Norman Laney’s phone had been ringing constantly since ten o’clock, which is when he had an “administrative hour,” and all his friends as well as his mother knew to call him then if they wanted to reach him in the office. In addition to the congratulations pouring in for last night’s triumph—plastered across the front page of the paper—all of Mountain Brook was abuzz with news of the Keller divorce.
Frank Keller was principal shareholder and CEO of Coca-Cola Bottling; in other words, he was one of the richest men in Mountain Brook. His wife Felicia—or Fee, as she was affectionately known—was one of the most beautiful women in Mountain Brook. She and her sister were both such famous beauties in their youth they’d been nicknamed the Gabor girls, whom they greatly resembled. Given Frank’s wealth and Fee’s looks, they were considered a perfectly matched married couple, despite the well-known fact that they had absolutely nothing in common. Fee was still a vivacious woman who wanted parties, parties, parties so she could show off her face, her figure, her clothes and her jewelry before it was too late. Accordingly, she was on the board of every major charitable organization in Birmingham, and greatly valued for the way she channeled her glamour and her husband’s money into all these worthy causes. But her husband came home exhausted in the evening and wanted only his drink and his dinner before going to bed. However, no one had dreamed it would all end in divorce. Even more shocking, the woman who was “getting” Frank Keller was their neighbor, whose husband had died six months ago from cancer.
“Poor Fee,” said Libba Albritton, the sixth person who had called so far with the news. She spoke as if her friend had a terminal disease from which she would soon be dead rather than merely a pending divorce. Poor Fee, indeed, thought Norman. In a way, she would soon be dead. In Mountain Brook, a woman of her generation who was spurned by her husband lost both her social and her sexual currency in one fell swoop. Fee’s many dearest “friends” had not loved her so much as the place she occupied in their universe. Alliances that had lasted for decades were already shifting to the incumbent Mrs. Frank Keller.
But what Libba had called about was something quite different: she and her husband Milton wanted him to come to New York again and help them negotiate the sale of another Miró painting. It was to be the same as last time: a week in New York with a chauffeured limousine, two or three nights at the theater for shows they wanted Norman to choose, dinner at La Côte Basque and La Caravelle.
“Summer is out,” he told her flatly. “But what about this spring?” He flipped rapidly through the school year calendar on his desk. “Spring Break starts on March 15th,” he told her.
Libba said she’d check with Milton and let him know.
All in all, he thought, this was turning out to be a much better school year than he’d thought possible after that dreadful beginning with Susan Ritchie’s death. This could be the best senior class he’d ever worked with: the way the applications were shaping up, he could have as many as a third of his class accepted into Ivy League schools.
Just then Tom Turbyfill tapped on his door and asked for a minute of his time. Norman had been expecting the headmaster all morning to offer his congratulations and thanks for getting the school’s name in the paper in such a prominent and flattering position. Norman had worked hard to make it happen, but had not known till he opened his paper this morning that the photograph of Theo Jackson in the Brook-Haven School’s production of A Raisin in the Sun would be on the front page, above the fold. And Theo—thank God—had a black face that showed up black in a flash photograph. The article itself ran in Section C, but was not the usual fluff found in Living. When being interviewed, Norman had made sure to mention at least half a dozen times that Theo Jackson and Mira Vernon—another of the play’s stars—would be the first African-American graduates the school had produced, and both were applying to Ivy League institutions for college. The reporter had duly noted these facts and worked them into the story. Feeling flush with his p.r. coup as well as the prospect of a luxurious trip to New York, Norman found himself in a generous and expansive mood, and motioned with unaccustomed friendliness for Tom Turbyfill to come in and have a seat. But Tom wanted him in his office. This was a bit unusual, but Norman assumed there was a parent in the headmaster’s office that Turbyfill couldn’t handle.
However, there were no parents and only the most perfunctory congratulations for the success of the fall play. Then the headmaster pursed his lips, formed a temple with his fingertips, and said this was the most difficult moment he had experienced at the school since coming on board two and a half years ago.
“What do you mean? What’s happened?” said Norman sharply. “Elizabeth and I can take care of anything you need us to. You know that.”
Tom Turbyfill pursed his lips more firmly and said, “I am afraid this is a problem of a different nature.”
