The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  The first snows did not arrive until the last of the village Christmas decorations had been pulled down and returned to their boxes in the basement of the town hall. By February, when the snows were deepest and the sky hung in a perpetual gloom of low-slung clouds, the building that had once housed Chatham School had been converted into a small dressmaking factory, its second floor stacked with bolts of cloth and boxes of thread and buttons, the sound of sewing machines humming continually from its lower rooms.

  But in other ways, things went back to normal, and there seemed to be little thought of Miss Channing, with only quick glimpses of Mary Reed sitting between Dr. and Mrs. Craddock at Quilty’s or building a snowman on her front lawn to remind me of her fate.

  And so the years passed as they always do, faster than we can grasp where we have been or may be going to. New buildings replaced older ones. Streets were paved, new lights hung. And high above the sea, the great bluff crumbled in that slow, nearly undetectable way that our bodies crumble before time, and our dreams before reality, and the life we sought before the one we found.

  Then, in December of the final year of Miss Channing’s imprisonment, when I was home for the Christmas break of my freshman year in Princeton, a letter came, addressed to my father, in an envelope sent from Hardwick Women’s Prison, and which he later slipped into the little brown folder that became his archive of the Chatham School Affair.

  The letter read:

  Dear Mr. Griswald:

  I write concerning one of my prisoners, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, and in order to inform you that she has fallen ill. Her file lists neither relatives nor friends who, under such circumstances, should be contacted. However, in conversations with Miss Channing, I have often heard mention of your name, of her time in, I take it, your employ, and I wonder if you could provide me with the names and addresses of any relatives or other close associates who should be informed of her condition.

  Best regards,

  Mortimer Bly

  Warden, Hardwick Women’s Prison

  My father replied immediately, sending the name and address of Miss Channing’s uncle in British East Africa. But he did more than that as well, did it with an open heart and against the firmly stated wishes of my mother, who seemed both shocked and appalled by the words he said to her that same night over dinner: I’ve decided to look in on Miss Channing, and take Henry with me.

  Four days later, on a cold, rainy Saturday, my father and I arrived at the prison in which Miss Channing had been kept for the last three years. We were greeted by Warden Bly, a small, owlish man, but whose courtly manner seemed almost aristocratic. He assured us that Miss Channing was slated to be taken to the prison hospital as soon as a bed was available, and thanked us for coming. “I’m sure it will brighten her spirits,” he said.

  After that, my father and I were directed into the heart of the prison, walking down a long corridor, the bars rising on either side, our ears attuned to the low murmur of the women who lived behind them, dressed in gray frocks, smelly and unkempt, their bare feet padding softly across the concrete floor as they shuffled forward to stare at us, their faces pressed against the bars, their eyes following us with what seemed an absolute and irreparable brokenness.

  “She’s at the back, all by herself,” the guard said, the keys on the metal ring jangling as he pulled it from his belt. “She ain’t one for mixing.”

  We continued to walk alongside him, our senses helplessly drawn toward the cells that flowed past us on either side, the dank odor that emanated from them, the faces that peered at us from behind the steel bars, women in their wreckage.

  Finally, we reached the end of the corridor. There the guard turned to the left and stopped, his body briefly blocking our view into the cell. While we waited, he inserted the key, gave it a quick turn, and swung open the door. “In here, gentlemen,” he said, waving broadly. “Step lively.”

  With that, he drew away, and my father and I saw her for the first time since the trial, so much smaller than I remembered her, a figure sitting on the narrow mattress of an iron bed, her long hair now cut short, but still blacker than the shadows that surrounded her, her pale eyes staring out from those same shadows like two small blue lights.

  “Miss Channing,” I heard my father murmur.

  Standing together, silent and aghast, we saw her rise and come toward us, her body shifting beneath the gray prison dress, her hand reaching out first to my father, then to me, cold when he took it, no warmer when I let

  “How good of you to come, Mr. Griswald,” she said, her voice low and unexpectedly tender, her eyes still piercingly direct, yet oddly sunken now, as if pressed inward by the dungeon’s leaden air. “And you, Henry,” she said as she settled them upon me.

  “I’m so sorry I never came before,” my father told her, expressing what I recognized as a true regret.

  For an instant she glanced away, a gray light sweeping over her face, revealing the purple swell of her lips, the weedy lines that had begun to gather at her eyes. “I had no wish to trouble you,” she said as she turned back to us.

  My father smiled delicately. “You were never a trouble to me, Miss Channing,” he said.

  She nodded softly, then said, “And how are things at Chatham School?”

  My father shot me a pointed look. “Just fine,” he said quickly. “Quite back to normal, as you can imagine. We think we may beat New Bedford come next spring. Several of the new boys are very good at the game.”

  I watched her silently as my father went on, noting the ragged cut of her hair, oily and unwashed, a nest of damp black straw, remembering how she’d looked at Chatham School and laboring to make myself believe that there was some part of her fate that she deserved.

