The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  In the brief period that remained before it closed for the summer, a similarly bare and withered peace appeared to descend upon Chatham School, turning it into a passionless world, as it seemed to me at the time, very nearly a void, all its former vibrancy, the tingling sense of intrigue and desire, now buried beneath a layer of stark propriety.

  During this time Miss Channing no longer arrived and departed with Mr. Reed, but walked back and forth from Milford Cottage alone. In the morning I would often see her moving up our street, her pace slow, meditative, so that she appeared to be in continual conversation with herself. At school she remained in her room, eating her lunch there, or sitting by the cabinet, reading, between classes. There were no more strolls into the village with Mr. Reed, no more meetings with him by the coastal bluff. And when the day was over, she would head back toward Black Pond, moving through the evening shade with the same thoughtful air with which she’d arrived at school that same morning.

  Her classes took on a similar mood of withdrawal. She became more formal than she had before, her demeanor more controlled, as if she now felt it necessary to conceal every aspect of her life, both past and present, from the many prying eyes she’d sensed around her for so long.

  During these final three weeks it was the column of faces that occupied most of her time. She covered a table with a dark green tarpaulin, and one by one the teachers and students of Chatham School came to her room and lay down upon it to have plaster masks made of their faces. Once I saw Mrs. Benton lying there, her eyes closed, her body tense and rigid, Miss Channing poised above her, staring down, a single finger daubed with moist clay drawing a line across her throat.

  My turn came during the middle of May.

  “Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I stepped into her classroom.

  It was after six in the evening, the air outside growing dark, a soft breeze rustling gently through the late spring leaves of the old oak that stood in the courtyard.

  She was wearing a long blue dress, but she’d thrown on one of the gray smocks she used to protect her clothing. Her hair was pulled back and tied with what appeared to be a piece of ordinary twine.

  “Hello, Henry,” she said in that aloof and oddly brittle tone she’d fallen into by that time. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to get a cast made of my face,” I told her. “For the column.”

  She nodded toward the table. “Lie down,” she said.

  I walked to the table, pulled myself onto it, and lay on my back, my eyes turned toward the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry I’ve come so late,” I said.

  She stepped up to the table, dipped her fingers in the wet clay, then began to apply it smoothly, first across my forehead, then along the sides of my face. “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I did as she told me, breathing softly as she coated my eyelids, her touch very tender, almost airy.

  “This is the way they make a death mask, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.” She continued to work, covering my face with a cold, thin layer of clay.

  Once she’d finished applying the clay, I lay on the table while it dried, listening as she moved about the room. I could hear the soft tread of her feet as she walked from the tables to the cabinet, putting things away, and I recalled how she’d drifted across the summer grass toward my father on that now-distant afternoon, the look in his eyes as he’d caught sight of her bare feet.

  After a time she returned to me, removed the cast, then wiped away the residue from my face with a moist towel.

  “It’s done,” she said as she dropped the towel into a basket by the table. “You can go.”

  I pulled myself to a sitting position, then got to my feet. By then Miss Channing was several feet away, where many other masks lay faceup on a wide table, eyes closed, lips pressed tightly together, cadaverously gray.

  “Well, good night, Miss Channing,” I said when I reached the door.

  “Good night, Henry,” she answered, her eyes now fixed on the mask she’d just made of my face as she wrapped it in a length of white cloth.

  I remained at the door, wanting to reach her somehow, remove her from the pall she seemed imprisoned in, tell her what she should do, how she must follow her father’s lead, live the life he’d prepared her for. I could almost see her rushing through the dark marina, a red cape flowing behind her, Mr. Reed waiting in the boat, lifting her into it, the hunger of their embrace, that thirsty kiss.

  “Is there something else, Henry?” she asked, now staring at me intently, her fingers still wet and glistening, bits of moist clay in her hair. She appeared strikingly similar to the way I’d later see her, rising from the water, her hair soaked and stringy, hung with debris from the depths of Black Pond, her question asked in the same bloodless tone, Is she dead? My answer delivered as passionlessly as my life would be lived from then on, Yes.

  Miss Channing finished the column only a few days later, and it was erected on the eighteenth of May in a ceremony my father arranged for the occasion. The ceremony took place on the front lawn of the school, and in the photograph taken that morning, and later included in my father’s archive of Chatham School Affair, Miss Channing stands to the right of the sculpture, her arms clasped to her sides, my father to its left, one hand tucked beneath his coat, Napoleonic fashion. All the teachers and students of the Chatham School are gathered around them, along with Sarah, who stands just off to the side, dressed up for the occasion, smiling brightly, her long black hair tucked inside a straw hat with a wide ribbon trailing off the back.

  Miss Channing didn’t speak to the assembly that morning, but my father did. He thanked her for her work, not only on the sculpture, but as a teacher who, he said, had done a “remarkable job all ‘round.” At the end of the speech he announced that Miss Channing would not be returning to Chatham School the following year, and that she would be “deeply, deeply missed.”

