The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  On the day the school’s governing board ordered it battered down, my father had stood with his arms folded over his chest, listening to the ring of the hammer as it shattered the plaster faces one by one. Standing rigidly with his back to the small group of people who’d come to observe its destruction, clothed in his neatly pressed black suit, he’d watched it all silently and with complete dignity. It was only after it had been done, the faces gathered in a dusty pile, that he’d glanced back toward me, his head cocked at an angle that allowed the morning sun to touch his face, its brief glimmer caught in the tears of his eyes.

  The cement walkway to the gallery had been replaced by a more attractive cobblestone, but the path itself was still as straight and narrow as before.

  At the door, a small cardboard sign read simply WELCOME, so I opened the door and walked inside, entering what had once been Chatham School for the first time in all the many years that had passed since its closing.

  From the foyer I could see the wide central corridor that had led from the front of the school all the way to the rear courtyard, the stairs that rose toward the second floor dormitory, and even the door of what had once been my father’s office, its brass knob reflecting the newly installed halogen lights.

  Beside the front window there was a little table filled with information about the various exhibitors represented in the gallery. I reached for the one nearest me and moved down the corridor, more or less pretending to read it, acting quite unnecessarily like some secret agent who’d been sent from the past to bring back news from the present, inform the ghostly legions as to how it had turned out.

  I’d gotten only a little way down the corridor before I was intercepted.

  “Well, Mr. Griswald. Hello.”

  I recognized the man who greeted me as Bill Kipling, the gallery’s owner, and whose grandfather, Joe Kipling, had once played lacrosse for Chatham School. Joe had been a lanky, energetic boy, later a town selectman and real estate baron, more recently an old man who’d swallowed handfuls of vitamins and food supplements before he’d finally died of liver cancer in a private hospital room in Hyannis.

  “Well, what made you decide to drop by after all this time?” the younger Kipling asked cheerily.

  “Just thinking about old times, I guess. When Chatham School was here.”

  “My grandfather went to Chatham School, you know.”

  “Yes, I remember him.”

  And saying that, I saw Joe Kipling not as a boy rushing forward with a lacrosse stick raised in the air, but as he’d stood beside the gray column, a sledgehammer in his hand, swinging it fiercely at the plaster faces Miss Channing had fashioned, a layer of dust gathering upon the shoulders of his school jacket.

  “My father loved Chatham School,” his grandson told me now.

  “We all did.”

  Some few minutes of small talk followed, then he left me to browse through the gallery undisturbed, knowing that I had not really come to see the pictures he’d hung from its walls, but to hear the shouts and laughter of the boys as they’d tumbled chaotically down the wide staircase at seven-thirty sharp, some fully dressed, others still looping their suspenders over their shoulders or pulling on their jackets, but always under the watchful eye of my father. For each morning he’d taken up his position at the bottom of the stairs, his arms folded over his chest like a Roman centurion, greeting each boy by name, then adding a quick “Work well, play well.” I could still remember how embarrassed I’d felt at such a scene each morning, the boys rushing by, trying so hard to please, to be what my father wanted them to be, sturdy, upright “good citizens.” At those times he’d appeared almost comical to me, a caricature of the Victorian schoolmaster, an artifact from that dead time, bloodless as a bone dug out of an ancient pit. Of all the mired and passionless things I did not wish to be, my father was chief among them. As for the “good life” about which he sometimes spoke, standing before the boys in his Ciceronian pose, it struck me as little more than a life lived without vitality or imagination, a life hardly worth living, and from which death could come only as a sweet release.

  His office had faced the staircase, and its great mahogany door was still in place. Stepping up to it, I could almost hear him uttering the ominous words I’d overheard as I’d swept down the stairs that faced his office on that drizzly afternoon in May of 1927. The door had still been fully open when I’d begun to make my way from the upper landing, but he’d begun to close it, his attention so focused on the people already inside his office that he hadn’t seen me descending the stairs. “This is Mr. Parsons, the commonwealth attorney,” I’d heard him say as he stepped farther into his office, slowly drawing the door behind him.

  I’d been able to glance inside the office and see a man in a dark suit, a homburg held in his hand. He stood in front of my father’s desk, a large cardboard box in the chair beside him. “Please sit down, Miss Channing,” I heard him say.

  Through the narrowing space that remained open as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I could see Miss Channing standing stiffly before Mr. Parsons, her hands folded together at her waist, her hair in a tight bun. As the door closed, I heard her reply to him, her words spoken softly, but in a tone that struck me as deathly cold. “I prefer to stand,” she said.

  The door to what had formerly been my father’s office now had a little sign tacked to it, one that read “Private,” so I could not go in. I stood, facing it, remembering that a completely different sign had once been there, one that had read “Arthur H. Griswald, Headmaster.”

  My father had removed that sign himself, placed it in a shoe box, and kept it in the cellar of the little house we rented after leaving Chatham School. But it was not very difficult for me to imagine that it was still in place, and that beyond the door his desk was still there too, along with the crystal inkwell my mother had given him on their tenth anniversary, the ceremonial quill pen he’d used to sign important documents, even the brass lamp with the dark green shade that had given the room an indisputable authority.

