The Chatham School Affair

I knew that a whole world had once held its ground in that small room, made what amounted to its last stand. How fully all of that had been visible in my father’s face the day he’d marched onto the front lawn of the school, then instructed Joe Kipling to take his place before Miss Channing’s carved column of faces. He’d paused a moment, his gaze lingering on the column, then turned to Joe and given the order with a single word: Begin.

I felt my eyes close against the awesome spectacle of that moment, the sound of the hammer as it slammed into the column, the severe and unsmiling faces of the people who watched as Joe Kipling pounded it into dust.

I turned away from the door. On either side, large rooms were filled with paintings of more or less modern design, the paint splattered upon the canvas or lathered over it in chaotic swirls, fragments of color pressed jaggedly one against another. I could only imagine how their disharmony would have offended my father, how much he would have preferred the idyllic scenes and passive landscapes he’d scrupulously selected for these same corridors during his tenure as headmaster, works governed by order and design, harmony and the laws of reason, a vision of life he’d striven to maintain at Chatham School … and failed.

Toward the rear of the corridor I stepped into the room that had once been Mr. Reed’s. Able to accommodate no more than ten or twelve student desks, its large windows looked out into the courtyard. Through them he had been able to see the little converted storeroom where Miss Channing taught. How often he must have glanced out those windows and caught her in his eyes, a slender young woman with raven black hair and light blue eyes, standing behind a sculpting pedestal or before an easel, spinning stories of fabled lands and tragic people while she worked with paint and clay. Although I never saw it happen, I’m sure that from time to time Miss Channing must have glanced toward her own window and caught Mr. Reed watching her from across the courtyard, at first through veils of autumn rain, then through swirls of windblown snow, and finally through the shimmering air of that final spring, their eyes now locked in a dreadful stare, a look as desperate and harrowing as the words I’d heard them speak: How do you want to do it? Without looking back.

?    ?    ?

I didn’t remain in Mr. Reed’s classroom for very long. For I could feel a heat and sharpness in the air, as if it had begun to sizzle.

And so I turned and fled to the courtyard where the outbuilding that had once been Miss Channing’s classroom still stood, though it had long been converted into the gallery’s framing shop.

The door was open, and standing at its threshold I could see the wide counter that ran along the rear of the building, stacks of empty frames leaning against the wall behind it. Frame samples of various colors and materials —brass, wood, aluminum—hung from a large square of pressed board. To the right, where I’d once sat at the front of the room, a work space had been created, complete with a large table and circular saw. A layer of sawdust and wood chips coated the floor beneath the table, and a bright red metal toolbox rested alongside.

Clearly, of the several places I visited that day, it was Miss Channing’s room that had been most transformed. No trace remained of the tables and chairs where the boys had sat watching her sculpt and paint, nor of the sculpting pedestals and easels and canvases we’d used to fashion our own crude works of art; nor the cabinet where she’d returned the room’s modest supplies before joining Mr. Reed for their drive home each afternoon; nor even the portraits of Washington and Lincoln that had watched us from the room’s opposite walls, their faces stern but kindly, like two old-fashioned fathers.

And yet, for all that, I sensed Miss Channing’s presence more within that transformed and cluttered space than in any of the other places I’d revisited. And I could feel Mr. Reed as well, the two of them together as I had found them on that long-ago afternoon, she behind the front table, he at the far door, moving toward her irrevocably, his words spoken so softly that I’d barely been able to hear them: Because I love you, I can do it.

It was more than I could bear. And so I wheeled around and walked back through the courtyard and down the central corridor of the building, then swiftly out of it, like someone in flight from a surging fire.

At last I came to a halt at the little cement bench where Sarah and I had sat together years before, the lighthouse behind us, the school in front. In my mind I saw Miss Channing and Mr. Reed walk once again to the car beneath the oak, Mr. Reed open the door, Miss Channing slip inside, the car begin to move, turning out of the parking lot and onto Myrtle Street, finally drifting by me as it had that day so many years before, Miss Channing staring straight ahead, so silent and so still, with nothing but a dark strand of loosened hair to leave its mark upon her face.

I returned to my office, sat down at my desk, my eyes involuntarily drifting over to the archive my father had long ago assembled, perhaps as something to remind him of his tall, though without in the least knowing that it had been mine as well.

I rose and walked to the file cabinet beneath my father’s portrait. Glancing up at it, I heard his voice in old age, hung with the bleakness of his final years, perhaps even the deepest of its disappointments: So there’ll never be a wife, Henry? Never a child? My answer as stark as it had always been: No.

I turned away from the portrait, opened the cabinet, and pulled out the forms I would need to begin my work for Clement Boggs, already considering what the last phase of that work would inevitably require, the cruel lyrics of a dreadful song playing in my mind as I made my way back to my desk:Alice Craddock

Locked in a paddock

Where’s your daddy gone?

PART 3

CHAPTER 12

During the final years of his life, with my mother gone, and few means of passing the idle hours, my father took to walking through the countryside. I was a middle-aged bachelor by then, with little to engage me but my legal practice. And so I often accompanied him on his rambles, the two of us first driving to a particular spot, then setting off into the woods. Usually we went to Nickerson State Park, where the trails were easiest. But from time to time we would wander into some more remote area, park the car along the road, then follow a less well-defined path around a nearby hill or up a gently angled slope.

Most of these walks were routine affairs, my father talking quietly about whatever he’d read most recently, a book or magazine article that had briefly held his attention. The past, particularly his years at Chatham School, seemed nearly to have disappeared from his consciousness altogether.

Then, one afternoon only a year before his death, we found ourselves on a hilltop outside Chatham, the spires and roofs of the village in the distance, and down below, like a dark, sightless eye, the unruffled waters of Black Pond.

He remained silent for a time, but I could see that he was struggling to say something, release some pronouncement he’d long kept inside. It was a struggle that surprised me. For except for those times when my mother had insisted upon bringing up the subject, my father had seemed more than satisfied to let all thought of the Chatham School Affair sink unmourned into oblivion.

“So much death, Henry,” he said finally. “Down there on Black Pond. So much destruction.”