On August 20, the second anniversary of her daughter’s death, Gail Kindler woke up crying and turned to reach for her husband and found the bed empty. So she turned her back, away from the place he’d left, and cried all by herself.
Fred was up, dressed, and in his office. This was the day the faculty reconvened to prepare for the new school year, which would start in several days.
Gail, though, with no new job to run to, stayed in their bed and again saw herself standing on the front porch of their house on the Mt. Gilead campus while her husband ran across the campus to her to get the news. She had phoned him to come home so she could tell him face to face. “I need to tell you something,” she had said. “Something bad has happened.” She still hadn’t believed it when she said it over the phone—and didn’t believe it until she saw his face as he came up the porch steps and understood that he had guessed. “Sarah’s dead,” she’d said.
She’d never dreamed she would ever see a face so crushed as Fred’s, so melted, a perfect stranger’s face, and they didn’t dare touch each other, not a hand clasp or an embrace to share their pain, for all the hours and hours it took to call their relatives and tell them; they knew that if they gave in to their need to comfort each other, they would break down completely and never finish the phoning. She’d read in lots of places since then that for many marriages the loss of a child is the end. But not for us, she thought, we wouldn’t, either of us, do that to the other, or to Sarah. Our bond’s too strong for that.
She stood up and took off her nightgown. She might as well get dressed. She was almost glad that he’d forgotten, the grief spread out to every day, for what difference did it make which day she died on? She was dead every day, and today was a special day in a very different way. Nevertheless, Gail hated this place, this house that belonged to someone else. It was like living on an iceberg.
She turned now to get to the chair where her clothes awaited her and saw him standing in the doorway. “You forgot,” she said.
“I only started to.” And then he was across the room and hugging her, and she was crying again, harder than she’d ever cried, as if the last pieces in the hollow insides of her were shattering again to even smaller shards, and he picked her up, right off her feet, and put her in the bed and got in beside her in his sports coat, his tie, and his flannel trousers. His shoes, muddy from running to her across the garden, made a smear on the sheets, and now he was crying too. “Oh, it hurts!” she said. “It hurts. It hurts.” And after a while they went to sleep.
They didn’t wake up until five minutes to nine—and he had to run to the meeting.
BUT PEGGY PLUMMER was walking across the campus toward the meeting with a springy step. Under her new headmaster, the new school year really was a tabula rasa, a brand-new chance to do things right and save the school. Next to her, Francis, who had relived his disastrous meeting with Fred Kindler a thousand times, was more subdued. He’d promised himself that in future meetings he would try to see through Kindler’s eyes—and be alert to Kindler’s sudden storms of temper.
They were headed to the exact center of the campus, to the library where the full faculty had always met in the big central room. Sometimes it made Francis just a little jealous that so much of the school’s life was centered in the library.
In the library, Peggy and Francis sat next to each other at the same place at the same table where they had always sat. He was calm enough. He touched Peggy’s hand beneath the table, where no one else could see, to show her he was going to make this work.
Fred Kindler stood to open the meeting, and Francis saw again how much shorter than Marjorie this new guy was. He didn’t fill the space around him the way Marjorie had. There was something subdued in the man—except when he was angry!—some hint of sadness that Francis hadn’t noticed before and didn’t seem right in someone so young.
The first thing Kindler did was point out that the meeting had started ten minutes late.
“At nine o’clock, our starting time, I took a head count,” he announced. “And discovered that about a dozen of us hadn’t arrived yet or were just coming in the door.” He paused for an instant and then resumed. “So I waited to start the meeting because I wanted all of us to be together.” Kindler’s voice was calm, the only person in the room who was not embarrassed. “I won’t wait again to start a meeting,” Kindler went on. He let his eyes rest on Francis’s face, and waited. It was clear to everyone that Fred Kindler was waiting for the senior teacher to say something in support of the new emphasis on punctuality; but there was something Francis wanted to add. He wanted to explain that Oliver lateness was a function not of carelessness but of intensity: the need to say one more thing in class, to finish up a conversation with a student. We’re here all day, he wanted to say, we’re not on a treadmill. Oliver people aren’t going to be dominated by anything, let alone a schedule. What he didn’t understand, of course, was that he was not defending the faculty’s bad habit with this flimsy argument. He was defending Marjorie. He couldn’t help feeling that every change the new head made insulted his predecessor and demeaned the past.
