The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Good,” Miss Channing said. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She turned to me. I could see that something was on her mind. “You didn’t bring a sketchbook with you, Henry,” she said.

  I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t …”

  “You should have it with you all the time,” Miss Channing told me. She smiled, then said a line I later repeated to Mr. Parsons. “Art is like love. It’s all or nothing.

  With that she quickly walked into the cottage, then returned, this time with a sketchbook in her hand.

  “Take one of mine,” she said as she handed it to me. “I have a few left from my time in Africa.”

  I looked at the book, the soft burgundy cover, the clean, thick paper that rested beneath it. Nothing had ever looked more beautiful to me. I felt as if she’d passed me a golden locket or a strand of her hair.

  “Now, don’t let me see you without a sketchbook ever again, Henry,” she said with a mocking sternness.

  I tucked the book beneath my arm. “I won’t,” I told her.

  She gazed at me a moment, then nodded toward the table and chairs. “Would you mind taking all this back into the cottage?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  I grasped one chair in each hand and headed for the cottage. On the way I heard Sarah say, “So you were painting this morning, were you?” And Miss Channing’s reply, “Yes. I often do in the morning.”

  Inside the cottage I placed the chairs at the wooden table in the kitchen. Through the rear window I could see Miss Channing and Sarah as they strolled toward the easel that still stood at the water’s edge, the pages of the drawing book fluttering slightly in a breeze from off the pond. Miss Channing had opened the drawing book and was showing one of her sketches to Sarah. Sarah had folded her hands before her in the way Miss Channing often did, and was listening attentively to her every word.

  After a while I turned and walked back into the small living room at the front of the cottage. The picture of Miss Channing’s father still hung in the same place. But since that time, several sketches had been added to the wall, carefully wrought line drawings that she had brought out of Africa and which portrayed vast, uncluttered vistas, borderless and uncharted, devoid of both animals and people, the land and sky stretching out into a nearly featureless infinity. This, I knew, was her father’s world, unlimited and unrestrained.

  I stared at her drawings a few seconds longer, then walked outside again, retrieved the table, placed it just inside the cottage door, and made my way over to where Miss Channing and Sarah still stood at the edge of the pond.

  “I like that one,” Sarah said brightly, her eyes on one of the drawings Miss Channing had just displayed.

  “It’s not finished yet,” Miss Channing told her. “I was working on it this morning.”

  I peered at the drawing. It showed a body of water that only faintly resembled Black Pond. For it was much larger, as well as being surrounded by a world of empty hills and valleys that appeared to roll on forever. So much so, that the mood of the drawing, its immensity and sense of vast, unbounded space struck me as very similar to the ones I’d just seen inside the cottage. But there was something different about it too. For near the center of the drawing, hovering near the middle of a huge, unmoving water, Miss Channing had drawn a man at the oars of a small boat. His face was caught in a shaft of light, his eyes locked on the farther shore.

  Sarah leaned forward, looking closely at the figure in the boat. “That man there, isn’t that—”

  “Leland Reed,” Miss Channing said, the first time I’d ever heard her say his name.

  Sarah smiled. “Yes, Mr. Reed. From Chatham School.”

  Miss Channing let her eyes settle upon the painting. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, a gesture which, months later, after I’d described it to Mr. Parsons, he forever called “a lover’s sigh.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I was still thinking of Miss Channing’s drawing a few minutes later when I brought my car to a halt in front of Dalmatian’s Cafe. It had long been my favorite place in Chatham, not only because it had been the place where the boys of Chatham School had sometimes gathered after a game or on the weekends, but because it had pretty much remained unchanged from that now-distant time. The grill and counter were still in the same place; so were the booths by the window. Even the old rusty plow blade that Mrs. Winthrop, the cafe’s first owner, claimed her great-grandfather had used to break ground on their family farm in 1754 still hung on the back wall, though now hemmed in by bright neon signs hawking beer and soft drinks.

  I took my usual seat in the booth farthest from the door, the one that nestled in a corner by the window, and from which I could look out and watch the village’s activities. And without warning I saw Dr. Craddock pull up in front of our Myrtle Street house just as he had on that night so long ago, driving the sleek black sedan in which he paid house calls in the twenties, saw him as he walked through the rain to where my father stood gloomily on the porch. The doctor had been dressed in a black suit, and had taken off his hat as he came up the stairs, his question delivered almost like a plea. I’m sorry to trouble you, Arthur, but could we talk about the little girl?

  And as I sat there hearing the doctor’s voice, time reversed itself, old buildings replacing more recent ones, the blue pavement of Main Street suddenly buried beneath a stretch of earth marked by both wooden wagon wheels and the narrow rubber tread of clanging Model A’s.

  Far in the distance I saw an old iron bell materialize out of the motionless air of the long-empty bell tower of what had once been Chatham School, then begin to move, as if it had been pushed by an invisible hand, its implacable toll reverberating over the buildings and playing fields of Chatham School summoning us to our classes in the morning, and releasing us from them in the afternoon, ringing matins and vespers with an authority and sense of purpose that had little diminished from the time of monks and kings.

