Then he gave Alan the news.
After Fred finished, Alan sat very still, his face even paler. “Six hundred and seventy-five?” he asked at last. “You’re absolutely sure?”
“Positive.” Fred started to hand Alan the papers, Vincent’s numbers and his own.
Alan put his hands up, shook his head. He didn’t need to read them. “How in the world could we have fouled up so badly?” he murmured. He wasn’t asking Fred; he was looking at the ceiling.
“He was the business manager,” Fred offered, but Alan shook his head, refusing the excuse. Now Fred liked him even more. “I believed him too,” Fred went on.
“Of course you did! Why wouldn’t you? You weren’t even here yet,” Alan exclaimed. Then after a pause he added, “The deal’s off if you want it to be.”
“I don’t understand,” Fred said. Alan was looking hard at him, searching his face, and then it dawned on him what his board chair was getting at.
“You signed a contract thinking the situation was very different from what it is,” Alan said mildly. “I’m not dishonorable enough to hold you to it.”
“But I want this!” Fred blurted.
“Think about it,” Alan insisted. “You owe it to yourself. You can tell me in the morning,” and Fred was taken by surprise. Out of nowhere came this turning point! Now he was suddenly imagining himself backing out the door of this office, Alan’s eyes still on him. He could feel the relief; he was floating, breathing easy in an enormous space. But the feeling only lasted an instant, and then he was overwhelmed by huge regret at throwing away his treasure. He imagined begging to be allowed to change his mind and come back.
“I’m here,” he said. “No way I’m going away.”
“I thought that’s what you’d say.” Alan was smiling now.
“If there comes a reason I should quit, I’ll recognize it,” Fred said.
But Alan paid no attention to that remark. Instead he was making plans. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” he announced. “Executive committee meeting tomorrow. Noon sharp. We’ll hold it at Milton Perkins’s club, as usual, and he can buy us lunch, as usual. I’ll call each of them tonight and tell them to be there, no matter what.”
“You going to tell them what it’s about?”
“Nope. Why ruin their sleep? They’ll find out when you tell them, and we’ll go from there.”
“Yeah,” said Fred, managing a grin, “why ruin their sleep.”
Alan was standing now, shaking Fred’s hand. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ve got the right guy at the helm.” Then he was out the door.
BY THE TIME Fred arrived at the head’s house he realized he had had a booming headache for hours. He went through the house to the back, where he knew that Gail would be gardening in the evening’s softening light.
“Hi,” she said, getting up from her kneeling to greet him. She took her gardening gloves off and reached a hand to him.
He kissed her cheek.
“How was your day?” she said.
“Don’t ask,” he said.
THREE
When Francis called Peggy from just east of the Mississippi River the day after Fred Kindler’s first day in office, she didn’t even ask where he was. He’d called to tell her how excited he was to be at the huge river, how much he wished she were with him so they could see it together, but she started right off before Francis hardly said a word. “He’s already here!” she exclaimed. “He showed up yesterday. What do you think about that?”
“Who?” Francis asked. “Who’s already there?”—as if he didn’t know.
Peggy left a freighted silence. Then, wearily: “Come on, Francis. You know who,” and now Francis wished he had traveled faster instead of spending four whole days at his college reunion in Ohio, two more at a friend’s house in Indiana, and then a whole week in Chicago easing his conscience at a math teachers’ conference. It didn’t occur to him that maybe he’d been keeping himself on a short leash by stopping so often so he could turn around and go back to the school before it was too late. Nor did it occur to him that the reason for his taking his school clothes with him, his blue button-down shirt, striped tie, sports coat, and slacks, wasn’t just the college reunion or the dinner at the end of the math conference; it was that these were his uniform, his identity. Instead, he thought that if he had escaped across the big divide of the Mississippi right away, he’d now be much further into the West and he wouldn’t care where Fred Kindler was. He’d have room to breathe.
“Marjorie left early,” he heard Peggy say. “She cleared out.”
“Oh,” he said. “So soon?” Then he realized he was not surprised. That was exactly what Marjorie would do.
But Peggy wasn’t talking about Marjorie now; she was talking about the new guy. “Two whole weeks before he even needed to be here!” she said. He knew what she left unsaid for him to think about: The new headmaster shows up early for his responsibilities—while you run away from yours. But that’s not what he was thinking about. What filled his brain instead was the picture of Fred Kindler actually ensconced in Marjorie’s office, enthroned behind her desk, surrounded by the pictures her students made for her. The wrongness of the fit, its impropriety, astounded him. It was Marjorie’s office!
“Well, what do you think of that?” Peggy asked again.
“Maybe he can’t read a calendar,” he said.
“Very funny, Francis.”
“I didn’t call you up to talk about him!”
“Oh, you didn’t?” Peggy mocked. “All right, then. So forget about it.”
He let a long silence go by, desperate for a way to rescue them from this. “Peg,” he finally begged, “let’s not fight.”
That’s right, she thought, let’s not.
“How are you, Peg?”
I’m confused, she wanted to say, and I’m scared we’ve lost each other, but she was too angry to plead for sympathy. “I’m okay,” she told him.
“Only okay, Peg?”
She shrugged her shoulders as if he were there to see. There was a long silence, while he waited for her to speak. “Where are you?” she finally asked.
“Just east of the Mississippi.”
“That’s nice,” she said, failing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. But she really did think it was nice that he was seeing the country and wished she were seeing it with him. And then it dawned on her that neither of them ever considered her joining him. The reasons for his trip were too foreign to her for that.
“All right, Peg,” he sighed, hearing only the sarcasm. “I’ll call you later.”
“All right.”
“I miss you, Peg.”
“I miss you too,” she admitted, “but if you were here we wouldn’t have to miss each other.”
Neither of them could think of what else to say. Francis hung up first and walked back to his old yellow Chevy, and started to drive again. In Denver, he would pick up Lila Smythe, next year’s president of the student council, and give her a ride the rest of the way to California. Lila, one of Francis’s and Peggy’s favorite students, lived in the dorm they parented, and though Francis had been delighted when she decided to join the dig, he now regretted his promise. She’d want to talk to him, as faculty advisor to the student council, about the council’s