Bonnie said thoughtfully, “The faculty is behaving like an abused child. Fits of anger. Reckless of feelings of others. Terribly upset by unpredictable behavior.”
“They should grow up,” said Rue.
Bonnie swung her legs out from under the table and turned her body to face the afternoon sun. She tipped her face up and closed her eyes. After a moment she said, “I’m hearing a lot of anger and mistrust. From the faculty and the parents. From the kids. A lot of it.”
“I know it,” said Rue. “I know it.” She sat watching Bonnie breathe. Being near her made her feel calmer. She knew she could be as heartless and childish as she wanted to be, and Bonnie would go on breathing.
“I loved this school,” Rue said. “I thought we were one body and blood. I thought I gave it health and strength. I know it gave that to me.”
“You did,” said Bonnie. “You did all that.”
“Now I’m making it sick. If the head’s sick, the body gets sick.”
“You’re not sick.”
“I’m not well.”
They sat for a while, listening to the sounds of the school. Cars were beginning to arrive in the parking lot, lining up for dismissal. The parrots yammered high in the live oaks. A dog barked in a yard up the hill, where the nearest newly built “mansions” pressed the edge of the campus.
“Are you saying good-bye?” Bonnie asked.
“Is that what it is? I wasn’t sure.”
“I don’t know, I was just asking,” said Bonnie.
“It’s like a bad place in a marriage,” Rue said. “You don’t know whether to tough it out or whether to let it go. You can’t tell if courage lies in hanging on or giving up.”
That afternoon before he left, Mike came to the door of Rue’s office. She was sitting very still, looking at whatever was on the surface before her. There was a picture of Henry. She had put away the ones of Georgia. There was a ceramic ashtray glazed in royal blue, given her in her first year at Country by a little boy who was now a Rhodes scholar. There was a silver pencil cup, and a clock, and her Rolodex. The telephone was black, and had dust between the buttons. Merilee used to clean it, but of course Emily had never thought of it and Rue would not have thought of asking her to.
The room seemed hermetic. Motes of dust were thick in the sunlight that slanted into the room from the windows over the soccer field.
“Are you all right?” Mike said from the doorway.
Rue nodded. Mike hesitated.
“Good night, then…” he said.
“Good night, Mike.”
The phones were ringing, and Mrs. Leavitt had been waiting for her appointment with Rue for twenty minutes. Emily went to Mike’s office.
“Do you know where Rue went?”
“No, isn’t she in her office?”
Emily explained about Mrs. Leavitt. Bill Glarrow came to the door and said, “Do you know where Rue is?”
“Maybe she stopped somewhere when she went out to take attendance. I’ll find her,” said Mike.
He went looking for Rue. Along the way he stopped at Primary, Middle, and at the library. Finally he found Bonnie in the preschool, and together they went back to Home, where Bonnie thought to look in the mailboxes to see if Rue had left anyone a message. In Mike’s box there was a letter on Rue’s personal paper. He opened it and read it. Bill Glarrow, Emily, and Mrs. Leavitt had all drawn near and were watching him.
“She’s resigned,” he said.
When Rue left Chandler’s office the first person she saw was Oliver Sale. He was standing outside the door in his gray suit and white shirt and massive black shoes. They stared at each other for a long moment. She nodded to him, and went past. Outside the office she pressed the button for the elevator, then decided she couldn’t wait. She went out the fire door, marked EXIT, and ran down two flights of cinderblock stairwell. She had a thought that she would be all right if she just got back into her car.
But once in the car, she couldn’t move. Here was the opposite of school. Here in daylight all the life was inside soundproof buildings, and outside nothing moved on the hot concrete. She couldn’t lift her hand to turn the key in the ignition. She had no job, no career, and no place to go. She sat in her car in the parking lot with her hands folded in her lap, swaddled by a profound silence.
She sat extraordinarily still, taking very shallow breaths, as if she were perched so marginally on the edge of existence that she might slip out of it spontaneously. She kept thinking of an elegy she had read once. She could no longer remember the poem, or the poet, but she kept hearing this line, as if someone somewhere were ringing it like a bell:
But Death, a magician, closed you in his hand and opened it suddenly empty.
Jonathan Sale had begun to hear the ghost. He heard it the first time one night after his mother turned off the light, shut his door, and clicked off down the hall in her taptap shoes. His mother was very beautiful with big hair and shiny clothes like a lady on television. She smelled good. But she didn’t smile as much as ladies on television.
Tonight she was mad at him because he patted her with his hand and he forgot he’d just been licking it. He thought his mother might like him to pat her because Lyndie had made her mad and had to be locked in her room. That meant she liked him best, but not the licking. His new teacher told him if he didn’t stop it he’d have to go to the Opportunity Room. He couldn’t stop it though because he didn’t remember doing it. His new teacher wasn’t very nice.
It was very dark at their end of the house. There had been yelling earlier. Now the house was quiet and then he heard the ghost. It was outside his door, crying and crying. He was afraid it would come in and do something to him. He wanted to tell Lyndie he could hear it now, he believed her now, but to do that he’d have to open the door.
