Читать книгу No Ivory Tower - Stephen Davenport - Страница 10

THREE

Well, has the shoe dropped yet?” Rachel’s father asked. He’d picked up the phone on the very first ring.

“No, Dad, it’s only August,” she reminded him. She knew better than to claim that shoes don’t always have to drop.

“When it does, it will be some issue you didn’t know was out there,” her father said. He felt a powerful empathy for Fred Kindler and was sure that the brevity of his tenure was the result of the latest dogma: everybody gets to have an opinion whether they know anything or not. He should know. He’d lost the presidency of a small liberal arts college in Ohio because he hadn’t been sufficiently eager to lead by persuasion in an institution where the faculty had tenure and he did not.

Rachel had had a lot of practice leading her father away from subjects she didn’t feel like talking about, so it was easy to get him to ask for news about her husband’s career. One of the many things in her life she was grateful for was the respect and affection her husband and her father felt for each other and how they always seemed to agree. Bob happened to be a white person—generating casual, indeed pleased, acceptance by most of the community of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls while, to no one’s surprise, in the larger community the reaction was far from universal. Rachel told her father about Bob’s plan to expand Best Sports and how hard he was working.

“Good news,” her father said. “I’m happy for him.”

“I am too, Dad,” Rachel said just as Margaret opened the door and poked her head inside. Rachel assumed she was going to tell her Milton Perkins was on the phone. “Dad, I have to go,” she said.

“Well, then go,” he said huffily into the phone. “But remember, it’s only August—not too late to tell the board you’ve changed your mind.” Then he hung up.

Margaret told Rachel that Milton had decided to come to school to talk with her face to face rather than just on the phone, and that he’d be here in just a few minutes. “Good,” Rachel said, her prospects for the morning brightening still more. “When’s my meeting with Francis?”

“Not today.” Margaret flushed, as if slightly embarrassed, or feeling a surge of happiness. Rachel couldn’t tell. “He left. He’ll be back for the first day of classes.”

“Left?”

Margaret nodded. “He and Peggy. To the Cape. They’ll be with their son, Sidney. A family celebration, I guess. He wants you to know, he’s moving back in with Peggy. Isn’t that wonderful? What a great way to start the year!”

Rachel agreed that it was. So what if she had to wait till the first day of classes to appoint Francis? Everybody had been afraid the Plummers were going to divorce. The hot contention between them as leaders of the pro- and anti-Kindler factions had brought to the surface the grievance of their religious differences they had been burying in years of overwork. Everybody knew Peggy was a devout Episcopalian, deeply involved in the local parish, and that Francis never accompanied her to church. He didn’t hide the fact that he saw divinity differently from his wife: in nature, “just like the Pequot People who once lived right here.” Every once in a while in class he would talk about a transcendent, egoless moment when he was a little boy fishing with his father and an ancient turtle had swum up from the bottom of the lake and presented itself to just him. “My father saw him but didn’t see,” he would say. “Here I am, the turtle’s message was as we stared at each other, and I felt myself melt into him and him into me and both of us into everything. Then the turtle sank back down out of sight and I was me again, though I didn’t want to be, and my father was my father, an other, and everything was else.”

When Fred Kindler arrived early in the summer one year ago and Francis fled to California ostensibly as the faculty advisor to a school-sponsored archaeological dig on an ancient Native American village where a housing tract was about to blossom, Francis had claimed he was on a vision quest. But Peggy had claimed it was part of a crack up, a mid-life crisis, which, if he weren’t so immature, would have happened earlier. What he was really doing was running away from his responsibility to show Fred Kindler where all the rocks and shoals were. God knows there were plenty of them.

Rachel remembered the sudden silence that had come over the faculty room last year, soon after a mysterious fire had destroyed the library, when Fred Kindler announced that there would be a substitute co-dorm parent, named Patience Sommers, to partner with Peggy in what had been the Plummers’ dorm for thirty-four years. Everyone had looked down at the floor rather than let their eyes meet either Peggy’s or Francis’s, who were sitting as far apart from each other as they could get. It had just become clear that there was too much bitterness between them to work together. Peggy believed that Francis agreed with the opinion, widely expressed by the student council, to which Francis was the advisor, that the fire that consumed the library was a sacred fire because it also consumed the Pequot Indian artifacts which Peggy had reverently curated. It was Peggy who had created the display and provided it the most prominent space in her library. She also collaborated with interested members of the faculty to use the display as stimulus for creating the school’s celebrated comparative anthropology course. Paradoxically, it was the respect for other cultures engendered by that course that inspired the student council’s assertion to the board, signed by almost every student in the school, that Miss Oliver’s had no right to possess what rightfully belonged to conquered Native Americans. Francis didn’t deny that he agreed with the recommendation. It was the last straw for Peggy. She told him to leave. He moved off campus. Thanks to Fred Kindler’s sensitiveness, the announcement that Patience Sommers would replace Francis was the last item on the agenda. The faculty room had never emptied so fast.

