Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  At the end of two weeks, Nan White came to Fred’s office to report on the progress of the new strategy. She seemed nervous. Normally he met with her in her office—on her turf—but she had insisted this meeting take place in his.

  “Out with it,” he said.

  “It’s just not happening.”

  “How many for the meeting here at school?”

  “So far, exactly seventeen.”

  “Didn’t we figure there were at least eight hundred alumnae within two hours’ driving range of the school?”

  “We did.”

  “How many for New York?”

  “On April 17, there were eleven—if you count spouses. On April 28, three.”

  “Philadelphia?”

  “Zero.”

  “Zero!”

  “Zero. Evidently they all got together to refuse.”

  “All right,” he murmured. “I guess I don’t have to ask about Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco.”

  “Pretty much the same. Altogether we have fewer than a hundred.”

  “Well, well, well,” he said, trying to smile. “I hope American Airlines will give our money back.”

  “Don’t give up yet,” Nan urged.

  “You don’t sound convinced.” When Nan didn’t answer, he said, “What does Jamie Carrington say?”

  “She doesn’t say.”

  “What do you mean, she doesn’t say?”

  “I talk with Mr. Perkins, not with Jamie Carrington. I don’t care what she thinks, or Mavis Ericksen, or anybody else says. I don’t work for them. I work for you!”

  “Thanks,” he said. He had to turn his face away for an instant. Mavis! he thought. Of course. Revenge. He’d give anything to know what passed between Jamie Carrington and Mavis Ericksen. He could only guess that Mavis had called people up to urge them not to serve as hosts, but he didn’t really believe that even if she hadn’t, the results would have been much better. Mavis was only a small part of this.

  Then he felt as if maybe he was wandering too far from where he needed to be. “You don’t work for me, Nan,” he reminded her. “You work for the school.”

  “Sometimes I hate this school!”

  “Me too,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

  Outside, through the French windows in his bright sunny office, the campus flowed with girls going to classes. The lawns had turned a deeper green in the last few weeks. Buds were swelling on the maple trees. “Well,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious what my next move has to be.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “ ‘Long as I’m the head, it isn’t going to work.”

  “Not another word! I don’t want to hear one more damn word like that!”

  “You know, I got the signal right away at Jamie Carrington’s house. I did my best to ignore it. I’m associated with the move to let boys in. I’m tarred with that brush. So they won’t follow me in the other direction. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It’s just not fair!” Nan said.

  “No. But it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  Nan didn’t answer. She didn’t take her eyes off his face either. She was struggling not to cry. He appreciated that. He really didn’t think he could handle it if she started to cry. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” he asked again. “Come on. You’re a professional. You need to say what you really think.”

  “All right,” she said very quietly. “I think you might be right.”

  He had to work hard now to keep the hurt from showing on his face. After all, he’d asked for it. “So,” he said, standing up, “I’m going to think about it. Very seriously.”

  “If you do, I will too,” she exclaimed, her voice breaking. She saw the hurt, plain as day around his eyes and in the thinness of his smile. “I leave here the minute you do!”

  Don’t do that, he started to say. The school will need you more than ever. But he couldn’t get the words out, it was too much to ask. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. “I need some air.”

  When Fred came back from his walk, he found that Nan had left him a note. Please don’t make that decision yet, it said. Promise me you’ll try one more thing first: get Francis Plummer involved in selling the new strategy. I’d hate it if you didn’t try everything—even this!—before you make that decision.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Fred swept Nan’s note off his desk and into the wastebasket. How in the world can you ask me to do that? he imagined asking her. Then he leaned back in his chair and stared out the French doors at the campus. It was not just having to ask Plummer for help that swelled his resentment so. It was the knowledge that people would follow Plummer’s leadership and spurn his! Now he wondered if he could even look Francis Plummer in the face.

  He got up from his desk and walked restlessly around in his office. He knew what he had to do. “Try everything,” he said to himself, repeating the words in Nan’s note. It was a comfort to know from her underlining that word that this was just as distasteful to her as it was to him. Then he opened the door to his office. “Get in touch with Mr. Plummer, please, Ms. Rice,” he said. “Tell him I want to see him in his next free period.”

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Francis was sitting in a chair in front of Fred Kindler’s desk, staring at the Mickey Mouse watch and the monstrous exclamation point beside it and thinking about how surprised he was that the goofy watch on the wall didn’t insult him anymore. Instead it made him sad, sorry for Kindler, and he wanted to explain how off-key it was. But you didn’t talk about style with this guy. He was all substance.

  As if substance was ever enough!

  “We need you to do something for us,” he heard Kindler say, and took his eyes off Mickey Mouse and shook his head to clear his thoughts. He knew Kindler would say “I need” to anyone else.

  “No?” Kindler said, misreading Francis’s head shaking. “You’re telling me you won’t do what we need?”

  “Wait a second,” said Francis, very flustered now. “I mean, no, I didn’t say I wouldn’t—”

  “You’re sitting there shaking your head!”

