The Chatham School Affair (4 page)

In those days Albert Parsons held the office of commonwealth attorney. A short, stocky man with wire-rimmed glasses, I often saw him making his way along the wooden sidewalk to his office, puffing his briar pipe and doffing his gray homburg to passersby. He’d appeared perfectly self-assured back then, confident in his own abilities, a man who expected to live out his life in a world whose rides were clear to him, a paradise, as he must have considered Chatham, poised on the rim of heaven.

I remember seeing Mr. Parsons in old age, when he would sit on the wooden bench in front of the town hall, tossing broken pieces of soda cracker to the pigeons gathered at his feet, his eyes watching them with a curious lack of focus. But before that, in the first years of his retirement, he’d built a workroom in his backyard, furnished
it with metal bookshelves, a wooden desk, a brass reading lamp, and an old black typewriter. It was there that he’d written his account of the Chatham School Affair, utterly convinced that he had unearthed the darkest of its secrets.

Down through the years I’ve often thought of him, the pride he took in having discovered the cause of so much death, then the way he later strode the streets of Chatham, boldly, proudly, as if he were now the exclusive guardian of its health, Miss Channing no more than a dark malignancy he’d successfully cut out.

It was a Saturday, clear and sunny, the last one before school was scheduled to begin, when I next saw Miss Channing.

My rather had already left for Osterville, as my mother told me that morning, but he’d left instructions for me to look in on Milford Cottage, see if Miss Channing needed anything, then run whatever errands she required.

Milford Cottage was almost two miles from the center of Chatham, so it took me quite some time to walk there. I arrived at around ten, knocked lightly at the door, and waited for Miss Channing to open it. When there was no answer, I knocked again, this time more loudly. There was still no answer, so I rapped against the door a third time.

That’s when I saw her. Not as I’d expected, a figure inside the cottage, or poised beside its open door, but strolling toward me from the edge of the woods, no longer dressed formally as she’d been before, but in a pale blue summer dress, billowy and loose-fitting, her black hair falling in a wild tangle to her shoulders.

She didn’t see me at first, and so continued to walk in the woods, edging around trees and shrubs, her eyes trained on the ground, as if following the trail of something or someone who’d approached the cottage from
the surrounding forest, lingered a moment, then retreated back into its concealing depths. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, plucked a leaf from a shrub, lifted it to the sun, and turned it slowly in a narrow shaft of light, staring at it with a kind of childlike awe.

When she finally glanced away from the leaf and saw me, I could tell she was surprised to find me at her door.

“Good morning, Miss Channing,” I called.

She smiled and began to walk toward me, the hem of her skirt trailing lightly over the still-moist ground.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.

She appeared amused by such a notion. “Scare me? You didn’t scare me, Henry. Why would you think that?”

I shrugged, finding her gaze so penetrating that I began to sputter. “Anyway, my father sent me to make sure that everything is all right. Particularly with the cottage. He wanted to know if anything else needed fixing. The roof, I mean. How it held up. Against the rain, that is. Leaks.”

“No, everything’s fine,” Miss Channing said, watching me intently, as if memorizing my features, carefully noting their smallest dips and curves, the set of my jaw, the shape of my eyes.

It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of being exposed, my skin peeled away layer by layer, revealing what lay beneath, the bony tower, the circuitry of arteries and veins, the resentment I so carefully suppressed. I felt my hand toy with the button at my throat.

“Well, is there anything else you need?” I asked, still mindful of my father’s instructions, but eager now to get away. “I mean, between now and Monday, when school starts?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“All right, then,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you at school on Monday.”

With that, I nodded good-bye and started back toward
the road, ambling slowly, not wanting to give an impression of flight.

I was halfway down the path that led from her door to the road when I heard her call to me.

“Are you walking back to the village, Henry?”

I stopped and turned toward her. “Yes,” I said.

“Would you mind if I came along with you? I haven’t really seen it yet.”

