The subject seemed closed. Then, abruptly, my father turned to me. “Henry, you must keep quiet about whatever you’ve heard at home,” he said. “About Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, I mean.”
I could tell that he was trying to find the words for some other, deeper thought. “Life is inadequate, Henry,” he said finally, his eyes upon me very solemnly. “Sometimes the most we can give, or get, is trust.” With that he leaned forward, patted my leg, rose, and went inside. Nor did he ever make any further attempt to explain what he’d said to me. But over the years, as he grew older and I grew older, I came to understand what he’d meant that night, that hunger is our destiny, faith what we use to soothe its dreadful pang.
I know now that my father had tried to reach out to me that night, show the path ahead, but I remember that as I watched him trudge wearily through the door, he seemed smaller to me than he ever had. I felt a malevolent wave of contempt for everything he stood for. It was swift and boiling, and in its wake I felt an absolute determination never to be like my father, never so pathetic, nor so beaten down.
Now, when I think of that moment in my life, of what I felt, and later did, the inevitable strikes me as nothing more than that which has just happened unexpectedly.
PART 5
CHAPTER 23
Some years ago I happened upon a line in Tacitus. It came near the end of the section of Germania that described the utter subjugation of the barbaric German tribes at the hands of the more tightly regimented Roman legions, a campaign that had stripped the Germans of the last vestiges of their savagery, all their primitive rites and rituals taken from them, their dances, songs, and stories. “They have made a wilderness,” Tacitus wrote, “and call it peace.”
In the brief period that remained before it closed for the summer, a similarly bare and withered peace appeared to descend upon Chatham School, turning it into a passionless world, as it seemed to me at the time, very nearly a void, all its former vibrancy, the tingling sense of intrigue and desire, now buried beneath a layer of stark propriety.
During this time Miss Channing no longer arrived and departed with Mr. Reed, but walked back and forth from Milford Cottage alone. In the morning I would often see her moving up our street, her pace slow, meditative, so that she appeared to be in continual conversation with herself. At school she remained in her room, eating her lunch there, or sitting by the cabinet, reading, between classes. There were no more strolls into the village with Mr. Reed, no more meetings with him by the coastal bluff. And when the day was over, she would head back toward Black Pond, moving through the evening shade with the same thoughtful air with which she’d arrived at school that same morning.
Her classes took on a similar mood of withdrawal. She became more formal than she had before, her demeanor more controlled, as if she now felt it necessary to conceal every aspect of her life, both past and present, from the many prying eyes she’d sensed around her for so long.
During these final three weeks it was the column of faces that occupied most of her time. She covered a table with a dark green tarpaulin, and one by one the teachers and students of Chatham School came to her room and lay down upon it to have plaster masks made of their faces. Once I saw Mrs. Benton lying there, her eyes closed, her body tense and rigid, Miss Channing poised above her, staring down, a single finger daubed with moist clay drawing a line across her throat.
My turn came during the middle of May.
“Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I stepped into her classroom.
It was after six in the evening, the air outside growing dark, a soft breeze rustling gently through the late spring leaves of the old oak that stood in the courtyard.
She was wearing a long blue dress, but she’d thrown on one of the gray smocks she used to protect her clothing. Her hair was pulled back and tied with what appeared to be a piece of ordinary twine.
“Hello, Henry,” she said in that aloof and oddly brittle tone she’d fallen into by that time. “What do you want?”
“I’ve come to get a cast made of my face,” I told her. “For the column.”
She nodded toward the table. “Lie down,” she said.
I walked to the table, pulled myself onto it, and lay on my back, my eyes turned toward the ceiling.
“I’m sorry I’ve come so late,” I said.
She stepped up to the table, dipped her fingers in the wet clay, then began to apply it smoothly, first across my forehead, then along the sides of my face. “Close your eyes,” she said.
I did as she told me, breathing softly as she coated my eyelids, her touch very tender, almost airy.
“This is the way they make a death mask, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.” She continued to work, covering my face with a cold, thin layer of clay.
Once she’d finished applying the clay, I lay on the table while it dried, listening as she moved about the room. I could hear the soft tread of her feet as she walked from the tables to the cabinet, putting things away, and I recalled how she’d drifted across the summer grass toward my father on that now-distant afternoon, the look in his eyes as he’d caught sight of her bare feet.
After a time she returned to me, removed the cast, then wiped away the residue from my face with a moist towel.
“It’s done,” she said as she dropped the towel into a basket by the table. “You can go.”
I pulled myself to a sitting position, then got to my feet. By then Miss Channing was several feet away, where many other masks lay faceup on a wide table, eyes closed, lips pressed tightly together, cadaverously gray.
“Well, good night, Miss Channing,” I said when I reached the door.
“Good night, Henry,” she answered, her eyes now fixed on the mask she’d just made of my face as she wrapped it in a length of white cloth.
I remained at the door, wanting to reach her somehow, remove her from the pall she seemed imprisoned in, tell her what she should do, how she must follow her father’s lead, live the life he’d prepared her for. I could almost see her rushing through the dark marina, a red cape flowing behind her, Mr. Reed waiting in the boat, lifting her into it, the hunger of their embrace, that thirsty kiss.
“Is there something else, Henry?” she asked, now staring at me intently, her fingers still wet and glistening, bits of moist clay in her hair. She appeared strikingly similar to the way I’d later see her, rising from the water, her hair soaked and stringy, hung with debris from the depths of Black Pond, her question asked in the same bloodless tone, Is she dead? My answer delivered as passionlessly as my life would be lived from then on, Yes.
Miss Channing finished the column only a few days later, and it was erected on the eighteenth of May in a ceremony my father arranged for the occasion. The ceremony took place on the front lawn of the school, and in the photograph taken that morning, and later included in my father’s archive of Chatham School Affair, Miss Channing stands to the right of the sculpture, her arms clasped to her sides, my father to its left, one hand tucked beneath his coat, Napoleonic fashion. All the teachers and students of the Chatham School are gathered around them, along with Sarah, who stands just off to the side, dressed up for the occasion, smiling brightly, her long black hair tucked inside a straw hat with a wide ribbon trailing off the back.
Miss Channing didn’t speak to the assembly that morning, but my father did. He thanked her for her work, not only on the sculpture, but as a teacher who, he said, had done a “remarkable job all ‘round.” At the end of the speech he announced that Miss Channing would not be returning to Chatham School the following year, and that she would be “deeply, deeply missed.”