Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  His hesitation lasted too long. With a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders, Fred Kindler moved his eyes away from Francis. “Let’s start making Oliver Time mean On Time,” he said. The man’s voice was pleasant, and he was smiling, but Francis heard his stubbornness.

  Then Kindler gave a little talk to start the year. He told the faculty how honored he was to be the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, how much he admired the school and how strongly he believed that, working together, they could regain for the school its historical position as the premier all-girls school in the nation. It was an appropriate talk, Francis was ready to admit, measured, respectful, and not self-centered. But for Francis, there was an ebullience missing that he was trained to expect, and there was that trace of sadness again, as if a little piece of Kindler’s mind were someplace else. It made Francis feel sad too, in a vague way he couldn’t account for.

  Next, Kindler gave the faculty the bad news about the budget. Having been so shocked himself when he had perceived this news at the beginning of the summer, he was hardly surprised when he saw how shocked the faculty was. What he didn’t know was that part of what stunned the teachers was they were actually being told, and he was using specific numbers. Marjorie had never shared financial realities in any specificity with the faculty. For she and they were educators, and in her mind educators didn’t involve themselves with such mundane matters as budgets. These were to be relegated to the lower orders: the business manager and bookkeeper and the members of the finance committee.

  But the truth of the matter was that even the board’s finance committee had had little to say about the finances of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, for Marjorie actually had run the board. She had run everything—until the revolution, initiated sadly and as kindly as possible by Milton Perkins and less kindly by Sonja McGarvey, which had brought in new board members, including Alan Travelers, to save the school from the very person who had made it so worth saving. How many times and in how many different kinds of organizations has this story been played out!

  Fred was careful to disguise how badly Carl Vincent had fouled up, and he was glad he was being truthful when he made it clear that Vincent retired of his own free will. For it was true that as soon as the ancient business manager had learned of Milton Perkins’s anonymous gift to his retirement fund, he couldn’t wait to quit.

  Fred knew better than to linger on the bad news. So he moved quickly to his plan for recouping the enrollment. Admittedly, there were no strategies unknown to other schools in his plan. There were only so many ways a school could be marketed. What was new and what lifted his spirits as he talked was the energy, the care, the discipline, and attention to detail the school would invest. Near the end, he passed around the new brochure, designed pro bono by his wife, which emphasized the school’s academic rigor and de-emphasized its idiosyncratic culture (one of the reasons Francis felt it described some other school) and which, in Fred’s and Nan White’s opinion, was better written, printed on better stock, and more graphically sophisticated than its predecessor. He ended by inviting the faculty not to think of enrollment as exclusively Nan White’s province but as theirs too, urging them to reach out to every visitor to campus.

  The faculty listened intently to Fred’s talk. All were aware that his entire emphasis had been on the recruitment of girls. Thus the specter of boys invading the school faded—at least for the moment. Looking around the room as he finished, Fred felt satisfied with this beginning.

  Near adjournment time, he said, “At one of our next meetings, I’d like you to come prepared to think about the way our students dress. I would have put it on the agenda for today if there had been time for it.”

  No response.

  Fred looked around the room, rested his eyes on Plummer’s face again. Then he looked away, much sooner than he had before. “I think if the students look more presentable it will be easier to sell the school,” he said.

  Several teachers were nodding their heads in agreement. Francis turned, as if by instinct, to see how Gregory van Buren was reacting. Gregory was looking around the room to see how others were reacting. The son of a bitch was counting votes! Francis watched while Gregory’s eyes went all around the room. Then Gregory put his hand up.

  Most of the time, Marjorie would try to ignore Gregory’s upraised hand. But Kindler called on him right away.

  “You don’t actually intend us to incur the students’ wrath?” Gregory asked, looking directly at Kindler. “You don’t really think that we should actually invade the sacred teenage right to emulate the appearance of sexual perverts, freaks, and criminals?” and Francis realized this wasn’t going to be the usual windy sermon. For Gregory wasn’t putting his hands together as if in prayer, just beneath his nose, as he usually did, and he was not pursing his lips between sentences, and he was not nodding his head in assent to his own wisdom, and he was not speaking very slowly to allow his listeners time to comprehend the elegant thoughts he was assembling in his ponderous syntax. He was not doing any of these things! He was waving his hands! And being sarcastic! And speaking very fast. He’d been pent up for years on this subject. Kindler had uncorked the bottle.

  “You are not daring, sir, I hope, to ask us to ignore the increasingly alarming fact that no one outside this hermetic little enclave understands our misbegotten allegiance to the concept that it is a good idea—a meritorious educational strategy, in fact—to allow girls studiously to take on the appearance of female garbage collectors or drunken agriculturists—when they don’t manage instead to look like strippers nearing the climax of their dance. Surely you don’t actually believe that it is difficult to explain to parents that our allegiance to this arcane concept is one we hold on purpose, that it is a considered choice among other options, such as occasionally requiring our students to look like normal persons.”

