The Chatham School Affair

  After that Mr. Reed told me a great deal of what he’d said to Miss Channing in the cemetery the previous afternoon, how he’d been born in a working class section of Boston, a noisy, pinched world of clattering factories and grimy tenements where people lived beneath clouds of industrial vapor and coal dust.

  “My father left when I was just a boy. My mother was a … well … not like your mother, Henry.” He smiled. “She looked a little like Sarah, though. With long black hair, I mean, and a light complexion. Black Irish, we call it. My mother wanted me to be a clerk of some sort. In a bank, something like that. To wear a white shirt and tie, that’s what she wanted me to do, look respectable.” He peered down at the brown jacket, its worn sleeves, the chalk dust. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”

  “How did you happen to become a teacher?” I asked.

  “Just by reading books, I guess. There was a school in Braintree. That’s where I went. The war interrupted things, but when I got back, I got a job at Boston Latin School.” I saw his fingers draw more tightly around the steering wheel. “It’s funny how you have to make so many decisions before you’re prepared to make them. All the important ones, I guess. About your life. Your work. The person you marry.” Suddenly he looked at me with a striking earnestness. “I hope you make all the right decisions, Henry. If you don’t, life can be so … treacherous…. You can end up wondering why you should even bother to live it through.”

  No one had ever talked to me so intimately, nor with such urgent regard for my own future happiness. It seemed to me that my father had spoken only of the rules of life, never of its possibilities, his world a straight, unbending road, Mr. Reed’s a narrow lane of pits and snares and hairpin curves, a place I should be warned about before it was too late and I had become not what I wanted to be, but what my father already was.

  “The main thing is not to settle too quickly,” Mr. Reed added after a moment. “In life … or in love.”

  An immense longing swept into his face, as if he’d recognized for the first time just how lonely and bereft he was. I wanted to offer him something, a token of the high regard I had for him. “Chatham School would be very different without you, Mr. Reed,” I said.

  He appeared wholly unmoved by what I’d said. “Yes, of course,” he replied dryly. “What would the boys do without me?”

  I said nothing else, but only watched as Mr. Reed continued to stare toward the road ahead, his face fixed in that intense yearning I’d wanted to ease somehow, and which I remembered in all the years to come, so that it finally seemed to me that we were not created in God’s image at all, but in the image of Tantalus instead, the thing we most desire forever dancing before our eyes, and yet forever beyond our grasp.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Once in the city, Mr. Reed led me through a series of shops, picking up the items he’d come to buy, brass knobs and hinges that he often touched softly before buying, moving his fingers lightly over the smooth surface of the metal, or holding it up to the light, staring at it wonderingly sometimes with an admiring smile, like a pirate of the old time, his eyes feasting on a gold doubloon.

  It was noon by the time we’d finished buying what Mr. Reed had come for. Bundled up in our winter coats, we had lunch on a bench in the Common, near the botanical gardens, facing the great facade of the Ritz Hotel, the two of us munching sandwiches Mrs. Reed had prepared for us, and which Mr. Reed took from a metal lunch pail, along with a thermos of lemonade.

  “I was tired of Boston before I moved to Chatham,” Mr. Reed told me. “But now—”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now I think I’m tired of Chatham.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  He shrugged. “Anywhere,” he said.

  “Is Mrs. Reed tired of Chatham too?”

  “No, she’s quite content to live in Chatham,” he said, his eyes taking on a strange agitation. “She always has been … content.” He thought a moment, then added, “She’s afraid of things, Henry.” His eyes drifted toward me. “Even afraid of me sometimes, I think.”

  With that, he turned away, placed the thermos in the lunch pail, and snapped it shut. “We’d better be on our way,” he said as he got to his feet, determined, or so it seemed, to end any further conversation about Mrs. Reed.

