The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Mr. Parsons: What items were purchased, according to the receipt?

  Witness: Well, the first one is a bottle of arsenic.

  Mr. Parsons: Do you recall the person who purchased that arsenic on March fifteenth?

  Witness: Yes, I do.

  Mr. Parsons: Who was it, Mrs. Krantz?

  Witness: Mr. Leland Reed.

  Mr. Parsons: Could you read the other items that Mr. Reed purchased that day?

  Witness: It says here, a knife and twenty feet of rope.

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

  Mr. Parsons: What is your job, Mrs. Abercrombie?

  Witness: I’m Mr. Griswald’s secretary.

  Mr. Parsons: By “Mr. Griswald,” you mean Arthur Griswald, the headmaster of Chatham School?

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Mr. Parsons: Mrs. Abercrombie, did you ever see or hear anything transpire between the defendant and Mr. Leland Reed that indicated to you that the nature of their relationship was somewhat beyond what might be expected of two professional colleagues, or even two friends?

  Witness: Yes, I did.

  Mr. Parsons: Could you tell the court, please.

  Witness: One afternoon—this was during the last week of March, I think—anyway, I was walking through the parking area. It was late. I mean, it was night already. Everybody had gone home. But Mr. Griswald had been preparing next year’s budget, so I’d stayed late to help him. Anyway, I saw that Mr. Reed’s car was still parked in the parking area, there beside the tree, where he usually put it, and as I went on by, I saw that he was sitting behind the wheel, and that Miss Channing was in the car with him.

  Mr. Parsons: Miss Channing was sitting in the front seat, was she?

  Witness: Yes, she was. And she had her hands sort of at her throat, and I saw Mr. Reed lean over and take her hands and pull them away.

  Mr. Parsons: Now, Mrs. Abercrombie, in your capacity as assistant to Mr. Griswald, did you ever have a conversation with the headmaster about the behavior of Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, the very scene that you witnessed that evening in the parking lot of Chatham School?

  Witness: Yes, I did. I felt like it was something he needed to know about. So I told him about what I’d seen that night in Mr. Reed’s car, and I also told him that there was a lot of talk about Miss Channing and Mr. Reed among the other teachers.

  Mr. Parsons: How did Mr. Griswald respond to what you told him?

  Witness: He said he wasn’t much for gossip.

  Mr. Parsons: And that was the headmaster’s only response to what you reported to him?

  Witness: The only one I know of, yes.

  But it had not been the only response my father made, as I had known long before Mrs. Abercrombie took the stand. For one day during the very next week, he dropped in on Mr. Reed’s afternoon class.

  I remember how I’d entered Mr. Reed’s room to find my father already stationed in one of the desks at the back. He nodded to each of us as we came into the room, then silently watched as Mr. Reed began his lesson, leaning back, trying to appear casual, but with a clearly visible sense of vigilance in his eyes.

  My father remained in that position during the entire class, his gaze only occasionally drawn toward the courtyard, Miss Channing’s room at the far end of it. Instead, he kept his attention intently focused upon Mr. Reed, no doubt listening not only to what he said, but how he said it, observing not just a teacher going through the motions, but the man behind the teacher, looking for that broken part of Mr. Reed that he so deeply feared and distrusted, not the part that had been shattered in the war, but long before, as he conceived it, in Adam’s dreadful fall.

  When the class was over, my father rose quietly and walked to the front of the room. He said something to Mr. Reed, nodded politely, then walked down the corridor to his office. I watched as he made his way down the hallway, his dark, ponderous frame like an ancient ship cutting through a stream of youthful, darting boys, silent, meditative, a melancholy figure in a black coat, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath the burden of our lost and implacable hearts.

  CHAPTER 18

  Spring came at last, and toward the middle of April, we went rowing, just as Mr. Reed had promised we would on that cold January day when the three of us stood at the end of the pier together and looked out over Black Pond.

