Saying Grace (30 page)

She had to present it on Thursday at the January Board meeting, and she was trying desperately to arrange enough of a surplus to give the teachers a six-percent raise.

She had a $90,000 budget allotment for capital improvements that she couldn’t seem to whittle down. Late last year a leak was discovered from the underground gasoline storage tank that had been used for thirty years for fuel for the school’s ancient buses, the truck, and the maintenance equipment. What at first had seemed an annoying unexpected $10,000 expenditure for testing and patching had ballooned to $50,000, mandated by the county water district to have the tank removed, followed by inspections of the water table to be made by an expensive engineering firm but paid for by the school, for the next three years, at $10,000 a pop. Worse, during the digging to remove the tank, which had completely destroyed the brand-new parking lot, it was discovered that the pipe system that carried water to Home and out to the bus barn was not only not copper, it wasn’t even plumbing pipe. It was electrical conduit, apparently installed in the years of shortage immediately after World War II. Rue was extremely afraid that the whole plumbing system, absent the pipe that served the new gym, would prove to be conduit and have to be replaced.

It was frustrating to be spending such huge sums on buried pipe when the sixth-grade teacher couldn’t afford the subscription to
National Geographic
that her son wanted for his birthday. On the other hand, Rue was glad of an excuse to stay closeted with the computer through the long weekend. She and Henry were treating each other with elaborate consideration, hoping that through good manners and ordinary kindness they would gradually return to the sense of affection and safety they had always provided for each 220 / Beth Gutcheon

other. She was afraid to ask Henry how it was feeling to him; for her, it wasn’t working. She felt far from him, and wary.

She was in the business manager’s office going over the capital expenses when Emily appeared at the door.

“Rue…there are three fifth-grade moms here to see you…they say it will just take a minute.”

She looked at her watch. “Who are they?”

“Barbara Wren, Inez Cort, and Corinne Lowen.”

“Do you know what it’s about?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Emily. “I had lunch with Malone.”

“Mrs. Trainer,” said Rue.

Emily nodded, trying to look grave.

Barbara Wren, who was immense, took up most of the couch in Rue’s office. Corinne and Inez perched on straight-back chairs. Inez Cort, who had an amazing cantilevered bosom, always seemed to Rue to have to fight gravity to remain upright. She and Corinne Lowen were unlikely allies of Barbara Wren, given that, along with Lyndie Sale and Malone Dahl, their daughters had done their best to make Nicolette Wren’s life a hell the entire year. But Rue could tell from the body language that allies they were. This was not a dispute coming to her for mediation, this was an offensive line.

Barbara Wren began. “I’m an atheist,” she said. “My father was a Communist.”

“Religion is a matter of family values,” added Inez. “It’s fine to be a Christian or a Jew or an atheist, I don’t care, but it’s our choice what we teach our children about religion.”

Corinne Lowen nodded vigorously.

“I’m with you so far,” said Rue.

“There was a short, or something, in the heater in the fish tank in Mrs. Trainer’s room,” said Barbara Wren.

“Over the weekend. It might have been during the wind storm Sunday night.”

“Or not, it doesn’t matter,” said Corinne.

“When the children came in this morning all the little fishes were cooked,” said Barbara.

“They were floating on top, we don’t know if they cooked or died of cold.”

“Cooked,” said Barbara Wren. “It wasn’t that cold in the room.

Saying Grace / 221

If the heater had just gone off the guppies at least would have lived.”

“But they all died,” said Rue, seeking clarification.

“Nicolette said she offered to scoop them up with the net and flush them down the toilet, but Mrs. Trainer made a fuss, embarrassed her, and said they should think of their poor little souls.”

“I’m sorry, fish do
not
have souls,” said Inez Cort. “It’s like…come
on
.”

Barbara laughed a big, gritty, contemptuous laugh. “She’s some kind of animist? Their Little Souls?”

Rue was beginning to hope that this one idiotic remark was all there was to the incident.

“She made them all go outside and stand in a circle, while one of the boys dug a burial pit.”

“Why a burial pit?” asked Inez scornfully. “Why not individual graves?”

