The Chatham School Affair Page 11

  We walked into the cottage, and I realized that it looked considerably different from when I’d last been inside. Some of Miss Channing’s older sketches had been replaced by more recent ones, quiet village scenes, along with intricate line drawings, beautifully detailed, of various leaves and vegetation she’d found in the surrounding woods, some of which now rested in a large glass vase on her mantel.

  “You’ve made it very cozy inside the house here,” Sarah said. She glanced about the room, taking in other changes, the hooked rug in front of the fireplace, the bookshelf in the far corner, the small red pillows that rested against the wooden backs of the room’s two chairs. “You’ve made it look like a regular house,” she added, drawing her scarf from her head. “It’s quite grand, Miss Channing.” She lifted the basket she’d brought with her from Myrtle Street. “I brought a fruitcake for you. There’s a bit of spirits in it though.” Her mischievous smile flickered. “So we shouldn’t be having too much of it, or we won’t stay clearheaded, you know.”

  Miss Channing took the cake and deposited it on the small table by the window. “We’ll have some after the lesson,” she said.

  They got down to their lessons right away, Miss Channing opening the notebook Sarah had brought along, peering at the writing inside, evaluating it closely before commenting. “Good,” she said warmly. “Very good, Sarah.”

  After that they went to work in the usual way, Miss Channing writing short, simple sentences which Sarah then read back to her. From my place in a chair not far away, I could see how well they got along, how much Sarah admired Miss Channing, perhaps even dreamed of being like her, “a fine lady,” as she’d always said.

  I suppose it was something in that “fineness” that made me take out my sketchbook that morning and begin to draw Miss Channing, concentrating on the way she leaned forward, her head cocked slightly, her hair falling in a dark wave across her shoulders. I found that I could capture her general appearance, but that there was something else I couldn’t get, the way her eyes sometimes darkened, as if a small light had gone off behind them, and which Mr. Parsons later described as “sinister,” the very word he used at her trial.

  She was still working with Sarah when I heard a car coming down Plymouth Road, its engine rattling chaotically as it slid to a halt in the driveway of the cottage.

  Miss Channing rose, walked to the window, and looked out.

  “We have a guest,” she said. There was a hint of excitement in her voice, something Sarah must have heard too, for her eyes swept over to me with a quizzical expression in them.

  By then Miss Channing had walked to the door and opened it, a gust of wind sweeping her black hair across her face.

  “Well, good morning,” she called, waving her arm. She turned toward Sarah and me. “It’s Mr. Reed,” she said.

  I walked to the window. At the edge of the yard I could see Mr. Reed as he got out of his car. He was wearing a heavy wool coat, brown boots, and a gray hat he’d pulled somewhat raffishly to the left. He waved to Miss Channing, then came tramping down the walkway, the snow nearly an inch deep by then.

  “You’re just in time for fruitcake,” Miss Channing told him as he neared the door.

  “Fruitcake,” Mr. Reed said. “Well, it’s certainly the right weather for it.” For a moment he stood on the threshold of the cottage, facing Miss Channing from the bottom of the stairs, his eyes lifted toward her, gazing at her. “I wanted to—” he began, then stopped when he saw Sarah and me inside the cottage. “Oh, I see you have company,” he said, his manner now stiffening slightly.

  “Yes, I do,” Miss Channing said. “Sarah’s here for her reading lesson. She made the fruitcake I mentioned.”

  Mr. Reed appeared at a loss as to what he should do next, whether he should come into the cottage or leave immediately. “Well, I wouldn’t want to disturb Sarah’s lesson,” he said.

  “No, no. We’ve just finished it,” Miss Channing told him. She stepped back into the room. “Please, come in.”

  Mr. Reed hesitated a moment, but then came into the cottage and took a seat by the window as Sarah and Miss Channing disappeared into the kitchen to serve the cake.

  For a time Mr. Reed said nothing. I could tell that my presence disturbed him. Perhaps at that time he thought me an informer, certain that I’d rush back to Chatham, tell my father about his visit to Miss Channing’s cottage. Then he glanced at me with a certain apprehensiveness I’d never seen in him before. “Well, Henry, are you enjoying your classes this year?”

