Читать книгу No Ivory Tower - Stephen Davenport - Страница 9

TWO

Rachel Bickham didn’t wait long enough to cross the campus from the faculty room to her office to call her husband so that the conversation would be private. She was afraid she would miss him if she did. So she called him from the faculty room the instant the meeting was over, while the teachers were still there. She’d talk quietly so they wouldn’t hear. And anyway, she didn’t have anything really private to tell him. She just wanted to hear his voice.

She had gotten up at dawn that morning because her husband, Bob Perrine, the CEO and founder of Best Sports Inc., with stores in New York City and Chicago, had begged her not to leave him alone yesterday in their New York City apartment, which he kept to be near his office and where they’d spent the weekend together. Then, after four hours of driving through the Bronx into Connecticut and north along the Connecticut River, she had returned to Miss Oliver’s School for Girls on the bank of that river, bursting with eagerness to get to work. She’d gone straight to the faculty meeting.

The first thing she would tell Bob, as she had promised him she would even though he hadn’t asked her to, was that she had arrived safely. She was feeling a little remorse for having been so preoccupied by the faculty meeting that was about to start—her very first one—that she’d forgotten to call him when she’d arrived on campus. First she would apologize, and then he’d forgive her and tell her he was glad he didn’t need to worry anymore, and then she’d tell him how lovely the white clapboard buildings of the campus looked in the morning sun, how the dew sparkled on the lawns, and how the mist was rising off the river.

She didn’t realize she was holding her breath, praying she wasn’t too late while the phone rang on the other end of the line. After what seemed to be forever, his secretary answered, and Rachel knew he’d already left to catch his plane. It was his private number. His secretary never picked it up unless he wasn’t there, and when she did, Rachel always felt resentful of her, though she knew that made no sense. “Oh well, I’ll call him later,” she told the secretary, but the morning that had seemed so bright had lost its luster.

So instead, the first thing she would do would be to call the new board chair Milton Perkins and get everything squared away by doing what she should have done on the day she was appointed. She would ask him to propose to the board that her title Headmistress be changed to Head of School. Certainly, Milton Perkins would understand how dated mistress was, and that, for a girls’ school with a newly appointed African American head, the term had an especially nasty ring. A year ago she had been on the verge of advising her predecessor, Fred Kindler, to make the same request, headmaster being even more out of tune than headmistress, but she refrained because she thought him too preoccupied trying to win over a disapproving community, busily traveling around the country and assuring the alumnae that he had not been brought in specifically to build up the enrollment by allowing boys into the school, the mere idea of which drove everybody crazy. And of course another damning issue for Fred had been his gender. Rachel had begun to think that if she had persuaded her friend to change his title, it might have changed attitudes just enough to save him his job. He would still be the head of the school and she still the chair of Science and director of Athletics.

But Fred wasn’t the head anymore because he’d offered his resignation when he realized which way the wind was blowing—and Milton Perkins had said, “You’re a hell of a guy, Fred. Almost everybody else would have to be told.”

What happened next was a secret that Rachel and Milton Perkins would rather die than not keep: the executive committee of the board asked Francis Plummer to be the interim head, but he refused because he understood they were offended by his refusal to support Kindler. They were choosing him only because the alumnae would follow him. Besides, his replacing Kindler, if only for a year, would embitter Peggy still more.

Just the thought that she would soon be talking with Milton Perkins began to brighten Rachel’s spirits again and melt away her dispiriting concern for having been the second choice. When Fred Kindler had resigned, the then-board chair Alan Travelers resigned too because he was tarred with all the same brushes that Fred Kindler was, especially the rumor of the Plan to Admit Boys. Perkins, whose three daughters had graduated from Miss Oliver’s, had assumed the chair in his place. He was everything Rachel was not: white, rich, elderly, retired, Republican; but they’d liked each other from the moment he’d offered her the interim headship last June after Francis had refused it, and she’d heard herself say, “I’m not going to be your head just because I’m convenient. You’ve got to want me enough now to want me permanently.” The idea had just come to her. It was outrageous. “Jesus!” Perkins had said, but he had already started to grin, loving her moxie, and she had answered, “You don’t want to be picking a new head every year.” His grin had gotten even broader and his face lit up. “You obviously agree,” she then noted. “You bet I do!” he had replied.

Now she was halfway across the lawn to her office, planning the day, her disappointment about the conversation with Bob that hadn’t happened fading further into background. First she’d persuade Milton Perkins of the importance of changing her title to Head of School, then she’d call Francis Plummer in to her office and give him the good news she knew he must have been expecting: you are, as of right now, the dean of academics. She and Milton Perkins agreed that without the right people around her, she wouldn’t last any longer in her job than Fred Kindler had. She would do everything she needed to do to avoid his fate. From the instant she had been appointed to hold the school in her hands as its head, she’d fallen more and more in love with it. And she was no longer just Rachel Bickham. She was Head of School Rachel Bickham. It wasn’t a promotion she had received; it was a new identity. Asleep or awake, she’d already begun to wear the school like a coat around herself. To lose it would be a cruel diminishment she couldn’t begin to imagine, a death in minor key.