  While Gregory paused to refill his lungs, Fred Kindler tried to cut him off. Marjorie used to say: “Never mind, Greg, we already know how you feel on this subject.” But Kindler was too polite, or not quick enough, and Gregory rushed on. “Failing to understand our strange philosophy, these outsiders who, I take this opportunity to remind us, constitute our market,” Gregory added. “That’s correct, our market—a blasphemous word in these elevated precincts—thinks we don’t give a damn about how our students look. Or perhaps they think we can’t see the children who have been committed to our care, that one of the important filters through which candidates must pass in order to be awarded the privilege of teaching here is that they be blind. How else could they explain such self-destructive eccentricity?”

  “You make your point quite clearly,” Fred finally managed, with just a hint of irony. “Thank you, Mr. van Buren.”

  “My point is that we are under-enrolled, sir. We are dying!”

  Fred looked around the room to see if anyone else wanted to speak.

  But Gregory still wasn’t finished. “Thank you, sir, for bringing the subject of student attire up,” he said, his tone gliding now from passion to his customary unction. After all the years with Marjorie, he could be forgiven for not understanding that with this new head he didn’t need to act as if addressing royalty. “Mrs. Boyd—who couldn’t bring herself to censor the students’ writing in the school newspaper—wouldn’t allow the faculty to discuss how students dress. I am delighted that we finally have a leader who—”

  “Marjorie Boyd was right,” Francis heard himself blurting. Gregory shut up, and everyone stared at Francis and then turned to Kindler to see his reaction. He was clearly surprised. But Francis wasn’t even thinking about the new head’s opinion; he was just saying, automatically, what he deeply believed. And besides, he was not going to let anyone criticize Marjorie, especially not Gregory van Buren. “She never would have put it on the agenda,” he said; then he realized that hadn’t come out right, he didn’t want to say the new head couldn’t bring up whatever he wanted to bring up, and he went on because he really did want to explain, he
really did have a reasonable point to make. “Marjorie and I figured out a long time ago that you can’t talk to a teenage kid about how she should dress without sounding like an idiot to her.”

  “Really?” Kindler asked, and Francis had no idea whether or not he was being sarcastic.

  “So then you can’t talk to her about the really important things,” Francis explained. “You have to choose how you’re going to use your ammunition. You only have so much.”

  Gregory took his eyes off Francis’s face and looked across the room at Kindler, and waited. The room was silent. Peggy slid her chair a few inches further away from Francis. “Well, I certainly don’t want any of us to sound like an idiot,” Kindler finally said. His face was blank. Everybody, except Peggy, who was looking down at her hands in her lap, was glancing back and forth between Francis and Kindler. Suddenly Kindler’s face wasn’t blank anymore. He was smiling. Everybody understood: He’d decided to smile. “It’s noon,” Kindler announced. “The time I promised this meeting would end. We will start meetings on time. And we will end them when we say we will end them. So we’ll bring this up another time. The meeting’s adjourned.” No one stirred. “We will bring the subject up again,” Kindler added. “I assure you. In the meantime, have a productive afternoon.” Then he stood up to end the meeting.

  A WEEK LATER, on the last day of new-student orientation before classes began, one of the six new students, a junior, Julie Lapham, from Norwich, Vermont, walked by herself back to her dorm after the evening meal. She was too unhappy to want company. She already knew it was a big mistake to have persuaded her parents to let her enroll at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.

  Closer to the dorm, she noticed an old, beat-up Subaru just like her brother’s in the dorm parking lot and felt even lonelier. She wished it really were her brother’s car. But Charley was a sophomore at Trinity College in Hartford, an hour away, and he was very busy and had his own life to lead, and she’d only been away from home a few days. So why would he come see her? Just two months before in July, Julie’s parents had told Charley and her that after Charley was born, they’d spent three years trying to have another child, and when they realized they couldn’t, they’d adopted Julie. Right up to that instant, neither Julie nor Charley had had any idea that she wasn’t their parents’ biological daughter. “We waited to tell you till we thought you were both old enough to know and we could tell you both together,” their father said. And then their mother turned to Charley and said, “We thought you’d like a sister.” As if he was the one who needed comforting.

  Julie’s first reaction had been that she needed to go away to find a place where she could have a family of her own. She chose Miss Oliver’s because Julie’s best friend’s mother, who had graduated from Miss Oliver’s in 1965, always said the school was like a family. Well, it didn’t feel like a family to Julie. She missed her real family and would have given anything to be helping her parents in their construction business in the afternoons after high school got out, instead of being stuck at a boarding school. But she couldn’t go home. Her parents, who at first had refused to enroll her at Miss Oliver’s, finally relented under the proviso that she promised to stick it out, whether she liked it or not, through her junior and senior years and graduate from Miss Oliver’s. Julie had made that promise eagerly at the time, and now she’d rather die than come crawling home, begging to be released from it, admitting she was wrong. It was a mantra in her family that you finish what you start.

