Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  Moments later, Steven stood in the doorway—conspicuously without his wife—saying goodbye to the four recruiters. He put his big hand lightly on Peggy’s shoulder and said to Fred: “You’ve got some damn good people around you, don’t you, Fred!”

  “You bet,” said Fred.

  On the way back to the airport Gail drove; Fred sat next to her in the front. “I’m coming back someday,” Nan announced from her seat in the back next to Peggy. “Mark my words, I’m coming back to exterminate Mrs. Sharon Maynard.”

  “I’ll help,” Gail said. “I’ll bring the poison.”

  Neither Peggy nor Fred could bring themselves to speak. Peggy thought it was time to keep her mouth shut. She feared she’d made Fred look weak when she butted in and spoke up for him that second time, saying, “You heard what he said.” As if he couldn’t speak for himself.

  And Fred was marveling at how quickly his lie had flown out of his mouth. He wasn’t the slightest bit ashamed. He wanted to turn to explain to Peggy that he really hadn’t needed her to stand up and save the day for him. But that would seem defensive and ungrateful. And then it dawned on him that his new friend had saved him, not from his reluctance to persevere in an untruth, but from his temper. He’d been drawing breath to blast the woman when Peggy stood up and blasted her for him, much more temperately than he would have. He would have told the red-headed woman to sit down and shut up and asked her who the hell she thought she was to argue with him. That would have made a great impression! he told himself.

  “I’ll check next time,” Nan said. “I promise. I’ll check the guest list myself. I won’t give anybody another chance to be so treacherous.”

  “Please don’t apologize,” Fred said. “There’s no way you could know that anyone would be like that.”

  “I do now,” Nan said, and Peggy was struck again by how fascinating was the lesson she was getting about the leadership of schools. From now on when she would think of school politics she’d think of red cans of gasoline—and lit matches.

  Thirty minutes later as Peggy and Gail got out of the same side of the car at the rent-return, Gail put her hand on Peggy’s arm. “Thanks,” she murmured. “When he has to tell a fib, he needs lots of help.” Gail didn’t know how far her husband had progressed in the art of diplomacy since becoming the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.

  Peggy didn’t answer right away. Here’s Gail, she thought, right here with her husband, while Francis and I are miles apart. She thought about Steven Maynard turning his back on his wife, and the parallel between what the trauma of Miss Oliver’s was doing to the Maynards’ marriage and her own did not escape her. “Do you think they believed me?” she asked at last.

  “Some of them. Maybe. Just a little. Anyway, it saved the day.”

  “That’s good,” Peggy said. To herself, she thought: If Francis had been there—if he’d said it—they would have believed.

  MILES AND MILES away, across three time zones, Francis ate a paltry supper just outside the boundary of Mount Alma State Park, where Livingstone Mendoza’s ardent little band was in the second week of its search for the Ohlone village. Francis, Lila, and the nine other students in his team sat in the long shadow of one of the huge oaks in the dry smell of oat grass that Mendoza had carefully explained didn’t exist in the Indian days; it came with the oats the Spaniards fed their horses, which then shat the seeds over the hills, the horse food as new to the country as the horses were, as invasive, Mendoza accused, as their pale-skinned riders.

  Francis and his companions refused to look east to where the tops of the hills were being scraped away, and south where already the exuberant vulgarity of a thousand steroid mansions spread like a rash to the horizon. Instead they looked only westward, down over the lion-colored hills toward an area where there were still no houses, where they sought the mounded earth that covered the thousand-year accumulation of ashes, bones, shells. Francis had been keeping to himself his growing conviction that the allotted time to find the village, between now and the end of August, was nowhere near enough. He was beginning to feel slightly absurd, embarrassed as if caught believing a gnat could conquer an elephant, to think that in all this space they could find the little village in so little time.

  Now, just as the little band stood up from their supper to return to work, they saw Mendoza trudging up the hill toward them. He had an angry expression on his face.

