She headed back to a keg. Near it a girl was passed out on a sofa. Next to her, a boy sat stroking her hair. The sofa was ripped, the innards showing. Julie filled a plastic cup and chugged it. The boy on the sofa got up and stood beside her. “Where’d you come from? Who robbed the cradle?” he asked. Julie filled her cup again, turned to the boy, looked him in the face, and chugged the beer down.
“I can do that too,” the boy said. He filled a cup, faced her, and chugged it. “Now, what else can you do?”
She gave him a little smile, filled her cup again, and very deliberately poured the beer on his head.
He grinned while the beer ran down over his hair and onto his shoulders. Then he filled his cup and, just as deliberately, emptied it on her head.
She didn’t move either while the cold sticky beer soaked her hair and ran down over her shoulders into her blouse. Then she filled her cup and poured it on his head.
Now a little crowd gathered to watch. They cheered with each pouring.
This game seemed to Julie to go on forever. The group of watchers got bigger, the cheers louder with each pouring.
Suddenly she was dizzy. She felt her lips twitching, her eyes rolling in their sockets. “Oh, shit!” she heard the boy say. “She’s going to barf.” He dropped his cup, escaped back to the sofa. Julie turned away, got out the door, and threw up on the lawn.
The next thing she knew she was sitting on a bench on the lawn, shivering with the cold, and Charley was standing over her. A girl stood next to Charley. “You passed out,” Charley said. His lips were red with lipstick and the girl’s lipstick was smeared. “Robin’s getting the car,” Charley said. “Bringing it as close as he can so you don’t have to walk. He’ll drive you back to school.”
“No, you,” she said.
Charley turned to his date.
“That’s fine, Charley,” the girl said. “I don’t mind. But I’m going to drive. You’re a little drunk.”
A minute or so later, Robin brought the car up into the driveway. “We’ll take her home,” Charley said to him.
Robin frowned and shook his head.
“I’m driving,” the girl said, and Robin smiled and got out of the car. After all, who wants to be with a girl who’s throwing up? He helped Julie into the backseat. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “Next time be more careful.”
Julie was sick once more on the way home. She just had time to get her head through the window. She made a mess on the outside of the car door.
“That’s all right,” Charley said. “I’ll just get a hose and it’ll be fine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the girl said kindly. “It happened to me once too.” Julie realized she didn’t know her name. She was too tired and sick and embarrassed to ask.
When they got back to school, Charley held her arm while they snuck across the campus. He left her by the window to her room. This time Clarissa didn’t pretend to be asleep. “It’s three o’clock in the morning!” she said. Julie didn’t answer. “You smell awful,” Clarissa said, sitting up, and turning on the light.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll help you with a shower so you don’t fall down and drown.”
“No, I’m all right.” Julie went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and got under it with her clothes on to get the smell out. When she got back to the room, the light was still on, and Clarissa still sitting up.
“You’re going to flunk out if you keep this up,” Clarissa said.
“I know I am,” Julie said. She had a history test in the morning she hadn’t studied for, and a paper due for Mr. van Buren the day after that she hadn’t begun. Clarissa turned the light out, and Julie got into bed. She wanted to think about Charley and that girl, both smeared with lipstick. But the room whirled around and around, and she couldn’t think about anything. Finally, at dawn, she fell asleep.
“CLOSE HER DOWN then,” Milton Perkins muttered two days later, thirty stories above the street in New York City. “She’s run her course. Just close the old girl down.”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Alan Travelers asked in a somber voice. “Well, isn’t it?” he repeated.
Two chairs to the right of Perkins, Sonja McGarvey reached across Barbara Tuckerman, a rigidly erect silver-blonde in her fifties, and lightly laid her fingers on Perkins’s hand. The red of McGarvey’s fingernails flashed against the starched white of Perkins’s cuff. “Please, Milton,” McGarvey said, her voice as quiet as if she and he were the only people in the room. Perkins turned to her, his face registering mild surprise, and Barbara Tuckerman slid her chair back from the table, as if escaping from a scene that should take place in private. “A coed school is better than no school at all,” McGarvey said. “I really want you to believe that.” Perkins didn’t take his hand away, and he did keep his suddenly gentle eyes on McGarvey’s face. But he moved his head from left to right and back again, as if rejecting a gift.
