Saying Grace
A Novel
Beth Gutcheon
For Robin Clements, beloved husband
And for my father, Frank E. Richardson, Jr., honored trustee, who fifty years ago saved a now famous midwestern country day school from impaling itself on a point of history. (In a fraught silence at a meeting of the school community called to decide whether the paralyzed school could continue to exist, he rose and addressed the sitting board, some of them founding members, all elderly rich men unaccustomed to compromise. He suggested that in order to allow for such innovations as parent committees, opening the board to women, and term limits for trustees, they should resign in a body. They all said, “Thank God, a solution,” and did so.)
To the woman who sent me the Elegy of Yuan Chen so long ago: If you read this, you will know I have never forgotten the story of your son. Here’s a patch for his memory quilt.
I owe grateful thanks to many others for various kinds of support and assistance. I thank Wendy Weil and Diane Reverand for their everlasting steadiness, for their professional support, and especially for the pleasure of their friendship. I thank Bitsie Root and Jerri Witt for invaluable suggestions on the manuscript and readers Emily Conroy, Pam Jones, and Cathy Lynn, whose reactions were more helpful than they can imagine. I am grateful for the assistance of John B. Clements, who shares a great deal of Georgia’s musical taste. Anyone familiar with the field will recognize that somewhere along the line Rue has met and been deeply impressed by the generous spirit and giant brain of Peggy McIntosh; Rue and her creator both are grateful for the encounter. And last and most I am grateful for the wit, intelligence, and cherished friendship of Douglas Ware.
Contents
Begin Reading
About the Author
Other Books by Beth Gutcheon
Copyright
About the Publisher
It was two days before the opening of school when the Spanish teacher dropped dead. Dropped is the right word; she was on her knees in the garden, cleaning out the crocosmia bed, when she felt a sudden lightball of pain in her chest, and then was herself extinguished. She toppled face-forward into the fragrant California earth, and lay there, stiffening in the September sunshine, wearing her green-and-yellow gardening gloves. She was otherwise dressed for work. It was the faculty’s first day back at The Country School, and the news of her death found her colleagues gathered in Packard gymnasium for a CPR course, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on rubber women.
As her colleagues mourned and comforted each other, Rue Shaw left the gym to hurry across campus to her office. Under the circumstances, she was struck by the illusion the parched campus imparted of a serene and manageable universe. The fields where the bigger boys played football were freshly mowed and green from a summer of sprinklers. As she passed, Manuel was laying down lines in white lime so that all could see the structure of the game, the clear boundary between in and out, good and bad, safe and sorry. Everywhere the scent of cut grass mingled with the smell of eucalyptus.
The offices of the Head, and all the rest of the administration, were in a building known as Home, because it had been the original homestead when the campus was a ranch. The Plum family who pioneered it had grown prosperous and built a grand Victorian farmhouse with wide, covered porches and the latest in gingerbread trim, in which Rue now lived. From there the Plum family had raised livestock and apricots and used the old homestead for a sheep barn. Rue Shaw now bustled into Home through the dutch door, which Merilee kept open at the top to let in the sunlight and the perfume of the outside air and closed at the bottom to keep out the campus dogs and cats. Rue went straight past Merilee’s desk to find her assistant head, Mike Dianda. His office, which had once been a birthing pen for lambs, was low and cluttered, with heavy dark beams and small windows. Mike’s desk was stacked with papers and books; he had more than once misplaced his telephone and had had to wait for it to ring so he could find it.
In Mike’s office, miscreant children sent to be sentenced sat in the ladderback wooden chair facing his desk. But the soft leather chair against the bookcase was only for Rue, for when she came in with mugs of tea at the end of the day and kicked the door closed behind her. Mike was to Rue like the brother she never had. He was tart, smart, handsome, and funny, and as far as she could tell, never afraid to tell her she was wrong. The collaboration was particularly successful because he did not want her job. He would make a fine school head when his life was more his own, but at the moment as a gay man and a single parent he had enough on his plate getting his daughters through school.
“I talked with the mother in Albuquerque,” said Mike, as Rue appeared in his doorway.
“How is she?”
“They knew Mariel had a heart condition.”
“Did they? Did we know it?”
“I didn’t. Maybe Lynn Ketchum did, or Cynda Goldring. They were closest to her.”
“Will they have the funeral here?”
“No, they’re taking her back to New Mexico. We’ll have to have a memorial.”
“God. Yes. When?” They both looked at the calendar. Beginning of term was jammed with conferences, trustee meetings, parent council meetings.
Rue said, “I better call Fletcher Sincerbeaux. And Helen Lord, and…who else has Spanish in Primary?”
“Would Mrs. Ladabaum come back, do you think?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know, isn’t she in Florida?”
“Would we want her if she’d come? She was getting awfully deaf.”
“Of course…I never saw a better teacher. We must have an ear trumpet somewhere.”
“Okay, I’ll find her,” said Mike.
Rue went off to her office to start calling fellow school heads who might have a lead on a Spanish teacher.
