The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Because I love you, I can do it.”

  “Then do.”

  “Let me take you home now. We can—”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Leland.”

  Another pause. Then he said it.

  “Do you want her dead?”

  I heard no answer, but only the sound of Miss Channing’s footsteps as she headed toward the door, and after that her voice again, anguished, pleading.

  “Leland, please. Let me go.”

  “But don’t you see that—”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Elizabeth, you can’t—”

  I heard the door of the room fly open, then saw Miss Channing rush quickly past where I stood beside the tree, and into the school, her black hair flying like a dark pennant in her wake. Watching her go, then glancing back into her room to see Mr. Reed now slumped in a chair, his head in his hands, I felt the same soaring anger I’d glimpsed in Mrs. Reed’s face as she’d glared at Miss Channing the day before, but with Mrs. Reed now the object of my rage, Miss Channing and Mr. Reed the birds I wished to free from her bony, strangling grasp.

  I was still seething nearly an hour later, Mr. Reed’s words echoing in my mind—Do you want her dead?—when Sarah found me on the front steps of the house on Myrtle Street.

  “Your father sent me to get you,” she told me as she lowered herself onto the step just beneath me. “He’s at the school. He has something he wants you to do.”

  “Tell him you couldn’t find me,” I replied sullenly.

  I felt her hand touch mine.

  “What’s the matter, Henry?”

  I shook my head, unable to answer her.

  For a moment she watched me silently, then she said, “Why are you so unhappy, Henry?”

  I gave her the only answer I had at the time. “Because no one’s free, Sarah. None of us.”

  Her question sprang from an ancient source. “What would happen if we were? Free, I mean.”

  My answer signaled the dawning of a self-indulgent age. “We’d be happy,” I said angrily. “If we were free to do what we want, don’t you think we’d be happy?”

  She had no answer for me, of course. Nor should I have expected one, since she was young, as I was, the hard fact that our lives cannot accommodate the very passions they inspire still a lesson waiting to be learned.

  Sarah got to her feet again. “You’d better go to your father, Henry. He’s expecting you.”

  I didn’t move. “In a minute,” I told her.

  “I’ll go tell him that you’re on your way,” Sarah said.

  With that, she walked away, leaving me to sit alone, watching as she reached Myrtle Street, then swung left and headed for the school, my mind by then already returning to its lethal imaginings, thoughts so malicious and ruthless that several weeks later, as Mr. Parsons and I made our way around that playing field, he could ask his question in a tone of stark certainty, So it was murder, wasn’t it, Henry? and to my silence he could add nothing more than How long have you known?

  CHAPTER 22

  I never answered Mr. Parsons’ question, but even as he asked it I recalled the very moment when I first thought of murder.

  It was late on a Saturday afternoon, the first week of May. I was alone in the boathouse, Mr. Reed having gone to Mayflower’s for a bag of nails. The boat was nearing completion by then, its sleek sides gleaming with a new coat of varnish, the mast now fitted with ropes, its broad sail wrapped tightly and tied in place.

  The lights were on inside the boathouse, but Mr. Reed had covered its windows with burlap sacks, the whole room shrouded, so that it resembled something gloomy and in hiding rather than the bright departure point of the great adventure it had once seemed to me.

  I was standing near the stove, gathering the last few nails from the bottom of a toolbox, when the door suddenly opened. I turned toward it, expecting to see Mr. Reed, then felt my breath catch in my throat.

  “You’re Henry,” she said.

  She stood in the doorway, a bright noon light behind her, facing me, one hand on the door, the other at her side, the sun behind her turning the red tint of her hair into a fiery aurora.

  “Mildred Griswald’s son,” she added.

  Leveled upon me as they were, her green eyes shone out of the spectral light, wide and unblinking, like fish eyes from a murky tank.

  I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She stepped through the door, her gaze upon me with a piercing keenness, alert and wolfish. “You’re helping him,” she said. “Helping him build the boat.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Her eyes drifted from me over to the gleaming side of the boat. Then, in a quick, nearly savage movement, they shot back to me.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “Gone to buy nails.”

  She came toward me, and I felt my body tense. For there was something in her manner, a sense of having been slowly devoured over many weeks, fed upon by thousands of tiny, gnawing doubts, that gave her a strangely cadaverous appearance, as if the bones were already beginning to appear beneath the pale, nearly translucent film that had become her skin.

  “Your mother and I were friends when we were girls,” she said with a faint, oddly painful smile.

  She continued to come forward, and seconds later, when she spoke to me again, I could feel her breath on my face. “The boat’s nearly finished.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said hollowly.

  She glanced about the room, her eyes moving randomly until, with a terrible suddenness, they fixed on the drawing I’d made of Miss Channing, which now hung over the desk in the far corner. Her face became instantly expressionless and void, as if an invisible acid were being poured over her features, melting her identity away.

  “Does she come here?” she asked, her gaze still concentrated upon the drawing.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She lifted her head and twisted it sharply to the left, her attention now focused on the cardboard box that rested on the desk, just below the portrait. Like someone lifted on a cushion of smoky air, she drifted toward it effortlessly, soundlessly, the world held in a motionless suspension until she reached it, dropped her head forward, and peered inside.

