by Monica Nolan
“Concetta Rasphigi. Chemistry.” The older woman studied Bobby for a moment with cold, dark eyes, and then her gaze wandered away to rest on some point of interest above Bobby’s head. She wore an unpressed, sacklike dress of some heavy black material.
Unable to think of anything else to say, Bobby stole a glance at the assembled company. As far as she could see, Metamora’s teachers were all women, all talking animatedly, most of them wreathed in cigarette smoke. Bits of conversation drifted over from a group of Bobby’s new colleagues: “Greece was an extravagance, but as Goethe said, ‘Die beste Bildung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen!’” “I got quite an education myself this summer. When the kids talked about a rumble, I thought, ‘Well, it’s all part of the continuum of experience.’” “What you should have done is sicced Munty on them as their sub-prefect!” The trio of teachers burst into laughter.
It all sounded like gibberish to Bobby, even the parts in English.
“Here you are!” Mona handed her a small glass of sherry with a radiant smile. Bobby took a sip. It tasted like cough medicine.
“I’ll introduce you around, shall I?” Mona gave Bobby’s arm a little squeeze, whether of encouragement or to assess the gym teacher’s biceps, Bobby wasn’t sure. “This is Concetta Rasphigi, Chemistry Mistress extraordinaire!”
“We’ve met.” Miss Rasphigi’s expression did not change.
“You must have really made an impression on Connie,” Mona whispered as she led Bobby toward the three women Bobby had been eavesdropping on. “It usually takes her a while to warm up to strangers. A brilliant woman, really brilliant, but she lives in a world of her own. Ladies, allow me to introduce our new Games Mistress, Bobby Blanchard. Bobby, I’d like you to meet Serena Rapp, our German Mistress, Alice Bjorklund, who teaches English, and Hoppy Fiske, Mistress of Current Events. Watch out Hoppy doesn’t draft you for one of her causes!”
“Shame on you, Mona!” The Current Events Mistress was as brisk and bright eyed as a squirrel. She waggled a playful finger at Mona before asking Bobby eagerly, “Are you registered to vote?”
“I—I think so,” Bobby stammered.
“Have you signed a petition in support of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto?”
“Genug!” interrupted the strapping German Mistress, tapping the ash off her gold-tipped cigarette. “Willkom-men! Welcome to Metamora, my little Games Mistress!”
“Thank you,” murmured Bobby. It was the first time in years she’d been called little, but it was true, the German Mistress topped her by several inches. She was like a…What did they call them? Not a Viking, but it started with a V. Think, Bobby! Bobby commanded herself. But before the word could come, Miss Rapp was asking her, “Where did you teach before? Wherever it was, I can promise you, Metamora will be a million times better!”
“This is my first teaching position.” To her dismay, Bobby felt herself blushing.
“Is Bobby short for Roberta?” asked the English Mistress in a gentle voice. She was rather dowdy and unathletic looking, but Bobby was grateful for a question she could answer.
“Yes, Bobby with a—” but Bobby’s explanation was cut short. A thin, older woman with gray hair cropped short poked her head into their circle. “Have any of you seen Madame Melville?” she asked urgently.
“Bunny, this is Bobby Blanchard, our new Games Mistress,” Mona said soothingly as she patted the newcomer’s arm. “Belinda Otis, our Latin Mistress, and Miss Craybill’s right-hand man!” Miss Otis gave Bobby a distracted nod.
“What do you want with Yvette?” boomed the German Mistress. “You know she never comes to these things!”
“But she promised me…”
Mona led Bobby away before she could find out what Yvette had promised Bunny. They stopped by a very old woman sitting in an armchair. Her eyes were closed, and her hair, lit by a shaft of light, was snow white.
“That’s Gussie Gunderson, our Greek Mistress,” whispered Mona. “She graduated from Metamora in 1904. We won’t wake her.” The two women stood and looked at the sleeping Greek Mistress respectfully before moving on.
“Bryce, Ole, I’d like you to meet Bobby Blanchard, our new Games Mistress.” Bobby was struck by the contrast between the two men who stood up politely from the Victorian love seat. Bryce was a short, plump man who wore his hair rather long and sported a sky blue tie, with white and yellow flowers. Ole’s tanned, deeply grooved face and the swelling biceps that strained the fabric of his short-sleeved shirt spoke of an active outdoor life.
“How do you do,” the two men chorused.
