I pulled in next to it and stopped. Through my windshield I could see the gallery a few yards away, its red brick portico little changed since the days when the building had housed the boys of Chatham School.
Other things had been altered, of course. The tall, rattling windows had been replaced by sturdy double paned glass, and a wide metal ramp now glided up the far right side of the cement stairs, granting access to the handicapped.
But more than any of these obvious changes, I noticed that a tall plaster replica of the lighthouse had been placed on the front lawn in almost exactly the spot where Miss Channing’s column of faces had briefly stood, my own face near the center of the column, my father’s near the bottom, where a circular bed of tulips had been planted.
On the day the school’s governing board ordered it battered down, my father had stood with his arms folded over his chest, listening to the ring of the hammer as it shattered the plaster faces one by one. Standing rigidly with his back to the small group of people who’d come to observe its destruction, clothed in his neatly pressed black suit, he’d watched it all silently and with complete dignity. It was only after it had been done, the faces gathered in a dusty pile, that he’d glanced back toward me, his head cocked at an angle that allowed the morning sun to touch his face, its brief glimmer caught in the tears of his eyes.
The cement walkway to the gallery had been replaced by a more attractive cobblestone, but the path itself was still as straight and narrow as before.
At the door, a small cardboard sign read simply WELCOME, so I opened the door and walked inside, entering what had once been Chatham School for the first time in all the many years that had passed since its closing.
From the foyer I could see the wide central corridor that had led from the front of the school all the way to the rear courtyard, the stairs that rose toward the second floor dormitory, and even the door of what had once been my father’s office, its brass knob reflecting the newly installed halogen lights.
Beside the front window there was a little table filled with information about the various exhibitors represented in the gallery. I reached for the one nearest me and moved down the corridor, more or less pretending to read it, acting quite unnecessarily like some secret agent who’d been sent from the past to bring back news from the present, inform the ghostly legions as to how it had turned out.
I’d gotten only a little way down the corridor before I was intercepted.
“Well, Mr. Griswald. Hello.”
I recognized the man who greeted me as Bill Kipling, the gallery’s owner, and whose grandfather, Joe Kipling, had once played lacrosse for Chatham School. Joe had been a lanky, energetic boy, later a town selectman and real estate baron, more recently an old man who’d swallowed handfuls of vitamins and food supplements before he’d finally died of liver cancer in a private hospital room in Hyannis.
“Well, what made you decide to drop by after all this time?” the younger Kipling asked cheerily.
“Just thinking about old times, I guess. When Chatham School was here.”
“My grandfather went to Chatham School, you know.”
“Yes, I remember him.”
And saying that, I saw Joe Kipling not as a boy rushing forward with a lacrosse stick raised in the air, but as he’d stood beside the gray column, a sledgehammer in his hand, swinging it fiercely at the plaster faces Miss Channing had fashioned, a layer of dust gathering upon the shoulders of his school jacket.
“My father loved Chatham School,” his grandson told me now.
“We all did.”
Some few minutes of small talk followed, then he left me to browse through the gallery undisturbed, knowing that I had not really come to see the pictures he’d hung from its walls, but to hear the shouts and laughter of the boys as they’d tumbled chaotically down the wide staircase at seven-thirty sharp, some fully dressed, others still looping their suspenders over their shoulders or pulling on their jackets, but always under the watchful eye of my father. For each morning he’d taken up his position at the bottom of the stairs, his arms folded over his chest like a Roman centurion, greeting each boy by name, then adding a quick “Work well, play well.” I could still remember how embarrassed I’d felt at such a scene each morning, the boys rushing by, trying so hard to please, to be what my father wanted them to be, sturdy, upright “good citizens.” At those times he’d appeared almost comical to me, a caricature of the Victorian schoolmaster, an artifact from that dead time, bloodless as a bone dug out of an ancient pit. Of all the mired and passionless things I did not wish to be, my father was chief among them. As for the “good life” about which he sometimes spoke, standing before the boys in his Ciceronian pose, it struck me as little more than a life lived without vitality or imagination, a life hardly worth living, and from which death could come only as a sweet release.
His office had faced the staircase, and its great mahogany door was still in place. Stepping up to it, I could almost hear him uttering the ominous words I’d overheard as I’d swept down the stairs that faced his office on that drizzly afternoon in May of 1927. The door had still been fully open when I’d begun to make my way from the upper landing, but he’d begun to close it, his attention so focused on the people already inside his office that he hadn’t seen me descending the stairs. “This is Mr. Parsons, the commonwealth attorney,” I’d heard him say as he stepped farther into his office, slowly drawing the door behind him.
I’d been able to glance inside the office and see a man in a dark suit, a homburg held in his hand. He stood in front of my father’s desk, a large cardboard box in the chair beside him. “Please sit down, Miss Channing,” I heard him say.
Through the narrowing space that remained open as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I could see Miss Channing standing stiffly before Mr. Parsons, her hands folded together at her waist, her hair in a tight bun. As the door closed, I heard her reply to him, her words spoken softly, but in a tone that struck me as deathly cold. “I prefer to stand,” she said.
The door to what had formerly been my father’s office now had a little sign tacked to it, one that read “Private,” so I could not go in. I stood, facing it, remembering that a completely different sign had once been there, one that had read “Arthur H. Griswald, Headmaster.”
My father had removed that sign himself, placed it in a shoe box, and kept it in the cellar of the little house we rented after leaving Chatham School. But it was not very difficult for me to imagine that it was still in place, and that beyond the door his desk was still there too, along with the crystal inkwell my mother had given him on their tenth anniversary, the ceremonial quill pen he’d used to sign important documents, even the brass lamp with the dark green shade that had given the room an indisputable authority.
