The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  Of course, there’d been plenty of testimony to remind me of them at the time, particularly of Mrs. Reed, neighbors and relatives who’d come at Mr. Parsons’ bidding, and who, by answering the questions he put to them, had labored to bring her back to life, consistently portraying her as a dutiful and, for the most part, cheerful woman, faithful and hardworking, a good mother and a good wife, incontestably entitled to her husband’s unswerving devotion.

  I remembered Mrs. Hale, the coroner’s wife, talking quietly of how well Mrs. Reed had taken care of her parents in their illness and old age. Then Mrs. Lancaster after her, speaking no less quietly about Mrs. Reed’s kindness toward her feebleminded sister, the way she’d never failed to bring her a cake and a jar of apple cider on her birthday.

  But of all the people who testified about Abigail Reed, the witness I most remember was my mother.

  As it turned out, she’d known Mrs. Reed almost all her life, remembered her as Abbey Parrish, the only daughter of William and Dorothy Parrish, he a fisherman who moored his boat in Chatham harbor, she a fisherwife of the old school, who hauled tubs of lobster and baskets of quahogs and slabs of smoked bluefish to the local market every day. As a child, Abigail had often accompanied her mother there, standing at her side, helping her sell the day’s catch from behind a wooden table that had been placed beneath a tattered canvas roof, her hands made rough by the work, scarred by scales and fins.

  On the stand, my mother had spoken in a somewhat more agitated manner than either Mrs. Hale or Mrs. Lancaster. Her voice took on an unmistakable edginess as she answered Mr. Parsons’ questions, her eyes sometimes involuntarily flitting over to Miss Channing, little sparks of anger glinting in them, especially as she related the afternoon Mrs. Reed had turned up at our house on Myrtle Street, her manner quite desperate by then, as my mother described it, a chilling terror in her red-rimmed eyes.

  Still, for all the impact of her testimony, my mother didn’t do or say anything on the stand that stunned me as much as what happened only a few minutes after she left it.

  “Walk your mother home, Henry,” my father told me as she stepped from the witness box and began to make her way down the aisle toward the back of the courtroom.

  She was already passing through its large double doors by the time I caught up with her, moving at that brisk, determined pace she often assumed, as if something were chasing after her, she trying to outrun it.

  “Are you thirsty, Mother?” I asked her as we made our way through the dense, crowd that had gathered on the courthouse steps. “Do you want to stop and have something to drink?”

  She stared straight ahead as she answered, roughly elbowing her way through the mob, her eyes glaring hotly toward the street. “No, I want to go home,” she said.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she wheeled to the right and strode up Main Street at the same nearly frantic pace, taking short, quick steps, her heavy black shoes thumping loudly along the walkway.

  For nearly a block she kept silent, then, suddenly, under her breath, in a kind of bitter hiss, I heard her say, “That woman should be hung.”

  My eyes widened in dreadful horror at what she’d said. “Miss Channing?” I gasped, my complicity in her fate sweeping over me in a bitter wave. “But she didn’t …”

  My mother waved her hand, silencing me, as she continued forward at the same merciless pace, her eyes now glowing furiously.

  I could tell by the hard look in them that she had no intention of saying more. So I simply rushed along beside her, glancing at the bustling crowds, the knots of people that had gathered on every street corner and in front of every shop. It looked as if the whole world had suddenly descended upon our village, all drawn by the dark specter of the Chatham School Affair.

  “I don’t understand why everybody is so caught up in this,” I said to my mother as she surged forward along the crowded street, an observation I only half believed but felt safe in making, so utterly neutral, as it seemed to me, edging neither toward my mother’s testimony nor my own, neither to the error of her suspicions, nor the unbearable actuality of my crime.

  Still she said nothing, oblivious, or so it appeared, not only of my last remark, but of the steady stream of traffic in the streets, the cars and people moving past us, the scores of men and women who spread out over the broad lawn of the town hall.

