The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

I watched him for a few moments, knowing that he was thinking about Miss Channing. I could feel the present I’d made for him still cradled under my arm. It seemed the perfect time to give it to him.

  “I have something for you,” I said, rising from the chair. “A Christmas present. I finished it while you were in Maine. I hope you like it. Merry Christmas, Mr. Reed.”

  I’d wrapped it in bright green paper and bound it together with a red ribbon. “Thank you,” he said, lifting it slightly, smiling. By its shape he must have known that it was a drawing, although when he opened it, I could tell that what I’d done both surprised and pleased him.

  “Miss Channing,” he murmured.

  I’d drawn her with pen and ink, though in a pose far different than Mr. Reed would have expected, her hair falling over her bare shoulders in a tangled mass, her eyes intense and searching, lips full and slightly parted, her head tilted forward, but her gaze directed straight ahead, a figure both real and unreal, ethereal, yet beckoning, rendered in an unmistakable attitude of seduction.

  “It’s beautiful, Henry,” Mr. Reed said, his eyes fixed on the portrait. He gazed at it a moment longer, then walked over to the small table in the corner. “I’ll hang it here,” he said. He took a nail from his jacket pocket and drove it into the wall above the desk. But before he hung the portrait, he paused, as if another thought had come to him. “You know, Henry, we should show it to Miss Channing.”

  “Do you think she’d like it?”

  “Of course she would.”

  I was not so sure, but Mr. Reed seemed certain, so a few minutes later we were backing out of the driveway of the boathouse, headed for Milford Cottage, Mr. Reed’s spirits considerably higher now, the framed portrait of Miss Channing pressed against his side.

  And so, as it turned out, I didn’t do any work on the boat that day. But during the next few weeks I often returned to the boathouse to do what remained of the caulking and sealing, construct the mast and the boom, assemble the rigging. Enough work so that, four months later, after the Coast Guard had found the boat adrift in Cape Cod Bay, towed it back to Chatham, and moored it in the harbor, I could still walk down to the water’s edge, look out beyond the other boats to the far side of the marina, and see the white prow of the Elizabeth lolling emptily in the distance, my eyes forever focused upon that part of it, the naked mast, the rolled-up sail, that I had helped to make.

  Miss Channing was standing at the edge of Black Pond when we pulled into the driveway, a place where Sarah and I would sometimes find her when we arrived at Milford Cottage on a Sunday morning, and where, in my mind, I still see her, dressed in white, her back to me, framed by a swath of dark water.

  She’d turned as Mr. Reed’s car came to a halt, rushed toward it briefly, then glimpsed me in the passenger seat, and instantly reined herself in, so that she was walking slowly by the time she reached us.

  “Hello, Elizabeth,” Mr. Reed said softly as he got out of the car.

  “Hello, Leland,” Miss Channing answered. It was the first time I’d ever heard her call Mr. Reed by his given name.

  He drew the picture from beneath his arm. “I want to show you something. It’s a Christmas present. Henry gave it to me.”

  She stared at the portrait much longer than I’d expected her to. Now I realize that she could not possibly have cared for the way I’d drawn her, that it was only a nakedly romantic vision of herself, fervidly adolescent, and as she’d continued to study it that afternoon, she might well have been thinking those very words she would later say to Mr. Parsons, her eyes downcast, staring at her hands. It was never me.

  “Very nice,” she said softly at last. She looked at me, smiled thinly, then handed the portrait back to Mr. Reed. “Would you like some tea?”

  Mr. Reed didn’t hesitate in his reply. “Yes. Thank you.”

  We went directly into the cottage.

  “When did you get back?” Miss Channing asked Mr. Reed after she’d prepared the tea and served us.

  “Just yesterday,” Mr. Reed answered.

  “And how was Maine?”

  “Like always,” Mr. Reed muttered. He took a quick sip, then said, “And you? What did you do while I was away?”

  “I stayed here,” she replied. “Reading mostly.”

  Mr. Reed drew in a slow breath. “Tell me, Elizabeth … do you sometimes think that you’re living only in your head?”

  She shrugged. “Is that such a bad place?”

  Mr. Reed smiled gravely. “It depends on the head, I suppose.”

  “Yes, of course,” Miss Channing said.

  There was an interval of silence before Mr. Reed said, “The boat will be finished by summer.”

  Miss Channing said nothing, but only raised the cup to her lips, her eyes on Mr. Reed.

  “After that it would be possible to”—he stopped, as if cautioning himself against speaking too rashly, then went on—“possible to go anywhere, I suppose.”

  Miss Channing lowered the cup to her lap. “Where would you like to go, Leland?”

  Mr. Reed stared at her intently. “Places you’ve already been, I suppose.”

  For an instant, they stared at each other silently, but with an unmistakable intensity and yearning that made the shortest distance between them seem more than they could bear. It was then I first recognized the full depth of what they’d come to feel for each other. It had emerged slowly, incrementally, building every day, word by word, glance by glance, until, at last, it had broken the surface of their long decorum, something irresistibly powerful now blazing up between them, turning all show of mere friendship into a lover’s ruse.

