Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  “Well, I have an alternative proposal,” Fred said and told them of his idea of rendering the ownership of the Collection to the Pequots while keeping it on campus in the library. He grew even more enthusiastic as he saw Lila’s expression brighten. Why shouldn’t she like it since everyone would win? “We’ll build another wing,” he went on. “It will be their Collection, honoring their history on ground where their village was situated, and we’ll invite members of their nation to be on our board and recruit their children—”

  “Oh!” Angela interrupted, smiling, and sitting up even straighter. “What a wonderful idea!”

  “It stinks,” said Marie

  “Well, I don’t think it stinks,” Fred said.

  “It stinks of compromise.”

  “Compromise is how the world works,” Fred said, then wished he hadn’t.

  “Oh, let’s stop pretending!” Marie exclaimed. “This isn’t a Pequot village. It’s a school for rich white girls.”

  Marie, please, what color are you? Fred thought.

  “That’s right, white,” Marie said, as if reading his mind. “We live in Greenwich, for God’s sake! My father’s a lawyer for Exxon; my mother belongs to the Junior League. They’re whiter than you are.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t they live in Greenwich if they want to?” Angela asked, and Marie looked at her as if she were three years old.

  “Hey, Marie,” Fred said softly, feeling a sudden flood of empathy for her parents, whom he hadn’t even met. “We need to talk.” He knew she wanted to know why the school could be so proud of its diversity—all those skin colors living together—when hardly anyone came from neighborhoods where kids got shot and the only stores were liquor stores. That bothers me too, he’d tell her. It’s one of the things I want to fix.

  “Okay, we’ll talk,” Marie said, shrugging her shoulders. “Sometime. Maybe.”

  So now Fred turned to Lila. “Well, Lila, what do you think of my idea?” he asked, and then the room was very quiet and everyone was looking at Lila, and right away Fred realized what a lousy thing he’d done. Sara was staring at Lila’s face, counting on her to answer. And he was the one who was worried about the pressure on Lila, and now he did this to her! Forget it, don’t answer that, he wanted to say.

  He didn’t need to, because Marie was too heated by this issue to wait for Lila’s answer. Or maybe she was trying to save Sara from the disillusion of Lila’s deserting her. She was certainly not trying to take the pressure off Lila. “It doesn’t make any difference what you think, or what Lila thinks or what I think,” she said to Fred, and he could feel her anger filling the room. Marie’s rage at injustice was inflamed by her thinking she’d been cheated out of the hurt of it because her family was rich. She thought she’d never have a chance to be as passionate as those other young people who before her time had sat scared to death at white lunch counters to try to make the world the way it ought to be. “The only person in this room who has any right to an opinion about this is Sara,” she said.

  “That’s not fair,” Angela blurted.

  Marie ignored her, keeping her eyes on Fred. “I ask you: Who are you to decide what should be done with the Collection? The only jurisdiction you have is that it’s in your possession.” And that you’re white and male and the headmaster, she was tempted to add. But she was too smart to go that far. “We need to not be the owners anymore,” she said instead. “We need to give the stuff back to the rightful owners. If they want to put it back here in our library, that’s their decision.”

  “Oh, you’re just splitting hairs!” Angela exclaimed.

  “No, she isn’t,” Fred said. “She’s being precise. That’s a good way to be.” Then turning to Marie, he said, “I like your approach. I like it a lot. But you have to know I like mine better.”

  “Why?” she wanted to know.

  “Because more good comes from it,” Fred answered, and Marie shut up. She sensed how stubborn he was, how fixed in his plan. There was another way for her to win: collect a ton of signatures on the petition. Let him deal with those.

  Sara still hadn’t spoken. Lila felt the weight of her gaze. How to explain to Sara that she liked Mr. Kindler’s idea? And how to explain how much she wished she didn’t? She envied the purity of Marie’s belief, the single-mindedness of it.

  “Anyway, Marie,” Fred said, “I think the proposal’s fine, and I admire it. But I like mine better. So I’ll deliver both to the board of trustees at the November meeting.”

