Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  One of the girls stepped forward. She looked like Lila, but he knew she wasn’t. She handed him a torch, which a second before had not been in her hand. He turned. The library was a dark cliff in front of him. He reached toward it with the torch, and it burst into flames. He realized, strangely, that he had been smelling smoke since before the flames began. He kneeled and wept. When he rose finally and turned around, all the girls were gone.

  He was still dreaming that he was weeping when Peggy shook him awake. She was staring at his face. “Wake up!” she said. He sat up. She handed him some clothes. “There’s a fire,” she said. “The library’s burning.” Her words were a monotone—as if it were someone one else’s library, on the other side of the world.

  WATCHING THE LIBRARY burn, all Francis could think of was that the smell and the crackling sound reminded him of campfires. He thought of marshmallows, their skins wrinkling, turning black. He stood, watching, behind the students, who had arrived there first. Everybody had to stand a long way back. Peggy stood to his right. Soon Margaret Rice joined them, standing to his left. She reached for his left hand, and he took hers. No one spoke. Finally, the fire department arrived and sprayed streams of water into the orange glow. The firefighters in their heavy coats were dark silhouettes against the flames.

  He stood on tiptoes and found Lila Smythe in the crowd of girls. She turned toward him then, and their eyes met. She left her friends, moving through the crowd toward him, until she stood in front of him. Peggy moved two steps away. “Well,” said Lila. “It isn’t how we planned things.”

  “It’s too bad,” he said. “It was a beautiful library.” Just then the building collapsed, the roof melted. There was a shower of sparks against the black sky. Someone screamed.

  “Fire purifies,” Lila said. Her eyes were shining. “It will work out. The insurance will rebuild the library, bring in some more artifacts, but it won’t rebuild the bones. They’re safe. It’s a sacred fire.” Her eyes were alight with more than the fire.

  He didn’t answer, just stared at her face. She looked right back. Ashes to ashes, he thought, the bones at rest. Then he felt a presence behind him, and he turned. Fred Kindler stood there, not ten paces away, staring into Francis’s face just the way Francis had stared into Lila’s.

  SEVENTEEN

  Don’t come home,” Peggy said to Francis as soon as Lila went back to her friends. The words surprised her. As if someone she didn’t know were saying them.

  Francis pretended he didn’t hear. He was not even looking at Peggy. He was staring at the fire. The flames were lower now that the walls had collapsed but still fierce enough to eat the water streaming from the firefighters’ hoses. The sodden smell of ashes floated in the dark. Some of the students were crying.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t hear me,” she told him. She couldn’t believe she was saying this, for she could see he was grieving too. But Lila Smythe had stood two feet away from her and told her husband that it was a sacred fire, and he didn’t say a thing, didn’t even argue!

  He stared straight ahead, but in the glow she saw the shock of her words register on his face. Margaret Rice heard them too. She turned to Peggy, then quickly looked away.

  “Just stay away, Francis,” Peggy said. Margaret looked at Francis, who gave her a little shrug that seemed to say, Don’t worry, she doesn’t mean it; then Margaret stepped away into the crowd. Francis turned to Peggy, reaching for her hand.

  “Find some other place to live,” Peggy said. She took a step away.

  “Peg!” he called after her.

  She whirled around, facing him again. “A sacred fire!” she said. “I hope it keeps you warm!” The crowd of watchers made room for her as she moved away.

  THERE IT WAS, big as life, her first reaction to the library’s burning down: She wanted him out of the house. She didn’t even ask herself how long she thought this feeling was going to last. So at five-thirty in the morning, she packed Francis’s underwear and socks, his shirts, and khakis in the same ugly duffel bag he’d taken to California, putting his shoes and shaving gear in a backpack. There was a Dewey decimal system for this stuff too, departing fragments, that Francis would just throw in all together if she were to allow him into the house long enough to pack them for himself. He’d come in an hour or two, after he’d finished moving around the campus talking to the students, comforting them. She was sure that’s what he was doing. Otherwise, he’d be there right then, convinced that she didn’t really want him out of the house. So she’d locked the door from the inside, a door they’d never locked in thirty years. She made neat piles in the duffel, squaring the edges. In the smell of wet ashes pervading her house, she had more need for order than ever.

  At six-thirty the phone rang. It was Fred saying he wanted to see her in his office. “So we can get started,” he said.

  “Started?”

  “On the new library, Peggy.”

  You’re crazy! she almost said. The fire had only been out a couple of hours. Then she realized it wasn’t crazy, wasn’t crazy at all; and it was typical of him to know this was exactly what she needed.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be asleep,” he said.

  “Give me thirty minutes.” If Francis came home before she was back from Fred Kindler’s office, he’d just have to wait to get his things.