  Mr. Reed was the only teacher who did not attend the ceremony that morning. Nor did I expect him to. For during the preceding two weeks he’d grown increasingly remote, arriving alone at school just before his first class and leaving alone directly after the last one. During the school day he no longer lingered in the hallway with students, nor took them into the courtyard for a recitation, despite the unseasonable warmth of those first days of summer. Instead, he conducted his classes in the usual manner, lecturing and reading, but with much of the spirit he’d once brought to it now drained away. From time to time, as he stood at the front of the room, he would let his gaze wander toward the window, where, across the courtyard, he could see Miss Channing with her own students before her. At those moments he appeared frozen in a grim and futile yearning, and seemed unable to draw his eyes away from her, until, at last, they would dart back to us, his head jerking slightly as they did so, like someone who’d been slapped.

  Still, despite the furious melancholy that so clearly hovered around him, Mr. Reed continued to work on his boat. It was finished by the third week in May, and the following Saturday he asked me to join him for the maiden voyage.

  The boat had already been taken from the boathouse when I arrived at the marina that morning, the wooden rack that had once held it now empty, the tools and supplies that had been used in its construction put away. The top of the desk had been cleared as well, the cardboard box in which Mrs. Reed had found such an assortment of disturbing things already taken to the house on Black Pond and placed in the attic where Captain Hamilton would later find it, the small brown bottle of arsenic still huddled in the corner, its cap tightly fitted, but the contents nearly gone.

  Only my drawing of Miss Channing still remained in its former place, though it now hung slightly askew, its surface coated with a thin layer of dust. It would still be there two weeks later, when I showed it to Mr. Parsons, his comment destined to linger in my mind forever after that. She’s what did it to him, Henry, she’s what drove him mad.

  But on that foggy Saturday morning, so
strange an eventuality seemed inconceivable, and the boathouse appeared merely like a structure that had weathered a violent but departed storm rather than one about to be blown apart by an approaching one.

  “All right, let’s try her out,” Mr. Reed said as he led me out of the boathouse and down the wooden pier to where I could see the Elizabeth lolling softly in the undulating water, its tall mast weaving rhythmically left and right, a white baton in the surrounding fog.

  Once we’d climbed into the boat, Mr. Reed untied the rope that held it to its mooring, adjusted the sail so that we briefly drifted backward, then took the rudder and guided it out of the marina.

  We followed what appeared to be a predetermined course, exactly like the one I’d seen drawn on Mr. Reed’s nautical map, along the western coast of Monomoy Island, past Hammond’s Bend and Powder Hole, and finally around the tip of the island at Monomoy Point and into the open sea. Mr. Reed kept his eyes forward for the most part, but from time to time he would peer about, like someone scouting dangers all around, so that for a single, exhilarating instant I felt once again a party to some desperate and wildly romantic conspiracy, this early morning voyage, begun before the harbor master had arrived at work, with the marina deserted and the coastline shrouded in mist, serving as our practice run. “A man could vanish into a fog like this,” he said at one point. “Disappear. Disappear.”

  It was nearly ten o’clock when we sailed back into Chatham harbor. The early morning fog had now burned off entirely; the air around us was crystal clear. Mr. Reed guided the boat into its place in the marina, then looped the rope to the wooden pylon, mooring it in the same dock where we’d found it earlier that same morning.

  But rather than being uplifted by the maiden voyage of a boat he’d been working on for three years, Mr. Reed remained solemn and downcast. I moved along beside him, down the long wooden pier and into the boathouse, wondering what I might do to lift his spirits, draw him out of the dreadful despair that had fallen over him, renew the vitality and soaring discontent I’d so admired before, perhaps even point the way to some victory that might still be his.

  Mr. Reed drew himself up on the desk in the corner of the boathouse, resting his cane against it, his hands folded one over the other. For a few minutes he talked about the Galápagos Islands, the ones off the coast of South America that Darwin had written of in The Voyage of the Beagle. “Everything must have looked new to him,” he told me. “Everything in life brand new.” He shook his head with a strange mirthlessness. “Imagine that,” he said. “A whole new world.”

  Watching him from my place a few feet away, I felt coldly stricken, like a boy at a deathwatch, helplessly observing the slow disintegration of someone he’d admired.

  As for Mr. Reed, he seemed hardly aware that I was in the room at all. At times his mind appeared to drift directionlessly from one subject to the next, his eyes sometimes fixed in a motionless frieze, sometimes roaming from place to place about the room, as if in flight from the one object he would not let them light upon, the portrait of Miss Channing that still hung on the far wall, her face forever captured in what must have come to strike him as a cruelly beckoning gaze.

  During all that afternoon he spoke only once about the boat, the long labor of the last few years, his eyes locked on the empty rack that had once held its lofty frame. “Well, she was seaworthy, at least,” he said. Then he grasped his cane, edged himself off the desk, and walked to one of the windows that looked out into the harbor. It was still covered with a strip of burlap, and for a moment Mr. Reed simply stared at the rough, impenetrable cloth. Then, with a sudden, violent jerk he yanked it down, a sheet of dust and a shaft of hard incandescent light pouring over him, and into which, for a single, surreal instant, he seemed to disappear.

  CHAPTER 24

  I often felt as if I had disappeared as well, vanished into the same dusky light that had briefly engulfed Mr. Reed.

