Читать книгу No Ivory Tower - Stephen Davenport - Страница 12

FIVE

On the same Friday that Mitch Michaels started to host his daughter and Claire Nelson in Madison, Connecticut, Rachel Bickham drove from the campus of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and joined her father, brother and sister on the ferry dock for Martha’s Vineyard. There, just as he always did, her father sighed as if he’d just heard news rescuing him from some unbearable fate, and announced, “This is where vacation begins.” As usual, he spoke for all of them. It was always the same: after the rush to get everything done so they could leave their work, after the packing, after the turning around and driving for miles to be sure all the burners on the stove were out, after fighting through the monstrous Cape Cod weekend traffic, they’d stand on the dock in the salty air clutching their tickets while the tension rose out of them, released to the sky where the gulls called and floated. That Labor Day weekend Friday, each coming from a different place, they arrived almost simultaneously a half an hour before the five-o’clock evening boat. First they exchanged the usual hugs; then they told each other how great each looked, and then they gushed over Rachel’s brother’s bouncy almost-spaniel puppy he’d just rescued from the pound, and then, surreptitiously, they began looking at the oncoming crowd and beyond it to the parking lot for Rachel’s husband.

It wasn’t as if her brother and sister didn’t understand that Bob might have felt he couldn’t leave his work to get there on time, or even not at all. Everybody in her family also worked very hard, each a high achiever like their dad, like leftist versions of Condoleezza Rice. Rachel’s brother, DuBois Bickham, was by day a public defender, by night the author under a pen name of money-making detective novels; her sister, Marian Anderson Bickham, was a community organizer in Detroit, a protégé of a prodigy of Saul Alinsky. She was tone deaf, believe it or not, a condition she confessed only half in jest that she assumed on purpose to claim her own identity.

Rachel didn’t carry the burden of a provocative name because she was the youngest and her mother had insisted this last child would have a neutral one. Her father used to remind her, though, that Rachel was a biblical name, heavy with implication. Her mother had been a stay-at-home mom until Rachel entered New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, where, before he became a famous author, Frank McCourt was everybody’s favorite teacher. From then until her death, her mother was a kindergarten teacher.

Ten minutes after they had greeted each other, and after DuBois’s puppy had lifted his leg all over Marian’s suitcases and she had forgiven both the dog and her brother and claimed that from now on the puppy’s name was Bags, Bob still had not arrived. The boat coming from the Vineyard was now at least two-thirds of the way across the Sound. They watched it move the rest of the way and tie up, and he still wasn’t there. The passengers trooped off, looking jealous of the people waiting to board, whose time on the Island was all still before them, and who now surged forward. Rachel and her family hung back, risking their favorite seats topside along the rail. She put up her hands and pushed them forward and her father, resisting, frowned. He was about to ask, “Shouldn’t you wait for him?” But Marian put her hand on his elbow, sent him a warning look, and tugged him toward the gangplank.

Martha’s Vineyard was special to Bob and Rachel also because it was where they had first met, seven years before, at a five-kilometer race to raise funds for a cause neither of them could remember. The woman Bob was dating then had invited him to spend the weekend with her and her family at their summer place—a sign that the romance had progressed to a critical point—and she had talked him into running with her in the race. Though the only thing Bob claimed to hate more than running was dieting, he agreed—another sign the romance was at a critical point. Bob played good tennis when he had the time, which was hardly ever, and he admitted to having been a fullback in high school, but a runner he was definitely not. He and his date showed up at the starting point at the same time as Rachel did. Bob’s date was as tall as Rachel, and blond like him. Though also as tall as Rachel, Bob would be willing to describe himself as a little tubby in the middle and with thick legs. Even his face was round.

They started out together, running side by side, his date in the middle between them. Rachel was still sleepy that morning from staying up late, so she ran at their easy pace. Besides, Bob kept glancing at her. Clearly he liked her looks, and she didn’t think his were too bad either. They chatted as they ran along for a while, and then Rachel quickened the pace. After all, they were warmed up by then, and when your legs were as long as Rachel’s it was uncomfortable to run as slowly as Bob and his date. Pretty soon the date wasn’t quite keeping up, and Rachel was telling Bob about the places they were passing through, like a tour guide, including her family’s cottage as they passed by it, and with his date no longer between them, they ran closer to each other. About halfway through she said, “By the way, my name’s Rachel Bickham.”

He was sufficiently winded now to have difficulty saying, “Mine’s Bob Perrine.”

