The Eliot Girls (4 page)

Had Larissa been a different kind of woman, Ruth would have said that she was atwitter. But unlike most people, her agitation manifested itself in a robotically rigid bearing of body and head. Ruth's own hands flitted and flapped uncontrollably when she was nervous or energized, flew upwards to her hair to fix straying strands or to her forehead and cheeks to brush away imaginary irritants. Her entire body loosened, threatening to trip her, and she dropped pens, paper, even coffee mugs, for no reason. Larissa, on the other hand, became superlatively controlled, as if all her physical expressions had to be stilled, sublimated to the elaborate, leaping demands of her mind. It might have been a performance, Ruth thought, Larissa's way of capturing notice, like turning off the lights to get rowdy students' attention or lowering your voice by barely perceptible decibels until it was nearly a whisper as a response to shouting, tactics they had all been taught in teachers' college.

Larissa was dressed in an adapted version of the school uniform. This outfit was an annual first-day tradition, and Ruth couldn't help noticing that not just the idea but the clothes themselves had been carried through the decade. Larissa wore the uniform only on special occasions—the first day of school, the closing ceremonies, the rousing final performance at the Independent Schools' Music Festival—and Ruth didn't doubt that she kept it safely ensconced in plastic for the rest of the year, but still the clothes showed their age. Certainly, she had done a better job of pushing the clothes past their expiry date than Ruth could have managed: the pleats on the narrow navy kilt were expertly pressed, and the long silver kilt pin shone as if she had sat at her kitchen table the night before with an emptying bottle of silver polish at her right hand. Unfortunately, the kilt also had a sheen to it, of cheap material too long loved. The tailored grey blazer fit her as neatly as it ever had, but the school crest on a pocket over her heart needed to be re-sewn at the bottom, and the hems of the sleeves were thinning, ever so slightly, much like the great leader's hairline.

In Larissa McAllister's view, her wearing of the uniform did not diminish her authority, but heighten it. She was proud to be associated with this company of brilliant girls, not simply as their devoted leader, but as their creator. She felt that she and her pupils, attired identically, made a beautiful spectacle of democracy—leader (she sometimes wondered whether
icon
was too strong a word) and followers as one. But she felt that she was more than their creator, God-like and distant. She had brought these girls, the hundreds of them, into the world—they were here because of her vision, because she'd seen, as a child attending a grubby grammar school on the Isle of Wight, that there could be more, should be more—through her craving for something too exceptional to articulate, through an almost maternal swell of desire—although what she felt was at once grimmer and more passionate than animalistic procreative instincts could ever be. (And maternal longings were something she counted herself blessed never to have experienced.)

Larissa was nearing sixty, yet she had not aged noticeably since Ruth first met her over ten years before, probably in part because back then she had looked much older than her years, as though she had always aspired to be an ageless, sexless grande dame and had only to get past the obstruction of youth to realize her truest incarnation. The name Larissa did not suit her, was far too flowery for the shrewd, hawkish face, with its jutting chin, the slender, pointed nose, and the tight lips over which she applied a daily slash of cranberry lipstick. Ruth tended to think of Larissa in terms of her full name, but when she considered the first name alone, she felt a fleeting tenderness for the woman—the name was proof that Larissa McAllister had once belonged to someone else, that a mother had aspired to beauty on her behalf. Even as she squirmed under that critical gaze, Ruth couldn't help acknowledging that Larissa was magnificent, in her way.

“More,” Larissa declared, breaking the waiting silence of the room.

“More what?” Sheila piped up.

“That is the question, Sheila,” replied Larissa, pointing at Sheila with approval. “More what?”

The high voltage in the room was making Ruth sleepy, and she yawned loudly, attracting Larissa's glare.

