The Chatham School Affair (6 page)

I remember the feeling of relief that swept over me each time I ran down the stairs, bolted through the broad double doors of Chatham School, and raced out into the open air. I don’t know why I felt the weight of Chatham School so heavily, or so yearned to be rid of it, for it was by no means a prison, my father by no means a tyrant. And yet, in my raw youth, the days seemed to drag along
behind me like a ball and chain. Every stricture burned like a lash, and sometimes, at night, I would feel as if my whole life lay smothered beneath a thick blanket of petty obligations and worn-out rules.

Miss Channing’s class had offered a certain relief from that musty atmosphere, so that even on that first afternoon I found that I looked forward to the next one in a way that I’d never looked forward to Mr. Crawford’s Latin lectures or the interminable recitations of Mrs. Dillard’s history class. There’d been a freshness to her approach, a sense of something less hindered by the ancient forms of instruction, something young, as I was young, already free in a way I one day hoped to be.

As I came out of the school, already vaguely considering a quick stroll into the village, perhaps even a secret cigarette behind the bowling alley, I saw Miss Channing sitting on one of the wooden benches that rested near the edge of the coastal bluff. Normally it would not have occurred to me to approach a teacher outside of class, but she already seemed less a teacher to me than a comrade of some sort, both of us momentarily stranded at Chatham School, but equally destined to go beyond it someday.

She didn’t appear surprised when I drifted past her, took hold of the rail that stretched along the edge of the bluff, and stared out to sea, my back to her, pretending that I hadn’t noticed her sitting directly behind me.

“Hello, Henry,” she said.

I turned toward her. “Oh, Miss Channing,” I said. “I didn’t see—”

“It’s a marvelous view, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

I glanced back over the bluff. Below, the sea was empty, but a few people strolled along the beach or lounged beneath striped umbrellas. I tried to see the view through her eyes. From behind me, I heard her say, “It reminds me of the Lido.”

“The Lido?”

“A beach near Venice,” she said. “It was always filled with striped umbrellas. The changing rooms were painted with the same stripes. Yellow. Bright yellow.” She shook her head. “Actually, it doesn’t remind me of the Lido at all,” she said, her voice a shade lower, as if now talking to me in confidence. “It’s just that I was thinking of it when you came up.”

“Why?” I asked, no other question occurring to me.

“Because my father died on the Lido,” Miss Channing said. “That’s what I was really thinking of just now.”

In later life we forget what it was like, the sweetness and exhilaration of being spoken to for the first time as something other than a child. And yet that was what I felt at that moment, sweetness and exhilaration, a sense that some part of my boyhood had been peeled away and cast aside, the man beneath allowed to take his first uneasy breaths.

“I’m sorry,” I said, immediately using a phrase I’d heard so many times on similar occasions.

Her expression did not change. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, really. He lived a good life.”

I could see the love she’d had for him and wondered what it was like to have had a father you admired.

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He was a writer. A travel writer.”

“And you traveled with him?”

“From the time I was four years old. That was when my mother died. After that we traveled all the time.”

As if my father had suddenly assumed my shape, I asked a question that seemed more his than mine. “What about school?”

“My father was my school,” Miss Channing answered. “He taught me everything.” She rose and joined me at the rail, the two of us now looking out over the beach below. “He believed in going his own way.” She paused a moment, a line coming to her, one I later read in her father’s book, and which she now repeated to me.

“An artist should follow only his passions,” she said. “All else is a noose around his neck.”

Now, when I recall that line, the calm with which she said it, I feel its dreadful premonition, and in my mind see an old car hurling down a weedy, overgrown embankment, a figure turning at the water’s edge, eyes wide, aghast, uncomprehending. And after that, forever after that, the long, unfading echo of her scream.

I
n the years following Miss Channing’s trial, my father assembled a small collection of materials concerning the Chatham School Affair, one he bequeathed to me at his death, and which I’ve been unable to discard. I’ve given other things away—my mother’s knitting needles, my father’s quill pen, stacks of books to the village library. But my father’s collection has remained intact, tucked into the bottom corner of the bookshelf in my office, all but hidden by the floor lamp that stands in front of it. It is a slender archive, especially given the events it summons up. Madness and suicide and murder, the forlorn world left in their wake. And yet there are times when my attention lingers on it with a curious nostalgia. For I know that it holds the defining moment of my youth.

