The Chatham School Affair

I glanced into the vacant bedroom, to where a little wooden bookshelf had once rested beside her bed. I could remember the books I’d seen collected there, the words of her father’s heroes bound in dark vellum: Byron, Shelley, Keats.

A gust of wind slammed against the cottage, rattling what remained of its few dusty windowpanes. I saw a bare limb rake across the glass, a bony finger motioning me outside. And so I nodded silently, like someone agreeing to be led into another chamber, then walked to the back of the cottage, out the rear door, and across the yard to the water’s edge.

The great willow still rose above the pond, the one Miss Channing had so often painted, its long, brown tendrils drooping toward the surface of the water. I wondered how many times during her first weeks in Chatham she’d stood beneath it, remembering the poems her father had so often read to her, sometimes in the very places where they’d been written, odes to nightingales and Grecian urns, pleasure domes and crystal seas, women who walk in beauty like the night. But there’d been other things as well, other titles on the shelf beside her bed, the speculations of Mesmer, the visions of Madame Blavatsky, the gruesome ravings of de Sade.

All of that, I thought, standing now where she had stood, my eyes fixed upon the motionless surface of Black Pond, All of that was in her mind. Then I looked out across the pond, and heard a voice, cold, lean, mouthing its grim question: Do you want them dead?

I was there when she saw him for the first time. Or, at least, I think I was. Of course, she’d already glimpsed him with the other teachers or disappearing into a classroom down the hall. But I don’t think she’d actually seen him before, that is, picked him out from among the others, noticed something that distinguished him and drew her attention toward him more intently.

It was toward the middle of October, near the end of Miss Channing’s first month at Chatham School. She was standing behind a sculptor’s pedestal, as she often did, though this time there was no mound of clay. We were only to imagine it there, she said, shape it only in our minds.

“When you imagine the muscles, you have to feel their power,” she told us. “You have to feel what is beneath the figure you’re working with. What is inside it.” She picked up a large book she’d previously placed on her desk and turned it toward us, already open to the page she’d selected to illustrate her point.

“This is a picture of Rodin’s Balzac.” She began to walk along the side of the room, the book still open, pressing the picture toward us. “You can’t see Balzac’s body,” she added. “He’s completely covered in a long, flowing cape.”

She continued to move along the edge of the room, the boys now shifting in their seats to keep her in view. “But if you opened the cape,” Miss Channing went on, “you’d see this.” With a purposely swift gesture, she turned the page, and there before us, in full view, was a monstrously fat and bulging Balzac, immense and naked, his belly drooping hugely toward his feet.

“This figure is actually under the cape,” she said. “Rodin added the cape only after he’d sculpted the body beneath it. The actual body of Balzac.”

She closed the book and for a moment stared at us silently. Then she lifted her hands and wriggled her fingers. “You must imagine what’s beneath the skin of the figure you’re working on. Feel the muscles stretch and contract.” She swept her hands back until they came to a halt at the sides of her face. “Even the smallest muscles are important, like the tiny ones that open and close your eyes.”

We stared at her in shocked silence, stunned by the naked figure she’d just displayed to us, but awed by it as well.

“Remember all that when you start to work on your figures in class tomorrow,” Miss Channing said just as the bell sounded our dismissal.

It was her last class of the day, and I remember thinking that her first month of teaching at Chatham School had gone quite well. Even my father had commented upon it, mentioning to my mother over dinner one evening that Miss Channing had “gotten a grip on things right away,” that teaching seemed to “fit her nature.”

I was already at the door that afternoon, the other boys rushing by, when I turned back and saw her alone, standing behind her sculpting pedestal. It seemed the perfect time to approach her.

“Miss Channing,” I said, coming toward her slowly.

She looked up. “Yes, Henry?”

I took her father’s book from my bag and held it out to her. “I thought it was great,” I said. “I’ve read it quite a few times. Even copied things out of it. I thought he was right about everything. About ‘living on the run.’”

She did not take the book, and I felt certain that she could sense the life I craved, how much I needed to bound over the walls of Chatham School, race into the open spaces, live on the edge of folly. For a moment she seemed to be evaluating me, asking herself if I had the will to see it through, possessed the naked ruthlessness such freedom might require.

“It isn’t easy to live the way my father did,” she said, her blue eyes focused powerfully. “Most people can’t do it.”

“But everything else … the way people do live …” I stammered. “I don’t want to live like my father does. I don’t want to be like him … a fool.”

She didn’t seem in the least shocked by my ruthless evaluation of my father. “How do you want to be, Henry?”

“Open to things. To new things.”

She watched me a moment longer, and I could see that she was thinking of me in a way that no one else ever had, not merely as the boy I was, but as the man I might someday be. “I’ve been noticing your drawing,” she said. “It’s really quite good, you know.”

I knew no such thing. “It is?”

“There’s a lot of feeling in it.”

I knew how strangely twisted my drawings were, how wreathed in a vampire blackness, but it had never occurred to me that such characteristics added up to “feeling,” that they might spring from something deep within me.