by Amanda Brown
“Don’t just stand there,” said Philippe, who had heard the crash all the way down the hall and raced in. “Fill the sink!”
The three of them conducted a hasty fish rescue while Emily watched in awe. The perfect storm left no casualties. While Philippe whisked Emily down to the kitchen to get an orange soda, Dick and Becca held their noses to mop up the carpet.
With most of the damage cleared, Becca sank into Dick’s womb-chair.
“To think I came in to ask for a couple of days off,” she said, shaking her head. “I have some parenting to do.”
Dick smiled generously. “Anything to keep you away from my fish tank.”
“What fish tank?” she said. She took a sniff of her wet sleeve and made an awful face.
“The one we’re wearing,” he said, looking nauseous. With sudden concern for the integrity of his womb-chair, he asked her to stand up and step away from it. Becca hurried toward the door.
“So I’ll be in, oh, I don’t know, next Thursday?”
“Make that Thursday two months from now,” he offered suddenly.
“What?” She squinted at him, unsure if she heard him right.
“Paid leave,” Dick explained. “Administrative. Listen, kid, with the Celex deal you’re already ahead of your last year numbers. If you don’t take a break, you’ll personally originate over half our profits! I’ll move Philippe over here and we’ll be fine.”
Becca smiled proudly. “Why would you pull your first string quarterback, if she’s having the game of her life?”
“To save her for next season,” Dick answered. “And to give your teammates some time on the field.”
She nodded. She could trust Dick not to have any hidden agenda. “Full pay?” she asked.
“Of course. Come into the office once a week or so and check in. I’ll call a special meeting of the management committee and we’ll approve it this week.”
Becca paused, shocked by the generosity of Dick’s plan.
Emily, who had a sugary orange mustache, rushed to the door to tug at Becca’s leg. “Can we play now? Becca? Pleeease?”
Dick raised an eyebrow, indicating it toward Emily with a nod of his head.
“You never know, Becca. I think you’ll be busy enough.”
“All right,” she agreed, “I’ll take the time off. Promise me you’ll get a new carpet with my year-end bonus. Not to mention a fish tank.”
“It’s all right,” he said, waving casually at the mess on the carpet. “I’m over the fish fad.” Becca smiled at him and left the office.
After a minute, Dick stepped into the hall and called out after them. “I wanted to redecorate anyway. The thing now is jungle cats!”
CHAPTER 14
Le Petit École
Becca, Emily, and Edward stood together in the crisp afternoon air, surveying the red, white, and blue paneled door of Le Petit École, Manhattan’s exclusive French-immersion preschool. A nondenominational, international, fully bilingual preschool, Le Petit École was accredited by the International Baccalaureate program’s Primary Years Program. It was the Sorbonne of nursery schools.
Though they faced another door into the unknown, Becca and Edward stood undaunted, waiting cheerfully, squeezing Emily’s hands and laughing together. The three had grown playfully comfortable together over the past couple of weeks, and they looked upon the school’s bright tricolor with a sense of amusement. They knew too little to be afraid.
“Cute playhouse,” Becca noticed, looking through the window at a Provençal-style chateau that sat at the far end of one classroom, complete with blooming windowboxes of flowers and wooden chickens that swung slowly on springs to peck for imaginary seeds.
Edward agreed. As they waited, he glanced down at the school’s brochure, then gave a quiet laugh.
“What?” Becca asked reflexively. Like Emily, who was tickling the palm of her hand, she hated to be left in the dark.
He showed her the school’s preachy “vision statement.”
“Whatever they mean by inquiry-based, transdisciplinary learning,” Edward read from the English side of the bilingual brochure, “I bet they have great food at parents’ night!” Tipping his head back, Edward breathed in the delicious scent of chocolate and croissants that drifted from the building.
Becca still had doubts about dunking Emily headfirst in French, but Dick Davis, whose children had languished on Le Petit École’s waitlist until they were almost too old to attend, gave the preschool his highest compliment.