“Bryce Bowles is our Biology Master—”
“But I prefer botany,” the teacher interrupted, beaming.
“—And Olaf Amundsen is Metamora’s groundskeeper.” Mona added in an undertone, “The Amundsen family has kept the grounds since Metamora was founded.”
“Let me know if you want any changes to the athletic field, Miss Blanchard,” Olaf told her.
“Thank you,” said Bobby gratefully. “Call me Bobby.” It was restful to find herself talking about something she knew. “How often do you chalk—”
“Well, if it isn’t the other members of Metamora’s Men’s Club!” Bobby’s question was interrupted by a man with horn-rimmed glasses, a pipe clenched between his teeth, and a shock of bushy brown hair. Laura Burnham, the Art Mistress, drifted along in his wake. “Howsa fella?”
“Hello, Ken,” said Bryce Bowles politely. Ole Amundsen said nothing.
“Bobby, I’d like you to meet Ken Burnham, our History Master. You’ve met his wife, Laura, of course. Bad Laura, leaving Bobby to wander the campus all alone! Bobby Blanchard, our new Games Mistress.”
It had never occurred to Bobby that the Art Mistress was married—and Ken Burnham made it seem even more unlikely.
“Welcome, Bobbi—may I call you Bobbi?” Ken shook Bobby’s hand vigorously. “Welcome to Metamora! Laura and I are back for our fourth year and we just think it’s a great old school—don’t we, honeybun?”
“Certainly, darling,” said Laura with a smile that showed all her teeth. Bobby thought that no one had ever looked less like a honeybun. “It’s Bobby with a ‘y,’” she corrected the History Master.
“My apologies! Are you interested in mounds, by any chance?” Ken asked her.
“Mounds?” Bobby repeated, her eyes wandering to Laura. The Biology Master and groundskeeper had slipped away.
“Indian burial mounds. This part of the country’s full of ’em!”
“Beware, Bobby, Ken has a deep passion for tribal history!” Mona trilled a little laugh. “Oh, Enid!” She pulled a dark-haired woman into the group. “I’d like you to meet our new Games Mistress. Bobby Blanchard, Enid Butler, our new Math Mistress.”
“How do you do?” said Enid, turning her head to expel a lungful of smoke. She wore black cat’s-eye glasses and her dark hair was the color of polished ebony. Her bangs bisected her pale forehead in a precise line and she wore a severely simple brown dress.
So this was the new Math Mistress! “It’s nice to meet another rookie,” said Bobby enthusiastically.
“I’m not precisely a ‘rookie.’ I’ve taught summer session at the Friendship School in Bay City the past two years,” Enid corrected her coolly.
“Oh!” I’m being too sensitive, Bobby told herself. She didn’t mean to snub me. “Well, I’m an absolute beginner, except for some assistant coaching in college. Truthfully, I’m feeling a little nervous about Tuesday.” Tuesday was the first day of classes.
“You’ll be fine,” said Ken heartily, with a wave of his pipe. Did he ever light it? Bobby wondered. Perhaps Miss Craybill frowned on pipe smoking as well as drinking. “Just think of the Iroquois prisoners, forced to run the gauntlet!”
“And when you teach something as basic as gym, you can always tell them to do laps when you run out of material,” Enid added. “That’s what my high school gym teacher used to do.”
“It’s not—there’s much more invol
ved than laps.” Bobby was shaken. Is this girl deliberately insulting me? “If you graduated from high school thinking that’s all there was to gym, you certainly must have gotten a bum specimen of a physical education instructor!”
“I didn’t mind,” Enid assured her. “I’d work on proofs for geometry in my head as I jogged.”
“You know, the Menominee exported wild rice and must have had some system of mathematical accounting,” Ken began, and Enid turned to him politely.
As Ken droned on, Bobby noticed that Laura had disappeared again, and that even Mona’s bright smile of interest was becoming fixed. Covertly, she looked around the room. Maybe she didn’t need to worry about purchasing more feminine clothing. Miss Rapp was wearing tailored scarlet slacks, which emphasized her generous hips. Valkyrie—that was the word. Hoppy Fiske—laughing now with Bryce Bowles—had paired a pale blue sweater set with a wrinkled fiesta skirt. Bryce’s golf pants were as flamboyant as his tie, while Miss Otis, Bobby realized, was clad in the Metamora school uniform: charcoal gray skirt with red piping, white blouse with red tie. She was deep in conversation with Miss Craybill, the Headmistress who’d interviewed Bobby in Bay City. When Ken paused for breath, Bobby suggested to Mona, “Maybe I should go say hello to Miss Craybill.”