  “Well, we already know which proposal they’ll take, don’t we,” Marie said. “You’re the headmaster.”

  Yup, you’re right, Fred was tempted to say. That’s the way the world works.

  Instead he didn’t say anything, and that was all the signal that Sara needed. She stood up and fled the room.

  Fred stood too, all his instincts pushing him to follow her. He wanted to put his arm around her, he wanted to explain, but he knew that wouldn’t work. He’d end up chasing her through the building, making her feel even worse, so he stood still behind his desk. Marie and Lila and Angela stood now too. All three were looking at the door.

  “Yes,” he said. “Take care of Sara.” The girls moved to the door.

  “Right,” Marie said bitterly, “We’ll make sure she’s learned her lesson.”

  “What lesson is that, Marie?” he challenged.

  “How the world works,” she answered over her shoulder as she went through the door. “Isn’t that how you put it?”

  FIFTEEN

  The Lord bless you and keep you,” Father Michael Woodward said to his congregation as the service ended this first Sunday in October. “The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.” He made the sign of the cross. “The Lord lift his countenance upon you and give you peace.” As he said this benediction, he looked straight at Francis and Peggy, and saw Francis inching his way closer to the aisle so he could be the first to get out of there. Well, good for you, anyway, for trying to conform, Father Woodward wanted to say to Francis, though the last thing he would pray for when he prayed for them both and for their marriage would be that Francis succeed in this pretense. Instead, Father Woodward (who had annoyed the vestry at last month’s meeting by suggesting only half in jest that the road to world peace was to give everyone who believes in a God a lobotomy to make them forget the differences in their beliefs—and then proceeded to go to sleep during the finance committee report) would pray for Peggy’s belief to broaden to embrace her husband’s too, rather than just the other way around.

  In fact, there was another reason, besides his alienation from the service, for Francis’s haste to leave the church. This was the Sunday the student council chose for the service projects Rachel Bickham had suggested to Fred Kindler instead of Sunday classes as a consequence of those missed during the Petrie invasion. So right after church, Francis hurried to join Rachel to lead a group of students in the cleanup of a salt marsh near the mouth of the river. When he got to the bus that would take them to the marsh, Rachel and the students were already there, waiting for him.

  On the way south to the marsh, Rachel reminded the students how wondrously complex an estuarine marsh was, how like blood was the mix of salt and fresh water that came and went over it, the marsh itself was like a womb where many of the creatures that lived in the ocean were born.

  They spent the afternoon walking in line abreast back and forth across the marsh, picking up discarded tires, bottles, cans, plastic bags that, floating in the ocean, choke turtles to death because they think they’re jellyfish. The students wondered at the many different kinds of crabs they saw, the balls of matted fur and crushed bones shat out by birds of prey, the variety of birds, grasses, animal tracks.

  When they were finished, they walked back to the bus in the slanted sunlight of the autumn afternoon, and just before they climbed on, Rachel told them that each acre of a healthy salt marsh delivered an average of sixty-two tons of foodstuffs to the food chain every yea
r. “Without one hour of human labor,” she told them. “No farm in the world can match that, no human ingenuity needed. We could disappear off the earth, and it would still happen,” Rachel said, echoing Lila’s words last summer when she had told Francis that his turtle appeared to him from out of the time when the world was here and human beings were not. Francis was struck by how similar Rachel’s words were to those Livingstone Mendoza had spoken when he came to the school last February and inspired Francis and Lila to follow him out west. Yes, inspire, Francis admitted, for it really was about the breath of life that Mendoza had been talking. It dawned on him that his efficient colleague, Rachel Bickham of the orderly mind, gifted teacher, able administrator, destined for the highest posts, would not have been as embarrassed as he, Francis, had been playing Indian for a childlike Livingstone Mendoza. Rachel and Mendoza would have recognized in each other that openness to the grace that comes, as Peggy put it. For to be as a child—full of wonder—is to be full of grace.

