The Chatham School Affair (15 page)

And yet, on that particular morning Miss Channing hardly looked wanton. She had dressed herself conservatively, as she usually did, her hair tied with a dark blue ribbon, a cameo at her throat.

It was Mr. Reed who appeared somewhat emboldened, standing very erect beside her, his face full of purpose as he spoke.

“Have you seen Sarah?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Not since this morning.”

Miss Channing drew a book from beneath her arm. It was old, with a peeling cover and frayed yellow pages, its spine long ago broken, so that some of the pages were barely held in place. “I wanted to give her this,” she told me.

“It’s my primer,” Mr. Reed explained. “From grade school. I’ve kept it all these years, and now Miss Channing thinks she can use it in her lessons with Sarah.”

I looked at Miss Channing. “If you want, I could give it to her when I go home after school.”

“Thank you, Henry,” Miss Channing said. She handed me the book. “Just tell Sarah to bring it when she comes for her lesson next Sunday.”

I nodded.

“Thank you again, Henry,” Miss Channing said. Then she turned, and the two of them walked back to the bench beside the cliff, Mr. Reed now sitting beside her,
though still at a discreet distance, his cane resting between them like a strictly imposed divide.

I didn’t see Miss Channing again until that same afternoon, this time as she stood behind the table at the front of her classroom.

“Today we’re going to start something new,” she said. “Landscapes.” She turned and made a broad arc over nearly the entire length of the blackboard, then flattened its upper reaches with a few quick strokes. “This is the general shape,” she said, “of a volcano.”

With that, her face took on the curious intimacy I’d become accustomed to by then, the odd intertwining of her teaching and her life. “Nothing on earth, not even the sea, will ever make you feel as small as a volcano makes you feel,” she said.

Then she told us the story of the day her father had taken her to Mount Etna. Its immensity could hardly be grasped by anyone who had not seen it firsthand, she said. It soared from its base to a height of nearly two miles, and the railway that circled it was over ninety miles long, roughly the same distance from Chatham School to Boston. “My father was in awe of the violence of Etna,” she said. “Of how powerful it was, and how indifferent to everything but itself. He wanted me to see how the lava from one of its eruptions had once flowed all the way to the sea, destroying everything in sight.”

She seemed to envision that vast smoldering flow as it had rolled down the slopes, then flowed across the valley, devouring everything in flames, consuming whole villages as it swept toward the sea.

Then, rather suddenly her face brightened. “But what I remember best about Mount Etna,” she said, “is that there were flowers everywhere. On the slope and in the valley. So many of them that even near the rim, where I could see smoke and steam rising from the crater itself, even at that point, where everything else was so desolate,
I could still smell the flowers down below.” She appeared genuinely amazed at the process she described. “Flowers grown from ash.”

During all the years since then, I’ve thought of the Chatham School Affair in exactly opposite terms, the whole process utterly reversed, something that flowered briefly, gave off an exquisite sweetness, then, in a harrowing instant, turned everything to ash.

And so, just as my father later said, some part of it was good. Especially for Mr. Reed, since, as I later learned, he’d never before experienced that form of passion that turns our eyes to the far horizon, erases the past like chalk dust from a board, raises us from the dead as surely as it consigns all others to the grave.

I showed up at his rented boathouse just after Miss Channing’s class that day, images of smoldering volcanos still playing in my mind, my sketchbook already filled with my own attempts at rendering an explosive and primeval violence I was certain I would never experience.

Mr. Reed was sitting at the little wooden desk he’d placed in the corner, a pile of papers spread out across it. He turned to face me as I came through the door.

“Hello, Henry,” he said.

“I wondered if you still needed help on the boat.”

He smiled. “So, you’re still interested?” he asked, already reaching for his cane

“Yes.”

“Well, there she is,” he said, indicating the boat. “What do you think?”

The boat rested on a wooden frame that stretched nearly the entire length of the room. The inner shell had only been partially fitted, so I could see into its still-unfinished interior. Hoisted upon the frame, without a mast, and with slats missing from its outer wrapping, it
looked more like the skeleton of some ancient beast than a boat.

