Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  But on the way, he overheard Milton Perkins telling one of his Polish jokes to a circle of uncomfortable-looking faculty members. Perkins, the recently retired president of one of the biggest insurance companies in the state, had been on the board a long time. Francis found himself slowing down on his way to the door, listening to the joke. He’d heard it before. Perkins was seldom able to resist baiting the faculty’s liberalism and being politically incorrect in a loud voice whenever he got an audience of teachers. Francis had always forgiven the man, understanding that underneath, Perkins had a deep respect for the school and the people who taught in it—which he had shown by years of generosity. To Francis, who, if pressed, would admit he liked to make derogatory generalizations about businessmen, Perkins was merely a gambler in a fancy suit who was just smart enough to sense the inferiority of his vocation to that of teaching. So why should Francis be bothered by the old man’s backwardness?

  But now, listening to the story, knowing exactly how it would build to the punchline in rhythmic stupidities, Francis stopped walking toward the door, turned, stepped back toward Perkins and his group of embarrassed listeners. Francis knew what he was doing, knew he shouldn’t, discovered that he’d been holding back these feelings for years in order to make things work for Marjorie, realized also that Perkins probably had been instrumental in Marjorie’s dismissal. He took another step toward Perkins and his group of listeners and saw Rachel Bickham, the chair of the Science Department and director of Athletics, whom he admired, looking at him hard. She shook her head, an unobtrusive gesture meant just for him. Don’t, she seemed to warn. Just don’t. But he loved the release he was about to get. The room was very bright to him now, all its colors vivid.

  “Why don’t you shut up?” he heard himself saying to Perkins. “Why don’t you just clam it?”

  That’s exactly what Perkins did—for an instant. He turned to face Francis. He clearly didn’t know what to do. He was certainly not going to apologize! So he just turned his back on Francis and went on telling his story. That’s what enraged Francis so—the dismissal! After all those years! He tapped Perkins on the shoulder, and when the man turned around, his face flaming, Francis told the same story back to him, substituting Republican for Polack. The group of teachers to whom Perkins had been telling his story glided away, so it was just Perkins now, and Francis, in the center of the room. Francis was pronouncing the name Perkins with the same clowning sarcasm with which Perkins had emphasized the final syllable ski of the Polish person in the joke.

  They were center stage. Francis glimpsed Marjorie, who was still standing by her fireplace, staring across the room at him. Her expression was begging him to stop. Father Michael Woodward, the local Episcopal priest and part-time chaplain, one of Francis’s and Peggy’s best friends, was standing by the opposite wall making slicing motions at his throat.

  Francis didn’t see Peggy. He went on and on, building a vastly more complex story than Perkins’s joke, a fantasy of ineptitude in which the absurdly Anglo-Saxon main character reached mythical idiocy. When a few of the people in the room couldn’t resist laughing, he was even more inspired, felt the lovely release, and went on some more—until he realized that Eudora Easter was standing at his right side and Father Woodward at his left. Their hands were on his elbows. He shut up.

  “Jeeeezus!” said Perkins into the sudden silence. “What in hell was that all about?”

  Nobody answered because Eudora and Father Woodward were escorting Francis from the scene of the crime.

  TWO

  The instant Fred Kindler saw the look on his secretary’s face when she came into his office early on the morning of his first day as headmaster and caught him down on his knees giving thanks, he knew he’d made a big mistake. If she had found him working in his office in the nude she couldn’t have looked more affronted.

  Margaret Rice, a tall, large-boned, black-haired woman in her fifties, who to Fred’s surprise was dressed in her summer vacation clothes—jeans and a man’s shirt, rather than the more professional clothes he had expected and would have preferred—stood in the doorway looking down on her new boss; and still on his knees in his coat and tie, he suddenly saw himself in her eyes: the bumpkin, country clod, ex-farm boy ascended. He was out of style, and, to boot, a man in a woman’s place. “Oh, my God!” Mrs. Rice whispered, then quickly correcting herself: “Excuse me; I should have knocked.” But the look was still on her face: Feminists don’t get down on their knees, it said. We’ve been there too much already.

