Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  Minutes later, Robin stopped the car near the edge of campus where there were no lights. “Thanks, Robin,” she said to the back of his head. She wanted to say more, but she couldn’t think of the words.

  He turned to look at her. “Take care of yourself.” She got out of the car and headed for her dorm. This time she wasn’t sneaking. If she got caught, she got caught. Then she heard the Subaru move away and realized that Robin had waited. He’d been watching her, hoping she got back without getting caught. She hoped that Charley had been watching too.

  WHEN JULIE CLIMBED through the window into her room, she could tell by Clarissa’s breathing that she was still only pretending to sleep. She let Clarissa know she didn’t believe her by being nowhere near as quiet as she would have been if Clarissa really were asleep. She rummaged around on her bureau for her toothbrush, then stomped out of the room to go to the bathroom, and when she came back, she closed the door with a bang.

  Clarissa went right on pretending. Her way of letting Julie know she didn’t want to deal with her tonight. She thought Julie had been partying with the Park Avenue crowd, Clarissa’s name for the kids who got wasted almost every night. They bored her to death. She opened her eyes just enough to see in the dim light coming through the window that Julie was throwing her clothes on the floor as she took them off to get in her bed.

  Now Clarissa was too furious to pretend any longer. “Pick your clothes up,” she commanded in the dark. She knew Julie was just trying to get her goat by strewing her clothes all over the floor. They’d fought about this before. Clarissa was a neatnik, Julie a slob. “Hang them in the closet,” Clarissa said.

  Julie turned on the light.

  “Like you promised me you would,” Clarissa said. She sat up. She was wearing her green pajamas, pressed and neat, her initials embossed on them, her mother’s gift to begin the year.

  Julie picked up her clothes and hung them in the closet, making a parody of being very neat, folding her T-shirt three times to get it right, creasing her jeans, and hanging each on a separate hanger. “I knew you were awake,” she said.

  “You better be careful,” Clarissa said. “Van Buren’s got eyes in the back of his head.”

  Julie didn’t respond

  Clarissa sat up even straighter in her bed. She didn’t want a roommate who didn’t like it here. Too much like she felt at home trying to explain to all her friends why she loved this school. They just thought she was weird. “Why not just quit and go home if you don’t like it here?” she asked.

  “My parents have paid the tuition; I’m not about to waste it.” Julie turned from the closet and sat on the edge of her bed.

  “All right. Then stop taking chances.”

  “And anyway, I wasn’t doing what you think I was doing.”

  Clarissa shrugged. She wasn’t the Gestapo. What did she care? Getting caught out of the dorm was trouble enough.

  “I was with my brother,” Julie said. She didn’t have to defend herself, it was nobody’s fucking business what she did or didn’t do, she just wanted Clarissa to know about her escapade, that’s all, she felt like telling her. So she told Clarissa about what she had been really doing when she snuck out. She liked Clarissa, liked her green pajamas, the way she studied so hard. She had heard the story about how last year Clarissa had refused to take van Buren’s final exam because there was an essay question on it about Huck Finn. And hadn’t argued when van Buren flunked her, not because she misinterpreted the book, an assertion he wouldn’t make because he had no essay to assess, but because civil disobedience has no meaning if it doesn’t have a price. How can you help not liking that?

  “Robin sounds like a nice guy,” Clarissa said when Julie finished. “I’m glad he was there for you.” Her voice was soft, her irritation gone. She turned out the light and lay down.

  Julie got in her bed. “Thanks for listening,” she said in the dark. She liked hearing Clarissa’s breathing across the room from her. This is how it must be for sisters, she thought.

  Just the same, she couldn’t figure out what it was about Miss Oliver’s that Clarissa was so loyal to and loved so much. How could she care whether or not boys were admitted; what was all the fuss about? What’s so special about going to school with only half the human race? And to have a whole meeting about whether to give that stuff back to some Indians? The Indians hadn’t even asked for it! She wanted to get up on stage in Morning Meeting and tell everybody to get a life. She wanted just not to be there.

