Saying Grace

by Beth Gutcheon

  They admitted that some of the newer ideas about whole language, for instance, or problem-centered teaching, were Urdu to Catherine. It was true she had been urged to take time off for faculty enrichment workshops, to let some new air into her pedagogical closet, and that she had not seen the need. But her husband had just died. Catherine’s friends could not know that she rarely bothered to correct students’ homework anymore or that she continued to use mimeos of tests she created ten years ago, the answers to which were widely circulated from older siblings to current fifth graders. They couldn’t know the number or intensity of the complaints about her teaching or how often the complaints were entirely justified. There was no way Rue could let them know these things without wounding Catherine Trainer more than she was hurt already.

  Rue’s great hope for restoring morale was that she could get the Board to vote the faculty a six-percent pay raise. She was planning to ask for seven percent and fight for six percent. She couldn’t believe it would go lower than that, given that Chandler had promised not to oppose it.

  The budget meeting was always intense, but this year the country was in a hard recession. This year she had a family apply for financial aid whose gross income the year before had been $400,000. (They were getting a divorce. Last year there had been a one-time bonus. There were the rentals on two different houses. There was the $5,700 per month debt service on the couple’s eighteen credit cards. The Scholarship Committee voted them a loan.)

  On the evening of the Board meeting, a pipe backed up in the preschool bathroom. (Morning would bring the plumber and the discovery of a Ninja Turtle deep in the line.) The carpet was partly flooded and soaked in the adjoining music room, where the Board usually met. Rue had to stand outside in the chill evening air waiting for Board members to arrive one by one and suggest that they reconvene in the science lab down the hill. When she finally joined them, the trustees were crammed into child-sized chairs arranged in a circle, gossiping among themselves. On a high shelf circling the room, there were clear jars of formaldehyde holding specimens of rattlesnakes and fetal pigs. The room fell quiet as Rue emptied dregs from the coffee urn into a paper cup and carried it to an empty chair. When she was settled, Chandler called the meeting to order.

  Rue fought for the faculty raise, and Chandler and Terry Malko fought back. When she turned to the usual faces for help—Sylvia French, Ann Rosen, Bud Ransom—she got nothing. Times were hard. There were families in the school for whom two tuitions represented a major proportion of their income. They couldn’t afford the increase in tuition you’d need to cover these raises.

  Rue countered that there were teachers in the school who were teaching evening classes in places like shopping malls, because they couldn’t feed their kids and put gas in the car to get to work on what they were being paid.

  Terry Malko raised the question of the discount on tuition for teachers’ children who attended Country.

  “If it’s a question of need, how can you justify giving Janet TerWilliams the same discount you give Evelyn Douglas?”

  “It’s a question of principle,” said Rue. “Pay them what they’re worth. They’re both great teachers. If we didn’t give Janet a discount, she’d probably go back to business school and go to work where she could make as much as you do,” she said, perhaps unwisely looking directly at Terry.

  “Why does a teacher with four kids getting discounts, like Janet, effectively get eight thousand dollars more a year than Robert Noonan or Lloyd Merton? Aren’t the ones with children taking the raises from the ones without?”

  “We are running a school, not a factory. Teaching is the machinery with which we make our product. Why aren’t you as interested in a capital investment in the faculty as you are in the goddamn water pipes?”

  There was a pause.

  “We can’t get the pipes any cheaper,” said Terry, and the whole room laughed, except Rue.

  They voted the faculty a four-and-a-half-percent pay raise, which after inflation meant a real raise of about one percent.

  They moved on to curriculum review. Chandler presented the compromise Rue had accepted, that the faculty write annual curricula and quarterly reports. Rue, feeling sandbagged by the vote on salaries, made her point to the full Board about the extra burden on the teachers, hoping that this was an unsupported motion of Chandler’s. The vote was illuminating. Terry Malko was voting with Chandler, and Ann Rosen, the leader of the loyal opposition, was silent. Sylvia French asked the odd question, but she didn’t have Ann’s brains or confidence, and the rest, many of them new to the Board, seemed confused by the issue or uninterested. The vote carried.