Dick’s wife, Leslie, had shepherded their kids through this process not too long ago, he explained to Becca, when she had stopped by his office that morning to see his safari-themed redecoration. She had not yet adjusted to her time off, and was still having a problem not attending meetings. But Dick absolutely insisted that she attend the school visit with Emily. She had to promise him.
“Both parents always attend the school interviews,” he cautioned her. “It’s a given.”
“Calm down, Dick,” Becca said, laughing at the urgency in his voice. “It’s just preschool. We thought she’d have some fun there, make a few friends.”
Dick was astounded at her naivete.
“Fun? Friends?” He shook his head emphatically. “You’ve got it all wrong, Becca. This is the day that will decide the rest of Emily’s life! It will virtually guarantee her place in elementary school.”
Becca remained unmoved.
Dick felt his blood pressure going through the roof. He thought of Becca as his protégé even though she was often one step ahead of him. The explanation of the realpolitk involved in the process of getting children into New York preschools wasn’t exactly something a senior executive was meant to pass on. Nevertheless, Dick felt that his role was to find a teachable moment here.
“Seriously, Becca,” Dick said, rubbing his temples with the sudden stress of recalling the preschool rat race. “Take it seriously. Every parent in Manhattan dreams of sending a kid to Little Eton! Its yacht racing team wins the fourth grade division every year.”
Becca did not conceal her surprise.
“They teach yacht racing to fourth graders?”
“That’s only the half of it,” he laughed. “Sit down, kid. Let’s get rid of that wool over your eyes.”
She sat, her arms folded.
“Le Petit École traditionally feeds into Little Eton. You can’t miss a shot at Little Eton. It’s the best day school in the city. It’s hidden in the southeast corner of Central Park, between the zoo and the pond. You can almost see it from your window.”
“I didn’t know there was a school there.”
“It’s the only one with a variance. And it’s not just a school, Becca. It’s Shangri-la.”
Becca burst out laughing. “Not you, Dick,” she teased him. “Caught up in a flashy image? I don’t believe it for a second.”
“Listen, Becca,” Dick insisted, drawing toward the couch where she sat, “the school is so perfect, at first I thought it was just my delusional fantasy. Let me tell you how it works. It’s more than just image.”
Becca sunk into the couch as Dick began to regale her with Little Etonite lore. According to Dick, whose kids were Etonites, the place was heaven on earth. Its primary school curriculum was based on the open-ceiling British system, which allowed the brightest children to move ahead of the pack at whatever pace was set by their private tutors. The students’ little brass-buttoned blazer jackets and navy wool jumpers, which were designed by Ralph Lauren to feature the school’s unique coat of arms, were only the beginning of Little Eton’s dapper charm. At sixth grade graduation, the young boys stood straight as arrows to recite Shakespearean sonnets. The little girls, carrying single red roses as they proceeded down the aisle in white lace gowns, wore wreaths of lavender and baby’s breath in their hair. Delightful!
The school’s behavioral standards were strict. Ten polite, snub-nosed, shiny-combed boys and symmetrically braided young girls stood stiffly by their desks to greet
the teacher when he entered the room each morning. (The teachers were all male, in the manner of wine stewards at fine restaurants.)
Onward the footsoldiers marched through their structured little days. The little gentlemen wore embroidered beanies on the practice field, where they tried their small hands at morning cricket, and the little ladies donned white gloves for lunch! In art class they designed their own tartans! From the dining hall to the handbell choir, Little Eton was a charmed circle. For parents, anyway, and they paid the checks.
Dick’s children had attended Little Eton since kindergarten, which was one triumph he could share with his illustrious style-rival, leverage-buyout wizard Henry Kravis.
Becca scoffed to think of children more concerned with afternoon tea than multiples, but Dick assured her that it was an important step on the road to the Ivy League.
“British, Shmitish,” Dick said. “That’s all marketing. The best thing about Little Eton is that it feeds to St. George’s. You have to start early.”
“You can’t be serious,” Becca protested. Was it this bad?