His hesitation lasted too long. With a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders, Fred Kindler moved his eyes away from Francis. “Let’s start making Oliver Time mean On Time,” he said. The man’s voice was pleasant, and he was smiling, but Francis heard his stubbornness.
Then Kindler gave a little talk to start the year. He told the faculty how honored he was to be the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, how much he admired the school and how strongly he believed that, working together, they could regain for the school its historical position as the premier all-girls school in the nation. It was an appropriate talk, Francis was ready to admit, measured, respectful, and not self-centered. But for Francis, there was an ebullience missing that he was trained to expect, and there was that trace of sadness again, as if a little piece of Kindler’s mind were someplace else. It made Francis feel sad too, in a vague way he couldn’t account for.
Next, Kindler gave the faculty the bad news about the budget. Having been so shocked himself when he had perceived this news at the beginning of the summer, he was hardly surprised when he saw how shocked the faculty was. What he didn’t know was that part of what stunned the teachers was they were actually being told, and he was using specific numbers. Marjorie had never shared financial realities in any specificity with the faculty. For she and they were educators, and in her mind educators didn’t involve themselves with such mundane matters as budgets. These were to be relegated to the lower orders: the business manager and bookkeeper and the members of the finance committee.
But the truth of the matter was that even the board’s finance committee had had little to say about the finances of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, for Marjorie actually had run the board. She had run everything—until the revolution, initiated sadly and as kindly as possible by Milton Perkins and less kindly by Sonja McGarvey, which had brought in new board members, including Alan Travelers, to save the school from the very person who had made it so worth saving. How many times and in how many different kinds of organizations has this story been played out!
Fred was careful to disguise how badly Carl Vincent had fouled up, and he was glad he was being truthful when he made it clear that Vincent retired of his own free will. For it was true that as soon as the ancient business manager had learned of Milton Perkins’s anonymous gift to his retirement fund, he couldn’t wait to quit.
Fred knew better than to linger on the bad news. So he moved quickly to his plan for recouping the enrollment. Admittedly, there were no strategies unknown to other schools in his plan. There were only so many ways a school could be marketed. What was new and what lifted his spirits as he talked was the energy, the care, the discipline, and attention to detail the school would invest. Near the end, he passed around the new brochure, designed pro bono by his wife, which emphasized the school’s academic rigor and de-emphasized its idiosyncratic culture (one of the reasons Francis felt it described some other school) and which, in Fred’s and Nan White’s opinion, was better written, printed on better stock, and more graphically sophisticated than its predecessor. He ended by inviting the faculty not to think of enrollment as exclusively Nan White’s province but as theirs too, urging them to reach out to every visitor to campus.
The faculty listened intently to Fred’s talk. All were aware that his entire emphasis had been on the recruitment of girls. Thus the specter of boys invading the school faded—at least for the moment. Looking around the room as he finished, Fred felt satisfied with this beginning.
Near adjournment time, he said, “At one of our next meetings, I’d like you to come prepared to think about the way our students dress. I would have put it on the agenda for today if there had been time for it.”
No response.
Fred looked around the room, rested his eyes on Plummer’s face again. Then he looked away, much sooner than he had before. “I think if the students look more presentable it will be easier to sell the school,” he said.
Several teachers were nodding their heads in agreement. Francis turned, as if by instinct, to see how Gregory van Buren was reacting. Gregory was looking around the room to see how others were reacting. The son of a bitch was counting votes! Francis watched while Gregory’s eyes went all around the room. Then Gregory put his hand up.