  It was then I realized that Mr. Reed had already removed his wife to some remote and inaccessible place in his life, locked her in an imaginary attic or down in a dark cellar, where she sat in the shadows, isolated and alone, listening with whatever combination of anticipation or fear to his footsteps on the stairs.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  On the way back to the car, Mr. Reed suddenly stopped at the window of a jewelry store on a side street not far from where we’d parked. “Look how beautiful that is, Henry,” he said, pointing to a necklace made of colored glass. He stared at it as if it were a talisman, something that could magically transform an all too lusterless world.

  “It’s pretty expensive,” I said, my eyes on the small white price tag.

  He looked at me as if I’d offered him a challenge. “Maybe once in a while you have to do something foolish,” he said. “Just to prove that you’re still alive.” With that, he smiled and walked into the shop.

  I followed him inside, then stood at the counter while the shopkeeper retrieved the necklace from the window and handed it to Mr. Reed. He turned it slowly, so that the colored glass in his hands glinted in the light. “I’ll take it,” he said.

  The shopkeeper wrapped it in a piece of tissue and placed it in a small red box. Mr. Reed thanked him and put the box in his jacket pocket.

  We were on the road a few minutes later, Mr. Reed’s spirits suddenly quite high, as if he’d proved himself in some way by buying the necklace, his hand from time to time crawling into the pocket of his jacket, moving slowly inside it, turning the box over delicately, fondling it with his fingertips, a curious excitement in his eyes.

  It was nearly nightfall by the time we got back to Chatham. Mr. Reed drove me directly to my house on Myrtle Street, the old car shaking violently as it came to a halt in my driveway.

  “Thanks for coming along, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.

  I nodded, then glanced toward the house. I could see my mother peering down at me from behind the parlor curtains. “I’d better get inside,” I said. “My mother’s suspicious.”

  “Of what?” Mr. Reed asked.

  I gave him a knowing smile. “Everything.”

  He laughed. “Most people are, Henry,” he said.

  I got out of the car and headed toward the stairs. I’d almost reached them when I heard Mr. Reed call to me. “Henry? Are you going to Milford Cottage with Sarah tomorrow?”

  “I guess.”

  “Tell Miss Channing I’ll drop by when I get back from Maine.”

  “All right,” I answered, then turned and moved on up the stairs.

  The rest of that evening went along routinely. I had dinner with my mother and father, then went for a short walk with Sarah, the two of us sitting on the bench by the bluff for a few minutes before the cold drove us back inside.

  “I don’t like winter on the Cape,” she said with a shiver.

  “I don’t either,” I told her. “Or the fall or spring or summer.”

  She laughed and gave me a playful nudge with her shoulder. “You should have more patience, Henry,” she said. “You’ll be off to college soon enough. You don’t ever have to come back here after that.”

  I looked at her squarely. Only half jokingly, I said, “If I do come back here, kill me.”

  Her face darkened. “Don’t say things like that, Henry. Not even as a joke.” Then she said a line that has never left me since that time. “I wish we could be happy just to be alive.”

  A few minutes later, now alone in my room, I went back over the day I’d spent with Mr. Reed, my affection for him growing, along with my admiration, particularly for the boldness I could see rising in him, making it possible that he might actuall
y break free from whatever it was that bound him so. I thought of the necklace he’d impulsively bought, then of the fact that Christmas was coming on. It struck me that I wanted to give Mr. Reed a present. I thought of something for the boat, a brass nameplate, perhaps, or a lantern for the small cabin we’d nearly completed by then. Then I noticed my sketchbook lying on top of my desk, and knew what the perfect gift would be.

  But several months later, near the conclusion of my first hour of testimony, it was clear that Mr. Parsons was not interested in what I’d later decided to give Mr. Reed for Christmas. He was interested in another gift entirely. The necklace brought back from Boston.

  Mr. Parsons: What happened after Mr. Reed bought the necklace?

  Witness: He put it in his pocket and we walked back to his car and came back to Chatham.

  Mr. Parsons: Did Mr. Reed ever tell you who the necklace was for?

