The Eastgate parking lot was filled with gleaming Cadillac coupes and Ambassadors with oversized fins. Rose locked the car, and, walking slowly to the main building, passed a gorgeous flowering tree with the most striking bluish-purple blossoms. A jacaranda, she would learn later.
A secretary brought Rose through an arched doorway down to the headmistress’s office, Rose’s heels making far too much noise against the polished stone. They passed through a corridor lined with framed photographs of Eastgate graduating classes, grave-faced girls dressed in white, clutching single lilies in their hands. Rose realized that Eastgate, for all its luster, was a young school. Forty years at most—laughably short by English standards. Gerhard had recently written her about a construction site down the road from him at which workers had unearthed in the mud a handsome marble bust, shockingly well preserved. It was of a Roman god, and soon it was discovered that the site had been the grounds of a two-thousand-year-old temple. Rose came from a place with true history. She, not Eastgate, embodied tradition.
“Mrs. Downes,” said the headmistress as Rose was ushered inside her office. Miss Monroe was a thin, silver-haired woman with a penetrating gaze. “How nice to meet you.” Her voice was warm enough but rapid, only a hint of a smile on her remarkably unlined face. She picked up the letter Rose had written. “As you must have heard, we are in a bit of a bind.”
“Yes, I heard,” Rose said. “Mr. Douglas told my husband, who told me,” she clarified.
“Ah, yes,” Miss Monroe said. Yes to what? Rose thought in a panic. “A wonderful family, the Douglases.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger of her right hand together—a gesture that seemed to betray her lack of interest in what Rose was saying. “So tell me about your experience. You’ve recently moved here, isn’t that right? From England? And you studied there?”
Rose nodded. “I did. I received two degrees, one in literature and the other a teaching certificate. At the University of London, Bedford College.” She spoke rapidly herself. She felt acutely aware that her time was limited. Still, she couldn’t help adding. “I don’t know if you’re aware of Bedford, but it has quite a history; it was the first college for women in Great Britain.”
“No, I’m not familiar with it. I know Oxford and Cambridge, of course.”
“Of course,” Rose echoed. Was she only interested in teachers with degrees from Oxford?
“But I must say I was glad to see that you studied in England. When I was at UCLA, I studied math with a Scottish professor. ‘We’re too soft in America,’ he used to say, and he was not wrong. Here at Eastgate we are rigorous. More so than our brother school down the road, I would say.”
“Indeed,” Rose said, sensing an opening, “rigor is key. But so is engagement, particularly with younger students. At my last teaching position,” she said, and she saw no reason to point out that it was her only teaching position, “I was at a boys’ school and they were a rather challenging group of young men, shall we say, so I had to come up with unorthodox assignments to engage them. To trick them into learning, whether they wanted to or not.”
“And you did this, how?” Miss Monroe asked, elbow on her desk, chin resting on her hand. For the moment, she seemed legitimately intrigued.
“A number of different methods. I had them write loads of reviews,” Rose explained, feeling more confident. “Films they had seen, meals at the pub; one time I assigned them to write a critique of the coach’s direction of their football team. That inspired more paragraphs of opinion, more actual writing, than I had seen before.” Miss Monroe smiled lightly, perhaps too lightly? “But that didn’t mean we steered away from the classics altogether,” Rose added hastily. “I took them to see performances, Tamburlaine the Great and Twelfth Night at the Old Vic. I had them reciting poems weekly. I had a list of words—‘the forbidden twenty,’ I called it—if any word on that list was misspelled on a quiz or paper, the student received a failing grade. The students thought it draconian, but by the end of the term no one confused the possessive ‘its’ with the contraction of ‘it is.’ I don’t imagine here that your students need such enticements.”
“You would be surprised,” Miss Monroe said. “‘The forbidden twenty,’ I like that. We here at Eastgate place an emphasis on educating our girls on all fronts—how to be strong wives, mothers, citizens in a democracy.”
“Of course,” Rose said, quickly, “the art of letter writing—”
“But sometimes we do so at the expense of rigor,” the headmistress went on. “We could use more of that rigor here.” She rose. “I’ll introduce you to two of our English teachers, who have some questions for you. But first, may I ask: Downes is your married name?”
“Yes, it is,” Rose said. She tried to say this with a smile. The interview had gone well. Hadn’t it?
“It’s only that your accent is unusual. You weren’t born in England, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t. I grew up in England,” Rose said, considering. “But I was born in Vienna. Perhaps that’s what you hear, my German, seeping through.”
“During the war, you moved to England?” Miss Monroe’s voice wasn’t warm, exactly, but there was a newly tentative quality to her words that made Rose conversely feel in control.
“Just before. I’m Jewish,” Rose said. “It wasn’t safe. My brother and I got out.”
“Ah,” the headmistress said. “I see. You know, the only time I have been to Europe was in ’35, before the war. We spent several days in Munich. It’s strange, what you recall. We had gone shopping and we were at a large department store where I was admiring a music box, a beautiful enamel box out of which a silver bird popped. It even flapped its wings, and sang. I was so engrossed in the box that I didn’t see several men in brown uniforms appear. They escorted a man out. They were saying—well—anti-Jewish things. It was terrible. A shameful time.”
Rose nodded, tense. How many more teachers did Miss Monroe say she must speak with?
“We have a music teacher here, a lovely man, a Mr. Goldstein. Originally from Europe too. He plays the cello. And he plays it so wonderfully, with such a mournful soulfulness; I sometimes find myself wondering where that feeling comes from.”
It was too much for Rose, the sympathy, the attention for all the wrong reasons. This woman thought she knew Rose, but she didn’t. “It comes from the music,” she said, the words out of her mouth before she could consider them.
Miss Monroe looked at Rose in surprise. Rose gazed down at her feet, pinched in pumps she rarely wore. She had spoken rashly. She had botched her one chance.
But here was Miss Monroe, holding out a cool hand and murmuring, “Yes, the music; how right you are.” A week later, Rose was hired.