“‘More' is to be our motto for this year, colleagues. More. More from the girls. More from ourselves. As exceptional as George Eliot Academy already is, excellence lies in constant evolution, constant pushing against predetermined boundaries. Today, I'd like us all to put our heads together to come up with innovative ideas for the coming year. You'll see in just a moment that on one half of the white board, I've compiled a list of last year's most exciting events. On the other half, I've anticipated two suggestions minimum from each staff member, and jointly we'll—”

There was a stirring then by the door, and even though she was about to whip away the black cloth, Larissa lost the attention of the room. Unaccustomed to such lapses, she looked startled and immediately stopped speaking. A man came in, shoulders hunched, dipping his head low, as though he thought he could shrink himself and enter unnoticed. An unlikely prospect, considering that he was, including the groundskeeper, one of only four male staff members. Ruth had never seen him before, not at the June cocktail party introducing the new hires, or at the widely resented, day-long summer meeting at the end of July (which Larissa referred to as “the summit”). She had heard, however, through Moira Loughlin, the art teacher, that there was talk of a late hire, a man who'd taught at the University of Toronto. But every now and then such rumours sprang up—the result of too many women in one place at one time.

And there he was, the rumour wished into reality. His attempts to minimize his presence were useless. His long lean body did not fold easily in on itself and his gangly weaving around the outstretched legs of the women on the armchairs and couches by the door only made him more conspicuous. Although he made little noise himself, a bright nebula of sound followed him as he manoeuvred: the women roused from their torpor, moving their legs to grant him a pathway, shifting nervously in their seats, whispering questions to each other or murmuring low hellos to him.

Ruth waited for the stern rebuff from Larissa, the short lecture on tardiness and example setting. She had been on the receiving end of Larissa's castigating arrows more than once and had found herself blushing like a teenager, a burning blotchy red from forehead to collarbone. Surely Larissa would be especially irritated by his timing, his interruption of the zenith of her presentation, the moment of high drama when she would unveil the white board. Better for him to halt the brainstorming, which was harder to control anyway, than the flourish of her revelation. But Larissa brightened visibly, letting her hand drop from the black cloth as she stepped away from the board.

“Henry!” she said. “You're with us at last. I hoped you would make it, but we all know how trying first days can be.”

She was smiling warmly. (Could Larissa McAllister smile warmly? Ruth had seen her smile politely, had seen her smile proudly, contentedly, conceitedly, reluctantly, tightly, angrily, but never, not once, warmly.) The cranberry lipstick had faded in the middle of her dry lips, leaving only an outline around them. She advanced on Henry, shook his hand heartily, and led him to the front of the room, where he tried to shrink even more.

“Some of you know, and some of you may not, about our dear Ms. Davidson's sudden personal decision to opt for early retirement. Those reasons, of course, are highly confidential. Ms. Davidson, naturally, was extremely concerned about the terrible inconvenience caused by her change of plans. However, as luck would have it, one of our Eliot parents, Clayton Quincy, heard of our conundrum and pointed us towards her very own husband, the talented man standing at my left. I present your new English teacher, Dr. Henry Winter. We're very fortunate to get him.”

Larissa was unable to stop smiling as she went on to recount at length Henry Winter's professional biography, all the way back to the academic awards he had won as a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Drawing particular radiance were his five years as a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. This was the first Eliot rumour Ruth had heard that turned out to be entirely true.

From across the room, Moira caught Ruth's eye and looked sideways towards Henry Winter, raising an eyebrow in mock lasciviousness. Henry Winter's appearance suffered from an odd duality. From the neck up, with his groomed face and freshly cut silver hair, he resembled a newscaster, but the rest of him was every bit the rumpled professor. He wore a tattered tweed blazer that looked as though it would smell musty, and beige corduroys, slightly worn at the knees. At his feet, the preppy re-emerged with a pair of well-worn Top-Siders. As Larissa rhymed off the long list of his published papers, he looked mortified, though he had surely supplied Larissa with the publications list in the first place.

Ruth wondered why anyone not ruled by some kind of perversion—self-destructiveness at best and sexual predation at worst—would leave a tenured university position for a job at an all-girls school. He looked benign enough, but wasn't that the insidiousness of such predators, their disguise of harmlessness? Ruth could imagine the author's photo on one of his tomes on literary theory (though she had always stayed well away from those books and guessed that their authors abjured the physical vanity signified by such likenesses): the wall of thick books behind him, the light from a window across one side of his face, his pensive gaze at the camera, through the camera, and the arm of his reading glasses like a piece of hay in his mouth. His eyes alone seemed to rebel against this image, as if showing up its pretensions: large and thickly lashed, baby blue.

