My Latest Grievance (10 page)

"What did you think of my idea?" she asked.

I said, "There are teas on campus every week. I don't think another one will attract the VIPs."

"This would be special. I'd think of something—a theme or a chamber group or jumbo shrimp—but the
raison d'être
would be interpersonal relations, so that President Woodbury and his fellow higher-ups can see me in action, by which I mean as an intelligent, mature, thoughtful, responsible
in loco parentis.
"

I said, "Would you get up and make a speech?"

"Wouldn't need to." She smiled. "I'd mingle. I'd pour. I'd circulate with trays of whatever delicacies my entertainment budget can cover. I'd include my fellow houseparents—"

"Mine, too?"

That stopped her and put her into her favorite mode: parsing sentences. "How funny. To think of them as your
houseparents
rather than as your mother and father. As if you were a paying student rather than their daughter."

Ignoring that, I said, "Run some more names by me. I know who can be fun at parties."

"Do you think I should invite the old lady?"

"Which old lady?"

"Ada Tibbets!"

I said, "She won't come. She only goes to things she can take her dogs to."

Laura Lee said, "That wouldn't be a problem. Let her bring her dogs. Ralph loves dogs."

I must have winced because she added, "Isn't that the whole point? To defuse the situation and show that he is simply a male presence in the dorm? At a school that doesn't have a chaplain, I might point out. Everyone who meets him will come away completely charmed and harboring no more sexual suspicions."

"Why not?"

"Because." It was dark on the steps of the library. I could barely see her smile, but I could hear it in her voice. "Because I'll introduce him as my cousin! Poof, end of rumors."

I said, "Some people have sex with their cousins. Some people even marry them."

"Noted," she said. "And may I point out that your father's first
marriage to me is always one degree away from any topic I raise with you."

I said, "Fine. Do it. Have a party. Invite your make-believe cousin. He can meet all your other cousins at Dewing. And bring on Ada Tibbets. Maybe I'll get to meet the legend."

"You haven't met her? After all these years? Even across a room at an inauguration?"

"Probably," I said.

"A really ancient dame with wrinkles on either side of her mouth like a marionette's?"

"Maybe I was looking for the young Ada Tibbets, the one in the oil painting in your foyer."

"Even in that dewy rendering, she looks like a battle-axe," Laura Lee said.

"She doesn't approve of the Hatches," I said.

"Not surprised," said Laura Lee.

"And we don't like her."

"Let me guess: Because she's not fair and open-minded and doesn't love her fellow man as much as her corgis? And because she smashes to smithereens the labor relations commandments? That kind of thing?"

"Correct," I said.

It was widely believed that Ada Tibbets liked only people of her own kind. Finalists for the Tibbets Hall job who lunched at her Chestnut Hill mansion returned with reports of long silences and challenging food requiring mysterious Victorian utensils. When the college tried to wrest the hiring decision from Mrs. Tibbets, gently citing federal laws and state guidelines, she stared back in a manner that suggested that any changes in protocol would mean changes in her will.

My parents had contemplated a switch to Tibbets Hall one year, to what they viewed as a more like-minded, picket-friendly, avantgarde population. Lunch at Ada Tibbets's long dining room table, during which her dim view, though unexpressed, of a man living among her girls became obvious, had squelched such a move permanently. She didn't like the fact that my father had been divorced; additionally, she served both shrimp and ham in one meal, which
my mother pronounced deliberate and malicious. Pointedly, they never reapplied after being turned down in favor of Mrs. Knight, an animal lover, a former resident of tony Manchester-by-the-Sea, and a Dewing alumna from the days of certificates rather than diplomas. Aviva and David hoped that future nonpursuit of the job would be perceived as a protest against inherited wealth, against narrow-mindedness, against the silver bell used to summon her doddering housekeeper to the dining room.

Later, as Laura Lee and I chaperoned each other back from the library, I asked her how her own interview with Ada Tibbets had gone. Was it horrible, the way I'd heard?

"I'm here, aren't I?" she said.

"Lots of people don't get hired after that lunch," I said.

