Читать книгу No Ivory Tower - Stephen Davenport - Страница 13

SIX

It was the vodka, Claire Nelson thought, walking toward Rachel Bickham’s office on the first day of school. Without the vodka, she never would have told. Did Amy’s father leave the bottle out on the counter when he stumbled off to bed just so he could sneak downstairs and out onto the porch and catch her giving a drink to Amy? He was weird enough. What would he have said when he found out Amy was only drinking tonic? But he never did come downstairs and so she poured another vodka tonic for herself and another straight tonic for Amy and then another and another.

And then they ate the ice cream.

“Ice cream and vodka!” Amy said. “Good nutrition makes you strong.” She had no idea there was no vodka in her tonic. “Only forty billion calories,” she giggled. They fed each other chocolate ice cream until it was all gone. It was smeary on their faces, and there were hundreds and hundreds of stars in the black above them, and the soft air carried the rich smell of Long Island Sound up to them from the beach. So maybe it wasn’t imagined alcohol that Amy was drunk on, maybe it was her happiness. “We’re going to do this every Labor Day weekend until we are a hundred and ten years old,” she said to Claire. “You and me. Promise?”

Claire burped. “Abshiludely!” She crossed her heart, and burped again, this time on purpose.

“Oh yes!” Amy said. “And always for dessert a burping contest!”

“Until the day we die!” Claire said. She stood up, opened her mouth, and spread her arms, a singer about to perform, and burped a perfectly satisfactory burp, and Amy responded with a louder one, which Claire tried to exceed in volume and length, but nothing came out. She swallowed air until it hurt and tried to expel it, but it got stuck somewhere down there, and then Amy stood up, leaned over, and, sticking her butt way out behind her, produced not a burp but instead an explosive, heroic, and very loud fart into the silence. Both girls dived to the floor. They were laughing too hard to stand.

When the laughter subsided, they spread their arms out, their fingers touching, and looked up at the stars, and while Amy was thinking how much fun it was, how liberating, to act like a jerk, to be an asshole on purpose, just for the fun of it, like boys do when they want to fool around, Claire felt that sudden lightness she always got when the Oh what the hell words came up in her brain like headlines, and she knew right then she was going to tell Amy everything.

Amy had said, “I won’t ever tell.” But that’s what Claire had said. And look what had happened! Twice now, once last year, and now this.

But last year’s confession—was that what it was?—was different from telling Amy. Karen Benjamin, the editor of the Clarion, the student newspaper, had been working on an article about the sexual activity of Miss Oliver’s students, and Karen, who was about the naivest person the world, needed Claire’s help. Karen needed to know that stuff like this happened if she were going to get the article right—even though both Karen and Claire knew that Mr. van Buren, the paper’s faculty mentor, was much too smart even to think about letting them print it. During their discussions, Claire had blurted out the scandal—maybe just to see how shocked Karen could be. But Karen was ethical—she wanted a journalist’s career, and that meant keeping secrets. Karen wouldn’t break her promise not to tell any more than Amy would. Besides, Karen had graduated in June and gone off to college where there were other things to think about.

What was she going to tell Rachel about first? The thing she did with the teacher? Had telling Amy been practice for that? Or was it not telling Nan White, the admissions director, last year when she was admitted—even though that was her father’s responsibility, because he was the grown-up? But she never expected that much integrity from her father, and she was sick of feeling guilty. She couldn’t talk to her father about it any more than she could to Mr. Gaylord Frothingham, the headmaster who’d caught them. He’d made it perfectly clear to Nan White that Claire had been sexually active. That was the term, those were the words: sexually active, like she did it jumping up and down, in a gym, maybe with lots of boys when she’d never actually done it with any boy in her whole life—and her father was being transferred to London, so they needed a boarding school, especially one without any boys. He just didn’t say sexually active with whom, that’s all, and who could blame him? He needed to get rid of the teacher and keep everything quiet. Mr. Alford, only twenty-three years old. His first year of teaching. She had no idea where he went. Or what he told his wife when she asked him why he was fired.