Now, thanks largely to the imagination and skillful work of Fred Kindler and Peggy Plummer, there was a new library with a wing owned jointly by the Pequot Nation and Miss Oliver’s arraying a more extensive, richer display of artifacts owned by the Pequot Nation, one of whose officials sat on the board of Miss Oliver’s. Rachel was as happy for herself as for the Plummers. Francis would be even more powerful in his new position with his marriage on the mend.

“All right then, please set up a meeting with Patience Sommers,” Rachel said.

“Not necessary,” Margaret said. “The Plummers already told Patience she wouldn’t be needed anymore. They hoped you wouldn’t mind. They felt it should come from them.” “Of course I don’t mind,” Rachel said, but as soon as the words were out, she knew she did. It was her prerogative, not theirs, to make such decisions. She felt a twitch of resentment.

“Their car was packed and ready to go when I called,” Margaret said. “They want to get to know each other again, I guess. They’ve done all their prep for starting school. They’ve been here for years, they don’t need the time.”

Rachel frowned. “Even so, don’t you think they should have asked me if they could leave?”

Margaret flushed again. “Yes, and I told them so, but obviously they didn’t agree,” she said, and in the heavy silence that followed, Rachel wondered if Margaret was embarrassed for her new boss’s lack of authority or for the Plummers’ behavior. Then Margaret’s face lighted up with relief: the subject was about to be changed. She gestured toward the French doors and said, “Here comes Milton now.”

Rachel turned, relieved too, and watched Milton Perkins’s thin, slightly stooped frame come toward her across the lawn, wearing a shirt and tie even on this warm summer day. She went out through the doors to meet him. He already knew she liked to walk by the river. They headed that way together.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked, sparing her the usual how-are-you exchange. She told him the good news about the Plummers.

“Really? Back together? I didn’t think that was going to happen.”

“Neither did I, and neither did Margaret.”

“Well, I have to say I’m glad we were wrong,” he said.

“The whole school’s going to be glad, especially the girls in their dorm,” Rachel said. “I was going to appoint him today, but he and Peggy went to the Cape. They want to get to know each other again,” she added, quoting Margaret.

He didn’t answer, just nodded his head. She was surprised. She wondered if he’d guessed that the Plummers hadn’t sought her permission to leave before the weekend began.

When they had reached the trail along the river, he put his hands on his hips. “This is a nice place to walk.” Indeed it was. The trail followed the edge of a bluff into an open field, high above where the river broadened. There was no wind that day, and the water below them was placid, a big, smooth heave on the way to the Sound. It always settled Rachel’s mind to walk along there where the river would still be running long after she was gone.

“We ought to sell this waterfront land,” Milton Perkins said out of nowhere. Rachel couldn’t tell whether he was actually serious. Maybe he was just pushing her buttons. There was a wide streak of irreverence in the man. There had been glee in his eyes when he had talked to the faculty and made up a story of a survey he’d recently read that showed that the IQs of liberals averaged twenty-five points lower than those of conservatives did.

She turned to him and said, “If we sold this land, every girl in this school would leave here straight for Hotchkiss. And the alumnae would give all their money to Wellesley and Smith.”

He grinned. “Then we’d fill the school with girls who wouldn’t miss it. We’d have enough money to pay off the accumulated deficit.”

She didn’t answer. She was right and so was he. The school had failed to make budget for the last four years of Marjorie Boyd’s tenure. The total accumulation was one million and two hundred thousand dollars. The board had pledged to find the money to pay down the loan that covered it. The deadline was in three years, four hundred thousand dollars a year. If they failed to meet it, the bank would raise the interest rate, maybe even call the loan. The school would be out of cash.

They came to where the trail ran down off the bluff to a little beach. She sensed that it was too steep for his old legs, so she pretended she’d had enough walking. They turned around and started back, and just before they arrived at his car, he told her to make sure she dropped everything over the Labor Day weekend so she’d be rested up “when school starts and everything hits the fan.” She told him she would. She and her husband and siblings and dad were going to spend the weekend at their family place on Martha’s Vineyard.

Just as he was about to get in his car, she remembered what she’d had Margaret call him for.

“You really care what your title is?” His tone was incredulous.

“I do,” she said. She wasn’t about to try persuasion. There wasn’t a PC bone in his body.

“Well then, I’ll take care of it.” He was looking over her shoulder at something behind her. She turned around. Gregory van Buren, still in his blue blazer, was just disappearing into the library. “What about him?” Milton Perkins said.

Rachel didn’t answer.

“I understand,” Milton Perkins said. “Plummer’s the one with the most charisma—and the alumnae expect it.” Then he got in his car and drove away.