The Chatham School Affair

I ran down Myrtle Street, breathless, my mind glittering in a world of fresh ideas. Though night had nearly fallen by the time I reached home, it felt like dawn to me. I remember bounding up the stairs, stretching out on my bed, and reading Mr. Channing’s book again, cover to cover. One sentence held for all time: Life is best lived at the edge of folly.

  I remember that a fierce exhilaration seized me as I read and reread that line in my bedroom beneath the eaves, that it seemed to illuminate everything I had ever felt. Even now it strikes me that no darkness ever issued from a brighter flame.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 7

  In old age and semiretirement I’d finally come to a time in life when I never expected to think of her again. By then years had gone by with little to remind me of her, save the quick glimpse of an old woman moving heavily across a wide wooden porch or rocking slowly in her chair as I drove by. And so Miss Channing had at last grown distant. When I thought of her at all, it was as a faded thing, like a flower crushed within the pages of an ancient, crumbling book. Then, suddenly, my own life now drawing to a close, she came back to me by a route I’d never have expected.

  I’d come to my office early that morning, the village street still empty, a fog sweeping in from the sea, curling around the corner of Dalmatian’s Cafe and nestling under the benches outside the town hall. I was sitting at my desk, handling the few cases that still came my way, when I suddenly looked up and saw an old man standing at my door.

  “Morning, Henry,” he said.

  It was Clement Boggs, dressed as he always was, in a flannel shirt and baggy pants, an old hat pulled down nearly to his ears. I’d known Clement all my life, though never very well. He’d been one of the local rowdies who’d smoked in front of the bowling alley, the type my father had always warned me against, a rough, lower-class boy who’d later managed to pull himself together, make a good life, even put away a considerable fortune. I’d handled quite a few of his legal affairs, mostly closings in recent years, as he’d begun to divest himself of the property he’d accumulated throughout his life.

  He sat down in one of the chairs in front of my desk, groaning slightly as he did so. “I’ve got an offer on some land I bought a long time back,” he told me. “Out on Plymouth Road.” He hesitated, as if the words themselves held all the terror, rather than the events that had happened there. “’Round Black Pond. The old Milford cottage.”

  As if I’d suddenly been swept back to that terrible summer day, I heard Mr. Parsons say, You often went to Milford Cottage, didn’t you, Henry? My answer simple, forthright, as all of them had been: Yes, sir, I did.

  Clement watched me closely. “You all right, Henry?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  He didn’t seem convinced, but continued anyway. “Well, like I said, I’ve got an offer on that land ’round Black Pond.” He leaned back slowly, watching me intently, no doubt wondering at the scenes playing in my mind, the swirling water, a face floating toward me from the green depths. “He wants to know if he can get a zoning variance. I thought you might look into it, see if the town might give him one.”

  Clement sat only a few feet from me, but he seemed far way; Mr. Parsons bore in upon me so closely I could almost feel his breath upon my face. When were you last on Black Pond? Matter-of-factly, with no hint of passion, and certainly none of concealment, my answer came: On May 29, 1927. That would be a Sunday? Yes.

  “You’ll have to go out there, of course,” Clement said, his gaze leveled upon me steadily, his head cocked to the right, so that for an instant I wondered if he might also be reliving my day in the witness box, listening once again to Mr. Parsons’ questions as they’d resounded through the crowded courtroom. What happened on Black Pond that day?

  Clement’s eyes narrowed, as if against a blinding light, and I knew that he could sense the upheaval in my mind no matter how hard I labored to contain it. “I don’t guess you’ve been out that way in quite some time,” he said.

  “Not in years.”

  “Looks the same.”

  “The same as what?”

  My question appeared to throw him into doubt as to what his answer should be. “Same as it did in the old days,” he replied.

  I said nothing, but I could feel myself helplessly returning to the days he meant. I saw an old car moving through the darkness, two beams of yellow light engulfing me as it came to a halt, a figure staring at me from behind the wheel, motioning now, whispering, Get in.

