Читать книгу No Ivory Tower - Stephen Davenport - Страница 8

ONE

Gregory van Buren, teacher of English, was more respected than beloved. His students would no more dare to be one minute late for his class than write different when they meant various, or use annihilate for destroy, and when someone used lay for the act of reclining in the present tense, he would actually lie down on the floor and deliver a lecture about transitive and intransitive verbs.

So Gregory’s heart sang when Rachel Bickham, his brand-new boss, started the first faculty meeting of the 1992 school year exactly at nine. It sang still more when she paused, mid-sentence in her start-of-year speech, and gave a look with precisely the right amount of amazement in it at the several teachers who straggled in at one minute after. It seemed an eternity before they found their seats and she resumed her sentence. Oh how he did enjoy their discomfiture! This is Miss Oliver’s School for Girls! he wanted to shout, not a used car lot.

He was also delighted by the way Rachel dressed: in a red silk blouse that set off her brown skin, a silver necklace, a gray skirt, and stockings. Stockings! Half the faculty were wearing shorts, some not even socks. Yes, he knew it was still summer—the Monday before Labor Day weekend—and the girls wouldn’t arrive until a week from Wednesday, but don’t try to convince him that people in sloppy clothes don’t do sloppy work. He was wearing his summer-weight blue blazer, the single-breasted one, a tie, and freshly pressed khaki trousers. He liked it too that Rachel stood up to make her talk, that she was tall—an asset for a leader—and that she moved her hands through the air as she talked—comely, long-fingered hands, the palms lighter in color than the rest of her.

Please, don’t say how grateful to have been appointed you are, he thought, and she didn’t, and his heart lifted still more. Why should she be grateful? It was the other way around. So what if she was only thirty-five? As the chair of the Science Department and director of Athletics, she had proven to be the best leader available at the end of last school year, just two months ago, when Fred Kindler, that honorable man, suddenly resigned after only one year in office.

Just thinking about how Fred Kindler had been treated made Gregory feel ashamed. Fred had been appointed to save the school from imminent financial collapse. Parents, and even some of the alumnae, were not sending their daughters because they had heard the school was so broke it might actually have to close—so the under-enrollment grew worse. When under-enrollment had caused the problem in the first place. The possibility of closing grew even more probable, and then rumors flew around that Fred Kindler planned to solve the problem by admitting boys. So he challenged the alumnae to save their beloved school and its sacred mission of empowering young women by raising the necessary money and persuading the parents of every high school girl they knew to send their daughter to Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. The alumnae’s response was clear: not until you go away. So he resigned, and right away the alumnae started to raise money and recruit girls—enough to keep the school alive.

But Gregory’s shame over the way the school had behaved was matched by his pride in Rachel for her response when the board chair offered her the position of interim headmistress while they looked for a permanent one. Oh, but didn’t she surprise them! “I won’t be your head just because I’m convenient,” she had said. “You’ve got to want me enough now to want me permanently.” How about that for nerve? And if anyone tried to mess with her the way they messed with Fred Kindler, they’d have Gregory van Buren to answer to.

Rachel sat down and turned the meeting over to Gregory’s colleague, Francis Plummer, who seemed rather pale and tired for a man who’d been on vacation all summer. Gregory, who remembered how he’d felt when his wife divorced him years ago, was sure Francis was grieving over the separation from his wife, Peggy, the school’s librarian. The rumor was she’d kicked him out of the apartment next to the dorm they parented. It made everybody sad, especially the girls in the dorm, to think of them living apart. Gregory didn’t believe they’d ever get back together. Francis had rebelled against the leadership of Fred Kindler, and Peggy had gone out of her way to support Fred. In Gregory’s view, that was enough to rend them asunder forever.

But Francis maintained his involved presence, no matter the state of his marriage. Indeed he drew all faculty eyes to him now as he stood up, seeming quite small after Rachel’s tall presence. He looked directly at Gregory. Almost everybody thought Francis was the best English teacher in the school, if not the world, and Gregory the second best by just a little.

“I do hope this satisfies your questions about our young artist Claire Nelson’s academic schedule,” Francis said to Gregory, referring to a student who had transferred last year for mysterious reasons into Miss Oliver’s from her school in New York City in the middle of her senior year. Right away some of the faculty had felt that was going to be trouble. Within days of attending the chair of Art Eudora Easter’s painting class, Claire had discovered a prodigious artistic talent. Rachel invited her back for another year in order to build a sufficient portfolio to gain entrance to the Rhode Island School of Design. Not everyone thought that was a good idea.

“Yes, I do hope to be satisfied,” Gregory said, returning Francis stare.

Francis looked surprised. He’d expected a long speech in ponderous syntax from Gregory. He didn’t know that his colleague had resolved to be as self-disciplined in his speech as he was sure Rachel would be in everything.

