My Latest Grievance (30 page)

Before me was a beautiful sight: a thousand Mary-Ruths holding candles in the dark. There were no banners, no signs, no chants, but their message was unmistakable: We are gathered together to protest the firing of Professor Hatch.

Aviva caught on first. I knew this because my bold, unbending, iron-willed mother put her hands over her face and began to sob.

"Who did this?" I asked Laura Lee.

"I can only take credit for the choreography," she said, and with that fluttered one end of her fluffy pink scarf, signaling a thousand synchronized candles to rise over the allies' heads.

"Like Rockettes," I whispered.

"Without a single rehearsal!"

"Who told them I was fired?" my father asked.

"Who cares?" said Laura Lee. "It spread like wildfire."

Were there faculty, staff, and fellow houseparents there, too? I can't say because the crowd has doubled in my memory. The yearbook photo of that night occupied two panoramic pages, bled across the gutter, shot with a slow f-stop that melted the stars and candles into streaks of white.

My father put his arm around my mother, who continued to cry as she murmured apologies for her atypical labile response. I ran back inside for Kleenex and returned to cries of "Speech! Speech!"

My father walked forward, three careful paces to the edge of the stairs. "I'm simply overwhelmed," he said.

"Louder!" yelled a voice in the back.

"I'm overwhelmed, I'm dumbfounded, but very, very grateful," and with that he, too—emergency president, seasoned housefather, union agitator—began to cry.

So there I was, the last Hatch standing. I stepped forward and yelled, "Wow. This is incredible. Is this, like, the whole school?" A cheer went up. "Any alums?" I asked. A few voices supplied graduation years. "He's in shock," I continued, warming up, grinning. "So let me ask: You're all here for my dad, right?"

Another cheer and a swell of yeses.

"Because you found out that he got sacked?"

A thousand boos rolled our way.

"Even though he has tenure," I continued. "Even though he kept this school open and running while the so-called president disappeared—"

My father said, "Frederica! I think that's enough. I want the floor back."

Not quite finished, I yelled, "Okay! Here's the man of the hour, my dad, the reason you're all here: David! Louis! Hatch!"

My father slipped off his humble knitted cap and smoothed his thinning hair. "I don't know if this"—he swept his arm across the crowd—"will change anything, but when I look out and see all of you, and know that the word went out—'to every Middlesex village and town and Dewing dormitory,' to misquote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—I can only believe that this is
your
shot heard 'round the world, whether we win or lose ... whether I stay or go..."

That led to a chant of "Stay, stay, stay," initiated by his daughter.

My mother touched my father's arm, meaning,
Let me.
Stepping forward in her down-filled coat of an unsightly orange, she called out in a shaky voice, "I want to thank every single one of you. I mean, I look out there and I see freshmen who don't even know us ... students I've argued with ... students I've put on probation ... students who have dropped my classes ... students I've flunked"—laughter—"but here you are, homework due, probably overdue, sacrificing your Valentine's Day to a cause bigger than yourself ... I'm overwhelmed ... and I want to thank whoever planned this, whoever found candles in a shut-down city and pulled off the biggest surprise party in Hatch family history."

Laura Lee stepped forward. What would she say?
Don't forget that I, too, am an endangered houseparent. Did I ever tell you that I used to be married to your man of the hour? Oh, and how do you like this headline: I'm pregnant with President Woodbury's love child, just in case any one of you hasn't figured that out yet.

But all she said was "Thanks for coming, ladies. Thank you for your spontaneity and for not spilling the beans. Please extinguish your candles before going back inside."

"Wait!" said a familiar voice.

"Aviva?" said my father.

There was no bullhorn in my mother's hand that night. Still the crowd fell instantly silent. "This is only phase one!" she cried. "This is preaching to the choir! Do we really want to waste this magnificent show of solidarity? We don't? Then follow me! And
keep those candles lit." Like a manic umpire on a close call, she threw her arm in the direction of the big white house across campus, finger pointed and eyes narrowed. A roar went up.

She turned to my father and said with her old urgency, "You stay here. Please. This shouldn't take long..."

