The Chatham School Affair Read online

  Still, it was his face that people found most striking, the ragged black beard, lined here and there with gray, and the dark, deep-set eyes. But more particularly the cream-colored scar that ran crookedly from just beneath his left eye, widening and deepening until it finally disappeared into the thick bramble of his beard.

  His name was Leland Reed.

  I often recall my first glimpse of him. It was a summer afternoon several years before. I’d been slouched on the front porch of our house when I looked up to see a man coming down the street. He walked slowly, his shoulders dipping left and right like a little boat in a gently swelling sea. At last he came to a halt at the short metal gate that separated our house from the street. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Arthur Griswald.”

  “That’s my father,” I told him.

  He did not open the gate, but merely peered at me like someone who could see both my past and my future in a single glimpse, how I had been reared, what I would become as a result.

  “He’s inside the house,” I said, stung by his inspection.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Reed answered.

  Seconds later I heard my father say, “Ah, Mr. Reed,” as he opened the door and let him in. Not long after that I found my father and Mr. Reed in the parlor, my father so engrossed in interviewing Mr. Reed that he never noticed me standing at the door, listening with a little boy’s curiosity for the world of men.

  Mr. Reed had come from Boston, as it turned out, where he’d taught at the Boston Latin School for the past three years. He’d grown tired of the city, he said, then went on to provide other details in a self-confident, manly voice, but with something distant in it, too, a voice that later struck me as somewhat similar to his face, strong and forthright in its own way, but irreparably scarred.

  “I’m surprised a man like yourself doesn’t want to live in Boston,” my father said. “I’ve always found it very stimulating.”

  Mr. Reed gave no answer.

  “Would you mind if I asked your age?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  I could tell that my father had thought him older, perhaps because of the wisps of gray visible in his beard, or, more likely, because his manner was so deliberative, his eyes so still.

  “Twenty-eight,” my father repeated. “And … single?”

  “Yes.”

  They talked for well over an hour that afternoon, and although I drifted past the parlor’s open door on several occasions, idly listening as their conversation continued, there was onto one small fragment of it that later struck me as revealing of the kind of man Mr. Reed actually was. It had come toward the end of the interview, my father’s pipe now lying cold and smokeless in the ashtray beside his chair, Mr. Reed still seated opposite him, both feet pressed firmly on the floor.

  “And what about travel,” my father asked. “Have you done much of that?”

  Mr. Reed shook his head. “Only a little.”

  “Where to, if I may ask?”

  “France.”

  My father seemed pleased. “France. Now, that’s a beautiful country. What part did you visit?”

  “Only the countryside,” Mr. Reed answered quietly, adding nothing more, so that my father had to finally coax him forward with another question.

  “You were there on business?”

  Mr. Reed shook his head, and I saw one of his large hands move down to a right knee that had begun to tremble slightly.

  “Just there on vacation, then?” my father asked lightly.

  “No,” Mr. Reed answered, a single coal-black eyebrow arching suddenly, then lowering again. “The war.”

  I remember that his voice had become strained as he’d answered, and that his eyes had darted toward the window briefly. At that, both my father and I suddenly realized that the casualness of my father’s question had plumbed an unexpectedly raw aspect of Mr. Reed’s experience, miraculously revealing to us what Mr. Reed himself must have seen some years before, an exploded shell lifting mounds of muddy earth, men hurling upward, then plummeting down, his own body spinning in a cloud of smoke, bits of himself flying away in surreal tongues of flame.

  “Oh,” my father said softly, glancing toward the cane. “I didn’t know.”

  Mr. Reed drew his eyes back to my father but didn’t speak.

  “In your letter you didn’t mention that you were a veteran. Most men do when they’re applying for a job.”

  Mr. Reed shrugged. “I find it difficult to do that,” he said.

  My father reached for his pipe, though I noticed that he didn’t light it. “Well, tell me why you think you’d like to teach at Chatham School.”

  I don’t remember Mr. Reed’s answer, but only that my father had appeared satisfied with it, and that Mr. Reed left the house a few minutes later, presumably walking back to the bus stop in Chatham center, then boarding a bus for Boston. I didn’t see him again until almost two months later, and even then only briefly, a man moving down the corridor of Chatham School, one hand clutching a book, the other a cane, whose steady, rhythmic thump announced him like a theme.

  As it still did when I heard it tapping down the hallway that autumn afternoon seven years later, followed by the inevitable cautionary whispers of, “Shhh. Mr. Reed is coming.”

  However, on that particular day he didn’t come into the room as he usually did, but stopped at the door instead, leaning one shoulder into it, so that he stood at a slant. “There probably won’t be many more days as pleasant as this one,” he said, nodding toward the window, the clear, warm air beyond it. “So I thought we’d have class out in the courtyard this afternoon.”

  With that, he turned and led us down the corridor to the rear of the school, then out into the little courtyard behind it. Once there, he positioned himself beside the large oak that stood near the center of the courtyard and motioned for us to sit down on the ground in a semicircle around him. Then, he leaned against the tree and glanced down at the book he’d brought with him. “Today we’re going to begin our study of Lord Byron,” he said, his voice a curious combination of something soft and rough, and which at times seemed almost physical, like the touch of a fine, unsanded wood. “You should pay close attention, for Byron lived the poetry he wrote.”

