ONE

Even in this, the last year of her reign, Marjorie Boyd has insisted that the graduation exercise take place exactly at noon.

“When the sun is at the top of the sky!” she has declared—as she has every year for the thirty-five years she has been headmistress of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. “Time stands still for just a little instant right then. And people notice things. They see! And what they see is the graduation of young women! Females! From a school founded by a woman, designed by women, run by a woman, with a curriculum that focuses on the way women learn! I want this celebration to take place exactly at noon, in the bright spangle of the June sunshine, so the world can see the superiority of the result!” Marjorie Boyd has demanded once again, still dominant at the very end in spite of her dismissal. She will be the headmistress till July 1, when her contract expires. Until then her will prevails.

Even her opponents understand that it is Marjorie’s vivid leadership that has made the school into a community so beloved of its students and alumnae (who are taking their seats now in the audience as the noon hour nears) that it must be saved from the flaws of the very woman who has made it what it is. Founded by Miss Edith Oliver in 1928, and standing on ground once occupied by a Pequot Indian village in Fieldington, Connecticut, a complacent suburb twenty miles south of Hartford on the Connecticut River, the school that Marjorie has created is a boarding school, a world apart, whose intense culture of academic and artistic richness is celebrated in idiosyncratic rituals sacred to its members.

“But it will be too hot at noon,” the more practical-minded members of the faculty have objected once again in an argument that for senior faculty members Francis and Peggy Plummer has become an old refrain. They are like theatergoers watching a play whose ending they have memorized.

“No, it won’t,” Marjorie has replied.

“How do you know it won’t?”

“I just do,” she said, standing up to end the meeting. For meetings always end when Marjorie stands up—and begin instantly when she sits down. Francis and Peggy understood that what Marjorie means is that she would cause the weather to be perfect for their beloved young women by the sheer power of her will. The weather has been perfect for each of the thirty-three graduation ceremonies in which Peggy and Francis have been on the faculty—and today, June 10, 1991, is no exception.

The clock in the library’s steeple chimes the noon hour now, and Marjorie Boyd is standing. She strides across the dais to the microphone. The graduating class sits in the honored position to the left of the dais, their white dresses glistening in the sunshine. The sky is an ethereal blue, cloudless, and under it, the green lawns sweep to the river. Behind the dais a huge three-hundred-
year-old maple spreads its branches, and Francis imagines a family of Pequot Indians sitting in its shade. The scent of clipped grass rises. In the audience the mothers wear big multicolored hats against the sun, and behind them the gleaming white clapboards of the campus buildings form an embracing circle.

Standing at the microphone, Marjorie doesn’t look much older to Peggy and Francis than when she first hired them thirty-three years ago immediately after their marriage, Peggy as the school’s librarian, Francis as a teacher of math, and soon after also of English, assigning them too as dorm parents in what was then a brand-new dormitory. She still wears her long brown hair, now streaked with gray, in a schoolmarmish bun at the back of her neck. Her reading glasses still rest on her bosom, suspended from a black string around her neck. “You were Oliver girls,” they hear Marjorie say, and Francis reaches to hold Peggy’s hand. They know what she is going to say next, and when she says it: “Now you are Oliver women!” giving the word a glory, Peggy starts to cry. She is surprised at her sudden melting. For up to this moment she has managed to assuage her grief over Marjorie’s dismissal by reminding herself that she had agreed with the board’s decision.

But Francis isn’t crying! He’s too angry to cry, won’t give his new enemies the satisfaction—for that’s how he thinks of those colleagues, old friends, whom he suspects of optimism over the dismissal of his beloved leader. He grips Peggy’s hand, squeezes hard, makes her wince. It’s her school! he wants to shout. Marjorie’s! Not theirs! He doesn’t want Peggy to cry; he wants her to be angry, to be obstreperous at every opportunity, to express disgust at the notion that schools bear any resemblance to businesses, as he does; he wants her to say rebellious things in faculty meetings, the way he’s been doing, surprising everyone, including himself, by seeming out of control.

Still sobbing, Peggy yanks her hand away. She’s been over this so many times before! You can be loyal without being stupid, she wants to yell. She was your boss, not your daddy. But of course she doesn’t. It’s not the time to tell her husband that maybe his ardent following of Marjorie was his way of escaping the dominance of a father who couldn’t be more different than Marjorie—he would have fired her years ago! She keeps her mouth shut. It’s bad enough that people see her sobbing.