  “Greed!” exclaimed Mendoza, panting and waving his arms as he arrived. “Greed, irreverence, and intransigence. I’ve never seen so much!”

  “What?” Francis interrupted.

  “They just don’t care!” Mendoza said.

  “What?” Francis asked again. “Who doesn’t care about what?” The last thing he wanted was to listen to Mendoza rant. There was only a little time before it would be too dark to work, and they needed every minute they could get.

  “A thousand years!” Mendoza pointed his arm down the hill. “A thousand years they lived there.”

  The students studied Mendoza, warily. This distraught little person wasn’t the same charismatic leader who had recruited them. Francis wondered if they were coming to the same conclusion he’d reluctantly been coming to: that Francis’s colleagues were right. Mendoza was a phony and a screwup. How else to explain the man’s inability to understand that much more time was needed?

  Lila was the first of the students to recover from the shock of their leader’s disarray. She put her hand out to touch Mendoza’s, and Mendoza appeared to grow a little calmer. “It will be all right,” Lila said softly. “You can tell us.”

  “We’ve only got till August first,” Mendoza announced. “Not the end of August. August first!”

  Nobody said a word.

  “They just told me,” Mendoza said after a long pause. He seemed to be shrinking to an even smaller size; the students towered over him.

  “They can’t do that!” a tall girl said. “No one can give people orders like that!” Lila looked at her as if she were three years old.

  Mendoza didn’t get a chance to answer the kid, because suddenly Francis was in his face. “Why in the world didn’t you find out how much time we had before we came all the way out here?” he blurted. “How could you possibly not do that?”

  “Officialdom! Rules, permits, lawyers!” Mendoza cried. Francis’s question hadn’t made a dent. “They don’t give a damn what we’re trying to do. All they think about is money!” he went on, and Francis realized it didn’t occur to Mendoza that this disaster was his mistake. He thought it was caused by what he was trying to cure. He wasn’t a phony at all; he was a total screwup.

  Even if despite the little archaeologist’s awesome incompetence they found the Ohlone village, it would be the result of mere demeaning luck, Francis realized. Win or lose, the whole venture a dreamer’s folly. He heard again his colleagues’ jeering and realized that he was not surprised—if not this disaster, then some other—and asked himself why hadn’t he checked up on Mendoza, at least asked for a résumé and talked with his references, and knew the answer: He hadn’t wanted to; he needed the cover. And this was good cover. For he really did need to do this spiritual exploring. Without that cover, he would have had to stay home and help the new head. It shamed him to realize he could be so sneaky, even with himself.

  “That’s when the developer comes in?” Lila asked Mendoza. “August first?” There was no indignation in her voice, no panic. She just wanted to know.

  Mendoza nodded. He took a red kerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face.

  Lila rested a calming hand on Mendoza’s tiny shoulder while she turned her head to Francis. “So, Mr. P.,” she asked him, “how do we fix this?”

  “We could go to the developer and ask for an extension,” he told her. He held back from saying, It won’t work, but we might as well give it a try. These kids needed his faith to seem as strong as Lila’s.

  “Good idea!” said Mendoza, optimism flooding right back in. “I’m sure he�
��ll agree!” Francis had to look away.

  Lila was studying Francis, not Mendoza. “Whatever we have to do, we’ll do,” she said. Her voice was firm. She turned away and went down the hill to the site, the first to return to work.

  When it was finally too dark to work, they returned to the huts they had made out of the tulle grass that Mendoza had somehow arranged to have gathered for them. Their replicated Ohlone village even had a sweat house, though they hadn’t used it yet. There was an argument, proposed by Lila, that though only male Ohlones had used it, the women should also participate. As he tried to fall asleep in Mendoza’s ersatz little village, Francis wondered at the purity of Lila’s youthful heart.

  The next day, a Saturday afternoon—less than a month before their time was up—Francis, Mendoza, and Lila (whom the students had elected as their representative) went together to the president of Mount Alma Improvement Company, Conrad Bullington, to ask for an extension. Bullington greeted them in his office, his obese body clad in a sky-blue warm-up suit.

