The Chatham School Affair (7 page)

More than anything,
A View from the Window
is a day-to-day record of the years Miss Channing lived and traveled with her father, a period during which they’d never actually had a fixed abode of any and, nor any permanent attachments, save for each other. The purpose of such a rootless life, Mr. Channing’s purpose in insisting upon it, is revealed in the opening paragraphs of his narrative:

After my wife’s death, to stay in Boston seemed doom to me. I walked about our house on Marlborough Street, gazing at the many luxuries she had acquired over the years, the velvet curtains, the Tiffany lamp, and a host of other appendages that, like Julia, were elegant in their way, but for which I could no longer feel any enduring affection. And so I decided to move on, to live in the world at large, to acquaint my daughter Libby with its most spacious and inaccessible climes
.

As to my reasoning in this matter, I have never hidden it, nor wished to hide it. I chose to educate my daughter as I saw fit. And with what purpose in mind? For none other than that she should live a life freed from the constrictive influence of any particular village or nation, nor ever be bound by the false constraints of custom, ideology, or blood
.

And yet, despite its grandly stated purpose,
A View from the Window
remained essentially a travelogue, though one that detailed not only sights and sounds and historical backgrounds, but the life Miss Channing and her father had lived as together they’d roamed the world.

It had been a vagabond life, the book made clear, a life lived continually in transit, with nothing to give it direction save for Mr. Channing’s furious determination to teach his daughter his own unique philosophy of life, relentlessly driving it home by escorting young Libby, as he called her, to bizarre and tragic sites, locations he’d selected for the lessons he planned to teach.

Reading that philosophy on the bluff that afternoon, I felt myself utterly swept away by a view of life so different from my father’s, from the governing assumptions of Chatham and of Chatham School, from any way of seeing things I’d ever encountered before, that I felt as if I’d suddenly entered a new galaxy, where, according to Mr. Channing, there should be “no rules for the rule of life,” nor any hindrance whatsoever to a man’s unbridled passions.

It was a world directly opposite to the one I’d been taught to revere, everything reversed or turned topsy-turvy. Self-control became a form of slavery, vows and contracts mere contrivances to subdue the spirit, the moral law no more absolute than a passing fad. More than anything, it was a world in which even the darkest evils were given a strange and somber dignity:

We took a boat from Sorrento, and disembarked a short time later at Marina Grande, on the eastern coast of Capri. The town was festive and welcoming, and Libby took great delight in its scents and in the winding labyrinth of its streets, skipping playfully ahead of me from time to time. She seemed captivated by the nearly tropical lushness of the place, particularly with the luxuriousness of its vegetation, forever plucking leaves and petals from the shrubs and flowers we encountered on the way
.

But I had brought her to Capri for more than an afternoon’s lark. Nor was it the quaint village byways and varied plant life I had brought her here to see. Mine was another purpose, as well as another destination, one I could but indistinctly glimpse from the town’s narrow pathways
.

And so we journeyed upward and upward for over an hour, baked in a nearly blinding summer heat, through the spectacular flowered hedges that lined both sides of the earthen walkway. The smell of flowers was everywhere, as were the sounds of small lizards, dozens of them
,
scurrying through the brush or darting like thin green ribbons across our path
.

The walk was arduous, but the great ruin of the Villa di Giovi made infamous by Suetonius, loomed enticingly above, beckoning me with the same sinister and mysterious call the sirens had issued to Odysseus from the Bay of Naples far below. For like the ancient world of those mythic seamen, the place I journeyed to that morning had been bloody and perverse
.

And yet there was something glorious here as well, something incontestably free in the wild pleasure gardens the emperor had designed, the human bodies he’d formed into living sculptures, even in the heedless and unrestrained delight he’d taken in their libidinous show. For it was in this place that Tiberius had exalted physical sensuality over spiritual aridness, breaking every known taboo, pairing boys with boys, girls with girls, covering his own wrinkled frame with the smooth bodies of the very young. And though hideous and unnatural as it might seem, still it remained the pagan world’s most dramatic gesture toward the truly illimitable
.

And so I brought Libby here, to walk with her within the bowers of this ruined yet still magnificent grove, and once there, I sat with her in full view of the infamous Salto di Tiberio and spoke to her of what life should be, the heights it should reach, the passions it should embrace, all this said and done in the hope that she might come to live it as a bird on the wing. For life is best lived at the edge of folly
.

An evening shade had fallen over the bluff, the deserted beach beneath it, the whole small realm of Chatham, when I finished
A View from the Window
. I tucked the book under my arm and wandered back down Myrtle Street toward home. On the way I saw Danny Sheen loping across the playing field, and Charlie Patterson lugging a battered trunk along the front walkway of Chatham School. Upstairs the lights were on, and I knew the boys
were either studying in the library or talking quietly in the common room, that soon the bell would call them to their dinner, my father dining with them as he always did on Friday evenings, rising at the end of the meal, ringing his little bell, then dismissing them with some quotation he hoped might serve them in the years to come.

Thinking of all that, Myrtle Street like a flat, turgid stream flowing sluggishly ahead of me, I realized that I’d never known any way of life other than the one defined by Chatham School, nor felt that any other might be open to me. Certainly I’d never conceived of my destiny as anything but derided. I would graduate from Chatham School, go to college, make my living, have a family. I would do what my father had done, and his father before him. A different date marked my birth, and a different date would mark my death. Other than that, I would live as they had lived, die as they had died, find whatever joy or glory there might be in life along the same beaten path they’d trod before me through the misty ages.

