That plan made, Fred had room in his mind to think over what had happened as he rushed back to school. He had to admit he was irritated at Alan Travelers for trusting that Ms. Richardson would honor the principle of confidentiality, and then being so careful of his own integrity that he wouldn’t consider moving the meeting to a secret place and another date just in case she did break the principle, which now it was clear she did. That had been Travelers’s first mistake. His second was not pulling Sonja McGarvey aside before he started the meeting and telling her to hold her proposal to admit boys for another time when the board would meet in private and have the time to figure out how to let the community know what was being considered and how to manage the reaction. Maybe Travelers had assumed McGarvey would make her proposal anyway, being the kind of person she was. McGarvey would scorn any approach that seemed roundabout, convinced that the only road to salvation was the quickest and most direct. Maybe she hadn’t trusted her colleagues ever to muster the courage, at least not until after it was too late, if she didn’t force the issue.
By the time Fred arrived on campus, his irritation had melted. Who was he to judge this board, still virgin in the heated politics of school after having been so long a rubber stamp, vassal to a royal head, for making his job even harder? He could have turned the job down; it was not as if he hadn’t known the risks. He knew how bored he would have been tamely managing the status quo of an untroubled school. Besides, he’d known he could fall in love with Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, and there had been the subliminal push from his dead daughter. He still wanted to lead the school that he was sure she would have loved.
Francis got the message in the middle of a class. He could tell it made the students as nervous as it made him. Teachers being summoned to the head’s office in the middle of a class? That had never happened before. The only reason he could think of for Kindler’s wanting so urgently to see him is that he’d gotten wind of the student council’s plan and needed to talk with the faculty advisor about it. That issue would have made even Marjorie nervous. Maybe Lila had paid Kindler the courtesy of telling him what she and Sara Warrior and the advisor to the student council had decided this morning. Good for her if she did, he thought, but he had wanted to be the one to tell Kindler. He had planned to go to Kindler’s office right after classes, not only because Kindler really needed to know, but also so it wouldn’t look as if he were withholding information to catch Kindler unaware. Francis wished he had told Lila that he would bring the information to the new headmaster.
He’d forgotten—maybe he hadn’t even known—that Kindler had been off campus at a board meeting all morning, and so no one could have warned him about this delicate issue that was going to complicate both their lives.
When Francis stepped through the door to the head’s office, he saw the tension on Kindler’s face. Kindler stood up, reached across his desk to shake Francis’s hand, then sat down behind his desk. This time he wasn’t going to come around his desk and sit near Francis. “Sit down, please, Mr. Plummer,” Kindler said, motioning to one of the chairs in front of his desk. Francis sat. Behind Kindler the crazy wristwatch loomed.
Francis didn’t wait for Kindler to start the conversation. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get to you earlier with this news,” he said. “But I had classes.”
Fred stared at this little man sitting across the desk from him. “What?” he said. “You knew?” He started to stand up.
“Only since this morning,” Francis answered. He tried to keep the defensiveness out of his voice.
“This morning was early enough. The board meeting didn’t start till nine o’clock.” Fred was standing up now. He was so angry he could hardly see. It didn’t occur to him that there wasn’t much he could have done if Plummer had told him as late as this morning that people were going to invade the meeting and actually sit in board members’ places. Actually take their places! All Fred knew was just how little he trusted this bastard. Conniving with Sandra Petrie! And I was going to tell him first?
“Wait a second!” Francis said. “So Lila got to you by nine o’clock? Good for her. I had classes. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to skip classes to tell you something you don’t need to know right away. The student council isn’t going to do anything for a couple of days at least. What the hell are you standing up for, for Christ’s sake?”
“Get out of here!” Fred Kindler said. “Just get out.”
“No,” said Francis very calmly. “No, I won’t get out.”
Kindler was still standing, gripping the edge of his desk with both hands. Francis saw how white the backs of Kindler’s hands were.