Most of the time, Marjorie would try to ignore Gregory’s upraised hand. But Kindler called on him right away.
“You don’t actually intend us to incur the students’ wrath?” Gregory asked, looking directly at Kindler. “You don’t really think that we should actually invade the sacred teenage right to emulate the appearance of sexual perverts, freaks, and criminals?” and Francis realized this wasn’t going to be the usual windy sermon. For Gregory wasn’t putting his hands together as if in prayer, just beneath his nose, as he usually did, and he was not pursing his lips between sentences, and he was not nodding his head in assent to his own wisdom, and he was not speaking very slowly to allow his listeners time to comprehend the elegant thoughts he was assembling in his ponderous syntax. He was not doing any of these things! He was waving his hands! And being sarcastic! And speaking very fast. He’d been pent up for years on this subject. Kindler had uncorked the bottle.
“You are not daring, sir, I hope, to ask us to ignore the increasingly alarming fact that no one outside this hermetic little enclave understands our misbegotten allegiance to the concept that it is a good idea—a meritorious educational strategy, in fact—to allow girls studiously to take on the appearance of female garbage collectors or drunken agriculturists—when they don’t manage instead to look like strippers nearing the climax of their dance. Surely you don’t actually believe that it is difficult to explain to parents that our allegiance to this arcane concept is one we hold on purpose, that it is a considered choice among other options, such as occasionally requiring our students to look like normal persons.”
While Gregory paused to refill his lungs, Fred Kindler tried to cut him off. Marjorie used to say: “Never mind, Greg, we already know how you feel on this subject.” But Kindler was too polite, or not quick enough, and Gregory rushed on. “Failing to understand our strange philosophy, these outsiders who, I take this opportunity to remind us, constitute our market,” Gregory added. “That’s correct, our market—a blasphemous word in these elevated precincts—thinks we don’t give a damn about how our students look. Or perhaps they think we can’t see the children who have been committed to our care, that one of the important filters through which candidates must pass in order to be awarded the privilege of teaching here is that they be blind. How else could they explain such self-destructive eccentricity?”
“You make your point quite clearly,” Fred finally managed, with just a hint of irony. “Thank you, Mr. van Buren.”
“My point is that we are under-enrolled, sir. We are dying!”
Fred looked around the room to see if anyone else wanted to speak.
But Gregory still wasn’t finished. “Thank you, sir, for bringing the subject of student attire up,” he said, his tone gliding now from passion to his customary unction. After all the years with Marjorie, he could be forgiven for not understanding that with this new head he didn’t need to act as if addressing royalty. “Mrs. Boyd—who couldn’t bring herself to censor the students’ writing in the school newspaper—wouldn’t allow the faculty to discuss how students dress. I am delighted that we finally have a leader who—”
“Marjorie Boyd was right,” Francis heard himself blurting. Gregory shut up, and everyone stared at Francis and then turned to Kindler to see his reaction. He was clearly surprised. But Francis wasn’t even thinking about the new head’s opinion; he was just saying, automatically, what he deeply believed. And besides, he was not going to let anyone criticize Marjorie, especially not Gregory van Buren. “She never would have put it on the agenda,” he said; then he realized that hadn’t come out right, he didn’t want to say the new head couldn’t bring up whatever he wanted to bring up, and he went on because he really did want to explain, he really did have a reasonable point to make. “Marjorie and I figured out a long time ago that you can’t talk to a teenage kid about how she should dress without sounding like an idiot to her.”
“Really?” Kindler asked, and Francis had no idea whether or not he was being sarcastic.
“So then you can’t talk to her about the really important things,” Francis explained. “You have to choose how you’re going to use your ammunition. You only have so much.”
