The Eliot Girls Page 5

  “Some of you know, and some of you may not, about our dear Ms. Davidson’s sudden personal decision to opt for early retirement. Those reasons, of course, are highly confidential. Ms. Davidson, naturally, was extremely concerned about the terrible inconvenience caused by her change of plans. However, as luck would have it, one of our Eliot parents, Clayton Quincy, heard of our conundrum and pointed us towards her very own husband, the talented man standing at my left. I present your new English teacher, Dr. Henry Winter. We’re very fortunate to get him.”

  Larissa was unable to stop smiling as she went on to recount at length Henry Winter’s professional biography, all the way back to the academic awards he had won as a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Drawing particular radiance were his five years as a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. This was the first Eliot rumour Ruth had heard that turned out to be entirely true.

  From across the room, Moira caught Ruth’s eye and looked sideways towards Henry Winter, raising an eyebrow in mock lasciviousness. Henry Winter’s appearance suffered from an odd duality. From the neck up, with his groomed face and freshly cut silver hair, he resembled a newscaster, but the rest of him was every bit the rumpled professor. He wore a tattered tweed blazer that looked as though it would smell musty, and beige corduroys, slightly worn at the knees. At his feet, the preppy re-emerged with a pair of well-worn Top-Siders. As Larissa rhymed off the long list of his published papers, he looked mortified, though he had surely supplied Larissa with the publications list in the first place.

  Ruth wondered why anyone not ruled by some kind of perversion—self-destructiveness at best and sexual predation at worst—would leave a tenured university position for a job at an all-girls school. He looked benign enough, but wasn’t that the insidiousness of such predators, their disguise of harmlessness? Ruth could imagine the author’s photo on one of his tomes on literary theory (though she had always stayed well away from those books and guessed that their authors abjured the physical vanity signified by such likenesses): the wall of thick books behind him, the light from a window across one side of his face, his pensive gaze at the camera, through the camera, and the arm of his reading glasses like a piece of hay in his mouth. His eyes alone seemed to rebel against this image, as if showing up its pretensions: large and thickly lashed, baby blue.

  “As remarkable as these intellectual achievements are,” Larissa was saying, “what impresses me the most, as a lifelong passionate educator of young women, are Dr. Winter’s reasons for leaving the University of Toronto. He grew disaffected by the university’s focus on research, the pressure on professors to publish or perish, often at the expense of the blossoming minds they are there to expand. Dr. Winter seeks direct contact with the young mind. Dr. Winter wants to teach!” Here she brandished her fist as if inciting a rallying cry.

  When Larissa finished speaking, several teachers immediately approached Henry to introduce themselves. Ruth could feel Sheila looking at her, waiting for her to look up so that they could share their excited reactions to the new hire. But Ruth felt an inexplicable resistance to taking part in the enthusiasm. Although lively curiosity about a new teacher was typical, the atmosphere today was notably different. The teachers were standing in small groups talking in low voices, stealing nervous glances at Henry Winter. A few tried to catch his eye, offering coy, falsely casual smiles. They reminded Ruth of the girls during school dances, trying to elicit invitations during the slow songs. Even Larissa, with her dry lips and owl glasses, her concerted attempts to seem too high-minded to care about appearance, was not immune to his maleness and treated it as an accomplishment rather than a chromosomal coincidence. The PhD heightened her exhilaration but was not the cause. Two other teachers had PhDs, and Larissa never capitulated to them or made reference to their accomplishments; in fact, she sometimes appeared to consider their extra years in academia a red flag, betraying an ugly truth: that George Eliot, rather than being the realization of their lifelong aspirations, was a comedown of sorts. Yet Larissa McAllister held Henry Winter possessively by the elbow as Michael Curtis and several others crowded in on him.

