The Chatham School Affair (11 page)

We headed down Myrtle Street together the following Sunday morning, Sarah walking beside me, a basket of freshly baked cookies hanging from one arm, her offering to Miss Channing.

At the bluff we swung to the left, passed beneath the immense shadow of the lighthouse, then down the curving road that led into the village.

“What if Miss Channing says no,” Sarah asked. “What if she won’t teach me?”

“I don’t think she’ll say no, Sarah,” I said, though I know that part of me hoped that she would, wanted Sarah to be refused so that she would have to consider the other choice I’d already suggested, far bolder, as it seemed to me, edged in that frenzied sense of escape whose attractions had begun to overwhelm me.

“But what if she doesn’t want to?”

I answered with a determination that was new to me, an icy ruthlessness already in my voice. “Then we’ll find another way.”

This appeared to satisfy her. She smiled brightly and took my arm with her free hand.

Still, by the time we’d turned onto Plymouth Road, her fear had taken root again. She walked more slowly, her feet treading very softly over the bed of oyster shells, as if it were an expensive carpet and she did not want to mar it with her prints.

“I hope I look all right, then,” she said as we neared Miss Channing’s cottage.

She’d dressed as formally as she knew how, in what looked like her own schoolgirl version of the Chatham School uniform. Her skirt was long and dark, her blouse an immaculate white. She’d tied a black bow at her throat and pinned a small cameo to her chest, one that had belonged to her mother, her sole inheritance, she told me.

It was not a look I admired, and even as I gazed at her, I imagined her quite differently, dressed like Ramona in
The Gypsy Band
, bare-shouldered, with large hoop earrings, a lethal glint in her eye, a knife clutched between her teeth as she danced around the raging campfire. It was as adolescent a fantasy as any I had ever had, and yet it was also tinged with a darkness that was very old, a sense of woman as most lusty and desirable when poised at the edge of murder.

∗ ∗ ∗

At Milford Cottage Sarah glanced down at her skirt and frowned. “There’s dust all over the hem.” She bent forward and brushed at the bottom of her skirt. “Sticks like glue,” she said, finally giving up. Then she lifted her head determinedly and I felt her hand tighten around my arm. “All right,” she said. “I’m ready.”

We walked down the little walkway that led to the door of the cottage. Without a pause Sarah knocked gently, glanced at me with a bright, nervous smile, and waited.

When no one answered, she looked at me quizzically.

“Try again,” I said. “It’s early. She must be here.”

Sarah did as I told her, but still there was no answer.

I remembered the occasion several weeks before, when I’d come to the cottage at nearly the same time, found it empty, as it now appeared to be, Miss Channing strolling along the edge of the forest.

“Sometimes she takes a walk in the morning,” I told Sarah confidently, although I could not be sure of any such thing. “Let’s look around.”

We stepped away from the door, walked to the far side of the cottage, then around it to the rear yard, toward the pond. A heavy morning mist still hung over the water, its lingering cloud rolling out over the edges of the land, covering it in fog.

For a moment Sarah and I stood, facing the pond, the impenetrable mist that drifted out from it covering the small area behind the cottage.

Nothing moved, or seemed to move, neither the air, nor the mist that cloaked the water, nor anything around us, until suddenly I saw a figure drift slowly toward us, the thick gray fog thinning steadily as she came nearer so that she appeared to rise toward us smoothly, like a corpse floating up from a pool of clouded water.

“Miss Channing,” Sarah said.

Miss Channing smiled slightly. “I was out by the
pond,” she said. “I thought I heard someone at the door.” Dimly I could see the easel she’d set up at the water’s edge, a large pad of drawing paper already in place upon it, all of it still shrouded in curling wisps of gray cloud.

“This is Sarah Doyle,” I told her. “You may remember her from when you had dinner at our house the night you first came to Chatham.”

Sarah lifted the basket toward her. “I brought you some cookies, Miss Channing,” she said nervously. “I baked them special for you. As payment, ma’am.”

“Payment?” Miss Channing asked. “For what?”

For an instant, Sarah hesitated, and I could see that she believed her entire future to be at stake at that moment in her life, all her limitless prospects to be placed in someone else’s hands.