Gregory took his eyes off Francis’s face and looked across the room at Kindler, and waited. The room was silent. Peggy slid her chair a few inches further away from Francis. “Well, I certainly don’t want any of us to sound like an idiot,” Kindler finally said. His face was blank. Everybody, except Peggy, who was looking down at her hands in her lap, was glancing back and forth between Francis and Kindler. Suddenly Kindler’s face wasn’t blank anymore. He was smiling. Everybody understood: He’d decided to smile. “It’s noon,” Kindler announced. “The time I promised this meeting would end. We will start meetings on time. And we will end them when we say we will end them. So we’ll bring this up another time. The meeting’s adjourned.” No one stirred. “We will bring the subject up again,” Kindler added. “I assure you. In the meantime, have a productive afternoon.” Then he stood up to end the meeting.
A WEEK LATER, on the last day of new-student orientation before classes began, one of the six new students, a junior, Julie Lapham, from Norwich, Vermont, walked by herself back to her dorm after the evening meal. She was too unhappy to want company. She already knew it was a big mistake to have persuaded her parents to let her enroll at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
Closer to the dorm, she noticed an old, beat-up Subaru just like her brother’s in the dorm parking lot and felt even lonelier. She wished it really were her brother’s car. But Charley was a sophomore at Trinity College in Hartford, an hour away, and he was very busy and had his own life to lead, and she’d only been away from home a few days. So why would he come see her? Just two months before in July, Julie’s parents had told Charley and her that after Charley was born, they’d spent three years trying to have another child, and when they realized they couldn’t, they’d adopted Julie. Right up to that instant, neither Julie nor Charley had had any idea that she wasn’t their parents’ biological daughter. “We waited to tell you till we thought you were both old enough to know and we could tell you both together,” their father said. And then their mother turned to Charley and said, “We thought you’d like a sister.” As if he was the one who needed comforting.
Julie’s first reaction had been that she needed to go away to find a place where she could have a family of her own. She chose Miss Oliver’s because Julie’s best friend’s mother, who had graduated from Miss Oliver’s in 1965, always said the school was like a family. Well, it didn’t feel like a family to Julie. She missed her real family and would have given anything to be helping her parents in their construction business in the afternoons after high school got out, instead of being stuck at a boarding school. But she couldn’t go home. Her parents, who at first had refused to enroll her at Miss Oliver’s, finally relented under the proviso that she promised to stick it out, whether she liked it or not, through her junior and senior years and graduate from Miss Oliver’s. Julie had made that promise eagerly at the time, and now she’d rather die than come crawling home, begging to be released from it, admitting she was wrong. It was a mantra in her family that you finish what you start.
A few yards closer to the dorm, she realized it was Charley. She saw his blond head. He saw her too and blew the horn. She quickened her pace. He leaned and opened the passenger door for her. He was in jeans and moccasins with no socks; the sleeves of his T-shirt were tight around his arms. His summer work with their parents had provided him with enough money to pay for his college expenses and his car and made him strong. Julie was almost as tall, but as if to advertise their different genes, she was much thinner than he, and her hair was brown.
“I just thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing,” he said. They were shy with each other and didn’t hug. They’d not always been the best of friends.
“Thanks.” She didn’t want to give away how happy she was that he’d taken this trouble.
“Well, how are you?” He made it sound like a challenge. He didn’t want her getting sentimental.
“I’m okay.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “What’s wrong? You don’t like it here?”
She shook her head.
“Give it time. It’s only been a few days.” But she knew that’s not what he really thought. He wasn’t surprised she was unhappy here. He had argued with her when she told her mother and father—right after she learned they weren’t her mother and father—that she wanted to go away to school. Charley had known better. “You’ll feel even more lost,” he’d said. “Stay home and get used to the idea.” But he hadn’t known how it felt when the people who were your mother and father all of a sudden tell you that they were not.
“Thanks for not saying, ‘I told you so,’” she told him now.
“I just wish they’d kept it a secret,” Charley said.
She shook her head. They’d been over this before. She thought it would be wrong not to know and wanted to defend her parents. “It’s not like them to hide the truth,” she said. “That’s not Mom and Dad.”