  Pretending not to notice, Ruth got up and wandered over to the kitchenette for more coffee. Through the fragmented blur of her peripheral vision, she gleaned what information she could about the intruder. Larissa was shepherding him around the room, facilitating introductions, a courtesy Ruth had never seen her extend to another teacher. Larissa had also never been so accommodating of a teacher’s lateness, new or not. In fact, she often unleashed her most scathing reprimands on new teachers, like an army sergeant trying to weed out the weak. Ruth didn’t understand why everyone was getting all worked up. She, at least, would not be swept away by the regressive, boy crazy inanity to which the other teachers had so easily succumbed. What was all the fuss about, anyway? He had fallen from grace, clearly. Why else would his next career move have been a placement at a girls’ school? Yet he was bound to think he was better than they. It wouldn’t be long before he was mentioning authors they had never heard of. As far as Ruth was concerned, his presence had stolen the morning from her, from all of them. She had no wish to meet him.

  “Oh, well! Six children! How about that,” he was saying. He was quite tall, her sideways glance registered, and stooping slightly, as though at pains to appear understanding.

  After several minutes, Larissa moved with him over to Lorna Massie-Turnbull, the music teacher, and the two male math teachers, Chuck Marostica, who was drinking from a small carton of chocolate milk, and Chip Moore, whose pointy ears and queerly sculpted goatee gave him a vaguely Mephistophelean cast. Ruth had a kind of sad affection for these men. Years ago, after hearing her mention her fondness for Toni Morrison, Chuck Marostica had given her an autographed first edition of Beloved for her birthday. (He had bought the book for himself when it was originally published because he loved ghost stories, but this one hadn’t been quite what he bargained for.) Although Chip and Chuck had been the only males on staff for years, they tended to attract the opposite of the fevered admiration with which most staff members were now blasting Henry Winter and ate most of their lunches in a corner of the staff room while grading papers.

  Not far from that group, Sheila was telling her favourite story, about how her heart had stopped once during a routine operation she’d had two years earlier. Wincing compassionately, Chandra Howard had an arm around her shoulder. Larissa and Henry swooped in at the tail end, and Larissa listened with a sour expression as Sheila circled back to the beginning for Henry’s benefit.

  Michael Curtis brushed past Ruth to the sink and refilled her bottle with water.

  “Goodness, someone ingested a touch too much vino last night, methinks!” she said, a hand on her forehead.

  “Oh, no!” Ruth replied.

  “I saw Audrey earlier. Doesn’t she look just darling.”

  Ruth smiled.

  “Poor girl was like a deer caught in headlights. I am so glad she stuck with it and powered through all those entrance tests. A great lesson for her in how hard work pays off, n’est-ce pas?”

  Ruth nodded. “That’s what Richard and I were hoping. She’s a bit nervous, though.”

  “Bien sûr! Henceforth begins the real work! Now, have you thought about getting her a tutor, Ruth?”

  “Oh. I’m not sure.”

  Michael drew Ruth into the refuge of her long arm. “Make sure you keep a lookout and stay ahead of problems. I always do some sessions on study habits near the start of the year, and the girls rave about how useful they are.”

  Ruth tried to nod with confidence. Getting Audrey into Eliot had consumed so much of her attention that she’d spared little worry for how Audrey would fare academically once in. As Michael sailed back to the group, Ruth busied herself with pointless tasks, wiping down the counters and rearranging cleaned mugs in the dish drainer. She was rinsing out her borrowed mug when Henry Winter moved in next to her at the
sink, waiting his turn to fill a mug with water.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Ruth looked up. “Oh.”

  His voice was clean and deep, a 1940s radio voice that made everything he said sound more incisive than it really was. She glanced out at Sheila and her group, who were reorganizing themselves sombrely in the wake of his departure. Ruth and Henry stood uncomfortably for some moments, Henry smiling with detached affability, sipping water from the Far Side mug Sheila had lent him. He didn’t introduce himself or inquire her name, and she was pondering how to extricate herself from their impasse when Michael cried from across the room, “Henry! Let me see you down to assembly!”

