The Cooper Station high school stood in an open field at the end of Laurentian Street. This was the oldest street in Cooper Station, named by Old Nate in memory of the place where he and his wife had spent their honeymoon. The school was a beautiful new building, all brick and glass and completely fireproofed and almost everybody in Cooper Station regarded it as the town’s monument to free education and its tribute to the American Way. Sometimes, there was talk of building the same kind of school in Cooper’s Mills, but this kind of talk always trailed off into vagueness and finally halted altogether until someone brought up the subject again. The people who usually brought up the subject were Dr. Jess Cameron, Nathaniel Cooper and Thomas Averill, the owner of the Twin Town Clarion. For a while, everyone would be enthusiastic about the idea of a new high school for Cooper’s Mills, then the subject of higher taxes would come up at town meetings and the excuses, old and tired and very much used, would begin.
“After all, the Catholics over there have their own school, so it hardly seems worthwhile to go to the expense of building a new public high school.”
“Most of the kids at the Mills don’t really want to go to high school anyway.”
“And most of them who do go never finish. I mean, they quit as soon as they’re sixteen years old and go right into the factories. I mean, the kind of education we give our children here would be sort of wasted there.”
Besides being the newest, finest school building in the state, the Cooper Station high school had been provided with an auditorium and several smaller meeting rooms which provided facilities for all important town activities since the town hall was old, drafty and inadequately heated.
As Nathaniel Cooper walked toward the lighted school building where the Cooper Station Town Board of Guardians was having its regular monthly meeting, he thought of the rather uncomfortable dinner he had just finished. It was always awkward to have dinner with a relative one hadn’t seen for ten years, he supposed. And Anthony certainly hadn’t been the best company.
He drinks too much, thought Nathaniel, remembering the way Anthony had gulped four Martinis before dinner.
“Just put in the gin, Nate,” Anthony had said. “And then whisper vermouth. That’s all. Whoops! Here, let me do it. You said vermouth too loud.”
Margery had been nervous.
“I watched for you, Anthony,” she had said. “When you wrote that you were coming and didn’t say anything about having anyone meet the train, I figured that you’d be driving. Is everything all right over at your house?”
“Wonderful,” Anthony had said. “The place is so spotless that it looks as if Mother’s ghost had been busy cleaning for a month. And Cooper Station hasn’t changed a bit. Nobody can fart but that it doesn’t make the front page of the Clarion. I hadn’t been in the house three minutes when you called up and I’ll bet everyone in town knows I’m here.”
“Well, I don’t know what we’ll do from now on,” Margery had said worriedly. “I’ve had Marie over there, but she cleans for Jess regularly and I just borrowed her from him.”
“Don’t worry about it, Margery. I’ll be fine. I don’t want anyone underfoot all the time anyway.”
“Anthony?”
“Yes?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Good Lord, Margery, stop fussing. I’m fine. I just came home to rest and get some work done.”
“Nate wrote to your agent, Anthony.”
“Margery,” Anthony had said savagely, “nervous breakdowns are very fashionable among writers. Didn’t you know?”
The last of the Coopers, thought Nathaniel sourly. Oh, well, it’s probably a good thing. Maybe the line’s been around too long as it is.
Besides Nathaniel, the Cooper Station Town Board of Guardians was made up of James Sheppard, a relative newcomer to the town who had been elected by what almost everyone regarded as a fluke, and Doris Delaney Palmer, the wife of Adam Palmer who was the president of the Palmer Soap Company of Boston. The Guardians, as they were called, acted in a supervisory capacity over all social and educational matters that concerned the town. The board acted as trustees for the town hospital, a fact which had driven Jess Cameron to outrage more than once, for except for Nathaniel who believed in leaving the job of hospital administration to those who knew what they were doing, the board, more often than not, fancied itself wise beyond wisdom and insisted on arguing about the price of x-ray machines when, as Jess put it, they should have busied themselves with rolling bandages. The Cooper Station library was also a victim of the Town Board of Guardians with the result that the small library contained a surfeit of books about Tibet while the works of Sigmund Freud were volumes that were regarded as consumption for foreigners who planned eventually to work in insane asylums and therefore not fit for the eyes of God-fearing northern New Englanders. Nathaniel Cooper had given up in his efforts to buck the ladies who served with him on the board long ago and until the election of Jim Sheppard, Nathaniel’s attitude had been one of To Hell With It.
“Not that I expect to see the works of Henry Miller on the shelves of the public library,” he told Margery, “but perhaps now we can put in something besides the limp mutterings of Frances Parkinson Keyes.”
The library, which had been given to the town by his grandfather, was Nathaniel’s pet project while Doris Delaney Palmer’s was the Administration of Funds for the Poor. Doris loved the poking and prying that was involved with such administration and it was a point of pride with her that she handled every town dollar as if it were her own. The end result of Doris’s way with money was that more than one family had lived on oatmeal and beans rather than ask the town for a dime and every year, at town meeting, Doris always delivered the accounting of funds with what some people considered pardonable pride.
