Map · Establishments · Harmon High School
An establishment in Harmon
Room 217 looks out on the practice field. The window does not open in winter and does not close in spring. The radiator has its own opinions, which the school year is built around accommodating.
— The Good Father, chapter one
Harmon High School is the brick building on Hayes Avenue, three blocks east of Main Street, set back from the road by a circular drive and a flagpole that has been there since 1953. The original construction was for an enrollment of eight hundred. Current enrollment is four hundred and twenty-eight. The annex out back, built in the late seventies for the baby boom that didn’t arrive here, is mostly used for storage; the band program has the basement of the annex; the rest is empty.
The building is one of the larger institutional facts of Harmon. It is the largest public building in town after the courthouse. It employs forty-seven adults. Its parking lot is, on Friday nights in the autumn, the most populated square of asphalt in the county.
Second floor, east wing, three doors down from the stairs. The windows face the practice field. The blackboard has been replaced twice since the room was built; the smartboard installed in 2018 works on the third attempt of any given morning. The radiator is the kind of fact that a teacher learns to teach around. David Marsh has taught American history in room 217 for fourteen years. The Antietam unit comes in the third week of October, the same week the radiator first asserts itself.
Most of The Good Father’s daylight hours happen at this address. The reader is in room 217 for fourteen scenes. The school is also where Emma Marsh is a freshman, which means she and her father share a building for a year that begins, in chapter one, with her humiliated by the proximity and ends, in chapter thirty, with the proximity no longer applying. The cafeteria is where, in chapter twenty-one, David hears about the school-board complaint from a colleague who does not realize David is the subject of it.
Harmon High also appears in the background of The Honest Woman, the auditorium where the school-board hearing happens in chapter eighteen, and in The Tired Mother, when Cat Brennan’s son’s sophomore year happens off-camera in the building David Marsh has, by then, stopped teaching in.