“She’s a danger to us!” Oliver roared. “Look at us! Do you want to go through what we just went through?”
“I can’t apologize any more than I already have. I understand your point of view, but I am not prepared to fire Mrs. Trainer at this time.”
That was the moment. They would stand, they would announce that they withdrew their children, then they would march out, call their lawyers, and call Chandler Kip.
To her surprise, they stayed seated.
“We want Lyndie moved to Mrs. Douglas’s class immediately. Today,” said Oliver.
“I’ll have to talk to Mrs. Douglas, her class is full. But I’m inclined to think that is the best thing to do.”
“It isn’t the best thing,” said Sondra. “Lyndie has friends in her class. She’ll have to start all over again. The best thing is to fire Mrs. Trainer.”
There was a silence. After a minute, Rue stood up. “I understand your feelings, and I’m taking them very seriously. Thank you for giving me so much of your time. I hope we’ll be able to go on from here and make this a really good school year for Lyndie.” She was fairly amazed when the Sales stood up and filed out. She’d begun to fear they might fall upon her and beat her. Or worse: simply stay all day.
Emily was at the door with a list in her hand and a stack of pink telephone messages. Before she could start, Mike slipped in and dropped into the chair Oliver had left.
“One minute, Emily,” said Rue. “I’ll be done as soon as I can.” Emily handed her the messages, went out, and closed the door.
“They’re staying. They want Lyndie moved to Evelyn’s class. I’m inclined to do it.”
“God, Rue. You’re going to have eight other families in here by carpool time, demanding you move their children too.”
“I know. I’ll just have to weather it. Mike, what am I going to do? This has to be Catherine’s last year. I don’t think she’s slipped as much as they say, but the rumors are getting corrosive.”
“If only she had let me make the call. If only she’d let you do it.”
“Yes, I know, thank you very much. I haven’t taken enough flak.”
“I’d have done it,” said Mike.
“You have nerves of steel.” Mike smiled and flexed a bicep like Charles Atlas. Rue told him about Lyndie’s anger at Catherine.
“I can’t send her back to that class now. She couldn’t learn with that kind of mistrust between them.”
“Does she want to switch?” Mike asked.
“I think so. Though the mother said she’s made close friends that she doesn’t want to leave. Malone Dahl and Jennifer Lowen?”
“Yes—but Emily says that Malone and Lyndie made friends at first because Malone was new. Now that she’s finding her way with Jennifer’s friends, Malone’s cooling off on Lyndie.”
“Because Malone’s a climber?”
“Not only that. They were never a perfect match. Lyndie is…”
“Weird,” said Rue.
“Well, yes.”
“So the question is, Is that the cause? Or the effect? Is she weird because something bad goes on at home? Or is the family uptight because one of the kids is weird?”
“One of them?”
Rue thought for a moment about Jonathan Sale, and then she thought about Georgia, and she wondered what it would do to you to have a baby, hoping it would grow to be bright and funny and loving, have a happy life, and instead you got…Jonathan Sale?
“Sometimes I wonder how anyone has the heart to have children at all.”
“I spent a little time with Lloyd Merton this morning. He had Lyndie in his class last year. He told me something that will make your hair fall off.”
“Tell.”
“He’s quite good friends with his opposite number at Seven Springs Middle, I forget her name, Joan…”
“Thor. I know her. Good teacher.”
“Lloyd ran into her somewhere and asked her how Lyndie had been in her class. Lyndie was having a hard time adjusting, he thought. Joan told him that early in the year, Lyndie came to her in tears and showed her some mean notes someone had left in her locker. ‘Lyndie is a poop,’ that kind of thing. Lloyd says that Joan is absolutely certain that Lyndie wrote the notes herself.”
Rue felt sick. She and Mike stared at each other.
“I think I better talk to Bonnie,” she said.
Bonnie listened to all that Rue told her.
“Complicated,” she said.
