Saying Grace (31 page)

“Look at last year’s budget, Chandler. You approved it. Yet we finished the year in the red because we didn’t foresee that half the sixth-grade girls would withdraw to get away from Monica Nelson, and we didn’t foresee having to destroy the parking lot and dig up the underground tank. How on earth are you going to guess what our needs will be five years from now?”

Nobody listened. At least not Chandler, or Terry. Terry who had suddenly decided that she had a vendetta against his son, Glenn.

Rue was evidently responsible for everything that was wrong in Glenn’s life, and Margee’s, and Terry wanted her to feel his anger.

Well, she felt it.

G
lenn Malko destroyed the library copy machine by putting transparency film through it instead of paper. Mike Dianda wanted to kill him.

“I asked Mrs. Nafie, and she said she didn’t know, go ahead…”

Glenn protested when he was delivered to Rue’s office.

“But you had already asked Mrs. Ketchum, and she said ‘Absolutely not, it will melt and wreck the machine,’” she countered. She was as angry as she could remember being with a child. Glenn made a face and looked at a corner of the ceiling.

“Didn’t you?” He shrugged. “Please answer me, Glenn!”

“I guess so,” he muttered.

Children were amazing. They seemed to believe that adults could read their minds, especially when their parents failed to divine some need or desire of theirs and they felt hard done by, and at the same time to imagine that adults could be deceived by the most transpar-ent excuse or lie.

Emily came to the door. “Mrs. Malko is in Los Angeles for the day, and Mr. Malko’s office doesn’t know where he is.”

Rue silently and invisibly cursed.

“Glenn, what did we say was going to happen if you got into trouble again?”

There was a long silence. “You’d kick me out.”

“This is not something I am doing to you. You are doing it to yourself. You had a choice. You had a thousand choices.”

“I didn’t know it would break the machine.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t know Mrs. Ketchum was right.”

“Would you have tried it on your father’s machine?”

There was a long silence.

“Glenn?”

He finally shook his head. No.

228 / Beth Gutcheon

Rue said, “I am too angry to talk to you any more right now. You are a valuable young man, and I believe in you, but I’ve had enough of you for the moment. Please go out and sit in the office until Mrs.

Goldsborough finds your father.”

Glenn got up and walked out.

Emily called Terry Malko’s secretary every fifteen minutes, until two in the afternoon, when Terry turned up and called her back. By that time Glenn had been waiting four hours. Emily told Rue that he cried quietly for much of the first hour. After that, he had slept.

Emily brought him lunch, but he didn’t eat it.

Expelling Glenn Malko was not something Rue wanted to do.

Glenn was a favorite, and a follower. His disruptive behavior was macho and silly, but nothing he wouldn’t outgrow, unlike the escal-ating malice of Kenny Lowen. Rue felt Glenn would learn more about handling conflict if she could engineer a compromise punish-ment. She hoped to suspend him for a week, perhaps, and arrange for him to work on weekends until he had paid to repair or replace the copy machine. Unfortunately, the four hours she had to wait before she could discuss the matter with Terry gave her time to find that Glenn himself had boxed her in. He had bragged so widely that there would be no more suspensions for him and only expulsion was bad enough for him if he got in trouble again, that she had to follow through.

She couldn’t discuss it with Henry. She knew too well what his reaction would be. “You expel a thirteen-year-old for using the wrong material in a copy machine, but you congratulate our daughter for dropping out of a full scholarship at Juilliard to become a Stool Sample?” Henry seemed to have convinced himself that Rue and Georgia shared a closeness that left him out, and that Rue had an influence with Georgia that Rue doubted she had.

The unrest among the parents over Glenn’s expulsion, coupled with the depression and anger the faculty felt over their nonraise, gave the Merry Nineties dinner and auction party that Saturday night a decidedly unmerry cast for Rue.

Chandler Kip, looking very GQ in his beautifully tailored dinner clothes, stopped Henry and Rue as they walked toward the dining room. The party was being held in the Madison Room of the Saying Grace / 229

Red Tower Inn, the fanciest motel in Seven Springs. Rue was dressed like a Gibson Girl and felt like an ass. When they stopped to sign in, she could see four school fathers inside the Madison Room, dressed in straw boaters and wearing suspenders, singing barbershop.