  She carried the suitcases and the backpack out of the bedroom, across the living room, and placed them next to the front door, divining what Francis would see when she opened the door and allowed him only that one step into the house to pick up his things. Her eyes went straight across the room to the mantelpiece where, between two candlesticks, a framed black-and-white photograph sat: her father and her mother, Ada Louise Boyer—the loveliest name in the world, she thought. On the front lawn, sprinkled with October leaves, they gazed past the camera at the bright future they still believed was theirs. The photo was the first thing Francis would see when he entered the house, but he wouldn’t notice. They’re dead, she said to herself, looking away. He never knew them. Next to this, another picture sat, in which she and Francis stood, bride and groom, side by side. In his rented black tailcoat, grinning, Francis came up to her shoulder. She went to this, plucked it off the mantelpiece. Francis’s grin was aimed right at the camera. She was looking past the camera, out of the picture, to where Francis’s father stood. She placed the picture on top of the backpack.

  She vacuumed, she dusted, she turned on the kitchen fan, trying to get the ashy smell out, pulled down the shades on the side of the house toward where her library had been, and when she was finished, her house as clean and neat as she could get it, she locked the door to the dormitory then went out through the front door, locking it behind her. The key felt strange in her hand. When Francis would come and find the front door bolted while she was away, he’d stand there for a little while not believing—she could hardly believe it herself—before giving up and going away. Then he’d go to Michael Woodward’s house. When he would come back to try again, she’d stand just inside the door, guarding her house.

  “I’VE ALREADY CALLED the insurance agent,” Fred Kindler told Peggy.

  “He’s coming right out. He says not to worry; it was completely insured.”

  What he didn’t tell her was that he hadn’t been sure it was insured until he’d called Alan Travelers, the first person he informed. He knew he was being overanxious.

  “Of course it was insured!” Alan had exclaimed. “You forget what I do for a living.” And then, “Oh, my God! You thought Marjorie and old Vincent were that unbusinesslike?”

  Fred hadn’t answered.

  “Okay, I won’t go there,” Alan had said and then changed the subject. “Don’t let this get you, Fred. Think of it as an opportunity. We’ve got a chance to build an even better library.” Alan’s voice had been full of energy. It almost sounded optimistic, and Fred knew that his board chair was trying to keep him pumped up. “Nobody was hurt. Concentrate on that.”

  “Well, I hope
that softens the blow for you at least a little bit, anyway,” Fred told Peggy now. “And I promise you this,” he added. “The new library’s going to be even better than the old one. You won’t lose a thing.”

  She shook her head, a very slight motion, like a hurt boxer clearing his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to sound—”

  “When do we get started?” Peggy asked. She didn’t want him to have to apologize for trying to keep her spirits up.

  “Right now!”

  “Thank you! I don’t know what I would do if I had to wait till Monday.”

  They started to work. He asked her to make a list: “Everything you’d want to preserve and everything you’d want to change if your library hadn’t burned down and we had all the money we needed.” You can’t replace a person, he wanted to say. You can a library. And you can make it even better.

  While she made her list, he made one of his own of everything that had to be done, starting with how to handle the newspapers. As soon as the faculty and students got enough sleep after being awake most of the night—it was still only seven in the morning—he was going to assemble them all. They would need to be together, all in the same space, after such a disaster; and after they talk a while, he’d ask them to send all newspaper reporters and phone calls from reporters to him. In the meantime, the phones were on the taped answering system that would tell people the switchboard was closed until eight o’clock, and if there was an emergency to please call a number that would ring right there on his desk so he could answer it himself. Even though later in the day the parents would be arriving to take their children home for the Thanksgiving recess, he’d divide the list of parents among the faculty and ask them to call and give exactly the same message to everyone: The library burned in the night; no one’s hurt; the cause is unknown. “Emphasize that too,” he’d tell them. “Don’t speculate with anyone about the cause.”

  When Peggy handed him her list, he wasn’t surprised that, except for a few minor details, it described the library that had just burned down. A few days later, he’d ask her to think some more.

  “Thanks,” he said. “This is great.”

  “All right,” she said. “What now?”

  “Keep making this list. Everything we can think of that needs to be done. We’ll put it into sequence later.” He stepped into Ms. Rice’s office. Peggy waited alone, then watched him return a moment later with a big pad of easel paper. The two of them ripped the sheets off and taped them up on the walls around his office. “I always feel silly when I do this,” he told Peggy, speaking as if to himself. “Too ‘with it’ and groovy. Like a consultant instead of a guy with a real job, but it works.”

  That’s when she started to cry.

  At first he ignored her, pretending he didn’t see she was crying. Then he reached for her hand. Peggy didn’t offer it and stepped a little further away from him. That small shake of her head again. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Look, I’d be crying too.”

  She made a small dismissive gesture with one hand, wiped at her eyes with the other, and forced herself to stop crying. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

  He turned to the sheet he was working on and wrote: appoint a committee to decide on the architect. She watched him write that, and on her own sheet she started writing the names of people who might be on the committee.

  After they had worked for several more minutes, she suddenly put her marker down, turned to face him, and said, “Who did it?” She’d been trying not to think about this, but she couldn’t put it off any longer.

