“I wonder if that’s what Weissman is trying to get us to do, come up with more complicated ciphers and ask the computer to resolve them,” Sam said. “I can sign up for a computer time slot. How about tomorrow night? Or Friday?”
“I, uh—see, I’m kind of—well, I don’t know how to do that,” Jerry said. “I’ve never done any—”
“I can show you.”
“But what happens if the computer is wrong?” Jerry asked. “I mean, is it going to tell us if it’s doing something wrong?”
Here was something Sam knew that Jerry didn’t. Something that even made Jerry a little nervous. “It can only do what we tell it to do, so if we’re wrong, it will be wrong. But we can only find out by trying, right?” Sam attempted Weissman’s old-school lingo and cadence, “And if it doesn’t work, why then, you’re simply one step closer to the correct path, men.”
Jerry smiled, then laughed out loud. He answered back in the same Weissman-ish tone, then mimed Weissman’s eyes going squinty when he pulled on his old-fashioned pipe. But Jerry’s smile disappeared too quickly as he went back to his notebook, his shoulders slumping as if he were even older than Weissman.
Jerry’s superiority wasn’t like anything Sam had encountered. He thought of the way Jerry had called him Richie Rich, lumping him in with those other guys who all had a thing. The football players and the ski racers had a thing; and the DKEs and the KAs and the Phi Rhos had a thing. The other New York and Boston guys, with their summer houses in Maine or the Adirondacks, they all had a thing. Sam had none of that. But Jerry had none of that, either. So whatever Jerry’s thing was, it was nothing like all the other college coolness things. Jerry’s thing was the opposite—he’d been to war. He’d gone to the other side of the world, marched through Vietnam’s jungly alien territory. Sam would have died of fright from all the daily unknowns. Jerry had probably gone down into those tunnels underground, might have killed a bunch of Vietcong. But he’d come back alive.
Thinking about what Jerry might have done made all the other guys seem profoundly stupid, as if everyone else on campus was in third grade. He wondered what Jerry thought of him. No doubt Jerry found him severely lacking. And yet! Jerry had shown his nervousness about going to the computer center, of all places. Jerry needed his help. Maybe Sam wasn’t so lacking after all.
* * *
On the bumpy connecting flight from LaGuardia, Virginia had to close her eyes and breathe slowly to hold back the waves of airsickness. But Rebecca was unbothered, making jokes about her aunts and uncles. She tapped on Virginia’s arm to get her to look out the window at the towering cloud formations and the shifting hues of the Atlantic, the narrow jut of the Eastern Shore. Traveling made Rebecca cheerful, more like the enthusiastic kid she’d been not that long ago.
June had sent Virginia airplane tickets. “Surprise! Now you can come on home for a few days,” June’s note read, and the unexpected plane tickets had sat on the kitchen counter, pushy and irritating, like June. Oh, come on, Ginny, it won’t hurt for Rebecca to miss a day or two of school, Marnie had said, after Virginia had complained about June’s tickets. Why not?
Clattering down the portable staircase at the Norfolk airport, Virginia spotted Marnie inside the terminal, waving and grinning through the plate glass. That glimpse of Marnie, along with the milky late-winter sunshine and the cottony feel of the mild air, brought tears to her eyes. She was home, lost and found. Back where she belonged.
Inside the terminal, Marnie folded them both into a hug. “Mmmph, so glad you’re here, girls. Becca, you’ve grown since—” Marnie stopped, changed conversational direction “—and you look wonderful, so grown-up.”
“You, on the other hand—” Marnie grasped Virginia’s arms, squeezing them “—you need some potato chips and a vodka gimlet. Were you always this pale and skinny?”
“Thanks, Marnie,” Virginia said.
In Marnie’s car, they bumped over the potholes of Little Creek Road, passing a string of sailors’ bars, two of them topless-girl bars; Marnie always took the back way across town because getting on the new interstate made her nervous. “I have to warn you, Momma just put her house on the market,” Marnie said quietly. “I didn’t want to tell you on the phone.”