“You have to hand it to Mrs. Palmer,” they said. “Knows where every cent is every minute of the time.”
But although the Funds for the Poor might be where Doris did her best work, it was at the selection of schoolteachers that she really shone. She relentlessly questioned and probed into the life of every man or woman who applied to Arthur Everett, the school superintendent, for a position in the Cooper Station schools.
“After all,” Doris was fond of saying, “we are paying their salaries and when a person is going to be in charge of our young people, we just can’t be too careful, now can we?”
Doris preferred teachers who had graduated from the state university, were married to people who had also attended the university and had the good taste to restrain themselves to one child.
“They make the most suitable teachers,” she said. “They are settled but not harried and they seem to fit right into things.”
“It beats me how the hell you find anybody dumb enough to apply for a job here in the first place,” said Adam Palmer. “Not with the money you pay.”
“Adam, to a dedicated schoolteacher there is no such thing as money,” said Doris.
“Well, then, I guess I can see why you’d never make a teacher,” said Adam.
“Adam,” said Doris severely, “it’s coarse to discuss money with such obvious interest.”
“You’re right,” said Adam grandly. “I shall leave the obvious interest to you, on the first of the month, when you examine the bank statements.”
Adam Palmer was the only man in Cooper Station who was wealthier than Nathaniel Cooper, a fact which gave Doris unlimited hours of pleasure. She could not understand what she called “Adam’s kowtowing” to Nathaniel.
“You could buy and sell the Coopers a dozen times over,” she told her husband often and angrily. “What makes them so special anyway? Why, that Anthony is totally worthless, off in New York doing heaven knows what. And as for Margery and Nate, well, if I couldn’t do better than produce an idiot—”
“Why don’t you shut up, Doris?” said her husband. “Just try to remember that there were Coopers around here when my grandfather was still stirring up hog fat and lye in his barn and long before any of the Delaneys had got off the boat.”
“And you should see the way he high-hats me at Town Guardians’ meetings,” continued Doris as if Adam had not spoken. “I’ve known Nathaniel Cooper for fifteen years and he still calls me Mrs. Palmer. Well, he needn’t think that I’m going to Mr. Cooper, sir, him like one of his millhands.”
“Good evening, Mr. Cooper,” said Doris Delaney Palmer when Nathaniel walked into the room where the Town Board of Guardians meeting was to be held.
“Evening, Mrs. Palmer,” said Nate. “Mary. Jim. Arthur.”
Mrs. Palmer’s smile never wavered. That bastard, she thought savagely, I’ll fix him. And that Jim Sheppard, too. Jim never had any business getting on the board in the first place. Callie Webster should be sitting in his chair right this minute.
Mary Welch, the town librarian, had come to make her usual futile plea for money and Arthur Everett waited impatiently until she had gone.
“Well, let’s get to it,” he said briskly. “I’ve got to go to a meeting up the Mills when I finish here.” Arthur Everett always spoke briskly when he was unsure of himself. “We’ve got to get the new teacher question out of the way. As you all know, there is a vacancy in the history department caused by the resignation of John Colbath. I’m recommending a young man named Christopher Pappas to fill that vacancy.” Arthur took a deep breath, the way a man might if he just stepped under a cold shower at seven o’clock in the morning. “Here are Pappas’s records,” he continued, not looking at Doris, and tossed a sheaf of papers down onto the table in front of Nathaniel.
“Arthur,” said Nate, whose head felt a little heavy from the Martinis before dinner, “I’ve been looking at papers of one sort or another all day. Can’t you just tell us about this fellow? Then we can vote and get it over with.”
“You’re recommending whom?” demanded Doris Palmer.
“Christopher Pappas,” said Arthur Everett and sighed inwardly. I knew it, he thought. I knew she’d never stand for it.
“Do you know who Christopher Pappas is?” cried Doris, turning to look at Nate.
“Well, from what Arthur’s said,” replied Nate, “I gather that Christopher Pappas is a male teacher.”
“I’ll tell you about him,” said Doris. “He’s that Greek fellow from the Mills. Born and raised there. And he got a job teaching down at West Farrington, the Lord only knows how. He was there for less than a month when he just upped and quit his job. No reason, just like that, he upped and quit. He’d signed a contract and everything. He was committed to teach for the whole school year and he just quit.” Doris fixed her eyes on Arthur Everett. “Everyone knows about Christopher Pappas,” she said. “And I, for one, would like to know whose bright idea it was to suggest a man like that for a position here in Cooper Station.”
James Sheppard balanced a yellow pencil on two fingers and looked up at Doris Palmer.
“Mine,” he said calmly.
“Mr. Sheppard,” said Doris, “must I remind you that the welfare of our children depends on us and that is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. After all, we are being asked to approve a teacher not a garbage collector and—”
“Mr. Pappas is a teacher,” said Jim Sheppard.
