Mrs. Elaine Vanderbilt

Mrs. Elaine Vanderbilt is the school administration made flesh, the institutional voice and the external pressure the students slowly learn to argue with rather than fear. She does not enter a room so much as annex it.

She regards the students' work as something close to musical heresy, and she reads art the way she reads everything else, through the cold logic of a budget report. She is not above reminding Joseph Shapiro that his pension is a thing she could make quietly disappear, a threat she keeps polished and close at hand.

The people who reliably stop her are the ones who want nothing from her: Kate Miller, who calls her love until it stings, and the veteran Mikhail Petrenko, who can silence her with a single look. Even Bunny Montgomery is a wall she cannot simply climb over.