The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  Miss Channing gazed at our remaining lighthouse as we drifted by it. “It’s more striking to have only one,” she said. She turned toward the backseat, her eyes falling upon me. “Don’t you think so, Henry?”

  I had no answer for her, surprised as I was that she’d bothered to ask, but my father appeared quite taken by her observation.

  “Yes, I think that’s true,” he said. “A second makes the first less impressive.”

  Miss Channing’s eyes lingered on me a moment, a quiet smile offered silently before she turned away.

  Our house was situated at the end of Myrtle Street, and on the way to it we passed Chatham School. It was a large brick building with cement stairs and double front doors. The first floor was made up of classrooms, the second taken up by the dormitory, dining hall, and common room.

  “That’s where you’ll be teaching,” my father told her, slowing down a bit as we drove by. “We’ve made a special room for you. In the courtyard.”

  Miss Channing glanced over to the school, and from her reflection in the glass, I could see that her eyes were very still, like someone staring into a crystal ball, searching for her future there.

  We pulled up in front of our house a few seconds later. My father opened the door for Miss Channing and escorted her up the front stairs to the porch, where my mother waited to be introduced.

  “Welcome to Chatham,” my mother said, offering her hand.

  She was only a few years younger than my father, but considerably less agile, and certainly less spirited, her face rather plain and round, but with small, nervous eyes. To the people of Chatham, she’d been known simply as the “music teacher” and more or less given up for a spinster. Then my father had arrived, thirty-one years old but still a bachelor, eager to establish a household in which he could entertain the teachers he’d already hired for his new school, as well as potential benefactors. My mother had met whatever his criteria had been for a wife, and after a courtship of only six weeks, he’d asked her to marry him. My mother had accepted without hesitation, my father’s proposal catching her so completely by surprise, as she loved to tell the women in her sewing circle, that at first she had taken it for a joke.

  But on that afternoon nearly twenty years later, my mother no longer appeared capable of taking anything lightly. She’d grown wide in the hips by then, her figure large and matronly, her pace so slow and ponderous that I often grew impatient with it and bolted ahead of her to wherever we were going. Later in life she sometimes lost her breath at the top of the porch stairs, coming to a full stop in order to regain it, one hand grasping a wooden supporting post, the other fluttering at her chest, her head arched back as she sucked in a long, difficult breath. In old age her hair grew white and her eyes dimmed, and she often sat alone in the front room, or lay curled on her bed, no longer able to read and barely able to attend to the radio. Even so, something fiery remained in her to the very end, fueled by a rage engendered by the Chatham School Affair, one that smoldered forever after that.

  She died many years after the affair had run its frightful course, and by then much had changed in all our lives: the large house on Myrtle Street no more than a memory, my father living on a modest pension, Chatham School long closed, its doors locked, its windows boarded, the playing fields gone to weed, all its former reputation by then reduced to a dark and woeful legacy.

  My mother had prepared a chowder for us that afternoon, buttery and thick with clams and potatoes, the sort typical of Cape Cod. We ate at the dining table, Sarah Doyle, the teenage servant girl my father had brought from Boston only two years before, ladling the fragrant chowder into large china bowls.

  Sitting at the table, Miss Channing asked few questions as my father went through his usual remarks about Chatham School, what its philosophy was, how it had come to be, a lecture my mother had heard countless times, but which clearly engaged Miss Channing’s interest.

  “Why only boys?” she asked at one point.

  “Because girls would change the atmosphere of the school,” my father answered.

  “In what way?”

  “The boys would feel their presence,” my father told her. “It would cause them to show off, to act foolishly.”

  Miss Channing thought a moment. “But is that the fault of the girls or the boys, Mr. Griswald?”

  “It’s the fault of the mixture, Miss Channing,” my father told her, obviously surprised by the boldness he detected in her question. “It makes the atmosphere more … volatile.”

