The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  I showed up at his rented boathouse just after Miss Channing’s class that day, images of smoldering volcanos still playing in my mind, my sketchbook already filled with my own attempts at rendering an explosive and primeval violence I was certain I would never experience.

  Mr. Reed was sitting at the little wooden desk he’d placed in the corner, a pile of papers spread out across it. He turned to face me as I came through the door.

  “Hello, Henry,” he said.

  “I wondered if you still needed help on the boat.”

  He smiled. “So, you’re still interested?” he asked, already reaching for his cane

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there she is,” he said, indicating the boat. “What do you think?”

  The boat rested on a wooden frame that stretched nearly the entire length of the room. The inner shell had only been partially fitted, so I could see into its still-unfinished interior. Hoisted upon the frame, without a mast, and with slats missing from its outer wrapping, it looked more like the skeleton of some ancient beast than a boat.

  “As you can see,” Mr. Reed said, “there’s still a lot to do. But not as much as you might think. Toward the end, it all comes together rather suddenly.” He paused, gauging my response. Then he said, “We can start now, if you’re still interested.”

  We set to work right away, Mr. Reed giving me my first basic lesson in boat-building, the patience it required, the precision of measurement. “You have to go slowly,” he said at one point. “Just let things fall into place.” He offered a wry smile. “It’s like a woman who can’t be rushed.”

  As we continued to work that afternoon, it struck me that something had fallen away from Mr. Reed, some part of the impenetrable weariness I’d seen during all the years I’d known him, and which had served to cloak him in a melancholy that seemed inseparable from his character. A new and vital energy had begun to take its place. It was as if a fire were slowly burning off the detritus of his former life, making him more alert and animated than I’d ever seen him, a sense of buoyancy replacing the ponderousness that had so deeply marked him until men, and which I have since come to recognize not as the product of a dream already fulfilled, but only of a hope precariously revived.

  We worked together all that afternoon, Mr. Reed more talkative than he’d ever been outside the classroom. He spoke of writers he admired, quoted lines from their works, though not so much in the manner of a teacher as simply of a man whose mind and heart had been informed and uplifted by his reading. He talked about his boat as well, its speed and durability, what its capacities were. “A boat this size, built this way,” he said at one point, “you could sail it around the world.” He thought a moment, as if considering such a possibility. “You’d have to sail along the coastline and skip from island to island,” he added. “But it could be done.”

  Only once did the old melancholy appear to settle over him again. “Just one life, Henry,” he said, staring out the window of the boathouse, his eyes fixed on the bay, and, beyond it, the open sea. “Just one life, and no more chances after that.” He turned back to me “That’s the whole tragedy, right there.”

  It seemed the perfect moment to add my own comment. “That’s what Miss Channing’s father says,” I told him. “In his book. He says that if you look back on your life and ask What did I do?, then it means that you didn’t do anything.”

  Mr. Reed nodded thoughtfully, and I could tell he was turning the line over in his mind “Yes, that’s true. Do you think Miss Channing believes that?”

  With no evidence whatsoever, I answered, “Yes, I do.”

  He seemed pleased by my answer. “Well, it is true, Henry. Absolutely true. Whether most people want to believe it or not.”

  I suppose that from then on I felt in league with Mr. Reed, willing to work on his boat every afternoon and weekend if mat’s what it took to finish it, willing to listen to him in all the weeks that followed, his tone bright and buoyant at first, then darkening steadily until, toward the end, he seemed mired in endless night.

  It was nearly evening when I finally headed back toward home. And I remember that as I walked up the coastal road, the autumn drizzle felt more like a spring rain, the bare limbs not destined for a deeper chill, but on the very brink of budding.

  The table had already been set for dinner by the time I reached home, my mother and father in their usual places at opposite ends of it, Sarah moving smoothly from one to the other, humming softly under her breath so my mother could not hear her.