One thing she did know: Amy was the only girl she’d want to have a burping contest with every Labor Day weekend for the rest of her life. It wasn’t coincidence that their fingers touched when they lay on their backs and looked up at the stars. They both had reached for each other’s hand. Like sisters. Maybe it was even lonelier to be ashamed of a father when all he needed was for you to love him back than to have a mother who ran away and a father who’s too busy. Amy had planned to spend the second half of the academic year on exchange at St Anne’s School in England, but she’d decided to wait till next year so she and Claire could be together this year while Claire was still at Miss O’s. Only sisters do things like that for each other.

CLAIRE WAS HALFWAY across the lawn, getting closer, getting nervous. Did she dare? Up ahead, that tree she’d painted. Her teacher, Eudora Easter, a perfect name for her, a black lady too, built like a snowman, said, “Paint what you see,” but Claire didn’t, she painted what the tree made her think about instead. What she felt while she watched it grow. Because if you can see it, why bother painting it? That’s why Rachel loved it so.

No, she didn’t have the nerve. No way she was going to tell. Stop and turn around. Rachel was never going to find out, she didn’t need to tell her first.

Too late. Rachel was waving to her. Well, I’ll just say hello.

HOW BEAUTIFUL SHE is! Rachel thought. She would have been hurt if Claire had pretended she hadn’t seen her waving. She opened the French doors and stood in them, watching Claire come toward her across the lawn. For any other girl, she might have waited at her desk, but it was hard not to stare at Claire. She had presence, a power to draw attention, and to get what she wanted at the moment, part instinctive, part calculated, Rachel thought, that emanated from an unruly will and stunning, good looks. If anyone needed guidance, it was Claire.

And any other girl would be coming through Margaret’s anteroom, but Rachel liked to think every girl on that campus had an adult she could go to as a surrogate parent, and she was glad to be that person for Claire. Since when does a child need to check with a secretary to talk with her mom?

A moment later, as Claire came through the French doors, Rachel reached to hug her, but Claire hesitated. Surprised, and a little bit hurt, Rachel kept reaching and hugged her anyway.

Claire turned full circle, after Rachel let her go, looking around the office, and Rachel realized she was trying to decide whether to sit on the chairs, for business, in the center of the room, or the sofa, for just visiting, under her art. Before she had been appointed head, Rachel had organized her office in the Science Building the same way: businesslike chairs and table in the center, comfy sofa against the back wall. Soon after Claire was admitted last January, she had started to spend some free time in Rachel’s office. She always headed straight for the sofa and plunked herself down. Some nights she would bring her books and do her homework on the sofa while Rachel worked at her desk. Rachel had confessed to her that she had no desire to take her work home to an empty house.

Rachel put her hand on Claire’s elbow and led her away from the chairs to the sofa, and pulled a chair up close for herself. “It’s good to see you again, Claire. Did you have a good summer?”

“It was okay.” Claire’s face was blank.

“Did you get some art done?”

“Yeah, some.” Claire looked out the doors, fidgeting.

“Paintings? Drawings?”

“Just drawings. “

“I’d love to see them.”

Claire shrugged. “Okay.”

Rachel waited, not wanting to prod anymore, but Claire still offered nothing. Her eyes refused to meet Rachel’s, and at last Rachel understood she’d have to be direct. “What’s up, Claire?’” she said, speaking very gently. “What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing. I just came to say hello.”

Rachel smiled. “We already did that.”

Claire tried to grin. It came out as a smirk. “Okay, let’s say hello again then.”

“Come on, Claire. This is me. Rachel. I’m not the sheriff.”

“I know,” Claire murmured.

“Well then?”

Now Claire looked like a person counting to three. She took a big breath and said, “I didn’t do it with a lot of boys. I didn’t do it with any boys.”

It took a moment for Rachel to absorb this news. Then she reached and took both of Claire’s hands in hers, flooded with motherly protective love. This was not the first time a girl had come out to her. Boys, too, in her other school. That was the kind of person she was—and what place could be safer than this? Why didn’t that headmaster just say it?