  And then, as if from some high aerie where I sat perched above them, I saw the boys pour out of the great wooden doors at the front of the school, sweep down its wide cement stairs, and fan out into the surrounding streets, myself among them, the gray school jacket now draped over my shoulders, its little shield embroidered on the front pocket, along with the single phrase, Veritas et Virtus, truth and virtue, the words my father had long ago selected as the motto of Chatham School.

  It was a Friday afternoon in late November, around three weeks after I’d taken Sarah to Miss Channing’s cottage for her first reading lesson. By then Sarah and I had become somewhat closer, she no longer simply a servant girl, I no longer simply the son of her master. Her yearning to make something of herself fired my own emerging vision of living an artist’s life, a life lived “on the run,” as Jonathan Channing had called it, and whose vast ambitions Sarah’s own great hope seemed to mirror in some way.

  We were on our way to the lighthouse that afternoon, Sarah in a cheerful mood, strolling almost gaily over a carpet of red and yellow leaves, Sarah with a new purse she’d bought at a village shop, I with my sketchbook tucked firmly beneath my arm.

  “I just want you to look at them before I show them to Miss Channing,” I told her as we strode across the street, then onto the broad yard that swept out from the whitewashed base of the lighthouse. “And if they’re bad, Sarah, I want you to tell me so. I don’t want Miss Channing to see them if they’re bad.”

  Sarah flashed me a smile. “Give them to me, Henry, and stop going on so about it,” she said, playfully snatching the sketchbook from my hand.

  “It’s just pictures of places around here mostly,” I added as she opened it. “Just beaches and stuff.”

  But to me they were anything but local scenes. For what they portrayed was not Chatham, but my view of it. As such, they were moody drawings of shrouded seascapes and gloomy woods, each done with an unmistakable intensity, everything oddly torn and twisted, as if I’d begun with an ordinary scene in mind, some commonplace beach or village lane, th
en dipped it in black ink and put it through a grinder.

  And yet, for all their adolescent excess, they’d had a certain sense of balance and proportion, the intricate bark of a distant tree, the grittiness of beach sand, drawings that suggested not only the look of things, but their physical textures. There was a vision of the world in them as well, a feeling for the claustrophobia of life, so that even the vistas, wide though they seemed, appeared pinched and walled in at the same time, the earth, for all its spinning vastness, no more than a single locked room from which nothing seemed able to escape.

  Sarah remained silent while she flipped through my sketchbook. Then, with a quick flick of her hand, she closed it, a wry smile on her lips.

  “I like them, Henry,” she said happily. “I like them a lot.”

  She no doubt expected a smile to burst onto my face, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, I stared at her with a decidedly troubled look. “But do you think Miss Channing will like them?” I demanded.

  She looked at me as if the question were absurd. “Of course she will,” she said. She gave me a slight nudge. “Besides, even if Miss Channing didn’t like your drawings, all she’d want to do is teach you how to make them better.”

  “All right,” I said, drawing the sketchbook from her hand as I got to my feet.

  I walked a short distance away from her across the lighthouse grounds, then stopped and glanced back to where she remained seated on the little cement bench. “Thank you, Sarah,” I said.

  She watched me closely, clearly sensing my insecurity, her teasing, carefree mood now entirely vanished. “Do you want me to come with you, Henry?”

  I knew she’d read my mind. “Yes, I think I do.”

  “All right,” Sarah said, coming to her feet with a sweep of her skirt. “But only as far as the courtyard, not into Miss Channing’s room. When you show her your drawings, you should do it on your own.”

  I’d expected to find her alone, doing what she normally did at the end of the school day, washing the tables and putting away her supplies. It was only alter I’d reached the door of her classroom and peered inside that I realized she was not. Even so, I don’t know why it surprised me so, finding Mr. Reed in her room, leaning casually against the front table while she stood a few feet away, her back to him, washing the blackboard with a wet cloth. After all, I’d often seen them arriving at school in the morning and leaving together in the afternoon, Mr. Reed behind the wheel of his sedan, Miss Channing seated quite properly on the passenger side. I’d seen them together at other times as well, strolling side by side down the school corridor, or sitting on the steps, having lunch, usually with a gathering of other teachers, yet slightly off to the side, a mood surrounding them like an invisible field, so that even in the midst of others, they seemed intimately alone.

  “Hello,” Miss Channing said when she turned away from the blackboard and saw me standing at the door. “Please, come in, Henry.”

  I came into her room with a reluctance and sense of intrusion that I still can’t entirely explain, unless, from time to time, we are touched by the opposite of aftermath, feel not the swirling eddies of a retreating wave, but the dark pull of an approaching one.

  “Hello, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.

  I nodded silently as I came down the aisle, sliding the sketchbook back slightly, trying to conceal it.

  “I thought you’d be at the game,” Mr. Reed said, referring to the lacrosse match that had been scheduled for that same afternoon. “It’s against New Bedford Prep, you know.” He glanced toward Miss Channing. “Traditionally, New Bedford Prep has been our most dreaded opponent.”

  I said nothing, tormented now with second thoughts about showing my drawings to Miss Channing since Mr. Reed would be there to see them too. I’m not sure I would have shown them at all had not Miss Channing’s eyes drifted down to the sketchbook beneath my arm.