“Hey, I hope you heard the words you just used? I hope I didn’t hear them wrong?” He looked away. That shyness again! It was new between them, and surprising. As if he were embarrassed to have it confirmed that he had a different status in the family than she did.
“Well, what should I call them? Mr. and Mrs. Lapham?”
“Don’t talk like that!”
“Maybe they should charge me rent, since I’m really only a guest.”
“Come on! Cut it out. You know they love you just as much as me.” There. He’d said it. They had been avoiding this subject for years, since long before they learned that Julie was adopted. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, it’s crazy. We’re still brother and sister.”
“We’re not brother and sister, we’re not even related. If I were eighteen, we could fuck and it wouldn’t even be illegal.”
He stared at her. There she goes again, he thought. Saying outrageous things to get attention. It was not his fault she didn’t take the pains to make life easy for herself by acting the way Mother and Father expected. That was why they were always on her case and not on his. He remembered how, even when she was still in middle school, Julie had loved to eat the greasy hamburgers in the school cafeteria because her parents, dedicated vegetarians, were heavy into animal rights, and she’d always sworn a lot because her parents hated profanity, and he knew the reason that she had worked so hard to win the high school rhetoric prize when she was still a sophomore with an essay “proving” the rightness of the Vietnam War was that their parents were pacifists.
Charley understood too that, until a year or so ago, her orneriness didn’t disturb their parents. They understood it as her way of establishing her identity, finding it amusing, sometimes even endearing. But now as she approached adulthood, she really did have an identity, which her father especially found less than endearing, because he suspected that she smoked and drank and did drugs with her friends and was maybe even getting sexually involved. (All of which, in fact, she had so far abstained from, mostly to be different.) And, maybe even more irritating to her father, she could now best him in their arguments—which he thought she started and she thought he started—successfully demolishing what she described as his thoroughly unstudied liberal positions with facts and statistics Charley suspected she made up as she needed them. Charley knew damn well that if their father were a conservative, Julie would be a liberal, rather than the other way around. “You’re too smart for your own good,” he told her now, “and you’re a pain in the ass.”
Just the same, he wondered how he’d feel if he were the one to learn what Julie had learned just a few weeks ago, and he remembered he had come here to see how she was doing. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said. “Maybe that’ll cheer you up.”
“I can’t,” she said, looking at her watch. “I’m supposed to be in the dorm by eight o’clock. It’s five of. They check you in.” She’d learned how carefully Mr. van Buren, her dorm parent, took attendance.
“What is this, a school or a prison?” he asked.
“Both,” she said, but they both knew it wasn’t Miss Oliver’s that was the prison; it was her pledge to stick it out there.
“But on weekends it’s different. I can check out,” she told Charley. She’d already heard the stories about how tricky some of the girls were in convincing the teachers on weekend duty that they were invited to somebody’s parents’ house where adults would take responsibility: forged letters of invitation, friends pretending to be a parent over the phone. And sometimes they just sneaked out after the final check-in at ten.
“Yeah, we have some big-time parties you could come to,” Charley said, his voice brightening at this reminder of his release from the strictures of home. It was not partying, the booze and the drugs so much more accessible than at home, that excited him. He’d already felt a tinge of boredom at the parties, which all seemed exactly the same. It was that he didn’t have to lie to his parents when he got home.
“Promise?” she asked. “You’ll invite me?”
He shrugged and made a gesture that said of course he would, she didn’t have to ask, and she leaned to hug him, her resentment flying away.
But as soon as she was out of the car, waving goodbye to him as he drove off, she felt depressed again.
When she got to her dorm, Mr. van Buren was already coming down the hall, checking the girls in. Clarissa Longstreet, Julie’s roommate, from Riverdale, just north of Manhattan, was sitting at her desk when Julie entered their room. She looked up from her book and said to Julie, “Where’ve you been? I was worried.” Clarissa was very small with a dark, round face and dyed blond hair and glasses whom Julie, who towered over her, had decided that she liked.