Marjorie sits after exactly four minutes during which she has told her audience that now they must take care of the school. All of her thirty-five graduation speeches have been exactly four minutes long. She practices them—first in her bathroom—“I love to hear the words bouncing off the tile,” she tells Francis and Peggy every year when she starts working on her speech weeks before the event. Francis and Peggy know that she times herself with the same stopwatch she brings to the track meets so that she can congratulate any girl who has improved her time. In this last year of her reign she has been taking the stopwatch to faculty meetings so she can time the windy ruminations of Gregory van Buren, head of the English Department, who, second in seniority only to Peggy and Francis, sits today immediately to Peggy’s right in the front row of the graduation audience, smirking as if he has discovered a grammatical error in Marjorie’s speech. Gregory doesn’t even try anymore to disguise his joy at what he loves to call “Marjorie’s expulsion”—or the “demise of the monarchy at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.”

There is an instant of silence after Marjorie sits, and then, simultaneously, Francis and the graduating class stand up. In an instant Peggy is up too, taller than her husband. The audience rises. Their applause swells. The block of undergraduates sitting right behind the faculty is chanting, “Yay, Marjorie! Yay, Marjorie!” On the dais, the trustees stand too, their board chair, Alan Travelers, looking uncomfortable.

To Peggy’s right, Gregory van Buren rises too slowly. She turns to him, grabs his elbow, pulls him upward. “Stand straight, windbag!” she whispers through her sobbing. “Stand straight and clap!”

Gregory’s too smart; he doesn’t even turn his head to her. He’s gazing up over the podium as if he were watching a bird, his hands coming together so softly they don’t make a sound, and Peggy is amazed to hear herself hissing: “Louder, you politician! Louder! Or I swear to God I’ll poke out both your eyes right here in front of everybody!”

For an instant as the words fly out, she feels wonderful, a prisoner released. But then stupid. This isn’t her. She doesn’t insult people, she’s never been involved in the school’s politics. And she doesn’t have Francis’s talent for effective goofiness. She thinks maybe she’s going to lose control permanently, wonders if everything is falling apart: Marjorie’s leaving and the resultant division in the faculty, and equally pressing, Francis’s leaving tomorrow on a trip that will last all summer, the first time in their thirty-three- year marriage they’ll be apart for more than a week. It’s the final straw. So she makes up her mind: she’ll stay in control. Not just for herself. For Francis too—until he’s able to control himself again.

Gregory still does not turn his face to her. He stares straight ahead, places his right hand on Peggy’s, lifts her hand from his elbow, places it at her side as if he were putting something back in a drawer, and whispers: “I thought you understood, unlike your husband—who only understands the past. Actually, I know you understand.”

Gregory’s right. She does understand. It was the newer members of the board who forced the issue. The era is passed, they pointed out, when being a great educator is enough. No longer do certain kinds of families automatically send their children away to boarding school; and besides, just as boarding school grows too expensive for many families, single-sex education for women seems to be losing its allure. So pay more attention to the business side: to marketing scenarios, strategic plans, financial projections. That’s the road to survival.

Peggy tried hard to persuade her friend to pay attention; and when rumors began to fly that the school was so strapped that it might have to make the one decision no one could even dare imagine, the one that would destroy the reason for the school’s existence—namely to admit boys—to survive, she barged right in to Marjorie’s office and told her that if she, Peggy Plummer, the school’s librarian for the past thirty-three years, were on the board, she would vote for Marjorie’s dismissal in spite of their ancient friendship, unless she changed her ways and started to act as if her profession, for all it was a calling, were a business too. But nobody gives Marjorie advice. It’s the other way around. So Peggy wasn’t surprised when, six months later, the board, whose chair, Alan Travelers, was the first male board chair in the school’s history, screwed its courage to the sticking place and demanded Marjorie’s resignation.

Peggy stops crying by the time she and her friend Eudora Easter, chair of the Art Department, have to go up front and confer the diploma on the first student. The order was determined the night before when the president of the junior class picked the graduates’ names out of the tall silk hat that is brought out of safekeeping once a year, according to ritual. The hat is rumored to have belonged to Daniel Webster. At Miss Oliver’s it is a sign of loyalty to believe myths that lesser schools would scorn.

Facing the audience beside Eudora, Peggy is calm again. She’s tall, slim, full breasted, her short black hair not covered by a hat, and she wears a trim business suit—librarian’s clothes. Eudora is much shorter than Peggy, very round, her beautiful African features shadowed under a huge red hat, and her red slippers are pointed upward at the toes like a genie’s. The students cheer her costume.

The ceremony goes on for several hours. For the graduates the teachers recite poems, sing songs, perform dances, even put on little skits. Francis confers the diploma on several girls by himself, and he and Peggy together do so for three girls who have lived in their dorm. For each, he spins the amazing tale of their blossoming, thus blessing their parents. Gregory van Buren’s one girl gets a long poem that nobody understands. She tries hard not to show her disappointment. When Gregory hugs her, he bends his middle away from her, sticking his butt out behind as if he were wearing a bustle.