My mother was right: It didn't take long, especially when the object of one's dissent refused to show his face. Woodbury must have sensed the approaching phalanx of Dewing women bearing candles and radiating disfavor. By the time the single-file ranks of the newly zealous reached the circular driveway, the president's house was utterly dark. Chants of "Hell no, Hatch won't go" didn't draw him outside, nor did all seven verses of "We Shall Overcome."

But it was cold, and some of the protesters had dates. A primitive construction-paper heart was taped to the second-floor window of Grace's room, and her puzzled face appeared next to it when the singing stopped. Even a relatively angry mob of Mary-Ruths led by an impassioned Aviva Hatch was not inclined to storm a president's house.

N
O HATCH WOULD HAVE GUESSED
that Ada Tibbets herself, famously wealthy grande dame and suspected anti-Semite, would emerge as our champion. Not that it was a matter of justice being served or contracts being honored, because women of her disposition weren't interested in righting occupational wrongs. What got to Ada Tibbets in the end, what horrified her and made her threaten to cut Dewing out of her substantial revocable trust, was the moral turpitude of the incumbent president of Mary-Ruth Dewing Academy—or whatever they called it nowadays.

Who filled her in, we wondered? It could have been anyone with a strait-laced soul or vindictive heart in possession of a pen, paper, a stamp. Some days I would have put my money on the perennially overlooked Bunny, a woman scorned by administrators of every stripe. Might a poison-pen letter carry a Connecticut postmark, implicating Marietta? Was it a committee of parents who had heard the rumors and felt it was their duty to squeal? Or perhaps it was a priest who felt that the wages of sin was a pink slip.

The famously imperious voice called our apartment in the late afternoon, a few days after the candlelight vigil that solved nothing.

"Ada Tibbets here," she said. "With whom am I speaking?"

"Frederica," I said.

"How old are you now?" she asked.

"Seventeen," I answered. "Why?"

"Don't be impertinent!" she barked. "I'm trying to paint a picture of your family."

"Sorry," I said. "Did you want to speak to one of my parents?"

"Of course I do," she said. "Your father. In private."

He was a few yards away at the kitchen counter, squinting at directions on a cold-remedy box.

"
The
Mrs. Tibbets, for you," I said in my most sonorous receptionist's voice.

He looked awful—he was coming down with something. His face was pale; he needed a shave and there were dark circles under his rheumy eyes. Of course I stayed at his elbow to hear why Ada Tibbets, for the first time in my life, was calling us at home.

It wasn't that she had the exclusive power to bring down a president, but she had the ear of the trustees, and a phone tree in the top drawer of a no-doubt priceless antique desk. Amazingly, none of her cronies had heard about Woodbury's affairs, administrative or sexual, or of Grace's attempted suicide, its resulting brain damage, or the expanding uterus of an innocent novice housemother. Benefactress Tibbets had been shocked, dismayed, appalled to learn that the college was collapsing under the weight of scandals so repellent that she had taken to her bed upon receiving the unsigned account that had elucidated her. The trustees, even those retired to Florida and Arizona,
did
know that a storm of historic proportions had closed down the college. They also knew—having called the president's house at all hours—that Dr. David Hatch had risen to the occasion while H. Eric Woodbury was absent for a week, despite what seemed like a negligible distance separating Providence from his sacred duty.

It was a short conversation. My father was mostly silent because Ada Tibbets, apparently, was delivering an impassioned speech. Finally, he closed with "Yes, I do" and "I certainly shall," which didn't calm me at all, because his eyes were red, and his handkerchief seemed poised to mop a distressed brow.

"What does she want?" I demanded the instant he'd hung up.

He walked to our one living room window. It overlooked the quad and—now that the trees were bare—the widow's walk above the president's house. "This is something I have to tell your mother first, hon," he said. "I hope you'll understand."

"Then call her, for God's sake," I said, checking my watch. "You can catch her in her office if you call right now!"

"Not this," he said. "This requires my telling her in person."

"Is it really bad?" I asked.

He turned and faced me. "I promise you it's not bad," he said.

D
AVID LOUIS HATCH, PH.D.,
was inaugurated as the tenth president of Dewing College on March 30, 1978. We kept the ceremony low-key due to the awkward circumstances of his ascension, but still we hosted delegates from fifty-five New England colleges, and snagged Archibald MacLeish to read from his poems.

