Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  Fred Kindler watched Peggy. He guessed why she wasn’t talking. Nevertheless, an idea came to him, bringing a surge of excitement. As one more strategy to save the school, he would reach out to the Pequot Nation, recruit their children (he wondered why that hadn’t been done before), invite several of their parents to join the board, and instead of returning the Collection, thus looking guilty and suspiciously correct, persuade the Pequot Nation to create an even more significant Collection to honor their tradition right here at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls—of every hue—where once a Pequot village had thrived. And the Pequots would participate in the dig that Sam Andersen was going to organize. Thus turn a potential public relations disaster into a victory. That’s how to build a school: reach out, bring in, include, make layers, build strength.

  Then the bell rang, and Lila adjourned the meeting. Feeling vaguely dissatisfied because they still wanted to know what Mrs. Plummer thought, the students moved out of the auditorium and to their classes. Karen Benjamin, stringer for the Hartford Courant’s weekly column that covered teenage concerns in Capital Area schools, skipped her class to phone the story in.

  THAT EVENING IT seemed to Francis that he waited for hours and hours for Peggy to come home from the library. He wasn’t going to let one minute go by before he cleared the air with her. He was not sure she really did forgive him for not telling her about the proposal before Fred Kindler did. And he was not sure she really could see both sides of the issue. Why should she after all these years? But it didn’t even cross his mind that she could think that the reason Sara had been chosen to make the proposal was to shut Peggy up. Sara had been chosen because she was the one to object to the Collection. What could be more obvious than that?

  He was surprised when suddenly the door connecting their apartment to the dormitory opened, and there Peggy was, framed in the doorway, and frowning at him, instead of at their front door where he’d been listening for her. He realized she’d been touring their dormitory before coming home, avoiding his company as long as she could. For thirty-three years they’d made a point of visiting with the girls together in the evening. He felt a wisp of anger rising, stuffed it down beside the hurt, and stood up from the chair he’d been sitting in. “Hello, Peg,” he said.

  She stopped just through the doorway. She could tell from the way he was looking at her that he’d been sitting there waiting for her, about to pounce on her with excuses and reasons before she even drew a breath. There was no way she’s going to listen. “I need some tea,” she announced and went to the kitchen.

  All right, I’ll wait out here, he decided, and sat down again. She needed a little space. Besides, he was not going to follow her like some faithful puppy. He heard the water gush into the kettle, heard her crossing to the stove and putting the kettle on it, even heard the click of the handle for the gas. As the minutes passed his sadness blossomed.

  “So now you’re politically correct?” she said at last through the doorway, speaking the term as if describing vermin. “How stylish!” She’d misinterpreted his staying in the living room, thought he was going to act as if nothing had happened. No way. She needed to fight.

  He kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to rise to crap like that.

  “You sure your name isn’t van Buren? Francis van Buren, politician?” She imagined his face getting red.

  He sat there. He wasn’t going to say one word to this.

  “No, I guess not. You’re just twins. Two of a kind.”

  Now he stood up. But he wasn’t headed for the kitchen. He was headed for the front door. Fuck this. He’d just leave. She could talk to air.

  “You could kiss and make up,” she said. “You and Gregory. He could be up on stage too. He could sit in your lap.”

  He whirled around. Now he was the one who needed to fight. He went through the kitchen door. She was facing him, her back to the stove. “You need to watch your mouth,” he said.

  “Really? Like when you blurted out in the middle of the first faculty meeting of the year that the new headmaster shouldn’t even talk about how the kids dress because Marjorie wouldn’t?” she asked, grabbing at the opening he’d given with his comment about watching her mouth. She didn’t care how crazy this was, how off the subject. The way he’d behaved in that meeting—in front of everybody! “Is that how you watch your mouth?” she asked him.

  “Why are you talking about that?” he asked her. “Speaking of running at the mouth.”

  “Because he had to save your butt, that’s why. He had to stop the meeting just so the senior teacher wouldn’t go on acting like the biggest asshole in the world in front of everybody.”

  “What else, Peggy?” He took a step forward. He was in her face, almost yelling. “What else? Think of everything. Make a big fucking list.”

  She stared at him. Then very quietly she said, “We don’t have much in common anymore, do we, Francis?”

  She didn’t wait for his answer. Instead, she took a step toward him, put her hand on his chest, pushed past him, and walked out of the kitchen, through their living room, toward the front door. He followed past her, reached the door before she did, put his hand on the knob. “Open the door, Francis,” she commanded. “I’m going to the library to work.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said. She reached for the knob. He let it go and stepped back, made a big sweeping gesture with his arm to usher her out. “Don’t hurry back,” he said, more hurt than he’d ever been.

  Outside, she turned back to him. “Using that little girl that way,” she said. “Preying on her feelings. Putting her up on the stage like that so nobody could argue. How could you let that happen!”

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t act surprised, Francis. After we told each other there would be no surprises.”