  TEN DAYS LATER, on the Monday morning of Thanksgiving week, Fred Kindler saw right away how upbeat the board members were when they gathered for the meeting at the River Club. There was good reason for their happiness: Just last week the school’s lawyers, who had been working closely with Hannah’s, reported that they couldn’t find any way by which Hannah’s ex-husband could stop her from making the gift. It was Hannah’s money, they had declared, and as soon as Hannah’s ex realized he was wasting his meager resources trying to prove it wasn’t, the school would get the gift. It was a sure thing, and it would be wrapped up in only a couple of months.

  So now the school had much more time in its race against the deficit!

  Fred barely acknowledged this happy news as he started his report to the board. He moved instead immediately to the grim recruitment statistics. He was a conservative man. The money wasn’t in the bank yet. Nevertheless, a new attitude, of optimism tempered by realism, of faith in good organization and specific plans, started to grow around the mahogany table as the meeting progressed. Alan Travelers sensed this optimism as he moved through the agenda, acknowledging it to Fred with a subtle glance.

  Near the end of the agenda came an important item under new business: the student council’s petition to the board, signed by more than two-thirds of the students, to return the Collection to the Pequots. There was a little silence when everyone was finished reading. The members all looked at Alan. How to deal with this?

  But Milton Perkins stared at Fred. “Why are you bringing us this crap, Fred?” he asked. “First they threaten us with the Declaration. Which, I gotta admit, I liked the nerve that took. But then they bring us this! Has nothing to do with building the enrollment, or even letting boys in, or any other price of eggs. Just tell them no, for crying out loud, and let’s get back to running the damn place!”

  “He’s probably already told them no, and they’re still there,” Sonja McGarvey said. “That’s why he’s bringing us this ‘crap,’ as you so elegantly put it.”

  “Process!” Perkins exploded. “Jeezus, process again! Petitions. Protests. Even Hitler couldn’t run this nuthouse!”

  “Try Eva Braun,” McGarvey suggested. “Hitler’s the wrong gender.”

  “When I first got on this board,” Perkins remembered out loud, “nobody argued with the head. And they never even saw the board.”

  “Was that before the glacier,” McGarvey asked, “or after?”

  “That was when board members gave their money instead of their half-baked opinions.”

  McGarvey started to say something, thought better of it, and turned to Travelers. “Can we get on with this?”

  But Perkins wasn’t finished. “Sounds like it was written by some goddamn lawyer!” he growled.

  Nobody answered.

  “Whenever I read anything written by a lawyer, I automatically tear it up.” Perkins was grinning now, obviously enjoying himself. It was not clear whether he was making this up or if this was actually what he did.

  “All right, Milton,” Travelers said.

  “Then I send him a bill for three hundred dollars for wasting my time opening the envelope.”

  “Can we just please get on with the subject?” McGarvey asked again.

  “We’re on the subject,” Perkins said. “And when the bastard doesn’t pay, I take him to small claims court just to hassle him.” Travelers rapped his knuckles on the table, but Perkins went right on. “Then when he sends me a bill, I wait until just before he takes m
e to small claims and send him half—”

  “Milton!” Travelers started to stand.

  Perkins put up his hand, relinquishing the floor. “Works every time,” he said, winding down. “They never even bill for the second half.”

  “All right. Now that we know how Milton feels about lawyers, let’s address this issue,” Travelers said.

  “I’ve made my point,” said Perkins.

  Travelers, with whom Fred had shared his idea, announced, “Fred here has an alternative.”

  Fred took over and recommended making the Pequots owners of the on-campus Collection. The solution, he said, provided not only a logical answer to a legitimate ethical question, but also an excellent public relations initiative that would support the needed enrollment growth. “We can raise money for building the extra room to house the Collection from people who otherwise wouldn’t give us a dime, and I believe we can also find some money for financial aid for Pequot children,” he told them. “It’s a win-win; let’s do it.”

