The Chatham School Affair (3 page)

My father kept his eyes on the road, of course, but I noticed that Miss Channing’s attention had turned toward the landscape of Cape Cod, its short, rounded hills sparsely clothed in tangles of brush and scrub oak, wind ripping through the sea grass that sprouted from the dunes.

“The Cape’s pretty, don’t you think, Miss Channing?” my father said cheerfully.

Her reply must have startled him.

“It looks tormented,” she said, staring out the window on the passenger side, her voice suddenly quite somber, as if it came from some darker part of her mind.

My father glanced toward her. “Tormented? What do you mean?”

“It reminds me of the islands of the Florida Keys,” she answered, her eyes still concentrated on the landscape. “The name the Spanish gave them.”

“What name was that?”

“Los Martires,” Miss Channing answered. “Because they looked so tormented by the wind and the sea.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” my father said. “But what does ‘Los Martires’ mean?”

Miss Channing continued to gaze out the window. “It means ‘the martyrs,’” she said, her eyes narrowing somewhat, as if she were no longer looking at the dunes and the sea grass beyond her window, but at the racked and bleeding body of some ancient tortured saint.

My father drew his attention back to the road. “Well, I’ve never thought of the Cape as looking like that,” he said. Then, to my surprise, I saw his eyes lift toward the rearview mirror, fix on mine. “Have you ever thought of the Cape like that, Henry?”

I glanced out the window at my right, toward a landscape that no longer seemed featureless and inert, but beaten and bedeviled, lashed by gusts of wind and surging waters. “Not until just now,” I said.

At about a mile beyond town we swung onto a stretch of road bordered on all sides by dense forest and covered with what had once been a layer of oyster shells, but which past generations of hooves and feet and wagon wheels had since ground into little more than a fine powder.

The woods had encroached so far into the road that I could hear the surrounding vegetation slap and scrape against the side of the car as we bumped along the road.

“It gets pretty deserted out this way,” my father said. He added nothing else as we continued in silence until the road forked, my father taking the one to the right, moving down it for perhaps a quarter mile, until it widened suddenly, then came to an abrupt dead end before a small white cottage.

“There it is,” my father said. “Milford Cottage.”

It was tiny compared to our house on Myrtle Street, so dwarfed by the surrounding forest that it appeared to
crouch fearfully within a fist of green, a dark stretch of water sweeping out behind it, still and lightless, its opaque depths unplumbed, like a great hole in the heart of things.

“That’s Black Pond,” my father said.

Miss Channing leaned forward slightly, peering at the cottage very intently through the downpour, like a painter considering a composition, calculating the light, deciding where to put the easel. It was an expression I would see many times during the coming year, intense and curious, a face that seemed to draw everything into it by its own strange gravity.

“It’s a simple place,” my father told her. “But quite nice. I hope you’ll at least find it cozy.”

“I’m sure I will,” she said. “Who lived here?”

“It was never actually lived in,” my father answered. “It was built as a honeymoon cottage by Mr. Milford for his bride.”

“But they never lived there?”

My father appeared reluctant to answer her but obligated to do so. “They were both killed on the way to it,” he said. “An automobile accident as they were coming back from Boston.”

Miss Channing’s face suddenly grew strangely animated, as if she were imagining an alternative story in her mind, the arrival of a young couple who never arrived, the joys of a night they never spent together, a morning after that was never theirs.

“It’s not luxurious, of course,” my father added quickly, determined, as he always was, to avoid disagreeable things, “but it’s certainly adequate.” His eyes rested upon Miss Channing for a moment before he drew them away abruptly, and almost guiltily, so that for a brief instant he looked rather like a man who’d been caught reading a forbidden book. “Well, let’s go inside,” he said.

With that, my father opened the door and stepped out into the rain. “Quickly now, Henry.” He motioned for
me to get Miss Channing’s valises and follow him into the cottage.

