BOOK ONE: SUMMER
ONE
Even in that last year of her reign, Marjorie Boyd had insisted that the graduation exercise take place exactly at noon.
“When the sun is at the top of the sky!” she declared—as she had every year for the thirty-five years she had been headmistress of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. “Time stands still for just a little instant right then. And people notice things. They see! And what they see is the graduation of young women! Females! From a school founded by a woman, designed by women, run by a woman, with a curriculum that focuses on the way women learn! I want this celebration to take place exactly at noon, in the bright spangle of the June sunshine, so the world can see the superiority of the result!” Marjorie demanded once again, still dominant at the very end in spite of her dismissal. She would be the headmistress till July 1, when her contract expired. Until then, her will would prevail.
Even her opponents understood that it was Marjorie’s vivid leadership that had made the school into a community so beloved of its students and alumnae (who were taking their seats now in the audience as the noon hour neared) that it had to be saved from the flaws of the very woman who had made it what it was. Founded by Miss Edith Oliver in 1928 and standing on ground once occupied by a Pequot Indian village in Fieldington, Connecticut, a complacent suburb twenty miles south of Hartford on the Connecticut River, the school that Marjorie created was a boarding school, a world apart, whose intense culture of academic and artistic richness was celebrated in idiosyncratic rituals sacred to its members.
“But it will be too hot at noon,” the more practical-minded members of the faculty had objected once again in an argument that for senior faculty members Francis and Peggy Plummer had become an old refrain. They were like theatergoers watching a play whose ending they had memorized.
“No, it won’t,” Marjorie replied. “
How do you know it won’t?”
“I just do,” she said, standing up to end the meeting. For meetings always ended when Marjorie stood up—and began instantly when she sat down. Francis and Peggy understood that what Marjorie meant was that she would push the weather to be perfect for their beloved young women by the sheer power of her will. The weather had always been perfect for each of the thirty-three graduation ceremonies in which Peggy and Francis had been on the faculty—and that day, June 10, 1991, was no exception.
Now the clock in the library’s steeple chimed the noon hour, and Marjorie Boyd was standing. She strode across the dais to the microphone. The graduating class sat in the honored position to the left of the dais, their white dresses glistening in the sunshine. The sky was an ethereal blue, cloudless, and under it the green lawns swept to the edge of the acres of forest that lined the river. Behind the dais a huge three-hundred-year-old maple spread its branches, and Francis imagined a family of Pequot Indians sitting in its shade. The scent of clipped grass rose. In the audience the mothers wore big multicolored hats against the sun, and behind them the gleaming white clapboards of the campus buildings formed an embracing circle.
Standing at the microphone, Marjorie didn’t look much older to Peggy and Francis than when she had first hired them thirty-three years ago immediately after their marriage—Peggy as the school’s librarian, and Francis as a teacher of math and soon after also of English—assigning them too as dorm parents in what was then a brand-new dormitory. Marjorie still wore her long brown hair, now streaked with gray, in a schoolmarmish bun at the back of her neck. Her reading glasses still rested on her bosom, suspended from a black string around her neck. “You were Oliver girls,” they heard Marjorie say, and Francis reached to hold Peggy’s hand. They knew what she was going to say next, and when she said it—“Now you are Oliver women!”—giving the word a glory, Peggy started to cry. She was surprised at her sudden melting. For up to this moment she had managed to assuage her grief over Marjorie’s dismissal by reminding herself that she agreed with the board’s decision.
But Francis wasn’t crying! He was too angry to cry, wouldn’t give his new enemies the satisfaction—for that’s how he thought of those colleagues, old friends, whom he suspected of optimism over the dismissal of his beloved leader. He gripped Peggy’s hand, squeezed hard, made her wince. It’s her school! he wanted to shout. Marjorie’s! Not theirs! He didn’t want Peggy to cry; he wanted her to be angry, to be obstreperous at every opportunity, to express disgust at the notion that schools bore any resemblance to businesses, as he did; he wanted her to say rebellious things in faculty meetings, the way he’d been doing, surprising everyone, including himself, by seeming out of control.
Still sobbing, Peggy yanked her hand away. She’d been over this so many times before! You can be loyal without being stupid, she wanted to yell. She was your boss, not your daddy. But of course she didn’t. It wasn’t the time to tell her husband that maybe his ardent following of Marjorie was his way of escaping the dominance of a father who couldn’t have been more different from Marjorie—he would have fired her years before this! She kept her mouth shut. It was bad enough that people saw her sobbing.
Marjorie sat quietly