  Thank goodness he didn’t ask her to join him, his first reaction. Instead, already rising from where he’d been kneeling beside his desk, he heard the apology in his voice, hating the sound of it. “I didn’t know you came in so early.” She was looking past him, her eyes scanning the walls as if she were looking for something—which he knew she was: Marjorie’s paintings, each painted by an Oliver girl. All gone. Marjorie had taken them with her, and the walls were now bare and white. The office had a bright, clean, monastic look. He loved it, it energized him, and seeing in his secretary’s eyes her resistance to this new sparseness, he felt his own stubbornness rising and was glad for it. No more apologies. Just be yourself, his wife had reminded him, and so, in his awkward way, had his own proud dad who never even finished high school. “I’m a lucky man,” he found himself telling Mrs. Rice, his eyes focused on hers. But her eyes slid away, and he decided not to tell her how during his early morning run he’d been overcome with gratitude for his good fortune at being chosen as the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.

  “Marjorie always came in at eight o’clock,” Mrs. Rice said. “I always came in at seven. It gave me time alone to get ready.” Then she was out the door.

  Alone now in the bright summer light pouring through the glass doors that looked out on the campus, he realized he was still standing in the exact spot beside his desk where he rose to after being caught on his knees by Mrs. Rice. His face was still burning. So it’s not cool to pray! he thought, suddenly angry. “Well, you’ve never lost a child,” he whispered to the door. “How do you know what to be grateful for?” He moved to his desk and sat down, already feeling just a little childish, unheadmasterly, to have allowed the words. He recalled his wife’s reminder not to let their old wound tempt him to take elevated positions—as if losing a child makes one wiser than all the people who hadn’t.

  The day had already lost some of the luster it had when he’d walked into this office fifteen minutes ago at a quarter to seven, two weeks before he was required. His contract called for him to start on the first of July, but when Marjorie moved out of the head’s house and cleaned out her office with surprising speed—“Who wants to die slowly?” she had asked—he was able to start earlier. He was too eager, too full of ideas, to sit around waiting. Now a piece of him wondered if he should have followed his wife’s advice—or was it a request?—and taken two weeks’ vacation. He shook his head, like a dog coming out of water. He would get on with his day.

  His desk was bare, save for a framed photograph of his wife and the file of papers he had requested from Carl Vincent, the school’s elderly business manager. He opened the file, turning directly to the projected budget for the fiscal year, soon to begin on July 1, 1991. Attached to the first page was a note from Vincent, dated just two days ago, telling him these were the latest projections “which the board has not seen because I’m presenting them to you first, according to protocol.”

  Fred felt a tickle of suspicion. Something was a little fishy about this note. But he put this aside and turned to the numbers. For several minutes the figures were a blur because his mind insisted on lingering over his awkward tête-à-tête with Mrs. Rice. Besides, he knew the gist of these numbers already; he’d been over them many times during his interviews and since his appointment.

  He already knew there was a projected deficit of $245,000. So he didn’t look at the bottom line. Instead he went right to the revenue figures. That’s where the problem la
y: The school had been under-enrolled for five years. And now there was a baby bust, a precipitous drop in the nation’s teenage population. And even if that were not the case, the appeal of single-sex education for girls had been declining for reasons that only consultants pretended to understand. Large deficits had increased in each of those five years, culminating in this latest, biggest one. So now the accumulated operating deficit, on top of the capital deficit caused by the failure to raise enough money to fund the new theater, the last of Marjorie’s pet projects, amounted to a total indebtedness of over two million dollars.

