Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  “You’re not telling me something,” she said, sitting beside him in the twilight. “It’s all over your face.

  He prevaricated by telling her everything about the meeting, describing it blow by blow, except the part where Ms. Richardson turned on him. He didn’t tell her that part. That’s what had been bothering him. That’s what he didn’t want to talk about.

  She saw right through this. “Come on, tell me,” she urged when he’d finished. “What’s really bothering you?” She knew the board bringing up the prospect of admitting boys, instead of him, wasn’t bad. It was good. It took the heat off him, it was what he wanted.

  He gave in finally and told her how Ms. Richardson had made him tell a lie. “How suddenly it all happened!” he exclaimed. “First she’s a kind, elderly woman, then she’s Machiavelli.”

  “You were right to lie to her, Fred,” Gail said. “You’re a realist. A grown-up. It’s nice to be married to a grown-up.”

  They sat side by side in the squeaky wicker chairs. June bugs banged on the screen door, hungry for the light. Gail picked up Fred’s hand and kissed it, held it to her cheek, then returned it to his knee. Neither of them spoke. After a while Gail stood up. “It’s ten o’clock, I’m going to bed,” she said, bending down to kiss his forehead. “Come on up when you think you can sleep.”

  He took her hand, held her back. He was still mulling over what she’d said. “A realist? You usually say idealist.”

  “That too. You’re both. You’re Don Quixote with a brain.” He laughed and let go of her hand.

  She wanted to add, You could have chosen a school that didn’t need to be rescued. That would have been just fine with me. But she kept the thought to herself, bent to kiss him again, and went upstairs to bed.

  He sat for a while, nowhere near ready to sleep, remembering the hollow sound of their voices in their house at Mt. Gilead after the furniture was taken out and put in the moving van. It was a relief that Gail’s profession was portable. A graphic artist as good as she could be successful anywhere, make as much money here in Fieldington as she ever did—more than he did—and maybe, when she was ready, after she got her roots down, and he got things at school a little more squared away, whatever was keeping them from getting pregnant would stop happening, and they’d be parents again. “We’re going to stay right here,” he said to the empty porch. “This is the place for us.”

  After a while he went into the house, tried to read; when that didn’t work, he turned on the TV, soothed himself with late-night blather, finally dozed in the chair. Near dawn when he went upstairs and got in the bed beside Gail, he found she was awake. He put his hand on her shoulder. That’s when she started to cry.

  “Hey!” he said. He put his arm around her, cradled her head. “You said yourself it’s not so bad. And anyway, it isn’t going to happen. They’ll never let boys in here.”

  “That’s not what I’m crying about,” she said. “Besides, I’m stopping.”

  “I know,” he whispered, kissing her cheek. “I know, I know.” How safe things used to be, that’s why she was crying. For that. Before he had decided to be a head. Before they had learned that a car accident could actually kill their daughter. If I were a great teacher, a Francis Plummer, he thought, maybe I wouldn’t be a head.

  “It’s like you’re out in space,” Gail said. “All alone.”

  “But I’m not,” he said. “I’m right here in bed. With you.”

  FAR WEST OF the Mississippi now, in the same dawn, Francis couldn’t sleep either. In this huge landscape where there were no woods, no little hills to wall him in, he felt released but unanchored too, much too restless to sleep. So he drove instead, went faster and faster. It was four-thirty in the morning, fifteen hours after his phone call to Peggy, and there was no other car in sight. Just a big semi up ahead getting bigger and bigger.

  He’d promised Peggy he wouldn’t eat greasy breakfasts at roadside restaurants, so he was fasting, three cups of black coffee, that’s all, and the caffeine was throbbing in his temples. He zoomed by the truck and waved to the fat guy, pasty faced, loaded on speed, NoDoze, everything but sleep, who from miles above waved back, then blasted the air horn, a crazed hello in the early morning.