  My father fully expected to have brought the subject to a close with that. An expectation I snared so completely that when Miss Channing suddenly spoke again, offering what amounted to a challenge, I felt something like a call to arms.

  “And without the girls, what’s the atmosphere?” she asked.

  “Studious and serious,” my father answered. “Disciplined.”

  “And that’s the atmosphere you want at Chatham School?”

  “Yes,” my father replied firmly. “It is.”

  Miss Channing said nothing more on the subject, but sitting across from her, I sensed that there was more she might have said, thoughts that were in her head, bristling there, or firing continually, like small explosions.

  At the end of the meal my father led Miss Channing and my mother into the little parlor at the front of the house for a cup of tea. I lingered at the table, watching Sarah clear away the dishes after she’d served them. Though my father had closed the French doors that separated the parlor from the dining room, it was still possible for me to see Miss Channing as she sat listening quietly to my father.

  “So, what do you think of the new teacher?” I asked Sarah as she leaned over my shoulder and plucked a bowl from the table.

  Sarah didn’t answer, so I glanced up at her. She was not looking at me, but toward the parlor, where Miss Channing sat by the window, her hands held primly in her lap, the Joan Crawford hat sitting firmly on her head.

  “Such a fine lady,” Sarah said in an almost reverential tone. “The kind folks read about in books.”

  I looked back toward Miss Channing. She was taking a sip from her cup as my father went on, her blue eyes peering just over the rim, sharp and evaluating, as if her mind ceaselessly sifted the material that passed through it, allowing this, dismissing that, her sense of judgment oddly final, a court, as it would prove to be, from which there could be no appeal.

  I was in my room an hour later, perusing the latest issue of Grady’s Illustrated Magazine for Boys, when my father summoned me downstairs.

  “It’s time to take Miss Channing home,” he told me.

  I followed him out the door, then down the front stairs to where Miss Channing was already waiting in the car.

  “It’s only a short drive,” my father said to her as he pulled himself in behind the wheel. “Perhaps I can get you there ahead of the rain.”

  But he could not, for as we drove toward the cottage, the overhanging clouds suddenly disgorged their burden, thunderously and without warning, as if abruptly being called to account.

  Once outside the village center, my father turned right, onto the coastal road, past the great summer houses that rose along the shore, then on toward the marsh, with its shanties and fishermen’s houses, their unkempt yards scattered with stacks of lobster traps and tangled piles of gray netting.

  Given the torrent, the drive was slow, the old Ford sputtering along, battered from all directions by sudden whipping gusts, the windshield wipers squeaking rhythmically as they swept ineffectually across the glass.

  My father kept his eyes on the road, of course, but I noticed that Miss Channing’s attention had turned toward the landscape of Cape Cod, its short, rounded hills sparsely clothed in tangles of brush and scrub oak, wind ripping through the sea grass that sprouted from the dunes.

  “The Cape’s pretty, don’t you think, Miss Channing?” my father said cheerfully.

  Her reply must have startled him.

  “It looks torme
nted,” she said, staring out the window on the passenger side, her voice suddenly quite somber, as if it came from some darker part of her mind.

  My father glanced toward her. “Tormented? What do you mean?”

  “It reminds me of the islands of the Florida Keys,” she answered, her eyes still concentrated on the landscape. “The name the Spanish gave them.”

  “What name was that?”

  “Los Martires,” Miss Channing answered. “Because they looked so tormented by the wind and the sea.”

  “Forgive my ignorance,” my father said. “But what does ‘Los Martires’ mean?”

  Miss Channing continued to gaze out the window. “It means ‘the martyrs,’” she said, her eyes narrowing somewhat, as if she were no longer looking at the dunes and the sea grass beyond her window, but at the racked and bleeding body of some ancient tortured saint.

  My father drew his attention back to the road. “Well, I’ve never thought of the Cape as looking like that,” he said. Then, to my surprise, I saw his eyes lift toward the rearview mirror, fix on mine. “Have you ever thought of the Cape like that, Henry?”