  Standing on the narrow black tar road just before he climbed back up into the bus, October’s woods flaming behind him, Francis looked out over the brown grass and living mud of the salt marsh to the sea beyond it, and seeing, he hoped, with Indian eyes, as Mendoza had offered, he wondered if he would be able to keep his promise that from then on his spiritual yearnings would be in tune with Peggy’s.

  A WEEK LATER, just home from church, he was still in doubt, though the words of peace in Father Woodward’s benediction echoed in his head. He wondered if he should bring the subject up with Peggy, ease their pain by talking about it. But he didn’t get this chance, because the doorbell rang. Peggy got there first. She opened it, flooding the apartment with golden light, and there, framed in the doorway, stood a tall woman who was smiling and reaching out for a hug.

  Looking into the visitor’s face from where he was standing behind Peg, Francis knew exactly who she was, who her friends were, what her mother and dad were like, the exact year she had graduated—but he couldn’t remember her name, and he was in his ocean again. He’d always remembered the names before; it was the young teachers who forgot. All this in an instant, a little spear of panic, and then Peggy said, “Why, Hannah! Hannah Fingerman!” and Francis, rescued, couldn’t even imagine the moment a second ago when her name hadn’t existed in his brain. “Come in!” Peg said. “It’s wonderful to see you!”

  Hannah was the same tall person she had been twenty years ago, though now the blackness of her hair was fake and she was a little thicker in the middle. Francis remembered she hadn’t been one of the “smart” ones, hadn’t succeeded in getting in to any of the colleges to which her friends had been admitted. The faculty had given her the benefit of the doubt when they graded her final exams in her senior year so she could graduate. “And why shouldn’t they?” Marjorie had applauded. “Everyone knows that the kids who flounder in classrooms are the ones designed to shine later.” That’s what Marjorie had been trying to say when she had irritated the trustees year after year by refusing to publicize the invariably impressive list of the most competitive colleges to which the seniors had gained acceptance. “That’s not how we measure success,” Marjorie would say, while Francis’s heart flamed with pride and Gregory van Buren shook his head.

  Hannah stepped through the door and fended off Levi, who was trying to put his nose up under her dress. “You guys never change!” she said. “You had a dog like that twenty years ago!” Now she was in the middle of the room, and Francis was kissing her cheek. “God!” she said. “You don’t look any different.”

  “Being around kids keeps you young,” he said.

  “Yeah, lucky you.” Hannah tossed her hair—a familiar gesture, but it didn’t look the same. Somehow, she was too old for it. “What was that dog’s name?” she asked.

  “Levi,” said Peg, smiling.

  “Levi? Oh, yes. I remember! What’s this one’s name?” She reached down now to pat Levi, whose whole rear end was wagging. “God, it’s good to see you guys! It feels like ten minutes ago. Lots of water over the dam.”

  “And you’re going to tell us all about it,” said Peg.

  “Levi,” said Francis. “The dog’s name is Levi.”

  Hannah looked up from her patting, searched Francis’s face. “You’re kidding.”

  “The one you knew was Levi One. This one’s Levi Two,” he said.

  Hannah was grinning now. She sat down on the sofa.

  “Really,” said Peg.

  Hannah, playing along, asked, “Is he Jewish?”

  Peg looked at Francis.

  “Yup,” said Francis. “He’s Jewish, all right.”

  “Now I really feel at home,” Hannah said, grinning even wider now.

  “Hannah,” Peggy said, “tell us where you’ve been.”

  Hannah shook her head. “I love it when things don’t change,” she said.

  “Well, we could talk about that!” Francis said.

  “Hannah, catch us up,” said Peg.

  “I’ve made a bunch of money,” Hannah announced. “Surprise! Surprise!”

  “We’re not surprised,” said Francis.

  Hannah told them she had married a Canadian whose health club in Montreal was failing, and, offering to help him, she had taken it over bit by bit, discovering an instinctive talent. “It’s the right brain,” she informed them. “As long as I don’t think too hard about things, I always get them right. He was just the opposite. He planned everything so much he never got around to doing anything. Too much business school, not enough guts. Well, we’re divorced now. He couldn’t stand it that his wife was better at something than he was, poor thing. Hell, I’m better at everything than he is, and now I have three clubs in Montreal, one in Toronto, and two in Vancouver. I’m national! Also, I’m a free woman. Being single is almost as much fun as being rich!”

