Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon

shouted back, “Look what’s happening! The birds are sitting on that branch up there, waiting to get at the feeder, and they’re shitting all over the camellias!” The children were overcome with delight. They looked down and saw that the hedge of dark green leaves below them was glazed with white, a virtual birdy toilet. “Those are specimen shrubs!” Mr. Glarrow had yelled. “Do you know what it would cost to replace them? It’s not a cold climate, for god’s sake, the birds have enough to eat!”
    Apparently Mrs. Trainer and Mr. Glarrow then had a race, speedwalking, to see who would get to Rue first. Mrs. Trainer won, because Mr. Glarrow had to stop outside the office to put down the bird feeder. By chance Rue appeared in her office doorway just in time to see Mrs. Trainer burst into the reception area, and Catherine beetled into Rue’s office and threw herself into a chair. They were in Rue’s office for about ten minutes when Catherine came out calmer, but sniffling and still talking about the dark-eyed junco, and went back to her class.
    Then Rue went in for a talk with Bill Glarrow, and after a while he stumped off to the middle school. Emily later learned he had 40 / Beth Gutcheon
    been sent to apologize to Mrs. Trainer for not discussing his decision with her before he acted upon it, although Rue agreed that he was perfectly right to prevent the death of the camellia bushes, dark-eyed junco or no.
    The parking lot was ablaze with gossip by next morning, with the moms of fifth graders retailing this story to anyone who would listen.
    C handler Kip had not been anyone’s first or even second choice for president of the Board of The Country School. He was fairly new to this Board and had no other experience with nonprofits.
    He had no talent for building consensus; his management style was to give orders and expect them to be taken. As with many self-made people, appearances were very important to him, and he didn’t have much tolerance for deviation from what he considered normal.
    Rue had had an unfortunate confrontation with Chandler the first month he was on the Board. Her assistant head had been hired away by a school in New York, and Rue wanted to hire Mike Dianda.
    Since hiring the staff was in her job description, she foresaw no problem. But she mentioned her choice to the Board as a courtesy, and Chandler made a great fuss. It was bad policy to promote a member of the faculty to management, he claimed. Rue gave several good reasons why it was not. Mr. Dianda was weak, Chandler then claimed. Discipline would be his province, and Mike Dianda couldn’t
    “play in the traffic.” Rue, baffled, insisted that the opposite was true.
    His judgment was sound, he kept a cool head when all around him were losing theirs, and he had excellent rapport with both faculty and parents. The objections went on without making definitive sense until Ann Rosen said, “Chandler…are you trying to tell us Rue shouldn’t promote Mike because he sleeps with kangaroos? Because we know that, and we don’t care.”
    Chandler had turned crimson, and there had been laughter. Because Ann Rosen read him absolutely right, he dropped the discussion. Because Ann Rosen was his social equal, he couldn’t hold such a grudge against her as he felt entitled to. But Rue was his employee, an overweight, self-important schoolteacher, and because of her, he had been humiliated. Rue, who did not feel herself to be less than Chandler’s equal, did not notice that she had made an enemy.
    Nobody thought that Chandler would be a perfect Board pres-42 / Beth Gutcheon
    ident. But it was a time-consuming job, and usually thankless, and for the last year and a half, Chandler had made it clear that he actively wanted it. The other more likely candidates actively didn’t.
    When at a faculty retreat (which Chandler had been too busy to attend) the Board vice president began to weep during a role-playing exercise and announced that he had at that