It might be summer and a steamy mid-July, but things had been humming at Wayward St. Etheldreda’s Academy, and head of school Tim Endibel was feeling rather pleased. Of course, he was tired and very much looking forward to vacation, but although he said it himself, things had gone well.
Co-head Midge Hazelbrow was now safely retired at long last, although that fool of a board chair, Walter Brigley, had put her on the board. Big mistake, Endibel knew this, but somehow his “I don’t think that is advisable at this time” had made no difference. History, tradition, Wally had said, she keeps the link with the old St. Eth’s crowd, and you know, money — and he had tapped his nose.
Tim looked out of the window, sealed shut against the summer heat and the smoke from the wildfires that turned the air sour and yellowed the sky. Somewhere out there, saws and drills bit steadily into the summer renovation project to build the roof deck play area.
The end of year celebrations had gone well. The usual retirements handled with grace, and Gloria Flosdorf leaving before Vonnie Braydune had turned the inclusive French pronouns into a cause célèbre. There had been a mention in the New York Star, but fortunately another school was having a leadership crisis, and it hadn’t really featured. Still — good riddance to her; although he had not wished her illness upon her, it was a relief not to have had her poisoning minds at the end of year party.
Plans for the new curriculum upgrade had gone really well, and he had to admit that Brian Russell had done a good job handling some of the more cynical old guard faculty. The new language would be up on the website before the start of the new school year, and some heavy hitters from their consulting partnership consortium were lined up to lead the faculty in the new training at the prof dev week in August.
Altogether, this new focus on learning and whatnot was going rather well. Winthrop-Chase may have a new sports pavilion, and All Saints have a theater and arts complex, and Fallow an international outpost or whatever, but Wayward St. Etheldreda’s was going to have the best and shiniest cutting-edge high school programming in town. This was something that would make its mark, get written up somewhere significant, and help with attrition.
Really, the language was splendid stuff. Beautifully crafted, smooth, and densely packed with meaning that would be backed up by practice after the training session and support programs already on the calendar and budgeted for. Tim was pleased that he had been able to leverage the endowed Fairslaughter Fund for this, and with luck, he could get another tranche for some exciting new follow-up programs for the next three years.
Admissions was still in enrollment mode, and Tim had had to remind the board that that was the way of it these days. No more wait list only after March — those days were long gone — but rolling admissions twelve months of the year.
He checked off some more accomplishments. Long-term facility planning well under way, with short- and long-term goals. Tim knew too well the wisdom of Picasso, or whoever it was, that inspiration and chance had to find you working. He had already overseen three significant campus plans, and this one was both ambitious and practical, and looked at the options of expansion while also selling the dank old dinosaur of the St. Etheldreda’s building. That might break Midge Hazelbrow’s heart, but so be it. Tim allowed himself a small smile.
Yes, he would go home early today, go to the gym, maybe even take a nap before heading out again. For Tim was meeting Megan Juniper for dinner, and he was rather looking forward to it. In fact, he realised he was very much looking forward to it, and with luck perhaps she would join him for a few days on the Cape before she took her annual trip to see her sister in Melbourne. It was good to have things to look forward to again.
He glanced again at the Academic Program Design and Pedagogy Document. Yes. It held. He was rather pleased with it.
The phone rang and Tim saw it was Brigley. Typical, he thought. Just before he was about to leave for the day, Brigley had to call, no doubt with some damn fool nonsense that a board member had read about and thought needed urgent attention.
“That you Tim? “Brigley said. Who did he think it was? “Look.” Brigley continued. I’m on my way over. Something has come up. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
Tim sighed.
He looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes. Just enough time to close the laptop, straighten the papers on his desk into a semblance of order, and pour himself the coffee he did not actually want but which gave him something to hold.
Brigley arrived in twelve.
He came in the way he always did, as though the building were slightly beneath him and he was doing it a favour by entering, blazer over one shoulder, the other hand already patting his breast pocket for a phone that was, in fact, in his other hand. Tim had long ago stopped being surprised by how much noise the man could make simply by walking into a room.
“Tim.” Brigley didn’t sit. That was never a good sign. “We have a situation.”
“We generally do,” Tim said, and immediately regretted the lightness of it, because Brigley’s face did not so much as flicker, and Brigley’s face always flickered at a joke, even a bad one, even one of his own.
“The Preger-Ashe family.” Brigley said. “You know them.”
Tim did know them. Of course he knew them. Three children, all currently enrolled — a fourth grader, a seventh grader, and one about to start upper school in the autumn — and a father, Jerrold Preger-Ashe, who sat on precisely no board committees but wrote precisely enormous cheques, which in Tim’s experience of boards was its own kind of committee membership. “What about them?”
“They’re pulling all three. Effective this week, if they can find alternative placement for all three. September at the very latest. Jerrold called me directly, which — ” Brigley did something with his mouth that suggested he found this both alarming and faintly gratifying, the way he found most crises gratifying, since a crisis was an occasion on which Walter Brigley got to matter. “He’s threatening litigation. Something about the accommodations plan for the middle one, and a promise he says was made to him in writing about class size caps that he says we have not honored, and now apparently there’s a lawyer involved, and — Tim, are you listening?”
Of course he was listening. He was also doing the arithmetic that any head of school does automatically and involuntarily the moment tuition dollars and annual fund contributions start walking toward the door, and the number that arrived was not a small one. Preger-Ashe was a cornerstone of the quiet phase of the capital campaign already underway, and Tim knew development was counting on them for something substantial.
“There’s more,” Brigley said, and Tim’s stomach did the small cold drop it did whenever anyone said there’s more in that particular register.
“Of course there is.”
“It’s probably nothing.” This was, Tim had learned in six years of working with Walter Brigley, the single most reliable indicator that whatever came next was not, in fact, nothing. “Someone posted something. About Sprout Russell. From the conference in Cancún — the leadership one, in June, I forget what it was called—”
“The Forum,” Tim said faintly.
“The Forum. There are photographs. Apparently. I haven’t seen them, I want to be clear, I have not seen them, but Marjorie has seen them, or knows someone who’s seen them, and she says — well, she says it’s the sort of thing that if it gets to the papers or the parents before we’ve gotten ahead of it —”
“Walter.”
“— and given that your Sprout Russell fellow is meant to be standing up in front of the entire faculty at prof dev next month explaining the new curriculum language, and then the parents association, the language you were just telling me is splendid stuff, I believe, were your words at the last board meeting —”
“Walter.” Tim set down the coffee he did not want. Outside, faintly, through the sealed glass, a saw bit into something and screamed. “Sit down.”
Brigley sat down.
Tim thought, with the particular exhausted clarity of a man watching a very good day quietly disassemble itself in real time, that he was not, after all, going to make it to the gym.