But here was this talented, passionate man ready to serve at her right hand and help her succeed. How lucky could she get? She would create this new title just for him, thus expanding and making official the leadership he had been providing unofficially for years as the school’s most influential teacher. Rachel would have made the appointment early in the summer, very soon after being made the head, if she had not had to leave the campus right after graduation. Months before being appointed, she had accepted a critical leadership job at Aim High, a highly successful summer program for low-income kids in Oakland, California. She didn’t even consider breaking this commitment. She had missed the relatively calm summer when Francis would have advised her on all the complex issues that can undo a leader before she’s hardly begun. And she hadn’t been able to start the search for a business manager to replace the one whom Fred Kindler had fired.

She wasn’t daunted though—not with the prospect of Francis Plummer at her right hand, and Milton Perkins supporting her as the chair of the board of trustees. Besides, she was a quick study, and she loved to work.

On the steps up to the door of the Administration Building she stopped and turned around, obeying a surprising impulse to gaze at the campus she had just crossed. It was as if she saw it for the very first time: across the wide, green lawns, the four dormitories, in new white paint applied over the summer, were aligned in a semicircle embracing a new library with a steeple that, like its predecessor, contained a bell that rang just once a year in June at noon to mark the beginning of the graduation ceremony. To its right was the classroom building, and to its left the Art Building and the Science Building, and beyond these, the gym, and then the athletic fields, and beyond those, more green lawns sweeping down to the river. She stood very still, taking all this in, and it came to her as it never really had before: she was in charge of this. It felt just right, so right, that she declared out loud, as if to an assembled multitude, “This is where I belong, right here.”

The declaration had come to her unbidden, without thought, just as those other words had a few minutes ago in the faculty meeting. She’d had no idea that she never saw people in groups until she had announced the fact and drawn to herself every atom of power in the room. So who could blame her right then for suspecting she had all the right instincts for her job? Besides, everybody who works in schools is optimistic in September when every single day of the new school year is still before them, a clean white sheet of paper.

And who could blame her, right then, for expecting she could have everything she wanted? After all, everything was only three desires, each connected to the other: First, to survive as the head of this school she was in love with and respected more than any other, the most effective instrument she could imagine for the empowerment of young women. Second, to keep a happy marriage with a husband whose job was just as consuming as hers. Third, to be a mother, and soon.

MOMENTS LATER, RACHEL was greeted at the door of her office by her secretary, Margaret Rice, who told her that her father had called.

“So early!”

“He’s lonely, I guess,” Margaret offered. She was a tall, large-boned, black-haired woman in her fifties. Margaret’s and Rachel’s memories of losing their mothers to breast cancer when they both were very young had already built a sisterhood between them.

“I called you last night,” Margaret said. “I thought you might like to come over for supper.”

“Thanks. That would have been nice, but I wasn’t home.”

“You stayed with Bob?”

“Yes, I did.”

Margaret frowned. “Really? Just how early did you have to get up?”

“I like the early mornings,” Rachel said, careful not to sound defensive. She asked Margaret to call Milton Perkins and set up the time for them to talk on the phone, and to make an appointment with Francis Plummer in her office, and then she entered her office and closed the door.

Rachel had arranged her office so that her desk was to the right of the door as you entered. To the right of her desk, big French doors looked out on the campus. She had placed a circle of chairs in the center for the efficient conduct of school business, and against the back wall a commodious sofa for those who wanted to mix business with conversations, including students who simply wanted to chat—which Rachel swore to herself she would always find time for no matter how busy she was.

That morning the sun flooded in through the doors, lighting above the sofa on a picture painted by Claire Nelson, whose schedule Francis Plummer had arranged, of the ancient copper beech which stood in front of the Administration Building, a motherly presence. The tree had grown there since the time when a Pequot Indian village stood on the ground now occupied by the campus, and sometimes, passing under its branches, Rachel would apologize to the people she imagined sitting in its shade. Now, paused inside the doorway of her office, she remembered telling Claire that she was the most artistically talented student she’d ever known. Rachel liked to think Claire painted the picture in thanks for Rachel’s trusting her to manage the burden that talent always brings, for the school’s admitting her, a girl with a troubled past, in the middle of her senior year and letting her stay on for an additional year so she would have time to build a portfolio for admission to the Rhode Island School of Design. For Nan White, the admissions director, Claire had painted a picture of the gates to the school.

Claire had no brothers and sisters. Her mother had abandoned her when she was eight years old, and Claire’s father, an investment banker, had just been transferred to London. He needed a safe place for his beautiful and precocious daughter who, according to the headmaster of her private day school in Manhattan, had “ventured into sexual activity.” Obviously, Miss Oliver’s, tucked away in a boring suburb and devoid of boys, was the right environment for Claire. After only a few days at her new school, Claire, like a child bringing her artwork home from school for her mother to post on the refrigerator, had invited Rachel to the Art Building to see one of the very first paintings she had made. It was of two little girls on a beach, holding hands, clinging to each other, an endless ocean behind them. To Rachel, it spoke so powerfully of loneliness, she had to look away.

Now Rachel lingered in her office, her eyes focused on the picture of the copper beech, for once obeying her mother’s dictum: Be still! How long do you think you will be here? And it came to her that because Claire hadn’t touched a paintbrush before enrolling in the school, she could stand for every student the school had ever taught. Rachel would never say in public such a thing about one girl out of so many, but just the same it felt like truth. Nor would she say in public—she would barely confess it to herself—that her hunger to be a mother had focused on Claire whom she had allowed deeper into her heart than any other girl in the school. Rachel’s mother had clung to her family through unspeakable pain, as long as she could. But here was a child whose mom had walked away on purpose.

Rachel sat down at her desk and reached for the phone.