Libby on Wednesday

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“I’ve decided to quit school again,” Libby said.

That did it. All around the table voices hushed in mid-sentence. Shocked alarm quivered in the silence. Even Gillian’s cats, the three great Persian puffballs and one sleek Abyssinian, looked up nervously from their favorite spot near the swinging double doors that led into the kitchen. Libby realized at once that she’d made a mistake.

It would have been better, she knew, to have approached the subject more gradually. To have prepared all four of them a little for what was coming, perhaps by giving them some reason for her sudden decision. Not the real one, of course. To tell them the truth about why she had to quit school was out of the question. But she could have mentioned some reasons—and there were many that she could think of—that they might understand and appreciate.

She had, in fact, tried that approach. She had made a stab at preparing Christopher, her father, when she had gone out to the gazebo where he had been working on his poetry to tell him that dinner was ready. Leaning against his
desk as he gathered up his pens and notebooks, she had mentioned casually that no one at Morrison Middle School seemed to know anything at all about Socrates. But to her surprise he hadn’t seemed shocked or even very much concerned. The calm smile on his thin, deep-eyed face didn’t even waver as he patted in the general direction of her cheek and murmured, “Mmm, that is too bad, isn’t it.”

She was about to say something more on the subject, when Christopher suddenly sat back down, scratched out a line of poetry, and began to scribble rapidly. Realizing that it was a bad time—Christopher was always a little vague and distant when he was working—she had gone looking for someone else.

But the results were much the same in the Great Hall, where she found Gillian, her grandmother, and her grandmother’s sister, Cordelia. Although neither of them was writing poetry, they were every bit as preoccupied as Christopher had been. Gillian and Cordelia were arguing, or as they liked to put it, “having a serious discussion.” At the moment the discussion seemed to be about politics—one of many subjects on which the two sisters always disagreed. But even though it was an old argument, they seemed to be too busy making the same old points to take much interest in what Libby was trying to tell them about Socrates at Morrison Middle School.

Telling herself she just hadn’t gotten their attention, she’d tried a slightly more straightforward approach as soon as they were all seated at the huge old table in the dining room. While the food was being passed around—Elliott’s special pot-roasted chicken with lots of fresh vegetables—she’d made her plans carefully. Perched, as she always was
at mealtime, on a couple of encyclopedias, since at age eleven she was still too small for the massive McCall House dining room furniture, she’d waited for what seemed a good moment to announce loudly that her eighth-grade math class was currently studying material she’d learned when she was nine years old.

But Elliott had been busy telling Christopher about an attempted theft at the bookstore, and Gillian and Cordelia were still going on about politics. And all four of them seemed as unconcerned about the mathematics she wasn’t learning as they had been about Socrates.

Libby was beginning to lose her temper. Usually they were only too interested in everything she had to say as well as everything she had been doing or even thinking, particularly anything about her experiences at Morrison Middle School. And even more particularly anything she really didn’t want to talk about. But when she really needed them to listen …

Deciding it was necessary to do something drastic, she blurted out her announcement about quitting school—and suddenly had their complete attention.

As the silence lengthened and stiffened, all four of them seemed to lengthen and stiffen too. Sitting around the long oak table, their suddenly erect bodies framed by the ornately carved backs of the huge old chairs, they looked like so many portraits. Like the stiff, solemn portraits with staring eyes that hang on the walls of ancient castles. Particularly Christopher with his poet’s face, fine-lined and melancholy, and Gillian in her bright fringed shawl and dangling earrings. For just a fraction of a second Libby’s awful load of misery was lightened by an urge to giggle.

It was Libby’s father—Christopher McCall—who spoke first. Putting down his fork and fishing in his lap for his napkin, he wiped his mustache carefully and said, “What is it, Libby? Is there a problem at school?”

She shrugged. “Not a problem, exactly. I’ve just been concerned lately that I’m not learning nearly as much as I was before I started school. Why couldn’t we just go on the way we were?”

“Ah,” Gillian sighed, her worried frown drifting off into soft-eyed daydream. “
The Way We Were
. One of my favorite movies. With Robert Redford, you know.” She glanced at Cordelia, and her blue eyes, always surprisingly young and lively-looking in her small wrinkled face, went suddenly needle sharp. “Such a handsome man, Redford,” she said meaningfully. The meaning was that Robert Redford was better-looking than Charlton Heston—another favorite disagreement between Gillian and her sister.

Gillian McCall, Libby’s grandmother, who was always just Gillian—not ever Mrs. McCall and absolutely not Grandma—flipped her fringes over her shoulder dramatically and sighed again before she went on. “Such a beautiful story. And in some ways quite like Graham’s and mine.”

Everybody smiled. They’d all heard it before—many times. Any conversation about movies, past or present, was sure to start Gillian off about the two main characters in
The Way We Were
, the talented writer and his madcap wife, and how they were so similar to Graham and Gillian McCall. But this time Libby wasn’t going to let Gillian’s romantic memories change the subject. The subject was that she, Libby McCall, wanted to go back to “the way we were”
until last fall—when she’d begun to attend school for the first time, at the rather advanced age of eleven years.

“I’ve just been thinking about it lately and I’ve decided I’d really prefer to go back to studying at home.” She smiled at each of them, her father first, and her grandmother, and then Elliott and Cordelia. “Unless it would be too much trouble for everybody. To start teaching me again, I mean.”

She knew what they would say. “Darling!” they said, and “Libby dearest, don’t be ridiculous.” It was hard to tell exactly who was saying what. With their sentences overlapping as if they were singing a round, they chanted soothing phrases, solo and duet. Phrases such as, “You weren’t any trouble. You know we all loved being your teachers. We all loved being the Libby McCall Private Academy. Didn’t we, Elliott? Didn’t we, Cordelia? Of course we did.”

The Libby McCall Private Academy had started after Libby’s first day in kindergarten, when she’d come home and announced that she wasn’t going back. She couldn’t remember exactly why she’d come to that decision so quickly, except that it had something to do with the fact that there wasn’t any good reading material in the classroom.

No one had made any fuss about it then. Everyone had agreed that there really wasn’t much point in making a person who could already read
The New York Times
spend the better part of a year learning the alphabet. And since Elliott had once taught school and still had a teacher’s credential, the school authorities hadn’t objected either. Dropping out of kindergarten had been very simple and easy, and it
seemed to Libby that dropping out of a seventh- and eighth-grade combination shouldn’t be any more difficult.

“Well, then,” Libby said, trying to sound as if it were all settled, “let’s do it again.” Choosing her grandmother as the one most apt to be on her side, she smiled, tucking in the corners of her mouth to emphasize her dimples—dimples that were especially admired by Gillian, from whom they were so obviously inherited. “The way we were. All right, Gilly?”

But it seemed it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. As the four of them looked around, checking each other’s faces, they all began to frown again. Libby sighed. It was so like them, taking forever to make a decision, except of course when Mercedes was at home. But Mercedes O’Brien, Libby’s absentee mother, wasn’t at home and probably wouldn’t be for several months. And this couldn’t wait that long. It couldn’t, in fact, wait even one more week. “Well?” she asked finally.