  “Not for that! I was just clearing my thoughts.”

  There was a long awkward silence. Francis still didn’t know why Kindler had summoned him. For a minute it looked to him as if Kindler couldn’t remember either, or, more likely, he was so disgusted that he’d just say the hell with it—whatever it was—and cancel the meeting.

  “We need you to send a message to the alumnae,” Kindler said.

  Francis waited for Kindler to explain. He was embarrassed to see how much it pained Kindler to admit he needed Francis’s help.

  “Because they still think you’re God almighty,” Kindler said.

  Francis turned his face, looked out through the French doors. He thought maybe he’d just get up and leave.

  “Sorry,” Kindler said, quietly, “I didn’t mean to descend to that. They think of you as the fine teacher that you are. That’s what I should have said.”

  Francis listened for sarcasm in Kindler’s tone. He didn’t hear any and felt even more embarrassed now. Praise from Kindler, however reluctant. That was awkward. And—he had to admit—a little welcome too.

  “It really is something to be proud of,” Kindler said.

  “I am,” said Francis almost under his breath.

  “Good,” Kindler said, and nodded his head, and sat perfectly still behind his desk. Francis sat still too, returning Kindler’s gaze.

  “Our strategy’s not working,” Kindler said at last.

  Francis still said nothing.

  “At least my part in it isn’t exactly turning people on. To them I’m the guy who wants to let boys in. Among other things.” There’s that damn self-pity again, Fred Kindler thought, and wished he could have the words back. But it was too late, and Francis Plummer had heard them. As if he were trying to tease pity, maybe even mercy, out of him! He’d rather die.

  But Francis heard no self-pity. He was too busy thinking about how he wouldn’t be
in Fred Kindler’s shoes for a million dollars if anybody asked him—which nobody who really knew him would.

  “So we want you to write a letter to all the alumnae, telling them you are behind this idea a thousand percent and you want to see them all at these meetings,” Fred said. “We want you to be there at every meeting. You have more clout than anybody else around here. It’s as simple as that.”

  Out of what had become his habit, his knee-jerk reaction, Francis spent a lively instant seeing himself refusing. He had the power now. He could do anything he wanted.

  “Mr. Plummer?”

  “Of course,” Francis said. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  “At your invitation, they’ll come. We all know that,” Fred said. He leaned toward Francis, studying him. “And you are going to open each meeting, introduce me, tell them you think I’m just a dandy head. Right?”

  Francis nodded.

  “The rest of us will do the real work of running the school. You just do the selling.” Kindler’s remark wasn’t meant to be an insult. He was just describing the facts.

  But that was exactly why Francis took it as an insult—and was almost proud of himself for ignoring it. “All right. I understand,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you,” Kindler said. “This whole plan was your idea, and it is a good one. Your part in it will make it work.”

  Francis was grateful to Kindler for saying this. “We’ll make it work,” he said. “Both of us. It will save the school.”

  Kindler nodded his head, agreeing. “I believe it might,” he murmured. And he added, “Please go to Nan White’s office the first minute you can. She has the details.” Then he stood up. It was clear he wanted this meeting to be over.

  “I’ll go right now,” Francis said, and stood too and offered his hand. This time Kindler took it and they shook. “I wish I’d thought of this before,” Francis said again.

  Fred didn’t answer. What could he say? He hadn’t thought of it at all.

  THE ATMOSPHERE IN Nan White’s office was so icy, it took Francis completely by surprise. He’d always felt comfortable with Nan—that is, when he’d been aware of her, a mere administrative functionary, miles away from the heart of the school where he resided. Now, as he entered her office, she loomed large.

  Nan studied him for what seemed like forever without saying a word, and when he tried to start the conversation by acknowledging why they were together in her office, she cut him off and ran through all the details of the plan. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the whole plan.” Her expression was rigid.

  “You’re not going to ask me how I like it?” he joked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t give a damn.”

  No one talks to me like that! he started to say, but checked himself and said nothing.

  “Why didn’t you get behind Fred Kindler in the beginning?” Nan stared at him. “It was all up to you, and you didn’t do a thing.”

  And before he could answer, she said, “If you’re thinking of telling me it’s complicated, don’t.”

  Francis checked himself again. He was not going to waste his time by giving in to his anger; he was going to write the letter, just do his job. He started to stand up.

  “That’s right,” Nan said. “Go write that letter. Bring it back to me, and I’ll correct it.”

  “Correct it!”

  “Yes. Correct it.”

  On his way out, Francis closed the door gently behind himself.

  Later it would occur to him that checking your feelings, holding them inside where they burned, was what a leader must do. Every day.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Several days later, when Lila Smythe arrived early at the dig, she was glad to see Mr. Kindler dressed in his old clothes. She approached him while he was talking to Mr. Andersen. Mr. Kindler turned to her and smiled, obviously glad to see her.

  “I need a partner today,” she said, handing him a trowel.