I didn’t relish the idea of being seen with a teacher outside a classroom setting. “It’s a long way into town, Miss Channing,” I said, hoping to dissuade her.

She was undeterred. “I’m used to long walks.”

Clearly, there was no way out. “All right,” I said with an unenthusiastic shrug.

She came forward, quickening her pace slightly until she reached my side.

Sometime later, after I’d read her father’s book and realized all the exotic places he’d taken her during the years they’d traveled together, it would strike me as very strange mat she’d wanted to go into the village at all that morning. Certainly, given the breadth of her experience, Chatham could only have seemed quaint. And yet her curiosity seemed real, her need to explore our small streets and shops not in the least diminished by the fact that she’d strolled the narrow alleyways of Naples and the plazas of Madrid, her father at her side relating gruesome stories of Torquemada’s Inquisition and the visions of Juana the Mad in that same tone of ominousness and impending death that later fathers would use as they led their children along the banks of Black Pond, grimly spinning out a tale whose dreadful course they thought had ended there.

I
have always wondered if, during that first walk down Plymouth Road with Miss Channing, I should have noticed some hint of that interior darkness Mr. Parsons later claimed to have unearthed in her. Often, I’ve tried to see what he saw in his first interrogation of her, the “eeriness” he described in his memoir, the sense that she had “delved in black arts.”

She carefully kept pace with me that morning, a breeze playing lightly in her hair, her conversation generally related to the plant life we saw around us. She asked the names of the trees and flowers that bordered the road, often very common ones like beach plum or Queen Anne’s lace.

“I guess you had different plants in Africa,” I said.

“Yes, very different,” she said. “Of course, it wasn’t at all the sort of place people think of when they think of Africa. It wasn’t a jungle, or anything like that. It was a plain, mostly grasslands. With a river running through it, and animals everywhere.” She smiled. “It was like living in the middle of an enormous zoo.”

“Did you like living there?”

“I suppose,” she answered. “But I really didn’t live there long. Only a few months after my father died.
With my uncle and his family.” She stopped and peered out into the surrounding forest. “It must have looked like this when the first explorers came.”

I could hardly have cared less about anything so distant. “Why did you leave Africa?” I asked.

She drew her attention back to me. “I needed a job. My uncle went to school with your father. He wrote to him, hoping he might know of a position. Your father offered me one at Chatham School.”

“What do you teach?”

“Art.”

“We’ve never had an art teacher,” I told her. “You’ll be the first one.”

She started to speak, then glanced toward the ground at the white dust that had begun to settle on her feet and shoes.

“It comes from the oyster shells,” I told her, merely as a point of information. “That white dust, I mean.”

She turned toward me sharply. “Oyster shells?”

“Yes. That’s what they used to put on the roads around here.”

She nodded silently, then walked on, suddenly preoccupied, my first hint of the strange life she’d lived before coming to Chatham, how deeply it had formed her. “That’s what they killed Hypatia with,” she said.

She saw the question in my eyes, and immediately answered it. “She was the last of the pagan astronomers. A Christian mob murdered her.” Her eyes drifted toward the road. “They scraped her to death with oyster shells.”

I could tell by the look on her face that she was seeing the slaughter of Hypatia at the instant she described it, the mocking crowd in its frenzy, Hypatia sinking to the ground, bits of her flesh scooped from her body and tossed into the air.

“There was nothing left of her when it was over,” she said. “No face. No body. Torn to bits.”

It was then I should have glimpsed it, I suppose, the
fact that she had lived in many worlds, that they now lived in her, strange and kaleidoscopic, her mind a play of scenes. Some quite beautiful—Mont Saint Michel like a great ship run aground in dense fog. Others hung in death and betrayal—the harbor in which the last weary remnants of the Children’s Crusade had trudged onto waiting ships, then disappeared into the desert wastes of Arab slavery.

But at the time I could only react to what Miss Channing had just told me. And so I grimaced, pretending a delicacy I didn’t actually feel, knowing all the while that some part of her story had intrigued me.