  I glanced out the window at my right, toward a landscape that no longer seemed featureless and inert, but beaten and bedeviled, lashed by gusts of wind and surging waters. “Not until just now,” I said.

  At about a mile beyond town we swung onto a stretch of road bordered on all sides by dense forest and covered with what had once been a layer of oyster shells, but which past generations of hooves and feet and wagon wheels had since ground into little more than a fine powder.

  The woods had encroached so far into the road that I could hear the surrounding vegetation slap and scrape against the side of the car as we bumped along the road.

  “It gets pretty deserted out this way,” my father said. He added nothing else as we continued in silence until the road forked, my father taking the one to the right, moving down it for perhaps a quarter mile, until it widened suddenly, then came to an abrupt dead end before a small white cottage.

  “There it is,” my father said. “Milford Cottage.”

  It was tiny compared to our house on Myrtle Street, so dwarfed by the surrounding forest that it appeared to crouch fearfully within a fist of green, a dark stretch of water sweeping out behind it, still and lightless, its opaque depths unplumbed, like a great hole in the heart of things.

  “That’s Black Pond,” my father said.

  Miss Channing leaned forward slightly, peering at the cottage very intently through the downpour, like a painter considering a composition, calculating the light, deciding where to put the easel. It was an expression I would see many times during the coming year, intense and curious, a face that seemed to draw everything into it by its own strange gravity.

  “It’s a simple place,” my father told her. “But quite nice. I hope you’ll at least find it cozy.”

  “I’m sure I will,” she said. “Who lived here?”

  “It was never actually lived in,” my father answered. “It was built as a honeymoon cottage by Mr. Milford for his bride.”

  “But they never lived there?”

  My father appeared reluctant to answer her but obligated to do so. “They were both killed on the way to it,” he said. “An automobile accident as they were coming back from Boston.”

  Miss Channing’s face suddenly grew strangely animated, as if she were imagining an alternative story in her mind, the arrival of a young couple who never arrived, the joys of a night they never spent together, a morning after that was never theirs.

  “It’s not luxurious, of course,” my father added quickly, determined, as he always was, to avoid disagreeable things, “but it’s certainly adequate.” His eyes rested upon Miss Channing for a moment before he drew them away abruptly, and almost guiltily, so that for a brief instant he looked rather like a man who’d been caught reading a forbidden book. “Well, let’s go inside,” he said.

  With that, my father opened the door and stepped out into the rain. “Quickly now, Henry.” He motioned for me to get Miss Channing’s valises and follow him into the cottage.

  He was already at the front door, struggling with the key, his hair wet and stringy by the time I reached them. Miss Channing stood just behind him, waiting for him to open the door. As he worked the key, twisting it right and left, he appeared somewhat embarrassed that it wouldn’t turn, as if some element of his authority had been called into question. “Everything rusts in this sea air,” I heard him murmur. He jerked at the key again. It gave, and the cottage door swung open.

  “There’s no electricity out this way,” my father explained as he stepped into the darkened cottage. “But the fireplace has been readied for winter, and there are quite a few kerosene lamps, so you’ll have plenty of light.” He walked to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out into the darkening air. “Just as I explained in my letter.” He released the curtain and turned back to her. “I take it that you’re accustomed to things being a little … primitive.”

  “Yes, I am,” Miss Channing replied.

  “Well, before we go, you should have a look around. I hope we didn’t forget anything.”

  He walked over to one of the lamps and lit it. A yellow glow spread through the room, illuminating the newly scrubbed walls, the recently hung lace curtains, the plain wooden floor that had been so carefully swept, a stone fireplace cleared of ash.

  “The kitchen’s been stocked already,” he told her. “So you’ve got plenty of lard, flour, sugar. All of the essentials.” He nodded toward the bedroom. “And the linens are in the wardrobe there.”

