The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook Page A

beyond the mundane and unglamorous life she otherwise seemed destined for, and which, since reading Mr. Channing’s book, I had also begun to feel far more powerfully than I ever had before. Watching her agitation, the restlessness that swept over her, I suddenly felt absolutely in league with her, the two of us castaways on a narrow strip of land whose strictures and limitations both appalled and threatened to destroy us. I saw my father as grimly standing in our way, reading his ancientbooks, mouthing their stony maxims. In my mind I heard his steady drone: Do this, do that. Be this, be that . I had never felt such a deep contempt for everything he stood for.
    “Maybe you should just take off, Sarah,” I told her. “Just take the train to Boston and disappear.”
    Even as I said it, I saw myself doing it. It would be a moment of wild flight, the real world dissolving behind me, all its gray walls crumbling, the sky a vast expanse before me, my life almost as limitless as the unbounded universe.
    “You should do whatever you have to, Sarah,” I continued boldly. Then, as if to demonstrate my zeal, I said, “If I can help you in any way, let me know.”
    Her response came as a question that utterly surprised me. For it had nothing to do with flight, with night trains to Boston, or disappearing into the multitude. Instead, she studied me intently, then said, “Do you remember Miss Channing? The lady that came to the house at the end of summer, the one that’s teaching art?”
    “I’m in her class.”
    “Such a fine lady, the way she talks and all. So smart, don’t you think?”
    “Yes, she is.”
    Sarah hesitated, now suddenly reluctant to ask what she had perhaps come to ask me all along. Then the wall fell, and she spoke. “Do you think that such a fine lady as Miss Channing is—talking so fine the way she does—that she might be of a mind to teach me how to read?”
    We headed down Myrtle Street together the following Sunday morning, Sarah walking beside me, a basket of freshly baked cookies hanging from one arm, her offering to Miss Channing.
    At the bluff we swung to the left, passed beneath the immense shadow of the lighthouse, then down the curving road that led into the village.
    “What if Miss Channing says no,” Sarah asked. “What if she won’t teach me?”
    “I don’t think she’ll say no, Sarah,” I said, though I know that part of me hoped that she would, wanted Sarah to be refused so that she would have to consider the other choice I’d already suggested, far bolder, as it seemed to me, edged in that frenzied sense of escape whose attractions had begun to overwhelm me.
    “But what if she doesn’t want to?”
    I answered with a determination that was new to me, an icy ruthlessness already in my voice. “Then we’ll find another way.”
    This appeared to satisfy her. She smiled brightly and took my arm with her free hand.
    Still, by the time we’d turned onto Plymouth Road, her fear had taken root again. She walked more slowly, her feet treading very softly over the bed of oyster shells, as if it were an expensive carpet and she did not want to mar it with her prints.
    “I hope I look all right, then,” she said as we neared Miss Channing’s cottage.
    She’d dressed as formally as she knew how, in what looked like her own schoolgirl version of the Chatham School uniform. Her skirt was long and dark, her blouse an immaculate white. She’d tied a black bow at her throat and pinned a small cameo to her chest, one that had belonged to her mother, her sole inheritance, she told me.
    It was not a look I admired, and even as I gazed at her, I imagined her quite differently, dressed like Ramona in The Gypsy Band , bare-shouldered, with large hoop earrings, a lethal glint in her eye, a knife clutched between her teeth as she danced around the raging campfire. It was as adolescent a fantasy as any I had ever had, and yet it was also tinged with a darkness that was very old, a sense of