Читать книгу Saving Miss Oliver's - Stephen Davenport - Страница 12

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 belief. 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 across 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.”

“Of course. But what has that got to do—?”

“We save the school, we save everything.”

“I already gave him some advice,” Peggy murmured.

“And that’s all you’re going to do?”

Now Peggy was too restless to sit. She got up, moved around the room, stopped next to a larger-than-life sculpture, the one she loved best. It was Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall, and in the center of his round, white stomach was a door that let you inside to sit on a bench where, when you pulled a lever, Humpty fell off the wall and came apart into exactly fifteen pieces. The students who had thought it up, designed it, and built it named the piece Undefeated because they, unlike the king’s men, could put Humpty back together again—in a jiffy.

Peggy rubbed her hand over Humpty’s smooth surface. She thought she knew what Eudora was going to say; it brought a little surge of joy.

“You can help him recruit,” Eudora said. “Travel around the country selling the school with him and Gail and Nan. You’ll be good at it. You’ll be wonderful.”

Peggy had no doubt that she could speak for the school, and she wanted to. But that’s not what she needed to hear. For on the heels of her excitement about it came her anger. “That’s what Francis should do!” she exclaimed. “It’s his job.”

“So you do it,” Eudora said. “You’re just as senior as Francis is. You be the head’s right hand.”

“Me?”

“Oh, baby!” Eudora murmured. “I’ve been counting on it.” It was true; she’d seen this coming, as soon as she learned that Marjorie was fired.

Peggy knew how striking this exchange of roles would be. “What place will Francis have when he comes back?” she wondered aloud.

Eudora studied her and smiled. “You’re catching on,” she said.

“I don’t want to catch on. I’m no politician.”

“Yes, you are. Everybody is.”

“It will create an even bigger separation between me and Francis.”

“And this is the way to heal it. How else? Run after him and drag him back? Go out there with him and pretend to be an Indian?”

This was too much for Peggy all at once. She needed to be alone now. She needed time to think.

And besides, here came Mary Bradford, a tall, blond kid with coltish legs, a summer student, into the studio. Mary had been so eager to get away from her family in San Francisco, where she’d been for only a week since the school year ended, that here she was back on campus two days before summer school began. She was carrying a big black portfolio case. In spite of the bounce in her step, she had the drawn look teenagers get when they are tired and won’t admit it. After flying in from the West Coast yesterday, she had stayed up most of the night to finish her drawings and couldn’t wait to show them to Eudora.

“Hello, Mary,” Peggy said, then turned to Eudora, smiled her goodbye, and started to move away. Mary was Eudora’s business, not hers. Besides, she couldn’t wait to be alone.

“No,” Eudora urged. “Stay here with us.” She wanted Peggy to see the drawings.

Eudora revered Mary’s talent, which she knew was greater than her own; she was using all her skill and passion in nurturing it. That was what Miss Oliver’s was all about. She wanted to confront Peggy with the result of her teaching, so clear in the blossoming of Mary’s work. Maybe that would stir Peggy to acknowledge that if they save the school, they save everything she cared about, including her marriage. After all, the Plummers were as much married to the school as they were to each other—and what was wrong with that? She turned to Mary. “Let’s show your work to Mrs. Plummer too.”

Mary hesitated

“Mary, Mrs. Plummer is my friend.”

That was all Eudora needed to say. For Eudora’s claim to an adult affection, to loyalty and trust, named exactly what was absent in Mary’s family—and the original reason for her having been sent away from home. “I’d love to have you see them,” Mary said to Peggy, and now Peggy had no choice. Later, she would realize how clever Eudora was being.

Mary took her drawings out of the case and laid them side by side on a big table. Eudora studied them. A year ago, she would have praised all of Mary’s work. But now, a year of hard work later, the stakes were up; she’d award no easy praise. She said nothing for the longest time, merely looked.

“It’s a joke,” Mary told Peggy, breaking the silence—and Eudora’s rule: Never explain. If it’s not clear on the paper, do it again. But she couldn’t help it, she loved her idea too much to chance Peggy’s not getting it. “It’s a double computer,” she said. “The place you put your feet is one keyboard—we’ll use organ pedals with the letters painted on them—and the other’s a wrap-around, so you can type with your feet and your hands at the same time, write two different books. And that’s not all. We’ll start with a hairdresser’s chair. It’ll have one of those weird old-fashioned hair dryer hoods so you can write two books and get a shampoo all at once!”

Eudora was still looking at the drawings, frowning now. It was as if she hadn’t heard a word. “I’m sorry,” Mary said to Eudora’s back. “I broke the rule. But my parents are always bragging about how busy they are. Multitasking,” she added. “How’s that for a stupid word?”