“Let me put it this way,” Dick said, stepping to his putting green. “Le Petit École gets you a tee time. Little Eton takes you down the fairway. Groton gets you up on the green, and ‘tap’”—he nudged an imaginary golf ball—“you chip one in for a birdie at Harvard.” He pictured Little Eton’s manicured cricket greens, windy yacht races, crew regattas, and for a minute, thought he might cry. Parents had so much to look forward to!
Becca shook her head with sympathy. Poor Dick was always chasing the right image. She promised to go, teasing Dick that she would get a seat in the back and make some phone calls.
She was surprised at how severely his face had clouded. Even for Dick, he seemed incredibly earnest. He warned Becca to take the process seriously. She was walking into a firestorm, and she was treating it like a Sunday stroll in the park.
“Whatever you do, Becca, don’t screw up the interview. You’re lucky to get it. Make sure the kid is ready. Every step of school competition is more cutthroat than the last. If she blows it at preschool, she’s sunk.”
Becca shrugged. “I’ll be myself, Dick. And so will Emily, I hope. She’s a great kid.” She checked her watch.
“Where is she?” asked Dick.
“She’s playing Hansel and Gretel with my staplers,” Becca said, laughing. “They’ve probably left a pretty long trail by now. Wish us luck!” She turned to leave the office.
Dick shook his head. He had a bad feeling about this.
“Hey,” he called after her. “Don’t forget, you’re being evaluated too.”
“Like hell I am!” Becca called back. Did he really think she could care what some Polly Do-Good in a Happy French playroom thought of her? It was already a bad joke to have competition for kids not long out of diapers. But asking her to put on a sash for the parental beauty contest was too much.
Five or six families had assembled at the schoolhouse door to wait behind Becca, who had elbowed the way forward for Edward and Emily, unconscious of the resentments she created in pushing ahead to stand as the “line leader.” Though each parent had the stomach of a pit trader, the manners of a tea party were supposed to prevail.
As Dick had predicted, two parents stood with each child. The children were scrubbed, fidgety, and bored. Becca noticed the parents greeting each other warmly, like old friends. They all seemed to know one another.
Edward smiled and waved to several of the mothers, who greeted him with enthusiasm.
“You get around, Eddie,” Becca observed under her breath.
He grinned at Becca.
“They’re all in French for Tots with Em. I took her last week, when you did the speech at the World Trade Organization. Remember?”
One swarthy, heavyset father threw a shoulder and edged Becca out of the path to the door. A look from Edward suggested that she let it go, and she unclenched her fists in time to clap with the others when the merry doorbell tune of “Frère Jacques” rang in the air.
The parents enjoyed a laugh, a delightful relief in the atmosphere of nervous apprehension.
“Will we have to speak French?” Becca asked Edward.
“Probably,” he whispered back. “The brochure says it’s a school for the whole family. You speak a little, don’t you? I thought you said you spent some time in Paris on a bank deal.”
Becca had spent a few months consulting with French banks on their compliance with the Basle capital adequacy framework, but she was pretty rusty.
“No problemo,” she answered. She noticed Edward cringe slightly before giving her his polite smile.
“It’ll come back to me when I hear it,” she promised.
The man who had edged Becca out to ring the doorbell made a show of shaking his injured right hand to draw attention to its splint. “My wrist!” he complained loudly. “I sprained it writing checks to the French tutor!”
His unbearable joke drew sympathetic laughs.
His wife spoke up quickly while her daughter dove like a mole into the folds of her coat.
“Nadine sings ‘Frère Jacques’—both verses—with the most authentic accent. And it’s not all because of the tutors. The summer we spent in Nice did wonders for her pronunciation. I knew that trip would be a great investment!” An unpleasant thought occurred to her, clouding her eyes like a stage curtain. “You wanted to go to Bali,” she spat at the check-writer.
“Not now, dear,” he hissed back. “Shut up and be charming.”
“Delightful, delightful,” she sang to nobody in particular. Young Nadine, for all her pronouncing prowess, had yet to emerge from her mother’s coat.
