Then I think, No, things must be as they became. And with that thought, time rolls onward again, and I see her take my father’s hand, shake it briefly, then let it go, her face turning slightly to the left so that she must have seen me as I finally roused myself from the church steps and headed toward her from across its carefully tended lawn.
“This is my son, Henry,” my father said when I reached them.
“Hi,” I said, offering my hand.
Miss Channing took it. “Hello, Henry,” she said.
I can clearly recall how she looked at that first meeting, her hair gathered primly beneath her hat, her skin a perfect white, her features beautiful in the way certain female portraits are beautiful, not so much sensuous as very finely wrought. But more than anything, I remember her eyes, pale blue and slightly oval, with a striking sense of alertness.
“Henry’s going to be a sophomore this year,” my father added. “He’ll be one of your students.”
Before Miss Channing could respond to that, the bus driver came bustling around the back of the bus with two leather valises. He dropped them to the ground, then scurried back into the bus.
My father nodded for me to pick up Miss Channing’s luggage. Which I did, then stood, a third wheel, as he immediately returned the full force of his attention to Miss Channing.
“You’ll have an early dinner with us,” he told her. “After that we’ll take you to your new home.” With that, he stepped back slightly, turned, and headed for the car, Miss Channing walking along beside him, I trudging behind, the two leather valises hanging heavily from my hands.
We lived on Myrtle Street in those days, just down from Chatham School, in a white house with a small porch, like almost all the others in the village. As we drove toward it, passing through the center of town on the way, my father pointed out various stores and shops where Miss Channing would be able to buy her supplies. She seemed quite attentive to whatever my father told her, her attention drawn to this building or that one with an unmistakable appreciativeness, like someone touring a gallery or a museum, her eyes intently focused on the smallest things, the striped awning of Mayflower’s, the hexagonal bandstand on the grounds of the town hall, the knot of young men who lounged in front of the bowling alley, smoking cigarettes, and in whose desultory habits and loose morals my father claimed to glimpse the grim approach of the coming age.
A hill rose steadily from the center of town, curving to the right as it ascended toward the coastal bluff. The old lighthouse stood at the far end of it, its grounds decorated with two huge whitewashed anchors.
“We once had three lighthouses here in Chatham,” my father said. “One was moved to Eastham. The second was lost in the storm of ’twenty-three.”
Miss Channing gazed at our remaining lighthouse as we drifted by it. “It’s more striking to have only one,” she said. She turned toward the backseat, her eyes falling upon me. “Don’t you think so, Henry?”
I had no answer for her, surprised as I was that she’d bothered to ask, but my father appeared quite taken by her observation.
“Yes, I think that’s true,” he said. “A second makes the first less impressive.”
Miss Channing’s eyes lingered on me a moment, a quiet smile offered silently before she turned away.
Our house was situated at the end of Myrtle Street, and on the way to it we passed Chatham School. It was a large brick building with cement stairs and double front doors. The first floor was made up of classrooms, the second taken up by the dormitory, dining hall, and common room.
“That’s where you’ll be teaching,” my father told her, slowing down a bit as we drove by. “We’ve made a special room for you. In the courtyard.”
Miss Channing glanced over to the school, and from her reflection in the glass, I could see that her eyes were very still, like someone staring into a crystal ball, searching for her future there.
We pulled up in front of our house a few seconds later. My father opened the door for Miss Channing and escorted her up the front stairs to the porch, where my mother waited to be introduced.
“Welcome to Chatham,” my mother said, offering her hand.
She was only a few years younger than my father, but considerably less agile, and certainly less spirited, her face rather plain and round, but with small, nervous eyes. To the people of Chatham, she’d been known simply as the “music teacher” and more or less given up for a spinster. Then my father had arrived, thirty-one years old but still a bachelor, eager to establish a household in which he could entertain the teachers he’d already hired for his new school, as well as potential benefactors. My mother had met whatever his criteria had been for a wife, and after a courtship of only six weeks, he’d asked her to marry him. My mother had accepted without hesitation, my father’s proposal catching her so completely by surprise, as she loved to tell the women in her sewing circle, that at first she had taken it for a joke.
But on that afternoon nearly twenty years later, my mother no longer appeared capable of taking anything lightly. She’d grown wide in the hips by then, her figure large and matronly, her pace so slow and ponderous that I often grew impatient with it and bolted ahead of her to wherever we were 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 windows boarded, 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.