  Witness: No, he didn’t.

  Mr. Parsons: Well, did you ever see it again?

  Witness: Yes, I saw it again.

  Mr. Parsons: Where did you see it?

  Witness: At Milford Cottage. In Miss Channing’s bedroom. It was lying on the bookshelf beside her bed.

  Mr. Parsons: How did you happen to see it?

  Witness: It was the Friday night before … the deaths. Miss Channing went into her bedroom. That’s where I saw it. She took it off the bookshelf, and gave it to me.

  Mr. Parsons: What did she say when she gave it to you, Henry?

  Witness: She said, “Get rid of this.”

  Mr. Parsons: And did you do that for her?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Parsons: What did you do with the necklace?

  Witness: I threw it into Black Pond.

  I will always remember the low murmur that rose from the people in the courtroom when I said that, then the rap of Judge Crenshaw’s gavel, calling them to order. It was late in the afternoon by then, and so he adjourned the court for the day.

  At dinner later that night, my father and mother and I sat silently at the table for a long time, a newly hired servant girl flitting in and out of the dining room, her hair a dazzling red. Then, her eyes aflame, my mother suddenly glanced at me. “They thought they were above everything,” she said with that bitterness that would mark her life from then on, “that woman and Mr. Reed. They thought they could do anything, and no one would ever know.”

  My father’s head jerked up from his plate, his eyes nearly bulging. “Mildred, please.”

  “Above all the rest of us, that’s what they thought,” my mother went on relentlessly, her glare now leveled directly upon my father. “They didn’t care who they hurt.”

  “Mildred, please,” my father repeated, though with little force. “This is not the time or place to—”

  “But they started in death and they ended in death,” my mother declared, referring now to the meeting in the cemetery I’d described in the courtroom only hours before. I could hear again the things I’d said, the answers I’d given, always careful to tell nothing but the truth, yet all the while listening as one truth followed another, the body of evidence accumulating one answer at a time, until, truth by truth, it assumed the shape of a monstrous lie.

  My mother lifted her head proudly. “I’m proud of you, Henry,” she said. “For remembering the ones they murdered.”

  I heard my father gasp. “Mildred, you know perfectly well that—”

  She raised her hand and silenced him. Her eyes fell upon me with a lethal force. “Don’t ever forget the ones that died, Henry.”

  I never did. But in remembering them, I also remembered Miss Channing and Mr. Reed in a way my mother would have abhorred. For despite everything, and for a long, long time, I persisted in thinking of them as romantic figures, modern-day versions of Catherine and Heathcliff, standing together on a snowy hilltop or strolling beside a wintry sea rather than rushing toward each other across a windswept moor.

  And yet, for all that, there were other times when I’d glimpse a row of marble headstones in the same cemetery where they’d gone to be alone that long-ago afternoon, and see Mr. Reed and Miss Channing as they’d appeared that final spring, Mr. Reed staring toward the courtyard, his eyes trained on Miss Channing as she worked on her column of faces.

  But that had been toward the end of it, the curtain poised to close, all the characters already beginning to assume their positions for the final scene: Abigail Reed, scratching at her hands as she peered out across Black Pond; little Mary at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes trained on the distant, darkened shed; I trudging grimly down Plymouth Road through the sweltering summer woods, a single phrase circling in my mind, taken from William Blake and quoted by Mr. Reed, facing the courtyard when he said it, Miss Channing at work on her column only a few short yards away. Sooner murder an infant in its bed than nurse unacted desire.

  PART 4

  CHAPTER 16

  Mr. Reed and his family returned to Chatham from Maine on the third of January in the new year of 1927. I’d just come out of Warren’s Sundries, a cup of hot apple cider steaming in my hand, when his car swept past me. Mrs. Reed was seated in the front seat, Mary in the back, an old trunk lashed to the top of the car, olive green, and with one of its corners slightly battered in.