  When Chandler brought up the five-year budget plan, Rue finally realized she was in a box. Chandler was constructing a series of obstacles she could neither get around nor over.

  “Look at last year’s budget, Chandler. You approved it. Yet we finished the year in the red because we didn’t foresee that half the sixth-grade girls would withdraw to get away from Monica Nelson, and we didn’t foresee having to destroy the parking lot and dig up the underground tank. How on earth are you going to guess what our needs will be five years from now?”

  Nobody listened. At least not Chandler, or Terry. Terry who had suddenly decided that she had a vendetta against his son, Glenn. Rue was evidently responsible for everything that was wrong in Glenn’s life, and Margee’s, and Terry wanted her to feel his anger.

  Well, she felt it.

  Glenn Malko destroyed the library copy machine by putting transparency film through it instead of paper. Mike Dianda wanted to kill him.

  “I asked Mrs. Nafie, and she said she didn’t know, go ahead…” Glenn protested when he was delivered to Rue’s office.

  “But you had already asked Mrs. Ketchum, and she said ‘Absolutely not, it will melt and wreck the machine,’” she countered. She was as angry as she could remember being with a child. Glenn made a face and looked at a corner of the ceiling.

  “Didn’t you?” He shrugged. “Please answer me, Glenn!”

  “I guess so,” he muttered.

  Children were amazing. They seemed to believe that adults could read their minds, especially when their parents failed to divine some need or desire of theirs and they felt hard done by, and at the same time to imagine that adults could be deceived by the most transparent excuse or lie.

  Emily came to the door. “Mrs. Malko is in Los Angeles for the day, and Mr. Malko’s office doesn’t know where he is.”

  Rue silently and invisibly cursed.

  “Glenn, what did we say was going to happen if you got into trouble again?”

  There was a long silence. “You’d kick me out.”

  “This is not something I am doing to you. You are doing it to yourself. You had a choice. You had a thousand choices.”

  “I didn’t know it would break the machine.”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t know Mrs. Ketchum was right.”

  “Would you have tried it on your father’s machine?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Glenn?”

  He finally shook his head. No.

  Rue said, “I am too angry to talk to you any more right now. You are a valuable young man, and I believe in you, but I’ve had enough of you for the moment. Please go out and sit in the office until Mrs. Goldsborough finds your father.”

  Glenn got up and walked out.

  Emily called Terry Malko’s secretary every fifteen minutes, until two in the afternoon, when Terry turned up and called her back. By that time Glenn had been waiting four hours. Emily told Rue that he cried quietly for much of the first hour. After that, he had slept. Emily brought him lunch, but he didn’t eat it.

  Expelling Glenn Malko was not something Rue wanted to do. Glenn was a favorite, and a follower. His disruptive behavior was macho and silly, but nothing he wouldn’t outgrow, unlike the escalating malice of Kenny Lowen. Rue felt Glenn would learn more about handling conflict if she could engineer a compromis
e punishment. She hoped to suspend him for a week, perhaps, and arrange for him to work on weekends until he had paid to repair or replace the copy machine. Unfortunately, the four hours she had to wait before she could discuss the matter with Terry gave her time to find that Glenn himself had boxed her in. He had bragged so widely that there would be no more suspensions for him and only expulsion was bad enough for him if he got in trouble again, that she had to follow through.

  She couldn’t discuss it with Henry. She knew too well what his reaction would be. “You expel a thirteen-year-old for using the wrong material in a copy machine, but you congratulate our daughter for dropping out of a full scholarship at Juilliard to become a Stool Sample?” Henry seemed to have convinced himself that Rue and Georgia shared a closeness that left him out, and that Rue had an influence with Georgia that Rue doubted she had.

