“Good news,” her father said. “I’m happy for him.”
“I am too, Dad,” Rachel said just as Margaret opened the door and poked her head inside. Rachel assumed she was going to tell her Milton Perkins was on the phone. “Dad, I have to go,” she said.
“Well, then go,” he said huffily into the phone. “But remember, it’s only August—not too late to tell the board you’ve changed your mind.” Then he hung up.
Margaret told Rachel that Milton had decided to come to school to talk with her face to face rather than just on the phone, and that he’d be here in just a few minutes. “Good,” Rachel said, her prospects for the morning brightening still more. “When’s my meeting with Francis?”
“Not today.” Margaret flushed, as if slightly embarrassed, or feeling a surge of happiness. Rachel couldn’t tell. “He left. He’ll be back for the first day of classes.”
“Left?”
Margaret nodded. “He and Peggy. To the Cape. They’ll be with their son, Sidney. A family celebration, I guess. He wants you to know, he’s moving back in with Peggy. Isn’t that wonderful? What a great way to start the year!”
Rachel agreed that it was. So what if she had to wait till the first day of classes to appoint Francis? Everybody had been afraid the Plummers were going to divorce. The hot contention between them as leaders of the pro- and anti-Kindler factions had brought to the surface the grievance of their religious differences they had been burying in years of overwork. Everybody knew Peggy was a devout Episcopalian, deeply involved in the local parish, and that Francis never accompanied her to church. He didn’t hide the fact that he saw divinity differently from his wife: in nature, “just like the Pequot People who once lived right here.” Every once in a while in class he would talk about a transcendent, egoless moment when he was a little boy fishing with his father and an ancient turtle had swum up from the bottom of the lake and presented itself to just him. “My father saw him but didn’t see,” he would say. “Here I am, the turtle’s message was as we stared at each other, and I felt myself melt into him and him into me and both of us into everything. Then the turtle sank back down out of sight and I was me again, though I didn’t want to be, and my father was my father, an other, and everything was else.”
When Fred Kindler arrived early in the summer one year ago and Francis fled to California ostensibly as the faculty advisor to a school-sponsored archaeological dig on an ancient Native American village where a housing tract was about to blossom, Francis had claimed he was on a vision quest. But Peggy had claimed it was part of a crack up, a mid-life crisis, which, if he weren’t so immature, would have happened earlier. What he was really doing was running away from his responsibility to show Fred Kindler where all the rocks and shoals were. God knows there were plenty of them.
Rachel remembered the sudden silence that had come over the faculty room last year, soon after a mysterious fire had destroyed the library, when Fred Kindler announced that there would be a substitute co-dorm parent, named Patience Sommers, to partner with Peggy in what had been the Plummers’ dorm for thirty-four years. Everyone had looked down at the floor rather than let their eyes meet either Peggy’s or Francis’s, who were sitting as far apart from each other as they could get. It had just become clear that there was too much bitterness between them to work together. Peggy believed that Francis agreed with the opinion, widely expressed by the student council, to which Francis was the advisor, that the fire that consumed the library was a sacred fire because it also consumed the Pequot Indian artifacts which Peggy had reverently curated. It was Peggy who had created the display and provided it the most prominent space in her library. She also collaborated with interested members of the faculty to use the display as stimulus for creating the school’s celebrated comparative anthropology course. Paradoxically, it was the respect for other cultures engendered by that course that inspired the student council’s assertion to the board, signed by almost every student in the school, that Miss Oliver’s had no right to possess what rightfully belonged to conquered Native Americans. Francis didn’t deny that he agreed with the recommendation. It was the last straw for Peggy. She told him to leave. He moved off campus. Thanks to Fred Kindler’s sensitiveness, the announcement that Patience Sommers would replace Francis was the last item on the agenda. The faculty room had never emptied so fast.
Now, thanks largely to the imagination and skillful work of Fred Kindler and Peggy Plummer, there was a new library with a wing owned jointly by the Pequot Nation and Miss Oliver’s arraying a more extensive, richer display of artifacts owned by the Pequot Nation, one of whose officials sat on the board of Miss Oliver’s. Rachel was as happy for herself as for the Plummers. Francis would be even more powerful in his new position with his marriage on the mend.
“All right then, please set up a meeting with Patience Sommers,” Rachel said.
“Not necessary,” Margaret said. “The Plummers already told Patience she wouldn’t be needed anymore. They hoped you wouldn’t mind. They felt it should come from them.” “Of course I don’t mind,” Rachel said, but as soon as the words were out, she knew she did. It was her prerogative, not theirs, to make such decisions. She felt a twitch of resentment.
“Their car was packed and ready to go when I called,” Margaret said. “They want to get to know each other again, I guess. They’ve done all their prep for starting school. They’ve been here for years, they don’t need the time.”
Rachel frowned. “Even so, don’t you think they should have asked me if they could leave?”
Margaret flushed again. “Yes, and I told them so, but obviously they didn’t agree,” she said, and in the heavy silence that followed, Rachel wondered if Margaret was embarrassed for her new boss’s lack of authority or for the Plummers’ behavior. Then Margaret’s face lighted up with relief: the subject was about to be changed. She gestured toward the French doors and said, “Here comes Milton now.”
Rachel turned, relieved too, and watched Milton Perkins’s thin, slightly stooped frame come toward her across the lawn, wearing a shirt and tie even on this warm summer day. She went out through the doors to meet him. He already knew she liked to walk by the river. They headed that way together.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, sparing her the usual how-are-you exchange. She told him the good news about the Plummers.
“Really? Back together? I didn’t think that was going to happen.”
“Neither did I, and neither did Margaret.”
“Well, I have to say I’m glad we were wrong,” he said.
“The whole school’s going to be glad, especially the girls in their dorm,” Rachel said. “I was going to appoint him today, but he and Peggy went to the Cape. They want to get to know each other again,” she added, quoting Margaret.
He didn’t answer, just nodded his head. She was surprised. She wondered if he’d guessed that the Plummers hadn’t sought her permission to leave before the weekend began.
When they had reached the trail along the river, he put his hands on his hips. “This is a nice place to walk.” Indeed it was. The trail followed the edge of a bluff into an open field, high above where the river broadened. There was no wind that day, and the water below them was placid, a big, smooth heave on the way to the Sound. It always settled Rachel’s mind to walk along there where the river would still be running long after she was gone.
“We ought to sell this waterfront land,” Milton Perkins said out of nowhere. Rachel couldn’t tell whether he was actually serious. Maybe he was just pushing her buttons. There was a wide streak of irreverence in the man. There had been glee in his eyes when he had talked to the faculty and made up a story of a survey he’d recently read that showed that the IQs of liberals averaged twenty-five points lower