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ONE Even in this, the last year of her reign, Marjorie Boyd has insisted that the graduation exercise take place exactly at noon. “When the sun is at the top of the sky!” she has declared—as she has every year for the thirty-five years she has been headmistress of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. “Time stands still for just a little instant right then. And people notice things. They see! And what they see is the graduation of young women! Females! From a school founded by a woman, designed by women, run by a woman, with a curriculum that focuses on the way women learn! I want this celebration to take place exactly at noon, in the bright spangle of the June sunshine, so the world can see the superiority of the result!” Marjorie Boyd has demanded once again, still dominant at the very end in spite of her dismissal. She will be the headmistress till July 1, when her contract expires. Until then her will prevails. Even her opponents understand that it is Marjorie’s vivid leadership that has made the school into a community so beloved of its students and alumnae (who are taking their seats now in the audience as the noon hour nears) that it must be saved from the flaws of the very woman who has made it what it is. Founded by Miss Edith Oliver in 1928, and standing on ground once occupied by a Pequot Indian village in Fieldington, Connecticut, a complacent suburb twenty miles south of Hartford on the Connecticut River, the school that Marjorie has created is a boarding school, a world apart, whose intense culture of academic and artistic richness is celebrated in idiosyncratic rituals sacred to its members. “But it will be too hot at noon,” the more practical-minded members of the faculty have objected once again in an argument that for senior faculty members Francis and Peggy Plummer has become an old refrain. They are like theatergoers watching a play whose ending they have memorized. “No, it won’t,” Marjorie has replied. “How do you know it won’t?” “I just do,” she said, standing up to end the meeting. For meetings always end when Marjorie stands up—and begin instantly when she sits down. Francis and Peggy understood that what Marjorie means is that she would cause the weather to be perfect for their beloved young women by the sheer power of her will. The weather has been perfect for each of the thirty-three graduation ceremonies in which Peggy and Francis have been on the faculty—and today, June 10, 1991, is no exception. The clock in the library’s steeple chimes the noon hour now, and Marjorie Boyd is standing. She strides across the dais to the microphone. The graduating class sits in the honored position to the left of the dais, their white dresses glistening in the sunshine. The sky is an ethereal blue, cloudless, and under it, the green lawns sweep to the river. Behind the dais a huge three-hundred- year-old maple spreads its branches, and Francis imagines a family of Pequot Indians sitting in its shade. The scent of clipped grass rises. In the audience the mothers wear big multicolored hats against the sun, and behind them the gleaming white clapboards of the campus buildings form an embracing circle. Standing at the microphone, Marjorie doesn’t look much older to Peggy and Francis than when she first hired them thirty-three years ago immediately after their marriage, Peggy as the school’s librarian, Francis as a teacher of math, and soon after also of English, assigning them too as dorm parents in what was then a brand-new dormitory. She still wears her long brown hair, now streaked with gray, in a schoolmarmish bun at the back of her neck. Her reading glasses still rest on her bosom, suspended from a black string around her neck. “You were Oliver girls,” they hear Marjorie say, and Francis reaches to hold Peggy’s hand. They know what she is going to say next, and when she says it: “Now you are Oliver women!” giving the word a glory, Peggy starts to cry. She is surprised at her sudden melting. For up to this moment she has managed to assuage her grief over Marjorie’s dismissal by reminding herself that she had agreed with the board’s decision. But Francis isn’t crying! He’s too angry to cry, won’t give his new enemies the satisfaction—for that’s how he thinks of those colleagues, old friends, whom he suspects of optimism over the dismissal of his beloved leader. He grips Peggy’s hand, squeezes hard, makes her wince. It’s her school! he wants to shout. Marjorie’s! Not theirs! He doesn’t want Peggy to cry; he wants her to be angry, to be obstreperous at every opportunity, to express disgust at the notion that schools bear any resemblance to businesses, as he does; he wants her to say rebellious things in faculty meetings, the way he’s been doing, surprising everyone, including himself, by seeming out of control. Still sobbing, Peggy yanks her hand away. She’s been over this so many times before! You can be loyal without being stupid, she wants to yell. She was your boss, not your daddy. But of course she doesn’t. It’s not the time to tell her husband that maybe his ardent following of Marjorie was his way of escaping the dominance of a father who couldn’t be more different than Marjorie—he would have fired her years ago! She keeps her mouth shut. It’s bad enough that people see her sobbing. Marjorie sits after exactly four minutes during which she has told her audience that now they must take care of the school. All of her thirty-five graduation speeches have been exactly four minutes long. She practices them—first in her bathroom—“I love to hear the words bouncing off the tile,” she tells Francis and Peggy every year when she starts working on her speech weeks before the