  I knew that a whole world had once held its ground in that small room, made what amounted to its last stand. How fully all of that had been visible in my father’s face the day he’d marched onto the front lawn of the school, then instructed Joe Kipling to take his place before Miss Channing’s carved column of faces. He’d paused a moment, his gaze lingering on the column, then turned to Joe and given the order with a single word: Begin.

  I felt my eyes close against the awesome spectacle of that moment, the sound of the hammer as it slammed into the column, the severe and unsmiling faces of the people who watched as Joe Kipling pounded it into dust.

  I turned away from the door. On either side, large rooms were filled with paintings of more or less modern design, the paint splattered upon the canvas or lathered over it in chaotic swirls, fragments of color pressed jaggedly one against another. I could only imagine how their disharmony would have offended my father, how much he would have preferred the idyllic scenes and passive landscapes he’d scrupulously selected for these same corridors during his tenure as headmaster, works governed by order and design, harmony and the laws of reason, a vision of life he’d striven to maintain at Chatham School … and failed.

  Toward the rear of the corridor I stepped into the room that had once been Mr. Reed’s. Able to accommodate no more than ten or twelve student desks, its large windows looked out into the courtyard. Through them he had been able to see the little converted storeroom where Miss Channing taught. How often he must have glanced out those windows and caught her in his eyes, a slender young woman with raven black hair and light blue eyes, standing behind a sculpting pedestal or before an easel, spinning stories of fabled lands and tragic people while she worked with paint and clay. Although I never saw it happen, I’m sure that from time to time Miss Channing must have glanced toward her own window and caught Mr. Reed watching her from across the courtyard, at first through veils of autumn rain, then through swirls of windblown snow, and fi
nally through the shimmering air of that final spring, their eyes now locked in a dreadful stare, a look as desperate and harrowing as the words I’d heard them speak: How do you want to do it? Without looking back.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I didn’t remain in Mr. Reed’s classroom for very long. For I could feel a heat and sharpness in the air, as if it had begun to sizzle.

  And so I turned and fled to the courtyard where the outbuilding that had once been Miss Channing’s classroom still stood, though it had long been converted into the gallery’s framing shop.

  The door was open, and standing at its threshold I could see the wide counter that ran along the rear of the building, stacks of empty frames leaning against the wall behind it. Frame samples of various colors and materials—brass, wood, aluminum—hung from a large square of pressed board. To the right, where I’d once sat at the front of the room, a work space had been created, complete with a large table and circular saw. A layer of sawdust and wood chips coated the floor beneath the table, and a bright red metal toolbox rested alongside.

  Clearly, of the several places I visited that day, it was Miss Channing’s room that had been most transformed. No trace remained of the tables and chairs where the boys had sat watching her sculpt and paint, nor of the sculpting pedestals and easels and canvases we’d used to fashion our own crude works of art; nor the cabinet where she’d returned the room’s modest supplies before joining Mr. Reed for their drive home each afternoon; nor even the portraits of Washington and Lincoln that had watched us from the room’s opposite walls, their faces stern but kindly, like two old-fashioned fathers.

  And yet, for all that, I sensed Miss Channing’s presence more within that transformed and cluttered space than in any of the other places I’d revisited. And I could feel Mr. Reed as well, the two of them together as I had found them on that long-ago afternoon, she behind the front table, he at the far door, moving toward her irrevocably, his words spoken so softly that I’d barely been able to hear them: Because I love you, I can do it.

  It was more than I could bear. And so I wheeled around and walked back through the courtyard and down the central corridor of the building, then swiftly out of it, like someone in flight from a surging fire.

  At last I came to a halt at the little cement bench where Sarah and I had sat together years before, the lighthouse behind us, the school in front. In my mind I saw Miss Channing and Mr. Reed walk once again to the car beneath the oak, Mr. Reed open the door, Miss Channing slip inside, the car begin to move, turning out of the parking lot and onto Myrtle Street, finally drifting by me as it had that day so many years before, Miss Channing staring straight ahead, so silent and so still, with nothing but a dark strand of loosened hair to leave its mark upon her face.

  I returned to my office, sat down at my desk, my eyes involuntarily drifting over to the archive my father had long ago assembled, perhaps as something to remind him of his tall, though without in the least knowing that it had been mine as well.

  I rose and walked to the file cabinet beneath my father’s portrait. Glancing up at it, I heard his voice in old age, hung with the bleakness of his final years, perhaps even the deepest of its disappointments: So there’ll never be a wife, Henry? Never a child? My answer as stark as it had always been: No.

  I turned away from the portrait, opened the cabinet, and pulled out the forms I would need to begin my work for Clement Boggs, already considering what the last phase of that work would inevitably require, the cruel lyrics of a dreadful song playing in my mind as I made my way back to my desk:

  Alice Craddock

  Locked in a paddock

  Where’s your daddy gone?