  “I guess so,” I answered.

  He smiled thinly and returned his attention to the window.

  He was still staring out of it a few seconds later, when Miss Channing and Sarah came back into the room. Miss Channing placed the cake on the table in front of him and began to cut. The first piece went to Sarah, the second to Mr. Reed. Then, turning to me, she said, “Would you like a large piece?”

  I shook my head, trying to be polite.

  She smiled, no doubt sensing my hunger, then spoke a line that life forever proves to be a lie. “Take as much as you want, Henry. There is plenty.”

  A few minutes later the four of us walked out of Miss Channing’s cottage, swung to the left, and followed Mr. Reed as he led us down Plymouth Road, then up a gentle slope to a clearing at the top of a nearby hill.

  Once there, we sat down on a fallen tree, the four of us in a single line, facing back down the hill toward Black Pond. The snow had thickened by then; a layer of white gathered on the leafless trees and settled onto the brim of Mr. Reed’s hat.

  “A snow like this,” Miss Channing said. “The flakes so small, but so many of them. Like confetti.”

  Mr. Reed smiled at her. “Is that how you’d paint it, Elizabeth? As confetti?”

  She smiled, but didn’t answer him. Instead, she walked a few paces farther on, while Mr. Reed remained in place, watching her as she reached the crest of the hill, then stood, peering out over the pond. For a moment she remained very still, as if lost in thought. Then she lifted her arms and drew them around her shoulders. It was a gesture made against the cold, quite unselfconsciously, I think, but one Mr. Reed must have experienced as a vision so beautiful and so brief that it remained with him forever after that, set the mark against which everything else would ultimately be measured.

  We stood in a ragged line at the crest of the hill, facing east, across Black Pond, to where a curl of chimney smoke could be seen rising from the trees along its most distant bank.

  “That smoke must be coming from your house, Mr. Reed,” Sarah said, pointing to it.

  Mr. Reed nodded, his manner now strangely somber. “I should be getting back home,” he said, glancing toward Miss Channing. “Abigail is waiting.”

  “It looks just like a Christmas card, if you ask me,” Sarah said happily. “The house by the pond. The snow. Just like a Christmas card, don’t you think so?”

  Mr. Reed smiled, but with a curious wistfulness, as if it were something he remembered fondly from a distant past. “Yes,” he said, his eyes now fixed on the far bank of the pond. “Yes, it looks just like a Christmas card.” Then he turned away and I saw his eyes light upon Miss Channing, linger upon her profile for a moment.

  “And are you going away for the Christmas holiday then?” Sarah asked him. The cold air had caused the color to rise in her cheeks and her eyes sparkled with excitement.

  He seemed reluctant to answer, but did so anyway. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to Maine for a couple of weeks. We always do that, go to Maine.”

  With that, he turned quickly and led us back down the hill to Miss Channing’s cottage.

  Mr. Reed stopped when he reached his car. “I’ll be getting home now,” he said, his eyes on Miss Channing.

  “I’m glad you dropped by,” she told him, her voice quite soft, almost inaudible.

  “Perhaps I’ll come again,” Mr. Reed said in a tone that struck me as subtly imploring, as if he were asking for some sign from her that he
should return.

  If she gave him one, I didn’t see it. Instead, she shivered slightly. “It’s really quite cold.”

  “Yes, it is,” Mr. Reed answered, his voice now entirely matter-of-fact. “Would you like a ride into the village?” he asked Sarah and me.

  We accepted his offer and climbed into the car. Mr. Reed remained outside it, facing Miss Channing, the snow falling between and around them. He spoke to her again, words I couldn’t hear, then stepped forward and offered his hand. She took it, held it for just an instant, then let it go, smiling quietly as he stepped away. It was then I saw it in all its naked force, the full measure of the love that had begun to overwhelm Mr. Reed, perhaps even some hint of the exquisite agony that was inseparable from it, not yet fierce, and certainly not explosive, but the fuse already lit.