  Miss Channing glanced toward the bedroom, her eyes settling upon the iron bedstead, the sheets stretched neatly over the narrow mattress, two quilts folded at the foot of the bed, a single pillow at its head.

  “I know that things take getting used to, Miss Channing,” my father said, “but I’m sure that in time you’ll be happy here.”

  I knew well what my father meant by the word “happy,” the contentment it signified for him, a life of predictable events and limited range, pinched and uninspired, a pale offering to those deeper and more insistent longings that I know must have called to him from time to time.

  But as to what Miss Charming considered happiness, that I could not have said. I knew only that a strange energy surrounded her, a vibrancy and engagement that was almost physical, and that whatever happiness she might later find in life would have to answer to it.

  “I hope you’ll like Chatham as well,” my father said after a moment. “It’s quite a lovely little town.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Miss Channing told him, though even as she said it, she might well have been comparing it to Rome or Vienna, the great cities she’d visited, the boulevards and spacious squares she’d strolled along, a wider world she’d long known but that I had only dreamed of.

  “Well, we should be going now,” my father said. He nodded toward the two leather valises in my hands. “Put those down, Henry.”

  I did as I was told, and joined my father at the door.

  “Well, good night, then, Miss Channing,” he said as he opened it.

  “Good night, Mr. Griswald,” she said. “And thank you for everything.”

  Seconds later we were in the car again, backing onto Plymouth Road. Through the cords of rain that ran down the windshield as we pulled away, I could see Miss Channing standing at the threshold of the cottage, her face so quiet and luminous as she waved good-bye that I have often chosen to recall her as she was that first night rather than as she appeared at our last meeting, her hair clipped and matted, her skin lusterless, the air around her thick with a dank and deathly smell.

  CHAPTER 3

  My father’s portrait hangs on the large woodpaneled wall opposite my desk and over the now-unused marble hearth, shelves of law books arrayed on either side. He is dressed in a black three-piece suit, the vest neatly buttoned, a formal style of dress common to portraiture at that time. But there is something unu
sual about the composition nonetheless. For although my father is dressed appropriately enough, he is not posed behind his desk or standing before a wall of books, but at a large window with dark red curtains held in place by gold sashes. Outside the window, it is clearly summer, but nothing in the landscape beyond the glass in the least resembles either Chatham or Cape Cod.

  Instead, my father gazes out into a strange, limitless plain, covered in elephant grass and dotted with fire trees, a vast expanse that sweeps out in all directions until it finally dissolves into the watery reaches of a distant blue lake, his attention focused on something in the exotic distance, perhaps the farther shore of that same lake, an effect that gives his face a look of melancholy longing.

  It is the tragic fate of goodness to lack the vast attraction of romance. Because of that, I have never been able to see my father as a man capable of the slightest allure. And yet, for all that, he was a man in love, I think. Though with a school, rather than a woman. Chatham School was his great passion, and the years during which he served as its founder and headmaster, a guiding spirit to its boys, a counselor to its teachers, he’d felt more deeply than he ever would again that his life was truly whole.

  I have looked at this portrait countless times, studying it as a way of studying my father, concentrating upon what lies mysteriously within it. Inevitably, I turn From it in a mood of vague frustration and uneasiness, my eyes drawn to the artist’s signature, her name written out in tiny broken letters: Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing.

  The portrait was painted during the last days of that school year, my father standing at the window of his office, peering out, while Miss Channing remained stationed at her easel a few yards away, her body draped in a gray, paint-dabbled smock, her hair falling to her shoulders in a great unruly mass. By that April, she no longer looked as she had upon her arrival the previous August. The blush of youth was gone, a haggardness in its place, and glimpsing her alone in her classroom during those last days, or as she made her solitary way down the coastal road, I could see nothing left of the young woman who’d stood in the doorway of Milford Cottage only a few months before, waving good-bye as my father backed our car onto Plymouth Road.