“You mean you’re not going to tell me that Colonel Mustard did it with a knife in the library?”
“Nope, sorry. I’d have to talk to the whole family.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. But if you have any chance to observe Lyndie, or even make friends with her, I’d appreciate any insight.”
“Of course.”
“Have you got any advice for me about Chandler Kip, by the way?”
“He’s a typical One,” said Bonnie.
“One what?”
“On the Enneagram. He’s a One, a typical Achiever.”
“What, pray tell, is an Enneagram?”
“It’s an ancient system, probably Zoroastrian, for recognizing personality types. There are nine.”
“And what is the use of it?”
“It’s useful to remember people are different. Otherwise you can make the mistake of thinking all failures are failures of character. If Chandler is a typical One, then by definition, he’s convinced he can do your job better than you can.”
“I already knew that. Let me ask you this. Leaving aside her type for a moment, do you think Catherine understands how hard she is making it for me to protect her?”
“No.”
“Does she have any sense of how much dissatisfaction there is with her performance?”
“No. She’s a…”
“Don’t tell me…”
“Two. But not such a typical one.”
“I’m beginning to feel she’s a typical birdbrain, and I don’t have much hope of getting her to hear me.”
“No,” said Bonnie. “I don’t blame you.”
They sat silent for a moment.
“What’s a Two?” asked Rue.
“A Helper. It’s a personality that gets its satisfaction from a feeling of being of service. It’s not a very intellectual type, and it can be a person who’s so focused on Doing Good that she doesn’t see the big picture.”
“I see,” said Rue. “I thought maybe it was a person who was prematurely deaf.”
Henry was very glad to have Rue home again. He’d lost a patient over the weekend, a young woman who had had four operations for brain tumors and was scheduled for a fifth. The tumors were technically nonmalignant, but that hardly mattered if they kept blossoming like cauliflowers inside her nonexpandable skull. The patient had been gallant and funny in the face of excruciating headaches, and though Henry knew he was going to lose her, he was taking it hard.
“Tell me about your parents,” he said.
“Are you sure we’re finished with Myrna?”
“I’m supposed to be so objective. What kind of a sick idea is that? Your patient is an object. Do you think there are doctors who believe that?”
“Only the men. The women doctors are all models of empathy mixed with inner strength.”
“That’s what I thought. I wish I’d stuck with obstetrics.”
“Ob-Gyns lose patients too.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” he said. “I have an idea. Why don’t we run away?”
Rue laughed. Henry and Rue were out for a walk at dusk. They walked holding hands and chose a route up into the hills, away from traffic, alongside groves of orange and avocado trees. The land was dry, but the air was fresh with spicy smells from the bark and the fruit and the drying eucalyptus leaves beneath their feet. This was a new luxury, this evening walk. When Georgia had been at home, Rue insisted on having supper early, so Georgia could get on with her homework. Now they often stayed outside together,
walking and talking over the events of the day, until the blue streaks of last light, and ate supper late, by candlelight.
“That’s a great idea,” said Rue. “When I was ten I decided to live in a tree when I grew up, like the Swiss Family Robinson. No one would know I was there, and no one could find me when they were mad at me.”
“My idea is very similar. We are perfectly matched. My idea is we go to Canyon de Chelly and live in the ruins up on a cliff. The roofs are all gone but it won’t matter, it never rains there.”
Rue looked at him with wide eyes. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Fine, let’s leave tomorrow. Let the parents all beat their children senseless, let Mr. Herring run the school since he knows how.” Henry was a great fan of Rue’s father’s habit of naming people by association. He treasured new examples of the genre. “I missed you a lot,” he added.
Rue stopped walking to put her arms around him.
“I missed you too. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“I feel pulled in too many directions,” he said. “My patient is dead and all my partners want to talk about is joining an HMO. My wife’s three thousand miles away, her school is on fire, and I miss Georgia.”
She held him and nodded. She missed Georgia too.