Eudora ignored Mary’s excuse and kept her back to her, still staring down at the drawings. She pointed with her left hand to the first picture in the sequence. “This one’s good,” she said. “Very good. These are even better.” She pointed with her right hand to the next three in the sequence.

“Thanks,” Mary said.

“Don’t thank me, dear,” Eudora answered. Then abruptly picking up the fifth drawing, holding it with both arms extended in front of her, she said, “What about this one?”

Mary hesitated.

“What about this one?” Eudora insisted.

“I was in a hurry.”

“Do it again.”

A tiny smile appeared on Mary’s face. Peggy thought she looked relieved.

“Tomorrow?” Eudora asked.

“All right. I’ll bring it in tomorrow,” Mary said. Then, pointing to the sixth drawing: “What about this one?”

Now it was Eudora who was smiling. She shook her head back and forth and didn’t answer. She knew that Mary understood: We’ll look at the sixth when the fifth one’s as good as it can get.

“That’s what I thought,” Mary said. She gathered her drawings into her case, slowly, deliberately, while Peggy and Eudora watched. Then she smiled at Peggy. “Thanks,” she said, and turned to Eudora. “Same time tomorrow?”

Eudora nodded. “I’ll be right here,” she said, and Peggy thought, Yes, and the next day too and the next and the next and the one after that, and knew—as if there had ever been a time when she didn’t!—how right Eudora was: We save the school, we save everything!

She followed Mary out the door and headed for Fred Kindler’s office to tell him he needed her on his recruiting trips.

TWO THOUSAND MILES away on the outskirts of Denver, Lila Smythe and her mother, Tylor, waited at Tylor’s house for Francis to pick up Lila for the trip to California and the dig. He’d been expected over an hour ago.

Mother and daughter were drinking their morning coffee at a little table on the patio. They were very much alike: tall, sturdy, their blond hair cut short. Tylor’s was fading. She wore dark glasses against the glare. She glanced at her watch. “Where do you think he is?” she asked, hoping that Francis was still miles away so that she could extend this time with her daughter.

“He’ll be here,” Lila answered. She felt a rush of tenderness for her mother, knowing how lonely she was going to be. She kept her voice casual to hide her eagerness to get going. “He’s absentminded. He’s probably lost the directions.”

“What do you think he’ll do if—?” Tylor started to ask, and then stopped. She knew this worry irritated her daughter, but she couldn’t leave it alone.

It was true. Lila had been home for two weeks, and almost every day her mother had brought up her worry that Miss Oliver’s would abandon its single-sex mission. She’d never thought of her mother as a worrier before, and it was making her impatient. “Don’t worry, Mom, we’d never let the school go coed,” she had insisted each time. This time she didn’t. She was tired of the subject, so she changed it. “Look, Mom.” She moved her chair around the table, put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, and turned her. Now they both stared at the side of the house. It caught the fierce light of the morning sun. The stucco glowed. “Light’s so different out here!” she said. “You taught me that. Back east it’s—”

“Pastel,” her mother supplied the word. She turned her head back to Lila, grazing her daughter’s cheek with her lips. “Thinner. Watery and vague. It’s the first thing I noticed when I escaped out here.”

That word: escape. Sometimes Lila envisioned her mother as if she were emblazoned with a sign: I escaped. That’s who I am. Her mother’s refrain: that she had divorced her husband fifteen years ago when she realized he would never think of her painting as anything more than a nice weekend hobby for a wife, and then picked Denver off the map as the place to live because she didn’t have any family there to criticize her, especially not her father, who had refused to send her to college. He had paid her tuition to Katherine Gibbs instead so she could be a secretary. “Yes, I know,” Lila would say. “But you refused to go. You got yourself a full scholarship at Smith instead. And now you’re a painter. A professional.” What she didn’t say anymore to her mother—now that she knew how much it hurt—was that she wished she had a father.

Lila was grateful to her mother for sending her to a school where there were no males to paint over the picture of what she chose to become. Now she knew that when you can choose what to do with your life, then what you do is who you are. It scared her to know that. And made her happy. It was why she sucked up all the biographies of women that Gregory van Buren kept giving her to read, one after another. How did he know this was exactly what she needed?

And here was Francis Plummer coming around the corner of the house. He must have heard their voices. “Hello,” he said. “Sorry I’m late. I got a little lost.” Tylor was surprised to see how tired he looked.

He joined them at the table and told them what he’d seen on his journey, how flat the middle of the country was, how stunning his first sight of the Rockies was—but nothing of what he’d been thinking about.