On the wall in her office Rue kept a framed motto from Lucy Madeira, a famous East Coast educator. It read: “Function in disaster, finish in style.” She often wondered what motto her predecessors, Carla and Lourdes Plum, would have willed her, had they been able to imagine her. The Plum family had proved over time to be as unfruitful as their land was lush, and their line narrowed and stopped with the spinster sisters, Carla and Lourdes, who had made a living conducting a day school according to tenets of their own devising.
Rue had made a study of the “archives” left by the Miss Plums. These artifacts were piled in wooden milk boxes and stored in the abandoned ice house, and included papers, letters, programs from Germans and Christmas plays, books, bottles of Coca-Cola syrup with which they treated children’s coughs, woolen bathing suits, theatrical costumes, and some untouched ration books from World War II. The Miss Plums had gaily mixed notions of progressive education which they read about in papers sent out from New York, with their favorite parts of Science and Health, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and the teachings of Madame Blavatsky. They believed that babies were born with their souls and their life paths fully formed, so there was no point imposing structure from without that might serve to crowd or cloud the structure within. They believed that every child had an aura which could be read, and that after death, that aura remained on earth, not so much a ghost as an angel, so the clear California air was crowded for them with invisible beings, concerned with the ways of woman and intervening in all her doings.
If the Miss Plums were right in their interesting theories, then no doubt their own auras lingered on the campus of The Country School, interfering in the business of shaping young lives in the ways most likely to confirm their own beliefs. If their theories were in error no one would ever know, because the Depression had put an end to their experiment before a significant sample of scholars could be sent out into the world. Their school was closed, and the Miss Plums lived by selling off bits and pieces o
f outer pastures until only fifteen acres remained. By that time World War II had brought prosperity back to the region, and the Miss Plums lived to see others make large profits on land that had recently been theirs. Their joint Will and Testament left what land and money remained for the founding of a Country Day School, on acres that had once been lost in a wide expanse of range and orchard, but by the last decade of the twentieth century formed a hemmed-in green patch of nature, bonsaied between expensive developer houses and an upscale mall called The Countrye Mile. The campus was like a patch of the world as it once had been, but in a jar, with the top off.
Emily Dahl arrived in Seven Springs by accident, if there are accidents. She had driven north until the children got hungry, and pulled off the highway into the nearest town. Her blond hair was clammy from heat and dirt, and there were half-moon perspiration stains under her breasts on her once crisp lemon-yellow blouse. She kept thinking of things she had forgotten to pack. A favorite pair of gardening shoes she had left outside the back door. A book she was reading, left facedown on the clothes hamper beside the bathtub. The worst was David’s gerbil. Fortunately, David had not yet noticed.
She found that Seven Springs was a town of some natural beauty. There were fruit trees, citrus, and apricot, and on the dry hills, avocado. She and Malone and David found a taco restaurant that was air-conditioned. Across the street was a movie house that must have been built in the thirties. It had dusty art deco lettering on the marquee and the front of the theater was faced with black marble. It was cracked now, with pieces missing, but the whole effect was evocative; she remembered the theater in the town on Long Island where she grew up, where the whole eighth grade would show up at the movies on Saturday night. If you liked somebody and he liked you, you would sit apart from the group, in the balcony. There would be frightened bumblings having to do with the boy getting his arm around you while pretending to stretch. You would then die of embarrassment as you waited another hour or so for him to get the nerve to let his arm, lying across the back of your seat, inch down to encircle your shoulders. This, Emily realized, was a memory from a simpler world.
Malone squinted across the street at the movie house while she ate. Eleven years old, she had just gotten her first pair of glasses. She looked like a cross between a beautiful bombshell and a baby owl.
“Mom, What About Bob just started.”
“Did it? Can you read the times from all the way over here?”
Malone nodded. “You’d only miss a little bit of it and I can tell you what happened.”
David said “Are we going to the movies?” David the space cadet noticed everything two beats after everyone else.
“I don’t know,” said Emily, wondering really, Why not? What else did they have to do that evening? “Sure, if you want to.”
“Yea,” said Malone and bounced in her seat. This was a New Mom. The Old Mom wasn’t so good at actually hearing what other people wanted. The Old Mom didn’t tend to consider that someone else’s plan might be just as good as hers.
So they went to the movie and ate popcorn even though they had already had tacos, and when they got out it was cool and dark and you could see Venus and the Big Dipper.
“Why don’t we find a motel with a pool?” said Emily, and this had met with wild enthusiasm, so they had stayed in Seven Springs for the night. The children splashed and shouted until the manager turned off the pool lights at nine o’clock. Emily could only watch, since one of things she’d forgotten was her bathing suit.
The next morning, over breakfast at a House of Pancakes, they took a poll and decided this town seemed as good a place as any to light and settle. Emily suspected that excess sugar and bread and circuses were behind the choice, since everything they had done since they arrived was an out-of-the-ordinary, somebody’s-birthday kind of treat. But the choice was made, and Emily stopped at the office of the first real estate company she saw.