Momma had talked about trimming her sails, Virginia recalled, but at the time she hadn’t bothered to listen, and Momma had been all euphemism, too polite to say, I’m in trouble, and I don’t know how I got here.
At Wards Corner, they sat in a line at the stoplight. To the right, Hays and Denton department store, where Virginia had bought her skirts and twinsets before college, and to the left, Breyer’s Shoes, the other shops radiating out from them.
“Mom, can we go shopping while we’re here?” Rebecca said. “I need some—”
“We’ve got everything you need, Becca,” Marnie interrupted. “You just name it. You see how busy it is here with all the stores and everything? This used to be nothing but farms, can you believe it?”
“And the barbecue place,” Virginia said, as the car inched along.
“Momma’s still mad about that,” Marnie said, and they both laughed. Virginia couldn’t remember the barbecue joint, which had been torn down in her childhood to make room for this congested shopping center, which showed its age. The drug store’s royal-blue awning had ripped, and the bare metal frame poked through like the hem of a slip showing.
“And we have plenty of other shopping centers too,” Marnie said. “But I bet you don’t have a roller rink in Westfield, do you, Bec?”
“A roller rink?”
“You know, where you can rent roller skates and skate round and round to the music,” Marnie said. “The kids love it. Margaret—” Marnie’s daughter “—will take you.”
“Oh,” Rebecca said. Virginia turned around to give Rebecca an encouraging smile, and Rebecca smiled back, eyebrows raised, maybe skeptical about the concept of a roller rink, or about roller skating with her older cousin Margaret, who paid little attention to Rebecca.
A few minutes later, they pulled into Momma’s driveway, the house where Virginia and her sisters and brother had all grown up, and Virginia let out a long breath. A mock Tudor among other mock Tudors in a leafy waterfront neighborhood, Momma’s house backed up onto the Lafayette River, with its dock where they used to sun themselves on nice days, and take the sailboat or Whaler out any old time. Virginia had had a happy childhood here; she had family who loved her right here. Why had she ever left?
At the end of the front walk, the FOR SALE sign blared Momma’s news.
Momma opened her side door and hugged them one after the other. Her nose was red, the skin around her eyes puffed and shiny. “Don’t mind me, just a spring cold,” she said, wrapping an arm around Rebecca and steering her toward the kitchen. “Let me get my girl something to eat.”
“We’ll get the luggage,” Virginia said, and she and Marnie backtracked to the car. “So what happened?” she whispered, behind Marnie’s car.
“It turns out that Daddy’s banker lost a lot of Momma’s money. Lost pretty much everything. Which means—”
“Everything? But can’t she—”
“It’s already decided,” Marnie said. “And Rolly—” Marnie tended to defer to their brother “—thinks this is for the best.” They were leaning against the open trunk now. Marnie waved at an older woman driving past the house, and Virginia did the same.
But their parents had built this house forty-some years ago. “Everything? Pension? Didn’t she have plenty for her own—and also, I mean, weren’t we all going to get something later, you know, when...” She trailed off.
“Well, first there was this mortgage that none of us knew about, and then Bryce Watson took his clients’ money and put it into a bunch of oil wells in Oklahoma and the parent company went bust and now they have to—”
“Oklahoma! What was he thinking? Why wasn’t a
nyone paying attention?” Virginia asked. Marnie didn’t answer. “But she just has to wait and eventually get her money back, at least some of it, or she can sue, right?”
“I don’t know, Ginny. I think it’s gone.”
She’d been counting on something from Momma, some small inheritance. A nest egg, at least. But she hadn’t bothered to pay attention, either. Now it was her own turn to be too polite, to be like Momma, too ashamed to admit that she was in big trouble.
“It’ll be okay,” Marnie said. “We just have to...adjust, I guess. Momma can move in with Aunt Kitty, or maybe with George and me. Or you and Rebecca, if you move down here.”
She was too roiled and mixed up to respond to what Marnie had just said.