He was very frightened, and it made him have to go to the bathroom. But the bathroom was down the hall; to go there, he’d have to open the door and he’d see what was out there. Sometimes he could hear it walking up and down, crying, and just there, then, there was a THUMP as if it had thrown itself against the door. He began to whimper and lick his hand. Being frightened made him have to go even more.
It took just over a week for Chandler to ask that a special flag-raising be held, so he could introduce the new acting headmaster. On the day, he arrived with a man in his thirties in tow, a highly polished object with pale hair and lashes, who was wearing a gray suit and black Gucci loafers. When the nearly three hundred children (minus the preschool) and their teachers stood in rows before him in the winter sunlight, Chandler himself raised the flag, and then led the Pledge of Allegiance. Then he and the pale-haired man stepped up to the microphone. He told them he was pleased that the Board had been able to bring the school’s moment of disarray to an end so quickly.
“Chip Horde holds a bachelor of science degree from Harvey Mudd, and a master’s in business administration. He has many years’ experience in the human resources field, and the Board and I feel that he is the right man to lead us through this difficult time. I know you’ll give him all the support you can as he gets his sea legs here. Please welcome Mr. Horde.”
There was anxious applause. Hundreds of faces studied this new one, wondering what his presence in their lives was going to mean. Mr. Horde gave a brief and gracious speech saying that he was glad to be on board, and that he would need their help. He said he was weak on names and would be grateful if they would introduce themselves to him each time they spoke. He said he hoped this would be a time of learning and growing together for all of them.
After classes began, Chandler brought Chip Horde up to Home to introduce him around and show him his office. Chip greeted each person on the staff by name before he was introduced.
“You must be Emily. Chip Horde, good to know you. Mike, good to know you. Bill Glarrow…so this is the Business Office? What database are you using?”
“Nutshell.”
“You’re kidding. Well.” And he went on with Chandler
into Rue’s office.
“What does he mean, ‘Good to know you,’” said Mike. “He doesn’t know me. He just got here.” He and Emily and Bill Glarrow looked toward the door of Rue’s office. The first thing Chip Horde had done was close it.
Chip Horde was on the phone with the police when Emily the secretary came to the door. It annoyed him to have her stand there listening to him. The English teacher, Cynda Goldring, had had her house burglarized; nothing was missing but the house had been trashed, and the burglar had painted swastikas all over the walls with Cynda’s nail polish. It was a disturbing crime, both unprofessional and uncannily malicious, and weirdly Mrs. Goldring suspected a child in the school, a Jewish boy. Kenny Lowen. It sounded to him like a hell of a PR problem.
The minute he hung up, Emily said, “Excuse me, Chip.” She came in with a software manual in her hand. “I’ve spent about an hour and a half on this; could you just show me once how you do it?”
Chip Horde, who was trying to understand the budget, looked surprised. “Do what, Emily?”
“I can’t get the program to print landscape, so we can print a run of envelopes. I could do one address at a time through the printer, but the software keeps overriding the printer command, and if I can’t do it through the software, I can’t access the mailing list….”
“Have you called Tech Support?”
“Yes, I have, but the people who make the printer say it should work and the people who make the software say I need another printer driver, but when I install the one they say, it won’t print at all….”
Chip Horde looked pointedly at his watch.
“I could do it faster by hand, honestly.”
“Don’t you think that looks a little unprofessional?” he asked sarcastically.
“Not as unprofessional as having the mailing two weeks late.”
“I can’t imagine this is normally the Head’s problem.”
“Normally, everything is the Head’s problem,” said Emily.
“I can’t believe she spent her time doing the secretarial work,” said Chip to Chandler. “You should see the files. They’re quite unbelievable. No wonder she never had time for anyone.”
“That’s just what I thought,” said Chandler. “I knew it.”
By the end of the second week Chip had fired Emily Goldsborough. He was extremely surprised to receive a protest delegation of parents and Board members, including Sylvia French and Carson McCann.
“She just wasn’t trained for the job,” he explained. “She’s a very nice lady, I agree.”
“Chip, maybe you don’t understand what the job is. This school is an organism. We need someone who knows the DNA. Who’s out of town, who’s friends with whom, whose parents are getting divorced, what doctor to call when you can’t reach the parents.”
“Doesn’t Mike know all that?”
“No. Besides, she’s a single mother, she needs the money.”
“Everyone needs the money,” said Chip. He brought in his secretary from his former company, a failed start-up, a girl of twenty-four named Kimberly who could type like the wind. She worked weekends completely redoing the school’s filing system so that no one else could find anything. When she realized what had happened, the development director went quietly and reasonably to Mr. Horde to explain that Kimberly had just made her job undoable. Mr. Horde said that was too bad, but the school would be better off in the end if it ran in a more professional way. The development director quit.
Mike Dianda explained to Chip Horde that faculty evaluation was a major part of the Head’s job. Chip began spending an hour of every day observing classes. Then he would shut himself in his room studying the evaluations Rue had written for each member of the staff over the years. It baffled him. He couldn’t figure out what the hell was supposed to go on in a classroom, especially since it seemed to be different for every grade. The only thing he could tell for sure was that one of the art teachers, not the one in the Birkenstocks, was half lit three-quarters of the time. He called Pat Moredock in during her lunch hour, confronted her with vodka bottles found in her paint closet, and told her she was fired.