Then there was a little silence, and Tylor said, “We were just wondering what you would do if Miss Oliver’s went coed.”

“You were, Mother. I wasn’t,” Lila said. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

“All right,” Tylor acknowledged “I was. And I pay the tuition.” She was looking intently at Francis, waiting for his answer.

“Well?” Tylor persisted, and Francis still didn’t answer. “Evidently, I’ve hit a hot spot,” Tylor said.

“Mother, please, it’s not going to happen,” Lila said, but Tylor’s eyes were still on Francis.

“It’s not a hot spot for me,” Francis finally said. “Because Lila’s right. It won’t happen.”

“A school can’t change its mission?”

“It’s not a mission; it’s what we are,” Francis said. “The alumnae won’t let it happen.” What was going to happen already had: Marjorie’s being thrown out. The rest he couldn’t imagine.

Tylor shook her head, not convinced.

“The students wouldn’t either,” Lila said, looking at Francis now, chastising him with her eyes for not including the students in the saving of the school.

“Don’t be naive,” her mother warned.

Lila smiled. Naive is what I’m not, she wanted to say, feeling a slight resentment that her mother couldn’t see how much she’d changed. She wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone at school. “I mean it, Mom, we’d burn the school down first.”

Tylor wasn’t going to answer hyperbole. Instead, she turned to Francis and asked her other question. “Why didn’t they make you the headmaster?”

“Mother!” Lila exclaimed “For God’s sake!”

Francis was too surprised to speak. The idea of his being the head had never crossed his mind. Tylor Smythe leaned slightly forward, waiting for an answer. Her dark glasses masked her eyes.

“Mother, he’s a teacher!” Lila said.

Tylor kept her eyes on Francis. “Is that the answer?” she asked him.

“I’ve never thought of myself as a head,” he answered, stunned to realize it.

“Shouldn’t the best, most experienced teacher be the head? The one who understands the school the best?” Tylor’s question was perfectly logical—for one who didn’t understand how proud many teachers were to think of themselves as labor, and how preferable the act of teaching was to sitting, removed from students and the subject that you love, in an office worrying about diplomacy, budgets, trustees, and strategic planning. As if a school were merely a business!

Francis was still too stunned to answer. Tyler leaned back in her chair. “All right, I won’t go there,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Mother,” Lila said. “It’s just not who he is, that’s all. It’s hard to explain.” Then she looked at her watch, glanced at Francis. “I’ve had enough coffee,” she told him, getting up to leave. “I’m going to put my backpack in the car.”

Tylor watched her daughter walk away. Francis saw the longing in her face. Lila disappeared inside the house, and Tylor turned her eyes back to Francis. “Did you notice how she said that?”

“What?” he asked, jolted by the sudden change of subject. He needed to linger over her question, why he wasn’t the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. It seemed that everything was happening much too fast.

“The car. If it were my car she would have said your car.”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

Tylor took off her dark glasses, studied his face. Now he could see her eyes. There were gray, little lines around them. “She never sees her father,” Tylor said

“I know. She told me.”

“Sometimes I think she fantasizes that you’re her dad.”

“Oh, no! She wouldn’t do that.”

“Why wouldn’t she? You and your wife—married for years!—make a home for her where everything that’s important to her happens. My home is just where she visits. It makes me sad.”

Francis wanted to avert his eyes. He felt much too vulnerable to be getting into this.

She reached across the table, took his hand as if she’d known him for years. “I’m grateful. To you and your wife. In loco parentis. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? Can’t do that and also find time to be the head. Maybe that’s what Lila meant.”

“Thank you,” Francis murmured. He didn’t know how to tell her it was not what Lila had meant.

“Well, give me a minute to say goodbye to my daughter.” She let go of his hand, and stood and put her dark glasses on again. “Then join us in the driveway, and I’ll wave goodbye to both of you.”

She went out to the driveway to help her daughter put her things in the car. Lila was already finished when she got there. Lila closed the trunk of Francis’s car and turned to hug her mother. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “Thanks for everything.” She meant thanks for escaping. And thanks for letting me go.

Francis was coming down the driveway now. He said, “I guess we’d better say goodbye,” and he and Lila got in the car and closed the doors, and her mother leaned in through the window and said goodbye again. Francis backed the car out of the driveway, and Lila waved to her mother, who lingered in the driveway. She knew her mother would go straight to her studio—and smother her loneliness with her work.