  In that ceaselessly agitated surrounding, it seemed equally safe to offer another observation, one I’d desperately clung to during the previous weeks, as if, by clinging to it, I could stay afloat above the tragedy that had by then engulfed so many others. “It’s the love story that attracts them, I guess. Just that it’s basically a love story.”

  At that, my mother came to a halt so abrupt and violent, she appeared to have run into an invisible wall.

  “A love story?” she asked, her eyes igniting with a fire I had never seen in them before and of which I had not believed her capable.

  “Well, that’s what Miss Channing and Mr.—”

  “You think it’s a love story, Henry?” My mother’s words burst from her mouth like puffs of steam.

  I could feel the air heat up around us, my mother’s body begin to smolder.

  “Well, in a way it is,” I said. “I mean, Miss Channing just—”

  “Miss Channing?” my mother cried. “What about Mrs. Reed? What about her love for her husband? Isn’t that a love story too?”

  It seemed the sort of question Mr. Parsons might have posed to the twelve jurors who’d been asked to judge Miss Channing, and ultimately to condemn her, and I realized that I had no answer for my mother, that I had never known the kind of love she had just spoken of, one based on ancient vows and meant to last forever, the “love story” of a marriage.

  “All you do is think about that woman,” my mother said. “That Miss Channing. How romantic it all is. Her and Mr. Reed. Walking on the beach. Sailing in the boat. Where do you think Mrs. Reed was while all that was going on?”

  In my mind I suddenly saw Mrs. Reed as she’d appeared on the porch the day we’d returned from the Bass River, heard her daughter’s words again, the vast suffering and loneliness they now so powerfully conveyed. She’s been sitting there all day.

  “I’m ashamed of you, Henry,” my mother snapped angrily, her words hitting me like small iron pellets. “Ashamed of the way you think.”

  Staring at her mutely, I realized that I’d never understood how from the moment the trial began, my mother had done nothing but consider not the tale spun by my willful romantic imagination, but the dreadful anguish of Abigail Reed, the unbearable fear and rage and sense of betrayal that must have overwhelmed her as she’d watched her husband slip away.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I whispered.

  What she said next stunned me with its uncompromising force. “You’re all alike, Henry, all you men.”

  She stared at me for one long, ghastly moment, then turned and walked away, leaving me in a world that had begun to move again, though differently than it had before, filled with greater complications, a weave of consequences and relations that seemed larger than romance, deeper and more enduring, though still distant from my understanding, a world I’d only just briefly glimpsed, as it were, through my mother’s eyes.

  My mother never again spoke to me directly about the Chatham School Affair. And I remember that a few hours later, after a nearly silent dinner, I went upstairs to my room, lay down upon my bed, and tried to think about Mrs. Reed, not in the panic and despair of her last seconds, as I’d continually thought of her throughout Miss Channing’s trial, but before that, when she’d been a wife and mother.

  Toward dawn I awoke, and there she was before me. Abigail Reed, as if she were alive again, with red hair and green eyes, watching me silently from the ruins of her shattered faith. And for the first time, as I lay in the shadowy early morning light, I found that I was able to imagine what it must have been like for her during those weeks when Mr. Reed had begun to drift from her, spending long hour
s with me in the boathouse, the two of us working deep into the night to complete his boat, while she remained at home, tending to their daughter, bathing her, clothing her in thick flannel sleeping gowns, putting her to bed.

  I saw all those many nights when the hour had grown late, and still Mr. Reed had not returned. How she must have wondered about the changes that had come over her husband, how preoccupied and distracted he had be come, as if he could not keep his mind from wandering away from her, and toward some distant attachment whose nature she could not let herself consider.

  And yet she had to have considered it, had to have noticed that he no longer touched her with the same affection, nor with any great desire, and that although he still frolicked with Mary, he more often preferred to be alone with his daughter, taking her on long walks or even rowing her out into the center of Black Pond, where, bundled up against the cold of that long winter, they fished in the icy water.

