The prestigious New England boarding school, Miss Oliver’s School for Girls, is on the cusp of going under. The trustees have just fired Marjorie Boyd, headmistress for the last thirtyfive years, because she’s derelict as a financial manager. But she is a brilliant educator, beloved of the alumnae and students, who are angry and rebellious and will hate her successor. Nevertheless, if her successor, Fred Kindler, can get the support of the legendary senior teacher, Francis Plummer, he has a fighting chance to save the school. But to Plummer, anyone who replaces Marjorie represents disaster.
His wife, Peggy Plummer, the librarian, thinks differently. She understands why the board of trustees had to save the school from the flaws of the very woman who had made it so worth saving. As passionately loyal to Kindler as Francis is to Marjorie, Peggy steps forward to help the new head, usurping her husband’s position at the head’s right hand. The school’s survival, Fred Kindler’s career, and the Plummers’ marriage are now all at risk.
AUTHOR’S COMMENTS
Years ago I wrote a comic short story about a young couple’s putting on a birthday party for their ten-year-old son. I gave the father in that story a funny name: Renfrew Obadiah. When I finished the story, the boy was still only ten years old, and Renfrew and Peggy Obadiah not yet thirty with a lot of years ahead of them, and I wondered what would happen next. But way went on to way and when I finally got back to the Obadiahs, they were fifty-five, their birthday boy had graduated from college and was wandering in Europe and what was happening to them wasn’t funny anymore at least not funny enough for a name like Renfrew Obadiah. So I changed their names to Francis and Peggy Plummer and plunked them down in the thirty-third year of their career at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls just as the headmistress whom they loved and had hired them was being fired—and asked myself what happened next.
As if I didn’t know!
What happened next is the trauma that always happens when a strong leader who has infantilized the organization by making all the decisions for years and years suddenly goes away. I’d started out to write a good story about things I’d seen as a consultant and discovered I had a case study too a richer version, I hope, of the kind they use in business schools and seminars for aspiring leaders.
Neither Miss Oliver’s School nor any of the characters is modeled on any specific real-life schools or people. The story is about a phenomenon, not a singular event. In that respect fiction always goes deeper than “truth.”
In fact I left out actual, real-life events because they were too strange for fiction. Like the time a friend was fired in his first year as a head ostensibly because he made the unforgivable mistake of having the worn out coffee cups in the faculty room replaced during the winter vacation. He didn’t know that the previous head’s wife had presented the cups to the faculty as a Christmas gift years before. When the teachers returned and discovered that their sacred cups were in the trash, a group of them presented the board with an ultimatum: fire the new head or they’d all resign because, they said, he had no respect for the school’s culture. Believe it or not, the board gave in.
I did use one true event, though in modified form, that you’ll recognize if you read the book: the athletic director at a school where I was consulting told me that he thought the junior varsity and third team coaches should play every player in every game, and wanted my advice on how to persuade the new head of school to make this a rule and enforce it. “What’s it have to do with the new head?” I asked when I finally realized he actually did want this advice. “You’re the athletic director and you’re 50 years old, for goodness sake! It’s your rule. You enforce it” He went white in the face. The former head, who’d been there forever, had made all the rules and done all the enforcing. A year after this incident, the new head of that school left to lead a different school. “I wanted to be the head of a school, not its mother,” she told me.
I still want to know what happens next for these characters. I like them too much to say goodbye. I’d like to do a story on Marjorie Boyd’s last days. All I know now is that she will decide how she will die.
She’s much too authoritarian to leave that decision to fate.