  My father glanced at his pocket watch as I took my seat. “Are you aware of the time, Henry?”

  I wasn’t, but said I was, then gave him a reason that I knew would justify my tardiness. “I was down at the marina, helping Mr. Reed.”

  “Helping Mr. Reed?” my mother asked doubtfully. “To do what?”

  “He’s building a boat,” I answered. I glanced toward Sarah, saw her give me a quick conspiratorial smile. “He’s been working on it for a long time,” I added. “He wants to finish it by summer.”

  My mother could not conceal her disapproval. “It’s his house over on the pond that could use a little work, if you ask me,” she sniffed. “More than some fool boat down at the marina.”

  “Now, Mildred,” my father cautioned, always careful that teachers at Chatham School not be criticized in front of me. “What Mr. Reed does in his spare time is his own business. But being on time for dinner is your responsibility, Henry, and be sure you look to it from now on.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, glancing once again toward Sarah, her smile even broader now, her eyes gleaming with a quick, mischievous fire.

  Her room was in the attic.

  The tap at the door must have surprised her. “Who’s there?” she asked, a hint of apprehension in her voice.

  “It’s me, Henry,” I said, standing in the utter darkness of the narrow stairway. “Miss Channing wanted me to give you a book.”

  She opened the door slightly, her face in candlelight. “You shouldn’t be up here, Henry,” she whispered. “What if your …’

  “They’re asleep,” I told her. I smiled mockingly. “I know they are. I can hear my mother snoring.”

  She laughed sharply, and swiftly covered her mouth. “Be quick about it, then,” she urged as she opened the door.

  The room was tiny, with a slanting ceiling, her bed pressed up against the far wall, a small desk and a chair at the other end, along with a short bureau with a porcelain wash basin and china pitcher on top. Now, when I recall that room, it seems smaller still, particularly compared to the aspirations of the girl who lived there, the life she yearned for.

  “Miss Channing asked me to give you this,” I said, handing her Mr. Reed’s primer.

  She stepped over to her bed and sat down upon it. I stood a few feet away, watching as she opened the book and began to leaf through the pages.

  “It’s Mr. Reed’s primer,” I said. “The one he had in grade school. Miss Channing wants you to bring it with you on Sunday.”

  She continued to glance through the book until she reached the end. Then she turned back to its beginning. “Look, Henry,” she said, her eyes on the book’s front page.

  I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her.

  “Look at what Mr. Reed wrote to Miss Channing,” she said.

  The words were in dark blue ink, Mr. Reed’s small, tortured hand immediately recognizable, though the words seemed far more tender than Mr. Reed himself ever had.

  My dear Elizabeth,

  I hope that you can make some use of this book, even though, like the owner of it, it is an old and worn-out thing.

  With love,

  Leland

  Sarah’s eyes lingered on the inscription for a time before she lifted them to me, her hand suddenly brushing mine very gently, almost silkily, with no more weight than a ribbon. “Have you ever been in love, Henry?” she asked, the words coming with an odd hesitancy, her eyes upon me with a softness and sense of
entreaty that have never left me since then, and which I often recall on those nights when the wind blows and drifts of snow climb toward the window, and I am alone With my memories of her.

  My answer was quick and sure. “No.”

  I saw her shoulders fall slightly, felt her hand draw away. She closed the book and placed it on the bed beside her. “You’d better go now,” she said, her eyes now averted.

  I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the narrow landing. “Well, good night, Sarah,” I said as I turned to close the door again.

  She did not look up, but kept her head bowed slightly so that a dark curtain of black hair fell over the right side of her face. “Good night, Henry,” was all she said.