“What is it?” said Norman, with growing impatience. He could hear the phone ringing in his office, and hated to miss his share of either the glory or the gossip that had been pouring in all morning.
“It is hard for me to say this Norman,” said the headmaster with maddening deliberation, “but the problem, it would appear, is with you.”
“What problem? What are you talking about?”
“I think it best if I do not vocalize it, and we do not discuss it. With a little reflection, I am sure that you will know the matter I am referring to.”
“I assure you, headmaster, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, and won’t be able to address the problem until you tell me exactly what it is.” Norman’s momentary good will toward Tom Turbyfill had expired.
“The only way you can adequately address this problem is by giving me your resignation.” Tom Turbyfill spoke in the bland, neutral tone of a funeral parlor director, for whom even the death of a loved one was a business best handled without stressful emotions.
Norman blundered to his feet like a wild beast staggered by an unexpected arrow. “My resignation!” he was almost shouting. “Have you lost your mind? What are you talking about?”
“Sit down, Norman. Sit down,” said Dr. Turbyfill. “I would lower your voice too, so we can keep this conversation strictly between the two of us. That is my every intention.”
Grudgingly Norman did as he was told.
“I have given this matter a great deal of thought over several weeks,” continued Dr. Turbyfill, “and decided that the best course of action for all concerned is for you to give me your resignation before the end of the school year. If you do so, I will never have to mention this matter to another soul, and I will be able to give you the highest of recommendations in your search for another position.”
Dr. Turbyfill paused, and Norman stared at him as if the man had indeed lost his mind. But the headmaster’s composure was as unruffled as his hair, which looked like a toupée, although it wasn’t.
“If you do not give me your resignation,” he went on, “I will be forced to go to the Board in the spring and tell them why your contract should not be renewed. Then the matter will be public record—and public knowledge—and I will not be able to offer you any recommendation at all. You can save yourself a world of embarrassment, not to mention your career, and save the school a possible lawsuit, if you do as I suggest. The choice is yours to make, although I believe it is a clear one.”
“It’s not clear at all,” said Norman in a voice of ice. “You cannot mean that I am to resign without even knowing why I’m resigning?” It was laughable, and after the initial shock had worn off, Norman’s first instinct was actually to laugh. It really did seem as if the headmaster had suffered some break with reality and was speaking out of a temporarily deranged mind. The conversation had become absurd, and Norman saw no point in continuing it. Tom Turbyfill had gone off the deep end, and he and Elizabeth would need to put their heads together quickly to figure out how to get through the rest of the year without an administrative earthquake.
“You know as well as I do why you must resign from this school.” Tom Turbyfill’s voice remained toneless and uninflected, even sort of friendly in that openly artificial way of institutional blather.
“I assure you, I don’t,” said Norman, rising again. “How can I defend myself when I don’t even know what you’re accusing me of? This is outrageous!”
Tom Turbyfill remained seated. “There is no way for you to defend yourself,” he said with continued calmness. “And I am not accusing you of anything. The issue was brought to me and I am simply acting upon it as I see fit in my capacity as headmaster.”
“Who came to you and what did they say?” said Norman, narrowing his eyes.
“I beg you not to make me reveal that information, Norman. If I have to, I will, but only at the annual meeting of the Board in the spring. If necessary, the other party to this matter will go before the Board as well at that time.”
“You’re acting like I’ve committed some unpardonable crime! Some unmentionable sin! Like I’ve assaulted a parent or fondled a student! I ask you again: Who came to you and what did they say?! Because I know, no matter who came to you, no matter what they said, there is no proof of ANYTHING because I HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING!! Much as I might have wanted to strangle a dozen parents, I have refrained from doing so, and I wouldn’t begin to know how to fondle a student even if I wanted to, WHICH I DON’T! So why don’t we just clear this up, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. Who said WHAT?!”
Tom Turbyfill simply looked down at his desk and shook his head, as if telling his reflection in the polished surface that Norman Laney had chosen the most self-destructive course of action available to him.