  I knew what she was looking at. A map. A knife. A coil of gray rope. And in the corner, a small brown bottle, the letters printed boldly in black ink: ARSENIC.

  She stared into the box for what seemed a long time, like someone recording everything she saw. Then she raised her head in what I will always remember as a slow, steady movement, as if drawing it from the dark, airless water in which it had been submerged, and turned to face me once again. “Is it just me?” she asked.

  “Just you?”

  “Is it just me? Or is it Mary too?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Reed.”

  During all the years that have passed since that moment, I have seen my share of fear and uncertainty and sorrow, but I don’t think I ever saw it in the same combination again, terror so delicately blended with pain, pain so inseparably mingled with confusion, that the final effect was of a shivering, anguished bafflement.

  That was what I saw in Mrs. Reed’s face. It is what I still see when I remember her. It was clear and vivid, all her misery in her eyes. Anyone might have seen it. It could hardly have been more obvious. The only mystery is why her plight, so dark and terrible, did not move me in the least.

  It was my mother that it moved.

  It was late in the afternoon when I returned home that same day. Sarah was in the dining room, setting places for the evening meal, but she stopped when she saw me enter the house, and rushed into the foyer. I could tell that she was alarmed. “Henry, I have to talk to you,” she said urgently. “Mrs. Reed came here today. To talk to your mother.”

  As Mrs. Reed had turned up at our door only a short time after she’d appeared in the boathouse, I had little doubt as to the purpose of her visit. Still, I ke
pt that earlier encounter to myself, allowing Sarah to go on with her story as if I had no hint of where it might be headed.

  “She looked odd, Henry,” Sarah said. “Mrs. Reed did. An odd look in her eye.” She shivered slightly. “It gave me a … a creepy feeling, the way she looked.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She asked to speak with your mother.”

  “Did they speak?”

  “Oh, yes, they spoke, all right. Your mother called for tea, and I brought it to them. Right in the parlor. With the door closed, of course.”

  I could see my mother and Mrs. Reed sitting beside the empty hearth of the parlor, our best china teacups in their hands, Mrs. Reed tormented beyond measure, telling of her husband’s betrayal, my mother growing more and more angry and alarmed as she listened to her story.

  “I couldn’t hear what they said,” Sarah added. “But it looked serious.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They went for a walk, the two of them.” Sarah gave me a piercing look. “What’s this all about, Henry?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” I lied, then turned away and mounted the stairs to my room.

  I was still there an hour later when my father returned from his office at Chatham School. He called me downstairs and asked me directly where my mother was. I glanced toward where Sarah stood silently at the entrance of the dining room, waiting for my answer.

  “She went out for a walk,” I said.

  “A walk?” my father asked. “At this hour? With whom?”

  “With Mrs. Reed,” I told him.

  He could not conceal his troubled surprise at such a visit. “Mrs. Reed? Mrs. Reed came here?”

  “Yes. She came by this afternoon.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Just to see Mother, I guess.”

  He nodded casually, determined to put the best possible light on such a meeting. “Well, they were neighbors, you know,” he said. “Your mother and Mrs. Reed. They’re probably talking about old times, that sort of thing.”

  “I didn’t know they were neighbors,” I said.

  “Yes, they were,” my father said, obviously reluctant to provide any further details. “Well, go on about your business, then, son,” he added, then turned and walked into the parlor.

  I stood at the parlor door, “When were they neighbors?” I asked.

  He sat down, picked up the newspaper from the table beside his chair, and began turning the pages, still trying to avoid any further discussion of the matter. “When they were young. Your mother lived next to the people Mrs. Reed worked for after she was—” He stopped and looked at me suddenly. “Mrs. Reed was abandoned, Henry. When she was a young woman.”

  “Abandoned?”

  “Left at the altar, as they say.” My father’s eyes now retreated behind the paper once again. “And so your mother has a certain … well, a certain sympathy, I suppose you’d call it. For Mrs. Reed, I mean.” He drew in a long breath. “For what she’s gone through in her life.”

  He said nothing more about Mrs. Reed, so that I left the parlor shortly after, returned to my room upstairs, and stayed there until I heard the creak of the front gate, glanced out the window, and saw my mother striding up the walkway to the front stairs.

  I had one of those premonitions children often have, moments when they sense that things are about to fly apart. Perhaps it was the firm, heavy-footed way my mother took the stairs, or the hard slap of the screen door as it closed behind her.

  In any event, I went downstairs to find her in the parlor with my father. He’d lowered the paper and gotten to his feet, facing her from what looked like a defensive position beside the mantel.

  “A woman knows, Arthur,” I heard my mother say.

  “That’s preposterous, Mildred, and you know it.”

  “You won’t face it, that’s the problem.”

  “There has to be some sort of—”

  “A woman knows,” my mother cried. “A woman doesn’t need proof.”

  “Yes, but I do, Mildred,” my father told her. “I can’t just bring two respected teachers into my office and—”

  “Respected?” My mother spat out the word. “Why should they be respected?”