  We walked out of the cottage a few minutes later, Mr. Reed and Miss Channing just ahead of me as we strolled out toward the pond, then turned to the right and walked to the end of the old wooden pier that stretched out over the water.

  “In the spring we’ll go rowing,” Mr. Reed said. “On the Bass River. All of us together.”

  I could see his house in the distance, the small white boat pulled up on dry land. I remembered that only a few weeks before, as we’d stood in the snow on the hill, the sight of his own house had appeared to disturb Mr. Reed, work in his mind like an unpleasant memory. Now it seemed very nearly invisible to him.

  It did not seem so to Miss Channing, however, and as she looked across the water toward it, I saw something in her eyes darken, a little light go out. “You should be getting home, Leland,” she told him.

  “Yes, I should,” he said, though he made no effort to do so. “That was the first boat I ever built, that little rowboat you can see on the bank there,” he said, his words now turned deeply inward, as if it had been in the process of building it that he’d discovered some abandoned part of himself, a part that had grown steadily since then, and was now poised to consume him. “I guess I wanted something that would let me drift by things,” he added. “Not sail toward them. But just drift by. Hardly make a mark.” He drew in a slow, troubled breath. “Your father would have despised me, Elizabeth,” he said.

  Her eyes flashed toward him. “Don’t ever think that, Leland,” she told him. “It isn’t true.” She glanced at me, then away, clearly trying to determine exactly what she could do or say in my presence. Then, as if suddenly alarmed by the fact that I was there at all, she said sharply, “You’d better go, Leland.”

  Mr. Reed nodded silently, turned, and headed off the pier, Miss Channing at his side, the two of them moving slowly across the yard toward where his car rested in the driveway, I off to the right at a little distance, trying to give them all the privacy I could, knowing that it was far less than they desired.

  “Well, I’ll come for you on Monday morning,” Mr. Reed said to Miss Channing when we reached the car. “We’ll drive into school together, just like always.”

  Miss Channing smiled very faintly, then, in a gesture that seemed to come from deep within her, she suddenly stepped forward and pressed her hand against the side of his face. “Yes,” she whispered. �
��Monday morning.”

  It was the only act of physical intimacy I ever saw between them. And yet it was enough so that when Mr. Parsons asked his question several months later—Was it your impression, Henry, that Miss Channing was in love with Mr. Reed at this time?—I could answer, as always, with the truth:

  Witness: Yes.

  CHAPTER 17

  And so it never surprised me that in the photograph taken nearly two months later, they were still together, standing side by side, Mr. Reed holding to his cane, Miss Channing with her arms at her sides, the trees that tower over them still locked in the grip of that long winter, their limbs stripped and frigid, as bare and fruitless as a bachelor’s life can sometimes be.

  Mr. Reed and Miss Channing are not alone in the picture, however. To Mr. Parsons’ dismay, no photograph of them alone was ever located. Instead, they stand amid a throng of teachers and students from Chatham School, along with its office and janitorial staff, everyone assembled on the school’s front lawn, with my father standing proudly in front of them, the lordly captain of their tidy ship, dressed, as always, in his black suit and starched white shirt. The boys fan out to the left and right behind him, all of them dressed in their winter uniforms, shoes shined brightly, wool scarves around their necks, dark blue with gold fringes, the colors of Chatham School. I stand near the end of one flank, my sketchbook pressed manfully against my chest, a warrior behind his sturdy shield.

  In every way, then, it was a picture typical of the time, a group photograph artlessly taken and presumed to have little value save to the people pictured in it. Nor would I ever have specifically recalled it had my father not cut it out of the school annual some months after its publication, then added it to his little archive, his reason for doing so made obvious by what he wrote on the back: Chatham School, 7 March 1927, Last known photograph of Leland Reed.

  But for Mr. Parsons, the principal importance of the photograph was that it showed Mr. Reed and Miss Channing standing beside each other as late as the first week of March 1927, their “illicit affair,” as he called it, still clearly going on. For their arms are touching lightly, as he noted for the jury, a fact that indisputably suggested, as he said in his closing argument, “that Elizabeth Channing and Leland Reed remained united in a relationship whose adulterous and malevolent nature witness after witness has already made clear.”

  The testimony of those witnesses was dutifully recorded in Mr. Parsons’ book, but even had I never read it, I would have remembered what they said, a catalogue of random sightings that stretched through the winter and nosed into the following spring, a scattering of words snatched from longer conversations, often innocent in themselves, but within the context of what later happened on Black Pond, as profoundly sinister and unnerving as a trail of bloody footprints around a scene of slaughter.

  Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 16, 1927.

  Witness: Well, I was sitting on one of the dunes there on First Encounter Beach. That’s when I saw two people coming up the beach, a man and a woman.

  Mr. Parsons: Is it unusual for people to be on the beach in late January, Mr. Fletcher?