  For the next few minutes they continued to talk together, and at no time did my father let slip the true state of our affairs, or of what had happened to Chatham School. Instead, he spoke of things that had long passed, a school that had once existed, a marriage for a time not frozen in a block of ice, villagers who never whispered of his poor judgment from places safe behind his back.

  Finally, we heard a watchman call out to us, and rose to leave her.

  “It was good seeing you, Miss Channing,” I said as lightly as I could.

  “You too, Henry,” she replied.

  My father draped his arm over my shoulder. “Henry won a scholarship to Princeton, you know. All he does is study now.”

  She looked at me as if nothing had changed since our first meeting. “Be a good man, Henry,” she told me.

  “I will try, Miss Channing,” I said. Though I knew that it was already too late for so high a word as goodness ever to distinguish me.

  She nodded, then turned to my father. “I so regret, Mr. Griswald, that you and the school were ever brought into my—”

  My father lifted his hand to silence her. “You did nothing wrong, Miss Channing. I have never doubted that.”

  “Still, I regret that—”

  In an act whose unexpected courage has never left my mind, my father suddenly stepped forward and gathered her gently into his arms. “My dear, dear child,” he said.

  Standing beside them, I saw Miss Channing draw him closer and closer, holding him very tightly, and for what seemed a long time, until, at last, she let him go.

  “Thank you, Mr. Griswald,” she said as she released him and stepped away.

  “We will come again,” my father told her. “I promise you that.”

  “Thank you,” Miss Channing said.

  We stepped out of her cell, my father quickly moving away from it and back down the corridor, while I remained, my eyes fixed upon her as she retreated to the rear of her cell, to the place where we had found her. For a time she stared at her hands, then her eyes lifted and she saw me lingering in the corridor. “Go, Henry,” she said. “Please.”

  I wanted to do exactly that, even felt the impulse to rush down the corridor as my father had, unable to bear a moment longer the tragedy before me
. But I found that for the briefest instant I couldn’t draw my eyes away from her, and as she turned away, I saw her once again as she’d first appeared, so beautiful as she’d stared out at the landscape of Cape Cod, pronounced it a world of stricken martyrs. It was then I felt something break in me, a little wall that had held through all my nightmarish dreams of Sarah and Mrs. Reed, of women floating in dark water. I thought of the rash and terrible thing I’d done and knew that I would never be able to trust myself again. And so the only answer seemed never to get close to anyone, to hold books as my sole companions, accept a bloodless, unimpassioned life, revere the law’s steadfast clarity against the lethal chaos of the heart.

  I was silent for a long time after that, silent as I turned from her cell, silent as I walked down the corridor to where my father waited, hollow-eyed, before the iron door, silent as we drove back to Chatham, a clear night sky above us.

  “What is it, Henry?” my father asked finally as we crossed the bridge from the mainland, the old car rumbling over the wooden trellis.

  I shook my head. “You can never take anything back,” I said, feeling for the first time the full call of confession, wanting to let it go, to tell him what had really happened on Black Pond.

  He looked at me worriedly, his eyes filled with a father’s care. “What do you mean, Henry?”

  I shrugged, closing myself off again, retreating, as Miss Channing had, into the shadowy darkness of my own cell.

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  And I never told him more.

  I’m sure that my father fully intended to visit Miss Channing again, despite the objections my mother had already voiced. But he still had the remainder of the school year to contend with, and so it was not until summer that he began to mention making such a visit.

  I had returned home from college by then, taken a summer job as a clerk in a law office in Chatham, its cordial atmosphere a pleasant respite from the mood at home, the way my mother and father forever bickered over small matters, while leaving the great one that had long ago divided them buried deep inside.

  And so I was once again in Chatham when another letter arrived suddenly from Hardwick Prison, addressed to my father, just as the first one had been, but this time bearing graver news.

  My father read it in the small room he’d turned into a cluttered study, sitting in one of the great chairs that had once been in the parlor of our house on Myrtle Street and which seemed to fill up the entire room.

  “Here, Henry,” he said, lifting it toward me after he’d read it.

  I took the letter from him and read it while standing beside his chair. It had been written by Warden Bly, and it informed us in language that was decidedly matter-of-fact that following a short recovery, Miss Channing had fallen ill again, that she had finally been transferred to the prison clinic, then to a local hospital, where, two days after her admittance, she had died. Her body was currently being housed in the local morgue, Warden Bly said, and he wished instructions as to what should be done with it.

  I will always remember how curiously exhausted my father looked after reading this letter, how his hands sank down into his lap, his shoulders slumped. “Poor child,” he murmured, then rose and went to his room, where he remained alone throughout that long afternoon.

  The next day he telegraphed Miss Channing’s uncle, informing him of his niece’s death and requesting instructions as to the disposition of her body. Two days later, Edward Channing replied with a telegram requesting my father to make whatever arrangements he deemed necessary, and to forward him “a bill for all expenses incurred in the burial of my unfortunate niece.”

  Miss Channing was buried in the little cemetery on Brewster Road four days later. Her plain wooden coffin was drawn by four uniformed guards from a prison hearse and carried on their shoulders to her grave.