When the bell rang, Norman flung open the door of the headmaster’s office and plunged furiously into the throng of students crowding the corridors between classes. The heat of all the human bodies and the enormity of his anger made him feel almost faint as he marched directly to the classroom where he taught “Art in the 20th Century” and wrote a topic on the board for an in-class essay: Discuss the meaning and the results of your attempt to paint like Jackson Pollock. “If anyone so much as sneezes while I’m out of this room, so help me God, I’ll have their hide and nail it to the door as a trophy!” he warned. The students looked at each other in complete surprise. After last night’s play and this morning’s front page, they had counted on the best of his moods, when he made no demands on them and told stories instead. (He had yet to recount his experiences at the premiere in Hollywood.)
“Laney’s on the warpath,” he could hear the students whisper in the hall as he made his way to Elizabeth Elder’s office. When he closed the door she always kept open, she knew something was greatly amiss, and accordingly removed her reading glasses and let them rest on the shelf of her bosom. But it was only after he’d told her what happened that he himself began to register the magnitude and seriousness of his encounter with the headmaster. Elizabeth’s hardened countenance told him at once that he was headed for a struggle rather than the simple mutiny he desired.
“I was afraid this would happen,” she sighed.
“Do you know who it is? Do you know—”
She held up her hand. “No, I don’t know that, Norman,” she said. “But I do know he’s wanted you gone from the moment he got here. You know that too.”
“Yes, but why? Why?”
She shrugged. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown when everyone knows it belongs to someone else.”
“But I’m no threat to him. If I’d wanted his job I would have taken it two and a half years ago when they offered it to me.”
“You should have taken it,” she said sternly. “I told you at the time you should and that we’d both live to regret it if you didn’t.”
“I have absolutely no desire to be the headmaster and never will,” he said.
“That’s exactly why you’d make such a good one,” she said tartly. “The best administrators are those who don’t want to be administrators. Anyone who actually wants such a job is inherently unsatisfactory.”
“The fact remains that I am not the headmaster and have demonstrated beyond doubt that it is not a position I seek.”
Elizabeth smiled like a parent indulging the ingenious excuses of a clever child. “But you are the headmaster, Norman. You run this school. You know that, he knows that, everybody knows that.”
“So what’s the problem? He gets the title and a salary several times what mine is. All he has to do is perform the administrative duties relevant to a person who has no degrees in any academic subject whatsoever.”
“I guess he’s not happy to play the puppet. Didn’t you see this coming?”
Miserably, Norman shook his head. “I didn’t think he could afford to cross me! I’m the one who knows everybody! I’m the best fundraiser! I’m a one-man public relations department! I’m the one who gets our students into Ivy League schools! I’m the one who increases enrollment year after year! I’m the one who makes this school what it is!”
“And that’s exactly why he wants to get rid of you.”
“Why would he want to get rid of the best employee he’s got? I’m the one who makes him look good!”
“It’s precisely because you are the best that he wants to get rid of you.”
Norman shook his head. “Obviously you understand something I don’t.” He was beginning to get annoyed with her.
“Norman,” she said, looking down the length of her nose at him. “You can’t really believe you make him look good. You make him look irrelevant.”
“He is irrelevant! The school is what matters, and I make the school look good. What’s more important, you and I make this a good school. Who cares how he looks?”
“Tom Turbyfill obviously cares how he looks.”
Norman stared at her. “What are you telling me? That he would do something that jeopardizes the school’s welfare if it makes him look good?” He shook his head. “I don’t see how that works. If the school goes down, he won’t look good for long.”
“How long do you expect him to stay here, Norman? Tom and Brenda have not exactly been asked to join the country club. They’re nobodies from Macon, Georgia, and that’s all they’ll ever be here. If I’ve heard the rumors, I know you have too. She is far from thrilled with their move here.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “They can move back where they came from.”
“He doesn’t want to move back. He wants to move up.”
She paused to give Norman a chance to explode. But he seemed strangely paralyzed all of a sudden.
“I’m afraid that’s what this is all about,” she continued with a sigh. “He knows he must distinguish himself in some way here before he can move up to a better position somewhere else. And he’s realized that with you around, he’ll never be able to accomplish anything he can point to.”