HOURS AND HOURS later, Lila barreled the dented yellow Chevy down Route 80 in Nevada, and Francis sat in the shotgun seat watching her out of the corner of his eye. Her two sturdy arms reached forward, her hands gripped the steering wheel, she stared straight down the road. She drove just like Marjorie Boyd, he thought: Everything gets out of the way. She was going someplace, this kid, blasting forward toward some passion that she would ride on for a lifetime. He thought of Siddy, his son, so different, wandering in Europe, tasting everything, circling, and lonely suddenly, he riffed on the fantasy that Lila’s mother had planted: that he and Peggy had adopted Lila too, Siddy’s younger sister by five years, and the two kids were telepathic, they didn’t need words to understand each other at the core.

He wondered if Lila remembered how much she had disapproved of herself when she arrived at the school three years ago—for her tallness, her thick legs, her braces. Now she liked her tallness, she thought her sturdy legs were just fine, and her braces were gone. In a coed school Lila would be one of the girls whom the boys didn’t want to date. At Miss Oliver’s she was president-elect of the student council; she would have more influence than many of the faculty.

“It’s weird how things happen,” Lila finally said without turning her head. Neither of them had said a word for miles. “If some little man, an archaeologist with a funny name, didn’t show up at school in February and give a speech, I’d still be in Denver now with my mom instead of here.”

“I didn’t think it was a funny name,” Francis said. “Livingstone Mendoza, what’s so funny about that?”

Lila smiled at his little joke. “I knew the minute he started to talk that I was going to sign up,” she said.

“Me too,” Francis murmured, remembering the little man, almost as small as Father Woodward, standing at the lip of the stage, promising that they would find the remains of the village that was there on the side of the mountain for thousands of years before the Europeans came. “So they could see what the Ohlones saw,” he had said, “maybe even dream their dreams.” Blue work shirt, dark tie, brown corduroy pants, and hiking boots. Mendoza’s intensity had made up for his small size, and his voice had filled the auditorium.

“How could I have spent three years at our school and passed up this chance?” Lila asked. “Three years thinking about, and then pass up this chance to be.”

“I guessed that you would sign up,” Francis said. “It didn’t surprise me. Though quite a few of the people on the faculty thought he was a phony. Or a lunatic,” he added, remembering Mendoza’s telling them that the Ohlones were not just outnumbered by the animals but by every species of animal, and claiming in a kind of chant that “if we put one of you and one of them side by side in their world, you would see emptiness and would despair. They would see the majesty of First Things, the nearness of God.”

For the first time, Lila took her eyes off the road, glanced at Francis. “But not you?” she asked. “You didn’t think he was a phony?”

“No, not me.”

“Why not? I mean, he was kind of intense. Sort of overboard.”

Francis hesitated. He’d concede Mendoza’s funny name, but he didn’t think he was overboard at all.

“Like, you’ll be three thousand miles away from home for two months, away from your wife and the school.”

“Yeah, it’s a long way.”

“So why’d you come if it’s so far away?”

“I’m only gone for the summer,” he said, thinking of his conversation with her mother. “You’re away from home from September to June.”

Lila frowned, took one hand off the wheel to push her blond hair away from her forehead. “Now you’re acting just like my mother,” she said. “Whenever she doesn’t want to tell me something I want to know, she changes the subject.”

“All right,” he said, giving in. “It’s like this: Once when I was a little kid, I was fishing with my dad.” He began to speak very fast now that he’d discovered he was going to tell her this amazing thing. “In a canoe. And a huge turtle swam up to the surface of the lake. Came right up beside me where I was in the bow of the canoe. He looked right at me, looked me right in the eyes.” He stopped talking suddenly, aware of how foolish he sounded.

“And you looked back at him,” Lila finished.

“Yes.”

“And then he went away?” Lila’s voice was very quiet.

“Yes. And then he went away.”

“You recognized each other,” she announced, and now he was surprised at how matter-of-fact her voice was. “He chose you,” she said. “He’s your totem. From out of the time when the earth was here and human beings were not.” All Francis could think about was how different this kid’s reaction was from Peggy’s when he tried to tell her what this moment meant to him.

“Thanks for telling me. I know you better now,” Lila said. “I’ve always wanted to know you. Now I do. Thanks.”

LATER, IN A campground near Winnemucca, Lila waited for sleep to come. She’d rather have been out under the stars, but Francis had insisted she put up her tent and sleep in it. Afraid some crazy rapist would come through. “Who knows who comes to public places like this?” he’d asked. Speaking like a dad! He was in his tent too, not far from hers. She imagined she could hear his breathing over the noise of the big trucks on Route 80 half a mile away. She shivered with her happiness and hugged herself, and then she fell asleep.