“As you can see,” Mr. Reed said, “there’s still a lot to do. But not as much as you might think. Toward the end, it all comes together rather suddenly.” He paused, gauging my response. Then he said, “We can start now, if you’re still interested.”

We set to work right away, Mr. Reed giving me my first basic lesson in boat-building, the patience it required, the precision of measurement. “You have to go slowly,” he said at one point. “Just let things fall into place.” He offered a wry smile. “It’s like a woman who can’t be rushed.”

As we continued to work that afternoon, it struck me that something had fallen away from Mr. Reed, some part of the impenetrable weariness I’d seen during all the years I’d known him, and which had served to cloak him in a melancholy that seemed inseparable from his character. A new and vital energy had begun to take its place. It was as if a fire were slowly burning off the detritus of his former life, making him more alert and animated than I’d ever seen him, a sense of buoyancy replacing the ponderousness that had so deeply marked him until men, and which I have since come to recognize not as the product of a dream already fulfilled, but only of a hope precariously revived.

We worked together all that afternoon, Mr. Reed more talkative than he’d ever been outside the classroom. He spoke of writers he admired, quoted lines from their works, though not so much in the manner of a teacher as simply of a man whose mind and heart had been informed and uplifted by his reading. He talked about his boat as well, its speed and durability, what its capacities were. “A boat this size, built this way,” he said at one point, “you could sail it around the world.” He thought a moment, as if considering such a possibility. “You’d have to sail along the coastline and skip from island to island,” he added. “But it could be done.”

Only once did the old melancholy appear to settle over him again. “Just one life, Henry,” he said, staring out the window of the boathouse, his eyes fixed on the bay, and, beyond it, the open sea. “Just one life, and no more chances after that.” He turned back to me “That’s the whole tragedy, right there.”

It seemed the perfect moment to add my own comment. “That’s what Miss Channing’s father says,” I told him. “In his book. He says that if you look back on your life and ask What did I do?, then it means that you didn’t do anything.”

Mr. Reed nodded thoughtfully, and I could tell he was turning the line over in his mind “Yes, that’s true. Do you think Miss Channing believes that?”

With no evidence whatsoever, I answered, “Yes, I do.”

He seemed pleased by my answer. “Well, it
is
true, Henry. Absolutely true. Whether most people want to believe it or not.”

I suppose that from then on I felt in league with Mr. Reed, willing to work on his boat every afternoon and weekend if mat’s what it took to finish it, willing to listen to him in all the weeks that followed, his tone bright and buoyant at first, then darkening steadily until, toward the end, he seemed mired in endless night.

It was nearly evening when I finally headed back toward home. And I remember that as I walked up the coastal road, the autumn drizzle felt more like a spring rain, the bare limbs not destined for a deeper chill, but on the very brink of budding.

The table had already been set for dinner by the time I reached home, my mother and father in their usual places at opposite ends of it, Sarah moving smoothly from one to the other, humming softly under her breath so my mother could not hear her.

My father glanced at his pocket watch as I took my seat. “Are you aware of the time, Henry?”

I wasn’t, but said I was, then gave him a reason that I
knew would justify my tardiness. “I was down at the marina, helping Mr. Reed.”

“Helping Mr. Reed?” my mother asked doubtfully. “To do what?”

“He’s building a boat,” I answered. I glanced toward Sarah, saw her give me a quick conspiratorial smile. “He’s been working on it for a long time,” I added. “He wants to finish it by summer.”

My mother could not conceal her disapproval. “It’s his house over on the pond that could use a little work, if you ask me,” she sniffed. “More than some fool boat down at the marina.”

“Now, Mildred,” my father cautioned, always careful that teachers at Chatham School not be criticized in front of me. “What Mr. Reed does in his spare time is his own business. But being on time for dinner is your responsibility, Henry, and be sure you look to it from now on.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, glancing once again toward Sarah, her smile even broader now, her eyes gleaming with a quick, mischievous fire.