  “Oh, my God, so that’s what this is about!”

  She stared at him. “Well, what did you think it was about?” she asked. Then she turned and walked away.

  FOURTEEN

  Fred was relieved a few days after Sara Warrior’s talk to discover in the Hartford Courant that Karen Benjamin’s report on the student council proposal was only one short paragraph in the Teen section, buried in the middle of a series of reports from several schools. He was grateful for the Courant editor’s preference for banal stories featuring football stars and pretty cheerleaders. If Fred had been the editor, he would have featured the controversy over the Pequot Collection. It was exactly the kind of issue that students and their teachers should confront.

  But Fred, who had almost never read a newspaper article about an independent school that hadn’t used the word exclusive, knew how inclined the public was to stereotype schools like Miss Oliver’s as arrogant. Even a very objective article on this issue would have fed the stereotype, which was exactly what he didn’t need.

  He had reason to be worried: Not only had the summer recruiting effort only managed to garner a mere six additional students for the sophomore and junior classes, and the smallest ninth grade in the school’s history, but so far, in September, there had only been three requests for information from families exploring schools for the next school year, the second in Fred’s programmed two-year race against the growing deficit. Nan White had told him that even in the previous year’s dearth there had been fifteen such requests by this time, the second week in September.

  It wouldn’t occur to Fred until much later that maybe Karen had had the same worry that he had and wrote a boring article on purpose.

  However unimportant to the public, the proposal to give away the Collection was momentous to the school, and Gregory van Buren, faculty advisor to the Clarion, hoped that it would require enough of Karen’s editorial attention for her to abandon her article on the sex lives of the seniors, a project he despised. There was huge opportunity in the Collection story. On the day her sparse report appeared in the Courant, he called her in to his classroom to ask her how she proposed to cover it in the Clarion.

  “I’ve given it to Cl
arissa Longstreet,” Karen told him.

  “Very amusing,” he murmured.

  “Really. I have,” she said, and now he was staring at her. “Aren’t you proud of me? I’m delegating. I’m giving away the plums instead of taking them for myself,” she said, keeping a straight face. She knew what he was trying to do, and she was tired of his indirection.

  “All of it?” he asked. “Karen, there are at least three features in this story.”

  “Let Clarissa decide how many features. She’s probably going to be editor in chief next year.”

  “The scene in the auditorium with the Warrior girl’s talk,” Gregory said, interrupting to list the features. He counted them on his fingers. “The place of the Collection in the development of the school. An editorial on the rightness, or wrongness, of giving it away or keeping it.” He knew that Karen understood all this. Clarissa too, he’d taught them both. But he was trying so hard to lure Karen into this story and away from the article she wanted to write! Just thinking about celebrating adolescent sex by writing about it in the school’s newspaper offended him.

  Perhaps one source of Gregory’s feelings on this subject was simple envy—his own sex life seemed to be finished. But Gregory, forty-five, divorced twenty years before, stuck with a monkish life because he really did believe that sex without love and lifelong commitment degraded humanity, and Gregory was too absorbed by Miss Oliver’s intense, inward-looking scene to have the time to fall in love again. Maybe the reason Gregory seemed so pompous and anachronistic was that, though surrounded by irony on every side, he took himself seriously enough to believe he had an eternal, precious soul that could be stained by fornication. He knew because he’d felt that stain a few times when, during his summer travels in foreign places, he’d fallen off the wagon, punctured his celibacy with some other lonely person, and then suffered weeks of remorse. At any rate, he took his students just as seriously as he took himself. They had souls too, just as eternal as his. That was really why he taught. If he had thought otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered.

  And he was one of the reasons Miss Oliver’s went against the tide. At Miss Oliver’s, Gregory van Buren was cool precisely because he wasn’t.

  “The whole subject?” he asked again. “Karen, you’re still the chief!”

  “I’ve got other fish to fry,” Karen said.

  “I know you do, and it’s wrong!”

  Well, why didn’t you just say that at the beginning? she thought. Out loud she said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” She really was. She was grateful for how tough he’d been on her, making her revise everything over and over until she got it right. Now she did that for herself. She knew Mr. van Buren disapproved of her article on moral grounds and also because it would be bad publicity for the school. Well, the headmaster had already told her that if he thought the article would harm the school, he wouldn’t let her publish it.

  “I can’t tell you not to do the interviews,” he said, as if reading her mind. “You can talk about anything you want. But you know the new headmaster won’t let you publish the article, so why do you persist in wasting your time? Mr. Kindler has more sense than his predecessor about such things,” he added, giving in to his sudden urge to goad her. Karen got his goat. He’d always been able to control his editors until this one came along. And she was the one he admired the most!

  “Well, then,” she said, “if the new headmaster won’t let me publish it, what are you so worried about?” It didn’t occur to either of them that Gregory would be the one to make the decision to ban the article. The school had been trained by Marjorie, who had made all the decisions.