It consists of nothing more than a folder containing a single copy of the Chatham School Annual for 1927, a few newspaper clippings and photographs. There is even one of Sarah Doyle, though it was unintended. In the picture she is rushing down the little walkway beside the school. Her back is to the camera, and snow is falling all around her, gathering on her long, dark cape, while the boys in the yard—the real focus of the picture—playfully
heave packed snowballs at each other, my father on the front steps of the school, arms folded over his chest, looking on with mock disapproval.

To these few things my father added three books, two of them directly related to what happened on Black Pond, one considerably less so.

The first is Mr. Parsons’ memoir, the work he quickly put together and had privately published just after the trial. As a book, it leaves a great deal to be desired. In fact, it is little more than an assortment of quotations from the trial transcript awkwardly strung together by Mr. Parsons’ own rather tedious narrative.

The second volume is more detailed. Titled
A Mortal Flaw
, it was written by one Wilfred M. Peyton, a professor of moral philosophy at Oberlin College. Scarcely a hundred pages long, it is essentially an extended essay published in 1929 by a small religious press, and hampered not only by Professor Peyton’s harsh, sermonizing tone, but by the way he singled out Miss Channing as the true villain in what he insists on calling—over and over again, like words from a warlock’s chant—“The Black Pond Murders.” Such was his rage against Miss Channing that whenever he spoke of her, it was with an Old Testament prophet’s infuriated rebuke. “To her father, she was ‘Libby,’” he wrote in a typical passage, “for by such endearment did he call her in her youth. But to the ages she should be more rightly known as Elizabeth, a cold and formal name that must be included among those of other women like herself: Delilah, Salome, and Jezebel.”

Of the three volumes of my father’s archive, Professor Peyton’s was the only one he clearly hated. So much so that he scribbled angry notes throughout its text, sometimes disputing a small, inconsequential fact (noting, for example, that the school library had three thousand books, not the mere two thousand attributed by Peyton), sometimes quarreling with an interpretation, but always
seeking to undermine the book’s authority to those who might later read it.

The reason my father so detested Professor Peyton’s book is obvious. For it was not only an attack upon Miss Channing, but upon Chatham School itself, as an “indulgent, coddling retreat for wealthy, dissolute boys.” Indeed, at the end of the book Professor Peyton flatly concluded that “the unspeakable outrage which occurred on the otherwise tranquil surface of Black Pond on 29 May 1927 was emblematic of the moral relativism and contempt for established authority that has emerged in educational theory during the last two decades, and of which Chatham School is only the most odious example.” It never surprised me, of course, that this was a passage my father had underlined in black ink, then appended his own heartrending cry of “NO! NO! NO!”

But for all its bluster and moral posturing, for all the pain it caused my father,
A Mortal Flaw
was, at last, a completely dismissible book, one which, after I read it, I never found the slightest need to pick up again.

I can’t say the same for the final volume in my father’s collection, however. For it was a book I have returned to many times, as if looking for some answer to what happened on Black Pond that day, perhaps even for what might have prevented it, some way to sedate our hearts, make them satisfied with less.

The third book is entitled
A View from the Window
, and on the back of the book’s cover there is a photograph of its author, Jonathan Channing, a tall, somber man in his late forties, staring at the camera from the courtyard of the Louvre.

“You can take it if you want,” Miss Channing said the day she lent it to me.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, the first week of class now ended. My father had sent me to Miss Channing’s classroom with a box of art books he’d picked up at a Boston bookstore the day before. Always somewhat impulsive, he’d been eager to get Miss Channing’s opinion
of them before turning them over to Mrs. Cartwright in the library on Monday morning.

She’d been standing at the cabinet, putting away her supplies, when I came through the door.

“My father wanted you to take a look at these.” I lifted the box slightly. “Art books.”

She closed the door of the cabinet and walked to her desk. “Let’s see them,” she said.

