Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  “You’re not going to let boys in?”

  “That’s right. No boys.”

  “Never?”

  “Jamie, get a grip.”

  “Oh!” she said.

  “Let Fred here explain,” Perkins said.

  Travelers and Fred both sat down again, and Fred explained the scheme. He started with the reasons for the first decision, but when he saw the frown begin to return to Carrington’s face, he zipped through that part and focused on the new plan. He watched her face grow more and more relaxed, saw her nod in agreement, repeated the idea in a different way and concluded.

  Carrington took her eyes off him the minute he finished.

  “So,” Travelers said. “The idea is that Fred as head, you as president of the Alumnae Association, and I as president of the board will send out an invitation together to the alumnae to attend meetings at the school and in our major cities, where we will put the challenge to them.”

  “All right,” she announced. “I’ll sign it.”

  “And we hope you’ll communicate personally with key people to urge them to come.”

  “Okay! Okay! I said I’ll do it.” Carrington put her hand up, cutting Travelers off. Then she turned directly to Perkins. “I’m sorry for what I said, Milton.”

  “Hey!” Perkins said. “It’s over.”

  “It’s a good plan,” she said.

  “You bet,” he said.

  “I’ll do it,” she repeated. “I’m yours.”

  “Thank you!” Travelers exclaimed.

  “Wonderful!” Fred said.

  But she didn’t look at either Fred or Travelers. It was as if they were not in the room. She reached across the desk and shook Milton’s hand. “You’re right.” she told him. “We’ve been down a long road together.”

  Perkins looked embarrassed.

  “So I’ll sign the letter, call some people, and then I’ll get back to you.”

  “Get back to Fred here, not me,” Perkins said, his hand finally released. “He’s the head.”

  Carrington shook her head. “I’ll get back to you,” she said, looking directly at Perkins. Then she stood, still refusing to look at Travelers or Fred. “Jack’s outside waiting,” she said. “He’ll take you to the airport now.”

  “In the Mercedes, right?” Perkins asked.

  She smiled at him. “For you? Of course.”

  Alan got up out of his chair. “Thanks for supporting our plan,” he forced himself to say, and put out his hand to shake. Jamie Carrington just looked at him.

  “Yes, thanks,” Fred murmured, standing up too. But he was damned if he was going to offer to shake her hand. Nor was he going to say goodbye. He headed directly for the door. Travelers followed.

  Perkins lingered for a moment, and Fred heard him say, “Wise up, Jamie. You’re blaming the wrong people.”

  “If you say so,” she said.

  “I say so,” Perkins answered.

  PERKINS SAT UP front this time in the big, warm Mercedes. Jack tried to start a conversation, but no one wanted to talk. Finally, Fred said, “I guess I know what kind of signal I got from her.”

  “Me too,” said Travelers.

  “Forget it,” Perkins interrupted, turning around to Fred. “Choose the signals you want to see, not the ones you don’t. You’re the boss.”

  “Milton’s right,” Travelers said to Fred as Jack pulled up to the entrance of the little airport. “You’re the boss, and you brought us this great plan. It will energize everybody, and you’re the one who thought it up.”

  “Yup,” Perkins said. “You’ve saved our bacon, Fred. And the next time we come back here, Jamie’s going to be so happy that the school’s full and with no boys in it she’ll send Jack here to get us in a—” he hesitated, then turned to Jack. “In a what, Jack?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, grinning. “Maybe a yacht?”

  AS FRED KINDLER, Milton Perkins, and Alan Travelers were boarding their plane on the other side of Long Island Sound to come home, Marjorie Boyd got out of her car in Sandra Petrie’s driveway and walked around to the back of the house to look at the view. She held her hand on the bun she wore at the back of her head to keep the wind from blowing it apart. Down the hill, a little to the north and on the other side of the river, lay the campus of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. In the distance the white clapboard buildings glimmered in the sun. Girls, tiny in the distance, walked the paths, and the lawns, brown from the winter, swept to the edge of the forest that lined the river.