“Oh, come on, surely there’s another alternative,” Tuckerman exclaimed. This was the first meeting she had attended since Fred’s appointment. “I believe emphatically that we should simply soldier on as Miss Oliver’s School for Girls,” she announced. “And I repeat, for Girls. We’ve been doing it for years.”
“You got two million dollars?” Perkins asked her, and McGarvey just looked away and rolled her eyes. Fred wanted to yell, That’s exactly the problem: You’ve been doing it for years!
Instead, he used the excuse of Barbara Tuckerman’s naïveté—which he guessed was fake—to sum up the situation all over again. Some of these people have been drifting so long, he needed to stick it between their eyes. “We need twenty-six new enrollments for next year,” he reminded them. “We can hope for fifteen, but I can safely predict only ten. Now without the Fingerman gift to tide us over, if we do only get ten, we’ll run out of cash around the beginning of next year’s winter term. If we get lucky and get fifteen, we can last about two weeks longer. We just won’t have any more money!” There! he said to himself. How’s that? Do you understand that?
“Oh, our poor school!” Charlotte Reynolds moaned.
“This is what we get for letting Marjorie do our job,” Mavis Ericksen declared, and when no one responded she said, “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Why do you think John and Charlotte and I got ourselves on the board?” she said, pointing down the table at John Williamson, who had joined the board the same time she and Charlotte did. “If the alumnae knew how the rest of you let that ridiculous Boyd woman go on and on, they’d sue you.”
“All right, Mavis,” Alan tried to interrupt. “Let’s not go there.”
“They’d take you right to court and get every penny you’ve got—if they didn’t shoot you first.”
“And they’d be right!” Charlotte said.
“But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to vote to let boys in!” Mavis finished.
“So I move that we close the school at the end of this year,” Perkins said. His voice was calm, resigned.
Silence.
“Well?” asked Perkins.
“Let’s not go quite so fast, Milton,” Alan said, though he knew they had reached the moment of decision. He didn’t want anyone even to suspect they hadn’t studied everything, examined every possible way out of this. So in the way of most boards when faced with such a calamity, they spent an hour and a half going over all the numbers again as if they didn’t already know everything the numbers could possibly tell them. As expected, they learned nothing new; and so they turned to the concept of operating with a skeleton crew, and Fred explained once again what they already knew about critical mass: how, since foreign language teachers didn’t teach math and math teachers didn’t teach English—and so on—a certain number of teachers was needed, no matter how few students there were to support them. Finished with this, with hopes even more rapidly descending, they examined the possibility of closing part of the campus, even renting some of the buildings out, the theater, for example, to the
local amateur repertoire company, which happened, McGarvey informed them, having already looked into this at Fred’s request, to have the use of Fieldington High School’s auditorium for free. She and Travelers and Perkins and also new member John Williamson had examined every possibility of creating revenue via use of campus—including the tax implications—and even selling timber from the many acres of forest the school owned, extending from the edge of the campus to the river. They went over all of it again with the rest of the board, and at the end no one contradicted McGarvey when she summed it up as a pipe dream to think that any of this could save the school.
In the ensuing silence Perkins said again, “I move we close the school at the end of the academic year.”
No one said a thing.
“That gives the kids time to find another school and the faculty to get hired someplace else,” Perkins added. “We should make the decision now; it’s only fair.”
“Is there a second?” Travelers asked.
Silence again. Fred and Alan looked at each other. Alan made a tiny gesture with his eyebrows, acknowledging the moment.
“I move we accept boys,” said McGarvey.
“Just a minute,” Travelers said. “We have another motion on the table.”
“Yeah, well it’s not getting any action, is it?” McGarvey said.
“Why isn’t it?” murmured Perkins. “What’s everybody afraid of?”
“Any second to the motion to close the school?” Traveler asked again. He looked around the room.