“For teaching me to read,” she said boldly, eyes on Miss Channing’s face. “If you’d be willing to do it, ma’am.”

Miss Channing did not pause a beat in her response. “Of course I will,” she said, and stepped forward to take the basket from Sarah’s trembling hand.

An hour later they were still at it. From my place at the edge of the water I could see Miss Channing sitting at a small table she’d brought from the cottage and placed beneath the willow tree. Sarah sat opposite her, a writing pad before her, along with a sheet of paper upon which Miss Channing had written the alphabet in large block letters.

I heard Miss Channing say, “All right. Begin.”

Sarah kept her eyes fixed upon Miss Channing’s, careful not to let them stray toward the page as she began. “A, B, C…”

She continued through the alphabet, stumbling here and there, pausing until Miss Channing finally provided
the missing letter, then rushing on gleefully until she reached the end.

“Good,” Miss Channing said quietly. “Now. Once more.”

Again Sarah made her way through the alphabet, this time stopping only once, at U, then plunging ahead rapidly, completing it in a flourish of pride and breathlessness.

When she’d gotten to the end of it, Miss Channing offered her an encouraging smile. “Very good,” she said. “You’re a very bright girl, Sarah.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said, a broad smile lighting her face.

They continued their work until almost noon, when I heard Miss Channing say, “Well, I think we had a very good lesson, Sarah.”

Sarah rose, then did a small curtsy, a servant girl once again, taking leave of her superior. “Thank you, Miss Channing.” Her earlier nervousness had now completely returned. “Do you think we could have another lesson sometime, then?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes, of course we could,” Miss Channing told her. “Actually, we should have a lesson once a week. Would Sunday mornings be all right?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Sarah burst out, a great relief and happiness sweeping over her. “You can depend on it, Miss Channing. I’ll be here every Sunday morning from this day on.”

“Good,” Miss Channing said. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She turned to me. I could see that something was on her mind. “You didn’t bring a sketchbook with you, Henry,” she said.

I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t …”

“You should have it with you all the time,” Miss Channing told me. She smiled, then said a line I later repeated to Mr. Parsons. “Art is like love. It’s all or nothing.

With that she quickly walked into the cottage, then returned, this time with a sketchbook in her hand.

“Take one of mine,” she said as she handed it to me. “I have a few left from my time in Africa.”

I looked at the book, the soft burgundy cover, the clean, thick paper that rested beneath it. Nothing had ever looked more beautiful to me. I felt as if she’d passed me a golden locket or a strand of her hair.

“Now, don’t let me see you without a sketchbook ever again, Henry,” she said with a mocking sternness.

I tucked the book beneath my arm. “I won’t,” I told her.

She gazed at me a moment, then nodded toward the table and chairs. “Would you mind taking all this back into the cottage?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

I grasped one chair in each hand and headed for the cottage. On the way I heard Sarah say, “So you were painting this morning, were you?” And Miss Channing’s reply, “Yes. I often do in the morning.”

Inside the cottage I placed the chairs at the wooden table in the kitchen. Through the rear window I could see Miss Channing and Sarah as they strolled toward the easel that still stood at the water’s edge, the pages of the drawing book fluttering slightly in a breeze from off the pond. Miss Channing had opened the drawing book and was showing one of her sketches to Sarah. Sarah had folded her hands before her in the way Miss Channing often did, and was listening attentively to her every word.

After a while I turned and walked back into the small living room at the front of the cottage. The picture of Miss Channing’s father still hung in the same place. But since that time, several sketches had been added to the wall, carefully wrought line drawings that she had brought out of Africa and which portrayed vast, uncluttered vistas, borderless and uncharted, devoid of both animals and people, the land and sky stretching out into
a nearly featureless infinity. This, I knew, was her father’s world, unlimited and unrestrained.

I stared at her drawings a few seconds longer, then walked outside again, retrieved the table, placed it just inside the cottage door, and made my way over to where Miss Channing and Sarah still stood at the edge of the pond.

“I like that one,” Sarah said brightly, her eyes on one of the drawings Miss Channing had just displayed.