  Mr. Reed didn’t see me as he drove by, nor did Mrs. Reed, for both were staring straight ahead, Mr. Reed’s face cast in shadow beneath the brim of a floppy gray hat, Mrs. Reed’s locked in stony silence, Mary’s eyes drifting toward me as the car went by, a frail smile on her lips, her small hand lifted in a faint gesture of recognition. Hi, Henry.

  It had been nearly two weeks since Mr. Reed’s departure, and the sight of him returning to Chatham filled me with anticipation, as if, after a long intermission, the curtain had risen again on the adventure in which I’d joined him.

  When I rushed home and told Sarah that I’d just seen Mr. Reed drive past Warren’s Sundries, she’d seemed to share my excitement about his return. “You can get on with the boat now,” she said, smiling. “Maybe finish it by summer.”

  During the Christmas break Sarah and I had often found ourselves alone in the house, my mother working at the church, helping other local women prepare for the Nativity play, my father busy in his office at Chatham School. The school vacation had given us a chance to talk more intimately and for longer periods than we ever had before. Sarah spoke eagerly of one day going to college, her glowing ambition no longer satisfied with attaining the most basic skills, but now set resolutely upon mastering the highest ones. In later years I sometimes thought that it was she who should have been my father’s child, a proud and grateful graduate of Chatham School, I an illiterate boy shipped in from far away, the future author of its ruin.

  For by then my own character and ambitions had moved very far from my father’s teaching. It was Mr. Reed to whom I was drawn, particularly to the passionate discontent I could sense in him, his need to do more, be more, break free of Chatham, discover some new world, as if life were a horn of plenty, vast and infinite, rather than a small basket, inadequately stocked, and from which, in choosing one fruit, we must forever lose another.

  I found him in the boathouse the day after his return to Chatham. Coming through the door, the Christmas gift I’d brought for him held firmly beneath my arm, I’d expected to find him as I usually aid, planing spruce for the rigging, caulking seams, or simply at work with sandpaper, paint, varnish.

  But instead, he was sitting idly at the stern of the boat, his hands in his lap, the cane propped up against the bare, unpainted rail to his left.

  He looked up sharply at my entrance, like someone pulled abruptly from a long period of deep concentration, his face still cast in that mood of troubled thoughtfulness I’d seen in it the day before.

  “I thought you might be here,” I said. “I saw you drive through town yesterday.”

  He smiled faintly. “Go warm yourself,” he said, pointing to the stove. “Then we can start to work.”

  I wa
lked over to the stove, then stood with my back to it, watching silently as Mr. Reed began to apply a coat of sealant to the inner frame of the boat. He seemed preoccupied, very nearly distracted, his eyes narrowing from time to time, his lower hp moving very slightly, as if he were reciting lines beneath his breath.

  “Did you enjoy your trip to Maine?” I asked, though I could tell he hadn’t.

  He shook his head, his eyes following the brush. “Not much.”

  I offered a possible reason, though one I doubted. “It’s probably even colder there than it is here in Chatham.”

  Mr. Reed didn’t look up from his work to answer me. “I don’t care for Maine. I’d rather have stayed here.” He added nothing else for a while. Then he said, “Did you go over to Milford Cottage during the break?”

  “Once,” I told him. “With Sarah.”

  The brush stopped. “And Miss Channing … how is she?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  And yet, even as I answered him, I recalled that there’d been something in Miss Channing’s manner that had seemed somewhat different from the other times I’d accompanied Sarah to Milford Cottage, more subdued than she’d been before, locked in what appeared the same concentration that I now noticed in Mr. Reed. Throughout the lesson she’d occasionally glanced out her front window, peering through the parted curtains to the empty lawn, her eyes filled with a subtle but detectable agitation, the way I imagined the wives of sailors to have gazed out from their widow’s walks, apprehensively scanning the horizon for their husbands’ ships. I now had no doubt that it was Mr. Reed she’d been thinking of at those moments.

  Mr. Reed returned to his work, the brush moving rhythmically right and left.