The Coldwell Banker lady, Sylvia French, was a “people person.” That, translated, meant she had been out of the job market for fifteen years and had no professional skills, beyond being an extremely nice woman. Fortunately, in Seven Springs there was a market for that. Sylvia had two children in a local private school for which she had run endless cookie sales and book fairs and drives to collect winter coats for the homeless. She was a fountain of enthusiasm for the town, for her school, for her belief in the widely available bounty of goodness life had to offer, and she loved accumulating details about other people’s lives. Sylvia was not the sort of woman who needed much privacy. In fact, she abhorred a vacuum, which is how she perceived silence. She sat at the wheel of her big sedan, her glossy cap of dark hair shining, her large brown slightly bulging eyes even bigger behind huge square-framed glasses, chattering as she expertly drove.
“I don’t know if this is in your price range but I must just show you these homes because they are so affordable, for what they are,” she burbled as she pulled into a crescent drive on which stood five or six monstrosities, on parched clay in which not a shrub or field daisy grew, only the odd blade of onion grass and some blackened stalks of what might have been milkweed. The houses were in a half-timbered Tudor style with a soupcon of French chateau thrown in. “Two master suites, two guest rooms, dining room, living room, family room, two-car garage, full basement…it’s all basically the same floor plan, but they’re flopped in this one and that one. So you can choose which way you want the view. Would you like to see inside?” Emily could see through the window of the nearest one that they also had nasty low ceilings, gaudy brass fixtures, and skip-troweling on the walls, like a pretentious motel.
“I think you better tell me the price,” said Emily.
“They’re asking a million six. It would be closer to two, but so many developers went belly-up in the last three years….”
“Ah,” said Emily.
From the plush back seat of Mrs. French’s car, Malone caught sight of something promising in the yard. “Mom, are we going to have a hot tub?” Emily didn’t answer. She was thinking that at these prices, Malone would be lucky to have her own bedroom.
“Mom,” said David from some zone of his own, “Where’s Ralph?”
Something in his odd little brain had at this moment come across the memory of his gerbil.
“I’m afraid that’s a good deal out of my range at the moment,” said Emily, knowing that she was wearing a very expensive watch and shoes, and that cars like her Volvo station wagon, which was currently parked in front of Sylvia’s office, didn’t come in Crackerjack boxes. How to convey that things were not what they appeared with them, that their circumstances had changed rather suddenly.
“It’s…” Emily began, and then stopped. Inadvertently she glanced in the rearview mirror at the children.
“I understand,” said Sylvia. And amazingly, she did. Sylvia glanced sideways and suddenly understood, from something fugitive in the smile or perhaps from the uncertain way Emily’s hand moved to push her hair back, that this very put-together, self-assured, and glossy human had suffered a recent and frightening crack in her foundation, and was trying to keep it from spreading. It wasn’t hard to guess the rest.
“Let’s try down here in the Lake District,” Sylvia said, turning the car away from the parched heights she had been ascending. “It’s an older neighborhood, very quiet and safe. I call it the Lake District, of course there’s no lake. There’s a street called Lake, and a very pretty pond with a playground, and a dog run. Do you have a dog?”
“No.”
“Mom,” said David a little more insistently, “where’s Ralph?”
“We have a gerbil,” said Emily. To David: “He’s in your bedroom in his cage.”
“Here?” asked David.
“Honey, you know he isn’t in the motel room. He’s in your old bedroom in Daddy’s house.” Daddy’s house. That was the first time it had ever been anything but “our house.”
“Who will feed him?” David asked.
?
??I’m sure Daddy will,” said Emily, lying. She doubted that Tom even knew they had a gerbil. It could be weeks before anything caused him to visit one of his children’s rooms. She’d have to call a neighbor who knew where the key was, ask someone to take Ralph home till she could arrange to come back for him.
They were driving down a winding street with far more modest houses than the Affordable Homes, fairly close together, under arching trees. These were houses from the twenties, frame and brick, many needing a little paint, or a lot of yard work. “You’ll want to be close to The Country School,” Sylvia was saying. “The public school, I’ll take you by it, it isn’t actually a bad school, they’ve only had one incident, I think, of children in Primary bringing guns to school, but The Country School is so special.”
Pressing to hear all her options, Emily learned that the town also boasted a private elementary school run by Scientologists, an Orthodox Jewish school, which was probably the toughest of all academically but you had to take half your courses in Hebrew, and a wildly progressive school called Greenmere, where they did a great deal of “water play” and didn’t start to read until fifth grade. Country’s most serious competitor was an ex-military school, where the children still drilled in patterned marching, carrying wooden rifles during PE. Sylvia said it was fine academically, but to her mind rather rigid and joyless.
“You better tell me about The Country School,” said Emily.
“It’s like a family,” said Sylvia. “That’s the most important thing. You feel that every child matters, that there are no favorites. Every parent too. The Head is a woman named Rue Shaw, and she is really something special. She’s smart, she has a sense of humor, and she has principles. Your kids don’t just get into the best high schools, although they do that too, they also learn to be really nice people.”