There was a second of silence after Marjorie sat, and then, simultaneously, Francis and the graduating class stood up. In an instant Peggy was up too, taller than her husband. The audience rose. Their applause swelled. The block of undergraduates sitting right behind the faculty chanted, “Yay, Marjorie! Yay, Marjorie!” On the dais, the trustees stood too, their board chair, Alan Travelers, looking uncomfortable.
To Peggy’s right, Gregory rose too slowly. She turned to him, grabbed his elbow, pulled him upward. “Stand straight, windbag!” she whispered through her sobbing. “Stand straight and clap!”
Gregory was too smart; he didn’t even turn his head to her. He was gazing up over the podium as if he were watching a bird, his hands coming together so softly they didn’t make a sound, and Peggy was amazed to hear herself hissing: “Louder, you politician! Louder! Or I swear to God I’ll poke out both your eyes right here in front of everybody!”
For an instant as the words flew out, she felt wonderful, a prisoner released. But then stupid. This wasn’t her. She didn’t insult people, she had never been involved in the school’s politics. And she didn’t have Francis’s talent for effective goofiness. She thought maybe she was going to lose control permanently, wondered if everything was falling apart: Marjorie’s leaving and the resultant division in the faculty, and equally pressing, Francis’s leaving the next day on a trip that would last all summer, the first time in their thirty-three-year marriage they would be apart for more than a week. It was the final straw. So she made up her mind: She’d stay in control. Not just for herself. For Francis too—until he was able to control himself again.
Gregory still didn’t turn his face to her. He stared straight ahead, placed his right hand on Peggy’s, lifted her hand from his elbow, placed it at her side as if he were putting something back in a drawer, and whispered: “I thought you understood, unlike your husband, who only understands the past. Actually, I know you understand.”
Gregory was right. She did understand. It had been the newer members of the board who forced the issue. The era has passed, they had pointed out, when being a great educator is enough. No longer do certain kinds of families automatically send their children away to boarding school; and besides, just as boarding school grows too expensive for many families, single-sex education for women seems to be losing its allure. So pay more attention to the business side: to marketing scenarios, strategic plans, financial projections. That’s the road to survival.
Peggy had tried hard to persuade her friend to pay attention; and when rumors began to fly that the school was so strapped that it might have to make the one decision no one could even dare imagine, the one that would destroy the reason for the school’s existence—namely, to admit boys—to survive, she had barged right in to Marjorie’s office and told her that if she, Peggy Plummer, the school’s librarian for the past thirty-three years, were on the board, she would vote for Marjorie’s dismissal in spite of their ancient friendship unless Marjorie changed her ways and started to act as if her profession, for all it was a calling, were a business too. But nobody gave Marjorie advice. It was the other way around. So Peggy hadn’t been surprised when six months later the board, whose chair, Alan Travelers, was the first male board chair in the school’s history, screwed its courage to the sticking place and demanded Marjorie’s resignation.
Peggy stopped crying by the time she and her friend Eudora Easter, chair of the Art Department, had to go up front and confer the diploma on the first student. The order had been determined the night before when the president of the junior class picked the graduates’ names out of the tall silk hat that was brought out of safekeeping once a year, according to ritual. The hat was rumored to have belonged to Daniel Webster. At Miss Oliver’s it was a sign of loyalty to believe myths that lesser schools would scorn.
Facing the audience beside Eudora, Peggy was calm again. She was tall, slim, full breasted, her short black hair not covered by a hat, and she wore a trim business suit—librarian’s clothes. Eudora was much shorter than Peggy, very round, her beautiful African features shadowed under a huge red hat, and her red slippers were pointed upward at the toes like a genie’s. The students cheered her costume.
The ceremony went on for several hours. For the graduates the teachers recited poems, sang songs, performed dances, even put on little skits. Francis conferred the diploma on several girls by himself, and he and Peggy together did so for three girls who lived in their dorm. For each, Francis spun the amazing tale of their blossoming, thus blessing their parents. Gregory van Buren’s one girl got a long poem that nobody understood. She tried hard not to show her disappointment. When Gregory hugged her, he bent his middle away from her, sticking his butt out behind as if he were wearing a bustle.
LATER THAT DAY in the desolate silence that overcame the school, when the last girl had left for the summer, Peggy roamed her empty dormitory. For the past four years at exactly this time, their son, Sidney, would return from college and she and Francis would focus on him all summer, feasting on his presence. But Siddy, who had finished college a year ago in June, left for Europe in September to wander for an indeterminate time. He’s figuring out who he is, what he wants to do with his life, Peggy told herself over and over, seeking comfort. All the young ones do that these days. The mantra brought her no more comfort than knowing that young people didn’t bother getting married anymore before they lived with each other. To Peggy, whose school was a home away from home for three hundred and forty-five students, wandering was anathema.
So, she asked herself, why did her husband insist on this trip that he would start tomorrow, the first day of summer vacation? He would be away not only from her for the entire summer but also from the new head who needed the senior teacher’s help in getting acclimated—and had every right to expect it. Francis had a big responsibility to fulfill right here this summer, one that he could fulfill better than anyone. So why did he choose to wander? He was not just out of college; he was fifty-five, for goodness sake!
She knew Francis’s response would be that he wouldn’t be wandering. He’d be chaperoning a group of students from schools all over the East on an archaeological dig in California—what was wrong with that? Wasn’t Miss Oliver’s School famous for its anthropology courses; wasn’t that what made them different from all those other schools? “If our girls can learn to look objectively at other cultures,” he had reminded her, “then they can look at their own with open eyes, instead of the way they have been indoctrinated to see—by men. That’s how we change the world! We’re going to live in a reconstructed Ohlone Indian village on the shoulder of Mount Alma while we do the dig to find the real village they lived in,” he had told her—as if she hadn’t known!
If he would just admit to himself the real reason, that he wanted to be like an Indian, she could object—and remind him that Indians made their vision quests when they were fourteen years old! For that’s what Francis and his students were trying to do: be like Indians. Otherwise, why not just live in tents?
But chaperoning an exercise in anthropology? How could Peggy argue against that? She was the one who, thirty years ago, had started the tradition of cultural relativism that made Miss Oliver’s unique. For it was she who had discovered the jumble of Pequot Indian artifacts in a closet of the little house that then served as the school’s library, and it was she who had persuaded Marjorie to raise the funds for a new library in which the Pequot artifacts, and several small bones