“Why a boy to dig the pit?” asked Corinne Lowen. “Girls can dig just as well as boys.”

“Then she produces, I swear to god, an Episcopal prayer book, and conducts a mass for the dead,” said Barbara.

“Mass? Isn’t that Catholic?” asked Inez.

“Episcopalians are Catholics who don’t believe in the pope,” said Barbara, the atheist. “Henry the Eighth and all that.” The allusion seemed lost on the other two.

“How do we know it was an Episcopal prayer book?” said Rue, who was wishing she could roll under her desk and howl with laughter.

“Nicolette asked to borrow it,” Barbara explained. Oh good, thought Rue. A little atheist Torquemada. “Then she came down to the lunchroom and told me.” It was probably a 1928 prayer book, thought Rue wildly. I bet that’s what they object to.

Unfortunately, they had a tighter grip on the situation than that.

“The woman is a nutcase,” said Barbara Wren.

Rue carried mugs of steaming tea into Mike’s office at the end of the day and closed the door.

“Let’s just stay in here and never come out,” she said. “And don’t answer the phone, I don’t want any more bad news.”

222 / Beth Gutcheon

“I have something to tell you,” Mike said.

“I know that tone. Stop, I can’t take it. You’re leaving.”

“No,” said Mike, “Bonnie’s leaving.”

“Bonnie! No!” There was a pause, in which they stared at each other, very unhappy. “Why? I thought she was happy here.”

“She’s very happy, but she doesn’t have a green card. She’s Canadian.”

“But…she’s been here for years. She took her degree here…. Don’t we ask for proof of citizenship? Or work papers? I feel like Zoe Baird.”

“Apparently Bill doesn’t, for part-time employees.”

“But he does get the TB test, the fingerprints, the child abuse statement?”

“Yes.” Rue relaxed a little. But grew unhappier as she began to think about having Bonnie go. They sat in silence, drinking their tea.

“Did you know about this?” Rue asked.

“I’ve known for a while.”

“There’s something about her,” Rue said. “She’s a comforting presence. She gives people the sense that they’re helping her, keeping her company, as they quietly dump out things they wouldn’t tell anyone else on earth. I look out and see her perched on a wall or leaning against a tree, and there’s something about her. Children trust her. Animals trust her.
I
trust her.”

Mike nodded.

“Oh, hell,” said Rue.

R
ue had a talk with Catherine Trainer about the separation of church and state and the unwisdom of sharing her private beliefs, however deeply felt, on a multicultural campus.

“This is a secular school whether we like it or not,” she said. “We teach ethics, and manners, but not religion.”

“There’s no line between them!” Catherine protested. “And a funeral is a cultural experience.”

“It may not be easy to draw the line,” said Rue, “but it is very easy to tell which side of it you were on.”

“When we were studying ancient Egypt and the gerbil died, we prayed to Osiris and buried it like King Tut. You didn’t see anything wrong with that.”

“I’m not going to debate this, Catherine. It’s not that complicated.

I want you to review the Faculty Handbook cover to cover, and from now on adhere to it to the letter, or your contract will not be re-newed.”

Rue had said the fatal words. It sounded in the room like a thun-derclap, and Catherine’s face took on a terrible surprised expression, as if a dear friend had pulled a gun and shot her. She had finally heard the message and the pain in her face was something Rue felt it would take years to forget. She left the office in tears, and left Rue near tears herself.

From that moment on, whenever she left her office Rue kept coming upon members of the faculty in clumps on the campus, talking excitedly. They would break apart or turn away when they saw her. A few of the unflappable ones, like Evelyn Douglas, and Janet TerWilliams, whose husband was rich, maintained their good will toward her. But by and large a climate of fear for their jobs and resentment against Rue settled in with the January rains.

Mike Dianda still had the faculty’s confidence, and he became the conduit for their grievances. They believed they were witnessing a 224 / Beth Gutcheon

witch-hunt by selfish parents with no concern for Catherine’s length of service and no willingness to see past their spoiled children’s complaints to the many fine and strong qualities that Catherine offered as a teacher.

They admitted that some of the newer ideas about whole language, for instance, or problem-centered teaching, were Urdu to Catherine.