“That’s a nice name,” she said, and for the next mile or so, she did all the talking. She tried to fool herself that she was just being nice, but she knew she was really showing off, and by practically killing himself to keep up with her, so was he. In Edgartown, they crossed the finish line at last and she turned to give him a high five, but he was bent way over, his hands on his hips, gasping. His date wasn’t even in sight. “Oh dear!” she said, managing not to laugh. “Did I run too fast?” He shook his head, still bent over. She wanted to say something funny about white guys being just as bad at running as jumping, but she decided she didn’t know him well enough yet. So instead, she said, “I don’t think I should be here when your date shows up.” He nodded his head up and down this time, but she didn’t budge.

Finally, he was able to stand up straight. He looked down the road. His date was staggering around the corner. “Yes, you better go,” he said. “But I know where you live.”

She giggled and said, “I know, I made sure,” then she turned away and ran up a side street toward home at a much faster pace than they’d run together. The next day, he called her from the public phone at the ferry dock.

Their first date was the next weekend in Boston where she was finishing her doctorate, and where he was raising the funds to start Best Sports. In the restaurant, which was all brown walls and red carpets and smelled like the ocean, his blue eyes never left her face, and he kept his hands very still when he talked, while she, as, usual, waved hers through the air. The next night they went to the movies. They started to hold hands the minute the lights went down.

Now, seven years later, Rachel’s father and brother and sister got their favorite seats on the ferry after all, overlooking the stern where she could keep watching the dock and the parking lot. Bob still wasn’t there. A minute later the long whistle blew, the thrum of the propellers increased, the boat vibrated, the water boiled at the stern, and then she saw him sprint out of the building where they sold the tickets. He ran awkwardly, leaning to one side carrying his suitcase. The boat started to move. A deckhand put up his hand to tell him stop, but he threw his suitcase onto the boat over the gap that was getting bigger and bigger, and leaped after it, landing clumsily on his feet like third-string basketball player surprised to have come down with a rebound. The crowd cheered. Not Rachel. At that moment she wished he was still in New York. She had left her work on time to make sure she didn’t miss the boat. What made him think his job was bigger than hers?

By the time they sat down to dinner that evening, Rachel had forgiven Bob. The atmosphere was too loaded with anticipation of the long weekend, and of memories of all the days here they’d never have again, to hold on to tiresome resentments. The menu was what it always was for the first dinner: spaghetti, the sauce straight out of a can, bolstered with hamburger and mushrooms, and a salad. That’s what Rachel’s mother had always prepared for the first meal because they always arrived too late for anything fancier. And, for this dinner, like for every first dinner since she died, they left her chair at one end of the long table empty. There’d been no decision to do so; no one in the family had ever said one word about it. They just did.

Rachel and her brother and sister never sat down at that table for the first meal of the stay without reliving, however subliminally, their mother getting up suddenly from her chair and running down the hall, getting to the bathroom just in time. They remembered it as if it had happened every night during their mother’s siege of chemo. Their father would freeze in his chair and then he’d get up and follow her into the bathroom so he could hold her head and the three kids would be the frozen ones now, while they looked in each other’s eyes across the table and heard the sounds of their mother throwing up on the other side of the bathroom door. There must have been something in the shape of that hall that amplified sound, a kind of horn—or maybe the sound no one wanted to hear was the one that was always the loudest.

A few minutes later, their parents would return and take their places as if nothing had happened, and her father would urge his children to eat, trying to keep a sense of normalcy, they understood, even Rachel, the youngest of the three. Her breasts had budded years before, but now where her mother’s soft bosom had been there was only flatness. Soon she’d lie on her back in the dark of her coffin deep under the ground, and so Rachel slept with every light in her room on, and didn’t stop until her freshman year at Smith where her roommate said she could only sleep in the dark.

Rachel’s mother would pretend she’d never left the table and resume the conversation right where it had been interrupted and Rachel still wondered how in the world she could remember. Her father would interrupt her and urge his children to eat again, but he couldn’t eat either. It was a wonder that the whole family didn’t waste away as fast as Rachel’s mother did—while the family dog got fatter and fatter.

Maybe that’s why, all those years later when her ardent husband kissed her breasts in bed that night, Rachel felt a wave of a feeling she couldn’t name—a surprising mixture of fear and disgust. He sensed it right away. He didn’t speak. He turned the light out and she lay down and he pulled the covers up over her and when she started to cry, he put his arms around her. They both sensed she wasn’t crying only for her mother. It was just time for her to cry, that’s all, and so she did. They both knew that people who don’t cry every once in a while haven’t the foggiest idea what’s going on. He held her tight until he fell asleep.