“Henry, excuse me a minute,” said Chandler. “Could I just have a minute with your wife?”

Nice touch, she thought. Asking her husband’s permission, not hers. She watched Henry stroll rather too willingly off without her as Chandler led her around a corner, out of the stream of arriving Country School couples and guests. They found themselves outside the Jefferson Room, from within which they could hear the strains of “Hava Nagila.”

“I have good news,” said Chandler. “I have persuaded Terry Malko to stay on the Board.”

“I’m glad,” said Rue, although she wasn’t. “How did you do that?”

“I told him that Glenn would be welcome to return to school on Monday. And that from now on, any disciplinary decision involving his children would be made by me.”

Rue felt herself go white. She couldn’t have been more affronted if he’d ripped off the front of her dress.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

“You’re out of control, Rue,” said Chandler. “Somebody’s got to do something.” And he turned on his handmade heel and walked away.

Henry saw Chandler Kip come into the Madison Room, joining his wife, Bambi, and Sondra and Oliver Sale, whom he had brought to the auction, no doubt to rub Rue’s nose in it. Bambi was wearing a corset that cinched her waist in to about the size of Henry’s bicep, and huge mutton sleeves, and was displaying a lot of cleavage.

Sondra Sale wore the dress of a frontier dance hall girl, very tight and low in the bodice, with black fishnet stockings. It wasn’t quite the right period, but it showed off her figure in a way that, Henry thought, seemed like a direct challenge to her husband. Come on, big boy, let’s show everyone the merchandise. Oliver, in a rented tuxedo, stared into space.

230 / Beth Gutcheon

Henry looked around for someone to sit with. There was Carson McCann, a good-looking redhead who ran a bookstore downtown.

Her husband was an aging preppie with rheumy eyes and a perpetu-al glass in his hand…. Henry wasn’t in the mood. There was Terry Malko with his pretty wife, Margee. Terry was looking like the cock of the walk, laughing loudly and elaborately patting the bare shoulders of his wife. They were sitting with some people Henry didn’t know, who looked too young to have school-aged children.

He saw Corinne and Bradley Lowen trying to find their table. Henry liked the Lowens a great deal, especially Bradley.

Henry saw Rue come into the room, looking white. He watched her locate Mike Dianda at a table with the Percys and some other teachers and whisper something to him. Henry saw Mike leap to his feet, like a spring uncoiling. Mike took Rue’s arm, and with a pang of something almost like jealousy, Henry watched them leave the room together. So. There was a crisis; fine, there had been dozens over the years. Team Rue would swing into action. Surgeons were cowboys, solitary gunslingers, and they didn’t play on teams. He realized with plangent clarity, standing in the middle of the ballroom at the Red Tower Inn, that he was sick of it.

Mike marched Rue into the lobby and found some chairs near a plastic date palm, where it was just possible to talk over the din of a crowd watching a Sharks game in an open bar irrationally named The Loggia.

“You can’t resign,” Mike said.

“I have to. I can’t go in there and give flowery speeches…this school is coming apart. The president of the Board has just violated every principle of sound management…. I have no authority. I can’t expel. If I can’t expel I can’t discipline at all, I can’t protect the teachers, it’s impossible. Impossible, full stop. Let
him
run the school.”

“Rue—he’s an asshole.”

“Thank you, Sherlock.”

“Hold on. Please. You can’t let an asshole like that have his way just because he wants it. We’re a culture here, we’re a civilization.

We’ve taken years to evolve our laws, our standards. We have order, we have peace, we have arts and music, gardens and orchards, we’re Saying Grace / 231

raising children to be decent useful citizens and carry this order out into the world. But we can’t do our work without you, and
you
can’t say, ‘Oh, fine, I quit, Open the gates,’ just because some moron in a loincloth shows up outside the walls and starts picking his nose and grabbing his balls and making faces at you.”

Furious as she was, Rue smiled.

“It’s not just you. The school belongs to all of us, but a body can’t act without a head. But if we
can
act, we can solve it.”

