawings into her case, slowly, deliberately, while Peggy and Eudora watched. Then she smiled at Peggy. “Thanks,” she said, and turned to Eudora. “Same time tomorrow?”

  Eudora nodded. “I’ll be right here,” she said, and Peggy thought, Yes, and the next day too and the next and the next and the one after that, and knew—as if there had ever been a time when she didn’t!—how right Eudora was: We save the school, we save everything!

  She followed Mary out the door and headed for Fred Kindler’s office to tell him he needed her on his recruiting trips.

  TWO THOUSAND MILES away on the outskirts of Denver, Lila Smythe and her mother, Tylor, waited at Tylor’s house for Francis to pick up Lila for the trip to California and the dig. He’d been expected over an hour ago.

  Mother and daughter were drinking their morning coffee at a little table on the patio. They were very much alike: tall, sturdy, their blond hair cut short. Tylor’s was fading. She wore dark glasses against the glare. She glanced at her watch. “Where do you think he is?” she asked, hoping that Francis was still miles away so that she could extend this time with her daughter.

  “He’ll be here,” Lila answered. She felt a rush of tenderness for her mother, knowing how lonely she was going to be. She kept her voice casual to hide her eagerness to get going. “He’s absentminded. He’s probably lost the directions.”

  “What do you think he’ll do if—?” Tylor started to ask, and then stopped. She knew this worry irritated her daughter, but she couldn’t leave it alone.

  It was true. Lila had been home for two weeks, and alm
ost every day her mother had brought up her worry that Miss Oliver’s would abandon its single-sex mission. She’d never thought of her mother as a worrier before, and it was making her impatient. “Don’t worry, Mom, we’d never let the school go coed,” she had insisted each time. This time she didn’t. She was tired of the subject, so she changed it. “Look, Mom.” She moved her chair around the table, put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, and turned her. Now they both stared at the side of the house. It caught the fierce light of the morning sun. The stucco glowed. “Light’s so different out here!” she said. “You taught me that. Back east it’s—”

  “Pastel,” her mother supplied the word. She turned her head back to Lila, grazing her daughter’s cheek with her lips. “Thinner. Watery and vague. It’s the first thing I noticed when I escaped out here.”

  That word: escape. Sometimes Lila envisioned her mother as if she were emblazoned with a sign: I escaped. That’s who I am. Her mother’s refrain: that she had divorced her husband fifteen years ago when she realized he would never think of her painting as anything more than a nice weekend hobby for a wife, and then picked Denver off the map as the place to live because she didn’t have any family there to criticize her, especially not her father, who had refused to send her to college. He had paid her tuition to Katherine Gibbs instead so she could be a secretary. “Yes, I know,” Lila would say. “But you refused to go. You got yourself a full scholarship at Smith instead. And now you’re a painter. A professional.” What she didn’t say anymore to her mother—now that she knew how much it hurt—was that she wished she had a father.

  Lila was grateful to her mother for sending her to a school where there were no males to paint over the picture of what she chose to become. Now she knew that when you can choose what to do with your life, then what you do is who you are. It scared her to know that. And made her happy. It was why she sucked up all the biographies of women that Gregory van Buren kept giving her to read, one after another. How did he know this was exactly what she needed?

  And here was Francis Plummer coming around the corner of the house. He must have heard their voices. “Hello,” he said. “Sorry I’m late. I got a little lost.” Tylor was surprised to see how tired he looked.

  He joined them at the table and told them what he’d seen on his journey, how flat the middle of the country was, how stunning his first sight of the Rockies was—but nothing of what he’d been thinking about.

  Then there was a little silence, and Tylor said, “We were just wondering what you would do if Miss Oliver’s went coed.”

  “You were, Mother. I wasn’t,” Lila said. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

  “All right,” Tylor acknowledged “I was. And I pay the tuition.” She was looking intently at Francis, waiting for his answer.

  “Well?” Tylor persisted, and Francis still didn’t answer. “Evidently, I’ve hit a hot spot,” Tylor said.

  “Mother, please, it’s not going to happen,” Lila said, but Tylor’s eyes were still on Francis.

  “It’s not a hot spot for me,” Francis finally said. “Because Lila’s right. It won’t happen.”

  “A school can’t change its mission?”

  “It’s not a mission; it’s what we are,” Francis said. “The alumnae won’t let it happen.” What was going to happen already had: Marjorie’s being thrown out. The rest he couldn’t imagine.

  Tylor shook her head, not convinced.

  “The students wouldn’t either,” Lila said, looking at Francis now, chastising him with her eyes for not including the students in the saving of the school.

  “Don’t be naive,” her mother warned.

  Lila smiled. Naive is what I’m not, she wanted to say, feeling a slight resentment that her mother couldn’t see how much she’d changed. She wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone at school. “I mean it, Mom, we’d burn the school down first.”

  Tylor wasn’t going to answer hyperbole. Instead, she turned to Francis and asked her other question. “Why didn’t they make you the headmaster?”

  “Mother!” Lila exclaimed “For God’s sake!”