  Now Francis was going almost a hundred, the car was beginning to quiver, and he started to laugh. Once when he was a little kid crossing the living room, past the black-robed glowering of his ancestor’s portrait above the mantel, and tripping on the rug, he heard his father mildly explain to a visitor, “Francis lacks coordination. And he’s so dreamy, he doesn’t always know where he’s going.” Francis, who at age fifty-five was still small, unathletic, and absentminded, remembered that now, so he pushed harder on the accelerator. Risk was the best revenge. When the car’s shuddering increased, he laughed again, surprised that he was laughing, that he wasn’t crying, wondered why he was speeding; he didn’t ever know anymore how he was going to feel in the next moment. He thought maybe he was finally living up to the romance the girls had built up around him, living a secret life they insisted on believing.

  Signs, telephone poles, fence posts blurred by, and after a while he found himself wondering how it would be to steer for one of them, smash his car and himself, and go to sleep. The image frightened him more than the midnight ocean into which he’d fallen overboard and was drowning all alone. So he slowed his car way down, gained control of it and of himself.

  Now he had only several hundred miles to go until Denver, where he would pick up Lila Smythe. He felt less regretful now about his promise to give her a ride; he’d had enough of loneliness. And there was something comforting about keeping a promise to a student, something solid and practical and helpful, about saving her the money it would cost her to fly. He hung on to that.

  Three hours later, he saw the front range of the Rockies up ahead. Soon he’d be in Denver.

  FOUR

  With Francis farther and farther away and Siddy wandering in Europe, Peggy was remembering what it was to be alone. She was thirteen again.

  The pale winter light slid through the window, showing the grease lingering on the tiles behind the stove. The kitchen smelled of the old linoleum her mother hated, which wouldn’t be there anymore if her mother hadn’t died giving birth to the stillborn baby who would have been Peggy’s little sister. Peggy peeled potatoes, alone. It was four o’clock, school was out, and her father wouldn’t come home till seven.

  They’ll eat together, he’ll ask her questions about her schoolwork, he’ll wash the dishes, thanking her for making dinner, for being such a good daughter, then she’ll go upstairs to her homework: gray geometry, Caesar dividing Gaul, a history text heavy with graffiti left to her by an anonymous predecessor: misshapen human forms, huge heads, penises that look like guns. Her father would be downstairs in the armchair across the fireplace from the matching empty one. Soon she’ll hear his tread on the stairs, he’ll come into her room, shyly kiss her on her cheek—she would know he wished he weren’t so distant. Before going to bed, she’ll hear him crying in his room.

  Then she was twenty-two, newly married, standing on a warm thick carpet, the color of roses. The walls of the big room were a bright clean white, and Francis’s father in a blue suit stood by the fireplace. He was smiling at her, standing under the portrait of John Plummer, Puritan Divine, black robe, white bib, round cheeks, stern, stable man, proud roots! The smell of roast lamb wafted from the kitchen. Francis’s mother’s in there with the black lady who helped, who called them by their last name while they called her by her first—all except Francis, who put a Mrs. before her last name, while his father rolled his eyes.

  They’d just come from church. Peggy still felt bathed in the light from the rose window over the altar. Francis’s father turned to her, he knew she’d listen, and he talked about the sermon. “Unless I believe as a child believes,” he said, but she didn’t hear the rest. It’s not the words she wanted, she didn’t need to understand. It’s what in his eyes. More than bel
ief. More than confidence. More than knowledge. A vast beneficence had been granted! He smiled at her. He was tall, he’s wearing a vest, there’s a gold watch chain across the front. His blue eyes shined with his belief. She loved those blue eyes!

  More than ever lately, Peggy found herself talking to her father-in-law. She couldn’t see him, had no idea what the heaven she was sure he lived in looked like, but she knew all she had to do was open her mind to him. Their conversation was more intimate now than when he had lived in a real body on the edge of Long Island Sound in the house that Peggy loved so much. She was sure he knew now that the only reason Francis had begged her to join his family’s Episcopal faith when they were married was to please him. “I didn’t see that then,” she told her father-in-law, “maybe because Francis didn’t either. Or if he did understand, maybe it was kindness, he didn’t want to hurt your feelings. What I really think, though, is how in the world could he have stood up to you?