  “Well, let me know what you find out,” Clement said, rising from his chair. “About the variance, I mean.”

  “I’ll look into it right away.”

  Once at the door, he turned back to face me. “You don’t have to stay out there for long, of course,” he told me, his way of lightening the load. “Just get an idea of what the town might think of somebody developing it.”

  I nodded.

  He seemed unsure of what he should say next, or if it should be me to whom he said it. Finally, he spoke again. “There’s one more thing, Henry. The money. From the land, I mean. I want it to go to somebody in particular.” He paused a moment, then said her name. “Alice Craddock.”

  She swam into my mind, an old woman, immensely fat, her hair gray and bedraggled, her mind unhinged, the butt of a cruel school-yard poem I’d heard repeated through the years:

  Alice Craddock,

  Locked in the paddock

  Where’s your mama gone?

  “It just seems right that she should get whatever the land out there brings,” Clement said. “I’m an old man. I don’t need it. And they say Alice has come on bad times.”

  I saw Alice as a middle-aged woman, slack-jawed, growing fat on potato chips and candy bars, her eyes dull and lightless, a gang of boys chasing after her, pointing, laughing, until Mr. Wallace chased them away, his words trailing after them as they fled down the street: Leave her alone. She’s suffered enough.

  “Not much left of what was given her,” Clement said.

  “Not much, no.”

  He shrugged. “Well, maybe this can help a little,” he said, then turned and walked through the door.

  Once he’d gone, I went to the window and looked out. I could see him trudging toward the dusty old truck he’d parked across the street. But I could see him, too, as he’d looked years before, during the days of the trial, the way he’d stood with his cronies on the courthouse steps as Miss Channing had been rushed down them, jeering at her as she swept past, the dreadful word I’d heard drop from his mouth as he glared at her: Whore.

  It was not something I’d ever expected to do, see Milford Cottage again, feel the allure I’d known there, the passions it had stirred. But once Clement’s old truck had pulled away, I felt myself drawn back to it, not in a mood of youthful reminiscence, but as someone forced to look at what he’d done, view the bodies in their mangled ruin, a criminal returning to the scene of his crime.

  And so I drove out to Milford Cottage only an hour later. It was still early, the streets deserted, with only a few people having breakfast at Dalmatian’s Cafe. Driving along Main Street, it seemed to me that the village had changed very little since the days of Miss Channing’s trial, when the crowds had swirled around the courthouse or milled about in front of Quilty’s and Mayflower’s, muttering of murder and betrayal.

  Once outside the village, I followed the road that led along the seashore. There were bogs and marshes on either side, just as there’d always been, and from time to time I spotted a gull circling overhead, a crow skirting just over a distant line of trees.

  A mile out of the village I turned onto Plymouth Road, taking the same route my father had taken the afternoon we’d first driven down it together, Miss Channing in the front seat, I in the back with her two valises. The forest thickness pressed in upon me no less thickly than it had that day, the green vines slapping once again against both sides of the car.

  As I rounded the last curve, Milford Cottage swept into view.

>   It looked much smaller than it had the last time I’d seen it. But that wasn’t the only change time had wrought. For the cottage had gone completely to ruin during the intervening years, the tar roof now ripped and curled, the screen door torn from its rusty hinges, the yard a field of weed and bramble, the whole structure so weathered and dilapidated that it seemed hardly able to hold its own against the changeless waters of Black Pond.

  I stared at it, reviewing the story of its abandonment. I knew that no one would ever live there again, no young woman would ever rearrange the lanterns inside it or hang her father’s picture on its walls. From the trial transcripts so generously quoted in Mr. Parsons’ book, I knew what had been said in its small rooms, what had been felt as well. But I also knew that there’d been other voices, too, other feelings, things Mr. Parsons, for all his effort, had been unable to unearth. As if her lips were at my ear, I heard Miss Channing say, I can’t go on. Then my reply, What can I do to help?