“You called me in to talk about the student council proposal,” Francis said. He was sure now this guy shouldn’t be the head of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. He was out of control, you never knew what was going to set him off. “So let’s talk about that,” he went on. “Not about the fact that I didn’t sprint across the campus to tell you in the first three seconds after I found out.” “What student council proposal?”
Francis didn’t answer for a second. “Oh?” he said. “That’s not what I’m here about?”
“What student council proposal?” Fred Kindler asked again.
“To give the bones back,” Francis said.
“The bones back,” Fred repeated. He was still standing, and he was frowning, but the anger was beginning to leave his face.
“The bones and the whole display. They think it’s blasphemous.”
“Who thinks what’s blasphemous, Mr. Plummer?”
“Sara Warrior. She’s a Pequot.”
“I know who Sara Warrior is, Mr. Plummer.” Fred sat down.
Francis shrugged.
“All right,” Fred said. “I shouldn’t have told you to get out. I’m glad you resisted.” But just the same, his mistrust lingered.
“Sara Warrior came to Lila, since she’s president of the student council,” Francis explained as Fred looked at his watch. “And Lila brought her to me.”
“And then what happened?”
“The decision to bring the proposal to the students in Morning Meeting.”
“To give the display away?”
Francis nodded. “If you want to put it that way,” he said.
“That’s what you decided?”
“Hell no, that’s what they decided.”
“They! Well, tell them no! We just spent fifteen thousand dollars we don’t have on—”
“I can’t tell them no,” Francis interrupted. Don’t you think I’d like to? he wanted to ask. The librarian’s my wife.
Fred stared at him. “You’re the advisor, for goodness sake, tell them no.”
“You don’t really mean that,” Francis said. “That the student council can’t bring up an issue at Morning Meeting?” That Kindler could even think of the idea proved he wasn’t the right head.
“Let’s drop this for now.” Fred looked at his watch again. “I’ve got something really important I want to talk to you about. I’m going to need your help.”
“But this is important! Discussing issues in Morning Meeting is a tradition.”
Fred’s face went red again. “Oh,” he murmured “you’re going to give me another lecture about tradition.”
Margaret Rice stepped into the office right then, without knocking. There was a new, satisfied look on her face. “We’re talking,” Fred said.
Margaret arched her eyebrows, shrugged her shoulders. “Okay,” she said, and left.
“Let’s start all over again,” Fred sighed to Francis.
“All right,” Francis said. “Good.”
Fred looked relieved. “This morning at the board meeting—” he began.
Then Margaret was back in the office. “She says it’s urgent.”
“Who?” asked Fred.
“Peggy Plummer,” Margaret said, looking straight at Francis.
“Wait a second,” Francis said. “I haven’t talked to her about what the student counc
il’s going to do.”
“You haven’t?” said Fred, looking at him even more sharply. Then turning to Margaret: “Urgent? Somebody hurt?”
Margaret didn’t have time to answer because by then Peggy was in the office. She didn’t even look at Francis. “You need to be in the auditorium, Fred,” she said.
“The auditorium?”
Peggy nodded her head. “The whole school’s gathering there right now. As we speak. A board member came on campus just a half hour ago. She went to every class. Announced in each one that the board has just voted to go coed. She’s leading the meeting. I think you’ve got a riot on your hands.”
“Who?” Fred asked, standing up.
“Why, Sandra Petrie,” Margaret Rice said gleefully. “Who else?”
TWELVE
Fred stood up so fast he knocked his chair over. He took two steps toward the door, tripped over the edge of the rug, and almost fell into Plummer’s lap—which he prevented by throwing his hand out to brace himself against Plummer’s chair. He missed, hitting Plummer in the shoulder instead, hard, as if he were punching him. Better if he’d hit him in the face! He was out the door and gone before Francis even stood up.
Fred sprinted up the steps to the auditorium two at a time. On the big green front doors someone had posted a placard:
Estrogen Yes!
Testosterone No!