  Instead of going directly to Chatham, Mr. Reed swung to the right and drove to his own house on the other side of the pond. “I should tell my wife that I’m going to the marina,” he told us.

  “The marina?” Sarah asked.

  Mr. Reed nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I rented a boat-house there a few years ago. I’m building a boat in it. A fifteen-footer.”

  Sarah stared at him admiringly, the thought of such a grand endeavor playing in her eyes. “When will it be finished?” she asked.

  “With a little help, I could probably finish it by summer,” Mr. Reed answered.

  Impulsively, without giving it the slightest thought, I suddenly made an offer that has pursued me through the years, following me through time, like a dog through the night, its black muzzle forever sniffing at my heels. “I could help you finish it,” I said. “I’d like to learn about boats.”

  Mr. Reed nodded, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Really, Henry? I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, I am,” I told him, though even now I don’t know why I felt such an interest. I do know that it had not come from the seafaring adventure novels I often read, though that was the reason I offered Mr. Parsons the day we walked through the boathouse together. More likely, it had sprung from a voyeur’s dark urge, the allure of the forbidden already working like a drug in my mind.

  We reached his house a few minutes later. Sarah and I remained in the car while Mr. Reed went inside.

  “He’s such a nice man,” Sarah said. “Not an old fogy like some of them at Chatham School.”

  I nodded. “Yes, he is.”

  He came back out of the house almost immediately, a long roll of white paper beneath his arm, bound with twine, like a scroll. I watched as he made his way across the yard, his daughter Mary rushing down the stairs behind him while Mrs. Reed stood at the edge of the porch, wiping her hands on her apron as she watched him trudge back toward us through the falling snow. She was still in that position when he pulled himself into the car, but Mary had bounded toward us, then stopped, smiling mischievously as she attempted to roll a snowball in her hands.

  Once inside the car, Mr. Reed started the engine and began to pull away. We’d drifted back only a few feet, when Mary suddenly rushed forward and hurled the snowball toward us. It landed on the hood and exploded just at the base of the windshield, sending a flurry of white onto the glass. Mr. Reed turned on the wipers, and as they swept across the windshield, I saw Mrs. Reed still standing on the porch, watching motionlessly as Mr. Reed continued backward, away from her, leaving two dark cuts in the snow.

  I told my father about that scene as we stood together on the hill overlooking Black Pond.

  “Do you think she’d already sensed it?” my father asked me when I’d finished the story. “I mean, before Christmas. Before they all went to Maine together? Do you think Mrs. Reed already suspected something?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  His eyes shifted to the left, and I could tell he was gazing in the general direction of where Mr. Reed had once lived with his wife and daughter. “If she did know, or if she already suspected something by that time, then she had to have dealt with it for a long time before …”

  “Yes, she had,” I said. And with those words I saw her again, Abigail Reed standing beside me as she had in the boathouse that day, her eyes staring down into a cardboard box, fixed on the things that lay inside it—the rope, the knife, a nautical map with a route already drawn in red ink.

  “So what finally broke her, I wonder. Sent her over the edge, I mean.”

  I said nothing.

  He looked at me, his puzzlement returning once again. “We’ll never get to the bottom of it, will we, Henry? We’ll never know what she was thinking in the end.”

  I did not answer him, but in my mind I saw her in that final moment, a face pressing toward me out of the murky depths, her red hair waving behind her like a shredded banner.

  CHAPTER 13

  But despite those times when I was forced to consider the end of it, as I had that day on the hill with my father, I found that I more often hearkened back to its beginning, particularly to a story Miss Channing told in class only a few days after we’d all had fruitcake and gone for a walk in the snowy woods.

  At Chatham School, the lunch break was one hour, from twelve to one, and after having lunch in the upstairs dining hall I’d walked into the village, made my way to Peterson’s Hardware Supply, idly fiddled with a fancy new fishing pole, then headed back up the snow-covered hill toward the school.