  Francis was too surprised to speak. The idea of his being the head had never crossed his mind. Tylor Smythe leaned slightly forward, waiting for an answer. Her dark glasses masked her eyes.

  “Mother, he’s a teacher!” Lila said.

  Tylor kept her eyes on Francis. “Is that the answer?” she asked him.

  “I’ve never thought of myself as a head,” he answered, stunned to realize it.

  “Shouldn’t the best, most experienced teacher be the head? The one who understands the school the best?” Tylor’s question was perfectly logical—for one who didn’t understand how proud many teachers were to think of themselves as labor, and how preferable the act of teaching was to sitting, removed from students and the subject that you love, in an office worrying about diplomacy, budgets, trustees, and strategic planning. As if a school were merely a business!

  Francis was still too stunned to answer. Tyler leaned back in her chair. “All right, I won’t go there,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Mother,” Lila said. “It’s just not who he is, that’s all. It’s hard to explain.” Then she looked at her watch, glanced at Francis. “I’ve had enough coffee,” she told him, getting up to leave. “I’m going to put my backpack in the car.”

  Tylor watched her daughter walk away. Francis saw the longing in her face. Lila disappeared inside the house, and Tylor turned her eyes back to Francis. “Did you notice how she said that?”

  “What?” he asked, jolted by the sudden change of subject. He needed to linger over her question, why he wasn’t the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. It seemed that everything was happening much too fast.

  “The car. If it were my car she would have said your car.”

  “Oh, I don’t know—”

  Tylor took off her dark glasses, studied his face. Now he could see her eyes. There were gray, little lines around them. “She never sees her father,” Tylor said

  “I know. She told me.”

  “Sometimes I think she fantasizes that you’re her dad.”

  “Oh, no! She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why wouldn’t she? You and your wife—married for years!—make a home for her where everything that’s important to her happens. My home is just where she visits. It makes me sad.”

  Francis wanted to avert his eyes. He felt much too vulnerable to be getting into this.

  She reached across the table, took his hand as if she’d known him for years. “I’m grateful. To you and your wife. In loco parentis. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? Can’t do that and also find time to be the head. Maybe that’s what Lila meant.”

  “Thank you,” Francis murmured. He didn’t know how to tell her it was not what Lila had meant.

  “Well, give me a minute to say goodbye to my daughter.” She let go of his hand, and stood and put her dark glasses on again. “Then join us in the driveway, and I’ll wave goodbye to both of you.”

  She went out to the driveway to help her daughter put her things in the car. Lila was already finished when she got there. Lila closed the trunk of Francis’s car and turned to hug her mother. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “Thanks for everything.” She meant thanks for escaping. And thanks for letting me go.

  Francis was coming down the driveway now. He said, “I guess we’d better say goodbye,” and he and Lila got in the car and closed the doors, and her mother leaned in through the window and said goodbye again. Francis backed the car out of the driveway, and Lila waved to her mother, who lingered in the driveway. She knew her mother would go straight to her studio—and smother her loneliness with her work.

  HOURS AND HOURS later, Lila barreled the dented yellow Chevy down Route 80 in Nevada, and Francis sat in the shotgun seat watching her out of the corner of his eye. Her two sturdy arms reached forward, her hands gripped the steering wheel, she stared straight d
own the road. She drove just like Marjorie Boyd, he thought: Everything gets out of the way. She was going someplace, this kid, blasting forward toward some passion that she would ride on for a lifetime. He thought of Siddy, his son, so different, wandering in Europe, tasting everything, circling, and lonely suddenly, he riffed on the fantasy that Lila’s mother had planted: that he and Peggy had adopted Lila too, Siddy’s younger sister by five years, and the two kids were telepathic, they didn’t need words to understand each other at the core.

  He wondered if Lila remembered how much she had disapproved of herself when she arrived at the school three years ago—for her tallness, her thick legs, her braces. Now she liked her tallness, she thought her sturdy legs were just fine, and her braces were gone. In a coed school Lila would be one of the girls whom the boys didn’t want to date. At Miss Oliver’s she was president-elect of the student council; she would have more influence than many of the faculty.

  “It’s weird how things happen,” Lila finally said without turning her head. Neither of them had said a word for miles. “If some little man, an archaeologist with a funny name, didn’t show up at school in February and give a speech, I’d still be in Denver now with my mom instead of here.”

  “I didn’t think it was a funny name,” Francis said. “Livingstone Mendoza, what’s so funny about that?”

  Lila smiled at his little joke. “I knew the minute he started to talk that I was going to sign up,” she said.

  “Me too,” Francis murmured, remembering the little man, almost as small as Father Woodward, standing at the lip of the stage, promising that they would find the remains of the village that was there on the side of the mountain for thousands of years before the Europeans came. “So they could see what the Ohlones saw,” he had said, “maybe even dream their dreams.” Blue work shirt, dark tie, brown corduroy pants, and hiking boots. Mendoza’s intensity had made up for his small size, and his voice had filled the auditorium.

  “How could I have spent three years at our school and passed up this chance?” Lila asked. “Three years thinking about, and then pass up this chance to be.”