  The way Carl Vincent had presented the numbers was hard to interpret. In fact, they were a mess. So it was a little while before Fred realized that these numbers were not the same as those he had studied so carefully just before he accepted the position, confident that the notion of single-sex education was so compelling to young women that all the school needed to fill again was a good marketing program. This budget he studied now, he realized, was keyed to nineteen fewer students than were predicted by the earlier version. Nineteen times the tuition of $18,600. That’s $353,400! He averted his eyes from the bottom line. Then he noticed that the line item for salaries was bigger than it was in the last version, by $77,000. Even though there were fewer students to teach! Either this number was wrong, or the previous number was wrong. So he pulled out the compensation charts for the upcoming year and confirmed what his intuition was already loudly declaring: The latest was the correct number.

  He couldn’t keep his eye off the bottom line anymore, which he had already figured would show a deficit of $675,400 instead of only $245,000. He was right. If this rate of drain continued, the bank would surely call the loans, and there simply wouldn’t be enough cash to run the school. He’d thought he had four years to turn things around. Now, on his very first day in office, he discovered he would be lucky to have two.

  When Fred had accepted the board’s offer, he did so on the basis of a very straightforward strategy that the board accepted: He would create an aggressive marketing campaign by which to rebuild the girls-only enrollment. He’d provided a schedule showing the targets for the addition of students each year. The board understood that failure to reach these targets even as soon as the first year was the signal to consider becoming coed, a strategy that some other singlesex schools and colleges were adopting. But it was best not to talk about this possibility, certainly not to write it into the formal plan. This specter looming in the background would enrage the alumnae, many of whom would rather the school close down than admit boys. In his own mind, though, Fred wouldn’t even think about the possibility of closing the school. He’d admit boys before he did that. He knew something about the grief that follows a school’s dying. That wasn’t going to happen to Miss Oliver’s. Not ever!

  Fred spent the next half hour reviewing budgets for the previous five years, noting once again the consistent gap between the optimistic predictions and the disappointing results, and a few more minutes thinking very carefully about how he was going to handle his conversation with Carl Vincent. Then he remembered that Vincent had left for vacation. That was the reason for his timing in presenting the corrected budget: He didn’t want to be around when everyone got the bad news and learned how inaccurate his projections had been. Fred felt sad for the old man.

  All right, so the next thing to do was to talk with Nan White, the admissions director, to see what the chances were of making up some of the lost enrollment over the summer. So, at exactly nine o’clock he was about to get up from his desk and walk down the hall to Nan’s office when Margaret Rice opened his office door (without knocking, he observed), stepped a very small distance into his office, and announced that his eight-thirty appointment had arrived.

  “Eight-thirty? It’s already nine!”

  “Hey, it’s summertime,” she said.

  “From now on, Mrs. Rice—”

  “Ms. Rice.”

  “Ms. Rice. Right. Sorry. From now on, I need you to keep me informed about the appointments you’ve made for me. I’d like to know a day ahead of time if it’s possible.”

  “All right,” she said. “Fine. From now on.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Who what?”

  “Who is my appointment with? Whom, I mean.” “

  Three teachers.”

  “Mrs. Rice, please, who are the teachers? Ms. Rice, I mean.”

  “I bet they’ll let you know when they get in here,” she said, flushing.

  He felt his face get hot too. She looked surprised, maybe even a little chagrined. “We’re going to have to talk,” he said, very quietly, very slowly. His sudden anger, always surprising to him, was a relief.

  “There’s just a way we do things around here, that’s all.” Ms. Rice’s voice was almost conciliatory now, embarrassed. “Marjorie Boyd—”

  “All right, Ms. Rice,” he interrupted. “Later we’ll talk. Right now, who are they?”

  “Melissa and Samuel Andersen; she teaches French, he teaches history.”

  “I know what they teach,” he said. “

  They just got married last Christmas.” “

  Yes.”

  “Marjorie married them.”

  “Marjorie! Mrs. Boyd? Married them?”

  “She performed the ceremony. It made some of the new trustees mad.”

  “Well, that’s interesting. Who’s the third teacher I’m about to see?”

  But Ms. Rice went right on, her tone of voice almost friendly now: “Marjorie got one of those Universalist Church preacher’s licenses that were created for COs in the Vietnam War. Since the alumnae learned about it, Marjorie’s been asked to perform quite a few marriages.”