He was already at the front door, struggling with the key, his hair wet and stringy by the time I reached them. Miss Channing stood just behind him, waiting for him to open the door. As he worked the key, twisting it right and left, he appeared somewhat embarrassed that it wouldn’t turn, as if some element of his authority had been called into question. “Everything rusts in this sea air,” I heard him murmur. He jerked at the key again. It gave, and the cottage door swung open.

“There’s no electricity out this way,” my father explained as he stepped into the darkened cottage. “But the fireplace has been readied for winter, and there are quite a few kerosene lamps, so you’ll have plenty of light.” He walked to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out into the darkening air. “Just as I explained in my letter.” He released the curtain and turned back to her. “I take it that you’re accustomed to things being a little … primitive.”

“Yes, I am,” Miss Channing replied.

“Well, before we go, you should have a look around. I hope we didn’t forget anything.”

He walked over to one of the lamps and lit it. A yellow glow spread through the room, illuminating the newly scrubbed walls, the recently hung lace curtains, the plain wooden floor that had been so carefully swept, a stone fireplace cleared of ash.

“The kitchen’s been stocked already,” he told her. “So you’ve got plenty of lard, flour, sugar. All of the essentials.” He nodded toward the bedroom. “And the linens are in the wardrobe there.”

Miss Channing glanced toward the bedroom, her eyes settling upon the iron bedstead, the sheets stretched neatly over the narrow mattress, two quilts folded at the foot of the bed, a single pillow at its head.

“I know that things take getting used to, Miss Channing,”
my father said, “but I’m sure that in time you’ll be happy here.”

I knew well what my father meant by the word “happy,” the contentment it signified for him, a life of predictable events and limited range, pinched and uninspired, a pale offering to those deeper and more insistent longings that I know must have called to him from time to time.

But as to what Miss Charming considered happiness, that I could not have said. I knew only that a strange energy surrounded her, a vibrancy and engagement that was almost physical, and that whatever happiness she might later find in life would have to answer to it.

“I hope you’ll like Chatham as well,” my father said after a moment. “It’s quite a lovely little town.”

“I’m sure I will,” Miss Channing told him, though even as she said it, she might well have been comparing it to Rome or Vienna, the great cities she’d visited, the boulevards and spacious squares she’d strolled along, a wider world she’d long known but that I had only dreamed of.

“Well, we should be going now,” my father said. He nodded toward the two leather valises in my hands. “Put those down, Henry.”

I did as I was told, and joined my father at the door.

“Well, good night, then, Miss Channing,” he said as he opened it.

“Good night, Mr. Griswald,” she said. “And thank you for everything.”

Seconds later we were in the car again, backing onto Plymouth Road. Through the cords of rain that ran down the windshield as we pulled away, I could see Miss Channing standing at the threshold of the cottage, her face so quiet and luminous as she waved good-bye that I have often chosen to recall her as she was that first night rather than as she appeared at our last meeting, her hair clipped and matted, her skin lusterless, the air around her thick with a dank and deathly smell.

M
y father’s portrait hangs on the large woodpaneled wall opposite my desk and over the now-unused marble hearth, shelves of law books arrayed on either side. He is dressed in a black three-piece suit, the vest neatly buttoned, a formal style of dress common to portraiture at that time. But there is something unusual about the composition nonetheless. For although my father is dressed appropriately enough, he is not posed behind his desk or standing before a wall of books, but at a large window with dark red curtains held in place by gold sashes. Outside the window, it is clearly summer, but nothing in the landscape beyond the glass in the least resembles either Chatham or Cape Cod.

Instead, my father gazes out into a strange, limitless plain, covered in elephant grass and dotted with fire trees, a vast expanse that sweeps out in all directions until it finally dissolves into the watery reaches of a distant blue lake, his attention focused on something in the exotic distance, perhaps the farther shore of that same lake, an effect that gives his face a look of melancholy longing.