  So he had been claimed already, it seemed. He nodded a goodbye and retreated, his hands tunnelling deep into his pockets. Tittering, the women encircled him, their laughter borne up on the air like birdsong.

  Chapter Four

  THE FIRST ASSEMBLY OF the year was reliably a stirring event, mobilizing the school spirit in old girls and new, but Ruth spent the length of it fidgeting, looking around the chapel for Audrey. Her own class of girls sat along the pew beside her, but she paid them little attention. Wide eyed, respectfully inhibited on this first morning of school, the girls required no management anyway, none of the shushing and stern glances, the behaviour management she so disliked, that made her feel prissy and alien to herself. It wasn’t until the assembly let out, when she was on her way back across the quad, distractedly correcting the disarray of her class’s line, that she saw Audrey emerging from the shadows of the chapel.

  In an instant, the jittery tenderness she had been feeling for her daughter evaporated. Audrey walked alone, unmistakably apart from the girls heading in the same direction. She seemed not even to be trying to talk to anyone. In fact, her expression was vividly grumpy. Ruth stared at her, suppressing the urge to go over and say something. As though sensing herself studied, Audrey looked up and met Ruth’s eyes. Ruth smiled, a small smile—it could have been meant for anyone—but Audrey’s face went dead, and she hurried away as quickly as if Ruth had been reaching for her.

  The trace of irritation Ruth had felt that morning in the car erupted into full being. What cause did Audrey have to be so morose? How could she expect anyone to speak to her when she had taken cover under such sulkiness? A sensation of something, guilt almost, brushed against Ruth, but she had no time to make sense of it before the head girl, Kate Gibson, sailed past with a friendly wave.

  “Good summer, Ms. Brindle?”

  As if to banish the cloud released by Audrey, Kate stood in the middle of the quad, glowing with the pleasure of the new year, her new position. Ruth could not help smiling widely in response. “Lovely, Kate, thank you,” she said. Kate represented everything most exemplary about Eliot. In grade nine, she had arrived at Eliot with a greater disadvantage than most girls her age could fathom, yet her triumphs formed the kind of inspirational success story everyone loved. At twelve, Kate had been in a car accident that resulted in the amputation of her left arm above the elbow, but if she had ever felt frustrated by her disability, ever experienced self-pity, she had never allowed a second of bad humour to surface on her sunny, freckled countenance. Ruth watched Audrey walk away, both arms intact, and felt the urge to yank her back. Look! she imagined saying to her daughter. Only one full arm! What complaint of her own could Audrey put up against a prosthetic limb? What a lesson Kate was in patience and victory, in indestructible spirit. Moreover, she was proof that Eliot was the seat of higher minds. The girls had not ostracized Kate, they had voted for her, they had made her their leader.

  Hours later, Ruth was still raw with disappointment. The drive home to the Beach was long, and she had trouble keeping her eyes on the road, though she knew the route so well she followed it mindlessly. It had been the same house on Silverbirch all these years, however little it resembled its original self. When she and Richard bought it during her pregnancy, it had been a small semi-detached at the top of a steep hill. For years, they had made only small improvements; then the old woman next door died and her errant children descended, appraising the neighbourhood and counting their money. Richard suggested that he and Ruth buy the house and make one large detached home out of the two. A trendy architect was deployed to replaced every existing wall, every known corner, with a better wall, a superior corner, yet every time she faced it, Ruth was frustrated by the lack of finesse that had gone into its design. The house looked exactly like what it was: two houses that had been joined awkwardly into one.

  Closing the door behind her, she dropped her briefcase and tossed her keys onto the console table in the front hall. The keys clanged as they hit the ornate porcelain dish that served as the table’s centrepiece. The disruptive noise was satisfying, a splash of cold water on the face, and Ruth had a flash of a different outcome: the compote toppled like a bowling pin. An act of carelessness so easily avoided might have been perversely gratifying. A kind of wicked fulfillment would be found in kneeling on the floor amid the jagged shards—the physical defeat of the maid-like posture, the clink as she dropped each broken piece into a garbage bag, the satisfaction of wallowing in her stupidity. The day’s pleasures had fallen short of her forecast, and disillusionment brought out the anarchist in her.