  As I neared Myrtle Street, I saw Miss Channing sitting on a wooden bench near the edge of the cliff, Mr. Reed standing behind her, leaning on his cane, the wind blowing back his jacket and riffling through his hair, so that he seemed momentarily captured in that passionate wildness Mr. Parsons would later describe as the origins of murder. I saw his hand touch her shoulder, then leap back, as if from a red-hot stove. Then he said something, and she glanced back at him and smiled.

  That’s when she caught me with her eye, peered at me an instant, then rose and began to stride toward me. She was wearing a long, dark coat, and as she moved toward me from the crest of the bluff, the high collar raised up against the back of her neck, I remember thinking that she looked like someone from an earlier century, one of those women we’d read about in Mr. Reed’s literature class the previous year, Eustacia Vye, perhaps, or Madame Bovary, wild and passionately driven, capable of that lethal wantonness Mr. Parsons later described to the jury, and in whose presence, he said, Mr. Reed was “little more than a piece of kindling before a raging flame.”

  And yet, on that particular morning Miss Channing hardly looked wanton. She had dressed herself conservatively, as she usually did, her hair tied with a dark blue ribbon, a cameo at her throat.

  It was Mr. Reed who appeared somewhat emboldened, standing very erect beside her, his face full of purpose as he spoke.

  “Have you seen Sarah?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Not since this morning.”

  Miss Channing drew a book from beneath her arm. It was old, with a peeling cover and frayed yellow pages, its spine long ago broken, so that some of the pages were barely held in place. “I wanted to give her this,” she told me.

  “It’s my primer,” Mr. Reed explained. “From grade school. I’ve kept it all these years, and now Miss Channing thinks she can use it in her lessons with Sarah.”

  I looked at Miss Channing. “If you want, I could give it to her when I go home after school.”

  “Thank you, Henry,” Miss Channing said. She handed me the book. “Just tell Sarah to bring it when she comes for her lesson next Sunday.”

  I nodded.

  “Thank you again, Henry,” Miss Channing said. Then she turned, and the two of them walked back to the bench beside the cliff, Mr. Reed now sitting beside her, though still at a discreet distance, his cane resting between them like a strictly imposed divide.

  I didn’t see Miss Channing again until that same afternoon, this time as she stood behind the table at the front of her classroom.

  “Today we’re going to start something new,” sh
e said. “Landscapes.” She turned and made a broad arc over nearly the entire length of the blackboard, then flattened its upper reaches with a few quick strokes. “This is the general shape,” she said, “of a volcano.”

  With that, her face took on the curious intimacy I’d become accustomed to by then, the odd intertwining of her teaching and her life. “Nothing on earth, not even the sea, will ever make you feel as small as a volcano makes you feel,” she said.

  Then she told us the story of the day her father had taken her to Mount Etna. Its immensity could hardly be grasped by anyone who had not seen it firsthand, she said. It soared from its base to a height of nearly two miles, and the railway that circled it was over ninety miles long, roughly the same distance from Chatham School to Boston. “My father was in awe of the violence of Etna,” she said. “Of how powerful it was, and how indifferent to everything but itself. He wanted me to see how the lava from one of its eruptions had once flowed all the way to the sea, destroying everything in sight.”

  She seemed to envision that vast smoldering flow as it had rolled down the slopes, then flowed across the valley, devouring everything in flames, consuming whole villages as it swept toward the sea.

  Then, rather suddenly her face brightened. “But what I remember best about Mount Etna,” she said, “is that there were flowers everywhere. On the slope and in the valley. So many of them that even near the rim, where I could see smoke and steam rising from the crater itself, even at that point, where everything else was so desolate, I could still smell the flowers down below.” She appeared genuinely amazed at the process she described. “Flowers grown from ash.”

  During all the years since then, I’ve thought of the Chatham School Affair in exactly opposite terms, the whole process utterly reversed, something that flowered briefly, gave off an exquisite sweetness, then, in a harrowing instant, turned everything to ash.

  And so, just as my father later said, some part of it was good. Especially for Mr. Reed, since, as I later learned, he’d never before experienced that form of passion that turns our eyes to the far horizon, erases the past like chalk dust from a board, raises us from the dead as surely as it consigns all others to the grave.