  I closed the door and returned to my room. I don’t recall thinking of Sarah again that night. But I have thought of her often since then, wondered if things might have turned out differently on Black Pond had I lingered a moment longer in her room. Perhaps I might finally have grasped the ribbon that dangled from her gown, given it a slow, trembling pull, and thus come to know both the power of that first encounter, and then the later pleasures of enduring love. I don’t know if Sarah would have given herself to me that night, but if she had, I might have gone to her from then on rather than to the boathouse or Milford Cottage. I might have experienced love up close and through all its changing seasons, and by doing that, come to feel spring as something other than a cruel deception, winter the dreadful truth of things.

  CHAPTER 14

  But in the end, I chose to think of life rather than to live it.

  I said as much in my office one afternoon. I’d been talking to Mr. Parsons’ son, Albert Parsons, Jr., the two of us in our middle fifties by then, with the elder Mr. Parsons now impossibly old and senile, a figure rooted on a bench outside the town hall, muttering to himself and flinging crumbs to the pigeons.

  “So many books, Henry,” he said in a tone that seemed vaguely accusatory. “Have you read them all?”

  I offered him a mirthless smile. “They’re what I have instead of a wife and children.”

  Albert laughed. “You’re a pistol, Henry. A real barnyard philosopher.” He sat back and let his eyes roam the bookshelves in my office, squinting at the titles. “Greeks and Romans. Why them in particular?”

  “They were my father’s favorites.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe because he thought they saw it more clearly.”

  “Saw what?”

  “Life.”

  He laughed again. “You’re a pistol, Henry,” he repeated.

  We’d just come to a settlement that each of us felt our clients would accept, his being the aggrieved party in a construction contract dispute, mine, a local contractor named Tom Cannon.

  “You know, Henry, I was a little surprised that Tom ever got named in a lawsuit like this,” Albert said. “He’s done plenty of work for me, and I’ve never had any trouble with him.” He took a sip of the celebratory brandy I’d just poured him. “He even built that little office my father used when he was working on his memoirs.”

  Some part of the old time abruptly reasserted itself in my mind, and I saw Mr. Parsons as he’d stood before the jury on the last day of Miss Channing’s trial, a man in his early forties then, still young and vigorous, no doubt certain that he’d found the truth about her, revealed for all to see the murderous conspiracy she’d hatched with Leland Reed.

  “How is Mr. Parsons these days?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s as good as can be expected, I guess,” Albert answered. “Of course, the way he is now, there’s not a whole lot he can do but sit around.” He took a greedy sip from the brandy. “He likes to hang around the courthouse for the most part. Or on that bench in front of the town hall.” He shrugged. “He mutters to himself sometimes. Old age, you know.”

  I saw Mr. Parsons on his lonely bench, his hand rhythmically digging into a paper bag filled with bread crumbs or popcorn, casting it over the lawn, a circle of pigeons sweeping out from around him like a pool of restless gray water.

  Albert took a puff on his cigar, then flicked the ash into the amber-colored ashtray on my desk. “He talks about my mother, of course, along with my sister and me,” he went on absently. “Some of his big cases too. They come to mind once in a while.”

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “The Chatham School Affair.”

  Albert looked at me, perhaps surprised that it had leaped into my mind so quickly. “Yes, that one in particular,” he said. “He got quite a shock from that woman … what was her name?”

  “Channing,” I said. “Elizabeth Channing.”

  Albert shook his head. “Nobody could have imagined that that woman would cause so much trouble,” he added with a short laugh. “Not even your father.”

  Inevitably I recalled how the people of Chatham had finally laid a large portion of the blame for what happened on Black Pond at my father’s feet. It was the price he’d paid for hiring Miss Channing in the first place, then turning what everyone considered a blind eye to her behavior, a delinquency that his neighbors had never been able to forget, nor his wife forgive.

  “You think he ever suspected anything, Henry?”

  I remembered the look on my father’s face as he’d closed the door of his office that day, with Mr. Parsons in his dark suit, reaching into the box he’d placed on the chair beside him, drawing out a book with one hand, a length of gray rope with the other, Miss Channing standing before him in a white dress. “Not of what they thought she did. No, I don’t think he ever suspected her of that.”