Claire frowned. “No, Rachel,” she murmured. “A man.”

“A man?”

Claire nodded. “A teacher.”

Rachel pulled her hands away. It was a while before she found her voice. “A teacher, Claire? Really?”

Claire kept her eyes on Rachel’s and didn’t answer.

“Oh my goodness!” Rachel said. She stared at Claire, and, horrified, saw a classroom, empty of students except for Claire standing in the center like an actress in a soap opera, watching the open door. Rachel couldn’t tell whether Claire’s expression was provocative or curious or regretful. And was she waiting for the teacher to enter through that door, or was it after it had happened and she was watching him escape?

“Yeah, a teacher,” Claire murmured, bringing Rachel back. Her tone was matter of fact, resigned. “Now you know.”

Rachel looked down at her desk. There was a tiny scar in the varnished surface she’d never noticed before. Claire continued, “I’m sorry. I should have told Nan White. My father and my headmaster should have too.”

Rachel willed herself to look up from the scratch. It had begun to look like a child’s drawing of a bird flying up near a big yellow sun. “But if it hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been anything to tell.” She didn’t want to talk about Claire’s not telling. That was beside the point.

“But I really am sorry,” Claire said.

Rachel put up her hand. “Who was this teacher?”

Claire stared. “I’m not going to tell you that!”

“Oh, Claire, I don’t want his name. How old was he?”

“Twenty-five, maybe twenty-six,” Claire said, shrugging and adding several years. Then, after a pause, “Maybe I should find a school in London. Maybe you shouldn’t have started a post-graduate program just for me.”

“Please, Claire. Don’t try to change the subject.”

“But what if someone finds out?”

“Claire! You didn’t hear me.”

“But that is the subject,” Claire insisted.

“No, Claire. What you and the teacher did. That’s what we need to talk about.”

Claire turned her face away from Rachel.

“Isn’t it?”

Claire said nothing, still looking away.

“Please look at me. I’m talking to you.”

Claire slowly turned her face to Rachel. She wore a stubborn look.

“Tell me one thing,” Rachel said. “Did you let it happen, or did you make it happen?”

Claire shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

Claire sighed, exasperated. “Okay—both.”

“Both, really?”

Claire dropped her head. She seemed relieved to surrender at last “No, just me.”

“Why?”

Claire hesitated.

“Claire?”

“All right. Because I could.” Claire still refused to look up at Rachel.

“I thought that might be the case,” Rachel said. “I’m glad you understand this much.” And when Claire didn’t speak, she added, “You know, we would have let you in if you’d told us when you applied.”

Claire nodded her head, then looked up at Rachel at last.

“We really would have, you know.”

“I know that now.”

“But you didn’t then. I understand, Claire. But if we had known that you were hiding something, we had the right to know—”

“You wouldn’t have.”

Rachel nodded. “Maybe not.”

“Especially since I was eighteen. It wasn’t a crime.”

“Really, Claire? Did you know that then?”

Claire flushed.

“I bet he didn’t either. He had other things on his mind,” Rachel said, bitterly. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. He just disappeared.”

“Probably to Australia. Maybe Mars.”

“You think so?”

“Oh, Claire, don’t pretend you don’t know he was disappeared. I would have sent him to a whole other galaxy if I’d been his headmaster. Yes, you were eighteen, and you knew what you were doing, but he was older than that and a teacher, with a teacher’s authority, doing the worst thing a teacher can do, and he knew he was doing it. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good, but it doesn’t let you off the hook, does it? Did your father sue the school?”

Claire shook her head.

“See? He didn’t because it might have come out if he had.”

Claire didn’t answer.

“I’m glad you’ve told me, Claire. It’s a start—”

“You’re not the only one I told,” Claire blurted.

Rachel didn’t answer. Claire had answered the question she had planned to ask next. She was now aware of a headache throbbing, and her neck felt stiff.