  “That’s wonderful, Hannah!” Peggy said. “We’re very happy for—”

  “Yeah, and I hear you might go coed,” Hannah interrupted. She leaned forward, her voice suddenly harsh. She could never have done that to a conversation as a kid. “If we hadn’t been just girls when I was here, I’d still be an assistant club manager and married to a wimp.”

  “Right!” said Francis.

  “It’s not definite,” Peggy said. “A long way from being definite. The girls—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, but I have a way to guarantee it won’t happen.”

  “What’s that?” Francis asked.

  “Money!” Hannah leaned back, spread her arms along the back of the sofa, taking up as much space as any man would.

  “You’re going to make a donation.” Peg’s tone was matter-of-fact.

  “That’s right.” Hannah kept her arms spread, her head tilted back, relaxed, as if she did this every day. “You bet! A big one.”

  “Hey! Hey! Hey!” said Francis. “Hannah baby!”

  “How big?” Peggy asked.

  “Two. Two big ones,” Hannah grinned.

  Francis and Peg looked at each other, disappointed. Two thousand? What good is that? Peg started to get up to get Hannah some coffee.

  “Two million,” said Hannah. “How’s that?”

  “Two million!” said Francis.

  “Two million,” Peggy repeated, as if testing the sound.

  “That’s it!” Hannah leaned forward again. “Two million to buy the deficit until the school builds the enrollment back up. And I mean the enrollment without any boys around. Just girls!” She leaned further forward still, gesturing with her hands in front of her, projecting herself, filling the room.

  “Just girls,” Hannah repeated. “No boys. We keep the old school, just the way it always was. That’s the whole point of the place, right? I make a deal: The school agrees to stay for girls only, and I cover the deficit while it builds the girls-only enrollment up again.”

  “We can do that,” said Peg.

  “We better!” Hannah said. “No compromises.”

  “Right,” said Francis.

>   “Besides which, I go on the board,” Hannah declared.

  “Of course!” said Francis.

  “When’s this going to happen?” asked Peggy.

  “Soon as my lawyers finish squashing my ex-husband’s attempt to get some of this dough.”

  “Oh,” said Peggy. Already she’d lost heart. She started to get up again.

  Hannah gestured to Peg to stay seated, she didn’t come for coffee. “Don’t worry. I mean it. It’s close to a done deal. Two months at most. I wouldn’t have come to you about this until it was actually done, except the board needs to know about this before it goes and does something stupid.”

  “Really?” asked Peg.

  “Count on it.”

  “Okay,” said Francis. “We’re counting on it!” His mind was full of schemes. If he took this gift right now, it would put him in charge. Whose gun was going to make a bigger bang than this?

  There was a little moment of silence while Francis thought of this, and none of them spoke, and the Sunday morning dormitory sounds of showers running on and on, padding feet, sleepy voices drifted into the apartment. “Ah, Sunday morning,” Hannah said. “The only day we could sleep.”

  “Yeah, we keep ’em busy,” Francis said.

  “That was the hardest thing for me to get used to,” Hannah remembered, “Saturday classes. You know, Mr. van Buren would harp on that, quoting from Thoreau all the time: ‘Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!’ I loved the guy, but on this he was full of crap. That’s not what this school is about.”

  “So what is it about?” said Peg.

  “Why, intensify, of course,” Hannah said, spreading her hands. “Anybody can see that. Intensify! Intensify! Intensify!”

  Francis thought: You were never dumb. We just asked you the wrong questions.

  “Well, Hannah,” Peggy said, “I’m sure you’re right. We can count on your gift. It’s wonderful! How marvelous! I hope you’ll march right over to Fred Kindler’s house right now and tell him. It will make his day!”

  “Fuck him!” Hannah said.