“I don’t see how.”

“He may think he can run the school without you, but does he think he can run it without teachers?”

Rue took a deep breath and looked at Mike. She saw his point.

The teachers wouldn’t stand for this either; how could they? If Glenn Malko set foot back on campus, it would take about half a day before their jobs were impossible. These kids would know in a hot minute that something at the heart of the machine had broken down.

“Welcome to
Lord of the Flies
,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“I can’t go in there and go politicking from table to table, Mike.”

“Of course not. If we’re going to have a shit fight, we need you out in front in spotless raiment, not carrying the shit bucket. These teachers are not stupid and they’re not weak, and neither am I. But if you quit, I’ll quit, and half of them will quit or want to, and very few of them can afford it. If you hold on, we can get on our ramparts and pour boiling oil on the bastard.”

Rue tried to remember how you did Lamaze breathing. She thought it would help her get control of her rage.

“You didn’t go to military school, did you?” she asked. “You’re pretty slick with a metaphor.”

Mike smiled. He held a hand to Rue, and she took it.

“You don’t actually know you can pull this off, do you,” she said, and it was not a question.

“No,” said Mike.

They sat holding hands, Rue feeling unspeakably grateful for Mike’s friendship. She couldn’t possibly have asked the teachers to stand with her now when they felt she had sold out Catherine 232 / Beth Gutcheon

Trainer, but Mike could. And of course he would really be asking them to stand up for themselves, not her.

“Okay,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” She tried once more to take a deep breath and then said crossly, “Do you have any idea how
fucking
uncomfortable these stupid corsets are?”

Mike said, “My land, I have never heard you use that word in public.”

“I’m getting into the mood,” she said. “Let’s go. I have to hype these big spenders to unbutton their wallets for the best little school in the world.”

As minutes passed and Mike and Rue did not reappear, Henry decided he was ready for a drink. At the bar he found Emily Goldsborough standing by herself. She was wearing black leggings and a long sweater and a Clinton/Gore button.

“I decided to go for the nineteen nineties instead of the eighteen nineties,” she said, a little embarrassed.

“You’re the only woman here who doesn’t look like a fool. Can I buy you a drink?”

She smiled. “Please. White wine.”

He was aware that she stood studying him as he ordered wine for her and a scotch for himself.

“You look nice in black tie,” she said, taking her drink. He looked as nice in black tie now as he had twenty-five years ago, when he had danced one dance with her at a formal party in Philadelphia, somebody’s coming-out party she thought, or was it a wedding?

She remembered his hand on her naked back as he spun her around.

He had kept his chin raised as he danced, as if he were scanning the crowd instead of thinking of the steps or the girl in his arms. What had she been wearing that her back was bare?

“I remember about a hundred years ago, when I offered to get you a drink and you asked for a gimlet,” he said, smiling.

“A gimlet…my god, how do you remember that?”

He was looking down at her, warm and teasing. “I didn’t know what one was.”

“I didn’t either. It was what my stepfather drank.”

Saying Grace / 233

“What did it turn out to be?”

They were walking to the edge of the room together, seeing the past instead of what was before them.

“It was delicious. It had Rose’s Lime Juice in it.”

“Rose’s Lime Juice…remember when we were young and people would drink that sort of stuff all night and be up for their nine o’clock classes?”

“I drank gimlets for about a year, as I remember, because they reminded me of you.”

Henry stopped and looked at her, quizzical.

“Did you really?”

“Yes.”

They found an empty table under a wall display of antique bicycles with huge front wheels.

“Do you really think I’m all right dressed like this?” Emily asked.

“Of course.”

“I went to the costume place to rent something, but do you know what they cost?”

Henry shook his head. “Rue conceals that sort of thing from me.

How are you getting along, that way?”

“Money?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Ann Rosen’s got Tom pretty well hog-tied.”

“Good.”

“But this job has been an interesting experience,” she added, gesturing at the Country parents, chatting and laughing and drinking.

“Being seen as a social inferior.”

Henry took a pull on his drink. “When I was growing up, my parents thought of doctors as tradesmen. Not the sort that one would know socially.”