  “I don’t know.” He was still facing his sheet of paper, still writing.

  “Who do you think?”

  “I don’t think,” he said, still facing the paper.

  “I think you should.”

  “Most people would,” he admitted.

  “Most people would be right.” She felt anger rising. How can he not want revenge?

  He turned to her then. “I have other priorities. I’m not going to wreck this community by investigating people, playing detective. I’m going to leave that up to the fire department and the police. They’re outsiders. They can be the ones to hold suspicions.”

  Marie? he wondered. Lila? How terrible that would be! He hated himself for even thinking of them. Thank God Sara had gone home a whole day before the fire. At least she was not a suspect. He shook his head to clear it. This was exactly what he’d told himself he wasn’t going to do.

  “I’m going to need to know,” Peggy said. “I’m not going to be able to let it rest.”

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  “All right,” she said. “I hope so.” Then after a pause: “Anyway, you need to know—”

  “Peggy, I don’t need to know anything.”

  “That you only have one person running our dormitory now. You’re the headmaster. You need to know that. Francis is going to be living somewhere else.”

  The sharpness of his disappointment surprised him. Not just for her, but for Francis too—that’s what surprised him. “This makes me very sad,” he said.

  “Me too. I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “The truth will come out someday,” she said, because she needed to change the subject back to the fire. “It always does. I just hope it wasn’t any of the students. That would hurt too much.” She started to cry again.

  “Maybe it just happened,” he murmured. Which he knew was crazy. But he had to admit that if he knew who did it, he would know whom to be grateful to. For like wars to failing presidents, this calamity provided a chance for him to shine. He was going to manage the crisis, build an even better library, bring the Pequots in to establish a more extensive Collection, and house it there. The new library would be his accomplishment; it would give him power. He was surprised to discover that he was not ashamed of these thoughts. But he was not about to admit them to Peggy.

  “Nothing ever just happens,” Peggy said, struggling to stop crying.

  “I know,” he said, and turned back to his work.

  EIGHTEEN

  In spite of Fred’s determination to downplay the investigation into the burning of the library, he realized as soon as the students returned from the break that he was in charge of a school in which the only thing anyone could see was the empty space and blackened foundation that loomed in the center of campus, where the library had been.

  Who did it? That was the question on everyone’s mind. And even more painful for some: Does anyone think I did it?

  That question haunted Lila Smythe, who thought she caught a certain expression, half fascination, half embarrassment, in the sidewise glances of some of her peers. She was sure that at least a few students—and who knew how many faculty?—had overheard her when she told Francis Plummer that the fire was sacred. She caught herself every once in a while feeling guilty, as if she actually had caused the fire. Even Sara Warrior, who everyone knew didn’t do it because she had been home with her family, felt estranged because she knew that she was the first person everyone thought of—as if she could imagine doing something so terrible! Marie Safford also wondered how many thought she did it.

  The lead investigator was a somber man in his forties, already bald, a weightlifter in a crisp blue uniform and shiny badge. He wanted to give a speech to the students about fire safety in the dorms, which Fred prohibited, angering the man and hurting his feelings. He didn’t understand that his face, associated with suspicion and mistrust, should be as invisible as possible.

  When the investigators finished examining the ruins, they reported that they’d eliminated natural causes such as lightning. Fred wasn’t surprised. Of course it wasn’t lightning; it had been a clear November night. They didn’t tell him any more than that since, officially at least, he was a suspect too.

  Fred pushed the investigators to work as fast as they could, and he wouldn’t le
t them interview the students on campus. He rented an office off campus and insisted the interviews take place in this neutral space and in the company of Kevina Rugoff, the school counselor. Some parents retained a lawyer to accompany their daughter to the interview. Most of the parents of the interviewed students were angry and hurt. Over the phone and in person in his office they railed at Fred. He let them tell him how angry they were at him, sometimes several times, assuring them each time that he understood their feelings before he ended the conversations.

  FOR THE STUDENTS, one small light in this darkness was their excitement over the secret they were for the most part managing to keep—especially, they incorrectly assumed, from the new headmaster—about the research Karen Benjamin was conducting on the sex lives of the seniors. The students didn’t know that last summer Karen had warned the headmaster about the article. If they did, they would have been even more convinced that they’d never see it in the Clarion. They expected it to appear sub rosa, Xeroxed and passed around. In fact, they might be disappointed if their new headmaster hadn’t forbidden publication. They expected him to confirm what they already knew: how much less daring, how much less heroically committed to the truth he was than their beloved Mrs. Boyd had been when she was the headmistress of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.

  Karen’s research focused as much on the girls’ attitudes as on their actual activities or lack of them. For instance, what, short of actual intercourse, qualified in their minds as sex? She had distributed a questionnaire to be filled out anonymously. The first section elicited objective responses to questions about what actual activities starting at what age, how many partners, and so on. The second section, more subjective, probed the motivations, such as:

  Why do you refrain from sexual activity (if you do)? Check any answers that apply: