The Chatham School Affair

“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.

CHAPTER 6

In 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.”