Finally, near the end of his talk, Fred actually had to say it, to put it out there: “Therefore the board of directors, at its last meeting, decided that it was its responsibility to the school to consider admitting boys if our effort to build girls-only enrollment doesn’t produce enough revenue.” He almost said, instead of shutting down. He caught himself just in time. Those words, released to the air, would have been too much reality all at once.
“Please understand: The board hasn’t decided to admit boys, only to consider it under certain circumstances, which I believe will never develop.” He hesitated again. “And of course, if that did happen, they would have to look at the fundamental question: Is there any point in being Miss Oliver’s if we are not for girls only.”
Silence.
“I’d like to hear your thoughts,” he said. He still hoped to entice them, get them involved, make them part of the rescue.
No one raised a hand.
“This school is known for facing problems square on. We can discuss this.”
Still no response. Everyone in the audience was watching him. No one said a word.
After what seemed forever, he heard Lila’s voice behind him. “Here is our answer.” Then she was standing next to him, handing him a sheaf of papers. The heading of the top page was DECLARATION. He read:
We, the undersigned members of the student body, declare our undivided loyalty to Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, and are adamant that this school remain for girls only. We also declare that we will not attend any school that admits male students, and that if Miss Oliver’s School for Girls decides to admit boys, each one of us will leave this campus permanently.
Underneath, and on the next three pages, were the signatures.
“There are three hundred and forty-five students,” Lila told Fred in a clear voice, which everyone could hear, “and three hundred and twenty-eight signatures. I understand there is a similar declaration going around the faculty.”
Fred stood, holding the sheaf of papers in his hand, saying nothing. He made no effort to disguise the fact that he was stunned. “Oh! Well, thank you, Lila,” he finally managed. “I’ll pass this on to the board.”
“Good,” said Lila. “So this meeting’s over, right?”
“Seems to be,” Fred said, though now that he was over his surprise, it was dawning on him that he was proud of these kids for their resistance. Later, he would realize that he should have turned back to the audience then and told the students so, praised them for their conviction and their faith, and thanked them. But he was too stunned and didn’t think fast enough.
If Lila had known what was going through Mr. Kindler’s mind she would have waited to adjourn the meeting so Mr. Kindler could express his thoughts, tell the students how proud of them he was. It could have saved the day for him. But Lila couldn’t know, and she was already at the lip of the platform. “This meeting is adjourned,” she declared. “Time for classes.” In silence, the girls stood, their faces impassive. As they left, Fred joined them, walking down the aisle.
No one looked at him.
THIRTEEN
The last thing either Francis Plummer or Fred Kindler needed was to be face to face with each other. But that was exactly what was about to happen a day later as Francis hurried across campus to his classroom and Fred Kindler walked on the same path in the opposite direction to his office. They both considered stepping off the path to avoid one another. But of course they rejected the idea. They were grown men, after all.
Francis forced himself not to look away from Kindler’s face as they approached each other. Fred Kindler did the same: He kept his eyes up, full on his senior teacher’s face. Let him cringe, he thought. He’d already crossed Francis Plummer off his list. He was hurrying to a meeting with Rachel Bickham. He could trust her advice. And Peggy Plummer’s too. And there were others, maybe, to help him steer the course.
Nevertheless, it made him sad to think how good it would have been if this Plummer were a different kind of guy and he could have had him for a partner. When Fred had visited Plummer’s English and math classes during his visits as a candidate, he’d seen the demands Plummer was able to make of his students, the standard to which he raised them. It was a revelation for Fred. He was sure that if he and Plummer were working hand in hand, they’d be able to turn the Declaration Lila presented to him yesterday into a victory for both of them and the school. The four of us, he thought. Gail and me and the Plummers. That would have made a home.
“Good morning.” Francis tried to say it first, but they both said it together—a kind of unison. The irony would occur to Francis later. Right then, all he was aware of was that every interaction he’d had with Kindler had been a disaster.
And then they were past each other, and he wondered if he should have stopped, put his hand on Kindler’s elbow, said something to give them both a chance to start again. But he didn’t know what he could say to make that happen. He could be a mentor to Fred Kindler if Kindler needed some advice as to how to run some other school. But here? Following Marjorie? How could that be! Kindler didn’t look like the head of this school, he didn’t talk like the head of this school. And he didn’t think like the head of that school. How could he not see how wrong he is for us?
Nevertheless, Francis would keep his opinion to himself, let others have their own.
On the other side of campus, Fred’s spirits lifted. He was looking forward to this meeting with Rachel Bickham. The high standards to which she held herself intimidated some of her colleagues, but they delighted him.
Chair of the Science Department, teacher of physics, head of athletics, and coach of the varsity basketball team, Rachel Bickham was six feet tall, thirty-four years old. Her stately presence drew one’s gaze when she entered a room. Her face was more handsome than beautiful, her voice quiet enough so you had to pay close attention to hear what she was saying, and when she taught, she moved her graceful hands through the air to express her passion for her subject. “The study of science reveals how elegantly the world works,” she would tell her students. “What could be more inspiring than that?”
