Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  “Promise?” she asked. “You’ll invite me?”

  He shrugged and made a gesture that said of course he would, she didn’t have to ask, and she leaned to hug him, her resentment flying away.

  But as soon as she was out of the car, waving goodbye to him as he drove off, she felt depressed again.

  When she got to her dorm, Mr. van Buren was already coming down the hall, checking the girls in. Clarissa Longstreet, Julie’s roommate, from Riverdale, just north of Manhattan, was sitting at her desk when Julie entered their room. She looked up from her book and said to Julie, “Where’ve you been? I was worried.” Clarissa was very small with a dark, round face and dyed blond hair and glasses whom Julie, who towered over her, had decided that she liked.

  “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Mr. van Buren,” Clarissa warned.

  Julie shrugged. Maybe that was exactly what she wanted to do. She lay down on her bed.

  Clarissa shook her head. “Really,” she said. “You don’t.” Clarissa wrote for the Clarion, to which Mr. van Buren was faculty advisor. She knew how sharp his tongue could get when you didn’t do things on time and do them well.

  The door opened then, and Mr. van Buren was standing in it. It was eight o’clock at night and he was still wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, dark tie, and flannel trousers. He glanced quickly at Clarissa and nodded his head. “Reading ahead,” he said. “Very smart.”

  Then he turned to Julie lying on the bed and stared. Clearly, he didn’t like that she was lying down. “You were almost late,” he said mildly. She couldn’t read the tone of his voice or the slight smile on his face, had no idea whether he was angry or simply stating a fact. “It would be advisable, I think, not to be almost late again,” Mr. van Buren said. Then, turning to leave, he looked back over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows at Julie as if to show how seriously she should take his advice. Then he closed the door and was gone.

  “Pretty weird, huh?” Clarissa said. “But wait till you have him in class. He’s the best English teacher in the world.”

  Julie had only been at Miss Oliver’s for a few days, and already she had heard how some students argued, as Clarissa did, that Mr. van Buren was the best and others that nobody could be better than Mr. Plummer, aka Clark Kent. Right then, if she cared enough to have an opinion, Julie would have agreed with Clarissa. She liked it that Mr. van Buren didn’t harangue her about lying down while he was talking to her, the way her father would have. She would have sat up, if he’d not left so soon. And she admired the ironic way he used the word almost.

  But he was a teacher, and she was still in his presence at eight o’clock at night and would be again in half an hour when he presided over a dorm meeting “to get properly organized for the year.” For Julie, school has always been a scene she was released from to a larger world at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Now she was sealed in twenty-four hours a day, and there was no relief. She could hardly breathe.

  ON THE FIRST day of classes, the students entering the dining hall for breakfast found a stack of the Clarion on each table, two pages of which were filled with Karen’s article on the new headmaster. To be greeted early in the morning of their first day of classes by a feature about the new headmaster made them even more resentful of Mrs. Boyd’s dismissal. They wanted to be greeted by Mrs. Boyd. For all their intelligence and good education, what many of the students took away from the article was that the new headmaster had ripped down all the pictures that students had given to Mrs. Boyd and that he was going to take away the freedom of press that Mrs. Boyd had championed.

  Only her close friends would learn that Karen, who had spent an hour with Mr. Kindler, was well disposed to him. If Karen had wanted to express her personal opinion in the Clarion, she would have written an editorial supporting the new headmaster, instead of an objective report of an interview. But she wouldn’t do that; it would look to the students as if the new headmaster had manipulated her and make him even more contemptible in their eyes. There was nothing she could do to make Mr. Kindler popular. He was on his own.

