The Affliction

by Beth Gutcheon

  A tall girl in the front row mumbled, “Northern Renaissance.”

  “Who has done the reading?”

  About half the class raised their hands.

  “Well, please take these few minutes to get yourselves caught up. If you’re up-to-date, read ahead. I’ll find Mrs. Meagher. Alison, what are you doing?”

  A girl in the back row did something magical with her hands under the desk and said, “Nothing.”

  “Where is your phone, Alison?”

  “In the basket right there.” A large basket on the teacher’s desk was full of cell phones of every size and color.

  “What is your number?”

  Alison gave it, and Ms. Goldsmith dialed it on the phone she brought out from her own pocket. In the basket a hunting horn sounded. Ms. Goldsmith fished it out, an oversize new model iPhone in a lime-green case with rhinestones.

  “This is your phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please come here.”

  Resentfully, Alison, wearing stretch jeans and a pair of docksiders with no socks, slouched forward, tugging at her pouchy gray sweater. It reached to her hips, which was not far enough.

  Ms. Goldsmith surveyed her. Alison looked into space.

  “Please show me what you have in your right-hand pocket.”

  After a pretense of being unable to understand the direction, Alison produced another cell phone, black and smudgy.

  “And what is that?”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Is it a cell phone?” Ms. Goldsmith asked, louder and with impatience.

  Alison neither moved nor spoke.

  Marcia looked at Alison for a long minute while the class watched somberly. Finally she said, “Please go to Ms. Liggett’s office. Give her that phone, and tell her why I sent you.”

  “What if she’s not there?”

  “Then stay there until she is,” said Marcia, sounding really cross. “The rest of you, please work quietly until Mrs. Meagher gets here.”

  The visiting committee met for lunch in the Katherine Jones room in the library. It was an intimate room with a fireplace, walls lined with books, with overstuffed chairs for reading, and a round IKEA table with matching chairs in the center of the room. There was a portrait of Miss Jones over the fireplace, a pretty girl with a blond pageboy wearing a pale blue sweater and a string of pearls.

  Sister Rose looked at it and said, “If there is anything, anything at all, you would like to know about Katherine Jones, just ask me.”

  “Who wanted the BLT?” asked Bill Toskey, who was pawing through the tray of sandwiches, chips, and soft drinks that had been left for them. Sister Rose raised a hand, and he tossed her the sandwich and a bag of Doritos.

  “I’ll bite. Who is Katherine Jones?” Maggie asked. She reached for the sandwich remaining on the tray and began trying to penetrate its triple-wrapped caul of plastic film.

  Sister Rose took a breath and began talking rapidly. “She was a student here in the late 1940s, killed in a car crash after a debutante ball in 1951, a week after she graduated. She was going to Vassar. Her parents were devastated, they were from Philadelphia, and they gave the money to build this addition in her honor. The portrait was posthumous from a photograph, it’s a good likeness, not Velázquez, but really very good. You would think that her school days were the happiest of her life but no, she hated Rye Manor and was a very bad girl when she was here, but her mother was a passionate alum, so there you have it, mourning or revenge, you’re sitting in it.”

  Bill was staring at her while tearing wolfishly at his roast beef sandwich with his long yellowish teeth.

  Maggie said, “Sister Rose, you are a very bad woman.”

  Sister Rose said, “Fortunately, mine is a loving God, so I know I’m forgiven in advance. I do have a point to make though. What on earth do the students make of that?”

  “Will someone tell me what we’re talking about?” said Bill Toskey resentfully, chewing.

  “I had a séance with a teacher named Florence Meagher at the reception last night,” said Sister Rose. “She asked me where we were meeting.”

  “She has The Affliction,” said Maggie.

  “What affliction?” Bill was still not amused.

  “She cannot shut up,” the two women said, almost together. Bill looked at them as if they’d both just come from a party to which he hadn’t been invited.

  “Did one of you meet with her this morning?” he asked rather aggressively, as if to remind them that someone in the group had to behave like a professional. Maggie recognized him now. He was the kid who had spent a lifetime being the one who didn’t get the joke.

  Maggie said, “I went to observe her class, but she didn’t show up.”

  Bill stared at her. “Didn’t show up?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not good,” he said, as if Maggie couldn’t have worked that out herself. Mrs. Meagher was the leader of the group that had written the school’s all-important interim progress report.

  “I tackled the business manager instead. We all meet with Mrs. Meagher’s committee this afternoon. Bill, why don’t you tell us about your morning?”

  When they’d finished eating, they went over their schedules for the afternoon and parted. Sister Rose was next meeting with the admissions office, Bill Toskey was going to talk with the building and grounds staff, and Maggie would be meeting with the trustee Long Range Planning committee, which in her opinion had some explaining to do.

  The door to Christina Liggett’s office was closed when Maggie arrived in midafternoon for a scheduled talk about the school’s budget. She moved on to the open office beside the front door, noting reflexively that there was no security here, unless the secretaries were armed. The imposing front door of the main building opened and closed many times a day with no one keeping track of who came and went. No schools in New York City ran that way anymore. There had been too many school tragedies in the news in the last few years.