Missy Kip went home to her father in tears.
“Mrs. Moredock was crying, Daddy. It’s not fair!”
“It doesn’t sound very fair, Missy. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh, come on, Chandler,” said Chip Horde. “She was tight as a tick at ten in the morning.”
“She’s an effective and popular teacher, Chip.”
“I don’t see how she could be.”
“It seems a little inhumane, that’s all. Why wouldn’t it be better to have a talk with her, see if she’ll agree to go for treatment?”
“Why? We can replace her in a minute, at half the price.”
“Be careful,” said Chandler sternly. “Now I’m serious, be careful with that kind of talk. We had a union organizer on campus last week. The last goddamn thing we want is the whole group signing up with the Classroom Teachers’ Association.”
The two sat in silence. Chip didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t known private school teachers could join the Classroom Teachers’ Association. Jesus, what a con game this was. How the hell did you get people bright enough to teach at all, to work for half what they could get in public school, if they had the choice of getting a union to stick it to everyone for them?
Chandler was thinking of Missy, and how much he wanted to go home to her and tell her he’d rescued Mrs. Moredock.
“I wonder if we couldn’t arrange an intervention for Pat,” said Chandler. “If she’d go somewhere and dry out, we could hold her job for her. What does she have for family? Who are her friends?”
“Now look,” said Chip, “back off. Read the Handbook. Hiring and firing is my job. I’m trying to build a team, Chandler. If you keep coming in here, giving everyone the message that I’m not really in charge, you’re going to find out no one is in charge.”
“Sorry. I just wanted to give you my thinking,” said Chandler stiffly.
“I’ve already acted. I couldn’t take it back even if I were inclined to. You want a wuss in this job? Is that what you thought I was?”
Chandler stood. “Of course not. I was trying to be helpful.”
“I don’t think I need the help,” said Chip, rising too. “No offense.”
“None taken,” said Chandler. This was a lie on both sides. The two men shook hands and Chandler left the office.
Lyndie Sale’s room was aggressively messy. Her school books were spread out around her, but she wasn’t working. She sat still, cross-legged on the bed. She had a Playboy magazine hidden under her mattress, and a pint of Bailey’s Irish Cream that she had stolen from Tagliarini’s in a knapsack on the shelf of her closet. But she didn’t dare get these out while They were up. They had fixed her door so it could only be locked from the outside, and they came in whenever they felt like it, without knocking. She could hear the hum of voices and canned laughter from the television downstairs. Lyndie got up and left her room on stockinged feet, moving toward the sound.
In the den, her father was watching television. His high forehead gleamed in the blue light. At a card table in the corner, her mother sat in lamplight, surrounded by yarn of different colors, and bowls of dead tennis balls. Lyndie knew what she was doing. Her mother would wind long hanks of yarn around a tennis ball, secure it, then divide the trailing wool into eight long clumps and begin to braid. The eight clumps would be braided legs. She was making toy octopuses. You could see from the rows of them propped on the bookshelf that she had already made a great many, whether for a school or church sale or some other reason, Lyndie didn’t know. Her eternal glass of red wine stood on the card table beside the tennis balls.
Without turning around, Oliver Sale said, “Lyndie…what are you doing?” Apparently he could feel that she had been gazing at his TV program from the doorway.
“I’m going to call Shannon.”
“Is your homework done?”
r /> “No, I need the assignment. I don’t know what pages.”
“You can’t watch TV until you finish.”
“I know.”
She went on, into the kitchen. The kitchen was filled with every fancy appliance you ever saw, a microwave, a convection oven, a gelato maker, a vegetable juicer, a Kitchen Aid, a breadmaker, and a Cuisinart. You’d think her mother liked to cook. Lyndie’s kindergarten drawings were lovingly framed and hung on the wall. A valentine she’d made for her mother two years ago hung on the refrigerator door, held by a magnet in the shape of an ear of corn. Lyndie took a popsicle from the freezer and started to eat it. She went to the phone and dialed. After a ring or two, a male voice answered.
“Hello?”
Lyndie just held the phone, and sucked on her popsicle. It was grape.
“Hello? This is Chip Horde…” the voice said on the other end, a little too loud. Lyndie said nothing, but made sure she was making enough noise that he knew someone was there. He said crossly, “Who is calling, please…”
“Lyndie, what are you doing?”
Lyndie slammed the phone down and whirled around. Her mother was standing in the doorway, her empty wine glass in her hand.
“I was calling Shannon.”
“You just hung up on her?”
“No, we were done.”
“You’re lying, Lyndie.”
They stared at each other.
Mike Dianda had asked for just a minute of Chip’s time. He sat in the chair by the head’s desk, where he and Rue had so often sat.
“What’s on your mind?” said Chip, as he stuck a pencil into his electric sharpener.
When the whirring stopped, Mike said, “I’m going to be leaving at the end of the year.”
Chip looked at him. “But you signed a contract.”