“Excellent idea,” Mona cried, coming to life instantly, and they made their escape, leaving only the irritating Enid to the minutiae of Menominee mathematics.
“Isn’t Enid stunning?” Was that a knowing nudge the housekeeper gave Bobby? “And she’s brilliant, really brilliant! One of the up-and-coming math minds, her advisor told Miss Craybill.”
Bobby imagined Mona describing her to other teachers as a brilliant physical education instructor.
“Miss Craybill!” caroled Mona, interrupting the headmistress’s conversation with Miss Otis. “Here’s Bobby Blanchard, at last!”
Miss Craybill took Bobby’s hand in both of hers. “Welcome, Miss Blanchard, welcome.” She was a small woman, her pepper-and-salt hair in an old-fashioned bun. When they had first met she had reminded Bobby of one of those plump little birds that cocks its head and looks at you with bright eyes. Now, however, her gaze wandered as she asked, “Your rooms are comfortable? I’m so glad. And the gymnasium? Of course you haven’t had time to visit our physical education facilities yet. Not to worry. Mona’s given you the keys?”
“Not yet, but I will, Miss Craybill,” Mona answered for her. She added to Bobby, “Maybe it will soothe your jitters to look at Miss Fayne’s records from last year.”
“Jitters?” Miss Craybill’s eyes stopped roving the room distractedly and focused fully on the young Games Mistress for the first time. “Now, you’re not to feel nervous! Not in the least. I trust Miss Watkins’s recommendation implicitly. Implicitly.”
“Oh, I’m not really that worried,” Bobby was embarrassed. “I’ve done some work over the summer, and I came up with some lesson plans I think will be real—corkers!” She fished the Anglicism out of her memory triumphantly.
“Excellent, excellent!”
“One is on timekeeping in history.” Bobby warmed to her subject. She’d show Miss Craybill she could be as intellectual as the rest of the faculty. “First I’d invite”—That was something she’d learned in her pedagogy class, you were never supposed to tell the student to do something, you were supposed to “invite” him. It seemed silly to Bobby, because if the student was in class and you were the teacher, it wasn’t like he could refuse your invitation. But she used the word in her lesson plans religiously—“I’d invite the students to imagine what life was like before stopwatches were invented. How would you time a race? How would you tell when it was halftime? For example, hourglasses. I guess they were accurate, but how would you stop and start them? And then imagine even further back, when people used sundials.” Someone gasped, but Bobby was too involved to notice who or wonder why. “Would it even be possible to use a sundial to organize, say, a field hockey game?
“Then I’d move to the practical module.” Bobby was full of enthusiasm now. “Maybe this is a little unorthodox, but I noticed you have a sundial out there in the quadrangle, and it might be fun to take the class out there, kind of like a…” Bobby noticed suddenly that the chatter in the room had died away and everyone was looking at Miss Craybill and her in consternation. “A little field trip,” Bobby wound up lamely.
Miss Otis wore an expression of helpless horror and Miss Craybill—she no longer looked like a little bird, but a sick woman. Her eyes were not quite focused in her bloodless face, and her hand was to her chest, as if she had difficulty breathing. “I feel unwell,” she said. The housekeeper sprang to Miss Craybill’s side and supported her as she stumbled unsteadily out of the room.
As the flabbergasted gym teacher wondered what was so terrible about timekeeping, Miss Otis yanked her into the shadow of one of the granite gargoyles that flanked the fireplace. “Didn’t Mona explain?” she hissed.
The murmur of conversation had begun again in the rest of the faculty lounge. “Explain what?” said Bobby, bewildered.
“About Miss Froelich!”
“She said she died, that’s all.”
“Oh, my dear.” Miss Otis blew her breath out in exasperation. “Nerissa Froelich fell from Kent Tower this past June. She landed next to the sundial, and that’s where Miss Craybill found her—dead.”
Chapter Four
A Picnic with Elaine
The afternoon sun beat down on the still campus as Bobby emerged from Cornwall and walked swiftly down the road to the big stone gates. No one else seemed to be stirring and that suited her fine; she didn’t want to answer any questions about where she was going.
