july 8–21, 2019 | new york 25“Real Brooklyn,” though: She’d been born on the border of Canar-
sie and Flatbush. Not this Brooklyn, which in its contemporary
iteration felt, to Morgano, almost like a parody of an upper-crust
enclave. The women on the board—and it was almost all women—
reminded her of some of the women she’d encountered at Bank
Street, who had taught for a year, then gotten married. The
“diamond-ring crowd,” she’d called them. They had names like
Courtney and Blake and Hatsy, and their families sounded like
they’d come straight off the Mayflower. Ashley Phyfe, married to a
descendant of furniture-maker Duncan Phyfe; Vicky Schippers,
whose husband’s family had been in the area since land was going
for wampum; Christie Coolidge-Totman. As in President Coolidge.
Morgano was intimidated and not a little envious. She’d married
young and raised three children before getting her master’s degree
at 40. Now she was in her 50s and had answered the ad in part
because the commute would be easier from her home in Park Slope,
but the idea of a new challenge—a school that needed to be brought
into the present—intrigued her, and she was pleasantly surprised
that the salary it offered was commensurate with Manhattan. And
while she wasn’t sure about these Diamond Ring Girls, with their
shiny hair, perfect teeth, and scallop-edged Chloé flats, looking into
their worried faces, she saw vulnerability she recognized. Money can
shield people from a lot of things, but no amount stops parents from
worrying about their children.
And it wasn’t like the moms of Brooklyn Heights were all Stepford
clones, Morgano discovered at the cocktail party the parents threw
for her after she was offered the job, held at the home of a family
where the mother was a managing director at Goldman Sachs. It
was in a renovated triplex on Schermerhorn Street and had a roof-
deck overlooking the Manhattan sky-
line. “You know, I actually like them,”
Morgano told her husband later. “They
seem like a good, progressive group of
people who have some of the very same
ideas as me.” The parents were enthu-
siastic about the changes she’d pro-
posed. They just had one major
request: The school wanted Morgano
to keep Hope Prosky on as an adviser.
Morgano thought this arrangement
sounded a little bit claustrophobic. But
she said yes, of course. After all, she’d
agreed to embrace tradition.
When the Grace Church School
librarian, who we’ll refer to as Mary
Smith, arrived in September, she felt a
pang when she saw that Prosky was no
longer standing at the gate greeting
students the way she had for years.
The new director was nowhere to be
seen. Over the summer, Smith had
asked for a meeting, but Morgano put her off, saying she was too
busy. Inside, she saw why: Morgano had cleaned house. All of the
furniture was gone. The tall, heavy bookcases had been replaced by
lighter, lower ones. A teepee anchored the Twos room; the stained-
glass windows filtered light onto an otherwise spare space. The
kitchen, formerly a clatter of tea mugs and shortbread crumbs, had
been wiped clean. Everyone around her was oohing and aahing, but
Smith had an uneasy feeling that the director wasn’t going to be
content with just replacing furniture. Fortunately, the library was
still the same. Perched on the very top floor of the building, the
Hope Library had been designed and built by a former Grace par-
ent, an architect, and it was a magical little place with warm wood
balconies and cozy window seats overlooking a rooftop playground.
“An oasis of tranquility,” Prosky had called it at the ceremony where
it was named in her honor, “where children’s imaginations can soar
on a boat of endless discovery.”
Smith might have believed her fears about the new director were
the result of imagination soaring, except the entire month of Sep-
tember came and went before she and Morgano crossed paths. “I’ve
heard a lot about you,” the new director said.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Smith replied pointedly.
Morgano looked down at the books Smith was holding. “I love
books,” she said, as Smith recalls it. “I would always pick a Calde-
cott winner to read to my classes.”
Later, the librarian repeated the conversation to the head Threes
teacher, whom we’ll call Pat Jones. “Who says that?” Smith said,
aghast. “You wouldn’t say, ‘Caldecott winner.’ You would say, ‘I love
reading Make Way for Ducklings.’ ”
But Jones was calm. “Change is hard, Mary,” she said. “You have
to sometimes accept change.” Jones was always calm—she spent her
days wrangling mobs of 3-year-olds, so she had to be. “I think she
has a lot of great ideas, and I am excited about learning from her,”
she told her colleague.SMITH WAS NOT SO OPTIMISTIC. Neither, it turned out,
was Prosky, who’d found Morgano not to be as grateful for her advice
as she might’ve expected. Things had gotten tense between them,
especially after Morgano decided to do away with certain Grace
Church traditions, like the Thanksgiving and Medieval Feasts.
While it may have been true the Pilgrim garb was problematic and
the Middle Ages were perhaps not developmentally appropriate
material for 3-year-olds, some of the other choices she’d made felt
ill-considered. “She took away our ability to go to potluck dinners,”
said one teacher. “Some teachers liked
them, but I loved them because you get
to know the parents, and you get to see
their little world, these tiny kids in these
gargantuan houses.”
Morgano, who put a stop to the prac-
tice of listing teachers’ home numbers in
the school directory and told teachers
they could no longer babysit students in
their off-hours, felt parent-teacher
socializing was unprofessional. “She was
like, ‘I want a wall,’ ” said one Grace par-
ent, and while this sounded reasonable,
it was confusing for some teachers from
the Hope era, some of whom had been
Grace Church parents, lived in the
neighborhood, and belonged to the
same institutions, like the Heights
Casino, a preppy tennis club on Mon-
tague Street, which, Morgano would
often point out, didn’t allow Jews like
herself to join until the ’50s. “She used
to call us ‘incestuous,’ ” recalls a former teacher. “I think she was
referring to nepotism.”
Except Morgano herself seemed to have trouble with boundaries.
Her fawning over the celebrities whose children attended the school,
like Keri Russell, had not gone unnoticed in discreet Brooklyn
Heights. “There was a night to meet her, and she only talked to Mag-
gie Gyllenhaal,” one parent recalls (the conversation may have been
only five minutes, but five minutes is an eternity when you are an
anxious parent).
Hope Prosky, however, had never been impressed by celebrity.
Once, when Paul Giamatti came into her office at the height of
his Sideways fame, she’d squinted at his name and asked, “Are
you related to the president of Yale?”
Well, maybe not never impressed. One parent on a school tourn a clear day,
looking out at the
towers along the East
River, you could
practically see their
tiny handprints
smeared on
the glass: the
competition.
O