  “Because when Francis thinks of God, he thinks of bears,” she explained, and turtles, and fish. “How’s he supposed to tell you that? He told me once. I just laughed. He was joking then—before he knew it was true.”

  PEGGY FINALLY GOT so lonely on the night after Francis called her just before he crossed the Mississippi that she invited their dog, Levi, into their bed with her. Levi was a big brown mongrel who drooled a lot. His other name was Spit; he was lonely too. He stood by the bed as Peggy got ready, his rear end wagging with his tail, and when Peggy got in on one side, he leapt up onto the bed on the other, offering to lick Peggy’s face, while Peggy pushed him away, and then he snuggled down beside her, groaning with satisfaction like an old man in a steam bath.

  Levi was afflicted with fleas in the summertime, and so when his scratching reached an apogee in the small hours of the dark, the bed shook and Peggy woke up thinking for an instant that she was in California with Francis and there was an earthquake and they were both dying.

  “But my dear,” her friend Father Woodward said to her that afternoon when she went to his cluttered little office to tell him about her vivid dream, “Francis will be living in a reconstructed Indian village on Mount Alma. Nothing’s there to fall on him.” Father Woodward spoke in the faintly affected upper-class British accent he joked that he had learned by mistake in theological school. “Francis is going to live forever,” he predicted.

  The little priest sat opposite her in a chair to one side of his desk, his feet barely touching the floor, while the light from the window shined on his bald head. Before coming to Fieldington, he’d been a curate in a big New York City parish, and though she’d miss him terribly, Peggy thought he should return to the city’s more eclectic scene. He had told her once that the bishop urged him to take the Fieldington parish ten years ago when the position opened. “He said living in suburbia would test my faith. He obviously suspected it wasn’t very strong.” But now the thought came to Peggy that maybe the bishop just had wanted him out of the way.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” Father Woodward murmured now, “Francis will be fine. He’s exploring.” She watched his little sandy mustache move up and down above his lip, which she found herself comparing to Fred Kindler’s red one, and the thought struck her that she’d do better to go to Fred with her grief. She was sure his faith was not so damn supple as to allow the idea that what Francis was up to was exploring. She shook the treacherous thought away. How did she know what Kindler believed? Besides, he was her boss, not her priest.

  She knew Woodward missed the point on purpose, so she pressed on. “Coming to Miss Oliver’s was the best thing that could have happened to Francis and me. We found our calling. And now he risks it all,” she said and went on to remind him that the only thing Francis knew about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life before Marjorie had hired them was that he didn’t want to be a businessman. “Though he didn’t have the foggiest idea what a businessman does,” she said. “It was just what his father did.”

  “He knew you had to wear a suit.” Father Woodward smiled. He was dwarfed by his chair, his tiny hands motionless in his lap. His knitting sat on the pile of papers on his desk in his dark little office, and she knew he was itching to get his hands on the needles. She’d advised him lots of times not to let his parishioners know he knitted.

  “If it were fly tying or something, it would be okay,” she said. “But knitting! You give your parishioners too much credit. This isn’t San Francisco. It’s New England. We’re even less broadminded than you think.”

  Father Woodward’s eyes flitted to his knitting, but he didn’t move his hands. His eyes behind the owlish glasses focused on her. He didn’t say anything. He was taking courses on how to counsel, Peggy thought. How to be like a shrink. But she didn’t want his advice, let alone his therapy. She wanted his prayer.

