The Chatham School Affair

“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.

More than anything, A View from the Window is a day-to-day record of the years Miss Channing lived and traveled with her father, a period during which they’d never actually had a fixed abode of any and, nor any permanent attachments, save for each other. The purpose of such a rootless life, Mr. Channing’s purpose in insisting upon it, is revealed in the opening paragraphs of his narrative:After my wife’s death, to stay in Boston seemed doom to me. I walked about our house on Marlborough Street, gazing at the many luxuries she had acquired over the years, the velvet curtains, the Tiffany lamp, and a host of other appendages that, like Julia, were elegant in their way, but for which I could no longer feel any enduring affection. And so I decided to move on, to live in the world at large, to acquaint my daughter Libby with its most spacious and inaccessible climes.As to my reasoning in this matter, I have never hidden it, nor wished to hide it. I chose to educate my daughter as I saw fit. And with what purpose in mind? For none other than that she should live a life freed from the constrictive influence of any particular village or nation, nor ever be bound by the false constraints of custom, ideology, or blood.

And yet, despite its grandly stated purpose, A View from the Window remained essentially a travelogue, though one that detailed not only sights and sounds and historical backgrounds, but the life Miss Channing and her father had lived as together they’d roamed the world.

It had been a vagabond life, the book made clear, a life lived continually in transit, with nothing to give it direction save for Mr. Channing’s furious determination to teach his daughter his own unique philosophy of life, relentlessly driving it home by escorting young Libby, as he called her, to bizarre and tragic sites, locations he’d selected for the lessons he planned to teach.

Reading that philosophy on the bluff that afternoon, I felt myself utterly swept away by a view of life so different from my father’s, from the governing assumptions of Chatham and of Chatham School, from any way of seeing things I’d ever encountered before, that I felt as if I’d suddenly entered a new galaxy, where, according to Mr. Channing, there should be “no rules for the rule of life,” nor any hindrance whatsoever to a man’s unbridled passions.

It was a world directly opposite to the one I’d been taught to revere, everything reversed or turned topsy-turvy. Self-control became a form of slavery, vows and contracts mere contrivances to subdue the spirit, the moral law no more absolute than a passing fad. More than anything, it was a world in which even the darkest evils were given a strange and somber dignity:We took a boat from Sorrento, and disembarked a short time later at Marina Grande, on the eastern coast of Capri. The town was festive and welcoming, and Libby took great delight in its scents and in the winding labyrinth of its streets, skipping playfully ahead of me from time to time. She seemed captivated by the nearly tropical lushness of the place, particularly with the luxuriousness of its vegetation, forever plucking leaves and petals from the shrubs and flowers we encountered on the way.But I had brought her to Capri for more than an afternoon’s lark. Nor was it the quaint village byways and varied plant life I had brought her here to see. Mine was another purpose, as well as another destination, one I could but indistinctly glimpse from the town’s narrow pathways.And so we journeyed upward and upward for over an hour, baked in a nearly blinding summer heat, through the spectacular flowered hedges that lined both sides of the earthen walkway. The smell of flowers was everywhere, as were the sounds of small lizards, dozens of