and saw at his table a strange-looking white man in his late forties wearing a seersucker suit, polka-dotted bow tie, white buck shoes, and owl-eyed tortoiseshell eyeglasses. His straight flaxen hair was parted in the middle, combed to matching partial bangs on his temples. Archbold waved us over and introduced us by first and last names to the man, whose name was Clive Cravensbrooke, which suited him almost too perfectly. His accent was an American version of British English, early Masterpiece Theatre . For a few seconds I wondered if he might be a clever downtown Manhattan performance artist having us all on.
It turned out that he was an adjunct professor of the history of landscape at Colgate University and was leading a group of students on a winter-term field-study trip, his costs underwritten by the parents of his students, much as ours was underwritten by that slick New York travel magazine. The students were all staying in a youth hostel down in Roseau, he said and chuckled, while he bunked up here at Springfield Plantation with his dear old friend John Archbold.
I did not mention my brief enrollment as a student at Colgate. Probably before his time, anyway. A mildly unsettling coincidencewas all. It’s hard to escape one’s past, even this far south of it. When we turned to leave for our corner table, Clive Cravensbrooke asked Chase if her birth name was Penelope.
Startled, she said yes. Chase was actually her middle name, she said.
Cravensbrooke said he knew her father long ago. And how was her dear mother, Ann? Was she still living in Little Compton? And was her father enjoying his retirement from Choate? Still living alone in his cabin hideaway in the Adirondacks?
Cravensbrooke had at hand an astonishing amount of both new and old detailed information about Chase’s entire family, as if for a lifetime he’d been compiling a dossier on them. Her uncle Dave and his wife, was he still headmaster and teaching middle school biology at Browne & Nichols? He even asked after her paternal grandmother by name. Was she still living at 436 Saint Ronan Street in New Haven?
Chase stammered, No, not now. My grandmother, she died some years ago.
Cravensbrooke seemed momentarily saddened, but not surprised, as if he’d already known of the woman’s death.
Chase asked him how he knew so much about her family.
He flashed the smile of a lizard, implying that actually he knew much, much more than she suspected, and dodged her question by asking her another batch of questions, as if showing off. Is your cousin Joe still making his beautiful furniture? And your sister Eliza, is she happy living in Standfordville? Still divorced? Her oldest must be about twelve by now.
Cravensbrooke would admit only that many long years ago, too many to admit, he said with a wink, Chase’s father had been his Latin teacher at Choate. Which did not explain much. He remembered him, he said, with great affection.
Clearly, he was obsessed with Chase’s entire family and had been tracking their lives for decades. But why? Over the years she had run into dozens of her father’s ex-students, none of whom hadmuch interest in or information about her family members or about her father himself, for that matter. There was something sinister about this man, and something pathetic and creepy. Meeting him in Dominica in the dining room of an old plantation house two thousand miles south of New England made her feel she was being stalked. Without her knowledge, it had been going on for many years. Too many, as he said, to admit.
Months later, back in the Adirondacks, Chase and I recounted to her father our strange meeting in Dominica with the man named Clive Cravensbrooke. It took a while, but then he vaguely recalled a boy with that name, a student at Choate in the late 1950s. Chase’s father had caught the boy cheating on his final exam in Latin class, he recalled. He’d seen to it that the boy was expelled from the school. What was he doing way
It turned out that he was an adjunct professor of the history of landscape at Colgate University and was leading a group of students on a winter-term field-study trip, his costs underwritten by the parents of his students, much as ours was underwritten by that slick New York travel magazine. The students were all staying in a youth hostel down in Roseau, he said and chuckled, while he bunked up here at Springfield Plantation with his dear old friend John Archbold.
I did not mention my brief enrollment as a student at Colgate. Probably before his time, anyway. A mildly unsettling coincidencewas all. It’s hard to escape one’s past, even this far south of it. When we turned to leave for our corner table, Clive Cravensbrooke asked Chase if her birth name was Penelope.
Startled, she said yes. Chase was actually her middle name, she said.
Cravensbrooke said he knew her father long ago. And how was her dear mother, Ann? Was she still living in Little Compton? And was her father enjoying his retirement from Choate? Still living alone in his cabin hideaway in the Adirondacks?
Cravensbrooke had at hand an astonishing amount of both new and old detailed information about Chase’s entire family, as if for a lifetime he’d been compiling a dossier on them. Her uncle Dave and his wife, was he still headmaster and teaching middle school biology at Browne & Nichols? He even asked after her paternal grandmother by name. Was she still living at 436 Saint Ronan Street in New Haven?
Chase stammered, No, not now. My grandmother, she died some years ago.
Cravensbrooke seemed momentarily saddened, but not surprised, as if he’d already known of the woman’s death.
Chase asked him how he knew so much about her family.
He flashed the smile of a lizard, implying that actually he knew much, much more than she suspected, and dodged her question by asking her another batch of questions, as if showing off. Is your cousin Joe still making his beautiful furniture? And your sister Eliza, is she happy living in Standfordville? Still divorced? Her oldest must be about twelve by now.
Cravensbrooke would admit only that many long years ago, too many to admit, he said with a wink, Chase’s father had been his Latin teacher at Choate. Which did not explain much. He remembered him, he said, with great affection.
Clearly, he was obsessed with Chase’s entire family and had been tracking their lives for decades. But why? Over the years she had run into dozens of her father’s ex-students, none of whom hadmuch interest in or information about her family members or about her father himself, for that matter. There was something sinister about this man, and something pathetic and creepy. Meeting him in Dominica in the dining room of an old plantation house two thousand miles south of New England made her feel she was being stalked. Without her knowledge, it had been going on for many years. Too many, as he said, to admit.
Months later, back in the Adirondacks, Chase and I recounted to her father our strange meeting in Dominica with the man named Clive Cravensbrooke. It took a while, but then he vaguely recalled a boy with that name, a student at Choate in the late 1950s. Chase’s father had caught the boy cheating on his final exam in Latin class, he recalled. He’d seen to it that the boy was expelled from the school. What was he doing way
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