Eyes went back and forth between him and Gregory. “We have decided that almost her entire time will be spent on her art,” Francis said. “She’ll elect two other courses from English and history.”

“But she’s abysmal in math.”

Francis smiled. “If she needs an accountant to register sales of her pictures, she’ll hire one.” Some of the faculty laughed.

“We?” Gregory said. “Shouldn’t we have conferred?”

“I thought about that,” Francis said, smiling more broadly now.

“And?”

“I decided it wasn’t necessary.”

Gregory smiled too. He’d made his point. “I thought so,” he said, and Francis sat down.

IT WAS A wonder that two so different models for students of how to be in the world could be contained in so small an institution as Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. Gregory was tall, always impeccably dressed, and formal, a believer in authority. Francis Plummer was short, slightly pudgy, and indifferently attired. Gregory was a devout Catholic, and Francis a Pagan, having been converted from his father’s Episcopal faith by an equal measure of affinity to the way he thought Native Americans viewed the world and a strong dose of rebelliousness. Gregory kept a discernible distance from his students—and, some would say, from the literature he presented to them. He thought of it as the world’s possession, not his, and he showed it to them analytically, letting them decide for themselves if they would fall in love with it, as he had so long ago that he couldn’t remember. At graduation time, more girls asked Francis to confer their diplomas on them than all the other teachers combined, but only one or two girls would ask Gregory. The poems he chose to honor them were never easy to understand, and when he hugged them, which he did only because graduation hugs were a sacred tradition at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, he was so shy of contact, he’d stick his butt out so far behind himself that people laughed and said he looked like he was wearing a bustle.

Everything that happened in Gregory’s classes was an exercise in critical thinking, and everything in Francis’s an exercise in engagement. Francis was passionate and demonstrative, and he wasn’t about to let the students decide whether they would fall in love with literature. The alumnae loved him for this as fervently as they disliked Fred Kindler for coming in from the outside, a perfect stranger. Every move Fred Kindler had made seemed to generate the same question: how dare you think you could understand us?

Francis Plummer was the face of the school. In the classroom he was as powerful and larger than life as Superman; outside the classroom, quiet, small, and unobtrusive. Many years ago, the students took to calling him Clark Kent, generating a mystique that’d been building for decades. That this very unathletic man spent weekends running dangerous rapids in the springtime when the water was high only added to the legend.

Thus Francis Plummer was vastly more powerful than Gregory van Buren in the school’s fraught politics that Rachel Bickham would have to manage. Gregory had arrived thirty-three years ago, right after his wife divorced him, and proceeded to live a monkish life on campus. But Francis and his wife Peggy, the school’s beloved librarian, had come a year earlier, directly from their honeymoon, and right away the then-headmistress, Marjorie Boyd, a brilliant, charismatic educator, admired by all, feared by many, beloved by some, put Francis Plummer at her right hand—though only unofficially, for she was too authoritarian to delegate officially anything to anybody. Francis was passionately loyal to her. Some would say he’d made her his surrogate parent, and when the board finally dismissed her after her own thirty-five-year tenure, for paying too little attention to the school’s increasingly precarious financial condition, Francis’s resentment over her dismissal led to his rebellion against her successor, Fred Kindler, until, too late, he realized how unwisely he had been acting. Francis felt guilty for this now, and though he was worried that Rachel was too young and inexperienced to succeed in so difficult a job, he was resolved to do everything he could to support this new headmistress, including, as everyone expected, taking the leadership of the academic program off her hands to lighten her load. Francis would be the first dean of academics in the history of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.

Near the end of the meeting, Rachel announced that the evening study-time supervision in the dormitories would be extended by a half hour, as Gregory and Francis had both advised. The chair of Foreign Languages, well known for her defense of workers’ rights, didn’t think it was fair to add to the teachers’ duties after the contracts had been signed. “All the assistant dorm heads would like to have a meeting with you this afternoon,” she said to Rachel.

“Oh, I never meet people in groups,” Rachel responded without a second of hesitation, and everyone looked at each other, and Gregory said quite loudly while pretending to murmur, “Hear, hear.” And right then and there Rachel adjourned the meeting at precisely the scheduled time, a first in years.

Gregory wanted to stand up and cheer. He was sure Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was back on course.

And Francis was grateful for this promptness. He often joked that when it came to his time to die, he hoped the passing would occur during a faculty meeting so the transition between being alive and being dead would be imperceptible.

What Francis and Gregory didn’t know was that there was another reason, beyond her ingrained punctiliousness about schedules, for Rachel’s adjourning the meeting right on time: she had a powerful desire to her to talk to her husband. And he was about to leave for Chicago.