Saying Grace (7 page)

“Okay,” said Chandler, “I’ll tell her I’m backing you up.”

“Thank you,” said Rue, feeling an unexpected wave of gratitude.

Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad.

Chandler wiped some bread in the grease on the plate left by his Blanket Roll Hash. He wasn’t finding this job at all as he had expected. He was used to conducting business in a decisive world of move fast, cut to the chase, on to the next. The men he worked with respected and enjoyed this style. With Rue he found himself continually in a mushy world of six sides to every question. He felt like a basketball superstar who finds he’s been traded to a football team. He wondered how to regain his footing.

“I had a talk with Oliver Sale the other day,” said Chandler. “You know he works for me?”

“Yes,” said Rue. The Sales were relatively new to the school. They had moved out from Sheboygan a year and a half before and put their children in public school, but it hadn’t worked out. Rue had taken both children in the middle of last year, under some pressure from Chandler Kip. There was a girl, Lyndie, now in fifth grade, and a boy named Jonathan in junior kindergarten who was passing strange. Jonathan had a walleye and he licked the palm of his hand all the time, as if he were a cat trying to calm himself. He also had a trick of sticking his tongue way out as if he were trying to get it into his nose. He was not an attractive child and seemed racked with anxieties. Late last spring Rue had asked the Sales to come in to talk about Jonathan, but they hadn’t responded to the message. That was fairly unusual. When parents were paying X thousands of dollars a year, they usually wanted all the attention they could get, and they virtually always snapped to attention at any hint that a child was not working out at Country.

“I don’t know how well you know them,” said Chandler.

44 / Beth Gutcheon

“Not well.”

“He’s a very bright guy, genius level.”

Rue only nodded. To her Oliver Sale was a tall and angular but flabby man who seemed to glower even when he tried to smile. His head was strangely proportioned, as if it had been necessary to cram all his features together at the bottom of his face, and leave the other two-thirds for forehead. The wife, Sondra, was more approachable, although nervous, like Jonathan. Rue’s memory was that when they came in for their interview, Oliver did all the talking.

“Oliver says that Lyndie doesn’t seem to have any homework.

They ask what her assignment is and she doesn’t know.”

Uh oh, thought Rue, here we go. She said, “I’ll speak to Mrs.

Trainer.”

“Thank you. You know I’ve heard
nothing
but complaints about Catherine Trainer since I joined the Board? I’d like to raise a point of curiosity. We’re in a recession here. Teachers are a dime a dozen; they’re stacked up over the airfield waiting for a job like this. Young kids with good degrees who would cost half as much as Mrs.

Trainer. Isn’t that true?”

“In a way.”

She looked at him, feeling weary. Oh, he was going to be one of these kinds of presidents. She wished they could all be like Ann Rosen, intelligent and supportive, good at leading the baying hounds away from the wounded deer, so that Rue could do her job while Ann channeled the Board in directions that strengthened the school.

“In what way?” Chandler asked.

Rue said, “It isn’t true that good teachers are a dime a dozen. There are plenty of teachers, but not plenty of good ones. Mrs. Trainer has been one of the best teachers I ever saw. She has a history with the school that is worth a great deal to the faculty, to the alumni, and to me.”

Chandler smiled, and took another roll. “Well, those points are well taken.”

“Thank you.”

“But in my business when we have a difficult personnel issue, we make a clean cut and go forward. We aren’t sentimental and no one expects us to be.”

“Can business really be as simple as that?”

Saying Grace / 45

“Yes,” he said, though they both felt instantly that this was a lie.

They sat silent another moment.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said with an air of beginning over.

“Just for my information. When a teacher is past it, what does it take to decide you’re cutting her too much slack?”

“It’s a matter of judgment. The important thing is that I have to be sure to think with my own brain and not let parking-lot politics think for me. I’ve had years when a particular teacher will come under fire for no reason known to God or man, and then the storm blows out to sea and the next year’s class is delighted with her again.