  It was a Saturday, warm and sunny, with what my father called “the glow of Easter” everywhere around us. During the preceding months I’d worked on the boat with Mr. Reed and attended classes with Miss Channing, but I’d actually seen them together only during their accustomed arrivals and departures from Chatham School. All their other “secret rendezvous,” as Mr. Parsons later called them, had been discreetly held outside my view.

  I’d gotten to the boathouse early that morning, already at work when Mr. Reed arrived, fully expecting that we’d labor through the day, as we always did, finish up toward the end of the afternoon, then take a long walk on the beach near the marina.

  Mr. Reed had arrived at the boathouse with a very different plan in mind, however, one he announced as soon as he opened the door and peered inside.

  “It’s too pretty to be cooped up in here,” he said, one foot inside the boathouse, the other still on the walkway outside it. He stepped out of the door and into the warm spring air. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me to follow after him.

  I followed him out the door, then down the wooden walkway toward the road. In the distance I could see his car, half-concealed behind one of the marina’s old outbuildings, but enough of it visible so that I could make out the small white rowboat roped to its top.

  Mr. Reed was already pulling himself behind the wheel by the time I rounded the corner of the building. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me forward, hurrying me along. “We want to get an early start.”

  It was then I saw Miss Channing sitting on the passenger side, a large basket in her lap, her pale blue eyes like distant misty lights behind the dusty windshield.

  “Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I climbed into the backseat of the car.

  She nodded but didn’t answer, and I suppose that it was precisely at that moment I first noticed the peculiar tension and uneasiness that would never leave her after that, a sense of being trapped or constricted, the world’s former breadth and expansiveness now drawing around her like a noose.

  Mr. Reed leaned forward and hit the ignition. “We’re off to the Bass River,” he said in a cheerful tone that struck me as somewhat forced, as if he were trying to lift Miss Channing’s spirits. He looked at her for a moment, offering a slender smile. “We’ll have the whole day, Elizabeth,” he told her. “Just like I said we would.”

  It took nearly an hour to reach the Bass River, a spot Mr. Reed had already selected, one he’d “chosen for its remoteness and seclusion,” as Mr. Parsons later described it, surrounded by high grass and at the bottom of a sloping embankment, so mat neither the car nor the boat was visible from the main road a short hundred yards or so away.

  “At this point in the river, it’s nearly a mile from bend to bend,” Mr. Reed told us as he began to untie the ropes that bound the boat to the top of the car. “We can row downstream, then come back with the tide.”

  Miss Channing walked to the bank of the river, and stood, watching, as the current swept past her, bearing bits of wood and marsh debris, its slowly moving surface reflecting a cloudless sky.

  Once the boat had been untied, Mr. Reed grasped the bow, pulled it toward him, then down, so that it slid off the roof of the car at a deep angle, its bow nosing into the soft ground. “All right, Henry,” he said, “take hold of the back there.”

  I did as he told me, the two of us lugging the boat toward the water, then setting it down in the moist earth that bordered the river.

  Miss Channing remained in place, still facing the water, her eyes fixed on a yellow film of pollen gat
hered in a pool on the farther shore.

  “Are you ready, Elizabeth?” Mr. Reed asked gently, almost delicately, as if her mood were a fragile tiling, a rare vase he feared breaking.

  She nodded without turning around, and Mr. Reed offered her his hand. She took it and stepped inside the boat. “Thank you,” she said as she released it.

  “You’re next, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.

  I climbed into the boat, then looked back just as Mr. Reed pushed it forward again, drawing himself up and over the rail as he did so, a movement that struck me as very smooth and agile, his cane left on the bank behind us, the river lapping softly at its curved end.

  I will always remember the few hours that followed, the slow drift of the boat down the narrow channel of the river, a wall of grass on either side, Mr. Reed at the oars, Miss Channing facing him from the opposite end of the boat, her right hand lowered toward the water, a single finger slicing it silently, leaving a glistening trail across its otherwise smooth surface.