“You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Mr. van Buren,” Clarissa warned.
Julie shrugged. Maybe that was exactly what she wanted to do. She lay down on her bed.
Clarissa shook her head. “Really,” she said. “You don’t.” Clarissa wrote for the Clarion, to which Mr. van Buren was faculty advisor. She knew how sharp his tongue could get when you didn’t do things on time and do them well.
The door opened then, and Mr. van Buren was standing in it. It was eight o’clock at night and he was still wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, dark tie, and flannel trousers. He glanced quickly at Clarissa and nodded his head. “Reading ahead,” he said. “Very smart.”
Then he turned to Julie lying on the bed and stared. Clearly, he didn’t like that she was lying down. “You were almost late,” he said mildly. She couldn’t read the tone of his voice or the slight smile on his face, had no idea whether he was angry or simply stating a fact. “It would be advisable, I think, not to be almost late again,” Mr. van Buren said. Then, turning to leave, he looked back over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows at Julie as if to show how seriously she should take his advice. Then he closed the door and was gone.
“Pretty weird, huh?” Clarissa said. “But wait till you have him in class. He’s the best English teacher in the world.”
Julie had only been at Miss Oliver’s for a few days, and already she had heard how some students argued, as Clarissa did, that Mr. van Buren was the best and others that nobody could be better than Mr. Plummer, aka Clark Kent. Right then, if she cared enough to have an opinion, Julie would have agreed with Clarissa. She liked it that Mr. van Buren didn’t harangue her about lying down while he was talking to her, the way her father would have. She would have sat up, if he’d not left so soon. And she admired the ironic way he used the word almost.
But he was a teacher, and she was still in his presence at eight o’clock at night and would be again in half an hour when he presided over a dorm meeting “to get properly organized for the year.” For Julie, school has always been a scene she was released from to a larger world at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Now she was sealed in twenty-four hours a day, and there was no relief. She could hardly breathe.
ON THE FIRST day of classes, the students entering the dining hall for breakfast found a stack of the Clarion on each table, two pages of which were filled with Karen’s article on the new headmaster. To be greeted early in the morning of their first day of classes by a feature about the new headmaster made them even more resentful of Mrs. Boyd’s dismissal. They wanted to be greeted by Mrs. Boyd. For all their intelligence and good education, what many of the students took away from the article was that the new headmaster had ripped down all the pictures that students had given to Mrs. Boyd and that he was going to take away the freedom of press that Mrs. Boyd had championed.
Only her close friends would learn that Karen, who had spent an hour with Mr. Kindler, was well disposed to him. If Karen had wanted to express her personal opinion in the Clarion, she would have written an editorial supporting the new headmaster, instead of an objective report of an interview. But she wouldn’t do that; it would look to the students as if the new headmaster had manipulated her and make him even more contemptible in their eyes. There was nothing she could do to make Mr. Kindler popular. He was on his own.
THIS FIRST MORNING of classes, Francis got to his classroom long before his students. He taught both his math and English classes there, where he also had his office; lighted by big windows that looked out on the campus, it was his seat of power, a little kingdom. It was one of the perks of his seniority that no other teacher used it. The front wall and the wall opposite the windows were covered by blackboards, and on that day the back wall, behind the big model of the Globe Theater created by a student years ago, was covered by a collection of black-and-white photographs of comely New England farmhouses that Bob Rice had sent him because he knew that Francis taught a lot of Robert Frost. The floor was covered by a thick rug. The tables in the classroom had been put together to form a three-sided square whose open side faced the front, where Francis’s desk was placed. He never sat at it when he was teaching.