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 12

  During the final years of his life, with my mother gone, and few means of passing the idle hours, my father took to walking through the countryside. I was a middle-aged bachelor by then, with little to engage me but my legal practice. And so I often accompanied him on his rambles, the two of us first driving to a particular spot, then setting off into the woods. Usually we went to Nickerson State Park, where the trails were easiest. But from time to time we would wander into some more remote area, park the car along the road, then follow a less well-defined path around a nearby hill or up a gently angled slope.

  Most of these walks were routine affairs, my father talking quietly about whatever he’d read most recently, a book or magazine article that had briefly held his attention. The past, particularly his years at Chatham School, seemed nearly to have disappeared from his consciousness altogether.

  Then, one afternoon only a year before his death, we found ourselves on a hilltop outside Chatham, the spires and roofs of the village in the distance, and down below, like a dark, sightless eye, the unruffled waters of Black Pond.

  He remained silent for a time, but I could see that he was struggling to say something, release some pronouncement he’d long kept inside. It was a struggle that surprised me. For except for those times when my mother had insisted upon bringing up the subject, my father had seemed more than satisfied to let all thought of the Chatham School Affair sink unmourned into oblivion.

  “So much death, Henry,” he said finally. “Down there on Black Pond. So much destruction.”

  I saw bodies swirling in green water, small hands clawing at a strip of black rubber, a boat lolling in an empty sea, a middle-aged woman rocking on her front porch, her eyes vacant and emotionless, staring into nowhere, her hair a sickly yellow streaked with gray.

  My father continued to peer down at the pond, his hands behind his back, two wrinkled claws. “I sometimes forget that I ever really knew them. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, I mean.” He shook his head. “How about you, Henry? Do you ever think of them?”

  I glanced about, recalling the slow trudge we’d all made up the hill that morning, Mr. Reed in the lead, Miss Channing just behind him. I could still feel the cold November air that had surrounded us, how we’d had to brush snowflakes from our eyes.

  “I came up here with them,” I said. “To the top of this same hill. Sarah came with us too.” My eyes settled on the very place where we’d stood together and looked out over the pond. “It all seemed harmless at the time.”

  I remembered Miss Channing and Mr. Reed strolling through Chatham, pausing to gaze in shop windows, or standing beside the fence at London Livery, Miss Channing stroking the muzzle of one of the horses. Once I’d come upon them in Warren’s Sundries, Mr. Reed with a model boat in his hand, turning it at various angles, pointing out its separate parts, the mast, the spinnaker, the fluttering sail, his words spoken quietly, bearing, at the time, no grave import. It wouldn’t be hard to do it.

  My father’s eyes searched the near rim of the pond. The thick summer foliage blocked the spot I knew he was looking for.

  “Why did you go to Milford Cottage so often?” he asked, still peering down the hillside.

  “Because of Sarah. I went to her reading lessons.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My father kept his tone matter-of-fact, but I knew how charged his feelings were, how many questions still plagued him. At last he asked one he’d kept inside for a long time. “Were you in love with her, Henry?”

  I remembered the night I’d gone to her room, how gently she’d received me, her eyes shy and downcast, her Body beneath a white nightgown, a satin ribbon dangling just above her chest. “She was a lovely girl,” I said. “And living in our house the way she did, I might have—”

  “I wasn’t talking about Sarah,” my father said, interrupting me. “I was talking about Miss Channing.”

  I heard rain batting against the windowpanes of Milford Cottage as it had that night, wind slamming at the screen door, saw candles burning in her bedroom, a yellow light pouring over her, the stillness in her eyes when she spoke. Will you do it, Henry? Then my reply, obedient as ever, Yes.

  “I always thought that was the reason you took it so hard,” my father added. “B
ecause you had a certain … feeling for Miss Channing.”

  Her face dissolved in a haze of yellow light, and I saw her as she’d appeared the day we’d stood there on the hill, snow clinging to her hair and gathered along the shoulders of her long blue coat. “I wanted her to be free,” I said.

  “To do what?”

  “Live however she wanted to.”

  He shook his head. “It didn’t turn out that way.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  I felt my father’s arm settle on my shoulders, embrace me like a child. “Never forget, Henry,” he said, offering his final comment on the Chatham School Affair, “never forget that some part of it was good.”

  I’m not sure I ever fully believed that, though I couldn’t deny that there’d been good moments, especially at the beginning. One of those moments had been the very day we’d all gone up the hill and stood together in the first snow of the season.

  Sarah and I had walked to Milford Cottage that November morning, Sarah eager to get on with her lessons, confident that she would soon master the skills she needed to “better” herself, childlike in her enthusiasm, adult in her determination.

  Not long after we’d left Chatham it had begun to snow, so that by the time we’d finally reached Milford Cottage we were cold and wet.

  As we neared the cottage, I saw Miss Channing part the plain white curtains of one of its small windows and peer out. She was wearing a white blouse, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and her hair fell loosely over her shoulders. From the look on her face, I could tell that she was somewhat surprised to see us.

  “You didn’t have to come, you know,” she called to us as she opened the door. “I would have understood that the weather—”

  Sarah shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no, Miss Channing,” she said, “I wouldn’t think of missing a lesson.”

  Miss Channing eased back into the cottage and motioned us inside. “Well, come in quickly, then,” she said. “You must be frozen stiff.”