  The unrest among the parents over Glenn’s expulsion, coupled with the depression and anger the faculty felt over their nonraise, gave the Merry Nineties dinner and auction party that Saturday night a decidedly unmerry cast for Rue.

  Chandler Kip, looking very GQ in his beautifully tailored dinner clothes, stopped Henry and Rue as they walked toward the dining room. The party was being held in the Madison Room of the Red Tower Inn, the fanciest motel in Seven Springs. Rue was dressed like a Gibson Girl and felt like an ass. When they stopped to sign in, she could see four school fathers inside the Madison Room, dressed in straw boaters and wearing suspenders, singing barbershop.

  “Henry, excuse me a minute,” said Chandler. “Could I just have a minute with your wife?”

  Nice touch, she thought. Asking her husband’s permission, not hers. She watched Henry stroll rather too willingly off without her as Chandler led her around a corner, out of the stream of arriving Country School couples and guests. They found themselves outside the Jefferson Room, from within which they could hear the strains of “Hava Nagila.”

  “I have good news,” said Chandler. “I have persuaded Terry Malko to stay on the Board.”

  “I’m glad,” said Rue, although she wasn’t. “How did you do that?”

  “I told him that Glenn would be welcome to return to school on Monday. And that from now on, any disciplinary decision involving his children would be made by me.”

  Rue felt herself go white. She couldn’t have been more affronted if he’d ripped off the front of her dress.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “You’re out of control, Rue,” said Chandler. “Somebody’s got to do something.” And he turned on his handmade heel and walked away.

  Henry saw Chandler Kip come into the Madison Room, joining his wife, Bambi, and Sondra and Oliver Sale, whom he had brought to the auction, no doubt to rub Rue’s nose in it. Bambi was wearing a corset that cinched her waist in to about the size of Henry’s bicep, and huge mutton sleeves, and was displaying a lot of cleavage. Sondra Sale wore the dress of a frontier dance hall girl, very tight and low in the bodice, with black fishnet stockings. It wasn’t quite the right period, but it showed off her figure in a way that, Henry thought, seemed like a direct challenge to her husband. Come on, big boy, let’s show everyone the merchandise. Oliver, in a rented tuxedo, stared into space.

  Henry looked around for someone to sit with. There was Carson McCann, a good-looking redhead who ran a bookstore downtown. Her husband was an aging preppie with rheumy eyes and a perpetual glass in his hand…. Henry wasn’t in the mood. There was Terry Malko with his pretty wife, Margee. Terry was looking like the cock of the walk, laughing loudly and elaborately patting the bare shoulders of his wife. They were sitting with some people Henry didn’t know, who looked too young to have school-aged children. He saw Corinne and Bradley Lowen trying to find their table. Henry liked the Lowens a great deal, especially Bradley.

  Henry saw Rue come into the room, looking white. He watched her locate Mike Dianda at a table with the Percys and some other teachers and whisper something to him. Henry saw Mike leap to his feet, like a spring uncoiling. Mike took Rue’s arm, and with a pang of something almost like jealousy, Henry watched them leave the room together. So. There was a crisis; fine, there had been dozens over the years. Team Rue would swing into action. Surgeons were cowboys, solitary gunslingers, and they didn’t play on teams. He realized with plangent clarity, standing in the middle of the ballroom at the Red Tower Inn, that he was sick of it.

  Mike marched Rue into the lobby and found some chairs near a plastic date palm, where it was just possible to talk over the din of a crowd watching a Sharks game in an open bar irrationally named The Loggia.

  “You can’t resign,” Mike said.

  “I have to. I can’t go in there and give flowery speeches…this school is coming apart. The president of the Board has just violated every principle of sound management…. I have no authority. I can’t expel. If I can’t expel I can’t discipline at all, I can’t protect the teachers, it’s impossible. Impossible, full stop. Let him run the school.”

  “Rue—he’s an asshole.”

  “Thank you, Sherlock.”

