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
CHAPTER 7
In 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.