“As remarkable as these intellectual achievements are,” Larissa was saying, “what impresses me the most, as a lifelong passionate educator of young women, are Dr. Winter's reasons for leaving the University of Toronto. He grew disaffected by the university's focus on research, the pressure on professors to publish or perish, often at the expense of the blossoming minds they are there to expand. Dr. Winter seeks direct contact with the young mind. Dr. Winter wants to teach!” Here she brandished her fist as if inciting a rallying cry.

When Larissa finished speaking, several teachers immediately approached Henry to introduce themselves. Ruth could feel Sheila looking at her, waiting for her to look up so that they could share their excited reactions to the new hire. But Ruth felt an inexplicable resistance to taking part in the enthusiasm. Although lively curiosity about a new teacher was typical, the atmosphere today was notably different. The teachers were standing in small groups talking in low voices, stealing nervous glances at Henry Winter. A few tried to catch his eye, offering coy, falsely casual smiles. They reminded Ruth of the girls during school dances, trying to elicit invitations during the slow songs. Even Larissa, with her dry lips and owl glasses, her concerted attempts to seem too high-minded to care about appearance, was not immune to his maleness and treated it as an accomplishment rather than a chromosomal coincidence. The PhD heightened her exhilaration but was not the cause. Two other teachers had PhDs, and Larissa never capitulated to them or made reference to their accomplishments; in fact, she sometimes appeared to consider their extra years in academia a red flag, betraying an ugly truth: that George Eliot, rather than being the realization of their lifelong aspirations, was a comedown of sorts. Yet Larissa McAllister held Henry Winter possessively by the elbow as Michael Curtis and several others crowded in on him.

Pretending not to notice, Ruth got up and wandered over to the kitchenette for more coffee. Through the fragmented blur of her peripheral vision, she gleaned what information she could about the intruder. Larissa was shepherding him around the room, facilitating introductions, a courtesy Ruth had never seen her extend to another teacher. Larissa had also never been so accommodating of a teacher's lateness, new or not. In fact, she often unleashed her most scathing reprimands on new teachers, like an army sergeant trying to weed out the weak. Ruth didn't understand why everyone was getting all worked up. She, at least, would not be swept away by the regressive, boy crazy inanity to which the other teachers had so easily succumbed. What was all the fuss about, anyway? He had fallen from grace, clearly. Why else would his next career move have been a placement at a girls' school? Yet he was bound to think he was better than they. It wouldn't be long before he was mentioning authors they had never heard of. As far as Ruth was concerned, his presence had stolen the morning from her, from all of them. She had no wish to meet him.

“Oh, well! Six children! How about that,” he was saying. He was quite tall, her sideways glance registered, and stooping slightly, as though at pains to appear understanding.

After several minutes, Larissa moved with him over to Lorna Massie-Turnbull, the music teacher, and the two male math teachers, Chuck Marostica, who was drinking from a small carton of chocolate milk, and Chip Moore, whose pointy ears and queerly sculpted goatee gave him a vaguely Mephistophelean cast. Ruth had a kind of sad affection for these men. Years ago, after hearing her mention her fondness for Toni Morrison, Chuck Marostica had given her an autographed first edition of
Beloved
for her birthday. (He had bought the book for himself when it was originally published because he loved ghost stories, but this one hadn't been quite what he bargained for.) Although Chip and Chuck had been the only males on staff for years, they tended to attract the opposite of the fevered admiration with which most staff members were now blasting Henry Winter and ate most of their lunches in a corner of the staff room while grading papers.

Not far from that group, Sheila was telling her favourite story, about how her heart had stopped once during a routine operation she'd had two years earlier. Wincing compassionately, Chandra Howard had an arm around her shoulder. Larissa and Henry swooped in at the tail end, and Larissa listened with a sour expression as Sheila circled back to the beginning for Henry's benefit.