  THIS FIRST MORNING of classes, Francis got to his classroom long before his students. He taught both his math and English classes there, where he also had his office; lighted by big windows that looked out on the campus, it was his seat of power, a little kingdom. It was one of the perks of his seniority that no other teacher used it. The front wall and the wall opposite the windows were covered by blackboards, and on that day the back wall, behind the big model of the Globe Theater created by a student years ago, was covered by a collection of black-and-white photographs of comely New England farmhouses that Bob Rice had sent him because he knew that Francis taught a lot of Robert Frost. The floor was covered by a thick rug. The tables in the classroom had been put together to form a three-sided square whose open side faced the front, where Francis’s desk was placed. He never sat at it when he was teaching.

  This morning, as he entered the empty classroom, the first thing Francis saw was A FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL GIFT FOR MR. P! emblazoned on the blackboard. Under this greeting, the big slate was covered with a math problem that went on and on, over the front blackboard and around the corner onto the one on the adjoining wall. He saw that the problem was worked two ways with two different answers. AND THEY’RE BOTH RIGHT!!! CAN YOU PROVE THEY’RE NOT? HUH, CLARK, HUH, I BET YOU CAN’T! Whoever had snuck out of the dorm in the middle of the night and spent hours in here doing this had used her nondominant hand. The figures were a little child’s; she wanted him to guess who she was.

  Francis smiled, his spirits lifting. He decided to leave the problem up there on the board for the advanced calculus class that would troop in to the classroom in a half an hour. That was the way to start a day! Math’s a game, play is the mind at work, and he was going to get the bagels and coffee ready.

  But he only got a minute or two to himself because there was a knock on the door, and he opened it, and there stood Lila Smythe. His heart skipped a little beat. Next to Lila, but shyly standing half a step behind, one of the new ninth graders faced him.

  “This is Sara Warrior,” Lila said. “She’s a ninth grader. She wants to talk with you.” Lila stood stiffly, unsmiling, in the doorway.

  She didn’t even say hello, Francis thought. “All right,” he said. “Come in.”

  Sara hesitated. Lila turned and smiled to her. “He won’t bite,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic, and then the two were in the room, and he was motioning them to seats at one of the tables and took a third, facing them. “Sara’s Indian,” Lila announced. “Pequot. That’s why she wants to talk to you.”

  “Native American,” he corrected. He’d read the admissions folder. Sara, who could trace her Pequot ancestry all the way back to the 1870 census, lived in Stonington.

  “All right, say it the PC way.” Lila shrugged. “Who cares?” And for an instant Francis thought he would ask Sara to excuse herself and have a talk with Lila. But he changed his mind. That wouldn’t be fair to Sara.

  Sara was a small girl, dressed more formally than the Oliver custom in a simple green skirt, a white, long-sleeved blouse. She looked at him, studying his eyes. He couldn’t read her face. But he did know she was the first Pequot citizen to be enrolled at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. He found himself wanting to apologize for that. “Welcome, Sara. We’re very glad to have you,” he said.

  “Thank you.” The first words she’d said.

  “Are you glad to be here?”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said. Because she really didn’t. She remembered how glad she had been at first, and how kind Mr. and Mrs. Kindler were at the reception for new students and their parents. Her mother and dad had driven her to school and were going to leave right after the reception, and she was already homesick, but the little red-headed man with the funny walk who she was surprised to learn was the headmaster crossed the room to greet them. Her father and he seemed to like each other right away as they sh
ook hands. They were the only two men in the room who were wearing suits, the headmaster in a funny brown one, her father in his pinstripe blue. That had made her glad. She knew the headmaster wore a suit for the same reason her dad did: to show respect.

  But now, after what she had discovered in the school library yesterday, she felt like a stranger. And she knew why the student who toured her around when she was visiting as a candidate skipped over the library, claiming she had a class to get to.

  Sara also remembered how excited she was when her English teacher, a tall, thin black man with dreadlocks in his first year of teaching, who she had sensed felt just as out of place as she did—and on whom she had a crush—persuaded her to think seriously about attending Miss Oliver’s. “They make you work,” he’d said. “They actually want you to think for yourself.” He’d heard about the school when had he reached out to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Government, just a few miles away, to see if he could arrange some interaction between the tribe and his class in order to broaden his students’ view of the world, which, to his disillusionment, he’d found to be exceedingly narrow. He was soon chastised for including in his curriculum material so incapable of being reduced to a standardized test—but that’s another story.