Norman remained thunderstruck. It had never occurred to him that an individual hired to lead an important institution would simply use it for his own advancement without caring if he destroyed it in the process, as long as he could move up afterwards. Despite the hundreds of thousands of faults Norman knew he possessed himself, one of the few he did not possess was small-minded selfishness, simply because he had always known that lifting himself up from where he came from meant doing the same for everyone else around him. How could any individual thrive or flourish in the midst of others who were struggling and failing? Norman saw himself as a member of the community, where his own well-being was part of the larger, general welfare. If life was just every man for himself, everyone else be damned, then that was the jungle. Norman wanted civilization. He had always wanted civilization.
What a fool he had been! He had thought all they needed as headmaster of the Brook-Haven School was a simpleminded figurehead who could perform all the boring duties smarter people like himself and Elizabeth didn’t have time for. So Tom Turbyfill didn’t want to be a mere figurehead. But he was still a simpleminded idiot, far too dimwitted to accomplish what he was trying to do on his own. Rapidly Norman scoured the mental list of his known adversaries for the likeliest candidate to be in cahoots with Tom Turbyfill. Elizabeth’s mind must have been thinking along the same track. Often this was the case, which is why they made such a formidable team.
“You have no idea who could have gone to Tom Turbyfill?” she said. “What complaint might have been made of this seriousness?”
“No idea.” He shook his head. Of course, he’d always had the feeling that he was getting away with something, and that one day he would cease to be able to get away with it and might even be held accountable for all the ways he had exceeded his mandate. Nevertheless, he shook his head even more emphatically and said, “I have absolutely no idea what I could have done.”
“You can’t think of a thing?”
“Of course there are hundreds of things!” he exploded. “You know me! I’m guilty of everything! It could be anything!”
“What about Warren Ritchie?” she suggested.
Norman considered. Ironically, Warren Ritchie was actually thrilled with Norman at the moment, because of Karen’s interview during the college tour with an admissions officer on the Harvard campus. These weren’t always granted when a student had already been interviewed by the local committee. Warren had been beside himself with gratitude, even inviting Norman for a thank-you dinner. Norman had even been tempted to accept, because Warren was now doing his entertaining at Highlands Bar and Grill; but in the end he had politely declined. However, at least they were back on terms of neutrality. The unpleasant conference last month seemed totally forgotten in that way Warren had of totally forgetting.
“It’s not Warren,” he told Elizabeth finally. “I’m afraid it’s someone in Mountain Brook who wants me out of here. Who doesn’t like what I’m doing with this school and has joined forces with Tom Turbyfill to get rid of me.”
“Then who? Think.”
He thought. Well, on the college tour a few weeks ago, in Washington, D.C., Sally Lindgren had sneaked into Malcolm Fielder’s hotel room and given him a blow job. Unfortunately, this had occurred on the same night that Norman was having dinner with Miranda Newcomb, one of his darlings from a few years ago, now a junior at Georgetown. Although he adored her grandmother Grace, he was not on good terms with her parents, whom he had defeated in mortal combat over their daughter’s choice of college. Now their worst fears were coming true, and they had demanded Norman undo the damage done to their daughter. Bent on joining the Peace Corps and going to Zanzibar when she graduated, Miranda was still very much in her “I-hate-the-South-and-I’m-never-going-back-to-Alabama” mode. And she was stubbornly, adamantly refusing to be among this year’s debutantes in Birmingham. If she didn’t change her mind soon, the opportunity would be lost. This would be a crushing disappointment to her family, and would have serious repercussions in the future. Whenever Miranda got married, her engagement announcement in the newspaper would not be able to mention that she had been presented at the Krewe Ball, the Ball of Roses, or Redstone. Norman had promised to do what he could, although he had also promised never to leave the parent chaperones alone in charge of the students on the college tour.
But he really needed to have this conversation with Miranda, and not just because her parents were up in arms either. Nor did he go for the elegant dinner—paid for by the Newcombs—and the opportunity to have a drink—okay, several drinks plus a bottle of wine—on what was supposed to be an alcohol-free trip. He went to deliver his own message to Miranda. Which was: As much as he wanted his students to transcend their origins, he also wanted them to know that after they had done so, they couldn’t forget their origins, reject their families or turn their backs on their community. For all he had encouraged Miranda to go to Georgetown and applauded her decision to join the Peace Corps, she still had to return to Alabama, at least occasionally, to bring a bit of the outside world back with her to inject into the hermetically sealed cocoon of her hometown. Unfortunately, Miranda had proven as intractable as her parents had described, and his outing had lasted longer than anticipated. Finally he had exploded at her:
“Of course it’s STUPID, SILLY, and MEANINGLESS!” he had shouted. “So why don’t you just do it then?!”