  As always, Mr. Reed began by giving us the details of the poet’s life, concentrating on his travels and adventures, a wild vagabond existence that Mr. Reed clearly admired. “Byron didn’t settle for what the rest of us settle for,” he told us. “He would find the lives we lead intolerably dull.”

  During the next hour we learned that Byron had been raised in a place called Aberdeen, that as a child he’d been stricken with infantile paralysis, his right leg and foot so terribly contracted that he’d walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. “Like me,” Mr. Reed said with a quiet smile, nodding toward his cane, “except that he refused to let it hinder him, or change his life in any way.”

  Byron had had what Mr. Reed called “an adventurous nature,” throwing wild parties at his own castle, drinking burgundy from a human skull. “He lived his ideas,” Mr. Reed declared. “Nothing ever stood in his way.”

  Class was nearly over by the time Mr. Reed finished telling us about Byron’s life. But before releasing us completely, he opened the book he’d brought with him. “I want you to listen now,” he said as he began flipping the pages briskly until he found the lines he’d been searching for. Then he looked toward us and smiled in that strange way I’d already noticed, a smile that seemed to require an undisclosed amount of effort. “Words need to be heard sometimes,” he said. “After all, in the beginning all poetry was spoken.”

  With that he read the lines he’d selected for us, his voice low, almost a whisper, so that the words themselves sounded inordinately private, an intimate message sent by one whose peculiar sadness seemed at one with Mr. Reed’s.

  Every feeling hath been shaken;

  Pride, which not a world could bow,

  Bows to thee—by thee fo
rsaken

  Even my soul forsakes me now;

  But ’tis done—all words are idle—

  Words from me are vainer still;

  But the thoughts we cannot bridle

  Force their way without the will.

  His voice trailed off at the end of the recitation, though his eyes remained on the lines a moment longer, his head bowed wearily, as if beneath the weight of thoughts he himself could not bridle.

  “I think it’s sometimes a good idea to end class with a poem,” he said at last. Then he paused, watching us silently, perhaps hoping for a response. When none came, he closed the book. “All right, you may go,” he said.

  We scrambled to our feet quickly, gathering our books into our arms, and began to disperse, some heading back into the building, others toward the rear entrance of the courtyard and the playing fields beyond. Only Mr. Reed stayed in place, his back pressed against the tree, the volume of Byron’s poetry dangling from his hand. He looked as if he might crumple to the ground. But then I saw him draw in a long, reviving breath, straighten his shoulders, step away from the tree, and begin to make his way toward the building. “Good night, Henry,” he said as he went by me.

  “Good night, Mr. Reed,” I answered.

  I picked up my books and turned to the right. Miss Channing’s classroom was directly in front of me, and when I glanced toward it, I saw that she stood at one of the three large windows that overlooked the courtyard. Her eyes were fixed upon Mr. Reed with a clearly appreciative gaze, taking in the slight limp, the narrow cane, perhaps even the jagged cream-colored scar. I’d never seen a woman look at a man in exactly the same way, almost as if he were not a man at all, but a painting she admired for the boldness of its execution, the way the standard symmetries had been discarded in favor of jaggedness and instability, her earlier sense of beauty now adjusting to take it in, finding a place for mangled shapes.

  CHAPTER 8

  From my place beneath the willow, staring out across the water, I could barely make out the house in which Mr. Reed had lived so many years before, and so I stepped away from the tree and took a narrow footpath that hunters and swimmers and the occasional forest solitaire had maintained over the years, and which I knew to be the one Miss Channing had taken on that Saturday evening two weeks later, when she’d set out for Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of Black Pond. As I began to move down that same path, I heard Mr. Parsons say, So, from the beginning you were aware of their meetings? My answer, Yes, I was. And what were your impressions, Henry? I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Do you now? Yes.

  A tangle of forest had surrounded Miss Channing that evening, and she might well have seen a lone white gull as it plummeted toward the surface of the pond. No doubt she heard the soft crunch of the leaves beneath her feet, but she may have heard an assortment of bird cries, too, or the scurrying of a field mouse, or the plop of a frog as it leaped into the water. For those were the things I saw and heard as I retraced her steps that morning, moving slowly, at an old man’s pace.

  Her dinner at Mr. Reed’s house had been arranged several days before. By then my father had told Miss Channing that it was getting a bit too cold for her to continue walking back and forth from her cottage to Chatham School. He’d gone on to inform her that there was another teacher who lived on Black Pond. It would be a simple matter for him to drop by for her each morning and return her to Milford Cottage in the afternoon.

  And so at some point before the end of October, I saw Mr. Reed escort Miss Channing to his car, a battered sedan, its wheels mud-spattered, its running board hardly more than a drooping sheet of rust, its windows streaked and scratched as if they’d been sandblasted with sea salt.