  “Well, now you’ve got one,” he said, happy for her invitation. “We’ve been partners all along.”

  She smiled, acknowledging this recognition, and Sam Andersen’s gaze traveled between the two of them. “It’s true,” Sam murmured. How much these two have made happen! Every new direction, every critical event, found them at the center. It was natural they would gravitate to one another.

  Kneeling beside Mr. Kindler as they troweled the earth, excavating carefully, Lila felt the same calm trust in him she did that day in his office when she confessed her ambivalence, how she had longed for Marie Safford’s vehement moral purity and chose compromise instead, and he’d told her she’d always have to live with such ambiguity because she’d always be a leader. She remembered how much she wished that meeting wouldn’t end. Partners! she thought, savoring his remark. Peers!

  Near the end of the session, two students in another part of the dig found several artifacts: a bone fishhook, a shard of pottery, a notched stone hoe whose handle rotted away long ago. That evening, Sam Andersen phoned the good news to Sara Warrior’s father. He was delighted to receive it.

  The next morning, a week before the series of meetings for explaining the new strategy was scheduled to begin, Nan White reported to Fred in an email (cc to Francis Plummer) that Francis’s letter had produced only four additional acceptances. Fred wasn’t surprised at these sparse results. He knew the reason. If I just went away they’d come in droves, he told himself. But Francis was surprised—and angry. When I invite you to come to meetings to hear about how you can save the school, you goddamn better come, he fantasized shouting. Who do you think you are?

  For the next three days, while the buds on the big maples turned into leaves, only two more people accepted, and this failure weighed on Francis. His frustration mounted until he finally decided to write another letter, much more strongly worded—and more than that—to make a very strategic list of fifty people and get on the phone with each of them. He went to Fred Kindler’s office to tell him of his plan.

  Francis heard no anger, only resignation, in Kindler’s mild “good morning” as he sat down across the desk from Kindler. The breeze coming through the open doors brought the smell of clipped grass from the first mowing of the year, and across the lawn Francis could see the gray foundation walls of the new library. When the construction workers arrive at eight o’clock, this silence would end, and the exhaust of their machines would pervade the air. That was fine with Francis. The sooner the new library was up, the sooner Peggy would stop grieving the old one. Then he realized that this must be what Kindler was thinking too.

  Fred followed his glance. He was proud of himself for convincing the board not to use the insurance money that had resulted from the fire to prop up the school’s desperate finances instead of for building the new library. “This is a time we need to be bold,” he had told them. Not to replace the library would have been a clear signal that the board was sure the school would fail, a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It’s coming fast,” he said now to Francis, thinking that if he resigned, the new library would be the only visible mark he left behind—and he wouldn’t even be here when it was finished. “They’re right on time. They don’t dare not be. They know I’d shoot them,” he said.

  “I bet they do,” Francis said, making sure his tone made clear he meant it.

  “This fall, she’ll cut the ribbon,” Fred Kindler murmured. He was not looking at Francis. He was still gazing across the lawn at the construction site.

  Francis knew Kindler meant Peggy would cut the ribbon. “I appreciate that,” he said. He was very embarrassed. “Instead of some big donor,” he added.

  “Perkins would be the one,” Kindler said, turning his attention back into the office—but not really to Francis. “He’s given more over the years than anyone.” What he didn’t tell Francis was that Milton Perkins was also anonymously funding the architects’ fees. “But Peggy’s cutting the ribbon,” Fred Kindler said. “It was Perkins’s idea as much as mine.”

  “Well,” F
rancis repeated. “I appreciate it.”

  Kindler looked at him squarely. “I have to tell you something.”

  Francis waited.

  “I don’t care whether you appreciate it or not.” Still no anger. Just a statement of fact. Fred Kindler had cut his losses.

  “Okay,” Francis shrugged.

  “It’s for Peggy. It has nothing to do with you.”

  Francis didn’t respond and kept his face expressionless. He was going to take whatever Kindler handed out. For the sake of the school. That was his mantra now. Be Kindler’s partner, no matter what.

  “So?” Kindler said. “You wanted to see me about something?”

  “I need to write another letter,” Francis urged. “They need to hear twice. And I’m going make a bunch of phone calls. Then I think more will turn out.”

  Behind his desk Kindler was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

  “Let’s try.”

  “I’m thinking of an alternative strategy.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  Kindler studied Francis. “This time, Mr. Plummer, you will not be among the first to know.”

  There was a little silence while Francis wondered what he was supposed to say to that—and then he knew what Kindler was not telling him. You’re going to resign! he almost said, but caught himself. Kindler’s steady eyes stayed on his face, and Francis forced himself not to look away.

  Kindler was raising his eyebrows now—as if to ask him why, since now he knew, he didn’t just get up and leave?

  But Francis didn’t move. Too much to take in all at once: this was exactly what he’d been hoping for. Then why did he feel so disappointed? “Look, I just wish we could have—” he began.