And when I do decide that a longtime employee of the school is ineffective, there are right ways and wrong ways to handle it. So I have to do what I have to do in the right way, at the right time.”

Chandler seemed annoyed by this answer, and shot his cuffs to display heavy mother-of-pearl cufflinks. He put one hand in his pocket and fumbled around, a gesture that looked habitual, like looking for a lighter and then remembering you don’t smoke anymore. He put his hands back on the table, folded together. Finally, he said, “Do I understand you to say that you are going to fire her?

In the right way, at the right time?”

“You do not.”

“What then?”

“I’m saying that it is improper for school parents, and most especially for Board members, to interfere with the head in personnel matters. Maybe we should schedule another board retreat, at your convenience, to review this sort of thing.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which they both looked around the room, as if suddenly enchanted with the decor.

Each had come to the meeting determined to establish a rapport, hoping to make a new start with each other. Rue felt chagrin that once again she had let her impatience show because a new trustee knew so much less about schools than she did. Of course he knew less; it wasn’t his job. He hadn’t been at it for eighteen years.

Chandler, for his part, had agreed to be president in the hope of serving the community, and also, of course, for the pleasure of wielding a big stick. He had told the Sales that he would take care of this. Now what was he going to tell them? It was embarrassing, and Rue knew it.

46 / Beth Gutcheon

“Let’s talk about the auction,” he said.

“Let’s.”

“I’m concerned about the theme,” said Chandler.

“You are? Gay Nineties? I thought it was very clever. We’ve found a collector to lend us some antique bicycles, with the huge front wheels. The eighth-grade girls will wear leg-o’-mutton sleeves and bustles. Imagine how much they’ll learn about how uncomfortable women’s lives used to be, these little ones who spend their lives in sweat clothes.”

“I don’t like the overtone of homosexuality.”

“Chandler!”

“Well, I don’t. I asked my wife what she thinks of first when she hears the word
gay
and she agrees with me.”

“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard!”

“Thank you very much. It’s not a lifestyle choice that should be associated with The Country School.”

“It’s not a lifestyle choice at all! It’s a lovely word, with many meanings. This decade a hundred years ago was called the Gay Nineties, and that’s what it’s always been called.”

“What about Merry Nineties?”

“You’re not serious.”

“Do you realize that from the beginning of this lunch, you have brushed off or belittled every single thing that I came here to say to you?”

She paused. She could see that in fact she had but…but…did she really have to deal with this? Maybe she could get Ann and Terry to sit down with him and explain to him what the job was. Maybe she could talk Terry into taking it over next year. She said carefully,

“I can see that it seems that way to you, and I’m sorry. But the auction is run by the Parents’ Council. Firing is done by me. If you are going to overstep your bounds in areas like this, I’m going to fight you tooth and nail. It isn’t good for the school.”

“And you are
the
authority on what’s good for the school?”

“In this case, yes.”

“I think I better go,” said Chandler quietly, and he went. It was the first time in her seventeen years of leadership at the school that a Board president, man or woman, had stuck her with the check.

L
ife had not been entirely fair to Catherine Trainer. It was not fair that Norman should have died the way he did. He never smoked. He didn’t drink, except a thimble of wine at Passover. And yet he got a ghastly cancer when he was only fifty-seven, and lingered, getting paler and thinner and less and less himself as his immortal spark was replaced erg by erg with man-made drugs. He lingered on in the hospital bed in the downstairs den long after he knew, where he was, or even who he was, and long after he lost all control of his bladder or sphincter muscles, which at least he never knew, thank god. Catherine used to race home from school at lunch and immediately after class to be with him. She started recycling lesson plans and putting off grading homework as Norman’s suffering grew, and she was the only one who could soothe him. It turned out not to make much difference, either the putting off or the soothing of Norman. School went on in a blur, and so did Norman.