“Are you ready, dear?” her mother coaxed. “Practice makes perfect!”
A shy “oui, oui” was spoken into the coat. Nadine appeared to be shaking. Her hands were white.
“She’d better be ready, for what it goddamn cost,” her husband snorted, checking the time on his massive gold Rolex.
A woman standing next to him, whose sweet dripping Boucheron perfume attracted the notice of a half-dozen pigeons, pulled her daughter protectively away from the crowd. The child, her fearful eyes blinking back tears, cuddled the mink-lined edge of her mother’s jacket and began to suck her thumb. The father followed.
“Work with me, Madeline,” her father implored her. “It’ll help my Newport Yacht Club application if you get in. Wouldn’t you like to play with Babette, in the game room? Wouldn’t you like to go sailing with Daddy?”
The child screamed.
Becca’s phone rang. Parents stared at her with disapproval.
“Is that me?” she asked with mock surprise. Only Edward gave a polite laugh.
She answered the call in a clear, businesslike voice that echoed loudly, as the other parents had quieted and held her in their hostile stares. Becca, consumed by the topic of her call, was oblivious to the reaction she created.
Edward gently stepped forward to hold her place in line.
“Forget it, Jack,” she said.
A cuckoo clock screeched two, and the school door swung open. At once the crowd of parents erupted into an instant smiling contest. A minute later, the children, poked in their little backs, were smiling too. Except Emily. She was pacing behind Becca, imitating her gestures, waiting for her turn to use the phone.
“Bonjour!” greeted Penelope Hobnob, director of admissions. She glared at Becca, shaking her finger.
“Rule one on the classroom visit, as you might have read in our handbook,” she snipped. “No phones.”
Becca nodded without answering. She held up her finger to indicate she’d be finished in a minute. “I’ll get to you in a sec,” she said in Penelope’s direction.
Penelope glared, standing with her hands on her hips. She clearly meant to hold the waiting parents hostage to her silence until Becca put the phone away.
“Listen, this is a bad time, Jack. But the answer is no. And don’t you dare go around me. If you find anybody at D
avis to pony up for this one, I’ll have your”—she glanced around—“your, you-know-whats on the chopping block! Capisce?” She paused, then smiled, laughing out loud.
“Great. I’ll call you this afternoon.”
Becca handed her phone to Emily, who put it to her ear and began to speak with great animation as they both stepped into line.
“Your name?” the director asked Becca.
“Becca Reinhart,” she answered. Emily gave Becca’s leg a big hug.
“Charming, Ms. Reinhart. I’ll be so interested to get to know you today.”
Her eyes approached Edward’s and stopped. “Why, Edward Kirkland. What a surprise! How is your dear mother?”
“Wonderful, Nellie. I’ll send her your greeting.”
Penelope Hobnob smiled warmly, overlooking the fact that the gauche Becca Reinhart was linked to dreamy Edward by the little hands of Emily Stearns.
As they entered the brightly decorated school, Becca’s phone rang a second time. Edward volunteered to go in with Emily while Becca finished her call in the hall. Covering the receiver, she explained to him it was important for her to take this one. “I’ll just be a minute,” she promised, pacing down the flowered hall, which was decorated in the style of a French jardin.
Half an hour later, she rushed into the classroom.
Penelope Hobnob tore herself away from Edward’s side, where she had been smitten with his colorful tales of the French Riviera, to glare at the hurried entering figure of Becca Reinhart. Emily rushed to greet Becca with a hug.
Monique Pegnoir, who taught the fours class to which Emily had applied, smiled maliciously.
“Bonjour,” she said to Becca. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
Edward, pushing his familiarity with Nellie Hobnob a bit, threw Becca a life preserver by taking the question.
“This is Emily’s other guardian, Becca Reinhart. Becca has traveled to Paris frequently on business.”
Penelope butted in. “Ms. Reinhart, we at Le Petit École believe that parents…” she paused, considering Emily’s situation, “or…parental figures…have a great deal to do with our students’ language retention.”