“Will she be shocked, do you think, to find we’ve fled the scene and gone to live on a cliff?” Rue asked.
“Of course not, she’d be proud.”
“I think you’re right,” said Rue.
After supper Rue ordinarily got into bed with a book while Henry, who needed little sleep, sat up in his study. Sometimes he watched old movies on cable, or wrote to Georgia, and sometimes he played war games on his computer. But this fall, unbeknownst to Rue, he spent at least an hour every night reading aloud into a tape recorder. For years Rue had been saying that she wanted to reread Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but she was never going to have time. He was reading them to her as a Christmas present, so she could listen to them while she worked in the garden. They were quite harrowing, he found, but haunting. He always had trouble giving Rue anything; she seemed to have everything she wanted. This year, all fall, he was looking forward to Christmas.
The scene of the October trustee meeting resembled Gettysburg after three days of fighting. The field was trampled and covered with gore, and hardly a blade of grass was standing. Bodies lay everywhere, and only Rue, Ann Rosen, the killer divorce lawyer, and Chandler Kip remained in the fray.
Rue and Ann Rosen had planned a reasoned discussion of personnel issues, especially the hiring and firing of teachers. Chandler had derailed that by announcing his own topic: he wanted to abolish Annual Giving. He sat in his $1,600 suit and his $200 necktie, and reported that it was offensive and unnecessary to ask hardworking families for donations over and above the tuition they already paid. Schools should run like businesses. If the school couldn’t run on the money it earned, then tuitions should be raised.
“Chandler, this isn’t a hardware store!” Ann Rosen had snapped. That was the first salvo, but it had been met with a roar of returning fire from Chandler’s side. Now Ann and her allies sipped coffee from paper cups in hollow-eyed silence as Rue tried to hold the fort.
“When the Wall Street Journal publishes a list of the twenty best colleges in the country, the first measure, the first, Chandler, is how much more the college spends per student than the cost of the tuition. Harvard costs $20,000 a year and it spends $50,000. On every undergraduate.”
“They have a huge endowment. We don’t.”
“How do you think they got a huge endowment?”
“They established themselves in a noncompetitive environment. Men got rich before the days of income tax, they went to Harvard, they could afford to be generous. The world has changed.”
“Women went to Harvard too,” said Ann Rosen wearily. “I went to Harvard.” Chandler ignored her. “But I admit, it was after the income tax,” she added, and Sylvia French laughed. Chandler glared at them.
“It’s uncharitable not to have Annual Giving,” Rue said. “If you raise tuition to cover operating costs, you’re going to lose students every time you do it, and they’ll be just the students you don’t want to lose.”
“I don’t agree. This is an entrepreneurial world. The schools that should survive are the ones that do the best job for the least money, and the people who should go to them are the people who can afford them.”
There was a groan from Ann Rosen. She whispered something to Sylvia. Terry Malko, sitting next to Ann, was taking notes in a tiny handwriting with a beautiful gold and red lacquer fountain pen.
“Suppose,” said Terry, “instead of Annual Giving, we have giving for special projects. You could give a computer to the second grade, let’s say, if you know your child’s classroom needs one.”
“So you can give money in a way that benefits your own child?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s just what we don’t need,” Rue said. “We are trying to build a community in which everyone understands that what is needed on this earth is the decent survival of all. Not a world in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And not a ghetto where your children meet only other children whose backgrounds are just like theirs! That is unfair to your children, and it’s not an education. We are trying to teach our students that in this world you repay the gifts you’ve been given, with interest. You don’t grab up as much as you can and scramble up a ladder with it, kicking at the hands on the rungs below you. And the first and best way we teach them that is by setting the example ourselves.”
“Amen,” whispered Ann Rosen.
“Yes, Amen,” said Chandler in a nasty tone. “Except I wasn’t aware you had been ordained, Rue.”
“I’m sorry to be pompous, it’s a failing of mine,” said Rue. “But this school has a mission, and what I said is an important part of it.”