  All during the meeting, Francis wondered at Bullington’s unfailing courtesy. He was far more respectful, less strident, Francis thought, than people who disagreed with each other on the Oliver faculty, who were quite given in their tweedy attire to offer polysyllabic insults to one another. Meanwhile, this gigantically unattractive man in his funny warm-up suit and greased hair remembered each of their names, offered them cool drinks, and explained very gently—but firmly—that it would drive up his costs prohibitively to leave the bulldozers and other heavy equipment idle beyond the agreed-on time. As if to alleviate their disappointment, Bullington offered to build a model of an Ohlone village. He would have it prefabricated and set up and prominently displayed once a year for the edification of the thousands of homeowners.

  “Where would you put it, for crying out loud?” Lila exclaimed, leaning forward in her chair. Bullington leaned back in his, as if pushed. Francis thought maybe after the meeting he would advise Lila not to come on so strong.

  But Bullington recovered immediately. “Why, I’d put it on this very commodious lawn in the center,” he responded, pushing his huge body up out of his chair. He lumbered across the office to a map on the wall. The sun coming in through the window glistened on his shiny hair. “Right here. A very expansive lawn that fronts the central golf course, near the lake with the fountain.”

  “On a lawn?” asked Mendoza.

  “Right here. We’ll put it up every year at the same time we have the Concourse d’Elegance.”

  “But the Ohlones didn’t have lawns,” Mendoza objected.

  Inspired by his idea, Bullington ignored Mendoza. “Thousands of people come to the Concourse,” he said. Francis began to giggle. He turned his face away so Bullington couldn’t see. He found that he didn’t want to be impolite to this man. The giggling felt a little crazy. Scary—like maybe it would turn into something else.

  “What in the world is a Concourse d’Elegance?” Lila imitated the developer’s wooden French.

  “Antique cars,” Bullington answered. His voice took on a fatherly tone. “Very elegant automobiles: Rolls Royces, Pierce Arrows …”

  “Next to a lake?” asked Mendoza.

  “Daimlers, wonderful old Mercedes …”

  “With a fountain?” Mendoza squeaked.

  “A Stanley Steamer too. People will come for miles, pay a very significant entrance fee. The opportunity to view an authentic representation of how the Indians once lived here would be an extra draw. White Eagle would be delighted to place a commensurate portion of the proceeds with any archaeological project you identify.”

  “But surely we don’t want to give the impression that we believe the Ohlones had lawns!” Mendoza exclaimed, leaning so far forward he was almost out of his chair.

  “Not for a minute, sir,” Bullington said, easing his body back toward his desk. Francis could feel the meeting coming to an end. “But I do think we could suggest that they would have enjoyed them,” Bullington continued, and now Francis couldn’t tell whether he was serious or just playing with them. “Why wouldn’t they have enjoyed them? After all, people are people. If they could have mastered the technique of transporting water, as we have, then who knows, maybe they would have had lawns instead of ashes and old clam shells to put their dwellings on.”

  Mendoza was back in his seat. His mouth was open, but he wasn’t saying anything.

  “Why not put it in the area you’re not going to develop?” Francis found himself suggesting. “The part designated for open land.” Maybe that would make Mendoza feel better, he thought.

  “By the chaparral?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because nobody would go there to see it,” said Conrad Bullington, standing up.

  THAT AFTERNOON, AS if to put a capstone on Francis’s sense of absurdity, two mammoth tractors, each dragging a trailer, labored up the hill to the replicated village. On each of the trailers were three well-used Porta Potties, which a band of workmen who had followed in a jeep removed from the trailers and placed in a ring around the little cluster of tulle huts, like the walls of a medieval town. The Porta Potties stood prominent under the ethereal California sky, a plastic Gothic; as they warmed in the yellow sunshine, they began to radiate a stink. Almaville’s city manager, who would have of course preferred to sprinkle these fields with huge houses and hot tubs and lawns, explained to the enraged Mendoza, “You can’t just go defecate in the fields like a bunch of Indians.” Francis was sure that it was Bullington who had informed the city government that this was exactly what was happening and suggested the Porta Potties—and wondered if the gesture was an act of friendship or an insult. In either case, Francis disobeyed the city manager’s edict, getting up at first light the next morning to climb further up the mountain, as he thought an Indian would. But when he returned, the ring of Porta Potties made him laugh, a disillusioned giggle. His sense of the absurd was now complete.