  At that moment she seemed as beautiful as any woman had ever been or would ever be. I picked up my sketchbook and began to draw, hoping to please her this time, to draw her as she really was. She was staring just off to the left as I began, her face in profile as she watched a gull prance along the far embankment. Turning back, she saw the sketchbook open in my lap, the drawing pencil in my hand, my eyes intent upon her. Her face suddenly grew taut, as if she thought I’d been sent to record her presence in the boat, use it later as evidence against her. “No, Henry,” she said.

  “But I was just …”

  She shook her head determinedly, her eyes locked in that steeliness Mr. Parsons would later associate with the coldness of her heart. “No,” she repeated firmly. “Put it down.”

  I glanced at Mr. Reed, saw him turn away from me, fix his attention on the stream ahead, clearly unwilling to go against her.

  “Yes, Miss Channing,” I said, then closed the book and placed it on the seat beside me.

  There was an interminable silence after that, Miss Channing motionless on her seat as we drifted onward, the boat now moving through a labyrinth of narrow channels, Mr. Reed suddenly tugging more fiercely at the oars, as if already in flight from some grim, pursuing hand.

  After a time we came to a bend in the river, but rather than rounding it, Mr. Reed rowed us to shore.

  Once on the riverbank, we spread a checkered cloth a few feet from the water, the wind billowing it up briefly as we lowered it to the ground. Mr. Reed sat at one corner, Miss Channing at another, removing fruit and sandwiches from the basket.

  We ate slowly, in what I later recognized as the kind of silence that falls when the last resort has been reached, all debate now closed, nothing to be taken back or reconsidered, the final decision irrevocably made, though perhaps still unstated.

  In an effort to lighten that very atmosphere, Mr. Reed suddenly looked at Miss Channing and said, “Tell us a story, Elizabeth.”

  She shook her head.

  Mr. Reed leaned forward slightly. “Something from your travels,” he said softly, almost gingerly as if her feelings were a red-hot coal he feared to touch.

  She shook her head again.

  “Just one, Elizabeth.” Mr. Reed’s tone was now so imploring it seemed almost beggarly.

  Without a word she got to her feet and strode away from us, down along the water’s edge, to where a tangle of driftwood lay on the bank, its limbs rising like fleshless bones from the moist ground.

  Mr. Reed watched her leave us, then, moving slowly and unsteadily without his cane, walked down to where she stood.

  I tried to turn away, but I found myself continually drawn back to them, their bodies so fully surrounded by walls of grass and coils of water, they looked utterly ensnared, like two animals captured in an invisible net, thrashing about, desperate to break free, and yet with every thrust and movement growing more fatally entangled. I thought of the delight in Mr. Reed’s eyes as he’d ought the glass necklace in Boston, then of the look on Miss Channing’s face as she’d pressed her hand against his cheek, traced its jagged scar, and finally of the hopelessness and futility that appeared to have overwhelmed them since that time. That the passion I was certain I’d seen between them should now be in the process of disintegration seemed inconceivable to me, and watching them, as they continued to talk intently only a few yards away, I felt a scalding surge of anger against the whole design of life, its web of duties and obligations, Chatham like a dark pit in which Miss Channing and Mr. Reed were now imprisoned, Mrs. Reed standing on its rim, grim and unrelenting, dressed in black, her implacable arms folded over her chest, the female version of my father.

  “Well, Henry, I suppose we’d better be on our way now,” Mr. Reed told me solemnly when he and Miss Channing rejoined me. I helped them gather up the cloth and the basket.

  At the boat Mr. Reed offered Miss Channing his hand. She grasped it lightly, stepped inside, and took her seat again at the stern.

  “It’ll be quick going back,” Mr. Reed told her as he pushed us off. “The tide’s coming in now.” He pulled himself over the rail and took hold of the oars, his gaze upon Miss Channing as he said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, and all that.”