Upstairs a little later, in Marnie and June’s old bedroom, Virginia sat on one of the twin beds for a minute, hiding from whatever else she’d ignored. Outside, spindly loblolly pines framed the backyard, and in the distance, the briny river glinted brown and gold. It was already spring here. She felt so tired; somehow she’d turned into her mother, her mother who she was supposed to be nothing like. Momma had gone to Sweet Briar College for one year, leaving to get married the day after she turned nineteen. Virginia never would have done that. Yet here she sat, frozen, in her sisters’ old bedroom, verging on middle age, or maybe she wasn’t verging, maybe it was middle age—at thirty-nine, she’d probably passed the halfway mark. For Oliver, forty-three had been the end of his life—he couldn’t have known that his middle age was his early twenties. But he’d achieved something, he’d had his obituary in the American Historical Review, while she had little to show for all her education. Momma had her four children and grandchildren, all her causes and clubs, altar guild and bridge group and tennis and her hundreds of distant relatives and friends. Her mother was a widow at the right age; Virginia was a widow at the wrong age.
A memory came to her: Norfolk, maybe her second year of college, around the time of the Arch Tazewell incident. She’d gone for lunch with Momma and Marnie in the downtown Hays and Denton tearoom. Chicken salad, as usual. The tearoom took up a gallery that wrapped around three sides of the store’s top floor. You could look across the open space to the other side, where other women sat eating chicken salad or she-crab soup or ham biscuits. Everyone looked so smug: nowhere these women would rather be than this tearoom, this tea balcony, in this staid department store whose top-floor windows looked out onto the Bank of Virginia building in one direction, and in the other, the Elizabeth River, bordered by its prickle of coal piers and the vast Navy base.
Norfolk was flat, worn-out, tedious. These women cared too much what the other women in the tearoom thought of them. Momma wouldn’t dare come here for lunch without a seasonally appropriate hat and gloves, even though it wasn’t church or the country club or some better place, a real city. Virginia wasn’t going to be one of these women.
“This place isn’t even nice.” Virginia’s voice had come out sulky. She sounded like a child, not a college girl, her bad thoughts colliding and trapping the good ones. She rolled her gloves into a ball, the way she used to do when she was little and bored at church.
“For heaven’s sake, Ginny,” Momma said.
Marnie laughed. “It took you this long to notice?”
“Marnie, honestly,” Momma said. “The women here work very hard to make a good lunch. They’re known far and wide for their pimiento cheese.” Momma’s voice wavered, her exasperation showing. “Now stop it, both of you.”
“I didn’t mean—that’s not what I meant.” Virginia had meant to say that she belonged somewhere else; she just didn’t know where yet. Well, Boston, most likely. New York, maybe. Not here.
Now she shook her head to clear out that old memory—how many times had she been sulky and rude to her mother? Years ago, Momma must have been relieved that her youngest daughter had stayed in the North. Yet here she was, home again.
* * *
Two days later, Virginia stood in the doorway of the academy’s new library with Toby Dickenson, the head of the upper school. The spacious library glowed with natural light from skylights, and beyond the tables and rows of bookshelves, floor-to-ceiling windows offered a view of green playing fields. A lonely librarian looked up at them, waved and went back to her work. This campus was modern and sleek, not at all what she’d been expecting.
“Wow,” Virginia said. “I had no idea the campus was so—so complete.” June hadn’t merely been bragging, all those times she’d told Virginia about the school her boys went to, its wonderful teachers and wonderful campus. June had gone and set up an interview for Virginia without telling her first—it was just like June to do something like that. “I don’t have a CV with me. No, June, absolutely not,” she’d said yesterday. Overnight she’d softened, though, muddled by Momma’s troubles and something else, maybe the damp, milky air, or the potted pansies blooming purple and gold on Norfolk’s porches.