Silence.
“The motion fails,” Travelers announced.
“I move to accept boys,” McGarvey repeated.
“Second?” Travelers asked.
“Hold it. I’m not through yet,” McGarvey said.
Travelers waited.
“And change the name to the Oliver School.”
“Get rid of for Girls?” Barbara Tuckerman exclaimed.
“Right. No more for Girls—and gear Fred’s marketing campaign to a coed school. Use all the same strategies he’s using right now. You know damn well that’ll work. Coed schools are turning kids away in droves. So the students have signed a pledge not to come back if boys are admitted. So what? Half of them will change their minds and come back anyway. We get some boys, and we enter the much bigger market of girls who want to go to school with boys. You know damn well we could get twenty-six more students in that market. Hell, just with the boys, we’ll get twenty-six—”
“Second?” Travelers interrupted “Then we can discuss.”
“I abstain!” Barbara Tuckerman blurted.
Alan Travelers looked at her for what seemed like minutes. “We’re not there yet, Ms. Tuckerman,” he said at last.
“Let’s call the question,” said McGarvey.
“We can’t,” Travelers said. “We don’t have a second.” He looked around the room again. “All right,” he said when no one offered a second, “I’ll second the motion—just to get it on the table so we can at least discuss it.”
“I’m not sure you can do that,” said Meg Updike, the alumnae representative to the board. “Can the chair second a motion?”
“I’m doing it. Discussion. Please.”
“Oh, goody!” McGarvey said. “We can discuss all the details while the school goes broke. Let’s start with the price of urinals.”
“We can start with the fact that the boys we take won’t be the best students,” Beverly Monroe challenged. Monroe had recently retired from a long career in admissions work in independent schools. “I just want to point that out so it can be part of the consideration.”
“Is that really why you’re bringing it up?” McGarvey asked across the table. “Or is it just some more bullshit?”
“Careful, Sonja,” Travelers warned.
Monroe blushed. “Well, it’s true.”
“I agree. It’s true,” said Charlotte Reynolds. McGarvey stared at her. “Well, it’s probably true,” she said.
Mavis Ericksen turned to Fred. “Mr. Kindler, is it true or isn’t it?”
“It’s true,” Fred said. “The best will go to schools that have been coed for years.” He hated this topic. Talking about kids as if there were a “best” and a “worst.”
“You mean second-line? We’re going to take second-line boys in?” Tuckerman asked.
“Beggars being choosers,” McGarvey muttered. “Jesus!”
“Any other discussion?” Travelers asked. No one answered. “Really? No questions, no thoughts? All right, then, we’ll call the question. All in favor, signify by raising your hand.” McGarvey put her hand up. So did Travelers—obviously with reluctance. Everybody else’s stayed down. Travelers looked surprised. “Both motions fail,” he announced.
“Big surprise!” McGarvey said.
“Scaredy-cats!” Perkins growled.
“I said I abstain,” Barbara Tuckerman said. Several people nodded their heads. “See?” said Tuckerman. “People are abstaining. They’re not ready. It’s natural.”
“This is no time for abstaining,” Travelers declared.
“I won’t accept—”
“Alan, let’s go around the table,” Fred suggested. “Ask each person to say whatever she or he is thinking right now.”
“I think we ought to hear what you think,” Barbara Tuckerman interjected. “You’re the headmaster. What’s your recommendation?”
“The board’s supposed to make these decisions,” Alan Travelers said. “You people need to do your damn job!”
Now there was a big silence in the room. “That’s right,” said Sonja McGarvey. “Time to step up to the plate.” Milton Perkins nodded in agreement.
“We’re not leaving here until we decide,” Travelers declared. “Does everybody understand that? We’re staying right here.” Now it was even quieter in the room.
John Williamson turned to Travelers. “There is a question that we should ask the headmaster,” he said.
Alan frowned. Either way, he clearly didn’t want this decision to be pinned on Fred—especially if the decision was to admit boys. He didn’t need a head whom everybody hated.
“It’s a question for the educator,” Williamson said. “The professional. It’s not about which way he’d vote if he could.”
