LITMIR.BIZ

      TWO

      Rachel Bickham didn’t wait long enough to cross the campus from the faculty room to her office to call her husband so that the conversation would be private. She was afraid she would miss him if she did. So she called him from the faculty room the instant the meeting was over, while the teachers were still there. She’d talk quietly so they wouldn’t hear. And anyway, she didn’t have anything really private to tell him. She just wanted to hear his voice.

      She had gotten up at dawn that morning because her husband, Bob Perrine, the CEO and founder of Best Sports Inc., with stores in New York City and Chicago, had begged her not to leave him alone yesterday in their New York City apartment, which he kept to be near his office and where they’d spent the weekend together. Then, after four hours of driving through the Bronx into Connecticut and north along the Connecticut River, she had returned to Miss Oliver’s School for Girls on the bank of that river, bursting with eagerness to get to work. She’d gone straight to the faculty meeting.

      The first thing she would tell Bob, as she had promised him she would even though he hadn’t asked her to, was that she had arrived safely. She was feeling a little remorse for having been so preoccupied by the faculty meeting that was about to start—her very first one—that she’d forgotten to call him when she’d arrived on campus. First she would apologize, and then he’d forgive her and tell her he was glad he didn’t need to worry anymore, and then she’d tell him how lovely the white clapboard buildings of the campus looked in the morning sun, how the dew sparkled on the lawns, and how the mist was rising off the river.

      She didn’t realize she was holding her breath, praying she wasn’t too late while the phone rang on the other end of the line. After what seemed to be forever, his secretary answered, and Rachel knew he’d already left to catch his plane. It was his private number. His secretary never picked it up unless he wasn’t there, and when she did, Rachel always felt resentful of her, though she knew that made no sense. “Oh well, I’ll call him later,” she told the secretary, but the morning that had seemed so bright had lost its luster.

      So instead, the first thing she would do would be to call the new board chair Milton Perkins and get everything squared away by doing what she should have done on the day she was appointed. She would ask him to propose to the board that her title Headmistress be changed to Head of School. Certainly, Milton Perkins would understand how dated mistress was, and that, for a girls’ school with a newly appointed African American head, the term had an especially nasty ring. A year ago she had been on the verge of advising her predecessor, Fred Kindler, to make the same request, headmaster being even more out of tune than headmistress, but she refrained because she thought him too preoccupied trying to win over a disapproving community, busily traveling around the country and assuring the alumnae that he had not been brought in specifically to build up the enrollment by allowing boys into the school, the mere idea of which drove everybody crazy. And of course another damning issue for Fred had been his gender. Rachel had begun to think that if she had persuaded her friend to change his title, it might have changed attitudes just enough to save him his job. He would still be the head of the school and she still the chair of Science and director of Athletics.

      But Fred wasn’t the head anymore because he’d offered his resignation when he realized which way the wind was blowing—and Milton Perkins had said, “You’re a hell of a guy, Fred. Almost everybody else would have to be told.”

      What happened next was a secret that Rachel and Milton Perkins would rather die than not keep: the executive committee of the board asked Francis Plummer to be the interim head, but he refused because he understood they were offended by his refusal to support Kindler. They were choosing him only because the alumnae would follow him. Besides, his replacing Kindler, if only for a year, would embitter Peggy still more.

      Just the thought that she would soon be talking with Milton Perkins began to brighten Rachel’s spirits again and melt away her dispiriting concern for having been the second choice. When Fred Kindler had resigned, the then-board chair Alan Travelers resigned too because he was tarred with all the same brushes that Fred Kindler was, especially the rumor of the Plan to Admit Boys. Perkins, whose three daughters had graduated from Miss Oliver’s, had assumed the chair in his place. He was everything Rachel was not: white, rich, elderly, retired, Republican; but they’d liked each other from the moment he’d offered her the interim headship last June after Francis had refused it, and she’d heard herself say, “I’m not going to be your head just because I’m convenient. You’ve got to want me enough now to want me permanently.” The idea had just come to her. It was outrageous. “Jesus!” Perkins had said, but he had already started to grin, loving her moxie, and she had answered, “You don’t want to be picking a new head every year.” His grin had gotten even broader and his face lit up. “You obviously agree,” she then noted. “You bet I do!” he had replied.

      Now she was halfway across the lawn to her office, planning the day, her disappointment about the conversation with Bob that hadn’t happened fading further into background. First she’d persuade Milton Perkins of the importance of changing her title to Head of School, then she’d call Francis Plummer in to her office and give him the good news she knew he must have been expecting: you are, as of right now, the dean of academics. She and Milton Perkins agreed that without the right people around her, she wouldn’t last any longer in her job than Fred Kindler had. She would do everything she needed to do to avoid his fate. From the instant she had been appointed to hold the school in her hands

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