The Chatham School Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

of information. “That white dust, I mean.”
    She turned toward me sharply. “Oyster shells?”
    “Yes. That’s what they used to put on the roads around here.”
    She nodded silently, then walked on, suddenly preoccupied, my first hint of the strange life she’d lived before coming to Chatham, how deeply it had formed her. “That’s what they killed Hypatia with,” she said.
    She saw the question in my eyes, and immediately answered it. “She was the last of the pagan astronomers. A Christian mob murdered her.” Her eyes drifted toward the road. “They scraped her to death with oyster shells.”
    I could tell by the look on her face that she was seeing the slaughter of Hypatia at the instant she described it, the mocking crowd in its frenzy, Hypatia sinking to the ground, bits of her flesh scooped from her body and tossed into the air.
    “There was nothing left of her when it was over,” she said. “No face. No body. Torn to bits.”
    It was then I should have glimpsed it, I suppose, thefact that she had lived in many worlds, that they now lived in her, strange and kaleidoscopic, her mind a play of scenes. Some quite beautiful—Mont Saint Michel like a great ship run aground in dense fog. Others hung in death and betrayal—the harbor in which the last weary remnants of the Children’s Crusade had trudged onto waiting ships, then disappeared into the desert wastes of Arab slavery.
    But at the time I could only react to what Miss Channing had just told me. And so I grimaced, pretending a delicacy I didn’t actually feel, knowing all the while that some part of her story had intrigued me.
    “How do you know about Hypatia?” I asked.
    “My father told me about her,” Miss Channing answered.
    She said nothing more about her father, but merely began to move forward again, so that we walked on in silence for a time, the sound of our feet padding softly over the powdered shells as the wind rustled through the forest that bore in upon us from both sides.
    When we reached the outskirts of Chatham, Miss Channing stopped for a moment and peered down the gently curving road that led from the center of the village to the lighthouse on the bluff. “It looks very … American,” she said.
    I’d never heard anyone say anything quite so odd, and I suppose that it was at that moment I knew that something truly different had entered my life.
    Of course, I kept that early intimation to myself, and so merely watched silently as she stood at the threshold of our village. From there she would have been able to see all the way down Main Street, from the Congregationalist Church, where the bus had let her off the day of her arrival, to the courthouse, where she would later come to trial, hear the shouts of the crowd outside: Murderess. Murderess . If she’d looked closely enough, concentratingon the small details, she might even have seen the wooden bench where, years later, Mr. Parsons would sit alone in the afternoon, thinking of his memoir, convinced that he had plumbed the black depths of her heart.
    I left Miss Channing on the outskirts of town, then walked up the hill that ran along the edge of the coastal bluff. At the top, I turned onto Myrtle Street, passing Chatham School as I made my way home.
    By then some of the boys had begun to arrive. I could see them lugging their trunks and traveling cases down the long concrete walkway that led to the front of the building. From there I knew they would drag them up the stairs to the dormitory, then empty their contents into the old footlockers that rested at the end of each bed.
    Many of the boys have blurred with time, but I can remember Ben Calder, who would later run a large manufacturing enterprise, and Ted Spencer, destined for the New York Stock Exchange, and Larry Bishop, who would go on to West Point and die leading his men toward the shores of Okinawa.
    In general, they were from good families, and most of them were good boys who’d merely exhibited a bit of rude