  Once again, she was surprised. It was not nostalgia that overwhelmed her but disbelief. “I used to be the head there,” she said aloud into the wind.

  She walked around to the front of the house, hoping that Sandra and her guests weren’t watching her. When the door opened to her knock, it was not just Sandra who greeted her but Harriet and Barbara standing in the doorway, three pairs of expectant eyes staring into hers, and she wanted to step back away from them.

  Each of them hugged her, gravely. “I’m still devastated,” Harriet Richardson finally said. “For you and the school. So angry I can hardly speak.”

  “Please, ladies,” Marjorie said. “I hope that’s not what we are going to talk about.”

  “Of course, not!” Sandra exclaimed. “We want to hear about your trip.” She led them into her living room. “Sit down there so we can look at you,” she said, smiling at Marjorie and pointing to the biggest chair. Marjorie sat in it; three other chairs faced hers as if she were on stage.

  “Well, where should I start?” Marjorie asked.

  “At the beginning, of course,” Barbara said.

  Marjorie began with the plays she’d seen in London, while Sandra poured white wine and everyone pretended not to notice Barbara put her hand over her glass. When Marjorie got to her time in Paris, Barbara asked her if she had looked up Sidney Plummer, who was still living there, supporting himself by working in a wine cave.

  “No, I didn’t,” Marjorie admitted. “I would have loved seeing him. He’s my godson, you know. But being with Siddy would bring back all my memories of the school. I took this trip to get away and start a new life.”

  It seemed to her that each of them leaned forward, and she realized they had misinterpreted her. They were waiting to hear her tell them that she couldn’t forget, that she was angry and bitter and still wanted to be the headmistress of Miss Oliver’s. Well, she did feel that way sometimes—but less and less, and anyway she wouldn’t talk about it. She resumed talking about her trip, how exciting it was, how refreshing, and saw their disappointment. They asked a few more questions and told their own travel stories because they didn’t know what else to talk about.

  But Sandra didn’t give up. “It’s time for lunch,” she announced. “We’ll go into the dining room now.”

  As soon as they were seated at the table and Sandra had served the salad, she turned to Marjorie and said, “Do you know what’s been happening at the school?”

  “I know the library burned down,” Marjorie answered.

  “Oh, my dear, that’s the least of what’s happened,” Harriet said.

  They waited for Marjorie to ask what happened, but she didn’t.

  “They are going to admit boys!” Barbara announced.

  “I thought they might,” Marjorie said mildly.

  Everyone stared.

  “Maybe they had to,” Marjorie said, as if she were making an offhand comment. “Maybe they had no choice.”

  “Of course they had a choice,” Barbara said, clearly bewildered.

  “Please, Marjorie,” Sandra said. “I know you’re trying to be diplomatic.”

  “I’m not trying. I can’t help it,” Marjorie said. Maybe that would shut them up. She was just as surprised at how angry she was at them as they were by the way she was acting.

  “I understand exactly how you feel,” Harriet said. “I experienced what you are presently experiencing. But the very reason for the school’s existence was at stake, and
then I realized that it had been planned all along and they had brought in this Kindler person for the express purpose of bringing in male students, and I finally decided it was a higher ethic—”

  “What do you want?” Marjorie said. “Get to your point.” She couldn’t believe she was being so impolite to Harriet Richardson. “Ladies, just say it,” Marjorie said when no one answered Because she knew they couldn’t just say it. They had expected her to get angry to hear boys were to be admitted, and say it for them: that she would lead a revolution, stage a coup. “I know what you want me to do,” she told them. “And I won’t. You should have known I wouldn’t. So let’s change the subject.”

  There was a lengthy silence. None of the women looked at her. They felt a more painful betrayal than when she had been fired.