Doris Palmer quivered with outrage. “Some teacher!” she cried. “Do you know what he’s doing now? He’s living in a shack up at the Mills with that wretched wife of his and their two brats and he’s teaching physical education at the School for the Feeble-Minded over at Marmington.”
Jim Sheppard put down the pencil he had been holding.
“The Pappas family is not living in a shack,” he said quietly. “They live in a house which they rent from Eben Seton for thirty-five dollars a month. The Pappas children are not brats, but attractive, well behaved, intelligent children. And Mrs. Pappas is far from wretched.”
“She’s not even decent!” shouted Doris Palmer. “She was pregnant before she ever got married. Everybody knows it.”
“You don’t know that for a fact, Mrs. Palmer,” said Jim Sheppard. “And even if it were true, I don’t imagine that Lisa Pappas is the first woman around here to have found herself in the same circumstances.”
“For God’s sake, Arthur,” said Nate wearily. “Will you please tell me about this man so that we can vote and get it over with?”
Arthur Everett looked at Doris. She might not be a Cooper, but Arthur knew that she was not without a certain power with many people in town. People who admired Palmer soap and Palmer money and who were not without influence when it came to a question of Arthur’s job.
“Well, Nate,” said Arthur, “Pappas is a good man. Honor student at the state university, two years’ experience with excellent references. It was Jim, here, who suggested that we consider him, but it was Ed Bailey, the head of the education department down at the university, who really talked me into recommending Pappas for this job.”
“It would seem to me, Mr. Everett,” said Doris Palmer angrily, “that Cooper Station has a superintendent with remarkably little backbone when someone we don’t even know can talk him into suggesting an undependable foreigner to teach in our town.”
“Christopher Pappas made a mistake on the job at West Farrington,” said Arthur. “He was younger then and he was an idealist and he couldn’t take interference in his work. Besides, Pappas isn’t a foreigner. He was born right here in this state. Right next door to Cooper Station.”
“Where were your parents born, Mrs. Palmer?” asked Jim Sheppard.
Doris Palmer’s whole body trembled. “Mr. Sheppard,” she said, “you forget yourself.”
“The hell with all this,” said Nate rudely. “Let’s hear the rest of it, Arthur.”
“Well, it was a culmination of a lot of things with Pappas,” said Arthur. “For one thing, there’s a fellow down there on the school board. Name of Hammond. Hammond had a daughter, a senior, the year Pappas started down there. The girl was failing American History and Pappas sent a warning home to her parents. Old Hammond blew his top. Went down to the school to see Pappas and told him he’d better pass his daughter or else. Like I said, Pappas was young. He asked Hammond or else what. To make a long story short, the girl failed the next exam and Pappas gave her a fifty for the quarter. Mrs. Palmer was mistaken when she said that Pappas taught for less than a month. It was just short of three months that he was there. There were a few other things, too,” Arthur went on, this time openly nervous.
“Like what?” insisted Nate.
“Ridiculous things,” said Jim Sheppard, sorry for Arthur Everett. “There were a few pinheads in West Farrington who claimed that Chris Pappas was a Communist because he told the kids that some of the greatest writers in the world were Russians.”
“They were,” said Nate.
“And Pappas also said things such as the Puritans had run away from intolerance only to become intolerant themselves.”
Nate smiled. “Pappas,” he said. “God’s Angry Man. Might do this town good to have someone like that around. I vote that we hire this fellow.”
“I’m with you,” said Jim Sheppard.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” said Arthur Everett gratefully.
“Just a minute!” cried Doris. “I won’t stand for this!”
“You’ve been outvoted, Mrs. Palmer,” said Arthur as gently as he could. No matter what else you could say about Doris Palmer, she was a fighter. He only hoped that she was a good loser.
Doris Delaney Palmer grabbed her gloves and handbag from the desk in front of her.
“I don’t care,” she said. “You haven’t heard the end of this. Maybe none of you cares what happens to our schoolchildren, but I do. And I’m sure that the citizens of this town will agree with me.”
“Mrs. Palmer,” said Nate, at the end of his patience, “you have been outvoted. At the close of this meeting, Mr. Sheppard and I will sign our names to a contract hiring Christopher Pappas. You may join us or not, as you like, but Christopher Pappas will teach in the Cooper Station high school next fall.”
Later that night, Arthur telephoned Christopher Pappas.
“Well, Pappas,” he said, “the Guardians approved you, but you’re going to have a time of it. Mrs. Palmer is dead set against you. She wouldn’t sign your contract along with Jim and Nate Cooper.”
“I’ll make it, Mr. Everett,” said Chris Pappas. “I’ll do such a good job that she won’t be able to stay set against me.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Arthur. “Good night, Chris. Good luck.”
The school superintendent hung up slowly. Poor bastard, he thought, poor, stupid bastard to break his heart for three thousand dollars a year.