“How do you know about Hypatia?” I asked.

“My father told me about her,” Miss Channing answered.

She said nothing more about her father, but merely began to move forward again, so that we walked on in silence for a time, the sound of our feet padding softly over the powdered shells as the wind rustled through the forest that bore in upon us from both sides.

When we reached the outskirts of Chatham, Miss Channing stopped for a moment and peered down the gently curving road that led from the center of the village to the lighthouse on the bluff. “It looks very … American,” she said.

I’d never heard anyone say anything quite so odd, and I suppose that it was at that moment I knew that something truly different had entered my life.

Of course, I kept that early intimation to myself, and so merely watched silently as she stood at the threshold of our village. From there she would have been able to see all the way down Main Street, from the Congregationalist Church, where the bus had let her off the day of her arrival, to the courthouse, where she would later come to trial, hear the shouts of the crowd outside:
Murderess. Murderess
. If she’d looked closely enough, concentrating
on the small details, she might even have seen the wooden bench where, years later, Mr. Parsons would sit alone in the afternoon, thinking of his memoir, convinced that he had plumbed the black depths of her heart.

I left Miss Channing on the outskirts of town, then walked up the hill that ran along the edge of the coastal bluff. At the top, I turned onto Myrtle Street, passing Chatham School as I made my way home.

By then some of the boys had begun to arrive. I could see them lugging their trunks and traveling cases down the long concrete walkway that led to the front of the building. From there I knew they would drag them up the stairs to the dormitory, then empty their contents into the old footlockers that rested at the end of each bed.

Many of the boys have blurred with time, but I can remember Ben Calder, who would later run a large manufacturing enterprise, and Ted Spencer, destined for the New York Stock Exchange, and Larry Bishop, who would go on to West Point and die leading his men toward the shores of Okinawa.

In general, they were from good families, and most of them were good boys who’d merely exhibited a bit of rude behavior their parents sought to correct by placing them at Chatham School. They were reasonably bright, at least adequately studious, and for the most part they later followed the route that had been prepared for them all along, taking up acceptable professions or running either their own businesses or those first established by their fathers or grandfathers. They did not seek a grandly romantic life, nor anticipate one. They had no particular talents, except, perhaps, for that peculiar one that enables us to persevere—often for a lifetime—in things that do not particularly interest us and for which we feel little genuine passion. In later life, after leaving Chatham
School, they would do what had always been expected of them, marry, support themselves, have children of their own. I thought them dull and uninspired, while my father saw them as inestimably dutiful and fine.

I was sitting in the swing on our front porch when my father returned from Osterville at around five that afternoon. Coming up the stairs, he spotted me slouched languidly before him, my legs flung over the wooden arm of the swing, a posture he clearly didn’t care for.

“So there wasn’t much to do at Milford Cottage, I take it?” he asked doubtfully.

“No, there wasn’t,” I told him.

“The roof didn’t leak?”

“No.”

“You asked Miss Channing that directly?”

“Yes, sir. I told her you were concerned about it. She said it was fine.”

He nodded, still looking at me in that questioning way of his. “Well, did you do anything at all for Miss Channing?”

“I walked her into town. That’s all she wanted me to do.”

He thought a moment, then said, “Well, get in the car, Henry. I want to make sure she’s got everything she needs.”

Had I not gone with my father to Milford Cottage that afternoon, I might never have seen what Miss Channing later captured in her portrait of him, the look on his face as he peered through the red curtains, his eyes fixed on the exotic blue lake that so clearly beckoned to him with an unmistakable sensuousness, but toward which he would not go.

The cottage looked deserted when my father brought the car to a halt in front of it. The front door was securely closed, no lamp yet lighted, despite the fact that it was late afternoon by then, the sun already setting.

“Maybe she’s still in the village,” I said as my father and I lingered in the car.

“Could be,” my father said. He stared at the cottage a moment longer, perhaps trying to decide whether to knock at the door or simply return to Chatham, content that he had at least done his duty in dropping by.