At the gate she leaned against the cool gray pillar, shaded by a big pine tree, and ran her fingers through her hair. She glanced at her wristwatch. Elaine had said 3:30.
A cold beer in a dim bar with Elaine looking adoringly across the table at her, that’s what Bobby needed. And then later they’d go back to the Ellman mansion—of course, Elaine would drop Bobby off first on a deserted stretch of Glen Valley Road, so she could sneak around the back way and they wouldn’t be seen together. But except for the sneaking around part, it would be almost like that poem Elaine had recited when they’d first strolled on the green lawn in front of the hospital, about thou and I and a jug of wine or something. Bobby couldn’t remember the exact words. But she remembered Elaine wearing her candy striper uniform and reciting it, looking like a younger Nina Foch, a slender brunette with a husky voice.
The smooth purr of Elaine’s little blue Triumph announced her arrival. Bobby slid into the passenger seat. “Hi, honey,” she said, leaning over for a kiss. But Elaine was already wrestling the car into a narrow U-turn, pointing it back toward Adena. “Not here,” she said instantly.
“Afraid the squirrels will tell?” Bobby couldn’t help asking.
“Don’t sulk.” Elaine glanced over at the disappointed gym teacher and demanded, “What on earth are you wearing a skirt for?”
Bobby looked down at her cotton skirt, then back at Elaine. “Aren’t we going to the Flame Inn?”
Elaine shifted gears impatiently. “Bobby, you know I can’t afford to be seen with you in a place like that.”
“Who’s going to notice? Who’s going to care if two girlfriends have a quiet drink together?”
It was an argument they’d had before and Bobby knew how it would play out, like a scene in a movie she’d watched too many times.
“A girl in my position gets gossiped about,” said Elaine on cue. “And we don’t look like we do our nails together.”
Elaine was picky about appearances, and it was hard to predict what would please her. Bobby’s penchant for pants in public always made Elaine uneasy. But when Bobby was forced to forgo her favorite dungarees for a skirt, Elaine complained she “didn’t look like herself.”
“That’s why I wore the darned skirt,” Bobby argued halfheartedly. “And who’s going to know you in a hick town
like Adena anyway?”
Elaine arched an eyebrow. “Didn’t you notice the Ellman Cycle store on the corner of Main and Mesquakie? It’s one of the top-selling stores in this part of the state. The manager sat at our table at the annual sales dinner. He’s been to our house!”
Bobby was silenced. That was the drawback of being with a girl like Elaine Ellman, daughter of Eddie Ellman, granddaughter of Erwin Ellman, the founder of Ellman’s Bicycles. Ellman bicycles were everywhere. And Elaine was convinced every salesman was reporting her activities back to her overprotective father.
“So where are we going?”
“I thought we’d have a picnic at Mesquakie Point.”
“A picnic,” Bobby repeated.
“Well, where are we supposed to go?” Elaine blew up. “You’re the one who had to take this crazy job out in the sticks! Games Mistress!”
Bobby held her tongue as Elaine turned right onto Mesquakie Point Road. Clearly the young candy striper was in one of her irritable moods, when the littlest thing was liable to set her off. Bobby reminded herself of the pressure Elaine was under—her candy-striping duties kept her on the go three afternoons a week, and innumerable social obligations claimed the rest of her time. It was no wonder she was out of sorts.
“Take that left up ahead,” Bobby suggested after they’d driven a few minutes in silence.
“Why? The picnic grounds are this way.”
“Ole Amundsen, Metamora’s groundskeeper, told me this road goes all the way to the point and no one ever uses it. He says there’s better spots here than the public picnic grounds. It’ll be nice and—private.”
“Oh, you! You only have one thing on your mind.” But Elaine made the turn and Bobby knew she wasn’t really annoyed. At the hospital, Elaine had always been ready to duck into an empty occupational therapy room for some heavy petting.
Several minutes later the Triumph bumped off the road and stopped between two majestic firs. Bobby lifted the picnic basket from the trunk and carried it through a grove of younger trees and brush to the clearing while Elaine followed with a heavy blanket. There was no sound but the wind in the trees and, faint in the distance, the rushing water of the Muskrat River rapids. Bobby set down the picnic basket and helped Elaine spread the blanket. She noticed a faint indentation in the ground, and a ragged line of stones. “Look.” She kicked one of the stones, half buried in the earth. “It’s an old foundation stone. We’re picnicking in someone’s front yard.”