Inside, at the back of the auditorium, the first thing he saw was Sandra Petrie up on stage, standing at a podium. He’d noticed the podium before, stored offstage. She must have moved it onstage to make herself seem authoritative. Petrie saw him right away. He stopped in his tracks to stare at her. She stared back, and he felt her anger as if it were a weight pushing him back, right out the doors he’d just come through. This wasn’t the same woman who’d been so embarrassed by what she’d done that she had obeyed Travelers’s command to join the board at the table just to get out of the limelight. And for her this wasn’t just about letting boys in anymore; it was about Fred Kindler too—for having kept that limelight on her, showing his contempt for her with that business about the minutes. If he hadn’t stirred her anger so, she wouldn’t be here, doing this.
Fred would realize this later, with time to reflect. But he was not reflecting then—he was walking up the aisle toward the stage, and everyone in the audience was turning to look to where Petrie was staring. He walked very slowly toward Petrie, who stood at the podium, as if she were waiting for him at the altar, and, as if he were outside himself, watching, he found himself whispering to a girl on the aisle, “Here comes the bride!” But his little joke was wasted on her. The only sound in the auditorium was the sound of his walking.
As he climbed the steps onto the stage, someone in the audience shouted: “We don’t want boys! We want Marjorie. Give us Marjorie back! Marjorie and no boys!” By the time he reached the podium, the chant had swelled: “Boys no, Marjorie yes! Boys no! Marjorie yes!”
Petrie didn’t budge from the podium. Inside his head Fred watched a movie of himself bodily picking her up—though she was taller than he—lifting her off the stage floor, and dropping her over the edge.
Instead he stood next to her at the podium and looked out over the chanting crowd, keeping his face blank, as if he were watching an uninteresting phenomenon that had nothing to do with him. He would simply wait for them to stop. After a little while, after they had expressed their feelings, they’d catch on to how discourteous they were being. Without turning his face from the crowd, he said, just loud enough for Petrie to hear, “This is not your podium, Mrs. Petrie. You should sit down.”
“It doesn’t appear to be yours either,” she hissed.
He didn’t answer, just kept waiting. There was now a rhythmic stamping of feet to accompany the chant. But quite a few of the girls had stopped; maybe they never had started. Petrie’s daughter, Melissa, sat at the outer edge of the last row on his left, very close to a side exit door, her face averted from the front. He looked for the faculty, discovering that many of them were not there, and felt a rush of respect at their refusal to be a part of this. The rest were spread out through the audience. Rachel Bickham sat in the back row. He was surprised that she was there. She seemed much too, well, noble to participate in something like this. He looked into her dark, handsome face, and she looked right back. What bothered him the most was Gregory van Buren’s presence in the front row. I thought you were for letting boys in, he wanted to say, then realized, as van Buren continued to avert his eyes, that maybe van Buren was there in the front row to be supportive of him. It would have been nice to know.
The noise slightly subsided. However angry they were, the girls were too sensitive not to get the message implied by his calm standing there, waiting. One of the girls in the front row stood up and faced the crowd, shouting, “Give me an M!” She got only a halfhearted reply from fewer than half the girls. “Give me an A!” the girl yelled—to which even fewer students responded, one of whom added with a disgusted shrug: “In all my subjects, so I can get into my daddy’s college.” That’s when Rachel Bickham stood up in the back row.
Sandra Petrie pointed to Bickham, and Bickham started to speak. “This is outrageous!” Bickham was very tall; her voice was quiet, but it filled the room. The chanting stopped.
“Yeah, he wants to let boys in,” someone said.
“Maybe he does,” Bickham said.
“Maybe?” Sandra Petrie interrupted. “You know very well he does! That’s why I called this meeting.”
Bickham’s beautiful, long-fingered hand was up, signaling silence. “Don’t embarrass yourself anymore,” she said to Petrie.