Finally she had to have a nurse in the daytime, while she was at work, but she nursed him alone every night and all weekend. In the last months, he was so drugged that he could hardly be said to have slept night or day; he just slipped in and out of trances of pain. And she slept sitting up in a chair beside him. Once she let the doctors bully her into letting him be carried off to the hospital. But the minute he saw her in the morning, in his first lucid moment in weeks, Norman made her promise to take him home and never let them take him again, and she kept the promise. She was holding his hand when he died, although there was so little of him left by then that he slipped away without a ripple, and she missed it.

Norman Trainer had been the only person left alive who didn’t call her Catherine. He had called her Caddy, as she had been called when she was little. Now no one called her that. Grandchildren might have, if she had any. She always thought that she would teach her grandchildren to call her Caddy, as she couldn’t imagine she 48 / Beth Gutcheon

would ever feel old enough to be Granny. But to have grandchildren you had to have children, and she was lacking those.

She and Norman had had a full life though. Norman was an electrical inspector for the city, which was a terribly interesting job.

He was always meeting new people and visiting new sites, and people always liked Norman. He had honest eyes. And she had her children at school. No one but Norman knew to what extent they became, in her mind, her own children. She yearned over the little ones in the preschool, watching them grow up on their way to her.

She followed the big ones as they moved to the upper school, and then off into the big world. She followed them around the campus with her eyes; she followed them in her mind’s eye when they physically departed. She had never missed a Homecoming at The Country School in all her nineteen years. She loved to see the grown-up strangers approach her, great twenty-five-year-olds whom she had taught when they were ten, and see them smile and exclaim

“Mrs. Trainer!” You could see in their eyes how they had loved her.

And they knew that she loved them.

Catherine made fifth grade fun. If she did an Egypt project they all made a model of King Tut’s tomb. When they studied the Age of Discovery, they made model Ninas and Pintas and sailed them on the carp pond, and then they studied the People of the Americas and did things like making a whole meal of foods eaten by Incas.

She taught her children to sprout beans in little dishes as the Natives of New England had taught the Pilgrims to do, to avoid scurvy in the long winters. They made popcorn, of course, and they read about pemmican, a convenience food made of sun-dried strips of deer or buffalo meat, packed in leather pouches with melted fat for energy, and often mixed with dried blueberries or cranberries for flavor and vitamins. The children felt this would be fun to make but too disgusting to actually eat. Likewise the cooking methods of the nomads of the plains, the tipi-dwelling Sioux, Cheyenne, and the like. Catherine taught how they trailed their tipi poles, skins, and fur robes along behind their horses or women (the two beasts of burden) on the trail, but they didn’t carry any pottery or cookware.

For a cooking pot they used a buffalo stomach, which they would fill with meat and fat and whatever vegetables might be gathered, then bury it in a hole filled with steaming hot rocks, and let it Saying Grace / 49

simmer. Then they dug it up and ate the stew, and then the pot. The children thought that would be gross, if you didn’t wrap it in alu-minum foil before you buried it.

A favorite project was the Sweat Lodge, which the fifth grade built each year on its Indian Overnight. For safety this was held on campus at the school. Parents helped each year to erect three genuine Cheyenne tipis, whose poles were stored in the Bus Barn and the skins in Catherine’s garage. The skins were actually marine duck, now smoke-stained and painted all around with pictograph accounts of battles and buffalo hunts. Every fall the children helped to cut and peel new tent pegs and lacing pegs from shrubs on campus, as the Indians would have. On the night of the Overnight, Catherine and Norman cooked and served maize (corn on the cob) and stuffed buffalo gut (hot dogs) in the Mess Tipi. The tipi was furnished in the ceremonial way, with the doorway to the east and the altar at the back, and the children sat cross-legged on blankets around the fire, passing food hand to hand. After dinner they did ritual prayer dances, chanting chants they had written, and then they told ghost stories until the last streaks of light were gone from the sky. Then the children were sent to bed, the girls in one tipi and the boys in the other.

Norman and Catherine used to sit watching the firelight until the worst outbursts of whispers and laughing had subsided and every child had been escorted by torchlight to the bathroom at least twice.

At first light, they all got up and began building the Sweat Lodge.