  “Why, I wonder,” Albert said casually, as if he were discussing no more than a local curiosity, “I mean, she was pretty strange, wasn’t she?”

  For a moment I thought I saw her sitting silently on the other side of the room, staring at me as she had that last time, her hair oily, matted, unwashed, her skin a deathly pale, but still glowing incandescently from out of the surrounding shadows. In a low, unearthly whisper I heard her repeat her last words to me: Go now, Henry Please.

  “No, she wasn’t strange,” I said. “But what happened to her was.”

  Albert shrugged. “Well, I was just a little boy at the time, so really, about all I remember is that she was very pretty.”

  I recalled my father’s eyes the day she’d approached him across the summer lawn of Milford Cottage, her bare feet in the moist green grass, then the look on Mr. Reed’s face as he’d gazed at her on the hill that snowy November morning. “She was beautiful,” I told Albert Parsons, my eyes now drifting toward the window, then beyond it, to the lighthouse she’d fled from that terrible afternoon. “But she couldn’t help that, could she?”

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” Albert said. “It was the man who was the real shocker in the whole thing. The other teacher, I mean.”

  “Leland Reed.”

  “That’s right.” Albert released a quick, mocking laugh. “I mean, God almighty, Henry, who’d have thought that a man like him would interest a young woman as pretty as that Channing woman was?” He shook his head at the curiousness of human beings, their woeful randomness and unpredictability, the impenetrable wilderness they make of life. “Why, hell, that Reed fellow looked like a damn freak, as I remember it, always limping around, his face all scarred up. Just a rag of a man, mat’s what my father said. His very words. Just a rag of a man.”

  I drew my eyes away from the lighthouse and settled them on the old oak that stood across the way, its bare limbs rising upward, twisting and chaotic, a web without design. Beyond it, down a distant street that led to the marina, I could make out the gray roof of the old boat-house where Mr. Reed and I had labored to build his boat. In my memory of those days I could see him working frantically through the night, painting, varnishing, making the final preparations for its maiden voyage. Like someone whispering invisibly in my ear, I heard mm say, Disappear, disappear, the grim incantation of his final days.

  “Of course that Cha
nning woman certainly saw some thing in him,” Albert said. He smiled. “What can you say, Henry? The mysteries of love.”

  But the nature of what Miss Channing might have seen in Leland Reed seemed hardly to matter to Albert, Jr. He crushed his cigar into the ashtray. “They didn’t get away with it though,” he said. “That’s the main thing. I once heard my fattier say that he’d never have gotten to the bottom of it—that he’d have just thought it was all some kind of terrible accident—if it hadn’t been for you.”

  I felt something give in the thick wall I’d built around my memory of that time. In my mind I saw Mr. Parsons standing in front of me, the two of us on the playing field behind Chatham School, facing each other in a blue twilight, Mr. Parsons suddenly twisting his head in the general direction of Black Pond before returning his gaze to me, his hand coming to a soft paternal rest upon my shoulder. Thank you, Henry. I know how hard it is to tell the truth.

  The newspaper headline stated the fact baldly: STUDENT TESTIFIES IN CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR.

  There’d been a photograph beneath the headline, a young man in dark trousers and a gray jacket, his black hair now slicked back and neatly combed, a figure that had not in the least resembled the wild-eyed boy who’d stood at the top of the lighthouse some weeks before, madly drawing one frenzied portrait after another, rendering Chatham as a reeling nightmare world.

  Others in the village have no doubt forgotten what I said upon the stand, but I never have, nor ever will. So that on that day over forty years later, when I’d sat in my office with Albert Parsons, Jr., watching him light his second cigar, I’d seen it all unfold once again, myself in the witness box, dressed in the black trousers and gray jacket of Chatham School, my hair neatly combed, all my wild ideas of flight and freedom now brought to heel by Mr. Parsons’ first question: When did you first meet Elizabeth Channing?