Toby Dickenson’s beard seemed to signal that he was a progressive, a good sign. He wore a bow tie and corduroy trousers, and as they toured the campus, he made self-deprecating and amusing comments about the school, the kids and his own background. They passed the lower-school building, then walked through the gym and out onto a playing field, Toby talking about his graduate work in history at William & Mary, and Virginia talking about Harvard (she heard herself saying Harvard again, name-dropping) more than Clarendon. Toby was proud of getting the girls and boys into the same academic building—when they’d first admitted girls, they’d kept boys and girls separate, except at lunchtime, he said. Before long, boys and girls would take all their classes together, if he had anything to do with it.
She laughed. “The powers that be at Clarendon College decided to let in thirty female exchange students from the Seven Sisters, but only for a semester at a time.”
“So we’re ahead of y’all. Far out!” He smiled at her. “I have to talk that way because I’m around teenagers all day.” They’d circled back to the upper-school building and stopped outside the headmaster’s office. She didn’t want him to leave. She wanted to keep talking; she hadn’t had such an easy conversation with a stranger, a man, in such a long time.
“Call with any questions,” Toby said. “I’ll be around.” He smiled and put out his hand for a quick shake, and was gone.
That didn’t mean anything, Oliver, she said silently. He was just being friendly. She’d said Oliver’s name multiple times without tearing up since she’d gotten home to Norfolk. She wondered what Oliver would think about her coming home to teach, to start a different life down here. The headmaster’s secretary, a trim woman in a tidy shirtwaist dress, hair blond shading into gray, looked up from her typing. Virginia introduced herself, surprised at how unflustered, how professional she felt this morning. Yes, she could do this, even without her CV in hand.
The secretary clucked at her about Momma’s financial losses, and that scoundrel who’d hoodwinked so many people. Virginia made agreeable sounds about Momma and that scoundrel, not sure how to respond.
“You know, my sister’s son Billy, such a nice young man,” the secretary was saying. “He’s about your age. Well, he never married, just hasn’t found the right girl. I think he’d like to have dinner with you, while you’re home.”
“I—I’ve got family commitments for the next two nights, and then we fly back,” Virginia managed to say. “And I’m not quite ready for any sort of—”
“Say no more, there’s no hurry,” the secretary said, her eyes crinkling at the edges, delighted to take part in Virginia’s tragedies and family embarrassments.
A few minutes later, Virginia sat across from Foster Burgess, the school’s headmaster, trying to attend to his telling of the school’s long history. He punctuated this telling—Union occupation of the old school building downtown, the growth spurt at the turn of the century—with brief, tiny smiles, and she found herself returning them. He gave her
a minute to describe her graduate coursework and her occasional teaching.
“Nothing against Harvard, per se, but SDS and all of that nonsense came out of the Northeast, didn’t it?” he said.
She considered whether to correct him, to say that she was fairly sure that Students for a Democratic Society had started at University of Michigan, then decided to tell him that Clarendon was different, that Clarendon’s small group of activists had gone to jail after they’d stormed into the administration building and taken over, forcing President Weissman and Dean Gilbert out of their offices; after a day the National Guard had come in. Since then, Clarendon had been silent, no sign of any activists, since those few had been suspended or kicked out. All of which meant Clarendon was going ever more backward, Louise and Helen and Lily would say. But of course Foster Burgess wouldn’t want to hear that.
“Ah, well, good,” he said. “Then you know firsthand that too much has changed, far too much. Perhaps the best of our culture has been undermined. But traditions and standards still have a place here, you know. We’re here to build a helpful bulwark, if you will.” He stopped, waiting for her response.
What was she supposed to say? Yes, I believe I have bulwark potential, Mr. Burgess. “Traditions,” she said. “Traditional standards,” she added, nonsensically.
“We have a couple of openings that you might be suited for, teaching in the girls’ division. Before we talk about joining the faculty, can you pledge to be part of that?”
“Pledge to be a part of the girls’ division?”
“Pledge to work to uphold our traditions and standards.” He gave another of those tiny weird smiles. “We need faculty who serve as role models and mentors as well as rigorous teachers. Who don’t undermine from within. We maintain a certain standard in morals, ethics and tradition, and in doing so we build the school and protect the culture at large. Now, for instance, a widow would be—”
The Wrong Kind of Woman Page 8