In the morning they awoke to perfect weather, so clear they could see individual people in a sailboat at least a mile out from shore, the color of each person’s hair and what they were wearing. Rachel’s mother had believed such gifts from the god of vacations heralded storms. She’d look up at the sky, observe there were no clouds, and advise her family to have fun on the beach while the sun is still shining “because this one is a weather breeder.” Rachel couldn’t remember her ever being right. And if she was, it didn’t make any difference: rainy days in the cottage were cozy with driftwood burning in the fireplace, Parcheesi and Monopoly. (It wasn’t against the rules to cheat.) And books! Everybody in her family loved to read. They’d sit, engrossed by stories in the living room with its wicker chairs and tongue-and-groove paneled walls and the black-and-white drawings of yachts in harbor, while the rain pattered on the roof and the fire crackled and the wind rattled the shutters.

Their mother had found the drawings in a flea market. Their father would have preferred brand-new pictures to grace the walls of the cottage, but their mother never got used to having whatever she wanted, let alone this capacious, gray-shingled “cottage,” part of Martha’s Vineyard enclave of affluent African Americans. Now their father treasured those pictures. They caught him looking at them again and again, as if he’d never seen them before.

It didn’t rain a drop that weekend, all three days as perfect as the first. No Parcheesi, no Monopoly, they didn’t read a line. They spent the mornings playing doubles on a neighbor’s clay court, four at a time until each had served a game, while the fifth took turns on the sidelines holding Bags’s leash so he wouldn’t chase the balls. The afternoons they spent on the beach. Evenings gin and tonic, dinner, then long talks over too much wine. Rachel and her husband were always the first to go upstairs to bed.

On their last night, already nostalgic, Rachel took a long hot shower to wash the ocean salt away while her naked husband waited for her in bed. Then she put perfume on in the places he liked her to, opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, and took down the little striped purse in which she kept her diaphragm. Last winter, after six years of marriage, they had decided to have a child, but in June she still wasn’t pregnant and then she was suddenly appointed head of school. They made the common-sense decision that she wouldn’t get pregnant until she’d been in office long enough to feel comfortable about taking a maternity leave. But she was thirty-five. Her time was running short. Or was it her mother’s empty chair that made her want to make a child right this minute for herself and a grandchild for her dad?

She opened the purse and took out the case. In her hands its round smoothness felt like some kind of shellfish made in a lab. Inside, the diaphragm looked altogether too much like the rubber dam her dentist used for her root canals. She thought of all the ardent little swimmers that had raced each other toward it, only to crash into it and die like thwarted salmon. She opened the bathroom door and stepped naked into the bedroom. Her husband’s eyes lighted up. She lifted her hand, the round rubber thing held between thumb and forefinger as if it were maybe just a little bit poisonous. “Let’s just see what happens instead,” she said.

He sat bolt upright. “What?”

“Just this once.” She let her hand drop down to her side. His eyes followed. She stood still so he would see her instead, naked, facing him. His eyes moved down from her face and over her body, lingering; his Adam’s apple jumped, his face softened, seeming to melt, as it did when he was aroused. “I’m sick of planning,” she murmured, fervent now, as aroused as he, and turned around to go into the bathroom and put the thing back in the cabinet. She gave a little booty shake to try to make him laugh, and with the door still open so he could see, she put the diaphragm back in its shell, the shell into the striped purse, the purse back into the cabinet. They were going to make love her way, or not at all.

Then she crossed the room to him, lifted the sheet, slid in, and pressing herself against his side, she threw her arm across his chest. “You are too,” she said. “Admit it.”

“I am what?”

“Never mind,” she said, raising herself above him. She lay down on top of him, and aimed her lips for his, but he turned his face. She missed, kissing him on his cheek. He was even more aroused now. That was obvious. She put her tongue in his ear, but he kept his head sideways on the pillow. She was suddenly as furious as she was horny, and she rolled off him onto her side, facing away.

“Oh, Rach!” he said. “A baby right now is the last—”

“Don’t say a word!” she hissed. “Just don’t.”

He was very still. She waited for him to beg her to get up, go back into the bathroom, put the damn thing in, and start all over, but he said nothing and they lay in the dark on their backs not touching, watching a glimmer of moonlight that played on the ceiling, and listening to the distant surf.

THE HONEYSUCKLE SMELL at the front door of the Head’s House, to which she returned on Monday, made Rachel want to cry. The vines ran up a trellis on the front of the Island cottage too, and yesterday all the windows were open and the same sweet, heavy summertime smell was rushing in when she saw her father straightening the pictures of yachts in harbor on the wall for the second time that day, and she touched him on the shoulder, just the end of her fingers lightly there.