  “The third person?” he interrupted.

  “Oh. The third person. That’s Fredericka Walters. She teaches German.”

  “I know,” he replied, feeling a further surge of worry. He’d made it a point, during his earlier study of the school, to know how many students each teacher instructed. Fredericka Walters was one of the highest-paid teachers on the faculty—with the fewest students. He was going to have to do something about that.

  “Oh, that’s right, you know what people teach,” Ms. Rice said, and he immediately regretted cutting her off. It dawned on him that before doing anything else he should have had a long, relaxed talk with her.

  “Some people call her Sam,” Ms. Rice went on. “She likes men’s names; and others call her Fred, of course.” Then after a pause: “But don’t worry. It won’t be confusing. It will be a while before anybody’s going to call you by your first name.” Her face flooded with red again.

  He forced himself to let that go, trying to believe she didn’t even know that she was insulting him; she was just describing his situation. “Show them in please, Ms. Rice,” he said as gently as he could.

  Margaret Rice went out the door. In an instant, she returned. “They’re not there.”

  “They’re not there!”

  “Right. They must have gone over to the faculty room to get some coffee. While you and I were talking.”

  “We only talked for a minute! The faculty room’s clear on the other side of the campus.”

  Ms. Rice shrugged her shoulders again. “They’ll be back.”

  “When’s my next appointment?”

  “Nine-fifteen. Mavis Ericksen and Charlotte Reynolds. Two of the new board members,” she added, rolling her eyes.

  I know; I met them during the hiring process, remember? Fred almost said. So did my wife. But he remembered what happened last time he told her he knew something.

  “It’s already five after nine,” he said instead. “That only leaves ten minutes. So when the teachers get back from the faculty room, tell them I can’t see them now. They can come back later.”

  Margaret Rice stood stock-still, staring at Fred for what seemed a very long moment. “You’re joking!”

  “No, I’m not joking. Tell them.”

  “You can’t just cancel an appo
intment like that. They’re teachers!”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “They’re going to be mad!”

  Now it was his turn to shrug. As Ms. Rice started to leave, he said, “Let’s leave the door open. I don’t want anybody to think I’m hiding in here.”

  “WE HEARD THAT about making the teachers wait,” Mavis Ericksen said. An alumna, she was a tall brunette, very pretty, in a red dress, stockings, high heels. She turned to Charlotte Reynolds for affirmation. Charlotte, also an alumna, and mother of an eighth, ninth, and tenth grader, was a stocky, thick-legged athlete in a short tennis dress. She nodded back at her friend. “Good for you, Fred,” Mavis said. Both women sat down in the chairs he offered. He came from behind his desk and sat in a third chair facing them.

  “Yes, good for you,” said Charlotte, whom Fred found more comfortable to look at; that way he could keep his eyes off Mavis’s heartbreaking legs.

  “We’re very glad you’re here,” said Mavis. “As a matter of fact, we are delighted! Welcome.”

  “Delighted is the perfect word,” Charlotte pronounced. “How’s everything going?”

  “Fine,” Fred fibbed, thinking of Carl Vincent’s numbers filed right behind him in his desk.

  “Really?” Mavis’s eyes probed.

  “Just diving in,” Fred said, feeling suddenly guarded. He tried to make his voice sound enthusiastic. “There are a lot of things I need to learn about.”

  “One of the things you have probably already learned,” Mavis said, “is that Charlotte and I are among the more recent appointments to the board. The result, I would say, of some….” She hesitated, turning to her friend.

  “Persistence,” Charlotte supplied.

  “Yes. Persistence,” Mavis agreed.

  “The school was getting pretty close to shutting down, you know,” Charlotte said.

  “I know. We will all work together to make what Marjorie built here permanent.” He imagined himself apologizing to Marjorie for such a lame statement.

  Mavis’s eyes focused intently on his. “You’re right. Respect for Mrs. Boyd. That’s how we need to approach everything. But I refuse to let anyone make me feel guilty.”