  Witness: Yes, sir. The cold pretty much keeps people in. But I probably wouldn’t have made much of it, except that the man had a cane, and you don’t usually see a cripple like that out on the beach no matter when it is.

  Mr. Parsons: What did these two people do on the beach that morning?

  Witness: They walked on a little ways, then they sat down at the bottom of one of the dunes.

  Mr. Parsons: And what did you observe at that point?

  Witness: Well, they talked awhile, but I couldn’t hear what they said, of course. They were sort of snuggled up together, with the man’s arm around the woman’s waist, pulling her up against him. They sat that way awhile, then I saw the man take a piece of paper out of his coat pocket. It was all rolled up, but he unrolled it, and they both looked at it. The man was talking and pointing out things on the paper.

  Mr. Parsons: Do you remember the color of that paper?

  Witness: It was greenish looking. Sort of light green.

  Mr. Parsons: Did you recognize either the man or the woman you saw that morning?

  Witness: No, I didn’t recognize them until later. That is, when I saw their pictures in the paper.

  Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 17, 1927.

  Mr. Parsons: Now, as the harbor master of Chatham harbor, Mr. Porter, you’re in charge of maintaining various buildings and storage areas that are rented to people who use the harbor, are you not?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Parsons: Do you remember renting such a building to Mr. Leland Reed in November of 1923?

  Witness: Yes, I do. He planned to build a boat.

  Mr. Parsons: Did he subsequently build that boat?

  Witness: Yes, he did. He finished it toward the end of this last May.

  Mr. Parsons: During the last weeks of the boat’s construction, did you sometimes have occasion to step inside the building Mr. Reed rented?

  Witness: I went in sometimes. To see how things were going.

  Mr. Parsons: Did you ever happen to see a piece of paper unfolded on the desk inside that building?

  Witness: Yes, sir. It was a nautical map is what it was. Of the East Coast, and down through the Caribbean.

  Mr. Parsons: Did you notice anything about the map that struck you as unusual?

  Witness: Well, I noticed that somebody had drawn a route on it. In red ink.

  Mr. Parsons: Now, this route, this nautical route, it went from where to where?

  Witness: From Chatham to Havana, Cuba.

  Mr. Parsons: Do you remember the color of the paper?

  Witness: It was the usual color for nautical maps. It was pale green.

  Mr. Parsons: Now, Mr. Porter, did you ever see the defendant, Elizabeth Channing, with Mr. Reed in the building where he was building his boat?

  Witness: Not in the building, no, sir. But I saw them out walking through the marina one time.

  Mr. Parsons: And when was this?

  Witness: Around the same time I saw the map, I guess. Early February, I’d say. Mr. Reed was pointing out into the bay there, sort of wheeling his cane around, like he was telling Miss Channing directions.

  Mr. Parsons: And if a boat followed that route out of Chatham harbor, where would it go, Mr. Porter?

  Witness: Into the open sea.

  Mr. Parsons: On that occasion, did you notice anything else about Miss Channing and Mr. Reed?

  Witness: Only that when they turned back toward the boat-house, Miss Channing sort of threw her head back and laughed.

  Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 19, 1927.

  Mr. Parsons: What is your occupation, Mrs. Benton?

  Witness: I teach Latin at Chatham School.

  Mr. Parsons: Are you familiar with the defendant?

  Witness: Yes, sir. Her place … her room at the school, I mean … it’s just across the courtyard from mine.

  Mr. Parsons: So you have a good vantage point to see what goes on in that classroom, is that correct?

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Mr. Parsons: Did you ever see Mr. Leland Reed in that room?

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Mr. Parsons: Often?

  Witness: Just about every day. He would come there and have lunch with Miss Channing. Then he’d come again in the afternoon.

  Mr. Parsons: Tell me, Mrs. Benton, situated as you were, so close to Miss Channing’s room, did you ever hear any conversation pass between the defendant and Mr. Reed?

  Witness: Yes, I did.

  Mr. Parsons: How did that come about?

  Witness: Well, I was coming along the side of Miss Channing’s room, and I heard voices.

  Mr. Parsons: Do you recall the approximate date when you heard the voices?

  Witness: It wa
s March fourth. I know because I had bought a birthday present for my son, and I was taking it home that afternoon.

  Mr. Parsons: And the voices you heard that day, they were coming from Miss Channing’s classroom?

  Witness: Yes, they were, and so I looked in, just as I was passing, and I saw Miss Channing sort of turned away, facing the wall over there by the cabinets, and Mr. Reed was standing behind her.

  Mr. Parsons: Did you hear any conversation at that time?

  Witness: A little. “We’ll find another way.” That’s what Mr. Reed said.

  Mr. Parsons: And that was all?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Parsons: Did Miss Channing reply to that?

  Witness: Well, she kept her back to him, but I heard her say, “There is no other way.”

  Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 20, 1927.

  Mr. Parsons: Now, Mrs. Krantz, you’re a clerk in Peterson’s Hardware, is that right?

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Mr. Parsons: I want to show you a receipt for a purchase made at Peterson’s Hardware on March 15, 1927. Do you recognize this receipt?