  “Would you be wanting us to hang about?” one asked my father, no doubt noticing that no one else had come to, as he put it, “see her off.”

  “No,” my father answered. “You didn’t know her. But thank you for asking.”

  With that, the guards left, the prison wagon sputtering along the far edge of the cemetery, past the grove with its cement pond, then disappearing down Brewster Road.

  My father opened the old black Bible he’d brought with him, and while I stood silently at his side, read a few verses from the Song of Songs, Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

  “We’ll need to send her things back to her uncle,” he said when he’d finished and we’d begun to make our way out of the cemetery.

  My father had gotten permission to store Miss Channing’s things at Milford Cottage, fully expecting that she would one day return to Chatham to reclaim them. When we walked into its front room, we found most everything still in place, the table by the window, the red cushions on the chairs.

  Everything else had been packed away. We found three boxes stacked neatly in Miss Channing’s bedroom, along with the two leather valises she’d brought with her from Africa. Only the black dress she’d worn on the day she’d taken the stand hung inside the large wooden armoire. My father took it out, opened one of the boxes, and placed it inside. Then he turned and looked at me, his face suddenly very grave. “Someone should know the truth, Henry,” he said. “If I died suddenly, no one would.”

  I said nothing, but only stood before him, a grim apprehensiveness settling upon me.

  “The truth about Miss Channing,” he added. “About what really happened.”

  I felt my heart stop. “On Black Pond?” I asked, trying to keep the dread out of my voice.

  He shook his head. “No. Before that. In the lighthouse.” He lowered himself onto the bed, paused a moment, then looked up. “You remember when I came here the day of the … accident?”

  I nodded.

  “And Miss Channing and I went into the cottage alone to have a private talk?”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering how he’d stood by the mantel, Miss Channing in a chair, her eyes lifted toward him.

  “That’s when she told me, Henry,” my father said. “The truth.”

  Then he told me what she’d said.

  She had not wanted to go to the lighthouse that afternoon, Miss Channing told my father, had not wanted to meet Mr. Reed, be alone with him again. For it seemed to her that each time they were together, something unraveled inside of him. Still, he’d asked her to meet him one last time, asked her in letter after letter during that last month, until she’d finally agreed to do it.

  He was standing against the far wall of the lighthouse when she entered it, his back pressed into its softly rounded curve, the old brown jacket draped over his shoulders, his black hair tossed and unruly.

  “Elizabeth,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you.”

  She closed the metal door behind her but did not move toward him. “I’ve missed you too, Leland,” she said, though careful to keep a distance in her voice.

  He smiled delicately, in that way she’d noticed the first time she’d seen him, a frail, uneasy smile. “It feels strange to be alone with you again.”

  She remembered the few times they’d been alone in the way he meant, with his arms around her, his breath on her neck, the warmth of his skin next to hers.

  “You haven’t forgotten, have you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No,” she admitted.

  He drew himself from the wall, staring at her silently. The chamber’s single light glowed faintly from behind a cage of wire mesh, throwing a gray crosshatch of shadows over his face. “How has it been for you, Elizabeth? Being away from me?”

  She looked at him sadly, mournfully, knowing that she would never allow herself to be taken into his arms again. “We have to go on, Leland,” she said.

  “Go on to what?” he asked. “To nothing?” He seemed on the verge of sweeping toward her.

  “I can’t stay long,” she told him quickly, then glanced out the small square window of the door, the playing field beyond it,
the boys of Chatham School scurrying about in a game of touch football.

  “Is it so hard to be with me now?” he asked, an edginess in his voice.

  She shook her head wearily, now regretting that she’d come at all. “Leland, there’s no point in this. The only answer is for me to leave.”

  “And what will I do then, Elizabeth?”

  “What you did before.”

  His eyes darkened, as if she had insulted him. “No. Never. I can never go back to the life I used to live.” He began to pace back and forth, his cane tapping sharply on the cement floor. “I can never do that, Elizabeth.” He stopped, his eyes now glaring at her. “Do you want to just throw me away? Is that what you want?”

  She felt a sudden surge of anger toward herself, the fact that she had ever let him love her as he did, or loved him in return, ever pretended that they lived in a world where no one else lived, where no other hearts could be broken.

  “We can go away, Elizabeth,” he said. “We can do what I always planned for us to do.”

  The very suggestion returned her to her own childhood, to a father with grand notions of freedom he never followed out of love for her, how bereft she would have felt, how worthless and unloved, had he been taken from her by any force less irresistible than death. “You know I won’t do that,” she said. “Or let you do it.”

  He stepped toward her, opening his arms. “Elizabeth, please.”

  She lifted her hand, warning him away. “I have to go, Leland.”

  “No, don’t. Not yet.”

  She looked at him imploringly. “Leland, please. Let me leave, still loving you.”

  He stepped forward again, closing the space between them, staring at her needfully, but now with a terrible cruelty in his eyes. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met you,” he told her. “Sometimes I wish that you were dead.”