My mother was doing her best to be sociable that evening, talking in that slightly rapid way of hers about whatever matter she thought might interest the people gathered around her.
At one point I heard her say, “Well, Chatham is small, but I think there must be quite a few eligible young men.” Then she turned to Miss Channing, the only unmarried woman in the group, and asked, “Don’t you think so, Elizabeth?”
I remember that Miss Channing seemed unable to answer my mother’s question, perhaps suspecting that she had some ulterior motive in asking it.
In that brief silence, I saw my mother’s eyes narrow slightly as she added, “I mean to say, I was wondering what your experience had been.”
Still, Miss Channing did not answer, and in that interval of silence I noticed Mrs. Benton glance knowingly at Mrs. Abercrombie.
Finally, Miss Channing said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”
I expected my mother to let the answer go, but she didn’t. “You wouldn’t?” she said, clearly surprised. “So you’ve not become acquainted with any of the young men in Chatham since you arrived?”
Miss Channing shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”
My mother gave her a slow, evaluating look. “Well, I’m sure someone will come along,” she said with a stiff smile.
They went on to other topics after that. Each time I glanced Miss Channing’s way, she appeared fixed in the same position, her hands in her lap, her back erect, a plate of uneaten food nestled in the grass beside her chair.
By nine most everyone had departed. It was April, a chill still present in the evening air, and so my father invited the few guests who remained to join him in the parlor.
My mother took her usual chair by the fireplace, my father the wooden rocker a few feet away. Mrs. Abercrombie and Mrs. Benton shared the small settee, while Miss Channing chose a chair somewhat off to the side. I pulled out the piano stool and sat by the window.
I don’t remember what they talked about for the next few minutes, only that Miss Channing said very little, her face more or less expressionless as she listened to the others, her hands still in her lap, as they had been all evening.
It was an attitude she might have remained in for the rest of the night had she not caught the sound of a car rumbling down Myrtle Street. She clearly recognized its distinctive clatter, turned toward the window, parted the curtains, and peered outside, her face suddenly bathed in light as the car wheeled into our driveway and came to a halt. I saw her eyes widen, her lips part silently as she watched a figure move down the driveway and up the stairs to our front door. One of her hands crawled into the other as she turned away from the window, listening first to the knock at the door, then Sarah’s cheery greeting when she opened it. “Well, good evening, Mr. Reed.”
He came directly into the parlor, his hat in his hand, the old brown jacket draped over his shoulders, like a cape.
“Hello,” he said. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
“No, not at all. Please, come in,” my father told him, though not with his usual enthusiasm. There was something rather stiff in the way he rose from his chair to shake Mr. Reed’s hand. “I hope Mrs. Reed is feeling better.”
Mr. Reed nodded. “Yes, she is,” he said.
“Please, sit down,” my father told him.
Mr. Reed took a seat near the door, glancing about until his eyes fell upon Miss Channing. And though his lips lifted in a thin smile, his eyes seemed utterly mirthless and unsmiling. “Hello, Miss Channing,” he said.
She nodded coolly. “Mr. Reed.”
My father glanced back and forth between them. “Well, now,” he said loudly, clearly trying to draw Mr. Reed’s attention back to the group, “we were all discussing the possibility of adding a course in Shakespeare to next year’s curriculum.”
Mr. Reed turned toward him but offered no reply.
“We were wondering who might best be able to teach such a course,” my father went on.
Mr. Reed stared my father dead in the eye. “I really don’t know,” he said with what must have struck my father as a shocking sense of indifference, as if Chatham School had ceased to play any significant part in his life, but only continued to hang from it, numb, limp, useless, like an atrophied appendage waiting to be cut away.
It was a tone that clearly disturbed my father, and which he could not confront, so he merely drew in a quick, troubled breath and returned his attention to the others. “Well, how about a round of port?” he asked them.
All heads nodded, and with that my father summoned Sarah to serve the port.
“We’re so lucky to have Sarah,” my mother said after she’d finished serving and left the room. “We had a wonderful Negro girl before her. Amelia was her name, and she was quite able.” She glanced at Miss Channing. “As a matter of fact, Amelia would have been very interested in talking to you, Elizabeth.”
Miss Channing’s fingers tightened around her glass. “Why is that?” she asked evenly.
“Because she’d have wanted to hear all about your life in Africa,” my mother answered. She’d picked her knitting from a basket beside her chair and the long silver needles flashed in the lamplight as she flicked them right and left.
“Amelia was a follower of Marcus Garvey, you see,” my father said. “She was quite taken with this idea of going back to Africa, living free, and all that.” He shrugged. “It was all terribly unrealistic, of course, the whole business.” Drawing a pipe from the rack that rested on the table beside his chair, he began to fill its dark briar bowl with tobacco. “But what can you do about such a romantic notion?”
It was a question he’d asked rhetorically, not expecting an answer, least of all a brutal one.
“You can crush it,” Mr. Reed blurted out harshly, his eyes darting over to Miss Channing, then back to my father.