For the first time all evening, Miranda had no righteous speech to make. In fact, she was speechless. Ultimately, she had said slowly but accusingly: “You are asking me to betray my principles, my ideals, that I worked so hard to establish, that you helped me to carve out in opposition to the role my parents want me to play—”
“I’m not asking you to betray anything, dammit!” he had shouted, and actually pounded his fist on the table so hard that a glass of ice water jumped and threatened to tip over. They both reached out to grab it, and the contact of their hands broke the tension.
“Darling,” he said, gently now, his pale blue eyes indicating the vast reservoir of kindness that lay behind them. “There are no principles involved in this. It’s not as if you’re expected to choose your future husband and announce your engagement at the end of the debutante season, like your grandmother was expected to do. All you have to do is fly home in February for one weekend, put on a pretty dress and walk down a piece of red Astroturf—or whatever it is—at the Civic Center. Then in June you walk down a piece of green Astroturf in another pretty dress at the country club. That’s it.”
“That’s a lot!” she had shot back, her brown eyes blazing again under the curtain of her heavy blonde bangs.
He had always loved that black-eyed Susan look she had, the vivid contrast of the brown eyes and the blonde hair. One of the many ironies of the whole situation: if she did agree to make her debut, she’d be the prettiest girl there.
“You are asking me to participate in a degrading ritual that treats women as objects and second-class citizens whose only purpose in life is to get married and serve some man as her lord and master! I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you, of all people! The only one I had on my side when I wanted to get away! Why are you joining forces with them? How can you ask me to do this?”
He sighed. “Degrading ritual”: this was the “I-hate-the-South” Southerner’s attempt to play to the liberal Yankee crowd. It bored him in the extreme. She had a long way to go. “All I’m asking you to do is give back,” he said wearily.
She stared at him, unyielding but also uncomprehending. He took this opportunity to say, “A minute ago, you said the whole thing was stupid and meaningless. Now you’re calling it a degrading ritual. It can’t be both, you know.”
He took a hard-earned victory sip of wine. He had scored a major point, and they both knew it. She sulked and remained silent. Letting her stew for a moment in outrage, he treated himself to another, larger sip of wine. Both the triumph and the wine went to his head a bit, and emboldened him further.
“You know,” he said, pontifically, swirling the wine around in its glass, “it’s bad enough that so many people in Mountain Brook don’t understand that with great wealth comes great responsibility.” He paused and took another reflective swallow of the excellent Cabernet. “But it’s also important to understand that with great education comes responsibility as well.” He set down his wine glass and bored into her eyes with his own narrowed ones. “Responsibility to give back from the enlightenment we’ve gained from obtaining one of the best educations available in the country. You want to help Zanzibar, but you won’t help Birmingham?”
She leaned back and crossed her arms aggressively across her chest, as if she weren’t prepared to give one iota of her position or herself. “I fail to see how making my debut can help lift Birmingham out of the dark ages,” she said icily. “How is that giving back?”
“For one thing, it’s giving back to your family. That’s all your parents are asking. And considering what they’re paying for you to attend Georgetown, I don’t think it’s a lot to ask. If you come down off your perch for a minute and think about it, I believe you’ll realize there are precious few ways to show your love and gratitude in return. And if this is what they really want from you, consider yourself lucky. You can make them happy without giving up anything except a few evenings of your life. As the beneficiary of so many advantages and privileges, it’s important for you just to get into the habit of giving back,” he concluded grandly.
Suddenly she broke down and began sobbing into her hands. “It’s just that I fought so hard to get away,” she said, her shoulders heaving. “I don’t want to give up anything I’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
He extended his hand across the table, palm upward, until she reluctantly placed her own hand in his. Squeezing it, he waited until she looked him in the eye. As soon as she did so, he abruptly withdrew his hand and adopted a brisk, businesslike tone designed to put an end to the conversation. Waiters were hovering impatiently in the near vicinity, and they were the only diners left in the restaurant on this Monday night.
