Read Online The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online
Authors: Thomas H. Cook
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of me from time to time. She seemed captivated by the nearly tropical lushness of the place, particularly with the luxuriousness of its vegetation, forever plucking leaves and petals from the shrubs and flowers we encountered on the way .
But I had brought her to Capri for more than an afternoon’s lark. Nor was it the quaint village byways and varied plant life I had brought her here to see. Mine was another purpose, as well as another destination, one I could but indistinctly glimpse from the town’s narrow pathways .
And so we journeyed upward and upward for over an hour, baked in a nearly blinding summer heat, through the spectacular flowered hedges that lined both sides of the earthen walkway. The smell of flowers was everywhere, as were the sounds of small lizards, dozens of them , scurrying through the brush or darting like thin green ribbons across our path .
The walk was arduous, but the great ruin of the Villa di Giovi made infamous by Suetonius, loomed enticingly above, beckoning me with the same sinister and mysterious call the sirens had issued to Odysseus from the Bay of Naples far below. For like the ancient world of those mythic seamen, the place I journeyed to that morning had been bloody and perverse .
And yet there was something glorious here as well, something incontestably free in the wild pleasure gardens the emperor had designed, the human bodies he’d formed into living sculptures, even in the heedless and unrestrained delight he’d taken in their libidinous show. For it was in this place that Tiberius had exalted physical sensuality over spiritual aridness, breaking every known taboo, pairing boys with boys, girls with girls, covering his own wrinkled frame with the smooth bodies of the very young. And though hideous and unnatural as it might seem, still it remained the pagan world’s most dramatic gesture toward the truly illimitable .
And so I brought Libby here, to walk with her within the bowers of this ruined yet still magnificent grove, and once there, I sat with her in full view of the infamous Salto di Tiberio and spoke to her of what life should be, the heights it should reach, the passions it should embrace, all this said and done in the hope that she might come to live it as a bird on the wing. For life is best lived at the edge of folly .
An evening shade had fallen over the bluff, the deserted beach beneath it, the whole small realm of Chatham, when I finished A View from the Window . I tucked the book under my arm and wandered back down Myrtle Street toward home. On the way I saw Danny Sheen loping across the playing field, and Charlie Patterson lugging a battered trunk along the front walkway of Chatham School. Upstairs the lights were on, and I knew the boyswere either studying in the library or talking quietly in the common room, that soon the bell would call them to their dinner, my father dining with them as he always did on Friday evenings, rising at the end of the meal, ringing his little bell, then dismissing them with some quotation he hoped might serve them in the years to come.
Thinking of all that, Myrtle Street like a flat, turgid stream flowing sluggishly ahead of me, I realized that I’d never known any way of life other than the one defined by Chatham School, nor felt that any other might be open to me. Certainly I’d never conceived of my destiny as anything but derided. I would graduate from Chatham School, go to college, make my living, have a family. I would do what my father had done, and his father before him. A different date marked my birth, and a different date would mark my death. Other than that, I would live as they had lived, die as they had died, find whatever joy or glory there might be in life along the same beaten path they’d trod before me through the misty ages.
But as I made my way home that evening, none of that seemed any longer as settled as it once had. The restlessness that seized me from time to time, the sullenness into which I fell,
But I had brought her to Capri for more than an afternoon’s lark. Nor was it the quaint village byways and varied plant life I had brought her here to see. Mine was another purpose, as well as another destination, one I could but indistinctly glimpse from the town’s narrow pathways .
And so we journeyed upward and upward for over an hour, baked in a nearly blinding summer heat, through the spectacular flowered hedges that lined both sides of the earthen walkway. The smell of flowers was everywhere, as were the sounds of small lizards, dozens of them , scurrying through the brush or darting like thin green ribbons across our path .
The walk was arduous, but the great ruin of the Villa di Giovi made infamous by Suetonius, loomed enticingly above, beckoning me with the same sinister and mysterious call the sirens had issued to Odysseus from the Bay of Naples far below. For like the ancient world of those mythic seamen, the place I journeyed to that morning had been bloody and perverse .
And yet there was something glorious here as well, something incontestably free in the wild pleasure gardens the emperor had designed, the human bodies he’d formed into living sculptures, even in the heedless and unrestrained delight he’d taken in their libidinous show. For it was in this place that Tiberius had exalted physical sensuality over spiritual aridness, breaking every known taboo, pairing boys with boys, girls with girls, covering his own wrinkled frame with the smooth bodies of the very young. And though hideous and unnatural as it might seem, still it remained the pagan world’s most dramatic gesture toward the truly illimitable .
And so I brought Libby here, to walk with her within the bowers of this ruined yet still magnificent grove, and once there, I sat with her in full view of the infamous Salto di Tiberio and spoke to her of what life should be, the heights it should reach, the passions it should embrace, all this said and done in the hope that she might come to live it as a bird on the wing. For life is best lived at the edge of folly .
An evening shade had fallen over the bluff, the deserted beach beneath it, the whole small realm of Chatham, when I finished A View from the Window . I tucked the book under my arm and wandered back down Myrtle Street toward home. On the way I saw Danny Sheen loping across the playing field, and Charlie Patterson lugging a battered trunk along the front walkway of Chatham School. Upstairs the lights were on, and I knew the boyswere either studying in the library or talking quietly in the common room, that soon the bell would call them to their dinner, my father dining with them as he always did on Friday evenings, rising at the end of the meal, ringing his little bell, then dismissing them with some quotation he hoped might serve them in the years to come.
Thinking of all that, Myrtle Street like a flat, turgid stream flowing sluggishly ahead of me, I realized that I’d never known any way of life other than the one defined by Chatham School, nor felt that any other might be open to me. Certainly I’d never conceived of my destiny as anything but derided. I would graduate from Chatham School, go to college, make my living, have a family. I would do what my father had done, and his father before him. A different date marked my birth, and a different date would mark my death. Other than that, I would live as they had lived, die as they had died, find whatever joy or glory there might be in life along the same beaten path they’d trod before me through the misty ages.
But as I made my way home that evening, none of that seemed any longer as settled as it once had. The restlessness that seized me from time to time, the sullenness into which I fell,
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