domain. “Let’s make an appointment,” he began. Then he heard her hanging up.
How much safer he would be if Joan Saffire were incompetent and he could fire her, he thought—and immediately regretted the thought.
AN HOUR AND a half later in a private dining room of the River Club in Downtown Hartford, Alan Travelers got right to the point. “Our new headmaster’s had a very busy first day,” he told the executive committee. “Among other accomplishments, he discovered that we have a larger deficit than we thought we did.” Impeccable in his blue suit, Travelers was standing at the head of the table. His tone sounded surprisingly cheerful to Fred.
“Yeah?” Milton Perkins growled. “So what else is new?”
“You’re about to learn,” Travelers said. “I think it’ll get your attention.” He sat down.
“Oh?” Perkins said. “How much?”
“Six hundred and seventy-five thousand.”
Perkins sat back in his chair as if he’d been shoved in the chest. He stared at Travelers. Then he turned to Fred. “Tell me I didn’t hear that right.”
“You heard it right,” Fred said, and from their frames along the oak-paneled wall opposite the tall windows overlooking the river, an array of nineteenth-century patriarchs, masters of New England thrift, looked sternly down at the room.
Fred handed out the papers he had prepared and proceeded to explain the difference between Carl Vincent’s figures and his own, going slowly, line by line. While he talked, no one touched the raw oysters that Perkins, who has lived at the River Club ever since his wife had died five years earlier, had ordered for the lunch, and when he finished, the members continued to stare down at their papers. They couldn’t bring themselves to look at each other. Perkins got up from the table, went to one of the windows, and stared at the river, his back to everybody.
“So much for the bad news,” Alan said dismissively, breaking the silence. He knew he needed to get these people past their disappointment and, worse, their humiliation at having been so gulled by Vincent’s numbers. “There’s good news too. We’ve got a head who before he does anything else—on his very first day!—gets us to the truth. That’s huge.”
“Yes,” said beautiful alumna Sonja McGarvey. “Finally some reality around here!” She turned to Fred, sent him a grateful—maybe even an admiring—look. She had black hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and her lipstick was very red. Only ten years out, Sonja was already rich. Marjorie had often pointed to her derring-do, entrepreneuring in software, as proof of the empowering effect of single-sex education on women, and Fred was already planning to ask her for the lead gift from the board this year.
“Exactly!” Alan said. He had to admit, he liked this challenge, since it gave him something to sink his teeth into, put some spice in his life. He’d won battles like this before. “We’ll just go faster,” he urged. “We’ll just rebuild the enrollment in two years instead of four. We’ve got the right head finally. We’ll just do it!”
But now Sonja McGarvey was shaking her head in disagreement. She leaned forward across the table toward Travelers, pent up, waiting to speak.
“Yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to do!” Travelers went on. “Revise the plan and move on.”
“That’s unrealistic,” McGarvey snapped. “It’s a pipe dream.”
All eyes came off Travelers and moved to McGarvey, then back to Travelers, who was obviously surprised. He was not used to being contradicted, especially by a woman who was not yet thirty. He started to say something, but from the window, Perkins beat him to it.
“So it’s unrealistic,” Perkins said. His back was still to the group, and he was still staring out the window, as if he were addressing the river. “When you don’t have a choice, who cares?”
“What’s he been smoking?” McGarvey asked the group. And when Perkins turned to face her, she asked him, “Can I have some too?”
Perkins left the window and, taking his seat again, leaned to McGarvey across the polished mahogany. “You could be right,” he growled. “Bean counters are every once in a century. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe we’ll pull something out of a hat.” He was grinning now, egging her on.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, here we go again!” she said.
“And if we don’t,” Perkins said, “the one thing we aren’t going to do is let boys in here.” He wasn’t grinning anymore.
The room went silent once again. Everyone stared at Perkins, who was plunging a fork into an oyster now.
“Fred didn’t say anything about letting boys in,” Travelers said. His voice was tight. “Neither did I. Neither did anyone. That’s not even on the table.”
“Good,” Perkins said, waving the fork with the oyster still on it. “We got that settled.”
“Jesus!” from McGarvey. “Welcome to fantasyland!”
Perkins turned again to study her, miming a mild scientific interest at the source of such a strange remark. He extended the fork, the oyster he was about to eat still dripping on its tines, across the table to her. He raised his eyebrows, kept the oyster before her. It was a test: If she took it, then she was normal after all.
McGarvey, of course, was much too smart to rise to this. She hardly looked at the oyster—or at Perkins, turning instead to Travelers as if chastising the chairman for letting the meeting get out of hand. So Perkins shrugged, plopped the oyster into his mouth, nodded up and down, then broke into a grin and aimed it around the room.
On McGarvey’s right, the elderly Ms. Harriet Richardson, who hadn’t said a word, was too ladylike to acknowledge the animus that had just drenched the room. She nodded her birdlike head at Milton Perkins. “For once you and I agree,” she murmured. Ms. Richardson, the former academic dean at one of New England’s most prestigious women’s colleges, stared intently across the table at Perkins, her tiny body very erect. “It would be a tragedy,” she said. “An abandonment of the reason we exist.”
Milton Perkins was grinning again. “You and I agreeing, that’s a sign things are completely out of control,” he told her. For Perkins, even to appear to agree with the likes of Ms. Richardson, a worshipful biographer of FDR, was more than he could stand.
“I’ll say it again,” Travelers said. “Nobody said anything about letting boys in.”
“Not yet,” McGarvey said.
“My dear, you aren’t suggesting—?” Ms. Richardson’s tremolo trailed off, while McGarvey put her blue eyes on Ms. Richardson’s face and stared. Ms. Richardson tried again. “We have a vision to uphold!”
“It’s not a vision. It’s a hallucination!” McGarvey hissed. “We’re supposed to know the difference.” Ms. Richardson’s face went pale, and McGarvey, who was trying to learn diplomacy and regretted her harshness, softened her voice. “Ms. Richardson, girls-only just doesn’t sell anymore,” she said.
“Sell! My dear, this isn’t a store!”
So much for McGarvey’s mildness. She reached across the table, tapped her bright-red nails on Ms. Richardson’s copy of the papers Fred had distributed. “See where the number is below the bottom line on Carl Vincent’s budget?”
Ms. Richardson took the bait. “Yes,” she said. “I see.”
“The one in parentheses?”
Ms. Richardson didn’t answer.
“Now look at Fred’s numbers; the figure in parentheses is bigger.”
“Sonja McGarvey,” said Ms. Richardson. “I can read.”
“By almost three quarters of a million dollars.”
“Six hundred