The Chatham School Affair (12 page)

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, then 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.

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.

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.