Five years earlier, Marjorie Boyd had recruited Rachel by pointing out that a major goal was the annihilation of the female stereotype as weak in math and science. One of the first things Rachel had done as chair of the Science Department was to announce to Marjorie, who almost never could bring herself to fire anyone, that the teachers who had been teaching science at the school for years were good—but not good enough. She hadn’t waited for Marjorie to get up the nerve; instead, against ancient protocol, Rachel took it upon herself to inform the least effective teacher that she no longer had a job as of the end of the winter term, and gave the rest of the department one academic year to find other schools at which to teach. Then, by making it clear that her standards would be extraordinarily high and her demands on them relentless, she succeeded in luring away from other schools three gifted teachers, each of whom had graduated from a single-sex college for women. And she did all this with enough directness and courtesy that the dismissed teachers left causing much less furor than Marjorie had predicted, their self-esteem reasonably intact.
“I think you may have chosen a consequence that doesn’t quite work,” Rachel told Fred, her long legs taking up much of the space between their chairs. “Taking their Sunday for a class. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Well, now, it doesn’t feel right to me either,” Fred agreed. “Besides, the girls could refuse. Just stay in their dorms, and then where would we be? It was much too arbitrary, but you know, I was just riding with whatever came to mind.”
“I could see that,” Rachel smiled. “So could everyone else! Riding hard, too. No one was going to get in the way.”
“And that’s what came to mind: Sunday class. Dumb idea.”
“Clearly off the cuff. But thanks for not getting steamrolled. I would have hated to see that.”
“I might have,” Fred admitted, “without your remark abo
ut foul shots. Thanks.”
“No way. You were doing fine. Besides, if it weren’t me, it would have been somebody else.”
“I hope.”
“Anyway, our kids just needed a little reminder. They know how to behave.”
“Signing that Declaration is behaving right, you think?”
“For the students? Yes, I do.”
“So do I,” Fred said “It’s what I would have done too.”
Rachel studied Fred’s face but didn’t say anything.
“What about you?” Fred asked. “If we went coed, what would you do?”
“I’d leave.”
Fred nodded in agreement. “That’s why you signed the faculty’s declaration?”
“You don’t know? You didn’t read it?”
“I did not. I wasn’t about to pretend that the faculty’s declaration had any weight. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that it doesn’t make any difference. We’re either broke or solvent.”
“That’s why I didn’t sign it,” Rachel said very quietly.
“You didn’t?”
“Hell no.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“Some other teachers didn’t sign it either.”
Fred nodded. “Speaking of grown-ups.”
“Yes. Some are. Some aren’t. What about the board, did they read it?”
“Don’t know yet. I sent it to the chair with a strong note suggesting he send it back, unread.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
“My goodness!”
Fred waited.
“I kind of hope he doesn’t take your advice,” she said.
“I kind of hope so too,” Fred said. “Now that I’ve had time to think about it.”
“Well, anyway,” Rachel continued after a little silence. “Back to that Sunday. I have an idea.”
“First I have a different question,” Fred said, realizing how much he wanted her advice.
Rachel looked surprised. She waited.
“What is your opinion of the appropriateness of our Indian display?”
“Oh,” said Rachel. “That.”
“Yes. That.”
“I wouldn’t go there if I were you.”
“Suppose I don’t have a choice? Suppose the student council brings it up and says it’s wrong?”
“Yes, I hear rumors that will happen.”
“It is going to happen.”
Rachel nodded. “Well, when it does, I’d say they’re right.”
“You would? Really?”
Rachel shook her head. “No, I guess I wouldn’t. It’s what I believe, but it would be wrong to say it.”
“Wrong? If you believe it?”
“Not for me. For you. The head. We’ve had the display for years. It would sound disrespectful of the past.”
“Including Mrs. Boyd?”
Rachel nodded. “When you speak, yes. Especially Marjorie.”
“Just what I need right now,” he said, and wished right away he could have those words back; they sounded too much like whining.
But Rachel didn’t seem to notice. “The idea has come up before,” she told him. “Five years ago, in my first year. It didn’t have much heat around it. Nobody was using words like blasphemy and racism, so Peggy Plummer wasn’t offended. And Marjorie just let the controversy die. She liked the Collection right where it was, and besides, it would have taken a fair amount of work to reach out and make the arrangements with the Pequot authorities, whom, I regret to say, we’ve never had anything to do with; and maybe she was afraid that when the Pequots realized we’ve had these things for years, they’d accuse us of racism and disrespect, which, of course, would be all over the news.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll just let the discussion happen. I won’t take sides, at least not at first.” He didn’t say—because he’d already sounded like a whiner—that sometimes the person with the most responsibility is the one with the least power. Instead, he murmured out loud, “It’s going to be tricky.”
“Very,” Rachel said. Then after a little pause: “Sometime I wonder if I could do your job.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I can do it,” Fred said, smiling.