“It’s not finished yet,” Miss Channing told her. “I was working on it this morning.”

I peered at the drawing. It showed a body of water that only faintly resembled Black Pond. For it was much larger, as well as being surrounded by a world of empty hills and valleys that appeared to roll on forever. So much so, that the mood of the drawing, its immensity and sense of vast, unbounded space struck me as very similar to the ones I’d just seen inside the cottage. But there was something different about it too. For near the center of the drawing, hovering near the middle of a huge, unmoving water, Miss Channing had drawn a man at the oars of a small boat. His face was caught in a shaft of light, his eyes locked on the farther shore.

Sarah leaned forward, looking closely at the figure in the boat. “That man there, isn’t that—”

“Leland Reed,” Miss Channing said, the first time I’d ever heard her say his name.

Sarah smiled. “Yes, Mr. Reed. From Chatham School.”

Miss Channing let her eyes settle upon the painting. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, a gesture which, months later, after I’d described it to Mr. Parsons, he forever called “a lover’s sigh.”

I
was still thinking of Miss Channing’s drawing a few minutes later when I brought my car to a halt in front of Dalmatian’s Cafe. It had long been my favorite place in Chatham, not only because it had been the place where the boys of Chatham School had sometimes gathered after a game or on the weekends, but because it had pretty much remained unchanged from that now-distant time. The grill and counter were still in the same place; so were the booths by the window. Even the old rusty plow blade that Mrs. Winthrop, the cafe’s first owner, claimed her great-grandfather had used to break ground on their family farm in 1754 still hung on the back wall, though now hemmed in by bright neon signs hawking beer and soft drinks.

I took my usual seat in the booth farthest from the door, the one that nestled in a corner by the window, and from which I could look out and watch the village’s activities. And without warning I saw Dr. Craddock pull up in front of our Myrtle Street house just as he had on that night so long ago, driving the sleek black sedan in which he paid house calls in the twenties, saw him as he walked through the rain to where my father stood gloomily on the porch. The doctor had been dressed in a
black suit, and had taken off his hat as he came up the stairs, his question delivered almost like a plea.
I’m sorry to trouble you, Arthur, but could we talk about the little girl?

And as I sat there hearing the doctor’s voice, time reversed itself, old buildings replacing more recent ones, the blue pavement of Main Street suddenly buried beneath a stretch of earth marked by both wooden wagon wheels and the narrow rubber tread of clanging Model A’s.

Far in the distance I saw an old iron bell materialize out of the motionless air of the long-empty bell tower of what had once been Chatham School, then begin to move, as if it had been pushed by an invisible hand, its implacable toll reverberating over the buildings and playing fields of Chatham School summoning us to our classes in the morning, and releasing us from them in the afternoon, ringing matins and vespers with an authority and sense of purpose that had little diminished from the time of monks and kings.

And then, as if from some high aerie where I sat perched above them, I saw the boys pour out of the great wooden doors at the front of the school, sweep down its wide cement stairs, and fan out into the surrounding streets, myself among them, the gray school jacket now draped over my shoulders, its little shield embroidered on the front pocket, along with the single phrase,
Veritas et Virtus
, truth and virtue, the words my father had long ago selected as the motto of Chatham School.

It was a Friday afternoon in late November, around three weeks after I’d taken Sarah to Miss Channing’s cottage for her first reading lesson. By then Sarah and I had become somewhat closer, she no longer simply a servant girl, I no longer simply the son of her master. Her yearning to make something of herself fired my own emerging vision of living an artist’s life, a life lived “on the run,” as Jonathan Channing had called it, and whose vast ambitions Sarah’s own great hope seemed to mirror in some way.

We were on our way to the lighthouse that afternoon, Sarah in a cheerful mood, strolling almost gaily over a carpet of red and yellow leaves, Sarah with a new purse she’d bought at a village shop, I with my sketchbook tucked firmly beneath my arm.

“I just want you to look at them before I show them to Miss Channing,” I told her as we strode across the street, then onto the broad yard that swept out from the whitewashed base of the lighthouse. “And if they’re bad, Sarah, I want you to tell me so. I don’t want Miss Channing to see them if they’re bad.”