  “I think I’d better leave,” Marjorie said, and stood up from table. She started to walk away. Sandra got up to beg her to stay. But Marjorie said, “No, that’s all right. You stay here and talk.” When she got to the dining room door, she turned back to them. “They wanted me to change, and they were right. But I didn’t want to, so I didn’t.” She put into words what she was at last willing to admit. “If I’d understood what was happening, I would have simply told them, ‘No, I don’t want to change.’ I would have resigned before they asked.”

  As she drove home, she made a decision. She would break the lease to her apartment, get away, find a very different place to live, a larger scene. New York City! She still had lots of time for some new career there, she was only sixty-three. She wasn’t about to ruin her memories by living in them.

  When Sandra got home, she called Mavis to tell her what had happened. “Well, then, we’ll have to try something else,” Mavis said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Julie Lapham spent the last afternoon of spring vacation with her parents, nailing shingles on the roof of a studio they were building for a Dartmouth professor. She was proud of being so sure-footed on the sloping plywood. To the west she could see across to the Vermont side of the Connecticut River to the hill where her family’s house was hidden in the trees. She couldn’t imagine her parents living anywhere else, doing any other kind of work, though she knew, because she’d made them tell the story over and over again when she was a little kid, that twenty years ago they had moved up here from New York without the foggiest idea how they were to make their living. Well, this was what they chose to do, she thought proudly: build post-and-beam buildings whose frames didn’t have a single nail in them and were solid as a rock and beautiful. She knew how hard they had worked to learn this specialty and build this business. Now they had more offers for work than they could accept.

  Maxwell Lapham, Julie’s father, climbed up and down the ladder to bring the shingle bundles up. A big man with a red beard and red hair under a floppy fedora hat, he wore an intense expression and lifted the bundles easily. Tracy Lapham was much smaller than her husband, less tightly wired, and, Julie noticed, nimbler on the roof. Her hair was black, shining in the sun. Julie was proud of how well she teamed with her parents; she knew what to do without their telling her.

  They worked until it got too dark, and when they got home, Julie went to her room to pack for her return to Miss Oliver’s in the morning. Her parents went to the kitchen to make dinner together.

  In her bedroom as she began to pack, Julie was already homesick, and her desire to stay home felt overwhelming. If she could stay home with her parents and be their only focus now with Charley away at college, she could prove to herself that she was no less beloved in her their eyes than he was. And after that happened she would dare to ask her mother and father who her biological parents were. When she first had learned she was adopted, she didn’t want to know. It would have made her feel as if all her life she’d been living in someone else’s home. Now she wished she’d gotten up the nerve to ask the question during her vacation. There was no way she was going to ask it tonight and then have to leave and deal with her feelings about it alone. She needed to be at home.

  She packed dispiritedly, grabbing her clothes from her bureau drawers and closet and tossing them into her suitcase, shirts and shoes and skirts all jumbled together, making an even bigger mess than she usually did because tomorrow when she would transfer it to her room at school, it was guaranteed to piss Clarissa off.

  And while her daughter packed in her room, Tracy Lapham looked up from her work to gaze out the kitchen window at the Connecticut River flowing south toward where her daughter would go tomorrow. “I feel like we’re selling her down the river,” she said to her husband, who was scrubbing potatoes at the sink. Miss Oliver’s School for Girls could insist until it was blue in the face that it was an independent, not private, school, but Tracy would continue to think of all such schools as private, antidemocratic havens for the privileged, who should be supporting public schools. And a boarding school to boot! Why would anyone who loved their children even dream of sending them away when they’re still so young? It was lonely enough with Charley away at college.

  “Well, it’s hardly selling when the one going begs to go,” Maxwell said.

  “We should never have given in,” Tracy answered.

  “Hindsight is easy, Tracy,” he said. “Forgive yourself. You remember how disturbed Julie was when we told her she was adopted.”

  What Tracy remembered then was saying to Charley, “We thought you’d like a little sister,” and seeing the look on her daughter’s face that said she’d always thought she was Charley’s little sister, until that instant when she found out she wasn’t. “Now that we know how much she hates it at that school, we should let her stay home.”

  “She’s never told us that she hates it.”