Rachel smiled too. “You’re doing fine. Just keep at it. Anyway, back to my idea.”
“I could use one!”
“Yes, you could.” Rachel grinned. “And here it is. Instead of classes on a Sunday, we do a service project. That way you still make your point.”
“What about my just calling the whole thing off, just admit I was off base?”
“Don’t you dare!”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“They’ll feel useful,” Rachel pointed out. “You don’t want to use classes for punishment. Besides, it will be good publicity.”
“It’s a fine idea,” Fred declared. “Let’s get the student council to choose the project.”
“Good idea.”
“Why in the world didn’t I think of this?” Fred asked himself out loud.
Rachel reached out, patted his hand. “Maybe because you’re human,” she said. “I’ll tell Francis.”
“That will help,” said Fred, not quite succeeding in keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.
Rachel stood up to leave. He could see she’d heard the sarcasm, but, good politician that she was, she ignored it. “Just one more thing,” she said, “an afterthought. I’m sure you’ve thought of it already.”
“Don’t count on it,” he grinned.
She smiled. One of the things she liked about this guy was his self-deprecation. “Bring Francis and Peggy Plummer in together to discuss the council’s idea,” she advised. “So they can work it out between themselves and you before it’s dropped on her in public.”
“I will,” he said. “Of course.”
AND, ON THE other side of campus, in the classroom that had been his for thirty-three years, Francis’s spirits also began to lift. He was about to do what he did best.
The bell had just rung. The students in his ninth-grade English class trooped in and took seats along the outer edges of the three-sided square of tables. Francis stood at the front of the classroom, just inside the square, like an actor in a theater whose stage projected out into the audience. “Home Burial,” he said, “by Robert Frost.” It was one of the poems he had assigned for them to read last night. The girls opened their books to the page and followed him as he recited this poem from memory about the young New England husband who from the bottom of the stairs catches his wife staring from the landing above him, out the window at the little graveyard behind the house, where their firstborn lies.
He didn’t try to hide how much he loved this poem he’d been teaching for years, how it really was by heart. For Francis (who didn’t know the Kindlers’ secret) there could have been no greater draw on his compassion than a parent who had lost a child.
It took him several minutes to recite this long poem, and when he finished there was silence, which he allowed to linger. He knew that many of these kids, whose programmed childhoods had been thicketed with expensive lessons in tennis, soccer, yoga, piano, gymnastics, martial arts—and the skills of outdoing less affluent people in the taking of standardized tests—seldom heard poems recited from memory. For who among their parents had the time or the inclination to memorize a poem? He wondered if Sara Warrior, who had been watching him intently from the back of the room, was an exception. Her head had not been down in her book like the other girls. Was that because she didn’t need to follow with her eyes, she could listen? Maybe her people didn’t hold their stories at arm’s length as if borrowing them for only a little while. Maybe they took them into memory, drawing them up inside themselves, and owning them.
But next to Sara, what Amy Leveret was intent on was showing how disengaged she was. She was slouching as far back from the table as she could get at the rear of the room without knocking the Globe Theatre off its table. Black pants, black
leather jacket on this hot September day, black hair dyed even blacker and spiked straight up. Still intent on improving the students’ attire, Fred Kindler had told Amy to take the ring out of her nose on her first day of school. She’d been looking for revenge ever since.
“Well, Amy, what do you think of the poem?” Francis asked her. He usually stayed away from such open-ended questions for their tendency to engender uncritical, self-reflective answers. But if he didn’t smoke Amy’s distemper out into the open, it would subvert the class for the rest of the period.
Amy slouched still further. “I think it’s boring,” she said.
“Why do you say that?” As if he didn’t know the answer: because he was yet another adult who professed to know what was good for her, what clothes she should wear, what poetry she should love as much as he did. If she were to be seduced by this poem, the anger she’d been nurturing for months would begin to melt, and then who would she be?
“Because you asked,” Amy said.
“Boring?” he repeated.
“Yeah. Boring.”
“How do you know, Amy?” There was no challenge to the question. He just wanted to know.
“Because I was bored,” Amy said. “How else would I know?”
“Well, Amy, that’s one way to find out,” he said. He was smiling, relaxed. He was not going to blame her but the entitled upbringing that made her answer by talking about herself. Besides, he liked her nervy quickness. He was glad the low enrollment had given Nan White an excuse to accept this kid.
Because he wouldn’t fight, she didn’t know how to respond to him. She looked around. Her classmates weren’t looking at her; they were looking at Francis. “But it’s the one I like the best!” Francesca Burke objected. She sat up very straight to the left of Francis, her back to the blackboard, her red hair lightened by the windows across the room. She leaned forward, her arms on the table, her feet wiggling nervously beneath it. Francis knew she was going to explain why she liked the poem. That’s exactly what he didn’t want.
He put his hand up to Francesca, smiling gently. “Wait,” he said. Francesca returned his smile, thinking he’d asked her to hold up long enough for the others to understand what he and she already did.
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