"You know why? Because when she asks, 'Do you mind if the dogs eat with us?' and then feeds them from the table—I mean fingers in their mouths, truly disgusting—some people don't handle it well. I not only smiled as if they were adorable, but I fed each one a couple of scraps as well."

"That's it?" I asked. "That's the test?"

"At least half of it."

"I've heard that she doesn't talk. That she sits there and stares so you'll feel uncomfortable."

"That's part of it—filling in the conversational gaps. Which is utterly reasonable when you consider that you'll be working with brooding adolescents."

"Especially at Tibbets Hall," I added.

Laura Lee said, "You know what's ironic? She has the last word on who's hired, but she has no idea who the population of Tibbets Hall is. She thinks everyone wears crinolines and goes to sleep at lights out. If she ever knew what went on in the beds of Tibbets Hall, she'd call the police."

"What's the rest of the test?"

"You won't like it," she said. "And you'll probably go running to your parents."

I said, "I will not."

Laura Lee looked around to see if anyone was close enough to hear her declaration, then whispered, "She quizzes you about your means."

It was so widely acknowledged, so untitillating, that I laughed. "Everyone knows that," I said. "She's famous for being a snob."

"Of course I lied to her. What possible correlation is there between a person's bank account and her suitability for the job of houseparent—except that a wealthy person wouldn't need it? But I told her my late father owned Dole Pineapple, because I'd had a tour of the plant in Hawaii—did your father ever mention that? It was the first thing that flew into my head, and apparently it hit exactly the right note."

"Someone should tell her that being judged by how much money you have in the bank is against the law," I said. "One of these days, a candidate is going to sue the college."

"Unlike you," said Laura Lee, "I wasn't raised to talk back. Besides, I saw it as an opportunity to be creative."

That might have been an excellent time to challenge her definition of creativity, to ask, "Do you ever tell the truth, Laura Lee? Do you think someone young and impressionable should be hearing how much you enjoy telling lies?" But why would I? At sixteen, before her lies ricocheted off my family, I found her flair for fiction altogether charming.

C
ONSIDERING MYSELF AN AUTHORITY
on all things Dewing, I felt entitled to append myself to groups touring the campus. The actual guides, both the hapless and competent ones, offered their audiences a variation of "This is Frederica Hatch. She lives here. Ask her anything." If no one responded, I'd volunteer that my mother and father were dorm parents and professors. Griggs Hall, straight ahead, the brick building with the fake white Doric columns, was my first and only home. The food was pretty good over there at Rita Curran Hall, named after a girl who had drowned in a campus pond, now drained and landscaped. We had a salad bar and a soft-serve ice cream machine that could mix the flavors so you could get chocolate and vanilla swirled together—on and on until the guide suggested I finish my homework or get back on my bike.

I offered myself as an unpaid intern the first summer I was over five feet tall. With no students on campus, it was the low season for tours. If a family visiting Boston from far away insisted—leaving tonight, it's now or never—Admissions called on me, their one-man skeleton crew. Feedback was excellent, due to my store of trivia and the charm I summoned from the inner actress
I'd been cultivating since birth. When I moved from volunteer to paid guide at age sixteen—thanks to staff shortages during a nasty flu season and over Christmas break—I developed a nose for the smarter-than-average applicants, sensing from their disdainful attitude that their rank in class was too high for Dewing.

"Your safety school?" I'd mouthe.

The girl would nod. To which I'd silently convey,
Good. We both know you can do better than this new iteration of the Mary-Ruth Dewing Academy.

Accordingly, my yield was poor; the lackluster legacies followed through with applications, while the overachievers didn't. Yet appreciative parents unfailingly checked the boxes that deemed me informative, engaging, and loud enough to be heard by those bringing up the rear. I wasn't supposed to take tips, but I couldn't see the harm. No one turned me in for either disloyalty or greed.

Soon after Laura Lee arrived, and with her blessing, I brought the odder applicants, the artistes and potential misfits, to Ada Tibbets Hall. Like all colleges in the 1970s, Dewing had its share of leftover hippies, vegetarians, and flower children. I'd lead the tour through the Tibbets living room, with its floral-labial wall-sized canvases of unframed student art, then knock on the housemother's door. "Ms. French is one of our most active and involved houseparents," I'd confide.