It is the tragic fate of goodness to lack the vast attraction of romance. Because of that, I have never been able
to see my father as a man capable of the slightest allure. And yet, for all that, he was a man in love, I think. Though with a school, rather than a woman. Chatham School was his great passion, and the years during which he served as its founder and headmaster, a guiding spirit to its boys, a counselor to its teachers, he’d felt more deeply than he ever would again that his life was truly whole.

I have looked at this portrait countless times, studying it as a way of studying my father, concentrating upon what lies mysteriously within it. Inevitably, I turn From it in a mood of vague frustration and uneasiness, my eyes drawn to the artist’s signature, her name written out in tiny broken letters:
Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing
.

The portrait was painted during the last days of that school year, my father standing at the window of his office, peering out, while Miss Channing remained stationed at her easel a few yards away, her body draped in a gray, paint-dabbled smock, her hair falling to her shoulders in a great unruly mass. By that April, she no longer looked as she had upon her arrival the previous August. The blush of youth was gone, a haggardness in its place, and glimpsing her alone in her classroom during those last days, or as she made her solitary way down the coastal road, I could see nothing left of the young woman who’d stood in the doorway of Milford Cottage only a few months before, waving good-bye as my father backed our car onto Plymouth Road.

I never knew precisely what Miss Channing did after my father and I drove away that evening, leaving her alone in the cottage. I have always imagined her opening the two valises and unpacking her things, putting her new hat on the narrow shelf at the top of the wardrobe, hanging her dresses on the wooden bar that ran nearly its entire length, tucking her undergarments in the drawers that rested at its base.

From the look of the cottage when I saw it again the next day, I know that she had found a nail already in
place and hung a portrait of her father, one taken years before in the courtyard of the Uffizi, the Florentine sun pouring over him, dressed stylishly in white trousers, a navy blue jacket, and a straw bowler, his fingers around the silver head of a polished wooden cane.

I also know that the randomly placed kerosene lamps must have cast heavy shadows throughout her new home, because I could tell from the positions I later saw them in that at some point during her first night in the cottage she arranged them in different places throughout the rooms, moving them here and there until, at last, a steady, even glow pervaded its shadowy interior, its darkened corners now brushed with light.

But more than anything, and with a certainty I cannot claim for other things, I know that toward midnight, when the rain finally stopped, she strolled out to the very edge of the pond, glanced over the water, and noticed a faint movement on its otherwise unmoving surface. It was then that a bank of clouds parted, a shaft of moonlight falling upon the water so that she could see the white prow of a rowboat as it skirted briefly along the far rim of light, then disappeared into the covering darkness. There was a figure in the boat, almost completely draped in a black poncho, as she later described it, so that she could make out only one small square of flesh, a hand, large and masculine, gripping a single moving oar.

I know all this absolutely, because she said as much on a sweltering summer day nearly a year later, the crowd shifting frantically to get a better view of her, craning their necks and lifting their heads, muttering grimly as they did so, talking of death and suicide and murder, their eyes following with a macabre fascination as she moved across the room and took her seat upon the witness stand.

In later life, after I’d returned to Chatham and begun my legal practice, I had only to glance out my office window
to see the name of the man who’d cross-examined Miss Channing on that August afternoon in 1927. For in those days, Mr. Parsons’ office had been located just across the street from where I now have mine, and which his son, Albert Parsons, Jr., still occupies, a lawyer who specializes in personal injury litigation and contract disputes, rather than the prosecution of criminal cases for which his father was renowned throughout the state.

The younger Parsons’ shingle swings above the same little rectangle of grass where his father’s once swung, and which I must have seen quite clearly on the very day my father picked up Miss Channing at the bus stop, our old Ford sweeping past it as we drove to our house on Myrtle Street, my father at the wheel, Miss Channing in the passenger seat, I crowded in the backseat with her luggage, so young and inexperienced, so lost to the iron laws of life that even had they been presented to me, I would have denied their right to hold me down. Certainly, I could not have known how often I would glance at Mr. Parsons’ shingle in the coming years, hear his voice thunder out of the past:
It was you, Miss Channing, you and you alone who brought about this death
.