“You wouldn’t be giving anything up,” he said emphatically. “When you graduate from Georgetown and join the Peace Corps, you’ll be a former debutante who’s going to Africa. Believe me, you’ll be making a much more powerful statement that way than you would be by making a SILLY and MEANINGLESS refusal of this one small request from your family. When Birmingham’s debutantes start doing things like graduating from Georgetown and joining the Peace Corps, this tells Birmingham it better re-think its notion of women. Isn’t that more important than trying to impress your classmates and prove how liberal you can be?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything!” she answered hotly, but he could tell she was stung.
“You know Valerie Whitmire?” he said.
“I know who she is.” Miranda took a sip of water and refused to meet his eyes.
“Could have taken a job anywhere after her fellowship, but came back to Birmingham and runs the indigent care clinic for the Health Department,” he continued.
Miranda nodded wearily, as if bored and tired, or else threatened by some other Mountain Brook woman’s refusal to be the usual Mountain Brook woman.
“She thought I was either kidding or following her mother’s orders when I told her she should join the Junior League. But I do not take orders from Adelaide Whitmire, although Adelaide’s the only one who doesn’t know that, and I was perfectly serious.”
Miranda looked up in surprise, and he seized her eyes with his own narrowed ones. “When women like Valerie join the Junior League, it will have a chance to be what it’s supposed to be, and not just some excuse for a social gathering of idle women. Plus, plenty of those idle women don’t want to be so idle; they just don’t know how not to be, because no one has shown them.” He twirled his empty wineglass and contemplated the tablecloth, keenly aware that he had Miranda’s full attention, but not wanting to blow it by capitalizing on it too obviously. “If you really want to bring about change, you have to work within the system,” he said lightly, as if dispensing casual advice about the most trivial of subjects. “You’ll find that out in Zanzibar if you don’t know it already. Nobody likes a carpetbagger,” he concluded emphatically, slapping the table for emphasis and also beginning the process of rising from the booth, where his weight had dug a hole almost impossible to get out of.
Although Miranda still seemed inclined toward a silly, meaningless and stupid statement of protest, he believed he’d made headway and done a good night’s work. It wasn’t until the next morning he learned what had taken place in Malcolm Fielder’s hotel room at the Iwo Jima Inn. Norman had chosen to handle it by pretending he hadn’t heard a word of the gossip and knew nothing about it. He failed to see how he could have been at fault. The curfew was clear, the chaperones were all in place, excepting himself, and no one could be expected to mount a twenty-four hour guard against adolescent hormones anyway. So he had simply reiterated the rules of the road, and threatened anyone who broke them with the next plane out. He had a soft spot for Sally Lindgren, because she was overweight and needed to prove herself. It wasn’t easy being a fat girl in Mountain Brook, and he hoped the incident would be forgotten by the end of the trip.
But the gossip had persisted long afterward, probably because students at the Brook-Haven School didn’t usually date one another. With only thirty to thirty-five students per grade, everyone felt like family; dating each other would have seemed incestuous. So the Malcolm-Sally liaison was big news, especially when—on the weekend after the trip—Malcolm “went back to” his girlfriend Kate Dexter, president of TKD at Mountain Brook High School. Sally was distraught and humiliated, missed a whole week of class and talked of dropping out. Anyone who had not heard about the blow job on the college tour knew about it now.
Sally’s mother Jan had stormed into Norman’s office blazing with indignation over her daughter’s humiliation, as if it were all Norman’s fault and all his responsibility to put it right. Norman loathed Jan Lindgren, and was fairly certain this loathing was fully reciprocated. He was also certain that Jan had come straight to the school from the beauty salon, because her hair, clothes and makeup were worthy of a Hollywood star staging her big scene.
He wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Jan hadn’t gotten more mileage out of her get-up by prancing into Tom Turbyfill’s office and cooking up the drama with him. Because Norman had not been overly sympathetic. He had simply pointed out that what happened proved his point about Sally needing to go to Middlebury, where the Yankee boys would be lining up to ask her out. Then he’d shown her the door. Afterwards, he’d grabbed the phone, called Sally at home, and told her he expected to see her in class on Monday morning. (When it came to playing the 600 pound gorilla, he was a natural.)