  She stepped into the bright busy room, which was flooded with sunlight from the large double-hung windows facing the street. “Is Ms. Liggett in her office, do you know?” she asked a cheerful woman at the nearest desk, whose name plaque read sharon comfort.

  “She will be right with you,” said Sharon with a smile that revealed a set of murderous-looking braces on her teeth. “You could have a seat in the hall.” Maggie had seen the stiff-looking sofa just outside the office door, of a kind last seen by her on a tour of a house museum outside Pittsburgh in 1958. It had a heavy brown wooden frame and was covered in some dark Victorian textile that might have been horsehair and looked as if it belonged in the Lincoln White House.

  “Or stay right here,” Sharon added, seeing Maggie’s expression. “Could I get you some tea?”

  Maggie sat in the chair beside Sharon’s desk, feeling totally at home and rather nostalgic in the bright and bustling room as Sharon went to microwave a cup of tea for her. At the next desk a trim little woman typed letters on fancy school letterhead. Beyond, a teacher Maggie recognized from the reception was doing a massive copying job at a giant machine. The machine whined and snicked, the background music of so many years of Maggie’s life. Making illegal handouts of copyrighted material, Maggie couldn’t help thinking, not that she’d ever known a school that didn’t do that sometimes. On Sharon’s desk, open in the middle and left facedown by her keyboard, was a black and yellow paperback called Excel 2002 for Dummies.

  Sharon handed Maggie her mug. She moved the book out of her way and said, “Don’t ever let anyone know you can work with spreadsheets.”

  “Words to live by. What have they stuck you with?”

  “Exam schedule. The assistant head used to do it, but she had to take over geometry when Mrs. Fuller went on maternity leave, so . . .”

  “I understand.”

  Down the hall, Ms. Liggett’s door opened and she came out with a man whose head was shaped like a butternut squash. Maggie watched the two say their good-by
es. A moment later, Christina came to the office door to say, “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  Settled back in her office, formalities dispensed with, Maggie asked Christina, “Is this your first evaluation?”

  “As head, yes. We went through it when I taught at Groton, but of course that wasn’t . . .”

  “Yes,” said Maggie. The unspoken words were “a life or death matter.” She added kindly, “Try not to worry. We’re here to help.”

  Christina said she appreciated that, whether or not she believed it.

  “So we better get right to it. You are spending down your endowment.”

  “Yes. Have been for some time, as I’m sure you know. We’ve made changes and you can see that we’re headed in the right direction—” She pointed to figures in her copy of the school’s financials.

  “You’re doing all the right things,” Maggie said. Though it didn’t change the fact that for many years, out of indolence and habit, the board and the school had done all the wrong things, and all that the new regime had accomplished was a decrease in the ship’s momentum toward the rim of the world and the date at which it might well go over the edge, accompanied by tears and screaming.

  Maggie turned a page in her folder and said, “Let’s talk about the swimming pool.”

  Christina sighed. “The board had been kicking that can down the road for a year or two when I got here.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “A life trustee wanted to give us the pool in honor of his wife.”

  “Life trustee?”

  “I know, I know. We’ve changed the governance rules. There was no chance he would just give us the money. He had a theory that girls’ schools were losing out because their athletic facilities weren’t as good as the Andovers and Exeters of the world. He wanted to prove it.”

  “Not a bad theory.”

  “So it was take the pool or take nothing.”

  “How is it working out?”

  “In a competitive move, another trustee decided to upgrade our tennis courts.”

  Maggie laughed.

  “And it may be moving the needle a little in our admissions. Steph Ruhlman and Lily Hollister definitely chose us for the pool, and we got a very good trustee along with Lily.”

  “I met him last night,” said Maggie. “The Commodore.”

  “Yes. They’re very generous, the Hollisters, and they don’t want their names on anything. And he’s got a hundred percent of our trustees giving money to the school; the first time that’s happened since . . . ever.”

  They talked about the other items on Maggie’s agenda. As an afterthought, she said, “This is my question, not the Association’s. What, if anything, do you do about security?”

  “You mean the stolen exam sheets?”

  “No, no. That I understand. I just was noticing that there’s nothing to prevent any person off the street from marching into the building.”

  Christina said, “We’re trying to raise money now for a video system. We upgraded the locks on all the dorms to coded keypads last year. And we have Ray Meagher, Florence’s husband. He’s a retired air marshal and on the auxiliary police here in town. He’s on call for us if we have trouble during the day. At night, the auxiliary police patrol.”

  “Wasn’t that Ray Meagher who was with you just now?”

  Christina looked surprised. “Had you met?”

  “Yes, briefly, on our campus tour.”

  “He just got the message that Florence isn’t in school. She was gone when he got up this morning. Her handbag and her tote bag are gone, as they always are on school days. Her house keys and car are gone too. He hasn’t a clue.”

  Maggie pondered this for a moment. As she stowed her notes and papers, preparing to meet her colleagues in the library, she asked, “Does Ray Meagher carry a gun?”

  “He certainly has one from his marshal days, and I know it’s licensed. One of the reasons we moved them out to their own cottage was that Florence didn’t think it was safe to have a gun in a school dorm. I agreed with her. Whether he’s armed when he’s on patrol for us I have no idea.”