“But,” said Petrie, “I—”
Bickham shook her head back and forth, a subtle gesture, and Petrie said no more. When a student rose, starting to speak without raising her hand, it was Fred who pointed to Bickham. “I believe Ms. Bickham has the floor,” he declared.
“When the other team shoots fouls shots, we don’t make any noise,” Bickham said. “That’s the Oliver way. Fairness. This would be the worst time to abandon it.” Then she sat down. The auditorium was suddenly much quieter.
So, thanks to Rachel Bickham, Fred had the floor. He stepped forward toward the lip of the stage to explain what the board had actually decided. Then he noticed Francis Plummer at the back of the auditorium, and he had a better idea.
“Good morning, Mr. Plummer,” Fred called loudly across the auditorium. “I assume you’ve come because you heard some noise and thought we might need your help.” His voice was loaded with sarcasm. He didn’t care how much the girls liked this sneaky little creep who—it was as plain as day—had kept him in his office on purpose with another one of his lectures about tradition so there’d be time for a riot to get started behind his back. He was going to take him on right here, right now!
Francis said nothing.
“Mr. Plummer, you have no answers for us this morning,” Fred said, and as soon as Francis opened his mouth to speak, Fred cut him off. “Well, anyway, thanks for dropping by. You’re just the right person to help us out.” Ignoring the several girls four rows back who were silently mouthing an exaggerated imitation of his every word, he kept on. “I think I’m right in saying that it’s the Oliver custom”—Oliver custom, now a whole row was mouthing his words—“that the student council is the body that calls special all-school meetings.”
Still no answer from Francis, who was trying to figure out what was happening. “Well, then, maybe the president of the student council can tell us,” Fred said. He looked around the audience, peering, as if he didn’t know where Lila Smythe was sitting. “Lila?”
“That’s right,” said Lila, her voice tentative for once.
“Fine. It is also the head of school’s prerogative.” He couldn’t keep his eyes away from the mute imitators, but he refused to react. “So, since this meeting was called with neither my authority nor the student council’s, I’m treating it as if it hasn’t happened. It was a nonmeeting. So, Lil
a, would you like to call a real meeting for tomorrow morning so we can discuss our situation, or do you want me to call it?” Lila hesitated.
“Lila?”
“I’ll call it,” said Lila.
“Good. What time?”
Lila turned toward Francis at the back of the auditorium.
“Your decision, Lila,” Fred said.
“First period?” said Lila.
“Good. Will you run the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. And since this is a non-meeting, I’m canceling it as of now. We’ve missed a whole class period. Funny how something that doesn’t happen can take up time. That’s not a problem though. Mr. Plummer here can figure out the best time for us to make it up.” There were a few hisses from the audience at this, but Fred went right on, riding his anger. “What do you think, Mr. Plummer, would this Sunday or the Sunday after be better?” Some more hisses. Francis started to say something, but again Fred cut him off. “Give yourself time to figure it out,” he said. Then, addressing the whole crowd: “Have a good morning, everybody. Mr. Plummer will let us know.” He turned to Petrie, raised his eyebrows at her, stepped away from the podium, and walked down the steps to the orchestra and up the aisle.
Behind him, he heard Sandra Petrie say, “All right. He’s left. Now let’s continue.” He heard someone else say, “Tomorrow.” By the time he neared the doors at the back of the auditorium, he could hear people getting up to leave. He was not surprised. He’d always known that whether they liked you or not, teenagers responded to the grown-up who’s willing to risk, to put it all out there—to be a little crazy when it counts.
As he passed Francis, who was still standing in the doorway, Fred said, “Be in my office in exactly five minutes.”
FRANCIS ENTERED THE head’s office and took a chair.
“I didn’t invite you to sit down,” Kindler said.
Francis didn’t believe the man was serious and continued to sit.
“Stand up,” Kindler said.
So, not knowing what else to do, how to act in the presence of this man who was so obviously out of control, Francis stood up.
Saving Miss Oliver's Page 19
