But now, listening to the story, knowing exactly how it would build to the punchline in rhythmic stupidities, Francis stopped walking toward the door, turned, stepped back toward Perkins and his group of embarrassed listeners. Francis knew what he was doing, knew he shouldn’t, discovered that he’d been holding back these feelings for years in order to make things work for Marjorie, realized also that Perkins probably had been instrumental in Marjorie’s dismissal. He took another step toward Perkins and his group of listeners and saw Rachel Bickham, the chair of the Science Department and director of Athletics, whom he admired, looking at him hard. She shook her head, an unobtrusive gesture meant just for him. Don’t, she seemed to warn. Just don’t. But he loved the release he was about to get. The room was very bright to him now, all its colors vivid.
“Why don’t you shut up?” he heard himself saying to Perkins. “Why don’t you just clam it?”
That’s exactly what Perkins did—for an instant. He turned to face Francis. He clearly didn’t know what to do. He was certainly not going to apologize! So he just turned his back on Francis and went on telling his story. That’s what enraged Francis so—the dismissal! After all those years! He tapped Perkins on the shoulder, and when the man turned around, his face flaming, Francis told the same story back to him, substituting Republican for Polack. The group of teachers to whom Perkins had been telling his story glided away, so it was just Perkins now, and Francis, in the center of the room. Francis was pronouncing the name Perkins with the same clowning sarcasm with which Perkins had emphasized the final syllable ski of the Polish person in the joke.
They were center stage. Francis glimpsed Marjorie, who was still standing by her fireplace, staring across the room at him. Her expression was begging him to stop. Father Michael Woodward, the local Episcopal priest and part-time chaplain, one of Francis’s and Peggy’s best friends, was standing by the opposite wall making slicing motions at his throat.
Francis didn’t see Peggy. He went on and on, building a vastly more complex story than Perkins’s joke, a fantasy of ineptitude in which the absurdly Anglo-Saxon main character reached mythical idiocy. When a few of the people in the room couldn’t resist laughing, he was even more inspired, felt the lovely release, and went on some more—until he realized that Eudora Easter was standing at his right side and Father Woodward at his left. Their hands were on his elbows. He shut up.
“Jeeeezus!” said Perkins into the sudden silence. “What in hell was that all about?”
Nobody answered because Eudora and Father Woodward were escorting Francis from the scene of the crime.
TWO
The instant Fred Kindler saw the look on his secretary’s face when she came into his office early on the morning of his first day as headmaster and caught him down on his knees giving thanks, he knew he’d made a big mistake. If she had found him working in his office in the nude she couldn’t have looked more affronted.
Margaret Rice, a tall, large-boned, black-haired woman in her fifties, who to Fred’s surprise was dressed in her summer vacation clothes—jeans and a man’s shirt, rather than the more professional clothes he had expected and would have preferred—stood in the doorway looking down on her new boss; and still on his knees in his coat and tie, he suddenly saw himself in her eyes: the bumpkin, country clod, ex-farm boy ascended. He was out of style, and, to boot, a man in a woman’s place. “Oh, my God!” Mrs. Rice whispered, then quickly correcting herself: “Excuse me; I should have knocked.” But the look was still on her face: Feminists don’t get down on their knees, it said. We’ve been there too much already.
Thank goodness he didn’t ask her to join him, his first reaction. Instead, already rising from where he’d been kneeling beside his desk, he heard the apology in his voice, hating the sound of it. “I didn’t know you came in so early.” She was looking past him, her eyes scanning the walls as if she were looking for something—which he knew she was: Marjorie’s paintings, each painted by an Oliver girl. All gone. Marjorie had taken them with her, and the walls were now bare and white. The office had a bright, clean, monastic look. He loved it, it energized him, and seeing in his secretary’s eyes her resistance to this new sparseness, he felt his own stubbornness rising and was glad for it. No more apologies. Just be yourself, his wife had reminded him, and so, in his awkward way, had his own proud dad who never even finished high school. “I’m a lucky man,” he found himself telling Mrs. Rice, his eyes focused on hers. But her eyes slid away, and he decided not to tell her how during his early morning run he’d been overcome with gratitude for his good fortune at being chosen as the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
“Marjorie always came in at eight o’clock,” Mrs. Rice said. “I always came in at seven. It gave me time alone to get ready.” Then she was out the door.
Alone now in the bright summer light pouring through the glass doors that looked out on the campus, he realized he was still standing in the exact spot beside his desk where he rose to after being caught on his knees by Mrs. Rice. His face was still burning. So it’s not cool to pray! he thought, suddenly angry. “Well, you’ve never lost a child,” he whispered to the door. “How do you know what to be grateful for?” He moved to his desk and sat down, already feeling just a little childish, unheadmasterly, to have allowed the words. He recalled his wife’s reminder not to let their old wound tempt him to take elevated positions—as if losing a child makes one wiser than all the people who hadn’t.
The day had already lost some of the luster it had when he’d walked into this office fifteen minutes ago at a quarter to seven, two weeks before he was required. His contract called for him to start on the first of July, but when Marjorie moved out of the head’s house and cleaned out her office with surprising speed—“Who wants to die slowly?” she had asked—he was able to start earlier. He was too eager, too full of ideas, to sit around waiting. Now a piece of him wondered if he should have followed his wife’s advice—or was it a request?—and taken two weeks’ vacation. He shook his head, like a dog coming out of water. He would get on with his day.
His desk was bare, save for a framed photograph of his wife and the file of papers he had requested from Carl Vincent, the school’s elderly business manager. He opened the file, turning directly to the projected budget for the fiscal year, soon to begin on July 1, 1991. Attached to the first page was a note from Vincent, dated just two days ago, telling him these were the latest projections “which the board has not seen because I’m presenting them to you first, according to protocol.”
Fred felt a tickle of suspicion. Something was a little fishy about this note. But he put this aside and turned to the numbers. For several minutes the figures were a blur because his mind insisted on lingering over his awkward tête-à-tête with Mrs. Rice. Besides, he knew the gist of these numbers already; he’d been over them many times during his interviews and since his appointment.
He already knew there was a projected deficit of $245,000. So he didn’t look at the bottom line. Instead he went right to the revenue figures. That’s where the problem lay: The school had been under-enrolled for five years. And now there was a baby bust, a precipitous drop in the nation’s teenage population. And even if that were not the case, the appeal of single-sex education for girls had been declining for reasons that only consultants pretended to understand. Large deficits had increased in each of those five years, culminating in this latest, biggest one. So now the accumulated operating deficit, on top of the capital deficit caused by the failure to raise enough money to fund the new theater, the last of Marjorie’s pet projects, amounted to a total indebtedness of over two million dollars.
The way Carl Vincent had presented the numbers was hard to interpret. In fact, they were a mess. So it was a little while before Fred realized that these numbers were not the same as those he had studied so carefully just before he accepted the position, confident that the notion of single-sex education was so compelling to young women that all the school needed to fill again was a good marketing