next remark.
“When my father died, I went to live with my uncle and his family in Africa,” she said finally. “He had a mission near a village where the natives lived in wooden huts. It was just a clearing in the plain. The people who lived in the village did all their cooking in their huts, and there was no way for the smoke to get out except through a small hole in the roof. When they came out of their huts in the morning, a sheet of smoke trailed behind them.” Her eyes lifted toward us, and I saw them take on a certain wonder and delight. It was as if in telling stories, she could find a voice to teach in, a way of reaching us. “Like wings that dissolved in the light,” she said.
“That’s where I learned to paint.” She was kneading the clay more quickly now, in short, quick thrusts. “In Africa.” She stopped suddenly and settled her eyes upon us. I could tell that a thought had just occurred to her, that in the very course of talking to us she’d discovered something. “That’s where I learned that to be a painter or a sculptor, you have to change your senses,” she said. “Switch them around, so that you
I didn’t see Miss Channing again until much later that same day. The last class had been dismissed for nearly an hour, and I was busily doing my assigned tasks around the school.
Under my father’s leadership, it was the policy of Chatham School to combine academics with physical labor, and so from the time of his arrival, each boy was assigned various chores. Some of the boys swept the classrooms and the dormitory, some washed the sheets and blankets, some worked on the grounds, pruning shrubbery or mowing grass or maintaining the playing fields. In the winter everyone shoveled snow or took turns unloading coal.
On that particular afternoon it was my job to return any books that lay on the library tables to their proper shelves, carefully keeping them in order according to the Dewey decimal system Mrs. Cartwright, the school librarian, had established. After that I was to dust the bookshelves with the old feather duster my mother had donated to the school after buying a new one at Mayflower’s a month before.
It was nearly four by the time I’d finished. Mrs. Cartwright surveyed the now-empty tables and ran a finger over the top of one of the bookshelves. “Very good, Henry,” she said when she found it clear of dust. With that statement of satisfaction I was released for the remainder of the afternoon.
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?”
