Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  He turned his gaze steadily on Alan Travelers, who instantly stood up. Now Fred and Alan, at opposite ends of the table, were the only ones at the table who were standing.

  “It seems that all of a sudden there is a lot of interest in what goes on at board meetings,” Alan said, speaking as if no one other than Fred were in the room with him.

  “Clearly,” said Fred.

  “It’s about time!” someone yelled from the crowd to Fred’s left. He didn’t want to take his eyes off Alan to find her. “We should have been watching you all along!”

  Now another young woman was waving her arms. She was in the crowd near the other end of the table, directly behind Travelers. “What are these men doing on the board, is what I want to know,” she shouted. “We never had men before. This is a girls’ school!”

  Suddenly everyone—except the board members—was talking at once. Fred waited for Travelers to get control. It would be wrong for the head of school to presume to do so. This was a board meeting. So he was relieved when Travelers put both hands up above his head. When the noise level descended just barely enough for him to be heard, Travelers spoke in a loud voice: “Your attention, everybody. Please. Your attention.” Above the noise Travelers shouted—though, to Fred’s admiration, he kept his calm. “Would the members of the board who are standing please take seats at the table, and will those guests who are at the table please give their places to board members.”

  Several board members stepped forward from the crowd along the walls. But no one at the table moved. The noise level rose even higher. The standing board members hesitated, clearly embarrassed, then stepped back. Someone in the crowd yelled, “No men!” It quickly became a chant: “No men! No men! No men!” Fred looked around the room to see who was not chanting. Many were refraining. He could see their embarrassment; several were trying to help Travelers get order. Across the room Mavis Ericksen stared at Fred with an expression that seemed to say: See what you’ve done? The chant continued. The noise bounced off the walls. Fred thought of standing on a chair and shouting for order.

  Instead, Milton Perkins stood up. His hands were shaking. The noise subsided, and into the relative silence he yelled: “Shut up! Just shut up and get away from the damn table!”

  There was an immediate silence, a kind of gasp. “Sit down, Mr. Perkins,” Travelers said very calmly into that silence. Perkins sat down. It grew even quieter.

  When a woman on Fred’s left stepped forward into that silence, Fred knew instinctively that she was going to grab the power back, if Travelers gave her time. “Oh!” she wailed. “I am so outraged!” She stamped her foot, and Fred’s heart sunk; Travelers wasn’t going to be quick enough. The man hadn’t been to enough faculty meetings. “Not for me!” the woman wailed. “It’s not for me that I am outraged. I’m used to abasement.” Fred knew she was the perfect person to play this part. He hated himself for noticing how unattractive she was, a tiny woman in mud-brown slacks, a blouse that looked as if it should have been worn by a third grader, oily brown hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. Behind her, Charlotte Reynolds was nodding her head encouragingly. “But for all the women in the world!” The mousy lady writhed her hips and shoulders as if somehow the motion would pump even more volume out. “All of them who have been slaves to men from the beginning of time! All of them in every country, in every century, who have labored while men have rested, who have nurtured the children whom men have ignored, who have stayed home while their brothers went to school.”

  “Hear, hear,” someone yelled.

  “Jesus, all of a sudden we’re in England!” Sonja McGarvey said.

  “And now it will happen again. Men will enter our sanctuary and take the spoils. So I am especially outraged. I am violated. I am raped by the thought that our young women of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, our hope of victory, of transcendence, will once again—” Here she hesitated, overcome; she looked around the room, her mouth opening and closing as if she were still speaking, but no words were coming out. Now the majority of people in the room were clearly embarrassed. “Once again,” she was finally able to say. “Once again.” Then she stopped.

  “So whadda we do now?” Milton Perkins asked in a loud voice, “Hold hands and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’?”

  In the silence that followed, a few titters. Then more.

  “At a board meeting, for cryin’ out loud!” Perkins said. Travelers reached his hand out to Perkins’s shoulder. Perkins pushed it away. “Who’s got a violin?” he asked.

  That’s when the mousy lady began to cry. Fred knew instantly it was a mistake. She was taking it much too far, he thought, much relieved. She hadn’t been in faculty meetings either! While the woman sobbed, some watched, some looked away. But one very young alumna came all the way around the table with her arms outstretched so far in front of herself she looked as if she might fall down, and put them around the weeping woman. The two of them swayed together for what seemed an eternity. Perkins wore an expression as if he were watching a freak show. Fred prayed he would keep his mouth shut.

  When the weeping subsided and the hug ended, Travelers spoke and Fred marveled at his grace. “Thank you, Ms. Aguire,” Travelers said very gently. “We deeply appreciate your great concern.”

  Fred watched the woman’s face lose it staginess. “Thank you,” she murmured, her hand flying up to her mouth in her surprise that her feelings had been affirmed and her name known.

