She didn’t appear surprised when I drifted past her, took hold of the rail that stretched along the edge of the bluff, and stared out to sea, my back to her, pretending that I hadn’t noticed her sitting directly behind me.
“Hello, Henry,” she said.
I turned toward her. “Oh, Miss Channing,” I said. “I didn’t see—”
“It’s a marvelous view, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
I glanced back over the bluff. Below, the sea was empty, but a few people strolled along the beach or lounged beneath striped umbrellas. I tried to see the view through her eyes. From behind me, I heard her say, “It reminds me of the Lido.”
“The Lido?”
“A beach near Venice,” she said. “It was always filled with striped umbrellas. The changing rooms were painted with the same stripes. Yellow. Bright yellow.” She shook her head. “Actually, it doesn’t remind me of the Lido at all,” she said, her voice a shade lower, as if now talking to me in confidence. “It’s just that I was thinking of it when you came up.”
“Why?” I asked, no other question occurring to me.
“Because my father died on the Lido,” Miss Channing said. “That’s what I was really thinking of just now.”
In later life we forget what it was like, the sweetness and exhilaration of being spoken to for the first time as something other than a child. And yet that was what I felt at that moment, sweetness and exhilaration, a sense that some part of my boyhood had been peeled away and cast aside, the man beneath allowed to take his first uneasy breaths.
“I’m sorry,” I said, immediately using a phrase I’d heard so many times on similar occasions.
Her expression did not change. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, really. He lived a good life.”
I could see the love she’d had for him and wondered what it was like to have had a father you admired.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He was a writer. A travel writer.”
“And you traveled with him?”
“From the time I was four years old. That was when my mother died. After that we traveled all the time.”
As if my father had suddenly assumed my shape, I asked a question that seemed more his than mine. “What about school?”
“My father was my school,” Miss Channing answered. “He taught me everything.” She rose and joined me at the rail, the two of us now looking out over the beach below. “He believed in going his own way.” She paused a moment, a line coming to her, one I later read in her father’s book, and which she now repeated to me.
“An artist should follow only his passions,” she said. “All else is a noose around his neck.”
Now, when I recall that line, the calm with which she said it, I feel its dreadful premonition, and in my mind see an old car hurling down a weedy, overgrown embankment, a figure turning at the water’s edge, eyes wide, aghast, uncomprehending. And after that, forever after that, the long, unfading echo of her scream.
CHAPTER 6
In the years following Miss Channing’s trial, my father assembled a small collection of materials concerning the Chatham School Affair, one he bequeathed to me at his death, and which I’ve been unable to discard. I’ve given other things away—my mother’s knitting needles, my father’s quill pen, stacks of books to the village library. But my father’s collection has remained intact, tucked into the bottom corner of the bookshelf in my office, all but hidden by the floor lamp that stands in front of it. It is a slender archive, especially given the events it summons up. Madness and suicide and murder, the forlorn world left in their wake. And yet there are times when my attention lingers on it with a curious nostalgia. For I know that it holds the defining moment of my youth.
It consists of nothing more than a folder containing a single copy of the Chatham School Annual for 1927, a few newspaper clippings and photographs. There is even one of Sarah Doyle, though it was unintended. In the picture she is rushing down the little walkway beside the school. Her back is to the camera, and snow is falling all around her, gathering on her long, dark cape, while the boys in the yard—the real focus of the picture—playfully heave packed snowballs at each other, my father on the front steps of the school, arms folded over his chest, looking on with mock disapproval.
To these few things my father added three books, two of them directly related to what happened on Black Pond, one considerably less so.
The first is Mr. Parsons’ memoir, the work he quickly put together and had privately published just after the trial. As a book, it leaves a great deal to be desired. In fact, it is little more than an assortment of quotations from the trial transcript awkwardly strung together by Mr. Parsons’ own rather tedious narrative.
The second volume is more detailed. Titled A Mortal Flaw, it was written by one Wilfred M. Peyton, a professor of moral philosophy at Oberlin College. Scarcely a hundred pages long, it is essentially an extended essay published in 1929 by a small religious press, and hampered not only by Professor Peyton’s harsh, sermonizing tone, but by the way he singled out Miss Channing as the true villain in what he insists on calling—over and over again, like words from a warlock’s chant—“The Black Pond Murders.” Such was his rage against Miss Channing that whenever he spoke of her, it was with an Old Testament prophet’s infuriated rebuke. “To her father, she was ‘Libby,’” he wrote in a typical passage, “for by such endearment did he call her in her youth. But to the ages she should be more rightly known as Elizabeth, a cold and formal name that must be included among those of other women like herself: Delilah, Salome, and Jezebel.”
Of the three volumes of my father’s archive, Professor Peyton’s was the only one he clearly hated. So much so that he scribbled angry notes throughout its text, sometimes disputing a small, inconsequential fact (noting, for example, that the school library had three thousand books, not the mere two thousand attributed by Peyton), sometimes quarreling with an interpretation, but always seeking to undermine the book’s authority to those who might later read it.
The reason my father so detested Professor Peyton’s book is obvious. For it was not only an attack upon Miss Channing, but upon Chatham School itself, as an “indulgent, coddling retreat for wealthy, dissolute boys.” Indeed, at the end of the book Professor Peyton flatly concluded that “the unspeakable outrage which occurred on the otherwise tranquil surface of Black Pond on 29 May 1927 was emblematic of the moral relativism and contempt for established authority that has emerged in educational theory during the last two decades, and of which Chatham School is only the most odious example.” It never surprised me, of course, that this was a passage my father had underlined in black ink, then appended his own heartrending cry of “NO! NO! NO!”
But for all its bluster and moral posturing, for all the pain it caused my father, A Mortal Flaw was, at last, a completely dismissible book, one which, after I read it, I never found the slightest need to pick up again.
I can’t say the same for the final volume in my father’s collection, however. For it was a book I have returned to many times, as if looking for some answer to what happened on Black Pond that day, perhaps even for what might have prevented it, some way to sedate our hearts, make them satisfied with less.
The third book is entitled A View from the Window, and on the back of the book’s cover there is a photograph of its author, Jonathan Channing, a tall, somber man in his late forties, staring at the camera from the courtyard of the Louvre.