event. Francis and Peggy know that she times herself with the same stopwatch she brings to the track meets so that she can congratulate any girl who has improved her time. In this last year of her reign she has been taking the stopwatch to faculty meetings so she can time the windy ruminations of Gregory van Buren, head of the English Department, who, second in seniority only to Peggy and Francis, sits today immediately to Peggy’s right in the front row of the graduation audience, smirking as if he has discovered a grammatical error in Marjorie’s speech. Gregory doesn’t even try anymore to disguise his joy at what he loves to call “Marjorie’s expulsion”—or the “demise of the monarchy at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.” There is an instant of silence after Marjorie sits, and then, simultaneously, Francis and the graduating class stand up. In an instant Peggy is up too, taller than her husband. The audience rises. Their applause swells. The block of undergraduates sitting right behind the faculty is chanting, “Yay, Marjorie! Yay, Marjorie!” On the dais, the trustees stand too, their board chair, Alan Travelers, looking uncomfortable. To Peggy’s right, Gregory van Buren rises too slowly. She turns to him, grabs his elbow, pulls him upward. “Stand straight, windbag!” she whispers through her sobbing. “Stand straight and clap!” Gregory’s too smart; he doesn’t even turn his head to her. He’s gazing up over the podium as if he were watching a bird, his hands coming together so softly they don’t make a sound, and Peggy is amazed to hear herself hissing: “Louder, you politician! Louder! Or I swear to God I’ll poke out both your eyes right here in front of everybody!” For an instant as the words fly out, she feels wonderful, a prisoner released. But then stupid. This isn’t her. She doesn’t insult people, she’s never been involved in the school’s politics. And she doesn’t have Francis’s talent for effective goofiness. She thinks maybe she’s going to lose control permanently, wonders if everything is falling apart: Marjorie’s leaving and the resultant division in the faculty, and equally pressing, Francis’s leaving tomorrow on a trip that will last all summer, the first time in their thirty-three- year marriage they’ll be apart for more than a week. It’s the final straw. So she makes up her mind: she’ll stay in control. Not just for herself. For Francis too—until he’s able to control himself again. Gregory still does not turn his face to her. He stares straight ahead, places his right hand on Peggy’s, lifts her hand from his elbow, places it at her side as if he were putting something back in a drawer, and whispers: “I thought you understood, unlike your husband—who only understands the past. Actually, I know you understand.” Gregory’s right. She does understand. It was the newer members of the board who forced the issue. The era is passed, they pointed out, when being a great educator is enough. No longer do certain kinds of families automatically send their children away to boarding school; and besides, just as boarding school grows too expensive for many families, single-sex education for women seems to be losing its allure. So pay more attention to the business side: to marketing scenarios, strategic plans, financial projections. That’s the road to survival. Peggy tried hard to persuade her friend to pay attention; and when rumors began to fly that the school was so strapped that it might have to make the one decision no one could even dare imagine, the one that would destroy the reason for the school’s existence—namely to admit boys—to survive, she barged right in to Marjorie’s office and told her that if she, Peggy Plummer, the school’s librarian for the past thirty-three years, were on the board, she would vote for Marjorie’s dismissal in spite of their ancient friendship, unless she changed her ways and started to act as if her profession, for all it was a calling, were a business too. But nobody gives Marjorie advice. It’s the other way around. So Peggy wasn’t surprised when, six months later, the board, whose chair, Alan Travelers, was the first male board chair in the school’s history, screwed its courage to the sticking place and demanded Marjorie’s resignation. Peggy stops crying by the time she and her friend Eudora Easter, chair of the Art Department, have to go up front and confer the diploma on the first student. The order was determined the night before when the president of the junior class picked the graduates’ names out of the tall silk hat that is brought out of safekeeping once a year, according to ritual. The hat is rumored to have belonged to Daniel Webster. At Miss Oliver’s it is a sign of loyalty to believe myths that lesser schools would scorn. Facing the audience beside Eudora, Peggy is calm again. She’s tall, slim, full breasted, her short black hair not covered by a hat, and she wears a trim business suit—librarian’s clothes. Eudora is much shorter than Peggy, very round, her beautiful African features shadowed under a huge red hat, and her red slippers are pointed upward at the toes like a genie’s. The students cheer her costume. The ceremony goes on for several hours. For the graduates the teachers recite poems, sing songs, perform dances, even put on little skits. Francis confers the diploma on several girls by himself, and he and Peggy together do so for three girls who have lived in their dorm. For each, he spins the amazing tale of their blossoming, thus blessing their parents. Gregory van Buren’s one girl gets a long poem that nobody understands. She tries hard not to show her disappointment. When Gregory hugs her, he bends his middle away from her, sticking his butt out behind as if he were wearing a bustle.