But it could just as easily be the Newcombs instead of the Lindgrens who had gone into the principal’s office demanding Norman’s ouster. Miranda had still not agreed to be placed on the debutante list, and the deadline was nearing. Or what if, say, Midge Elmore’s father, now a retired FBI agent with lots of time on his hands, had taken it into his head that Norman Laney was engaged in dangerous and subversive activity which must be stopped? He had never forgiven Norman for getting his granddaughter into Harvard. Despite the fact that Caroline had not become a lesbian and even had a boyfriend who was not a Jew, the J. Edgar Hoover crowd wasn’t the kind to drop a grudge or a suspicion. As all the world now knew, they could stalk people they didn’t like for years, especially those who were trying to do the least little revolutionary thing. And these people often ended up mysteriously dead. Could it be that Norman was now the target of a retired FBI agent’s final case? In truth, any parent or grandparent of any one of his students—past or present—could have figured out what Norman was doing and realized he was guilty of the worst sort of treason. And they didn’t have to charge him with something he’d actually done. They could always make something up; they could always just say he’d pawed some student, God forbid. He wondered: if someone were to accuse him of molesting a student, would it be a male or a female they’d put him with? Either way, if they wanted him gone, they could easily get rid of him. He was only where he was on their sufferance. It wasn’t a comforting thought.
The bell rang for lunch.
“We’ll talk about this more on Saturday,” said Elizabeth, gathering her handbag.
“Saturday?” Norman drew a blank.
“We have a date,” said Elizabeth in consternation. “The symphony.”
“Oh, yes,” said Norman. “Of course. The symphony. You must forgive me. My brains have turned into scrambled eggs.”
“You’re not going to stand me up again, are you?”
Fortunately, there would be no need to. The Alabama Crimson Tide was playing a game on Saturday night, and that would literally be the only game in town. No other event dared compete with that one, and the only parties would be those devoted to watching the game. These were a strange spectacle indeed: wealthy white Southerners gathered around a television set cheering for big black males whom they would have feared, hated and reviled under any other circumstances. The only way he could make sense of this was to consider it a remnant of those not-too-distant Alabama days of black slaves and white masters, when the slaves carried the burden, as in this case the ball, for the white society. But this was a thought too terrible to contemplate. It was definitely not a sight for his Saturday night. He had long since stopped being invited to these occasions, having made it clear years ago that neither his ego, his identity, nor his sense of well-being were dependent on a certain team of brutes winning more games than any other team of brutes; and he had never found himself so bored or desperate as to watch a football game from start to finish. But everyone else he knew, except Elizabeth, would be either watching the game or attending it. It never mattered whether the Tide had a good team or a bad team; one thing they would always conquer each and every autumn was the Birmingham social calendar. The joke was: you better not plan on getting married or passing away during football season, because no one would come to either your wedding or your funeral; they’d all be at the game. No bride in Birmingham ever dreamed of getting married in autumn.
“Of course I’m not going to stand you up,” he said indignantly, as if he’d never once done so.
“Then why don’t you come for dinner at six?” she suggested. “We’ll figure this out then.”
* * *
Back in his office, Norman waited impatiently on the phone while holding for Valerie Whitmire.
“Hey, darlin,’” he said when she finally picked up. “Something’s happened and I’ve got to talk to you. But this is not a conversation I can have on the telephone.”
“What about dinner tonight?” she suggested. “Highlands Bar and Grill.”
He looked at his watch. It was only ten after twelve, his mother never began her preparations for dinner until well after lunch, and he adored Highlands Bar and Grill. Still, he hesitated. It was not just the best, but the most expensive restaurant in town.
“On me,” she said. “I’m dying to hear about the premiere, and quite able to pay for the privilege.”
Gratefully he accepted and said he’d be there on the dot of seven.
Not counting the myriad ways in which he pushed against the boundaries of who he was, what he was, where he was and what he was supposed to be doing on a daily basis, there was only one actual “firing offense” he’d committed since Tom Turbyfill had been at the school. It had happened about two years ago, and almost no one knew about it, not even Elizabeth Elder or his mother. One of the few who did was Valerie Whitmire, and he had to talk to her as soon as possible.