“This is in Florence,” she’d say, or “I saw this at the Prado.” She turned the book toward me. “This one always frightened me. What do you think, Henry?”
I looked at the painting. It showed a little girl with stringy blond hair, crouched before an enormous tree, its jagged limbs stretching to both sides of the canvas, the gnarled limbs hung with surreal images of floating heads and body parts, the colors livid, greens the color of bile, reds the color of fresh blood. Staring at the tree, the child appeared frozen by the terror and immensity of what she faced.
“Have you ever felt like her?” Miss Channing asked me quietly, her gaze fixed on the illustration, rife with its malicious and chaotic gore.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Miss Channing.” Which was true then, though it is no longer so.
She turned the book back around, leafing through it once again, until she came upon a photograph of the courtyard at the Louvre. “There’s a picture of my father standing here,” she told me. “They used it for his book.”
“His book?”
“Yes,” Miss Channing said. “He was a travel writer. He wrote a great many articles, but only one book.”
Out of mere politeness I said, “I’d like to read it sometime.”
She took this as a genuine expression of interest, opened the drawer of her desk, and drew out a single volume. “This is it,” she said as she handed it to me. “The picture I mentioned is on the back.”
I turned the book over and looked at the photograph. It showed a tall, slender man, handsome in a roguish sort of way, dressed in dark trousers and a white dinner jacket, his hair slicked back in the fashion of the time, but with a wilder touch added in the form of a single black curl that fell just over the corner of his right eye.
“I was ten years old when that picture was taken,” Miss Channing said. “We’d just gotten back from a visit to Rouen. My father was interested in the cathedral there.”
“Was he religious?”
“Not at all,” she said with a smile I found intriguing.
I lifted the book toward her, but she made no move to reclaim it.
“You can take it if you want,” she said.
I had not really wanted to read her father’s book, but I took it with me anyway, reluctantly, unable to find an acceptable way to refuse it.
As it turned out, I read it that same afternoon, sitting alone on the coastal bluff, the other boys of Chatham School either engaged in a game of football on the playing field or gathered outside Quilty’s Ice Cream Parlor in the village.
In earlier years I’d tried to be one of them. I’d joined them in their games, even participated in the general mischief, playing pranks on teachers or making up nicknames for them. But in the end it hadn’t worked. For I was still the headmaster’s son, a position that made it impossible for them to accept me as just another boy at Chatham School, one with whom they could be as vulgar and irreverent as they pleased, calling my father “Old Grizzlewald,” as I knew they often did.
Though never exactly ostracized, I’d finally turned bookish and aloof, a boy who could often be found reading in the porch swing or at the edge of the playing field, a “scholarly lad” as my father sometimes called me, though in a tone that never struck me as entirely complimentary.
Recalling the boy I was in those days, so solitary and isolated, I’ve sometimes thought myself one of the victims of the Chatham School Affair, my life no less deeply wounded by the crime that rocked Black Pond. Then, as if to bring me back to what really happened there, my mind returns me to a little girl on a windy beach. She is running against the wind, an old kite whipping left and right behind her. Finally it lifts and she watches it joylessly, her eyes wreathed in that forsakenness that would never leave them after that. Remembering how she looked at that moment in her life, I instantly recognize who Black Pond’s victims
I looked at the painting. It showed a little girl with stringy blond hair, crouched before an enormous tree, its jagged limbs stretching to both sides of the canvas, the gnarled limbs hung with surreal images of floating heads and body parts, the colors livid, greens the color of bile, reds the color of fresh blood. Staring at the tree, the child appeared frozen by the terror and immensity of what she faced.
“Have you ever felt like her?” Miss Channing asked me quietly, her gaze fixed on the illustration, rife with its malicious and chaotic gore.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Miss Channing.” Which was true then, though it is no longer so.
She turned the book back around, leafing through it once again, until she came upon a photograph of the courtyard at the Louvre. “There’s a picture of my father standing here,” she told me. “They used it for his book.”
“His book?”
“Yes,” Miss Channing said. “He was a travel writer. He wrote a great many articles, but only one book.”
Out of mere politeness I said, “I’d like to read it sometime.”
She took this as a genuine expression of interest, opened the drawer of her desk, and drew out a single volume. “This is it,” she said as she handed it to me. “The picture I mentioned is on the back.”
I turned the book over and looked at the photograph. It showed a tall, slender man, handsome in a roguish sort of way, dressed in dark trousers and a white dinner jacket, his hair slicked back in the fashion of the time, but with a wilder touch added in the form of a single black curl that fell just over the corner of his right eye.
“I was ten years old when that picture was taken,” Miss Channing said. “We’d just gotten back from a visit to Rouen. My father was interested in the cathedral there.”
“Was he religious?”
“Not at all,” she said with a smile I found intriguing.
I lifted the book toward her, but she made no move to reclaim it.
“You can take it if you want,” she said.
I had not really wanted to read her father’s book, but I took it with me anyway, reluctantly, unable to find an acceptable way to refuse it.
As it turned out, I read it that same afternoon, sitting alone on the coastal bluff, the other boys of Chatham School either engaged in a game of football on the playing field or gathered outside Quilty’s Ice Cream Parlor in the village.
In earlier years I’d tried to be one of them. I’d joined them in their games, even participated in the general mischief, playing pranks on teachers or making up nicknames for them. But in the end it hadn’t worked. For I was still the headmaster’s son, a position that made it impossible for them to accept me as just another boy at Chatham School, one with whom they could be as vulgar and irreverent as they pleased, calling my father “Old Grizzlewald,” as I knew they often did.
Though never exactly ostracized, I’d finally turned bookish and aloof, a boy who could often be found reading in the porch swing or at the edge of the playing field, a “scholarly lad” as my father sometimes called me, though in a tone that never struck me as entirely complimentary.
Recalling the boy I was in those days, so solitary and isolated, I’ve sometimes thought myself one of the victims of the Chatham School Affair, my life no less deeply wounded by the crime that rocked Black Pond. Then, as if to bring me back to what really happened there, my mind returns me to a little girl on a windy beach. She is running against the wind, an old kite whipping left and right behind her. Finally it lifts and she watches it joylessly, her eyes wreathed in that forsakenness that would never leave them after that. Remembering how she looked at that moment in her life, I instantly recognize who Black Pond’s victims
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