  It didn’t take long for the board to authorize Fred to put out feelers to the Pequot authorities and move forward with the plan if the Pequots agreed. There was a lot of work to do to bring this off.

  “I think it’s a great idea!” Alan Travelers said just before he adjourned the meeting.

  “We still need to put the right spin on it, though,” McGarvey pronounced. “It’s great public relations if we make it very clear we’re doing the right thing, and doing it right.”

  “I agree,” said Fred. “We’ll do it.”

  “Christ, what is this, Berkeley, California?” Perkins said. He hated both the student council’s idea and Fred’s for their political correctness. He was not the kind of man who spun. “You open up this can of worms with the Indians, they’ll decide they don’t want it in anybody’s museum. They’ll want to just bury the stuff, and then even they won’t know about their past,” he said. “What about that? You thought about that?”

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” Travelers suggested, and rapped on the table and called for adjournment, and when everybody but Perkins raised a hand, he ended the meeting.

  But, once again, Milton Perkins wasn’t finished. He stared across the table at McGarvey. “Since it’s spinning you want, why give just one little bone back?” he asked her gleefully. He just loved to push her buttons! “Why not give ’em a whole skeleton? We could dig an old alumna up. Find a real big one who died years ago. She’d never know the difference. We could give her to the Indians. That would shut everybody up.”

  Before Perkins finished, McGarvey was out the door. She’d been looking at her watch for the last ten minutes.

  “YES, I UNDERSTAND,” Lila admitted the next morning when Fred told her the board’s decision. “It makes a lot of sense. And Marie’s idea was a little crazy.” But that was the trouble: Lila really did understand. She wished she didn’t.

  “Lila, are you okay?” It was the second time he’d asked her. He respected her yearning for the moral purity of Marie Safford and Sara Warrior’s position and would have been disappointed if she didn’t. “There’s a lot of pressure on you, Lila,” he said, taking a different tack. “More than on some of the faculty, even.”

  That wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. Pressure. Tension. It made it worse to talk about it.

  “You could have a chat with Ms. Rugoff,” Fred persisted, mentioning the school counselor. He held his breath, remembering how angry Francis Plummer had been when he mentioned counseling to him.

  Lila shook her head.

  “All right,” he said, backing off. “It was just an idea.”

  “I don’t need her to tell me what’s bothering me,” she said, lowering her eyes. “I already know.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he murmured and sat quietly waiting.

  “It’s hard to explain, and it sounds stupid,” Lila began. She looked up, studying him to see if she trusted him enough to reveal this much about herself.

  “I bet it won’t sound stupid to me.”

  She sent a little smile to thank him for that. “I wish I could be like Marie,” she said, admitting it at last. “The way she cares about what’s absolutely right, and nothing else.”

  “Not even whether it works?”

  “Yes!” she said. “Not to give a damn!”

  “It’s too late, Lila,” he said. “You’re way past that point.” And when she didn’t say anything to that, he asked, “How old are you, Lila?”

  She frowned. Why was he asking that? “Eighteen,” she said. “Why?”

  “How long do you think those Pequots lived?”

  “In the village that was here? Maybe forty years.”

  “You’re almost halfway there. You’d be a chief by now.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said and shook her head. “The chiefs were men.”

  “Behind the scenes, Lila. The real boss behind the boss.”

  “No way. I’m not going to be anybody’s boss. I’m going to be an archaeologist.”

  “You’ll be the boss archaeologist,” he said. “You’ll take the weight.”

  But he’s got that wrong, she thought. I don’t take it. It goes right by the ones who really want it, which I don’t, and just comes to me. She could tell him that—if she knew him better, if it didn’t sound so proud. “Well, anyway,” she finally said, bringing their meeting to an end. She needed to get out of there before he mentioned Ms. Rugoff again. “Thanks for telling me. I’ll tell the students today in Morning Meeting.” But she didn’t stand up, realizing she didn’t want the meeting to end after all. She liked talking to this man; he calmed her down.