  As to what they’d said to each other on that first drive, no one would ever have known had not Mr. Parsons later been so insistent on learning every word ever spoken between them, requiring revelations so detailed that I could still hear their voices whispering in the air around me as I struggled to make my way along the edges of Black Pond.

  I live just on the other side of the pond. You can probably see my house from your cottage.

  Yes, I’ve seen it.

  You may have seen me on the pond too. I go rowing on it occasionally.

  Do you row at night?

  Sometimes.

  Then I think I saw you once. It was my first night in the cottage. I went out to stand by the pond. It was overcast, but I think I saw you for just a moment. Not you, exactly. Just part of the boat, and your hand. Why do you go out at night?

  For the solitude, I suppose.

  You don’t live alone?

  No. I have a wife and daughter. What about you? Do you live alone?

  Yes.

  You’re not afraid? Living out here?

  No.

  Some people would be.

  Then they should live elsewhere, I suppose.

  Listening to their voices as I continued my journey around Black Pond that morning, I realized that such a statement had to have struck Mr. Reed as amazingly self-possessed. How different she must have seemed from any other woman he had ever known.

  I’ve seen you teaching. The boys seem very interested in your class.

  I hope they are.

  They look very attentive.

  I’ve seen you with your class too. You were reading to them in the courtyard.

  Oh, yes, a couple weeks ago. I wanted to take advantage of what I thought might be the last day we could go outside before winter sets in.

  It was from Byron.

  You recognized it.

  Yes, I did. My father read a great deal of Byron. Shelley too. And Keats.

  At that moment Miss Channing told him of her visit to the cluttered Roman apartment in which Keats had died. His books were still there, she said, along with pages written in Keats’s own hand.

  The interest Mr. Reed by then had come to feel for Miss Channing can be gauged by what he did next.

  I know this is rather sudden, Miss Channing. But I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with my family and me tomorrow evening?

  I would like that very much, Mr. Reed.

  Around six, then?

  Yes.

  Shall I pick you up?

  No. I like to walk. Besides, your house is just on the other side of the pond.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Only a ruin remained of Mr. Reed’s house, and even that was so overgrown, I nearly missed it as I made my way along the water’s edge that morning. Hung with vines, its roof covered with forest debris, a scattering of shattered lobster traps strewn across its grounds, it gave off a forlorn sense of having been abruptly abandoned, then left to rot forever.

  The stairs creaked loudly as I climbed them, grabbing a shaky railing as I went, then stood silently on the porch for a moment, looking into the house, thinking of the terrible words that had been said within its cramped few rooms, wondering if some element of all that might linger still, like a poison mold growing on the walls. A tiny voice pierced the air. Mama. Mama.

  It was then that I glanced back out into the yard, where for a single visionary instant I saw a small girl in a white boat closely tethered to the shore, playfully pulling at the oars, her blond hair held in place by a thin red ribbon.

  From behind me, a second, disembodied voice called her name. Mary, Mary.

  I turned and saw Mrs. Reed standing at the door of a house that was no longer overgrown with vines, its paint no longer peeling from wood gone black and sodden in the years since its abandonment. She seemed to stare directly through me, as if I were the ghostly one, she brought back to life. Then her eyes narrowed, and she brushed back a loose strand of red hair as she called to her daughter once again, her words echoing in the air, bounding and rebounding across the unresponsive surface of Black Pond. Mary, come inside.

  I felt a cold wave rush through me, then saw Mary dart past her mother and into the house, laughing happily as she dissolved into its darkened space, her laughter growing faint in the distance, as if s
he were still running, though now down the passageway of a vast, unending tunnel.

  Like a blast of arctic air, I felt all the terror of the past sweep over me in a breathless shiver, as if it were Mrs. Reed and her daughter who had drawn me back into their world rather than I who had returned them unwillingly to mine.

  I peered into the interior of the house, its front door long ago pulled down. The walls were now stripped and bare, the fireplace crumbling, the floor little more than a loose assemblage of sagging wooden slats. The kitchen was at the rear of the house, silent, empty, a dusky shaft of light pouring in from the rear window, and with nothing but four rust-colored indentations in the floor to indicate the heavy iron stove Mrs. Reed had used to prepare dinner for her family.

  From court testimony I knew that Mrs. Reed had made a special meal for Miss Channing that night, that it had consisted of cabbage and boiled ham, deviled eggs, and a rhubarb pie. I knew that after dinner Mary Reed had busied herself in the front room while the Reeds and Miss Channing lingered over a pot of coffee whose phantom aroma I could almost smell, as if, down all the passing years, it had continued to waft out of the deserted kitchen, filter through the long-abandoned rooms, drift out onto the creaky, leaf-strewn porch where I stood.

  Throughout dinner Mr. Reed had kept the conversation centered on Miss Channing, forever returning her to one place or another from her travels, so that during the course of the dinner she’d described everything from the look of Vesuvius as it loomed menacingly over the ruins of Pompeii to the tiny Danish village beloved by Christian Andersen. “How interesting,” had been Mr. Reed’s repeated responses. “How the boys at school must enjoy listening to you.”