A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (25 page)

I couldn’t stand myself.

Friday my cell phone rang.
It was Mary Paige. I didn’t know she had that number.

She needed to talk to me. She had just dropped Faith off at school. Could we go somewhere for coffee?

“You’d better come to my house.”

As soon as she came, she started in on the usual polite girls’-school chitchat. I didn’t want to hear it. “What’s on your mind, Mary Paige?” I didn’t suppose that I sounded very cordial.

“Mr. Christopher Goddard wants to sue us.”

Her tone was a little high and mighty for someone whose child had brought this all on herself. “Has he actually filed?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. His lawyer just called, making the most awful threats.”

Chris needed to get things unstuck. I didn’t know exactly what would happen if he sued Faith, I didn’t know how her juvenile standing would impact the process, but I doubted that he would need to actually file. The threat would probably be enough.

“You have to understand,” I said to Mary Paige, absolutely certain that she had no interest in understanding, “that Chris must want a chance to defend himself. No one knows for certain what Faith actually said to Mrs. Shot.”

“But don’t you understand that she had no idea how serious this would be? That, in her mind, saying this about him was no different than saying it about one of the sixth-grade boys.”

“Then she can end everything right now by saying that she wasn’t telling the truth.”

“But if she says it didn’t happen, they will expel her.”

I should hope. “That’s hardly surprising. A lot of damage has been done.”

“And the handbook says that there is no refund of tuition.”

I was careful not to react. Was this dragging on because of money? “If you want to make a deal—that Faith will recant in exchange for a tuition refund—you should be able to get that.” The board would have to be out of its mind not to accept.

“Well, it’s not just the money … there are other legal issues here. I don’t want her to leave Alden. I graduated from there. Look at what my grandparents did for the school.”

I remembered what Pam Ruby had told me at the beginning of the year—that Faith being at Alden was a key part of Mary Paige’s divorce strategy, why she had to leave Texas, why she couldn’t work.

Surely the “I can’t work, I have to drive car pools” was not a realistic legal strategy—however realistic it might feel to an individual woman on a particular day—but having her daughter go to this school might have been part of why Mary Paige was allowed to take the girl out of Texas. I didn’t know enough about divorce law.

“The problem is,” Mary Paige continued, “Virginia public schools have these rigid standardized tests that are pegged to their curriculum, and the sixth graders are starting them after Spring Break. She can’t take a test on Virginia history.”

People use the word
can’t
way too much. Faith could certainly
take
a test on Virginia history, she probably couldn’t pass it. “See if Alden will let her finish out the year off-site.” Several years ago two seniors were caught smashing a window of a fellow student’s car. They were not allowed to return to campus, to attend graduation ceremonies and such, but they were allowed to submit their final papers so that they could earn their diplomas.

“You’re not being any help, Lydia.”

“But, Mary Paige, why would I be any help?” I’m such a major buttinski, I so like being in the thick of things, that only now did I realize how odd it was of her to come to me. “I’m not on the board; I’m not particularly close to anyone who is.”

“But everyone likes you, Lydia. Everyone listens to you.”

She said that as if she were accusing me of something. So now
I
was the popular one? “Mary Paige, I know you want this to go away, and I do think that you can get a lot of what you need—the tuition refund or letting her get credit for this year somehow—but I don’t see how she can be reintegrated into the school community.”

I couldn’t hate this woman. This was the second time her world had fallen apart. She had thought that she could divorce her husband without it affecting her life, but that hadn’t worked. And now her daughter was getting them exiled from this next community.

But did she really think that there would be no consequences for her? That having her grandmother’s name on the gym was enough to give her the seemingly charmed life that the rest of us were working so hard to achieve?

“It’s Chris who shouldn’t be allowed back,” she said, “not Faith.”

“Chris? Weren’t we just talking about Faith recanting? Why should he have to leave if he hasn’t done anything?”

“When an educator threatens to sue a child in the school, when he wants to extort money from a family—”

“Chris doesn’t want your money. Trust me. Chris didn’t want your money.”