“Then we have an important disagreement,” said Chandler quietly. “I believe that this country was built by individualists. The revolution was fought by men who weren’t afraid to say ‘Bullshit’ to bullshit, who wouldn’t pay taxes that exploited them without giving them any return. The economy, and the character of this country, were built by men who go their own way, take care of their own, and who aren’t afraid of competition. That’s what I think this school stands for. And I’m prepared to put it to a vote.” Rue stared back at him appalled.
“And women,” said Ann Rosen, as she made an X on a tic-tac-toe grid and pushed the paper over to Sylvia.
“What?” said Chandler.
“Men and women. The revolution was fought by men and women. ‘The national character was built by men and women who.’”
Chandler didn’t get it. He turned questioning to Terry, who smiled slightly but didn’t speak. Chandler let it pass. Terry turned to look at Ann.
“I move we vote to abolish Annual Giving. Second?”
Rue said, “Chandler, it’s late. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to poll the community before we do something that will be very hard to undo?”
“We can’t respond to that motion, Rue, since you’re not a voting member of the Board. Is there a second to my motion?”
“I move to table the motion,” said Ann Rosen.
“Second,” said Sylvia French. Rue thanked them with her eyes. Just then, the door to the music room, where they were meeting, surrounded by pictures of musical notes and shelves full of Orff instruments, opened. Looking very apologetic, buffed and coiffed like a model, Chandler’s almost beautiful wife poked her head in and waggled her fingers at the group. “Hello…sorry…sorry to interrupt…shall I wait in the car?”
“No, come in, come in, of course not, come in, Bobbi,” said everyone except Chandler. Bobbi scooted in and sat in a tiny chair against the wall, as if by achieving stillness quickly she could erase the interruption, and perhaps her presence.
Chandler looked back at the table. His motion was unseconded and he felt suddenly that his control
of the group was at an ebb, now that he was being picked up at school as if by his mother.
“My car’s in the shop. Again,” he said, and got a murmur of sympathy.
“Damn Jags,” said Terry. “They’re pretty though.” Everyone agreed.
“Well,” said Chandler. “There’s a motion on the table. All in favor?”
Everyone said ‘Aye,’ except Chandler. He took a breath.
“Motion to adjourn?”
“So moved,” said Sylvia.
“Second,” said Terry.
“Meeting adjourned. Thank you all,” said Chandler, standing.
Everyone else began to talk wearily and gather papers and pens and handouts. Bobbi popped up and went to rub against her husband, like a cat marking territory.
Henry had built a fire and was waiting for Rue with a glass of wine beside her chair.
“How did it go?”
“Unbelievable,” she said, sinking into a huddle and accepting the wine. “I thought the big issue would be personnel and the budget. I thought maybe I’d get chewed on some more because the Lowens are so mad that I moved Lyndie Sale out of Catherine Trainer’s class but I won’t move Jennifer. But no.” She described what had happened.
“I think I should ask Chandler to join my men’s group,” said Henry.
“What men’s group?”
“I think we should get together in the woods some weekend and do some drumming and chanting and then talk about what shits our fathers were until we all burst into tears. I think it would do us a world of good.”
“You know, it might. I’m out of ideas.”
“We’ll be Men together. We’ll stride around the woods carrying big sticks to show what Men we are, and we’ll talk about natural selection and kill small animals with our teeth. You can spend the afternoon with Bambi, learning to do your nails.”
“Bobbi.”
“I’m sure it’s Bambi. She works so hard on those doe eyes.”
“I could have a major revolt on my hands,” said Rue. “Without Annual Giving, I couldn’t afford Mike’s salary. It happened to a friend of mine in San Diego. The Board made him balance the budget by firing staff. He spent all day doing two people’s jobs and nearly had a nervous breakdown. The teachers lost faith in him because he could never give them time when they needed him. The parents began to run roughshod over the teachers, all the while complaining that Todd was unresponsive.”