  Perhaps, in order to escape the unbearable implications of the changes she noticed in him, Mrs. Reed had sometimes recalled the moment when she’d first seen him, a tall, slender man, leaning on a cane as he bought his weekly supplies at the village store, the way they’d walked out together, he holding the door for her, nodding quickly as she passed, then falling in behind her for a little distance before she’d stopped, turned toward him and asked him bluntly if he was not Leland Reed, the new teacher at Chatham School.

  But where had he gone, this man who’d lived with her for more than five years, who was the father of her daughter, and who’d provided for her and loved her as no man ever had or ever would again, but who now seemed to have receded, perhaps even beyond the promised gravity of home.

  How Mrs. Reed must have suffered during all those long nights, I thought as the air lightened outside my bedroom window that morning. How she must have yearned to regain Mr. Reed once again, not just for a night, but forever.

  But as I well knew, Mr. Reed had never returned to her. So that as the days passed one after the other, and the nights deepened and grew colder, I knew that she must have walked to the window at regular intervals, parted the curtains, and peered out into the darkness, her eyes now fixed on the empty road, searching for some sign of his approaching car. At such a moment, locked in dread, Mrs. Reed’s face could not have looked at all like the women of romantic myth, Iseult beneath her billowing white sail, or Guenevere waiting heroically to be burned alive. And yet, for all that, she now seemed heroic to me somehow, as my mother had certainly thought of her when she fled the court that day, convinced, as she had every right to be, that no man, her son included, could ever conceive or even remotely comprehend the depth of her long pain.

  CHAPTER 20

  Nor do I think that my father ever really understood it. At least not at that time. For although he must have felt the deepest sympathy for Mrs. Reed, I believe that he remained captured in a different orbit, one that spun around Miss Channing, had her life, her loss, as its central star.

  And so it never surprised me that he labored to defend her on that August afternoon when it came his turn to take the stand.

  Mr. Parsons: Now, you hired Miss Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing as a teacher at Chatham School, did you not, Mr. Griswald?

  Witness: Yes, I did.

  Mr. Parsons: And early on, did you have any reason to doubt the wisdom of choosing Miss Channing for her post at Chatham School?

  Witness: No, I did not.

  Mr. Parsons: Well, at a later time, did you begin to have reservations about Miss Channing’s character?

  Witness: Not exactly.

  Mr. Parsons: But as you have already heard, Mr. Griswald, an earlier witness has testified that she told you about certain rumors having to do with Miss Channing’s relationship with Leland Reed.

  Witness: Yes, I was informed that certain people felt that way.

  Mr. Parsons: But you chose to ignore their warnings?

  Witness: I had no proof of anything, Mr. Parsons.

  Mr. Parsons: But you had observed some rather odd behavior, had you not? In regard to both Mr. Reed and Miss Channing. Certain alarming behavior?

  Witness: I wouldn’t call it alarming.

  Mr. Parsons: Well, isn’t it true that both Mr. Reed and Miss Channing appeared extremely strained during the final weeks of the school year?

  Witness: Yes, they did.

  Mr. Parsons: And didn’t this strain become obvious at one point in your own house, Mr. Griswald? At a party on, I believe, April twenty-third.

  Witness: Yes, it did.

  Mr. Parsons: Did Miss Channing and Mr. Reed come to that party together?

  Witness: No. Miss Channing came into my office the afternoon before the party and asked if I might pick her up.

  Mr. Parsons: You, Mr. Griswald? She didn’t wish to be picked up by Mr. Reed?

  Witness: Evidently not.

  Mr. Parsons: And did you agree to do that, to bring Miss Channing to your house that evening?

  Witness: Yes, I did.