  For with the boat now finished, I saw him only occasionally, either in his classroom or at a distance, a figure who seemed perpetually in flight, walking rapidly down a far corridor or turning the corner of Myrtle Street, silent, harried, like someone running beneath the lash of invisible whips.

  As for Miss Channing, I rarely saw her anywhere but in her room, so I felt once again like one student among many, with nothing to distinguish me or set me apart from the rest, watching silently, just as they did, while she gave her final lessons with a formality that struck me as very nearly rigid, all the ease and spontaneity that had marked her former relationship with us completely cast aside, leaving her distant and preoccupied, her focus turned inward with a deadly gravity.

  Left more or less to myself, I became increasingly agitated as the end of the school year approached. I fidgeted nervously through Miss Channing’s classes, my attention drifting toward the window, not with the lack of interest that sometimes afflicted the other boys, but in an attitude of barely controlled hostility and contempt, as if she were a lover who had led me on and then betrayed me, and whom I now despised.

  I felt bereft and abandoned, deserted by my closest allies. And so I poured all my energy into my drawing, watching helplessly as those darker elements that had earlier marked it now took on a demonic blackness, the village forever hung in gothic shadows, the sea disappearing into a grim invading horde of thunderclouds. The angles and perspectives changed as well, tilting Chatham on a cruel axis, its crooked streets plunging in jagged lines toward a central maelstrom, houses careening left or right, a world of colliding shapes. Stranger still, I drew my distortions as if they were not really distortions at all, but our village seen rightly, caught in the actual warp and wrench of the world, a grotesque deformity its true face.

  During this time I had only Sarah to remind me of everything that had once seemed so exciting, the piercing intensity I’d felt the day we’d all stood on the snowy hilltop together and gazed down at Black Pond, how open life had seemed at that moment, how thrillingly romantic. All of that now appeared smothered and inert. So much so that I even began to avoid Sarah, closing my bedroom door at the sound of her approach, as it she were nothing more than a bitter reminder of some lost ideal, a charred locket that had once hung from a lover’s neck.

  Sarah no doubt sensed the way I felt, but she refused to withdraw from me despite it. Instead, she often came to where I lay in my room, knocked at the door, and demanded that I join her for a walk along the beach or accompany her on a shopping trip to the village.

  On the final Thursday of that school year, she found me sitting at the edge of the playing field. It was late in the afternoon. The teachers had already gone home to prepare the final examinations of the coming week, and some of the boys had decided to play a game of touch football before going to their rooms for a night of study.

  “What are you doing here, Henry?” she asked as she strode up and lowered herself onto the ground beside me.

  I shrugged silently, pretending that my attention was on the boys as they continued at the game, their movements dictated by its unbending rides, no hitting, scratching, kicking, rules that must have, in the end, given them comfort, the limits laid out so clearly, but which I saw as yet another example of their strapped and adventureless lives.

  “You hate it, don’t you, Henry?” Sarah demanded. “You hate Chatham School.”

  The game dissolved. I looked at her evenly, the truth bursting from me. “Yes, I do.”

  Sarah nodded, and to my surprise read my thoughts with perfect accuracy. “Don’t run away, Henry. You’ll be leaving for college soon. After that, you won’t have to …”

  I turned away from her and nodded toward the boys. “What if I end up like them?”

  She settled her gaze on the playing field, watching and listening as the boys darted about and called to one another. From the look in her eyes I could tell that she did not think them so bad, the boys of Chatham School, nor even the lives they would later make. For she was already mature enough to sense that the wilder life I so ye
arned for might finally come to little, the road less traveled end in nothing more than the dull familiarity of having traveled it.

  But I lacked that same maturity, and so Sarah’s rebel spirit now seemed as dead as Mr. Reed’s and Miss Channing’s, the whole world mired in a vile dispiritedness and cowardice. “When you get right down to it, you’re just like them, Sarah,” I told her sneeringly, nodding toward the boys, my words meant to strike deep, leave her soul bleeding on the ground. “You’re a girl. That’s the only difference.”

  I might have said more, struck at her with an even greater arrogance and cruelty, but a loud crash suddenly stopped me. It was hard and metallic, and it had come from the lighthouse. Glancing toward it, I saw Miss Channing rush out its open door, a red scarf whipping behind her as she made her way across the lawn.

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “Miss Channing,” she whispered.

  Miss Channing reached the street, wheeled to the right, and headed down it, her stride long and rapid until she came to the coastal road. For a moment she stopped, briefly dropped her head into her hands, then lifted it again and whirled around, glaring toward the lighthouse for an instant before she turned away and rushed down the road toward town.

  It was then that we looked back toward the lighthouse. Mr. Reed stood in its still-open door, his head drooping forward as he leaned, exhausted, upon his cane.

  “Why don’t they just run away together?” I blurted out with a vehemence so deep the words seemed directed less to them than to me. “Why are people such cowards?”

  Sarah watched me softly, gently, the harsh words I’d just said to her already put aside. “They’re not cowards, Henry,” she told me firmly.

  “Then why don’t they just go ahead and do what they want to do and forget everything else?”