Laura Lee always managed to look surprised—the dressing gown helped convey that—even though Admissions alerted its hosts to pending visits. "Come in, come in," she'd cry. "I apologize for the mess, but I do feel that my girls come first" If there were dirty dishes in the sink, Laura Lee would say that she'd just entertained her foreign students for lunch—not easy to give every girl her native cuisine—so please excuse her kitchen. If clothes were draped over her furniture she would say, "I help out in the theater department, with wardrobe. Nothing official, just as a volunteer. That's my background: the stage." We had no theater department at Dewing, just an annual variety show to fund a new bike rack or a rape hotline.

She and I were a good team: She told tall tales and I egged her on. I might ask, "What play are we doing this term?" and she would answer effortlessly,
Moon for the Misbegotten
or
Flying Down to Rio.
Depending on my mood, I might ask, "How do you handle homesickness, especially with foreign students?" to which she would rattle off a sentence that sounded soothing in a few different languages. If the chaperoning parent was male, not unattractive, and without a wedding ring, she would switch into another mode: "Please! Ask me anything. Don't be shy. Parents always wonder:
Can
a housemother be married? Is there a Mr. French? Do I get any privacy?"

If no one bit, I would ask, "Um. Ms. French? What's your schedule like? Do you ever get a night off?"

She'd say, "Although I feel married to my job, I insist on every other weekend off. We houseparents cover for each other, and of course we have resident advisers on every floor, chosen for their maturity and reliability."

"Some of you could become RAs," I would say to the slack-jawed visitors. "It gets you a reduction in room and board."

"Didn't you say
you
lived in a dorm?" someone would inevitably ask me, meaning, Why are we seeing
her
apartment and not yours?

"My parents have office hours every afternoon," I would lie. "They're both professors."

"
Brilliant
professors," Laura Lee would add. "Very involved in campus ... doings."

"It sounds like you really love it here," a parent usually noted to one or both of us.

Laura Lee would answer sounding solemn and vaguely widowed. "I haven't had an easy life. I was married young. Here, at last, I've found a home. A family, really. I've been on my own for a long time, and now I've got a mission." She'd pause until someone prompted, "Mission?"

The answer changed with each visit. It might be in the realm of the imaginary ("to bring the New England small college theater medal to Dewing"), academic ("to keep the silver bowl for the highest collective grade point average of any dormitory"), medical ("to keep my girls safe, healthy, fit, and substance-free"), or—of most interest to me—highly personal ("to have a home at last, to find the daughters whom God didn't see fit to bless me with, to touch the lives of young women who can learn from my mistakes
and benefit from the wisdom I gained in all my yesterdays, on stage or off, for richer or poorer, in war and in peace").

She never seemed embarrassed by her own soliloquies or her loungewear, never exchanged a knowing glance with me acknowledging our act.

"We've taken enough of Ms. French's valuable time," I'd say, leading my group outside.

While not stating explicitly their disapproval of my expanding relationship with Laura Lee, my parents asked, "Is she such an ambassador of goodwill that hers deserves to be the only dorm you lead your tours to?"

I pointed out that they had always hated coming back from class, tired and hungry, to find a coterie of nosy parents in their parlor. Laura Lee didn't have classes to teach or wrongs to right, so she viewed my visits as within her job description.

"Is her place tidy?" my father asked.

I said, "Not tidy. But not so bad."

"From what you tell me, she seems to welcome the interruptions," said my mother, "whereas I dreaded those knocks on the door. No matter how many times I pleaded with the Admissions Office to stop sending tours through Griggs, I couldn't stop them."

"I think it was a form of harassment," said my father.

"It wasn't you they were showing off," I said. "It was the piano. They think it makes a nice impression—"

"At a school with no music department, no orchestra, no chamber group? Not even a marching band?" my father asked. "Seems a little misleading."

I said, "I thought I was doing you a favor—knocking on Laura Lee's door instead of ours. She really likes to talk."