  She had no idea how hard her friend was working not to tell her what he thought she should discover for herself. It’s not just panic that is driving Francis, he wanted to say. It is also courage. Francis shouldn’t have to defend his spiritual quest to anyone. It’s his escaping, his running away, that’s indefensible. He’s going to have to figure out for himself that he can’t do both at once. But Peggy was not ready to hear this yet. So he waited.

  “Francis has been having dreams too, all year,” she told him. “I wonder if he’s still having them way out there in the West, and if he is,” she added, “I probably wouldn’t understand them.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Father Woodward said. “If you could understand them, you would have gone with him.”

  “That’s not fair,” Peggy said, and Father Woodward shrugged his little shoulders. “And it’s beside the point,” she added.

  “All right then, my dear, what is the point?”

  “You tell me,” she demanded. It was his last chance. Silently she was begging him, Don’t tell me he’s questing. Tell me he’s straying. Say let us pray!

  Father Woodward looked out the window to the bright sunshine on the lawn. “It’s easier to explain than to understand,” he murmured. “You could explain it. A Sioux medicine man could tell him what’s really going on. But where are we going to find a Sioux?” Father Woodward turned his face from the window and added, “One could claim they’re the same. What Francis wants and what you believe.”

  Oh, please! Don’t be so damn liberal! she wanted to yell. I don’t need a priest who believes in Everything. Instead, she kept her face as expressionless as possible. He had enough problems without knowing how much he’d failed her.

  Father Woodward shrugged. “Don’t you two grow apart,” he begged. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “It’s time to go,” she said, stretching the truth. She had plenty of time, and so did he. She stood, moved to his desk, leaned over it, and kissed him tenderly on his forehead like a sister—her forgiveness. His bald pate gleamed beneath her eyes. He kept his hands flat on the desk as if keeping it from flying away. His face was slightly flushed.

  “I’ll pray for you both,” he murmured, and she went out into the bright summer light.

  STRAIGHT TO EUDORA’S studio. If Father Woodward couldn’t help her, surely Eudora could.

  Peggy loved the smell of the studio: turpentine, clay, oil paints, dust. Her spirits lifted as soon as she was through the door. Ever since Marjorie had hired Eudora, a young artist, newly widowed and still thin, thirty-two years ago, just one year after she hired Peggy and Francis, Eudora had been the colleague whom Peggy trusted the most.

  “I’ve lost him,” Peggy began. And stopped when Eudora shook her head. “All right, an exaggeration,” she admitted. “But it’s how I feel.”

  “You don’t lose them until they die. That’s when they go away.” Eudora tossed this off, a bright, encouraging matter of fact. She was not speaking from grief—her husband died years ago, two weeks after their honeymoon, drowned absurdly in a swamp on a reserve Marine Corps training exercise—but from memory of grief. She sat motionless in her red work smock in her chair acros
s from Peggy’s, more of a presence even than the mammoth wooden chairs she had inspired her students to create. Kinesthetic sculptures she called them, her latest enthusiasm. They dominated the space. And demonstrated Miss Oliver’s at its best. For here was one of the several areas in which the school had freed itself from the ant mentality that craved to departmentalize the curriculum of almost every school. As if life came in boxes! These creations surrounding Peggy in her colleague’s studio were at once furniture and works of art and machines. And also jokes—as if to prove that, in the right atmosphere, teenagers could be counted on not to take themselves too seriously. The piece nearest Peggy was a red-white-and-blue throne, bright and arresting in the cracked and crazed enamel of its varnished paint, that played “The Star Spangled Banner” as soon as you sat in it—so that you had to stand up—and, of course, stopped playing as soon as you did. It was the sixth version; the first five had not been sufficient and were destroyed.

  “Francis is doing what he needs to do,” Eudora said.

  “No, he’s not. He’s running away.”

  Eudora shook her head again. “Let’s not talk about Francis. Let’s talk about you and what you need to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “See? I knew this wouldn’t take long,” Eudora smiled.

  “Like what?” Peggy repeated.

  “Like helping this new guy save the school. That’s what you need to do.”