My father looked at him quizzically, his hand now suspended motionlessly above the bowl of his pipe, his eyes widening to take him in. “Crush it, Mr. Reed?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Mr. Reed said. “You can tell her how foolish such an idea of freedom is. How foolish and preposterous it is to believe that you can ever escape anything or change anything, or live in a way that—”
He stopped, his eyes now turning toward Miss Channing, who only glared at him, her face taut and unmoving.
Then my father said, “Well, that would be rather cruel, wouldn’t it, Mr. Reed?” His voice was surprisingly gentle and restrained as he continued, his eyes leveled upon Mr. Reed’s. “Perhaps you could simply remind her—Amelia, I mean—that there is much in life beyond such extreme desires.”
Mr. Reed shook his head, drawing his gaze from Miss Channing, and waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said wearily.
There was an exchange of glances among the guests, then, as if to lower the heat within the room, Mrs. Benton chirped, “It’s a lovely room you have here, Mrs. Griswald. The curtains are … lovely.”
With that, the conversation took a different and decidedly less volatile turn, although I can’t remember what was said, only that neither Mr. Reed nor Miss Channing said anything at all. Mrs. Abercrombie left within a few minutes, then Mrs. Benton, each of them nodding cordially as they bade my father and mother good night.
Mr. Reed rose directly after that. He seemed weary beyond measure, as if his earlier outburst had weakened him profoundly. At the entrance to the parlor he turned back. “Do you need a ride home, Miss Channing?” he asked, though with an unmistakable hopelessness, her answer already made clear to him by the ravaged look in her eyes.
“No,” she said, adding nothing else as he turned from her and moved silently out the door.
And so it was my father and I who drove Miss Channing home that night, gliding through the now-deserted village, then out along Plymouth Road to where we finally came to a halt at the very end of it, the headlights of my father’s car briefly illuminating the front of Milford Cottage before dissolving into the impenetrable depths of
Black Pond.
“Well, good night, Miss Channing,” he said to her quietly.
I expected Miss Channing to get out of the car, but she remained in place. “Mr. Griswald,” she said. “I wonder if I might ask you something?”
My heart stopped, for I felt sure that she was about to tell him everything, reveal the whole course and nature of her relationship with Mr. Reed, ask my father for that wise guidance I know he would have given if she had done so.
But she did nothing of the kind. Instead, she said, “I was thinking of making something for the school. A piece of sculpture. Plaster masks of all the boys and the teachers, everyone at the school. I could arrange them on a column. It would be a record of everyone at Chatham School this year.”
“That would be a lot of work for you, wouldn’t it, Miss Channing?” my father asked.
“Yes, it would. But for the next few weeks—” She stopped, as if trying to decide what to say. “For the next few weeks,” she began again, “I’d just like to keep myself busy.”
My father leaned forward slightly, peering at her closely, and I knew that whatever he had refused to see before that moment he now saw in all its fatal depth, Miss Channing’s misery and distress so obvious that when Mr. Parsons finally asked his question, You knew, didn’t you, Mr. Griswald, that by the night of your party Miss Channing had reached a desperate point?, he could not help but answer, Yes.
But that night at Milford Cottage he only said, “Yes, very well, Miss Channing. I’m sure your sculpture will be something the school can be proud of.”
Miss Channing nodded, then got out of the car and swiftly made her way down the narrow walkway to her cottage.
My father watched her go with an unspoken sympathy for a plight he seemed to comprehend more deeply than I would have expected, and which later caused me to wonder if perhaps somewhere down a remote road or along the outer bank, some woman had once waited for him, one he wished to go to but never did, and in return for that refusal received this small unutterably painful addition to his understanding.
If such a woman ever lived, her call unanswered, he never spoke of it.
And as to Miss Channing, as he watched her make her way toward the cottage that night, “God help her” was all he said.
CHAPTER 21
I think it was the somberness of my father’s words that awakened me early the next morning, sent me downstairs, hoping that I wasn’t too late to catch up with Sarah as she set off for her weekly reading lesson.
She was already at the end of Myrtle Street when I called to her. She waited, smiling, as I came up to her.
“I thought I’d go with you this morning,” I told her.
This seemed to please her. “That would be grand,” she said, then turned briskly and continued on down the street, the basket swinging between us as we made our way toward Milford Cottage.
We reached it a short time later, the morning air bright and warm, with more of summer in it now than spring. Miss Channing was sitting outside, on the steps of the cottage, her body so still she looked as if she’d been in the same position for a long time.
“Good morning,” she said as we came down the walkway, her tone less open and welcoming than I had ever heard it, her eyes squeezed together slightly, like someone wincing with an inward pain.
It was only a few minutes later, after she’d begun Sarah’s lesson, that Miss Channing grew less distracted in her voice and manner. She began to smile occasionally, though less vibrantly than in the past, so that her overall mood remained strangely subdued.
The lesson ended at eleven, just as it usually did.
“Good, Sarah,” Miss Channing said as she rose from the table and began to gather up the books and writing pads. “You’re coming along splendidly. I’ll see you again next Sunday.”