  A few yards closer to the dorm, she realized it was Charley. She saw his blond head. He saw her too and blew the horn. She quickened her pace. He leaned and opened the passenger door for her. He was in jeans and moccasins with no socks; the sleeves of his T-shirt were tight around his arms. His summer work with their parents had provided him with enough money to pay for his college expenses and his car and made him strong. Julie was almost as tall, but as if to advertise their different genes, she was much thinner than he, and her hair was brown.

  “I just thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing,” he said. They were shy with each other and didn’t hug. They’d not always been the best of friends.

  “Thanks.” She didn’t want to give away how happy she was that he’d taken this trouble.

  “Well, how are you?” He made it sound like a challenge. He didn’t want her getting sentimental.

  “I’m okay.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “What’s wrong? You don’t like it here?”

  She shook her head.

  “Give it time. It’s only been a few days.” But she knew that’s not what he really thought. He wasn’t surprised she was unhappy here. He had argued with her when she told her mother and father—right after she learned they weren’t her mother and father—that she wanted to go away to school. Charley had known better. “You’ll feel even more lost,” he’d said. “Stay home and get used to the idea.” But he hadn’t known how it felt when the people who were your mother and father all of a sudden tell you that they were not.

  “Thanks for not saying, ‘I told you so,’” she told him now.

  “I just wish they’d kept it a secret,” Charley said.

  She shook her head. They’d been over this before. She thought it would be wrong not to know and wanted to defend her parents. “It’s not like them to hide the truth,” she said. “That’s not Mom and Dad.”

  “Hey, I hope you heard the words you just used? I hope I didn’t hear them wrong?” He looked away. That shyness again! It was new between them, and surprising. As if he were embarrassed to have it confirmed that he had a different status in the family than she did.

  “Well, what should I call them? Mr. and Mrs. Lapham?”

  “Don’t talk like that!”

  “Maybe they should charge me rent, since I’m really only a guest.”

  “Come on! Cut it out. You know they love you just as much as me.” There. He’d said it. They had been avoiding this subject for years, since long before they learned that Julie was adopted. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, it’s crazy. We’re still brother and sister.”

  “We’re not brother and sister, we’re not even related. If I were eighteen, we could fuck and it wouldn’t even be illegal.”

  He stared at her. There she goes again, he thought. Saying outrageous things to get attention. It was not his fault she didn’t take the pains to make life easy for herself by acting the way Mother and Father expected. That was why they were always on her case and not on his. He remembered how, even when she was still in middle school, Julie had loved to eat the greasy hamburgers in the school cafeteria because her parents, dedicated vegetarians, were heavy into animal rights, and she’d always sworn a lot because her parents hated profanity, and he knew the reason that she had worked so hard to win the high school rhetoric prize when she was still a sophomore with an essay “proving” the rightness of the Vietnam War was that their parents were pacifists.

  Charley understood too that, until a year or so ago, her orneriness didn’t disturb their parents. They understood it as her way of establishing her identity, finding it amusing, sometimes even endearing. But now as she approached adulthood, she really did have an identity, which her father especially found less than endearing, because he suspected that she smoked and drank and did drugs with her friends and was maybe even getting sexually involved. (All of which, in fact, she had so far abstained from, mostly to be different.) And, maybe even more irritating to her father, she could now best him in their arguments—which he thought she started and she thought he started—successfully demolishing what she described as his thoroughly unstudied liberal positions with facts and statistics Charley suspected she made up as she needed them. Charley knew damn well that if their father were a conservative, Julie would be a liberal, rather than the other way around. “You’re too smart for your own good,” he told her now, “and you’re a pain in the ass.”

  Just the same, he wondered how he’
d feel if he were the one to learn what Julie had learned just a few weeks ago, and he remembered he had come here to see how she was doing. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said. “Maybe that’ll cheer you up.”

  “I can’t,” she said, looking at her watch. “I’m supposed to be in the dorm by eight o’clock. It’s five of. They check you in.” She’d learned how carefully Mr. van Buren, her dorm parent, took attendance.

  “What is this, a school or a prison?” he asked.

  “Both,” she said, but they both knew it wasn’t Miss Oliver’s that was the prison; it was her pledge to stick it out there.

  “But on weekends it’s different. I can check out,” she told Charley. She’d already heard the stories about how tricky some of the girls were in convincing the teachers on weekend duty that they were invited to somebody’s parents’ house where adults would take responsibility: forged letters of invitation, friends pretending to be a parent over the phone. And sometimes they just sneaked out after the final check-in at ten.

  “Yeah, we have some big-time parties you could come to,” Charley said, his voice brightening at this reminder of his release from the strictures of home. It was not partying, the booze and the drugs so much more accessible than at home, that excited him. He’d already felt a tinge of boredom at the parties, which all seemed exactly the same. It was that he didn’t have to lie to his parents when he got home.