This morning, as he entered the empty classroom, the first thing Francis saw was A FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL GIFT FOR MR. P! emblazoned on the blackboard. Under this greeting, the big slate was covered with a math problem that went on and on, over the front blackboard and around the corner onto the one on the adjoining wall. He saw that the problem was worked two ways with two different answers. AND THEY’RE BOTH RIGHT!!! CAN YOU PROVE THEY’RE NOT? HUH, CLARK, HUH, I BET YOU CAN’T! Whoever had snuck out of the dorm in the middle of the night and spent hours in here doing this had used her nondominant hand. The figures were a little child’s; she wanted him to guess who she was.
Francis smiled, his spirits lifting. He decided to leave the problem up there on the board for the advanced calculus class that would troop in to the classroom in a half an hour. That was the way to start a day! Math’s a game, play is the mind at work, and he was going to get the bagels and coffee ready.
But he only got a minute or two to himself because there was a knock on the door, and he opened it, and there stood Lila Smythe. His heart skipped a little beat. Next to Lila, but shyly standing half a step behind, one of the new ninth graders faced him.
“This is Sara Warrior,” Lila said. “She’s a ninth grader. She wants to talk with you.” Lila stood stiffly, unsmiling, in the doorway.
She didn’t even say hello, Francis thought. “All right,” he said. “Come in.”
Sara hesitated. Lila turned and smiled to her. “He won’t bite,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic, and then the two were in the room, and he was motioning them to seats at one of the tables and took a third, facing them. “Sara’s Indian,” Lila announced. “Pequot. That’s why she wants to talk to you.”
“Native American,” he corrected. He’d read the admissions folder. Sara, who could trace her Pequot ancestry all the way back to the 1870 census, lived in Stonington.
“All right, say it the PC way.” Lila shrugged. “Who cares?” And for an instant Francis thought he would ask Sara to excuse herself and have a talk with Lila. But he changed his mind. That wouldn’t be fair to Sara.
Sara was a small girl, dressed more formally than the Oliver custom in a simple green skirt, a white, long-sleeved blouse. She looked at him, studying his eyes. He couldn’t read her face. But he did know she was the first Pequot citizen to be enrolled at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. He found himself wanting to apologize for that. “Welcome, Sara. We’re very glad to have you,” he said.
“Thank you.” The first words she’d said.
“Are you glad to be here?”
“I don’t know,” Sara said. Because she really didn’t. She remembered how glad she had been at first, and how kind Mr. and Mrs. Kindler were at the reception for new students and their parents. Her mother and dad had driven her to school and were going to leave right after the reception, and she was already homesick, but the little red-headed man with the funny walk who she was surprised to learn was the headmaster crossed the room to greet them. Her father and he seemed to like each other right away as they shook hands. They were the only two men in the room who were wearing suits, the headmaster in a funny brown one, her father in his pinstripe blue. That had made her glad. She knew the headmaster wore a suit for the same reason her dad did: to show respect.
But now, after what she had discovered in the school library yesterday, she felt like a stranger. And she knew why the student who toured her around when she was visiting as a candidate skipped over the library, claiming she had a class to get to.
Sara also remembered how excited she was when her English teacher, a tall, thin black man with dreadlocks in his first year of teaching, who she had sensed felt just as out of place as she did—and on whom she had a crush—persuaded her to think seriously about attending Miss Oliver’s. “They make you work,” he’d said. “They actually want you to think for yourself.” He’d heard about the school when had he reached out to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Government, just a few miles away, to see if he could arrange some interaction between the tribe and his class in order to broaden his students’ view of the world, which, to his disillusionment, he’d found to be exceedingly narrow. He was soon chastised for including in his curriculum material so incapable of being reduced to a standardized test—but that’s another story.
“Sara’s seen the Collection in the library,” Lila said.
“Good!” Francis said brightly.
Lila turned her head away, stared out the window, and then it dawned on him what Sara was going to say. Her eyes were full on his.
“It’s wrong!” Sara said.
He didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t need it between him and Peggy.