We moved into the president's house even before my father's induction, as soon as Dr. Woodbury packed up his belongings and slinked back to Maryland, where he'd had the foresight to keep the family home. I personally emptied the closet and bureau drawers in the former First Daughter's room and mailed two cartons to Marietta's boarding school with an insincere note—my mother insisted—claiming that our door was always open. She wrote back, a couple of expletives on an index card alluding to snitches at Brookline High, and a postscript that said, generically, "Hi to Mom."

I stepped in to recommend another adjustment to the Woodbury flow chart: that Mrs. Woodbury stay. It wasn't an easy sell to anyone, especially my parents, who worried that Grace needed more supervision and stimulation than Dewing daycare could provide. I pointed out that they had lived their entire Dewing lives with a hundred girls swarming above and around them. How hard
would it be, given the help that came with the office, to assimilate one simple and harmless soul into the household, who, in her own cortically impaired way, was good company? In the end, we struck a deal: Grace could stay, a foster child of sorts, until I went off to college, provided she didn't disturb the family peace and if I didn't shirk my custodial duties.

I took the green and gold room, the smallest bedroom in the manse, but the one closest to Gracie's newly pink one. It was twice as big as my Griggs Hall cell and overlooked the backyard rather than the campus, which contributed to the feeling that I no longer had to breathe the same air as a thousand undergrads.

Dr. Woodbury, to save face, pretended to resist our informal guardianship of his still legal wife. But once I had converted my father to the cause, he did the rest. Grace, he asserted, needed the constancy of her room, her TV, her chums. She'd woken up from her stupor—no aspersions intended, he told the sedation-happy husband—to find Frederica at her bedside, leading her to solid food and to life's simple pleasures. "You've heard of animal imprinting?" my father asked. "Well, that's what we've got here, in human form. You're welcome to get a second opinion, but my advice is, don't move her one single centimeter."

The dean of residential life had the nerve to suggest that it would be so very helpful, given the upheavals of the past few months, if Aviva could moonlight as housemother in Griggs or Tibbets—her choice—until the end of the year. David, now in the privacy of a big and relatively secluded house, discovered his voice. He ranted in rhetorical fashion about the ill-considered suggestion, as if he had eighteen years too many of pent-up discretion and low-decibel stewing. Aviva resigned from the union executive board, which would have placed her across the table from her own husband and also because she was confident that the new labor relations climate would not require such a high level of moxie.

Guided by the misapprehensions of Ada Tibbets, who believed that the rookie housemother had been seduced and abandoned by the previous administration, the board of trustees recommended that Laura Lee be allowed to keep her job and her health benefits
through her confinement. My father, arguing before the board in executive session, failed to persuade a majority that Laura Lee was too mercurial to shepherd Ada Tibbets's namesake hall. Counsel for the college agreed with the board, and that was that: The only way to avoid a festival of lawsuits and their attendant publicity was to let Miss French stay.

The issue of child support was the last thorny subject my father took up with the outgoing president, who maintained, in the way of all dodgers and liars in the years before DNA testing, that he was not the father of Laura Lee's unborn child. Yes, he'd consider revisiting his alleged responsibility after the birth, and yes if the child's blood type was O he might be the father—but so might a million other guys.

It was a noteworthy lesson, even for someone who'd been fed a daily diet of italicized lessons: that people in high places, luminaries with advanced degrees in Classics and in possession of excellent manners, can disappoint you as profoundly as anyone else.

Laura Lee held her head up high once she received the board's vote of Victorian confidence, but those of us who knew her saw how hard she took Eric's abandonment. She believed he would come through once he'd left town in disgrace, his wife in someone else's custody, his daughters estranged. She called our private line often to ask if we were shunning her. Might it be our newfound stature and status? Or had we forgotten our roots and didn't want to be seen in the company of a lowly, out-of-wedlock houseparent? Perhaps, despite lip service to all things fair and square, we had decided to forsake our cousin? But whatever sins she had committed or whatever behaviors we found unforgivable and annoying, couldn't they be considered water under the bridge?