“Two people,” Claire said. “They both said they wouldn’t tell. One’s the best friend I have in the school. The other’s already graduated.”

“That’s good news,” Rachel said, relieved that the second girl was no longer in the school. “It’s really confidential, isn’t it, Claire? Nobody’s business. Make sure your friend still in the school understands.”

“I told you. I already did,” Claire said, and started to cry. “She’s the best friend I have anywhere, not just in the school.”

“So you thought you’d get it off your chest by telling her?”

Claire shook her head.

“Well, then you wanted to impress her, maybe?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make? I just did.”

Oh all right, Rachel thought, giving up for now. Half the time adults don’t have any idea why they’re doing what they’re doing. So why should children?

“Oh, I just wish I hadn’t done it!” Claire said through her sobs.

Rachel wondered if Claire’s tears were authentic—or was she like an actress in a movie whose director says, “Cry.” She was irritated now—at herself as much as at Claire. Something was very wrong about the way she was handling this. She stood up, told Claire to stay there until she got settled, and went out through the door to walk by the river—until she felt settled too.

RACHEL’S EVERY INSTINCT told her that casual sex was wrong. Plain and simple: wrong, especially for kids. Call her an old-fashioned woman, she didn’t care. Nothing about each person in the world should ever be treated casually. If she didn’t believe that, then how could she believe anyone was worth teaching? So why wouldn’t she be especially heartsick about a kid having sex with a teacher, and also especially since the kid in question was Claire? And even more especially since she was sure Claire had been the initiator. Yes, Claire was the victim too, but so was teacher. That this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last, only made it more painful for Rachel.

Rachel remembered again how touched she’d been when Claire wanted her to see her first real painting. They had only known each other for a couple of days. Claire was indirect about it, as if she were actually a shy person. She started the conversation by talking about how Eudora Easter had begun the first class of the new semester by simply telling the girls to start drawing.

The girls had stared at Eudora. “Draw what?”

Eudora smiled. “How about this?” She put her hands on her hips, turned her head to one side, and pointed her chin skyward: an African Queen. Round and soft, at least two hundred pounds. Red beret, red sneakers, big pendant earrings golden against her black shiny skin. “Or something out there,” she said, changing her pose to point out the window. “Or something in here,” pointing to the left side of her voluminous chest, “or here,” touching her forehead.

“But you keep moving,” someone said. “And we don’t know how.”

Eudora said, “Just start.”

Claire told Rachel she already had. “Everything went quiet,” she said. “And I didn’t draw Eudora, I drew my mother. Isn’t that silly? I could hardly remember what she looked like. It’s in the studio if you want to see it.”

So in her next free moment, Rachel had crossed the campus to Eudora’s studio. “I know why you’re here,” Eudora said. She pointed to the wall where she’d posted the picture. She didn’t need to. It had already drawn Rachel’s attention.

Claire had turned the sheet of paper sideways to make it horizontal and then cut it in half lengthwise to make it long and thin. A long, narrow beach stretched along that horizontal. Two little girls walked holding hands toward the right margin. In a few more steps they would disappear. Behind them, the ocean, the horizon, the sky, each long and thin and horizontal. “Look!” Eudora said. “There’s no real foreground. Everything recedes.”

Rachel didn’t answer. She wouldn’t have been able to describe what she was feeling without sounding crazy. All she knew was she was intensely alive and profoundly lonely at the same time. She wondered, after Claire learned the skills to go with her talent, would her pictures still be as primal as this? How did she know to make mother and daughter the same age, collapsing time?

“This is why I do what I do,” Eudora had said.

NOW, AS RACHEL walked on the bluff above the river, some clouds, moving fast, crossed the sun and a cool wind came up, roughing the water below her, which was suddenly gray like November, and Rachel realized why she had suddenly felt something was wrong in the way she was reacting to what she was already thinking of as Claire’s Confession: it wasn’t the head of school’s business. It was Kevina Rugoff’s, a psychologist, the school counselor, appointed specifically to help kids and their families negotiate situations like Claire’s. Rachel needed to put Claire under Kevina Rugoff’s attention and focus on the care of the school.