  LATER IN THE day, Francis got a message that Peggy had called. He hurried down the hill to Mendoza’s tiny office in a trailer to phone her back. He was happy that Peggy called him and not the other way around; but he had no idea why she was calling, and by the time he was halfway there, he’d begun to worry that she was sick or that Siddy had an accident in Europe.

  “You went to Cleveland!” he exclaimed after Peggy told him about her helping Fred Kindler with the recruiting. “With him?”

  She didn’t answer. Why should she? She’d already said it.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Yes, and as a matter of fact, we’re coming to recruit in San Francisco the last Monday of the month. About three weeks from now. You can offer to join us there and help. That’s why I called you.” She didn’t tell him—why rub it in?—that she was sure the only reason Nan and Fred hadn’t asked him to help at the meeting even though he was right next door was that they didn’t trust him. The only reason she hadn’t brought this up with them was that it was too embarrassing. That was why, just this morning, she had decided to call him on her own and ask him to call Fred Kindler and offer his help.

  “Francis, we can both help him,” she said. “We can get together and help make things work for our new boss. So will you come or not?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be there.” In fact, he was delighted to have this chance to redeem himself. Before he even left California!

  “Good! I knew you’d say that.”

  “You’re coming out here! We can spend the night together.”

  “We’re leaving right after the meeting,” she said. “Night owl to Bradley. We’re flying there to have another recruiting gathering on campus that night.”

  “Peg! Go in the early morning.”

  “I’ll think about it. I’ll ask Fred.”

  “Ask Fred!”

  “Of course. Who else would I ask, Francis? He’s the headmaster, remember?”

  He heard her resentment rising again, so he held himself in check, as if he were counting to ten. “We’ve been
away from each other for weeks,” he said at last.

  “And whose fault is that?” she asked. Then, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone back to that.” She was so tired of being resentful. “Just join us in San Francisco, Francis,” she pleaded. “Just come and help him. Just do the work, all right?”

  “Of course I’ll come. I already said I would.”

  “Fine,” Peggy said, her voice softening. “Call him and tell him.”

  “I’ll call Nan White.”

  “I think you should call him. He’s the headmaster.”

  “I’ll call Nan,” he insisted. “She’s the Admissions director. I’m not going over her head.”

  She knew this wasn’t the real reason. He’d never cared much for such niceties. Now she was resentful again.

  He waited for her to respond, ready to relent. What the hell, he’d just grit his teeth and call Fred Kindler. He knew perfectly well he didn’t have to like the guy, didn’t even have to approve of him; all he had to do was work for him. But when Peggy didn’t say anything, he dropped that idea and changed the subject. He wanted to make love to her, was what he wanted. “How are you, Peg?” he began.

  “You know what? Let’s wait until you’re home to tell each other how we are. Over the phone it just makes me angry.”

  “All right, but I still miss you.”

  “Me too,” she confessed.

  “Maybe after San Francisco you won’t be angry anymore.”

  “That would be nice, Francis.”

  “Then we’ll spend that night together. There’s no way I’ll let you fly away that night.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll see you in three weeks.” Then she hung up. Right away she regretted this ending. “Of course I’ll stay the night,” she whispered to see how the words would sound, and thought of calling him back—she knew he was waiting for just that. But she kept hearing him refuse to call Fred Kindler. How childish! He could square things with Fred with one simple call. She loved Francis one minute and was furious the next. How tired she was of going up and down with all these feelings!