  “Sara’s seen the Collection in the library,” Lila said.

  “Good!” Francis said brightly.

  Lila turned her head away, stared out the window, and then it dawned on him what Sara was going to say. Her eyes were full on his.

  “It’s wrong!” Sara said.

  He didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t need it between him and Peggy.

  “Sara’s right, isn’t, she? If it were white people’s bones, they’d be in a graveyard, wouldn’t they?” Lila said. “Not in a display in a private school library.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” he murmured.

  Lila just watched him.

  “But it’s mostly artifacts: clothing and tools and weapons,” he said halfheartedly. “There’s only a small piece of one femur.” Sara Warrior was still studying him.

  “Is that what we would have done if we had found the Ohlone village?” Lila asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he admitted.

  “I never thought about it at all,” Lila said, “but then Sara came to me.”

  “I asked her how you got them,” Sara said. “I asked if they were given to you.”

  “But of course she already knew the answer,” Lila said.

  “I was hoping they were gifts,” Sara said. “That you hadn’t taken them.”

  “I see,” said Francis.

  “It was my new school,” Sara said. “That’s why I was hoping.”

  “There are two ways to look at this,” Francis began. He owed it to Peggy to defend what she believed: that the display was a presence that students didn’t just read about but see. It put the understanding in their gut, not just their brain, of how many ways there were to be human.

  But Sara cut him off. “Not if they weren’t given to you,” she said. “Not if you took them. Then there’s only one way.”

  We didn’t take them, he wanted to say. We found them. But he knew that was lame because they weren’t given, and he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Let Peggy try, he thought.

  “What do you think?” Lila asked. “You’re the advisor.” He heard the accusation in her tone: that he was going to back off this time too.

  He hesitated again.

  “All right, I’ll decide,” Lila said “We’ll bring it to the school. The student council. In Morning Meeting. Won’t we, Mr. Plummer?” Lila prodded. And now they were both silent, because he was thinking about how this issue, if it got in the papers, could hurt the school, and she was thinking here was another time when he couldn’t take the heat.

  “All right,” he said at last. It was the Oliver tradition when an issue came up: The student council aired it in an open discussion in Morning Meeting. It was one of the things he loved about the school.

  “You don’t have to sit on stage. We can break that tradition,” Lila said.

  “You think I’m going to hide?”

  “You think I came in here to embarrass you? You’ve already said there are two ways to look at it. Suppose Mrs. Plummer wants to defend the other way?”

  “I’ll be on stage,” he said. “I’m not about to break the tradition. Besides, my wife is a reasonable person. And I’ll let her know what’s going to happen so she won’t be surprised.”

  “Good for you,” Lila said There was no bitterness in her voice. Maybe he’d earned back a glimmer of her respect.

  “I’ll introduce the issue,” Lila said. “Then we’ll put Sara on, and she’ll make her proposal.”

  “Proposal? I thought it was going to be a discussion.”

  “Tell him, Sara,” Lila said.

  “To give it back to its rightful owners,” Sara said. “Of course. To get it off this campus right away.”

  “Otherwise it might be hard for her to stay here, don’t you think?” Lila said. Though her tone was mild, he was a little irritated. He knew what her rhetorical question meant: If you’re going to be inclusive, you have to adjust to the ways the people you include see the world. Well, he didn’t need a lecture. You’re so much nicer when you’re not being sanctimonious, he wanted to say. But of course he didn’t. He’s lost the chance to be her guide.

  The bell for first period rang. Francis’s advanced calculus class, waiting outside the classroom door, knew his closed door meant he was having a private talk. They wouldn’t come in until he opened it. “Thank you for listening,” Sara said, and both girls stood up and left. Then his students trooped in. They talked quietly, sleepy in the early morning; their chairs scraped against the floor as they took their seats, and Francis made a mental note to go to Fred Kindler’s office first thing after classes. Kindler needed to know this issue was coming up. Right after that, he would tell Peggy.