  “All right.” He stood, and the meeting was over. She was disappointed. “Thanks, Lila.” He shook her hand. Treating her like a grown-up. A peer. “This is going to work out fine.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’ll be just fine.”

  THE NEXT PERSON Fred told was Peggy, of course. He promised that over Thanksgiving recess, which started the next day at noon, he would begin to work on the plan. He would do some research and ask around to figure out with whom among the Pequot authorities he should broach the idea. Peggy was delighted. What she had started years ago was going to achieve its most logical and inspiring development. In her mind, she saw the new wing, a true museum, the school serving not just a private but a public purpose. “Why didn’t I think of this idea years ago?” she asked.

  Because you’re human. He wanted to quote Rachel Bickham to her. Instead he said, “Who cares who thought of it. We’re teammates.”

  “Yes, and I love being on your team,” she told him. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to this place.”

  LATER THAT MORNING, when Lila made the announcement, applause broke out. But when she went on to tell the students that this good idea was their new headmaster’s, the applause was sparse, seemed grudging, almost disappointed that it wasn’t someone else’s: Peggy Plummer’s, especially, or Francis’s, or Rachel Bickham’s, even Gregory van Buren’s. So Peggy stood up, showed her true colors once again, telling the school how creative an idea this was, how inclusive, how much it pleased her; and the students, corrected, supplied a little more applause.

  The twenty or so students who remained unpersuaded sat on their hands until the applause ended. They did so for themselves and for Sara, who wasn’t there to get this news. She had called her parents the previous evening; they had arrived in the morning and took her home. They would bring her back on Monday when Thanksgiving recess was over. That way she didn’t have to be there for the turkey the school would serve tonight, the pumpkins, the corn: Indian food white people eat to say thank you to their god for helping them steal the land. Thanksgiving was not for Sara at this school, where a remnant of one of her people lay in a display for all to gawk at.

  AFTER THE THANKSGIVING dinner, Peggy again went to her library for the evening instead of coming home. Levi went with her, leaving Francis alone in the apartment thinking about Fred Kindler’s soluti
on to the issue of the Pequot Collection. He had to admit it was a marvelous idea to invite the Pequots back to the ground on which one of their villages had thrived for centuries. So it didn’t surprise him that he thought right then of the papier mâché model that Siddy had made in the sixth grade of that very village. It was stored away in the attic. Up there with all the other nostalgia that neither he nor Peggy could bear to throw away.

  He climbed the stairs. Under the naked lightbulb that hung from the rafters, he found the model just where he had placed it years ago on an old table. What he noticed, which he had not seen as sharply before, was the familiar shape of the ground that Siddy had modeled—his son’s loving imitation of the ground on which he had grown up, the place in the world he’d known best. The revelation filled Francis with longing for his son. Staring at the model, he remembered that Siddy’s teacher had told him that this was perfect research. “Everything we know tells us that an Indian village very much like this one existed here on this very spot for years and years and years. On this very spot!” she repeated. He remembered loving her for being so proud of Siddy.

  For a few seconds he knew he’d been in the village, way beyond mere visualization, its every part familiar, and suddenly he was so lonely for his son he missed a breath, remembering that years ago when he and Peg were very young and they had just brought Siddy into their lives, they would wake in the middle of the night and go into his room just to watch him sleep. Siddy had chastised him once when he couldn’t have been more than seven years old for cutting down a small tree in the backyard that was casting shade on the garden. “There are millions of trees in New England,” Francis told the boy. “They are like weeds.”

  “But Dad, it’s alive!” Siddy had said.

  THAT NIGHT HE dreamed: In the middle of a starlit night the students stood in semicircular rows in front of the library staring at him. Somehow he knew that he had called them there. He heard drums. The library loomed behind him in the dark.