The Chatham School Affair Read Free Page A

going. Later in life she sometimes lost her breath at the top of the porch stairs, coming to a full stop in order to regain it, one hand grasping a wooden supporting post, the other fluttering at her chest, her head arched back as she sucked in a long, difficult breath. In old age her hair grew white and her eyes dimmed, and she often sat alone in the front room, or lay curled on her bed, no longer able to read and barely able to attend to the radio. Even so, something fiery remained in her to the very end, fueled by a rage engendered by the Chatham School Affair, one that smoldered forever after that.
    She died many years after the affair had run its frightful course, and by then much had changed in all our lives: the large house on Myrtle Street no more than a memory, my father living on a modest pension, Chatham School long closed, its doors locked, its windowsboarded, the playing fields gone to weed, all its former reputation by then reduced to a dark and woeful legacy.
    My mother had prepared a chowder for us that afternoon, buttery and thick with clams and potatoes, the sort typical of Cape Cod. We ate at the dining table, Sarah Doyle, the teenage servant girl my father had brought from Boston only two years before, ladling the fragrant chowder into large china bowls.
    Sitting at the table, Miss Channing asked few questions as my father went through his usual remarks about Chatham School, what its philosophy was, how it had come to be, a lecture my mother had heard countless times, but which clearly engaged Miss Channing’s interest.
    “Why only boys?” she asked at one point.
    “Because girls would change the atmosphere of the school,” my father answered.
    “In what way?”
    “The boys would feel their presence,” my father told her. “It would cause them to show off, to act foolishly.”
    Miss Channing thought a moment. “But is that the fault of the girls or the boys, Mr. Griswald?”
    “It’s the fault of the mixture, Miss Channing,” my father told her, obviously surprised by the boldness he detected in her question. “It makes the atmosphere more … volatile.”
    My father fully expected to have brought the subject to a close with that. An expectation I snared so completely that when Miss Channing suddenly spoke again, offering what amounted to a challenge, I felt something like a call to arms.
    “And without the girls, what’s the atmosphere?” she asked.
    “Studious and serious,” my father answered. “Disciplined.”
    “And that’s the atmosphere you want at Chatham School?”
    “Yes,” my father replied firmly. “It is.”
    Miss Channing said nothing more on the subject, but sitting across from her, I sensed that there was more she might have said, thoughts that were in her head, bristling there, or firing continually, like small explosions.
    At the end of the meal my father led Miss Channing and my mother into the little parlor at the front of the house for a cup of tea. I lingered at the table, watching Sarah clear away the dishes after she’d served them. Though my father had closed the French doors that separated the parlor from the dining room, it was still possible for me to see Miss Channing as she sat listening quietly to my father.
    “So, what do you think of the new teacher?” I asked Sarah as she leaned over my shoulder and plucked a bowl from the table.
    Sarah didn’t answer, so I glanced up at her. She was not looking at me, but toward the parlor, where Miss Channing sat by the window, her hands held primly in her lap, the Joan Crawford hat sitting firmly on her head.
    “Such a fine lady,” Sarah said in an almost reverential tone. “The kind folks read about in books.”
    I looked back toward Miss Channing. She was taking a sip from her cup as my father went on, her blue eyes peering just over the rim, sharp and evaluating, as if her mind ceaselessly sifted the material that passed through it, allowing this, dismissing that, her sense of judgment oddly final, a