  “Now,” Travelers said in the same gentle tone, “I do hope that we can make places for every board member at this table.” As he spoke, he moved to a place just behind the nearest chair occupied by a nonboard member, and placed his hand at the top of the chair back. The woman sitting in it glanced up at him and rose as Alan Travelers, with a graceful gesture, pulled her chair back to ease her standing. Then he turned to the nearest board member who stood next to the wall and invited her to the empty chair with an equally graceful gesture of his open hand. The woman took the chair, and Travelers moved toward the next chair in which a non-board member sat. But he didn’t have to. Simultaneously each of the usurpers gave up their seats. The last board member to sit down was Mavis Ericksen.

  When all were seated, Travelers said, “Now we’ll begin. May I have a motion that the minutes of our last meeting be approved?”

  “Just a minute,” Fred said. Travelers stared down the table.

  “We’re missing one of our members.” Fred announced. He was staring now at Sandra Petrie, who had remained with the crowd against the wall.

  “So we are,” said Travelers. His tone of voice made it clear that he too had suddenly figured out who had broken the confidence and started this riot. Harriet Richardson must have told her what Sonja McGarvey was going to propose today. Why else would she remain standing at the wall?

  Petrie’s face was pale. “I’m resigning,” she whispered.

  “There’s a process for that,” Travelers said. “Not appropriate in the middle of a board meeting. I insist that you join us.”

  Petrie shook her head, remained standing. Travelers stared and waited, and Petrie finally sat down, just to get out of the limelight. She averted her eyes from the other board members.

  “The motion to accept the minutes, please,” Travelers said.

  “How about you, Mrs. Petrie,” Fred said. “Wouldn’t you like to make the motion to accept the minutes?”

  Sandra Petrie flashed him a confused look. Now that she was sitting down, she seemed much shorter than when she had stood by the wall; all her height had to be in her legs. Her face was thin, very pale—almost pretty, Fred thought, if it weren’t for the frown.

  “Ms. Petrie?” Fred said.

  “All right, I move the minutes be approved.” Her voice was tentative.

  “What about the misspellings?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t understand,” said Petrie.

  “The misspellings.”

  “Where?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re t
he one who’s approving the minutes.”

  “Fred, please,” Travelers said.

  “Don’t you think we should spell things right at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls?” Fred asked, looking directly at Petrie.

  Her face was very pale.

  “Well?” Fred insisted.

  Petrie looked down at the table, hunching her shoulders. Clearly she wasn’t going to speak.

  “She only talks when she’s standing up,” Fred announced across the table to Alan Travelers, who looked at him as if he’d never met him before.

  “I move the minutes be accepted,” said Reginald Griffin, a new board member. He was struggling not to laugh.

  “Second,” Sonja McGarvey said.

  Travelers chaired the rest of the meeting through every committee report, none of which had anything to do with the subject that had brought the intruders. After a while, some of them left. Those who stayed grew increasingly restless. “When are you going to get to the real question?” asked a tall woman in a green dress from where she stood by the wall.

  “Madam, we’ve been dealing with real questions all morning,” Travelers responded innocently.

  Fifteen minutes later when the old business was finished, Travelers opened the meeting to new business. Sonja McGarvey was the first to raise her hand. Travelers recognized her.

  “We have a fiscal crisis,” McGarvey said. “Everybody knows it. We are going to go under unless we make a change.” She stopped there while every person in the room stared at her. “Therefore, in order to ensure the continuing existence of our school, I move that we accept boys.”

  Silence in the room. Then “bitch traitor!” from a woman standing by the wall. A murmur started to rise.

  Travelers was fast. “Is there a second?” he said. The room went quiet again. No one at the table raised a hand.

  “The motion fails,” Travelers announced, and the tension left the room, like air through a window.

  “All right, I’ll make another motion then,” McGarvey said.

  “No more, bitch!” the same woman hissed.

  Travelers called on McGarvey.

  “I move the admission of boys as an alternate strategy to closing down when we reach a point where it is obvious that the goals in the headmaster’s schedule for rebuilding the girls-only enrollment cannot be reached.” The board members stayed quiet. The angry murmur rose again among the standees.

  “Will you accept a change from when to if?” Travelers asked. The room went quiet again.

  “Oh, all right,” McGarvey said, and repeated word for word her previous motion except that she changed when to if. She turned away from Travelers then and put her eyes on Fred. He thought he saw a hint of a smile on her determined face. Thank you, he wanted to say. If was exactly what he needed!

  “We need a second,” Travelers said.

  No one put up a hand.

  “The motion fails,” Travelers said.

  “Well, I’ve done my best,” McGarvey said. “Let the school commit suicide if it wants to.”

  “So we’ve just decided we’d close the school down before we let boys in?” Reginald Griffin asked. “We’ve painted ourselves into a corner?”

  “We haven’t decided anything,” Travelers said. “The motions weren’t seconded. We didn’t vote.”

  “All right then, I move that if the school gets into financial extremis, we consider the option of admitting boys,” Reginald Griffin declared.

  “Second!” Sonja McGarvey said. Then under her breath, “Chicken shit’s better than nothing.”

  Travelers stood up. “Any discussion?” He frowned. It was clear that if anyone raised a hand, he’d kill. And anyway, the members couldn’t wait to get out of there, off that stage. “Good,” he said. “We’ll vote by secret ballot.” He handed a tablet of paper down the table.