  It was a line from Romeo and Juliet, of course, and it must have lingered in Miss Channing’s mind, for when the bend in the river had disappeared behind us, she broke her silence. “I went to Juliet’s house in Verona when I was sixteen,” she said. “There were lots of people there. It was like a shrine.” She gathered her arms more tightly around the basket that rested in her lap. “My father pointed to the balcony and told me to stand where Juliet had, looking down at Romeo.” Her eyes took on an unmistakable intensity, as if she were reliving the moment again, she on the stone balcony, her father in the courtyard below, their eyes fixed upon each other. “That’s what he was searching for, I think,” she said. “An ideal love.”

  Mr. Reed drew back the oars slowly. “If he’d ever found a love like that,” he said, “I’m sure he’d have found a way to keep it too.”

  Miss Channing said nothing, but only stared rigidly ahead as the boat moved swiftly inland, the nightbound tide now exerting its vast pull. No one ever looted more tortured by a grave resolve.

  It was nearly night when we reached Milford Cottage. An evening mist drifted over the pond. I sat in the car while Mr. Reed walked Miss Channing to her door. They lingered on the threshold, Mr. Reed on the step beneath Miss Channing, she looking down at him. Finally, he took her hand, held it very briefly, then released it and headed back toward where I sat.

  She’d lit a candle by the time Mr. Reed got into the car, a soft yellow glow now coming from the windows of the front room.

  “It’s so hard, Henry,” Mr. Reed said, his eyes on the cottage as he began to back away. “It’s the hardest thing in the world.”

  I never mentioned his words to Mr. Parsons, since they’d seemed directed toward something larger than the Chatham School Affair, not the crime of forbidden love, which was Mr. Parsons’ sole interest, but some deeper one, plotted at the core of life, and which inflexibly decrees that one love in flower must leave another in decay.

  When we arrived at Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of the pond, Mary was playing in the front yard, building a house of sticks and leaves as she sat near the water, nearly obscured in a blue twilight. She ran toward the car as we got out, then stood watching while we unlashed the boat and carried it toward its usual mooring by the tree at the water’s edge.

  “Did you catch a fish?” she asked Mr. Reed brightly as she skipped along beside him.

  “We didn’t go fishing,” he told her. “Just rowing.” He glanced back toward me. “Just Henry and me,” he added.

  We set the boat down, and Mary climbed into it as Mr. Reed tethered it to the tree, taking a seat at the bow, bouncing slightly, her small hands clapping rhythmically to some beat in her mind.

  “Where’s your mother?” Mr. Reed asked her once he’d secured th
e boat.

  Mary pointed to the porch. “She’s been sitting there all day”

  I turned toward the house. In the evening shade I had not seen her, but now I could make her out quite clearly. She sat in the far corner of the porch, rocking quietly, her green eyes peering dully out of the shadows like two small, unpolished stones.

  CHAPTER 19

  After the Chatham School Affair, my father always believed that the deepest tragedies inevitably unfolded slowly, reached their climaxes in seizures of violence and grief, then lingered on forever in the minds of those who were near enough to feel their lethal force and yet survive.

  Some, of course, do not survive at all.

  Those who perished return to me most often in a newspaper photograph published during the trial, which I saw lying on my father’s desk at Chatham School one evening, my father at his office window, his hands clutched behind his back, staring out into the courtyard, where the remnants of Miss Channing’s sculpture had been gathered into a pile of gray rubble, an almost surreal mound of shattered faces.

  In the photograph Mrs. Reed is seated in her husband’s small white boat. Mary is on her wide lap. Both smile happily in a picture taken, according to the newspaper, by Mr. Reed during what it called “happier times.”

  I can still remember how wrenching I found that photograph the evening I first saw it. Because of that, it never surprised me that I sometimes took it from the little archive I inherited at my father’s death, staring at it by the fire, letting it remind me of Mrs. Reed and her daughter, what they’d been, no longer were, and thus warn me away from the temptation I occasionally felt to find a wife, have children of my own.