That realization should have left her the mental room to consider the media’s delight in finding nasty stories about scandals at “elitist” private schools, a head of school’s nightmare: the baby aborted in a dorm, for instance, found in a plastic bag under the would-be mother’s bed; the teacher who invited the students in his dorm to his apartment for pizza—and pornographic movies.

But her feelings for Claire blinded Rachel. Claire needed a mom more than she needed a shrink, and Rachel was the closest thing to a mom Claire would ever have.

Rachel would have to call the head of Central Park Academy, Claire’s New York City school. Is it true that one of your teachers had sex with your former student, Claire Nelson? She could think of a million people to whom it would be easier to pose the question to which she already knew the answer than to this sixty-year-old man. She did! Then why didn’t you tell me? As if she didn’t know. The only time she’d spent with Gaylord Frothingham was when they had served together on an ad hoc committee of the National Association of Independent Schools. During lunch, he had assumed that everybody was as fascinated by his detailed analysis of the last two centuries of Harvard-Yale football games as he was. Nevertheless, she was sure he would be more ahead of the times than she was about the problem she was calling him about, much less easily perturbed. She turned around and hurried back to her office. When she got there, Claire had left.

CLAIRE HAD STOPPED crying right after Rachel left her alone. That didn’t mean she’d been faking the tears, she told herself. No, she stopped crying because, as she watched Rachel pass under the copper beech and across the lawns toward the river, it sank in that Rachel hadn’t seemed worried that the story would come out and hurt the school. So if Rachel wasn’t worried, why should she be, and how did she ever get up the nerve to say, Maybe I should find a school in London? No school in London, or anywhere else, would ever have a teacher like Eudora Easter. And now she didn’t have to feel guilty anymore about not telling. That was for her dad and old Mr. Gaylord Frothingham to feel.

She stood up from the sofa and went out the way she came, grateful for the privilege. She’d known all along she did what she did with poor Mr. Alford because she needed to prove she could.

He was just out of college, twenty-three years old, only five years older than she had been—and everybody knows girls mature faster than boys. She was still wondering how dumb can a school administration get, to give a brand-new teacher seniors to teach. He’d ask a question and all the class would raise their hands and wave them as if they were going to die if he didn’t give them a chance to show how deeply they were reading his assignments, and whoever he called on would give the dumbest possible answer, and they’d all agree, talking all at once, shouting at each other, going on and on, sometimes for the whole period. Claire began to feel sorry for him. One day she gave him a good answer. Everybody stared at her. She stared right back. One of the boys said that was the wrong answer and started to propose an absurd one. “Stop,” she told him. “You’re boring me.” He stopped and looked around the room. No one said anything, and they never played that game on poor Mr. Alford again. Claire relived that moment over and over. She’d discovered something about herself she hadn’t known was there. After class Mr. Alford thanked her, apologizing for not controlling her classmates.

That afternoon, walking home after school, she discovered that his route to where he lived was the same as hers when she saw him walking in the same direction ahead of her. The oh-what-the-hell feeling rushed up in her and she walked fast and caught up with him just as he turned from the sidewalk onto the steps of the brownstone house where he lived. “Remember that book you said you’d lend me? Can I pick it up now?”

That was the first time. They both regretted it and agreed it would never happen again. But her power over his resistance was intoxicating. It was the same newly discovered power that made the boy shut up. So it happened again. And then again. For six weeks, on Friday afternoons, after they thought everyone had left the school—until old Mr. Gaylord Frothingham discovered them. He’d stayed late and was going around making sure all the lights were off. If only they had gone to Mr. Alford’s house, like the first time. But that would have required planning, an admission of intention, instead of pretending, each time, that they were caught in a spontaneous whirlwind they never would have submitted to, if they’d had time to think.

Claire shook her head. She’d think more about all this later. Right now she had to hurry to get to class.