  For a time I peered at the front door that had barred my father’s way that first afternoon, remembering how Miss Channing had stood behind him, waiting silently in the rain as he’d struggled to unlock it. Then I walked up to it, gave a gentle push, and watched as it drifted back, revealing the emptiness inside.

  I stepped into the cottage, my eyes moving along the leaf-strewn floor, settling for a moment on the old fireplace with its heap of gray ash. I heard Miss Channing say, Get rid of this, and closed my eyes abruptly, as if against a vision I expected to appear before them at any moment, Miss Channing standing at the hearth, staring into it with a steely glare, feeding letters into its leaping flames.

  When I opened them again, the cottage was as empty as before, with nothing to give it sound or movement but the drama playing in my mind.

  I glanced into the vacant bedroom, to where a little wooden bookshelf had once rested beside her bed. I could remember the books I’d seen collected there, the words of her father’s heroes bound in dark vellum: Byron, Shelley, Keats.

  A gust of wind slammed against the cottage, rattling what remained of its few dusty windowpanes. I saw a bare limb rake across the glass, a bony finger motioning me outside. And so I nodded silently, like someone agreeing to be led into another chamber, then walked to the back of the cottage, out the rear door, and across the yard to the water’s edge.

  The great willow still rose above the pond, the one Miss Channing had so often painted, its long, brown tendrils drooping toward the surface of the water. I wondered how many times during her first weeks in Chatham she’d stood beneath it, remembering the poems her father had so often read to her, sometimes in the very places where they’d been written, odes to nightingales and Grecian urns, pleasure domes and crystal seas, women who walk in beauty like the night. But there’d been other things as well, other titles on the shelf beside her bed, the speculations of Mesmer, the visions of Madame Blavatsky, the gruesome ravings of de Sade.

  All of that, I thought, standing now where she had stood, my eyes fixed upon the motionless surface of Black Pond, All of that was in her mind. Then I looked out across the pond, and heard a voice, cold, lean, mouthing its grim question: Do you want them dead?

  I was there when she saw him for the first time. Or, at least, I think I was. Of course, she’d already glimpsed him with the other teachers or disappearing into a classroom down the hall. But I don’t think she’d actually seen him before, that is, picked him out from among the others, noticed something that distinguished him and drew her attention toward him more intently.

  It was toward the middle of October, near the end of Miss Channing’s first month at Chatham School. She was standing behind a sculptor’s pedestal, as she often did, though this time there was no mound of clay. We were only to imagine it there, she said, shape it only in our minds.

  “When you imagine the muscles, you have to feel their power,” she told us. “You have to feel what is beneath the figure you’re working with. What is inside it.” She picked up a large book she’d previously placed on her desk and turned it toward us, already open to the page she’d selected to illustrate her point.

  “This is a picture of Rodin’s Balzac.” She began to walk along the side of the room, the book still open, pressing the picture toward us. “You can’t see Balzac’s body,” she added. “He’s completely covered in a long, flowing cape.”

  She continued to move along the edge of the room, the boys now shifting in their seats to keep her in view. “But if you opened the cape,” Miss Channing went on, “you’d see this.” With a purposely swift gesture, she turned the page, and there before us, in full view, was a monstrously fat and bulging Balzac, immense and naked, his belly drooping hugely toward his feet.

  “This figure is actually under the cape,” she said. “Rodin added the cape only after he’d sculpted the body beneath it. The actual body of Balzac.”

  She closed the book and for a moment stared at us silently. Then she lifted her hands and wriggled her fingers. “You must imagine what’s beneath the skin of the figure you’re working on. Feel the muscles stretch and contract.” She swept her hands back until they came to a halt at the sides of her face. “Even the smallest muscles are important, like the tiny ones that open and close your eyes.”

  We stared at her in shocked silence, stunned by the naked figure she’d just displayed to us, but awed by it as well.

  “Remember all that when you start to work on your figures in class tomorrow,” Miss Channing said just as the bell sounded our dismissal.