Her room was in the attic.

The tap at the door must have surprised her. “Who’s there?” she asked, a hint of apprehension in her voice.

“It’s me, Henry,” I said, standing in the utter darkness of the narrow stairway. “Miss Channing wanted me to give you a book.”

She opened the door slightly, her face in candlelight. “You shouldn’t be up here, Henry,” she whispered. “What if your …’

“They’re asleep,” I told her. I smiled mockingly. “I know they are. I can hear my mother snoring.”

She laughed sharply, and swiftly covered her mouth. “Be quick about it, then,” she urged as she opened the door.

The room was tiny, with a slanting ceiling, her bed
pressed up against the far wall, a small desk and a chair at the other end, along with a short bureau with a porcelain wash basin and china pitcher on top. Now, when I recall that room, it seems smaller still, particularly compared to the aspirations of the girl who lived there, the life she yearned for.

“Miss Channing asked me to give you this,” I said, handing her Mr. Reed’s primer.

She stepped over to her bed and sat down upon it. I stood a few feet away, watching as she opened the book and began to leaf through the pages.

“It’s Mr. Reed’s primer,” I said. “The one he had in grade school. Miss Channing wants you to bring it with you on Sunday.”

She continued to glance through the book until she reached the end. Then she turned back to its beginning. “Look, Henry,” she said, her eyes on the book’s front page.

I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her.

“Look at what Mr. Reed wrote to Miss Channing,” she said.

The words were in dark blue ink, Mr. Reed’s small, tortured hand immediately recognizable, though the words seemed far more tender than Mr. Reed himself ever had.

My dear Elizabeth,

I hope that you can make some use of this book, even though, like the owner of it, it is an old and worn-out thing.

With love,
Leland

Sarah’s eyes lingered on the inscription for a time before she lifted them to me, her hand suddenly brushing mine very gently, almost silkily, with no more weight than a ribbon. “Have you ever been in love, Henry?” she
asked, the words coming with an odd hesitancy, her eyes upon me with a softness and sense of entreaty that have never left me since then, and which I often recall on those nights when the wind blows and drifts of snow climb toward the window, and I am alone With my memories of her.

My answer was quick and sure. “No.”

I saw her shoulders fall slightly, felt her hand draw away. She closed the book and placed it on the bed beside her. “You’d better go now,” she said, her eyes now averted.

I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the narrow landing. “Well, good night, Sarah,” I said as I turned to close the door again.

She did not look up, but kept her head bowed slightly so that a dark curtain of black hair fell over the right side of her face. “Good night, Henry,” was all she said.

I closed the door and returned to my room. I don’t recall thinking of Sarah again that night. But I have thought of her often since then, wondered if things might have turned out differently on Black Pond had I lingered a moment longer in her room. Perhaps I might finally have grasped the ribbon that dangled from her gown, given it a slow, trembling pull, and thus come to know both the power of that first encounter, and then the later pleasures of enduring love. I don’t know if Sarah would have given herself to me that night, but if she had, I might have gone to her from then on rather than to the boathouse or Milford Cottage. I might have experienced love up close and through all its changing seasons, and by doing that, come to feel spring as something other than a cruel deception, winter the dreadful truth of things.

B
ut in the end, I chose to think of life rather than to live it.

I said as much in my office one afternoon. I’d been talking to Mr. Parsons’ son, Albert Parsons, Jr., the two of us in our middle fifties by then, with the elder Mr. Parsons now impossibly old and senile, a figure rooted on a bench outside the town hall, muttering to himself and flinging crumbs to the pigeons.

“So many books, Henry,” he said in a tone that seemed vaguely accusatory. “Have you read them all?”

I offered him a mirthless smile. “They’re what I have instead of a wife and children.”

Albert laughed. “You’re a pistol, Henry. A real barnyard philosopher.” He sat back and let his eyes roam the bookshelves in my office, squinting at the titles. “Greeks and Romans. Why them in particular?”

“They were my father’s favorites.”

“Why’s that?”