  Tracy ignored his remark; he was just being stubborn. Julie wasn’t going to admit that she was wrong, that she was wasting her parents’ money, that she was running away only because she hadn’t known what else to do with the way she felt. “There’s no fiat from heaven that she has to go back,” Tracy said.

  Maxwell left the sink and put his arms around Tracy. “Please, dear,” he said. “We’ve been over this so many times before. She needs to finish what she started.”

  In his embrace, Tracy didn’t answer. She knew he was right. That’s what they’d always taught their children: No matter how hard it got, you stayed the course.

  BOOK FOUR: SPRING TERM

  TWENTY-FOUR

  First thing on the first day of spring term, the whole school assembled in the auditorium at Fred’s request, and while everybody was wondering what the bad news was this time, Fred stood on the stage and announced, “I have great news. The plan has changed. Boys will not be admitted to our school.” And then he rushed on to explain before the roar of gladness drowned him out. “The board, at my suggestion”—for Alan Travelers had commanded him, several times, to put that in—“has challenged your parents and the alumnae and, yes, each of you to go out there and talk about this school and recruit and recruit and recruit until we’re full again. And if everyone works together—and I know everyone will—then we’ll never have boys at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls!”

  There was a moment of silence, as if no one was breathing, and then a roar even louder than he had expected, and the students were standing up and hugging each other and in the back two teachers were dancing with each other. Halfway back on the aisle Francis Plummer was standing too. Fred looked him straight in the eye. You told me to pretend it was my idea, he wanted to say. Well, that’s what I’m doing. Plummer returned the stare, but he was the first to look away.

  “Isn’t it great news?” Fred said to the school, when at last the noise died down enough. Because, by God, he was going to celebrate too! “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Suddenly there was very little noise. The cheering stopped, and the students stared at him. Why are you celebrating? they obviously wanted to know. You’re the one who tried to let boys in.

  He stared back at them. “I do think it’s wonderful,” he said bravel
y. “And it is a great way to start spring term.” Silence again. He could see how restless they were. They wanted to celebrate—but not with him. “I’m proud of you for signing the Declaration.” Silence again. They didn’t believe him. “I really am,” he said, and still there was silence.

  So he dismissed them, and they trooped out of the auditorium, buzzing with the news. Then he left the stage and walked down the aisle and followed them out. It was warm outside on this early April day.

  The students and the faculty gathered in clusters on the lawns. They talked loudly, laughing, celebrating. He stood on the steps of the auditorium watching them. From one of the faculty clusters, Rachel Bickham looked across the lawn to him, smiled, and gave him two thumbs up. Then he walked alone to his office.

  HE SPENT THE next few days waiting to see how many people responded to the invitations and checking the enrollment data—especially the reenrollments. Very few came in. He persuaded himself that these undergraduates and their parents were waiting to see how the alumnae reacted to the challenge before they committed. And he continued to spend a good deal of his time walking around the campus to make himself visible, show his face. For that’s how one built trust: through personal connections—like he had at Mt. Gilead, where the students had hung out in his office so much, telling him things they’d never tell their parents and kidding him about his funny clothes, that it had been hard to get his work done. But now at Miss Oliver’s the students kept their distance even more than before. Nevertheless, he showed his stubborn side, never stopped trying to reach out to them.

  The members of Sam Andersen’s spring term dig for Pequot artifacts on the Oliver campus was one group with whom Fred’s reaching out was successful. Lila Smythe and Sara Warrior were among the fifteen students who showed up each afternoon at the fraction of an acre they had roped off to begin with on the northeast corner of the campus. They welcomed him each afternoon when he stopped by to say hello and were especially glad when he had the time to put on some old clothes and join them at their work. Lila was always glad for a chance to be in Mr. Kindler’s company, and Sara was grateful to him for giving his blessing to the agreement Mr. Andersen had made with her father that any artifacts they would find would be brought to him so he could make the legal arrangements to make them the possessions of the Pequot Nation.