  The room was quiet while the board members wrote either yes or no on their ballots and handed them back to Travelers. Fred was not a board member, so he didn’t have a vote. Travelers made two piles on the table in front of him. Then he counted each of them. Twice. “There are twelve ayes and eleven nays and two abstentions,” he announced calmly, and Fred knew right away that if the members had been asked to raise their hands in front of their audience, there would have been only two ayes, one of them Sonja McGarvey’s and the other, he was fairly sure, Travelers’s, though Alan hated the idea of going coed.

  “So you’ve voted to let boys in!” one of the invading alumnae declared. In her forties, blond hair gone mostly to gray, the woman was clearly trying to keep her voice calm in spite of her agitation. She had been glancing at her watch for the last hour.

  “We have not,” Travelers responded. “We’ve simply included it among the options to consider if we’re in extremis. And in the meantime, we are going to do everything possible, under the leadership of our new head of school, Fred Kindler here, to rebuild our all-girls enrollment.”

  “I wish I could believe it won’t happen,” the alumna said.

  “Trust us to try,” Travelers said, standing up. Then turning back to the table, he said, “A motion to adjourn, please.”

  “So move,” said Reginald Griffin.

  “Second,” said McGarvey, standing up.

  “One more question, please,” from the gray-haired alumna.

  “Madam, we have an adjournment motion.”

  “For Mr. Kindler,” the alumna said.

  Alan knew that she was up to something, so he ignored her. “All in favor of the motion to adjourn,” he said to the table, and all the board members raised hands. “This meeting is adjourned,” he declared. The board members rose quickly from the table, and so did Fred.

  But he didn’t escape. The woman and about ten others surrounded him as soon as he stepped away from the table. “Surely, you’re not going to refuse to talk to us,” she said.

  “No, of course I’m not.” Fred glanced at Alan, who had seen what was happening and was listening hard.

  “Mr. Kindler, my name is Elizabeth Preston, class of ’61.”

  “How do you do, Mrs. Preston,” Fred said gravely.

  “I have a daughter in the class of ’93. I don’t suppose you’ve had time to get to know her yet,” she added sarcastically. Her implication was clear: He’d been so busy plotting to let boys in that he’d had no time to get to know the students.

  “I’m looking forward to getting acquainted with every student, Mrs. Preston.”

  Preston nodded, leaving a loaded silence. Then she said, “My question is where do you stand on this issue?”

  Now Travelers was by Fred’s side. “Mrs. Preston, in the first place, it was a secret ballot, and in the second, he doesn’t have a vote.”

  “I’m not talking about a vote, Mr. Travelers. I know he doesn’t have a vote, and I know why: so you can protect him. But that won’t work, will it? I mean, we’re grown-ups here, and he is the leader, isn’t he?”

  “Madam, it’s a board position.”

  “Oh, please, Mr. Travelers. He’s the headmaster.”

  “Mrs. Preston,” Fred interrupted. “Believe me—” Then he saw the trap she was laying and stopped. He had to support whatever position the board took—or resign.

  “I’ll do my best,” Preston murmured.

  Fred took a breath. He stared at her.

  Preston shrugged her shoulders, didn’t flinch. “Just as I thought,” she said. “You’ll do whatever you’re told to do. The board’s little patsy.”

  “Let’s go, Fred,” Alan said, tugging at Fred’s elbow. “There’s no point in this.”

  “We would have preferred someone with conviction!” Preston said.

  Fred resisted Alan’s tugging. “I’m not going to lower myself to respond to that,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t care if you did,” Preston said. Then she turned her back and walked away, and her supporters dutifully followed.

  “She’s smart,” Alan said to Fred after the room was empty. “She’s crazy, but she’s smar
t. You say you’re against letting boys in and the board votes to do that, you have to leave. I could have killed her.”

  “How do they get so good at smelling blood?” Fred wondered aloud. “Instinct? Or a plan?”

  “We’ll never know,” Alan said. “She probably doesn’t either.”

  ELEVEN

  Now Fred Kindler was in a rush. He needed to get back to campus as fast as he could and be the bearer of this news: The board is willing to consider admitting boys. Otherwise, someone else would bear it. If he didn’t get there first and do things right, Perkins’s prediction would come true: He’d have a crazy house on his hands. Fred’s walk across the parking lot to his car became a jog, and then a run.

  First tell the faculty, Fred decided. That’s protocol, that’s courtesy. That put them on his team. He’d call a meeting right away and tell them, sculpting the news, keeping it to its truthful context—only if the only other choice was to close the school. Then together, they’ll call a meeting of the school and he’ll tell the students. And he’ll call Alan and ask him to write a letter, today, from the board to all the parents and alumnae. It was a matter of getting the news out first, calmly, from the people in charge, before the crazy people did.

  Then—brilliant thought—the way to do this thing exactly right: tell Francis Plummer first, the senior teacher. That’s the protocol; then go to the faculty. Plummer would appreciate that. So would the faculty. He’d take five minutes, do that first, make it clear to Plummer that for all their problems he’s still the senior teacher. Honor that, and Fred would be honored back. Stick to protocol. In a crisis, do everything right.