But passing under the branches of the copper beech as Rachel had, she couldn’t keep herself from slowing down. What would the tree look like, she suddenly needed to know, if she were sitting down, looking up at it, the way Rachel said she thought the Pequots must have done? The question made her sad, wondering if those people knew what was going to happen to them. She’d find the answer by coming back in the winter and sitting down on the ground and painting what she felt when all the leaves had fallen off and died and the branches were bare against the sky. It would be a different painting from the one she’d painted for Rachel.

Thus decided, she hurried on, looking back only once to see how the morning light washed across the coppery leaves.

“YES, IT’S IMPORTANT,” Rachel told Gaylord Frothingham’s secretary. “Very.”

“Important enough to interrupt his vacation? He’s in Paris. It’s his last day. Our school starts next week.”

Rachel hesitated, knowing how much she would hate to have her vacation broken into with the kind of questions she needed to ask. “Well, I guess it is,” the secretary said, interpreting the silence. Rachel gave her direct number, and not five minutes later her phone rang.

“Rachel?” he said. “Rachel Bickham?” The wariness in his voice was louder than his words.

“Hello, Mr. Frothingham. Sorry to interrupt your vacation.”

“That’s all right. I’m here in our hotel room, resting. My wife’s at the Louvre looking at pictures. She can look at them forever. Museums exhaust me right away. They’re worse than faculty meetings. How’s everything in Connecticut?”

“Fine, Mr. Frothingham, everything’s fine. But there’s one thing I want to talk about.”

“Well, good. Because if everything’s fine then perhaps we should both hang up.”

“Mr. Frothingham—”

“I’m Gaylord. And you’re Rachel, and please, let’s both hang up.”

Rachel shook her head as if he could see her from across the ocean. “I have a question. It’s about Claire Nelson.”

“Oh Rachel, I wish you were better at taking hints!”

“Is there anything about her I should know that I don’t?”

“Please. Don’t ask that question.”

“Mr. Frothingham! I already have.”

“Well, let’s just pretend you didn’t. It would be so much better for you and your school. She’s graduated. She’s gone. Why in the world do you want to know?”

“She isn’t gone. She’s back for a post-graduate—”

“She is! Oh my! Then you really don’t want to know.”

“But she told me already. She confessed. I just want to know if there’s anything else I need to know.”

“She told you? When?”

“This morning.”

“This morning! That’s wonderful.”

“Wonderful?”

“Because last January when you admitted her is a long time ago. Which means when you admitted her you didn’t know. Rachel, you’re in good shape. And besides, I’ve taken care of everything. Everything. Our school is in Manhattan, you know. New York City. Right, Rachel? Believe me, we’re way ahead of you on stuff like this. She’s a good girl. She needed to confess. Fine, she did, and that’s the end of it. Because she’s also very smart.”

Rachel didn’t say anything. She agreed: the less she knew, the better.

“I’m going to walk to the Louvre to get my wife, now,” Gaylord Frothingham said. “Whether or not she’s through. It’s aperitif time in Paris. She’ll have the goose liver. I’ll have a glass of wine and forget this conversation ever happened. All right, Rachel?” Before she could answer, he hung up.

RACHEL CALLED MILTON Perkins to share this news with him—without, of course, identifying Claire. She knew he could figure out who the student was, but she also knew the people you can trust with a secret are the same people who don’t ever want to know what they don’t need to know, and they had agreed that when it wasn’t clear whether to share information or not, they would. No surprises between them, ever.

He was silent for a long time when she finished telling him. He had three daughters who had graduated from the school. That they loved Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was the reason he did too. No one would be more determined than he to protect the school’s reputation. “Thank you for telling me,” he said at last. “The rest of the board doesn’t need to know—unless something happens, which I don’t think it will.” Then, after a pause, he added, “But they will want to know why you started a post-graduate program on your own. That’s a board decision.”

Rachel was stunned. It hadn’t occurred to her.

“You’ll remember next time,” Milton Perkins said.