It was true she had been urged to take time off for faculty enrichment workshops, to let some new air into her pedagogical closet, and that she had not seen the need. But her husband had just died. Catherine’s friends could not know that she rarely bothered to correct students’

homework anymore or that she continued to use mimeos of tests she created ten years ago, the answers to which were widely circu-lated from older siblings to current fifth graders. They couldn’t know the number or intensity of the complaints about her teaching or how often the complaints were entirely justified. There was no way Rue could let them know these things without wounding Catherine Trainer more than she was hurt already.

Rue’s great hope for restoring morale was that she could get the Board to vote the faculty a six-percent pay raise. She was planning to ask for seven percent and fight for six percent. She couldn’t believe it would go lower than that, given that Chandler had promised not to oppose it.

The budget meeting was always intense, but this year the country was in a hard recession. This year she had a family apply for financial aid whose gross income the year before had been $400,000. (They were getting a divorce. Last year there had been a one-time bonus.

There were the rentals on two different houses. There was the $5,700

per month debt service on the couple’s eighteen credit cards. The Scholarship Committee voted them a loan.) On the evening of the Board meeting, a pipe backed up in the preschool bathroom. (Morning would bring the plumber and the discovery of a Ninja Turtle deep in the line.) The carpet was partly flooded and soaked in the adjoining music room, where the Board usually met. Rue had to stand outside in the chill evening air waiting for Board members to arrive one by one and suggest that they recon-vene in the science lab down the hill. When she finally joined them, the trustees were crammed into child-sized chairs arranged in Saying Grace / 225

a circle, gossiping among themselves. On a high shelf circling the room, there were clear jars of formaldehyde holding specimens of rattlesnakes and fetal pigs. The room fell quiet as Rue emptied dregs from the coffee urn into a paper cup and carried it to an empty chair.

When she was settled, Chandler called the meeting to order.

Rue fought for the faculty raise, and Chandler and Terry Malko fought back. When she turned to the usual faces for help—Sylvia French, Ann Rosen, Bud Ransom—she got nothing. Times were hard. There were families in the school for whom two tuitions represented a major proportion of their income. They couldn’t afford the increase in tuition you’d need to cover these raises.

Rue countered that there were teachers in the school who were teaching evening classes in places like shopping malls, because they couldn’t feed their kids and put gas in the car to get to work on what they were being paid.

Terry Malko raised the question of the discount on tuition for teachers’ children who attended Country.

“If it’s a question of need, how can you justify giving Janet TerWilliams the same discount you give Evelyn Douglas?”

“It’s a question of principle,” said Rue. “Pay them what they’re worth. They’re both great teachers. If we didn’t give Janet a discount, she’d probably go back to business school and go to work where she could make as much as you do,” she said, perhaps unwisely looking directly at Terry.

“Why does a teacher with four kids getting discounts, like Janet, effectively get eight thousand dollars more a year than Robert Noonan or Lloyd Merton? Aren’t the ones with children taking the raises from the ones without?”

“We are running a school, not a factory. Teaching is the machinery with which we make our product. Why aren’t you as interested in a capital investment in the faculty as you are in the goddamn water pipes?”

There was a pause.

“We can’t
get
the pipes any cheaper,” said Terry, and the whole room laughed, except Rue.

They voted the faculty a four-and-a-half-percent pay raise, 226 / Beth Gutcheon

which after inflation meant a real raise of about one percent.

They moved on to curriculum review. Chandler presented the compromise Rue had accepted, that the faculty write annual curricula and quarterly reports. Rue, feeling sandbagged by the vote on salaries, made her point to the full Board about the extra burden on the teachers, hoping that this was an unsupported motion of Chandler’s. The vote was illuminating. Terry Malko was voting with Chandler, and Ann Rosen, the leader of the loyal opposition, was silent. Sylvia French asked the odd question, but she didn’t have Ann’s brains or confidence, and the rest, many of them new to the Board, seemed confused by the issue or uninterested. The vote carried.

When Chandler brought up the five-year budget plan, Rue finally realized she was in a box. Chandler was constructing a series of obstacles she could neither get around nor over.