Sarah looked at me quizzically, then turned back to Miss Channing, clearly worried by the distress she saw in her, perhaps even afraid to leave her in such a troubled state. “Would you like to take a stroll, Miss Channing?” she asked softly. “There’s a little parade or something in the village today.” She looked at me for assistance. “What is it, Henry, that parade?”
“It’s to celebrate the beginning of the Revolution,” I said. “The shot heard ‘round the world.”
Sarah kept her eyes on Miss Channing. “We could all walk into town together,” she said. “It’s such a pretty day.”
For a moment Miss Channing seemed thrown into a quandary by Sarah’s invitation. Finally, she said, though still with some reluctance, “Well, yes, I suppose I could do that.”
We set off right away, the three of us walking at a leisurely pace down Plymouth Road. It was deep enough into spring for the first greenery to have appeared, budding trees and ferns and a few forest wildflowers, a rich pungency in the air around us. “There was once a French king who was very fond of sweet smells,” Miss Channing said after a moment, “and when he gave parties in the ballroom, he would have his servants pour different perfumes over live pigeons, then release them into the air.” She stopped and drew in a long breath. “It must have been like this,” she told us, “a tapestry of smells.”
She began to walk again, adding nothing more, but I would always remember that this was the final story I would hear from her, the slender smile she offered at the end of it, the last that I would see upon her face.
At noon the streets of Chatham were already filled with people who’d come into the village for the day’s festivities. We found a vacant spot on the hill in front of the town hall and stood, along with everyone else, waiting for the parade. Below us, on the crowded sidewalks, we could see the people moving back and forth, trying to find a clear view of the street. Miss Channing remained silent most of the time, nearly motionless as well, save that her eyes had a tendency to follow knots of children as they darted along the sidewalk or across the lawn.
We were still standing on the lawn of the town hall when the local fife and bugle corps marched by, followed by a ragged gang of villagers dressed in Revolutionary costumes, my father among them, doffing a tricornered hat. The town’s new fire engine came next, festooned with flags and bunting, and after it, a small contingent of the Massachusetts State Police, riding horseback, a tall, slender man in the lead, with gray hair and a formal manner, his silver badge winking in the afternoon light, and whom I later recognized as Captain Lawrence Hamilton.
The crowd began to disperse soon afterward, children rushing here and there as their parents summoned them to their sides, groups of young people heading off toward Quilty’s for ice cream and soda, couples strolling idly toward the outskirts of town, no doubt headed for the beach, where a clambake had been scheduled for later in the day.
“Well, I guess that’s it for the parade,” I said absently, looking to the right, toward Miss Channing.
She didn’t answer me, or even turn her eyes in my direction. Instead, she continued to peer across the street. I glanced toward where she was staring, and saw Mrs. Reed standing on the opposite corner, with Mary in her arms.
For a moment Mrs. Reed held her attention on the parade. Then, at a pace that seemed surreally slow, she turned to face us, her gaze suddenly leveled upon Miss Channing, cold, steady, hateful, yet strangely haunted too, features that seemed locked forever in a ghostly rage.
It must have been a look that Miss Channing could not bear, for she whirled around immediately, like someone wrenching herself from a murderous, invisible grip, and began to push forward through the crowd, leaving Sarah and me in her wake, watching, astonished, as she plunged away from us, darting left and right through the milling crowd until she finally disappeared into the throng.
“What’s the matter with Miss Channing?” Sarah asked, both of us still staring off in the direction where she’d gone.
“I don’t know,” I answered. But I did.
For a long time I believed that it was what Miss Channing saw that afternoon, Mrs. Reed in all her wounded anguish, little Mary helpless in her arms, that d
etermined the nature of the conversation I overheard the very next day.
It happened late in the afternoon, a blue haze already settling over the school courtyard, hovering in the trees and over the pebbled walkway Miss Channing had just completed a portrait session with my father, for I remember seeing her in his office only moments before, my father at the window where she’d placed him, she a few feet away, peering toward him from around the side of her easel.
He’d offered to drive her home, as he later told me, but she had declined, telling him that she wanted to begin work on the other project she had proposed, the column of faces that was to be her gift to Chatham School. After that she’d returned to her classroom, brought out a lump of clay, and begun to fashion a model of the sculpture she was soon to make.
She was still at it sometime later when I walked through the courtyard, glanced to the right, and saw her standing at her sculpting pedestal, her hands sunk deep in the pockets of her smock. She was looking toward the front of the room, but until I moved farther west, heading toward the rear door of the school, I couldn’t make out what she was looking at, for the large tree that stood near the center of the courtyard blocked my view. And so it was not until I’d passed beyond it that I saw Mr. Reed standing at the entrance to her room.
It was a scene that startled me, the two of them facing each other so silently and at such a physical distance that they looked like duelists in an evening shade. And so I stopped and drew back behind the tree, listening like a common eavesdropper as their voices came toward me from the open windows of Miss Channing’s room.
“What do you want, Leland?”
“Something impossible.”
“You know what has to be done.”
“How do you want me to do it?”
“Without looking back.”
There was a pause, then I heard Mr. Reed speak again.
The Chatham School Affair Page 18