  “Because it’s wrong. It’s perverse and degrading. That is what disturbs me, not the PR that the head worries about.”

  Karen wanted to say that there was nothing degrading about telling the truth, but she knew him well enough to know he would say that there was no such thing as objectivity, that just writing about teenagers having sex with each other without saying it’s wrong would make it seem to teenagers that it was right. Well, she didn’t agree. She didn’t think it was right, and she was a teenager.

  “I’m sorry you don’t agree with me that it’s wrong,” he murmured, giving up. He stood to show the conversation was over.

  Karen stayed in her chair. She wanted to say something more, but it didn’t come to her, so she stood up. “Clarissa will do fine,” she said. “I promise.”

  He nodded his head to affirm he knew that was true and sat down again, and feeling very sad, he watched her walk out the door.

  When she was halfway across campus heading to a class, she realized that one reason she wanted to write article was to earn Mr. van Buren’s praise. For once she wanted to write a piece that was so good he couldn’t find one thing to criticize. She’d come close lots of times, but there was always something. He’d taught her how to work, and she wanted to prove to him she’d learned. Just trying to make him admit that this one, which would be harder to do well than all the others, and that he hated, was as good as it could get, was worth the risk that the headmaster wouldn’t allow it to be printed.

  THAT AFTERNOON, FRED had an appointment with the officers of the student council. Lila arrived at his office before the others, bringing a greeting that had nothing personal in it, neither of animosity nor of affection—a mere “hi” as she came through the door. He sensed that she hadn’t written him off like most of the students.

  “Good morning, Lila,” he said warmly and gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk. Sitting down, she never took her eyes off his face.

  “Well, I guess you know what this is about,” she said.

  “Well, I’d be pretty dumb if I didn’t,” he said and smiled.

  But Lila, with too much on her mind to catch his playfulness, pushed on with her agenda. “I’ve asked Sara Warrior to come too,” she told him. “Even though she’s not on the council. Since it was her idea, I thought I should.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, though it wasn’t; it would make the meeting tenser.

  “Thank you.”

  “You okay?” he asked. He was worried about her. He saw how pale she was, how tired, this eighteen-year-old, the force behind the Declaration, the person who took responsibility for Sara’s claim. She had more pressure on her than many of the faculty.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  She didn’t know how to answer. If it had been later in the year they would have known each other better, and she could explain how Mr. Plummer had disappointed her, and Fred might observe that finding out her hero had clay feet showed she was outgrowing Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, as she should in her senior year. But they were too unknown to each other for such a conversation, so she simply nodded her head to insist she was feeling fine.

  And besides, here came the other girls.

  Angela Nash had been picked by lottery because nobody knew the ninth graders well enough yet to vote for one. She was so eager to get this job permanently when her classmates would vote in January that she tripped on the rug and almost fell down while making sure she got the chair nearest Fred. He had to turn away to hide his smile. Take it easy, he wanted to say to her. I don’t have a vote.

  Sara sat down beside Angela, her eyes cast down so she didn’t have to look at Fred. Marie Safford, a junior, was taller than Lila and stately, a young black woman wearing dreadlocks and studious glasses. She stalked, as if entering dangerous territory, to a chair on the other side of Lila from Fred, clutching a manila folder.

  “We have a proposal,” Lila said.

  “I figured you did.” He smiled. “Let’s hear it.”

  Lila nodded to Marie. Marie looked at Angela and moved the folder toward her, offering it. “No, you,” said Angela. “Go ahead.” The quirky way she held her head when she said this reminded Fred of his daughter, and now, suddenly more than ever, he didn’t want their proposal between him and them. He would have given anything just to sit and chat with th
ese kids, just pass the time of day.

  Marie opened the folder. “We, the student council of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls …”

  “Please,” said Fred. “Don’t read it. Just talk it through with me.”

  Marie shook her head. “Why not?” Angela asked. “We’ll explain it as we go.”

  “No,” Marie said. “I want to read it. This is not a conversation; it’s a proposal.”

  Lila looked at Fred. “Go ahead, read,” he said to Marie. So she did:

  We, the student council of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, require the administration and the board of trustees officially to return the artifacts, sacred to the memory of the Pequot culture, to their rightful owners, along with the human remains of a member of that tribe for burial in accordance with their sacred customs, and moreover, that the school, now and forever, relinquish all claims of ownership to these items currently on display in the school library.

  Jeepers! Fred thought, trying hard not to giggle. How about some iambic pentameter to dress it up? Out loud he said softly, “Don’t say require. Say request.”

  “Why?” Lila asked.

  “Because you’ll get further. That’s the way the world works.”

  “I’m not sure I like the way the world works,” Lila said.

  Angela put her hand on Lila’s knee, but Marie just rolled her eyes. “Lila’s been studying history again,” she explained to the ceiling. “She’s just now learning about racism.” Sara, stiff with tension, didn’t said a word. Fred tried to catch her eyes, but she looked away.