  What Francis didn’t know was that Sam Andersen, the history teacher whose sense of humor Francis liked so much and whom he had seen playing tennis with Fred Kindler, was designing a new course that he would teach later in the year in the spring term. It fit right in with the Oliver emphasis on experiential education: an archaeological dig right here on the campus, where certainly there were many artifacts still to be found. Sam wondered why in the world no one had thought of this before. He’d shared his idea with Peggy Plummer—who thought it was wonderful.

  TEN

  In the same morning that Lila and Sara confronted Francis about the Pequot display, Fred arrived at the River Club parking lot a few minutes before his first full board meeting. All during the drive from Fieldington he had heard, over and over again, Ms. Richardson say, “You won’t get away with this,” and now he wished Alan Travelers hadn’t persuaded him that Ms. Richardson would never stoop so low as to tell people that Sonja McGarvey was going to propose the admission of boys at the board meeting. “Ms. Richardson would never break a confidence, I don’t care how angry she is, and if I’m wrong the worst part for me won’t be holding the meeting in public,” Alan had said. “It will be my disappointment in a friend.” He went on to say he’d be damned if he were going to sneak around and hold the meeting at a secret time and in a secret place. “We’ll just handle it, if it happens,” he said to Fred. “You and I. We’ll take it as an interesting challenge.”

  Through the windshield, Fred stared at the river, just yards from the edge of the parking lot. How peaceful it would be just to sit here all morning watching the unresisting water flow! He shook his head to jettison the thought, got out of the car, and entered the building.

  As he approached the oak doors he heard the sound of angry voices, and when he entered the room, he saw right away that most of the people sitting at the table weren’t board members—he recognized very few of them—while the legitimate members, their places usurped, stood with embarrassed and angry looks on their faces among the crowd that surrounded the table, taki
ng up all the space between the table and the walls. It was obvious to him that these invaders had made sure to arrive very early, before the board members, and had commandeered the seats.

  The room went silent as he stopped in the doorway, and everyone turned to look at him. We have the power, not you, the invaders’ expressions said. You can’t do anything we don’t want you to do. He saw this on their faces, that they could riot to get what they wanted, and his nervousness flew away. He was suddenly calmer than he’d ever be staring at the river. And even more surprising, he was happy. This is exactly what he wanted: a fight! Oh, yes, I can! he thought, I will do exactly what I want.

  “Good morning,” he said. No response.

  No matter: waiting for an answer provided an instant in which to think. He was grateful also to discover that Alan Travelers was one of the few board members who were at the table; he was sitting calmly at the chairman’s place at the end of the table opposite where Fred was standing. His eyes met Fred’s.

  Milton Perkins was also at the table, next to Travelers. Fred knew right away he would be the first to speak. He was right. Perkins’s voice was a whisper, intended only for Fred, but it was nevertheless loud: “We’ve got a traitor in our midst!” Fred heard irony and chagrin in Perkins’s voice, but the crowd did not, and there were boos and hisses. “Well, damn it, we do!” Perkins said, this time not in a whisper, and now there was laughter. Fred’s gorge rose even more: that these people would ridicule the old man! The students would never be so unkind.

  Fred kept his face perfectly calm, almost expressionless, as if he were about to go to sleep. He put his hands up to the people who stood to his right and left along the wall. The laughter stopped. He gazed around the room, looking into people’s eyes while he let his anger flood him. He didn’t see the oak walls behind the people, was oblivious to the array of Hartford’s patriarchs in their golden frames, and didn’t notice that the sun, breaking through the clouds and sparkling on the river just outside the windows, had lit up the room. He only saw each face, and stared, and sent his message—now you have to deal with me! So don’t you ever mock a human being again!—wondering all the while: Where the hell did I learn to do this? The room went very quiet.