I brought them to her, then watched while she looked through each book in turn, slowly turning the pages, pausing to gaze at the paintings she found reproduced there, sometimes mentioning the name of the gallery in which a painting now hung. “This is in Florence,” she’d say, or “I saw this at the Prado.” She turned the book toward me. “This one always frightened me. What do you think, Henry?”

I looked at the painting. It showed a little girl with stringy blond hair, crouched before an enormous tree, its jagged limbs stretching to both sides of the canvas, the gnarled limbs hung with surreal images of floating heads and body parts, the colors livid, greens the color of bile, reds the color of fresh blood. Staring at the tree, the child appeared frozen by the terror and immensity of what she faced.

“Have you ever felt like her?” Miss Channing asked me quietly, her gaze fixed on the illustration, rife with its malicious and chaotic gore.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Miss Channing.” Which was true then, though it is no longer so.

She turned the book back around, leafing through it once again, until she came upon a photograph of the courtyard at the Louvre. “There’s a picture of my father standing here,” she told me. “They used it for his book.”

“His book?”

“Yes,” Miss Channing said. “He was a travel writer. He wrote a great many articles, but only one book.”

Out of mere politeness I said, “I’d like to read it sometime.”

She took this as a genuine expression of interest, opened the drawer of her desk, and drew out a single volume. “This is it,” she said as she handed it to me. “The picture I mentioned is on the back.”

I turned the book over and looked at the photograph. It showed a tall, slender man, handsome in a roguish sort of way, dressed in dark trousers and a white dinner jacket, his hair slicked back in the fashion of the time, but with a wilder touch added in the form of a single black curl that fell just over the corner of his right eye.

“I was ten years old when that picture was taken,” Miss Channing said. “We’d just gotten back from a visit to Rouen. My father was interested in the cathedral there.”

“Was he religious?”

“Not at all,” she said with a smile I found intriguing.

I lifted the book toward her, but she made no move to reclaim it.

“You can take it if you want,” she said.

I had not really wanted to read her father’s book, but I took it with me anyway, reluctantly, unable to find an acceptable way to refuse it.

As it turned out, I read it that same afternoon, sitting alone on the coastal bluff, the other boys of Chatham School either engaged in a game of football on the playing field or gathered outside Quilty’s Ice Cream Parlor in the village.

In earlier years I’d tried to be one of them. I’d joined them in their games, even participated in the general mischief, playing pranks on teachers or making up nicknames for them. But in the end it hadn’t worked. For I was still the headmaster’s son, a position that made it impossible for them to accept me as just another boy at Chatham School, one with whom they could be as vulgar and irreverent as they pleased, calling my father “Old Grizzlewald,” as I knew they often did.

Though never exactly ostracized, I’d finally turned bookish and aloof, a boy who could often be found reading in the porch swing or at the edge of the playing field, a “scholarly lad” as my father sometimes called me, though in a tone that never struck me as entirely complimentary.

Recalling the boy I was in those days, so solitary and isolated, I’ve sometimes thought myself one of the victims of the Chatham School Affair, my life no less deeply wounded by the crime that rocked Black Pond. Then, as if to bring me back to what really happened there, my mind returns me to a little girl on a windy beach. She is running against the wind, an old kite whipping left and right behind her. Finally it lifts and she watches it joylessly, her eyes wreathed in that forsakenness that would never leave them after that. Remembering how she looked at that moment in her life, I instantly recognize who Black Pond’s victims truly were, and in that captured moment perceive the terror I escaped, the full depth of a loss that was never mine.

I learned a great deal about Miss Channing the afternoon I read her father’s book. I learned about her father too: the fact that he’d been born into a privileged Massachusetts family, educated at Harvard College, and worked as a journalist in Boston during the years following his graduation. At twenty-three he’d married the former Julia Mason Rockbridge, also from a distinguished New England family. The two had taken up residence on Marlborough Street, near Boston Common, and in 1904 had a daughter, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing. After that Mr. Channing continued to work for the
Boston Globe
, while his wife performed the usual functions of an upper-class woman of that time. Then, in the fall of 1908, Julia Channing fell ill. She lingered for some weeks, but finally died in January 1909, leaving four-year-old Elizabeth entirely to her father’s care.