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.
THREE
Well, has the shoe dropped yet?” Rachel’s father asked. He’d picked up the phone on the very first ring.
“No, Dad, it’s only August,” she reminded him. She knew better than to claim that shoes don’t always have to drop.
“When it does, it will be some issue you didn’t know was out there,” her father said. He felt a powerful empathy for Fred Kindler and was sure that the brevity of his tenure was the result of the latest dogma: everybody gets to have an opinion whether they know anything or not. He should know. He’d lost the presidency of a small liberal arts college in Ohio because he hadn’t been sufficiently eager to lead by persuasion in an institution where the faculty had tenure and he did not.
Rachel had had a lot of practice leading her father away from subjects she didn’t feel like talking about, so it was easy to get him to ask for news