“All right, ask it,” Travelers said.
Williamson turned away from Travelers and faced Fred. “Haven’t we learned enough about how to educate girls at Miss Oliver’s that now we could apply that knowledge to the benefit of girls and boys in a coed school?”
“Of course we can,” Fred said.
“Of course we can what?” Mavis said.
“Of course we can apply—” Fred began.
Mavis cut him off. “You traitor!” she hissed. “You son of a bitch!”
Travelers stared hard at Mavis.
Mavis stared right back. She started to say something.
Travelers cut her off. “Sonja, make your motion again,” he commanded. And Mavis started to cry.
McGarvey put the forefinger of her right hand on the thumb of her left. “Admit boys,” she said over the sound of Mavis’s sobs. She moved to the forefinger. “Change the name to the Oliver School.”
“Eliminate Miss too!” Charlotte exclaimed.
“Yes, eliminate Miss, why the hell not?” McGarvey moved to the second finger. “And continue with the present marketing strategies but geared to coed.”
“Second?” asked Travelers.
“I second the motion!” Williamson said.
“You too?” came from Mavis, crying.
“You promised!” Charlotte said.
“Discussion?” Travelers asked.
“We got you on to get rid of Marjorie, not to let boys in!” Charlotte said, leaning across the table at Williamson.
Travelers rapped his knuckles loudly on the table. “All in favor of the motion, signify by raising your hand.”
Everybody except Mavis Ericksen, Milton Perkins, and Charlotte Reynolds raised a hand.
&
nbsp; Alan Travelers hesitated, looking straight at Fred. Then he moved his eyes around the room. “The motion passes,” he announced. “This is an historic moment. Thanks for doing your job.”
Mavis Ericksen got up from her chair, leaving her papers on the table, and charged out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Fred was sure she’d go straight to Sandra Petrie. “This meeting is adjourned,” Travelers announced.
LATE THAT EVENING, back at the head’s house after the drive from New York City, Fred heard a message left on his answering machine and knew right away that if Gail had thought to check for calls, she would have deleted it and he never would have heard the enraged and drunken voice stumbling over the wires: “You … you Quibling. Quidling. Quisling!” It was Barbara Tuckerman’s voice. The prim, erect, perfectly dressed Barbara Tuckerman, who had moved graciously back so Sonja McGarvey could lay her hand on Milton Perkins’s hand, was saying, “Thadz wha you are a fugging quisling, a real pansy, weak … weak.” Big sigh then. Fred imagined her running a finger down a list of epithets and thought he heard ice tinkling in a glass. “Sonabitdch,” Tuckerman chose from her list. “Knew the minud Mavis tol’ me you didn’ have tha guds to fire that Saffire bidch we had tha wrong person.” Then in the background he heard a man’s voice, obviously her husband’s: “Honey, please.” The voice was gentle, and now Fred felt very sad. He knew he should hang up. But he was fascinated. “Don’t. You’re making a fool out of yourself,” the husband said, but then Tuckerman’s voice got even louder, drowning him out. “Shid! We’d a been better off if we’d stayed with Barjorie Moyd. At leasd she wasan a man!” Fred heard her draw a new breath; she was thinking what else to say, she was going to start all over again. He hung up the phone.
“And I didn’t even make the recommendation!” Fred said to the empty room. Then he pushed the delete button and headed for bed.
TWENTY
At eight-fifteen the next morning, the entire school was in the auditorium, the big doors in the back were closed, and Fred Kindler was stepping toward the lip of the stage. “Good morning,” he said into the silence. There was almost no response. The students sat warily silent, and most of the faculty stood along the back wall near the doors, ready to retreat. If news couldn’t wait for a regular Morning Meeting at the usual time, it must be bad. Fred nodded his head. He agreed: It was much too tense in there for pleasant greetings. He introduced Alan Travelers then sat down on a chair onstage, and felt a small relief when all the eyes came off him and on to Travelers. The board chairman stood and calmly began to talk.
Saving Miss Oliver's Page 32