“Sara’s right, isn’t, she? If it were white people’s bones, they’d be in a graveyard, wouldn’t they?” Lila said. “Not in a display in a private school library.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he murmured.
Lila just watched him.
“But it’s mostly artifacts: clothing and tools and weapons,” he said halfheartedly. “There’s only a small piece of one femur.” Sara Warrior was still studying him.
“Is that what we would have done if we had found the Ohlone village?” Lila asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he admitted.
“I never thought about it at all,” Lila said, “but then Sara came to me.”
“I asked her how you got them,” Sara said. “I asked if they were given to you.”
“But of course she already knew the answer,” Lila said.
“I was hoping they were gifts,” Sara said. “That you hadn’t taken them.”
“I see,” said Francis.
“It was my new school,” Sara said. “That’s why I was hoping.”
“There are two ways to look at this,” Francis began. He owed it to Peggy to defend what she believed: that the display was a presence that students didn’t just read about but see. It put the understanding in their gut, not just their brain, of how many ways there were to be human.
But Sara cut him off. “Not if they weren’t given to you,” she said. “Not if you took them. Then there’s only one way.”
We didn’t take them, he wanted to say. We found them. But he knew that was lame because they weren’t given, and he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Let Peggy try, he thought.
“What do you think?” Lila asked. “You’re the advisor.” He heard the accusation in her tone: that he was going to back off this time too.
“All right, I’ll decide,” Lila said “We’ll bring it to the school. The student council. In Morning Meeting. Won’t we, Mr. Plummer?” Lila prodded. And now they were both silent, because he was thinking about how this issue, if it got in the papers, could hurt the school, and she was thinking here was another time when he couldn’t take the heat.
“All right,” he said at last. It was the Oliver tradition when an issue came up: The student council aired it in an open discussion in Morning Meeting. It was one of the things he loved about the school.
“You don’t have to sit on stage. We can break that tradition,” Lila said.
“You think I’m going to hide?”
“You think I came in here to embarrass you? You’ve already said there are two ways to look at it. Suppose Mrs. Plummer wants to defend the other way?”
“I’ll be on stage,” he said. “I’m not about to break the tradition. Besides, my wife is a reasonable person. And I’ll let her know what’s going to happen so she won’t be surprised.”
“Good for you,” Lila said There was no bitterness in her voice. Maybe he’d earned back a glimmer of her respect.
“I’ll introduce the issue,” Lila said. “Then we’ll put Sara on, and she’ll make her proposal.”
“Proposal? I thought it was going to be a discussion.”
“Tell him, Sara,” Lila said.
“To give it back to its rightful owners,” Sara said. “Of course. To get it off this campus right away.”
“Otherwise it might be hard for her to stay here, don’t you think?” Lila said. Though her tone was mild, he was a little irritated. He knew what her rhetorical question meant: If you’re going to be inclusive, you have to adjust to the ways the people you include see the world. Well, he didn’t need a lecture. You’re so much nicer when you’re not being sanctimonious, he wanted to say. But of course he didn’t. He’s lost the chance to be her guide.
The bell for first period rang. Francis’s advanced calculus class, waiting outside the classroom door, knew his closed door meant he was having a private talk. They wouldn’t come in until he opened it. “Thank you for listening,” Sara said, and both girls stood up and left. Then his students trooped in. They talked quietly, sleepy in the early morning; their chairs scraped against the floor as they took their seats, and Francis made a mental note to go to Fred Kindler’s office first thing after classes. Kindler needed to know this issue was coming up. Right after that, he would tell Peggy.
What Francis didn’t know was that Sam Andersen, the history teacher whose sense of humor Francis liked so much and whom he had seen playing tennis with Fred Kindler, was designing a new course that he would teach later in the year in the spring term. It fit right in with the Oliver emphasis on experiential education: an archaeological dig right here on the campus, where certainly there were many artifacts still to be found. Sam wondered why in the world no one had thought of this before. He’d shared his idea with Peggy Plummer—who thought it was wonderful.