  “That’s enough,” my father said.

  My mother sank briefly into a fuming silence. Then, in a calm, deadly voice she said, “If you won’t do something about this, Arthur, then I’ll have no respect for you either.”

  My father’s voice filled with dismay. “How can you say such a thing to me?”

  “Because I mean it,” my mother said. “I married you because I respected you, Arthur. You seemed like a good man to me. Honest. Steady. But if you don’t do something about this situation between Mr. Reed and that woman—well, then, the way I see it, you’re not the man I married.”

  What I have always remembered most from that dreadful moment is that as my mother listed those things that had drawn her to my father, she never once mentioned love.

  For a few smoldering seconds they faced each other without speaking. Then my father walked to his chair and slumped down into it. “It doesn’t matter anyway, Mildred,” he said softly, his eyes now drifting toward the window. “Miss Channing is leaving Chatham School. She will not return next year.” He picked up the newspaper from the floor beside his chair but did not open it. “She resigned this afternoon. Whatever it is that Mrs. Reed thinks must be going on between Miss Channing and … well … you can tell her that it has come to an end.”

  My mother stood rigidly in place. “You men always feel the same way. That when it’s over, a woman can just forget that it ever happened.”

  Wearily, my father shook his head. “I didn’t say that, Mildred, and you know it.”

  What my mother said next amazed me. “Have you ever betrayed me, Arthur?”

  My father looked at her with an astonishment exactly like my own. “What?” he blurted out. “My God, Mildred, what’s gotten into you? How could you ask me such a question?”

  “Answer it, Arthur.”

  He stared at her, curiously silent, before he finally took a breath and gave his answer. “No, Mildred,” he said evenly. “I have never betrayed you.”

  I looked at my mother, her eyes upon my father with a lethal gaze, and it struck me that she did not believe him, or at least that she would never be sure that he’d told her the truth.

  For a moment they simply faced each other silently. Then my mother walked past him, edging her way through the parlor door as she headed for the kitchen. “Dinner in an hour” was all she said.

  The dinner we sat through an hour later was extremely tense. My father and mother spoke only of trivial things—my father’s plan to include a couple of new courses in the curriculum, my mother’s to have a larger summer garden at the back of the house. When it was over, my mother walked into the parlor, where she stayed, knitting by the unlighted hearth, until she went up to her bed. My father went back to the school, where he worked in his office until nearly nine, returning home only after my mother had already gone upstairs.

  I was sitting in my customary spot in the swing on the front porch when I saw him coming down the street, his gait very slow, his head lowered slightly, the posture he always assumed when he was deep in thought.

  He nodded to me as he came up the stairs.

  “Nice evening, isn’t it, Henry?”

  I expected him to go directly into the house, as he usually did. But instead, he came over to the swing and sat down beside me. At first I didn’t know what to do in regard to the exchange I’d heard between him and my mother a few hours before, but after a time my curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to bring it up.

  Still, I didn’t want to approach things too directly, so I said, “When I was coming downstairs this afternoon, I thought I heard you say that Miss Channing was leaving Chatham School.”

  He did not appear surprised that I’d overheard him, nor particularly alarmed by it, so that I felt the
faint hope that, perhaps for the first time, he’d begun to see me not as a little boy from whom life must be concealed behind a wall of secrecy and silence, but as someone on the brink of adulthood to whom, however painfully, its truths must be revealed.

  “Yes, she’s leaving, Henry.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “I don’t know.” He glanced toward me, then away again. “But I wouldn’t worry about Miss Channing. She’ll do quite well, I’m sure. She’s a very able teacher. Very able. I’m sure she’ll find another post somewhere else.”

  The subject seemed closed. Then, abruptly, my father turned to me. “Henry, you must keep quiet about whatever you’ve heard at home,” he said. “About Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, I mean.”

  I could tell that he was trying to find the words for some other, deeper thought. “Life is inadequate, Henry,” he said finally, his eyes upon me very solemnly. “Sometimes the most we can give, or get, is trust.” With that he leaned forward, patted my leg, rose, and went inside. Nor did he ever make any further attempt to explain what he’d said to me. But over the years, as he grew older and I grew older, I came to understand what he’d meant that night, that hunger is our destiny, faith what we use to soothe its dreadful pang.

  I know now that my father had tried to reach out to me that night, show the path ahead, but I remember that as I watched him trudge wearily through the door, he seemed smaller to me than he ever had. I felt a malevolent wave of contempt for everything he stood for. It was swift and boiling, and in its wake I felt an absolute determination never to be like my father, never so pathetic, nor so beaten down.

  Now, when I think of that moment in my life, of what I felt, and later did, the inevitable strikes me as nothing more than that which has just happened unexpectedly.

  PART 5

  CHAPTER 23

  Some years ago I happened upon a line in Tacitus. It came near the end of the section of Germania that described the utter subjugation of the barbaric German tribes at the hands of the more tightly regimented Roman legions, a campaign that had stripped the Germans of the last vestiges of their savagery, all their primitive rites and rituals taken from them, their dances, songs, and stories. “They have made a wilderness,” Tacitus wrote, “and call it peace.”