  After a very full afternoon of meetings, Maggie and her team had dinner with the student council, then retired to write up their notes and prepare for finalizing their report. In her room, when she had finished, Maggie went straight to bed without even checking her e-mail. She’d be home by early afternoon, time enough to pick up the strands of her life and get back to living it.

  Chapter 3

  Thursday, April 23

  The morning brought rain, and with it the humid smell of spring earth, spongy and promising. The visiting committee met in the Katherine Jones room to try to come to one coherent conclusion about the school’s health and prospects. They were all signed in to the same Google Docs file, and were soon at loggerheads about many things, from endowment and admissions to word choices and the proper use of the hyphen. Bill Toskey, a reflexive contrarian, was coming down with a cold and hadn’t liked his dinner the night before; overnight his posture had hardened into the dogma that the school deserved one more year to accomplish impossible changes, and then the pink needle. Sister Rose was quietly equally adamant; she saw hard work and improvement; she thought the school should have at least another five years and could even see voting for ten. Maggie was in the middle. They argued, typed, negotiated, and finally settled on their findings, which Maggie would polish and send on to the Independent School Association for its decision. Bill Toskey and Sister Rose left together in his car, and Maggie began to think about lunch and her train to the city, when Emily George, the board chair, appeared at the door and uttered the sentence that used to punctuate her workday about every half hour: “Maggie, do you have a minute?”

  * * *

  The rain had stopped and the streets of the village were washed and drying in the sun. Maggie asked for a sidewalk table at Le Bistro on Rye’s charming Main Street, where she was delighted to find a mâche salad with crostini and warm goat cheese on the menu. If she was going to be here a while, it was important to know there would be someplace to eat. She ordered her lunch then texted her friend Hope. Hope was long divorced, and she and Maggie had discovered that they traveled well together and greatly amused each other. At any stage in life it was important to have at least one person who was always delighted to hear from you.

  The spring sun was warm on Maggie’s face and she could see the Hudson River far below, wide and blue and glittering. She had sailed this river with her husband, Paul, on a chartered sloop called Curlew one summer just after they were married. It was a beautiful wooden boat, just right for two; Paul called it their “sleek teak single-sticker.” Later that summer they’d sailed her Downeast, before the wind, to Nova Scotia. She particularly remembered an August evening when they had picked up a mooring in Yarmouth Harbor. They had sat in the cockpit, relishing the slight sway and bob of the water beneath them, drinking single malt scotch out of paper cups as the sun, huge and bloodred, slipped silently into the sea like a giant coin into an unseen slot in the horizon. They got talking about the Dry Salvages on the way in, so after dinner, Paul read the Four Quartets aloud to her by lamplight. You had to love a man whose nautical library included not just charts and Lloyd’s and Samuel Eliot Morison, but also P. G. Wodehouse and T. S. Eliot.

  Her food arrived, along with a glass of lovely pale gold Sancerre, and at the same moment, her phone rang.

  “Greetings from the home of the cod and the bean,” said Hope. “Are you done dissecting that poor school?”

  “We are.”

  “Did you push it off the edge of the cliff?”

  “Bill Toskey badly wanted to, but he wasn’t a match for Sister Rose. We recommended they get another five years.”

  “I’m glad,” said Hope. “So you’re on your way home?”

  “I am not. I’m having my lunch at a rather charming joint on the main drag, and trying to decide what to do.”

  “About what?”

 
; “The art history teacher has disappeared.”

  “How disappeared?”

  “Unclear. I was supposed to observe her class yesterday morning but she never arrived. The husband says her car and purse and her school bag, everything you would expect her to have with her, are gone, and he has no clue.”

  “Suitcases missing? Passport? Money?”

  “Everything right where it should be.”

  “What do the police say?”

  “So far, they shrug and quote statistics. The husband serves on the local auxiliary force and they all go bowling together. The husband’s not worried, so the police aren’t worried.”

  “But?”

  “Her colleagues say this is completely unlike her. She was very wound up about the evaluation and chaired the committee that wrote the self-study. She loves the school. But there’s more, of course. This morning Christina called the woman’s sister in Virginia. She expected the sister would laugh it off, since Florence could be a little scatterbrained. She didn’t. She burst into tears.”

  “Wait a minute, I’m going to take notes.”

  “The last time the sister saw her, Florence said, ‘If anything happens to me, don’t assume it’s an accident.’ The sister has been in a swivet about it ever since.”

  “Oh Em Gee,” said Hope. She’d been told by her daughter to stop saying that but she couldn’t help it. “What did she mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. There’s a lot of gossip, about her husband, and the marriage. So here is this incredibly fragile institution, just inching away from disaster.”

  “Got it.”

  “Whatever is going on will probably shake out on its own in a couple of days, but . . .”

  “The child school head asked you if you would stay and see what you can do.”

  “The board chair did,” said Maggie. “She’d heard about what happened at Oquossoc last fall. The board wants me to guide Christina through whatever comes next.”

  “You mean they’re hoping you can figure out what happened to Florence before they have to call the police.”