  And so, as he had so many times in the past, my father demanded that I come with him to Milford Cottage that evening, the two of us driving through a soft blue twilight to retrieve her. On the way, I remember that he had a certain agitated look in his eyes, like someone pressed into a service he’d rather have avoided but felt it his duty to perform. By then, of course, he must have known that something very grave had begun to darken the atmosphere of Chatham School, something he found it difficult to confront, or simply knew no way of confronting. I have often wondered what I might have said had he turned to me that evening and asked me bluntly what I knew about Miss Channing and Mr. Reed. Perhaps I would have lied to him, as I later did, claiming an innocence I did not deserve

  But he talked of the party instead, the long tables that had been placed on the back lawn, the Chinese lanterns he’d hung over them, how festive everything looked.

  It was not until we neared Milford Cottage that he grew silent.

  Miss Channing came out immediately, dressed in a long black skirt and a dark red blouse, her hair bound tightly in a bun. Her eyes seemed feverish and her skin was very pale.

  I got out of the car, and held the door open for her. “Thank you, Henry,” she said as she got into the front seat beside my father.

  “Good evening, Miss Channing,” my father said.

  She nodded softly. “Good evening, Mr. Griswald.”

  They hardly spoke for the first few minutes of the drive back toward Chatham. Then, out of nowhere, my father suddenly blurted out, “I was thinking of offering you a commission, Miss Channing. A private commission, that is. A portrait of myself.” He glanced toward her, then back to the road. “Do you do portraits?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve done a few. My uncle. His wife. When I was in Africa.”

  “So, do you think you’d like to take a crack at it?”

  She smiled slightly. “Yes, I would.”

  My father seemed pleased. “Splendid.”

  They went on to arrange various times when my father would be available to sit for her, and during the next few weeks I saw them often in his office together, the door always open, of course, Miss Channing in her gray smock, standing behind her easel, my father posed beside the window, looking out onto the courtyard, his body caught in a shaft of light.

  During the rest of the drive, my father talked rather absently about the spring term, how brief it always seemed compared to fall and winter, warning Miss Channing that the boys would become “increasingly rambunctious” as the end of the school year approached. “So keep a firm hand on them,” he told her, “because they’ll certainly need it.” It was not until we’d turned onto the main road back to Chatham that he suddenly said, “By the way, Mr. Reed may not be able to join us this evening.”

  My attention sprang to Miss Channing, and I saw her body grow tense at the mention of Mr. Reed’s name.

  “It seems that Mrs. Reed has taken ill,” my father went on. “Something to do with her stomach.”

>   Miss Channing turned away from my father and toward the window at her side, a quick reflexive gesture made, or so it seemed to me at the time, in order to shield her face from his view. Watching her, I recalled the way she’d sat so stiffly in the boat as we’d made our way down the Bass River only a week or so before, her manner now even more enclosed than it had appeared that day, so that she seemed oddly frightened of the very movement her life had taken, as if it were a blade swinging above her head.

  It was warm enough for my father to have rolled the window down on the driver’s side, and as we made our way along the coastal road he peered out over the fields of sea grass that rose from the marshes and the bogs. “I love the spring on Cape Cod. Summer, too, of course. Do you plan to stay here on the Cape for the summer, Miss Channing?”

  “I haven’t really thought about the summer,” she murmured as if such a possibility had not occurred to her.

  “Well, there’s still plenty of time to think about it,” my father told her, then let the subject drop.

  We pulled into the driveway of our house seconds later. I got out and opened the door for Miss Channing. “Thank you, Henry,” she said as she stepped out of the car.

  Some of the other teachers had already arrived, the rest coming only a few minutes later, everyone serving themselves from the plentiful buffet my mother and Sarah had arranged on a long table in the backyard, then sitting in small groups on chairs my father and I had placed throughout the grounds earlier that afternoon.

  It was my job to help Sarah serve the guests at the buffet table, and from that position I could see Miss Channing as she sat with a group not far away, my mother facing her directly, Mr. Corbett to her right, Mrs. Benton, the Latin teacher, to her left, and finally Mrs. Abercrombie, my father’s assistant, just a bit outside the circle, her long, thin legs requiring somewhat more room.