“The threat is so completely out of line, that simply shows that he is unfit to be a member of this community.”

I shut my eyes. I had been wrong. I could hate this woman. It would be no problem at all.

On Friday of this awful
week, Spring Break began. The flood of crisis-related e-mails slowed on Thursday night as people began packing for their trips to Colorado, Spain, or Jamaica and then ceased as they left town.

The kids and I had planned to go to Houston for Spring Break, but with Jamie so focused on the trial, I knew that a visit would end up being awful for all of us. I thought about taking the kids somewhere else, but wherever we went, I would be running “Camp Mom”—me getting up each morning responsible for my two campers having a day packed with fun-filled, educationally enriching, culturally broadening, lifetime-of-memories experiences. It seemed easier to do that from home, where I could share the responsibility with the television set.

The three of us painted Erin’s bedroom and went to the zoo. We hiked the Billy Goat trail out at Great Falls and made caramel corn. We sorted through all the books in Thomas’s room and made more caramel corn. I was occasionally unnerved by how normal it felt not to have Jamie with us, and that thought drove me to making yet more caramel corn. When we were caramel-corned out, we took a subway trip, ending up at the Pentagon City Mall over in Virginia. There was a movie theater there, and Erin was willing to watch a little-kid movie with Thomas while I looked for new clothes for him, an activity for which he has no interest.

I was coming out of Macy’s when I heard someone call my name—not “Mom,” but “Lydia.”

It was Chris Goddard.

How odd to see him at a suburban shopping mall. We city residents disdain the malls. They are, we pride ourselves on saying, the locus of empty, mindless experiences … although, in truth, I have found myself capable of empty, mindless experiences in such a variety of places that it really doesn’t seem fair to blame malls.

“What a nice surprise,” Chris said as he came up to me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone from school here before. Thank you for your note. I did appreciate it.”

“It was nothing,” I said, not quite truthfully. Tracking down his home address had been a bit of a challenge. I looked at him carefully. There might be some unfamiliar gray shadows under his eyes and a new gauntness below his cheekbones, but the light in the mall was thin and watery so everyone looked a little gray.

The mall had a central atrium that rose up over a food court and a community stage. We were on the facility’s second level, and we had stepped toward the railing to get out of the way of the foot traffic even though the mall was fairly quiet on this weekday afternoon. The public schools didn’t have their Spring Break for another week or so. Public-school holidays usually result in the malls being very crowded. Those families don’t automatically go to Colorado, Spain, or Jamaica every time their kids are off school for five minutes. Chris gestured down to the food court. “Do you have time for coffee?”

As we rode down the escalator, I answered his questions about why we weren’t out of town and explained that the kids were in the movie theater. He was carrying a bag from Johnston & Murphy, a men’s shoe store.

We got coffee and sat down at a table. I was wearing one of the new outfits I had gotten in Houston. It was just slacks and a shirt, but the silhouette was trim and stylish, the colors fresh. I’d flipped back the cuffs of the shirt and I was wearing two thin silver bangles around my wrist. I was trying to feel light and feminine all on my own.

“So how are you?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

“It hasn’t reached the e-mail lists yet?”

I shook my head, not knowing what “it” was.

“These are my back-to-school shoes. I will be in my office tomorrow.”

“Oh, Chris.” My bracelets slipped down my arm with a silvery jingle. “I am so glad. What happened? I knew that you had threatened to sue Faith. Did that get things unstuck?”

He nodded. “We knew we had to threaten someone, and Faith and her mother seemed an easier target than the board.”

“I hope that you don’t feel guilty about that.”

“No, especially since the goal was not to have to sue anyone. But the threat got the mother to get a lawyer, and he very quickly took the position that the girl had said one thing in a private conversation with a school administrator and then never repeated it. While that might meet the legal definition of slander, it didn’t make for much of a case. At that point the board had to acknowledge, at least among themselves, that Mrs. Shot may have had her own agenda.”