  The dish had been Richard’s first gift to her. There had been no occasion for the offering, a fact that ought to have doubled the sweetness of the gesture but had only ever added to Ruth’s bewilderment. It was an antique English compote (a term she’d never heard until he offered it), a delicate, fanciful thing. The first part was a scalloped cream bowl with intricately carved cactus lilies and vines winding around its outer wall. This bowl sat atop a similarly garlanded pedestal, around which stood three winged cupids involved in the work of making gilt arrows, each at a station supplied with tools, also gilt. When Richard had presented it, in a box wrapped in pink tissue paper, she looked to him for some sign of ironic intent, though she knew there was none. The compote was rare and expensive. That much was clear.

  Over the years, Ruth’s perception of the compote had changed. Still it clashed embarrassingly with her cooler antiques and still she was bored by such sincere, fastidious craftsmanship. Still she was puzzled over the wrongness of the gift, but no longer did she see this wrongness as a failing. She pictured Richard puttering around a musty antique store and picking this present in a wave of foolish bliss about their future. To be so smitten that his sense deserted him, to try so hard and be so wide of the mark—there was something endearing about the misstep. Ruth found that to imagine his innocence was to imagine her own, to conceive of herself as a gentler person than she was truly becoming.

  It was out of such surprises that their life together had been born. The ordinary ways people ended up together had always needled Ruth’s conviction that true love must grow out of inflammatory circumstances. She and Richard had met at a vet clinic, where Ruth was working part-time as an assistant for the summer before she started teachers’ college. Their relationship had been companionable enough—in her view sorely lacking in the tempestuous ill will she associated with passion. Dinners followed by polite kisses followed by dinners followed by impolite kisses: she was certain that love ought not to develop so functionally. Their first visit to her mother’s house became their true beginning, in spite of—indeed because of—the fact that it was almost the end of them.

  Ruth’s parents had bought one of the Playter estates in Greektown before they were fashionable and before they were called estates. Although widowed, Ruth’s mother, Antonia, had continued to rattle around in the roomy three-storey Edwardian house. Ruth and Richard were removing their shoes in the octagon of the entryway when Antonia, a slim and elegant woman who still managed to look like she could beat Richard at an arm wrestle, materialized in the doorway to the kitchen, running her hands upwards through her short white hair like a child waking from a nap. “So sorry,” she said. “I was just outside watching the dust in the s
unlight.” So began a monologue that ranged in subject from the lawyers across the street who wanted to buy her latest series of photographs (in which the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus was variously depicted in nighttime scenes from her recent trip to Brazil) to the cat across the street who had a crush on her golden retriever, and that included no one in particular, least of all Richard, who, by the time the roast chicken was served, sat in the stifling heat of the dining room dabbing at his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief, staring blankly at his wine glass.

  If Ruth had thought nothing could ruin an evening more than her mother’s determination to prove how delightful she was, that was because she hadn’t yet experienced Richard countering Antonia’s posturing with humourlessness so impossibly extreme that Ruth wondered if it were a form of deep irony too sophisticated for her to understand. She gave him chances to prove that he was just being rebellious. She repeatedly let her leg fall against his under the table, offering opportunities for stealthy groping, but Richard kept his hands well ordered on his lap or occupied with his utensils. She went into the kitchen to fill the glass pitcher with fresh water and lemon slices, hoping that he would follow her in and accost her at the refrigerator, or at least touch her breast. To Antonia’s story about moving into the neighbourhood long before gentrification was even a consideration, Richard replied that it must have been the last thing the architects had in mind, Greek immigrants right off the boat buying these grand houses. As Antonia used her fork to feed the dogs chicken scraps, Richard volunteered that his advice, as a veterinarian, was never to feed animals from the table, particularly when the dogs are already overweight.