But as I made my way home that evening, none of that seemed any longer as settled as it once had. The restlessness that seized me from time to time, the sullenness into which I fell, the way I cringed as my father offered his trusty platitudes to the assembled boys, the whole inchoate nature of my discontent began to take a certain shape and definition so that for the first time, I dimly began to perceive what I really wanted out of life.

It was simple. I wanted to be free. I wanted to answer only to myself, to strike out toward something. I didn’t know at that moment how to gain my freedom, or what to do with it. I knew only that I had discovered what I wanted, and that with that discovery a great pall had lifted, a door opened. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I had to go in a different direction than my father had gone, or that any of the other boys of Chatham School would likely go.

I ran down Myrtle Street, breathless, my mind glittering in a world of fresh ideas. Though night had nearly
fallen by the time I reached home, it felt like dawn to me. I remember bounding up the stairs, stretching out on my bed, and reading Mr. Channing’s book again, cover to cover. One sentence held for all time: Life is best lived at the edge of folly.

I remember that a fierce exhilaration seized me as I read and reread that line in my bedroom beneath the eaves, that it seemed to illuminate everything I had ever felt. Even now it strikes me that no darkness ever issued from a brighter flame.

PART 2

I
n old age and semiretirement I’d finally come to a time in life when I never expected to think of her again. By then years had gone by with little to remind me of her, save the quick glimpse of an old woman moving heavily across a wide wooden porch or rocking slowly in her chair as I drove by. And so Miss Channing had at last grown distant. When I thought of her at all, it was as a faded thing, like a flower crushed within the pages of an ancient, crumbling book. Then, suddenly, my own life now drawing to a close, she came back to me by a route I’d never have expected.

I’d come to my office early that morning, the village street still empty, a fog sweeping in from the sea, curling around the corner of Dalmatian’s Cafe and nestling under the benches outside the town hall. I was sitting at my desk, handling the few cases that still came my way, when I suddenly looked up and saw an old man standing at my door.

“Morning, Henry,” he said.

It was Clement Boggs, dressed as he always was, in a flannel shirt and baggy pants, an old hat pulled down nearly to his ears. I’d known Clement all my life, though never very well. He’d been one of the local rowdies
who’d smoked in front of the bowling alley, the type my father had always warned me against, a rough, lower-class boy who’d later managed to pull himself together, make a good life, even put away a considerable fortune. I’d handled quite a few of his legal affairs, mostly closings in recent years, as he’d begun to divest himself of the property he’d accumulated throughout his life.

He sat down in one of the chairs in front of my desk, groaning slightly as he did so. “I’ve got an offer on some land I bought a long time back,” he told me. “Out on Plymouth Road.” He hesitated, as if the words themselves held all the terror, rather than the events that had happened there. “’Round Black Pond. The old Milford cottage.”

As if I’d suddenly been swept back to that terrible summer day, I heard Mr. Parsons say,
You often went to Milford Cottage, didn’t you, Henry?
My answer simple, forthright, as all of them had been:
Yes, sir, I did
.

Clement watched me closely. “You all right, Henry?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t seem convinced, but continued anyway. “Well, like I said, I’ve got an offer on that land ’round Black Pond.” He leaned back slowly, watching me intently, no doubt wondering at the scenes playing in my mind, the swirling water, a face floating toward me from the green depths. “He wants to know if he can get a zoning variance. I thought you might look into it, see if the town might give him one.”

Clement sat only a few feet from me, but he seemed far way; Mr. Parsons bore in upon me so closely I could almost feel his breath upon my face.
When were you last on Black Pond?
Matter-of-factly, with no hint of passion, and certainly none of concealment, my answer came:
On May 29, 1927. That would be a Sunday? Yes
.

“You’ll have to go out there, of course,” Clement said, his gaze leveled upon me steadily, his head cocked to the right, so that for an instant I wondered if he might
also be reliving my day in the witness box, listening once again to Mr. Parsons’ questions as they’d resounded through the crowded courtroom.
What happened on Black Pond that day?

Clement’s eyes narrowed, as if against a blinding light, and I knew that he could sense the upheaval in my mind no matter how hard I labored to contain it. “I don’t guess you’ve been out that way in quite some time,” he said.

“Not in years.”

“Looks the same.”

“The same as what?”

My question appeared to throw him into doubt as to what his answer should be. “Same as it did in the old days,” he replied.

I said nothing, but I could feel myself helplessly returning to the days he meant. I saw an old car moving through the darkness, two beams of yellow light engulfing me as it came to a halt, a figure staring at me from behind the wheel, motioning now, whispering,
Get in
.

“Well, let me know what you find out,” Clement said, rising from his chair. “About the variance, I mean.”

“I’ll look into it right away.”

Once at the door, he turned back to face me. “You don’t have to stay out there for long, of course,” he told me, his way of lightening the load. “Just get an idea of what the town might think of somebody developing it.”

I nodded.

He seemed unsure of what he should say next, or if it should be me to whom he said it. Finally, he spoke again. “There’s one more thing, Henry. The money. From the land, I mean. I want it to go to somebody in particular.” He paused a moment, then said her name. “Alice Craddock.”

She swam into my mind, an old woman, immensely
fat, her hair gray and bedraggled, her mind unhinged, the butt of a cruel school-yard poem I’d heard repeated through the years:

Alice Craddock,
Locked in the paddock
Where’s your mama gone?

“It just seems right that she should get whatever the land out there brings,” Clement said. “I’m an old man. I don’t need it. And they say Alice has come on bad times.”

I saw Alice as a middle-aged woman, slack-jawed, growing fat on potato chips and candy bars, her eyes dull and lightless, a gang of boys chasing after her, pointing, laughing, until Mr. Wallace chased them away, his words trailing after them as they fled down the street:
Leave her alone. She’s suffered enough
.