“Does she want your job?”

“Not really. She would take it if offered, but she likes her job. What she wants is for the school to stop changing.”

That wasn’t going to happen. “She went about it just like a middle-school girl would have, talking about what someone had said in private but never quite saying what was actually said.”

Chris liked my point. “That turns out to be a very powerful technique. Anyway, the individual members of the board are horrified that they never stopped to question Mrs. Shot. As an official body, they aren’t going to say that publicly, but they are extending my contract by two years as a show of support.”

“And what’s happening to Faith?”

“Nothing.”

I couldn’t believe it. Faith wasn’t being expelled or suspended? “But obviously they know that she made it all up. Is anyone questioning that?”

“They say that they believe me, but we are a school with a culture of forgiveness and redemption.” His eyebrows arched over the thin pewter-toned frames of his glasses, and it was clear that he wasn’t feeling very forgiving, and I can’t say that I did, either.

“Does the board think that Mrs. Shot is as much to blame as Faith?” That would be one reason for not punishing Faith. “Or is it that Faith’s great-grandmother’s name is on the gym?”

He didn’t answer. He picked up his coffee, but his eyes never wavered from mine.

This episode hadn’t simply been caused by the psychology of an unhappy girl. There had been sociological forces: the old against the new, the aristocracy against the meritocracy. Unfortunately for them, the Old Guard had picked the wrong battle. They had lost, but they had managed the retreat well enough that no one was going to be held accountable. Both Faith and Mrs. Shot were going to stay at the school.

“Aren’t you angry?” I asked.

“You have no idea,” he said. “None. I’d leave this place in a heartbeat if staying weren’t the best way to salvage something of my reputation and career.”

“This is
so
unfair. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Chris looked down at his coffee. “That is not correct. I do have some measure of responsibility. In the name of getting to know the school, I got involved in things that weren’t my job to get involved with. People don’t like that. I’m also probably too proud of my ability to deal with people one-on-one—”

I interrupted. “You’re great with individuals, and the high-school kids love you. We hear that all the time.”

“But that isn’t the most important part of my job. I spent extra time with Faith because I thought that would help her, but if that’s what I want to do, I should be a counselor, not an administrator. I need to focus on my job and step back from being the guy who can swoop in and fix anything and everything.”

“But isn’t fixing everything your job?”

“Not at the micro-level, and certainly not all at once. I’m still angry enough that I need to work on autopilot for a while.”

“That doesn’t sound so good.” Not only for the school, but for him as well. What I had liked about him was the dry wit and the impish warmth behind his elegant, shrewd presence. It sounded as if we were going to be left with a lot of the shrewdness, some of the elegance, but the rest was going underground. “What can you do on autopilot?”

“Let’s call it ‘emotional disengagement.’ I can disengage enough from the personal to get back to the fund-raising. The Capital Campaign has gotten off to the worst possible start.”

“You heard about the dinner at Mimi’s?”

He held up a hand. He had obviously heard too much about it. “We need to get the campaign back on track. If we can’t, then someone else needs to be in my shoes. Right or wrong, if I can’t be effective, I should leave, but leaving now will make it seem as if I were guilty.”

Then there was one answer. He had to be effective. The Capital Campaign had to be a success. If I needed to get myself on the Capital Campaign committee, that’s what I would do. Chris Goddard was not leaving this school.

School started on the Tuesday
after Spring Break week. The board of trustees, with the help of hired public relations professionals, was in full “let’s put this behind us and move forward” mode.

Jayne Reynolds sent a letter to every family in the school, citing the board’s full support of Chris. In the next paragraph she defended the board’s actions, emphasizing the need to listen to all children and to give voice to the least powerful members of a community.

Of course she was right. Somewhere there were headmasters, teachers, or coaches acting inappropriately to students. But what would happen now when one of those students spoke up? “Oh, don’t you remember that case in D.C.?” people could say. “The girl was lying.” The implication would be that this child was lying as well.