  “Did you bring that for me?” she asked.

  She could see my reluctance to hand it over. To counteract it, she smiled and said, “You know, my father used to stand me in front of a bare wall. He’d say, ‘Look closely, Libby. On that wall there is a great painting by someone who was afraid to show it.’ If no one ever sees your work, Henry, then what’s the point of doing it at all? Let’s see what you’ve done.”

  I drew the sketchbook from beneath my arm and handed it to her.

  She placed it on the table and began to turn the pages, studying one drawing at a time, commenting from time to time, mentioning this detail or that one, how the trees appeared to bulge slightly, something in them trying to get out, or the way the sea tossed and heaved.

  “They have a certain—I don’t know—a certain controlled uncontrol about them, don’t you think?” she asked Mr. Reed.

  He nodded, his eyes on her. “Yes, I do.”

  She drew in a long breath. “If we could only live that way,” she said, her eyes still on one of my drawings.

  She’d said it softly, without undue emphasis, but I saw Mr. Reed’s face suddenly alter. “Yes,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, yet oddly charged as well, as if he were responding not to an idle remark made in an open room, but to a note slipped surreptitiously beneath his chamber door.

  I left Miss Channing’s room a few minutes later, reasonably satisfied with her response, but in other ways somewhat troubled and ill at ease, as if something had been denied me, a moment alone with her.

  “I knew she’d like them,” Sarah said firmly when I told her what had happened.

  She’d waited for me at the back of the school, the two of us now moving down its central corridor, other boys brushing past us, a few turning to get a better look at Sarah after she’d gone by.

  Once outside, we returned to our little cement bench beside the lighthouse. From it we could see Chatham School just across the street.

  “I wish I could leave here,” I said abruptly, almost spitefully, my mind turning from my drawings to the escape route they represented for me. Not art, as I know now, but an artist’s life as I then imagined it.

  Sarah looked surprised by the depth of my contempt. “But you have everything, Henry. A family. Everything.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t care. I hate this place.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere else, that’s all.”

  She looked at me knowingly. “There are lots of places worse than Chatham,” she said.

  It was then that Miss Channing and Mr. Reed came out the front door of the school and began strolling slowly toward the parking lot. Despite the formal distance they maintained, the fact that they at no point touched, there was something in the way they walked along together that drew my attention to them, called forth those first small suspicions that would later grow to monstrous size.

  “I’ll bet they’d like to go someplace else too,” I said.

  Sarah said nothing, but only turned toward the school and watched as Mr. Reed and Miss Channing continued toward Mr. Reed’s car. When they reached it, he opened the door for Miss Channing, waited until she’d gotten in, then closed it once again.

  The car rumbled past us a few seconds later, Mr. Reed at the wheel as always, and Miss Channing seated beside the passenger door. A late afternoon chill had settled over the village by that time, and I noticed that she’d rolled her window up to shut it out. Her face, mirrored in the glass, seemed eerily translucent as the car swept by.

  More than anything, I remember that she appeared to sit in a great stillness as the car drifted by. Just as she would some months later, after the verdict had been rendered, and she’d been hustled down the courthouse stairs and rushed into the backseat of a black patrol car. She’d sat next to the window on that occasion too, staring straight ahead as the car inched through the noisy, milling crowd, slowly picking up speed as it continued forward, bearing her away.

  CHAPTER 11

  I found that I couldn’t go directly to my office after leaving Dalmatian’s Cafe that
morning. For there was yet another place that called to me even more darkly than Milford Cottage or Mr. Reed’s house or the silent reaches of Black Pond. For although the final act had occurred there, its tragic origins lay somewhere else, a different conspiracy entirely from the one Mr. Parsons felt so certain he’d unmasked in the courtroom the day I took the stand.

  And so, after a second cup of coffee at Dalmatian’s Cafe, I walked back to my car, pulled out of the parking space, and headed up the steadily ascending coastal road that curved along the outerbank to Myrtle Street.

  At the top of the bluff I wheeled to the right. The lighthouse gleamed in the bright morning air as I drove past it, a vast blue sky above, with only wisps of skirting clouds to suggest the tearing wind and rain that had rocked us during most of the preceding week.

  Dolphin Hall rose just down the street from the lighthouse, and even at that early hour there were a couple of cars parked in its lot. One of them, a sleek BMW, bright red with thin lines of shimmering chrome, was parked beneath the same ancient oak that had once shaded the battered chassis of Mr. Reed’s old Model T.

  I pulled in next to it and stopped. Through my windshield I could see the gallery a few yards away, its red brick portico little changed since the days when the building had housed the boys of Chatham School.

  Other things had been altered, of course. The tall, rattling windows had been replaced by sturdy double paned glass, and a wide metal ramp now glided up the far right side of the cement stairs, granting access to the handicapped.

  But more than any of these obvious changes, I noticed that a tall plaster replica of the lighthouse had been placed on the front lawn in almost exactly the spot where Miss Channing’s column of faces had briefly stood, my own face near the center of the column, my father’s near the bottom, where a circular bed of tulips had been planted.