  “Hold on. Please. You can’t let an asshole like that have his way just because he wants it. We’re a culture here, we’re a civilization. We’ve taken years to evolve our laws, our standards. We have order, we have peace, we have arts and music, gardens and orchards, we’re raising children to be decent useful citizens and carry this order out into the world. But we can’t do our work without you, and you can’t say, ‘Oh, fine, I quit, Open the gates,’ just because some moron in a loincloth shows up outside the walls and starts picking his nose and grabbing his balls and making faces at you.”

  Furious as she was, Rue smiled.

  “It’s not just you. The school belongs to all of us, but a body can’t act without a head. But if we can act, we can solve it.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “He may think he can run the school without you, but does he think he can run it without teachers?”

  Rue took a deep breath and looked at Mike. She saw his point. The teachers wouldn’t stand for this either; how could they? If Glenn Malko set foot back on campus, it would take about half a day before their jobs were impossible. These kids would know in a hot minute that something at the heart of the machine had broken down.

  “Welcome to Lord of the Flies,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I can’t go in there and go politicking from table to table, Mike.”

  “Of course not. If we’re going to have a shit fight, we need you out in front in spotless raiment, not carrying the shit bucket. These teachers are not stupid and they’re not weak, and neither am I. But if you quit, I’ll quit, and half of them will quit or want to, and very few of them can afford it. If you hold on, we can get on our ramparts and pour boiling oil on the bastard.”

  Rue tried to remember how you did Lamaze breathing. She thought it would help her get control of her rage.

  “You didn’t go to military school, did you?” she asked. “You’re pretty slick with a metaphor.”

  Mike smiled. He held a hand to Rue, and she took it.

  “You don’t actually know you can pull this off, do you,” she said, and it was not a question.

  “No,” said Mike.

  They sat holding hands, Rue feeling unspeakably grateful for Mike’s friendship. She couldn’t possibly have asked the teachers to stand with her now when they felt she had sold out Catherine Trainer, but Mike could. And of course he would really be asking them to stand up for themselves, not her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” She tried once more to take a deep breath and then said crossly, “Do you have any idea how fucking uncomfortable these stupid corsets are?”

  Mike said, “My land, I have never heard you use that word in public.”

  “I’m getting into the mood,” she said. “Let’s go. I have to hype these big spenders to unbutton their wallets for the best little school in
the world.”

  As minutes passed and Mike and Rue did not reappear, Henry decided he was ready for a drink. At the bar he found Emily Goldsborough standing by herself. She was wearing black leggings and a long sweater and a Clinton/Gore button.

  “I decided to go for the nineteen nineties instead of the eighteen nineties,” she said, a little embarrassed.

  “You’re the only woman here who doesn’t look like a fool. Can I buy you a drink?”

  She smiled. “Please. White wine.”

  He was aware that she stood studying him as he ordered wine for her and a scotch for himself.

  “You look nice in black tie,” she said, taking her drink. He looked as nice in black tie now as he had twenty-five years ago, when he had danced one dance with her at a formal party in Philadelphia, somebody’s coming-out party she thought, or was it a wedding? She remembered his hand on her naked back as he spun her around. He had kept his chin raised as he danced, as if he were scanning the crowd instead of thinking of the steps or the girl in his arms. What had she been wearing that her back was bare?

  “I remember about a hundred years ago, when I offered to get you a drink and you asked for a gimlet,” he said, smiling.

  “A gimlet…my god, how do you remember that?”

  He was looking down at her, warm and teasing. “I didn’t know what one was.”

  “I didn’t either. It was what my stepfather drank.”

  “What did it turn out to be?”

  They were walking to the edge of the room together, seeing the past instead of what was before them.

  “It was delicious. It had Rose’s Lime Juice in it.”

  “Rose’s Lime Juice…remember when we were young and people would drink that sort of stuff all night and be up for their nine o’clock classes?”

  “I drank gimlets for about a year, as I remember, because they reminded me of you.”