She shook her head to clear the memory away. She had work to do. She’d go in, change into running clothes, take a run, then come back and shower and get to her office. She pushed the door open. It was dark inside, all the shades down, and cool after the humid air outside. And big. Too big for her right then—commodious enough for a head with a spouse and several kids. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be alone in it, even for the few minutes it would take to change to running clothes. She put down her suitcase in the foyer, turned around, and headed for her office.

The campus was empty. All afternoon, working in her office, Rachel waited for the phone to ring. Twice she reached for it to make the call to Bob. Each time, she stopped before she picked up the receiver. You’re being dumb, she told herself. What difference does it make who calls first? Still she didn’t call, and when she was hungry at dinnertime, she went to a restaurant in the nearby village of Fieldington to eat. She still didn’t want to be alone in her house. The hostess seated her at a table next to a middle-aged couple. Rachel took comfort in the fact that they hardly said a word to one other.

Back on campus, the lights were on in Eudora Easter’s apartment. Eudora was the chair of the Art Department, twenty years older than Rachel, and the only other black woman on the staff. Rachel stopped the car by the side of the drive and crossed the lawn in the twilight, hungry for her company. Their friendship had blossomed at the end of last year when Eudora had gone out of her way to thank Rachel for daring to break precedent by allowing Claire Nelson to stay another year. Eudora had been on the faculty forever—only one year fewer than the Plummers. During all that time, no girl had ever stayed on after her senior year. “But you gave me the chance to do what needs to be done to make sure that enormous talent of hers gets a foundation,” she told Rachel. “I don’t trust anybody more than I trust myself to make that happen.” Eudora dressed in costumes that, no matter how outlandish, always seemed just right for her. She was a large woman with a round, soft body and a beautiful face whom Marjorie Boyd had hired when Eudora was still thin—right after her husband drowned absurdly in a swamp during a Reserve Marine Corps exercise two weeks after their honeymoon—and since then she had given up dieting.

But before Rachel was halfway across the lawn, the lights went out in Eudora’s living room in the front and, an instant later, came on in the backroom Eudora had converted into her private studio. Rachel turned around and walked back to her car. She knew better than to intrude on Eudora’s painting time.

On the other side of the lawn, the lights in Francis and Peggy Plummer’s apartment were out. The Plummers and Eudora had lived just across a small lawn from each other all those years. It warmed Rachel to think about the deep Plummer-Easter friendship. She figured the Plummers were still driving home from the Cape and wondered what they were saying to each other after living apart for almost half a year.

Home at last, she went straight upstairs, turned on all the lights in her bedroom, got in bed to watch the Red Sox game, and promptly fell asleep. She woke up long after the game was over, switched off the TV and the lights, and lay back down in the dark, wondering what it had been like for her dad getting in bed alone the first time after her mother died. She saw an enormous darkness in which her father reached to touch the empty space beside him. She wasn’t surprised; it had happened every first night she was alone again after a weekend with her husband.

But this time it was different: she got up out of the bed and padded down the hall in her bare feet to one of the other bedrooms, climbed up into a single bed, surprised at herself for being so weird, and promptly fell asleep again.

ON TUESDAY MORNING the sky was blue, the air fresh, a perfect September day. The faculty would return; the campus would be busy again. And this morning she would interview a candidate for business manager to replace the geriatric, incompetent, beloved man whom Marjorie Boyd should have let go but didn’t, leaving that nasty job to Fred Kindler. The business manager was also the chief financial officer in Rachel’s scheme, a critical part of the team she needed to create around herself. Maybe this was the one.

He was a retired CFO of a successful mail-order business who’d grown sick of playing golf all day. His CV and references convinced her he had the necessary sophistication to think outside of the box about the finances of what was actually the combination of a school, a hotel, and a kind of orphanage. So, before she broached the subject of the school’s history of poor discipline regarding finance, and the one-million-two-hundred-thousand-dollar accumulated deficit, Rachel asked him some questions about how he would interact with the faculty. She explained that the teachers savored their autonomy and had a tendency to hold their issues as more important than “business” ones, and was about to tell him she could use some help in modifying this aspect of the culture, when he interrupted her and went on and on about how if you just give people the data they always catch on to the truth. She waited for a chance to tell him that she agreed—unless the data came via the way he was pontificating at her now, but he just kept on going, and by the time he finished, she was pretty sure he didn’t have what it takes to be the business manager of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.

She gave him one more chance. “Our teachers can be a bit resentful of all the people they know who have twice the money and half the brains,” she said. “How would you react to that?” She was hoping for a laugh. Instead he got a little huffy right there in his chair, and it crossed her mind to suggest he check with her husband: maybe the sporting good business could use his expertise. Instead she told him she would get back to him and stood up. He left, shaking his head.

The next day the students arrived.