  It was her last class of the day, and I remember thinking that her first month of teaching at Chatham School had gone quite well. Even my father had commented upon it, mentioning to my mother over dinner one evening that Miss Channing had “gotten a grip on things right away,” that teaching seemed to “fit her nature.”

  I was already at the door that afternoon, the other boys rushing by, when I turned back and saw her alone, standing behind her sculpting pedestal. It seemed the perfect time to approach her.

  “Miss Channing,” I said, coming toward her slowly.

  She looked up. “Yes, Henry?”

  I took her father’s book from my bag and held it out to her. “I thought it was great,” I said. “I’ve read it quite a few times. Even copied things out of it. I thought he was right about everything. About ‘living on the run.’”

  She did not take the book, and I felt certain that she could sense the life I craved, how much I needed to bound over the walls of Chatham School, race into the open spaces, live on the edge of folly. For a moment she seemed to be evaluating me, asking herself if I had the will to see it through, possessed the naked ruthlessness such freedom might require.

  “It isn’t easy to live the way my father did,” she said, her blue eyes focused powerfully. “Most people can’t do it.”

  “But everything else … the way people do live …” I stammered. “I don’t want to live like my father does. I don’t want to be like him … a fool.”

  She didn’t seem in the least shocked by my ruthless evaluation of my father. “How do you want to be, Henry?”

  “Open to things. To new things.”

  She watched me a moment longer, and I could see that she was thinking of me in a way that no one else ever had, not merely as the boy I was, but as the man I might someday be. “I’ve been noticing your drawing,” she said. “It’s really quite good, you know.”

  I knew no such thing. “It is?”

  “There’s a lot of feeling in it.”

  I knew how strangely twisted my drawings were, how wreathed in a vampire blackness, but it had never occurred to me that such characteristics added up to “feeling,” that they might spring from something deep within me.

  I shrugged. “There’s not much to draw around here. Just the sea. The lighthouse. Stuff like that.”

  “But you put something into them, Henry,” Miss Channing said. “Something extra. You should get a sketchbook and take it around with you. That’s what I did in Africa. I
found that just having it along with me made me look at things differently.” She waited for a response, then continued when I failed to offer one. “Anyway, when you’ve done a few more drawings, bring them in and let me look at them.”

  I’d never been complimented by a teacher before. Certainly none had ever suggested that I had a talent for anything but moodiness and solitude. To the other teachers I had always been a disappointment, someone tolerated because I was the headmaster’s son, a boy of limited prospects and little ambition, a “decent lad,” as I’d once heard my father describe me in a tone that had struck me as deeply condescending, a way of saying that I was nothing, and never would be.

  “All right, Miss Channing,” I said, immensely lifted by her having seen something in me the other teachers had not seen.

  “Good,” she said, then returned to her work as I headed down the aisle and out the door.

  I walked into the courtyard and drew in a deep, invigorating breath. It was autumn now, and the air was quite brisk. But my mood had been so heated up by Miss Channing’s high regard that I could not feel its hint of winter chill.

  A few hours later I took my seat for the final class of the day. I glanced out the window, then at the pictures that hung on the wall. Shakespeare. Wordsworth. Keats. My attention was still drifting aimlessly from one face to another when I heard the steady thump … thump … thump of the approaching teacher’s wooden cane, soft and rhythmic, like the distant muffled beating of a drum.

  Was he handsome, the man who came into the room seconds later, dressed, as always, in a chalk-smeared jacket and corduroy pants?

  Yes, I suppose he was. In his own particular way, of course.

  And yet it never surprised me that the people of the village later marveled that such fierce emotions could have stormed about in a so visibly broken frame.

  He was tall and slender, but there was something in his physical arrangement that always struck me as subtly off kilter, the sense of a leaning tower, of something shattered at its base. For although he always stood erect, his back pressed firmly against the wall of his classroom while he spoke to us, his body often appeared to be of another mind, his left shoulder a few degrees lower than the right, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a bust whose features were classically formed yet eerily marred, perhaps distorted, the product of an unsteady hand.