Free The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook Page B

herself if I had the will to see it through, possessed the naked ruthlessness such freedom might require.
    “It isn’t easy to live the way my father did,” she said, her blue eyes focused powerfully. “Most people can’t do it.”
    “But everything else … the way people do live …” I stammered. “I don’t want to live like my father does. I don’t want to be like him … a fool.”
    She didn’t seem in the least shocked by my ruthless evaluation of my father. “How do you want to be, Henry?”
    “Open to things. To new things.”
    She watched me a moment longer, and I could see that she was thinking of me in a way that no one else ever had, not merely as the boy I was, but as the man I might someday be. “I’ve been noticing your drawing,” she said. “It’s really quite good, you know.”
    I knew no such thing. “It is?”
    “There’s a lot of feeling in it.”
    I knew how strangely twisted my drawings were, how wreathed in a vampire blackness, but it had never occurred to me that such characteristics added up to “feeling,” that they might spring from something deep within me.
    I shrugged. “There’s not much to draw around here. Just the sea. The lighthouse. Stuff like that.”
    “But you put something into them, Henry,” Miss Channing said. “Something extra. You should get a sketchbook and take it around with you. That’s what I did in Africa. I found that just having it along with me made me look at things differently.” She waited for a response, then continued when I failed to offer one. “Anyway, when you’ve done a few more drawings, bring them in and let me look at them.”
    I’d never been complimented by a teacher before. Certainly none had ever suggested that I had a talent for anything but moodiness and solitude. To the other teachers I had always been a disappointment, someone tolerated because I was the headmaster’s son, a boy of limited prospects and little ambition, a “decent lad,” as I’d once heard my father describe me in a tone that had struck me as deeply condescending, a way of saying that I was nothing, and never would be.
    “All right, Miss Channing,” I said, immensely lifted by her having seen something in me the other teachers had not seen.
    “Good,” she said, then returned to her work as I headed down the aisle and out the door.
    I walked into the courtyard and drew in a deep, invigorating breath. It was autumn now, and the air was quite brisk. But my mood had been so heated up by Miss Channing’s high regard that I could not feel its hint of winter chill.
    A few hours later I took my seat for the final class of the day. I glanced out the window, then at the pictures that hung on the wall. Shakespeare. Wordsworth. Keats. My attention was still drifting aimlessly from one face to another when I heard the steady thump … thump … thump of the approaching teacher’s woodencane, soft and rhythmic, like the distant muffled beating of a drum.
    Was he handsome, the man who came into the room seconds later, dressed, as always, in a chalk-smeared jacket and corduroy pants?
    Yes, I suppose he was. In his own particular way, of course.
    And yet it never surprised me that the people of the village later marveled that such fierce emotions could have stormed about in a so visibly broken frame.
    He was tall and slender, but there was something in his physical arrangement that always struck me as subtly off kilter, the sense of a leaning tower, of something shattered at its base. For although he always stood erect, his back pressed firmly against the wall of his classroom while he spoke to us, his body often appeared to be of another mind, his left shoulder a few degrees lower than the right, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a bust whose features were classically formed yet eerily marred, perhaps distorted, the product of an unsteady hand.
    Still, it was his face that people found most striking, the ragged black beard, lined here and there with