The Chatham School Affair (19 page)

It had been nearly two weeks since Mr. Reed’s departure, and the sight of him returning to Chatham filled me with anticipation, as if, after a long intermission, the curtain had risen again on the adventure in which I’d joined him.

When I rushed home and told Sarah that I’d just seen Mr. Reed drive past Warren’s Sundries, she’d seemed to share my excitement about his return. “You can get on
with the boat now,” she said, smiling. “Maybe finish it by summer.”

During the Christmas break Sarah and I had often found ourselves alone in the house, my mother working at the church, helping other local women prepare for the Nativity play, my father busy in his office at Chatham School. The school vacation had given us a chance to talk more intimately and for longer periods than we ever had before. Sarah spoke eagerly of one day going to college, her glowing ambition no longer satisfied with attaining the most basic skills, but now set resolutely upon mastering the highest ones. In later years I sometimes thought that it was she who should have been my father’s child, a proud and grateful graduate of Chatham School, I an illiterate boy shipped in from far away, the future author of its ruin.

For by then my own character and ambitions had moved very far from my father’s teaching. It was Mr. Reed to whom I was drawn, particularly to the passionate discontent I could sense in him, his need to do more, be more, break free of Chatham, discover some new world, as if life were a horn of plenty, vast and infinite, rather than a small basket, inadequately stocked, and from which, in choosing one fruit, we must forever lose another.

I found him in the boathouse the day after his return to Chatham. Coming through the door, the Christmas gift I’d brought for him held firmly beneath my arm, I’d expected to find him as I usually aid, planing spruce for the rigging, caulking seams, or simply at work with sandpaper, paint, varnish.

But instead, he was sitting idly at the stern of the boat, his hands in his lap, the cane propped up against the bare, unpainted rail to his left.

He looked up sharply at my entrance, like someone pulled abruptly from a long period of deep concentration, his face still cast in that mood of troubled thoughtfulness I’d seen in it the day before.

“I thought you might be here,” I said. “I saw you drive through town yesterday.”

He smiled faintly. “Go warm yourself,” he said, pointing to the stove. “Then we can start to work.”

I walked over to the stove, then stood with my back to it, watching silently as Mr. Reed began to apply a coat of sealant to the inner frame of the boat. He seemed preoccupied, very nearly distracted, his eyes narrowing from time to time, his lower hp moving very slightly, as if he were reciting lines beneath his breath.

“Did you enjoy your trip to Maine?” I asked, though I could tell he hadn’t.

He shook his head, his eyes following the brush. “Not much.”

I offered a possible reason, though one I doubted. “It’s probably even colder there than it is here in Chatham.”

Mr. Reed didn’t look up from his work to answer me. “I don’t care for Maine. I’d rather have stayed here.” He added nothing else for a while. Then he said, “Did you go over to Milford Cottage during the break?”

“Once,” I told him. “With Sarah.”

The brush stopped. “And Miss Channing … how is she?”

“Fine, I guess.”

And yet, even as I answered him, I recalled that there’d been something in Miss Channing’s manner that had seemed somewhat different from the other times I’d accompanied Sarah to Milford Cottage, more subdued than she’d been before, locked in what appeared the same concentration that I now noticed in Mr. Reed. Throughout the lesson she’d occasionally glanced out her front window, peering through the parted curtains to the empty lawn, her eyes filled with a subtle but detectable agitation, the way I imagined the wives of sailors to have gazed out from their widow’s walks, apprehensively scanning the horizon for their husbands’ ships. I now had
no doubt that it was Mr. Reed she’d been thinking of at those moments.

Mr. Reed returned to his work, the brush moving rhythmically right and left.

I watched him for a few moments, knowing that he was thinking about Miss Channing. I could feel the present I’d made for him still cradled under my arm. It seemed the perfect time to give it to him.

“I have something for you,” I said, rising from the chair. “A Christmas present. I finished it while you were in Maine. I hope you like it. Merry Christmas, Mr. Reed.”

I’d wrapped it in bright green paper and bound it together with a red ribbon. “Thank you,” he said, lifting it slightly, smiling. By its shape he must have known that it was a drawing, although when he opened it, I could tell that what I’d done both surprised and pleased him.

“Miss Channing,” he murmured.

I’d drawn her with pen and ink, though in a pose far different than Mr. Reed would have expected, her hair falling over her bare shoulders in a tangled mass, her eyes intense and searching, lips full and slightly parted, her head tilted forward, but her gaze directed straight ahead, a figure both real and unreal, ethereal, yet beckoning, rendered in an unmistakable attitude of seduction.

“It’s beautiful, Henry,” Mr. Reed said, his eyes fixed on the portrait. He gazed at it a moment longer, then walked over to the small table in the corner. “I’ll hang it here,” he said. He took a nail from his jacket pocket and drove it into the wall above the desk. But before he hung the portrait, he paused, as if another thought had come to him. “You know, Henry, we should show it to Miss Channing.”

“Do you think she’d like it?”

“Of course she would.”

I was not so sure, but Mr. Reed seemed certain, so a few minutes later we were backing out of the driveway of the boathouse, headed for Milford Cottage, Mr.
Reed’s spirits considerably higher now, the framed portrait of Miss Channing pressed against his side.

And so, as it turned out, I didn’t do any work on the boat that day. But during the next few weeks I often returned to the boathouse to do what remained of the caulking and sealing, construct the mast and the boom, assemble the rigging. Enough work so that, four months later, after the Coast Guard had found the boat adrift in Cape Cod Bay, towed it back to Chatham, and moored it in the harbor, I could still walk down to the water’s edge, look out beyond the other boats to the far side of the marina, and see the white prow of the
Elizabeth
lolling emptily in the distance, my eyes forever focused upon that part of it, the naked mast, the rolled-up sail, that I had helped to make.

Miss Channing was standing at the edge of Black Pond when we pulled into the driveway, a place where Sarah and I would sometimes find her when we arrived at Milford Cottage on a Sunday morning, and where, in my mind, I still see her, dressed in white, her back to me, framed by a swath of dark water.

She’d turned as Mr. Reed’s car came to a halt, rushed toward it briefly, then glimpsed me in the passenger seat, and instantly reined herself in, so that she was walking slowly by the time she reached us.

“Hello, Elizabeth,” Mr. Reed said softly as he got out of the car.

“Hello, Leland,” Miss Channing answered. It was the first time I’d ever heard her call Mr. Reed by his given name.

He drew the picture from beneath his arm. “I want to show you something. It’s a Christmas present. Henry gave it to me.”

She stared at the portrait much longer than I’d expected her to. Now I realize that she could not possibly have cared for the way I’d drawn her, that it was only a
nakedly romantic vision of herself, fervidly adolescent, and as she’d continued to study it that afternoon, she might well have been thinking those very words she would later say to Mr. Parsons, her eyes downcast, staring at her hands.
It was never me
.

“Very nice,” she said softly at last. She looked at me, smiled thinly, then handed the portrait back to Mr. Reed. “Would you like some tea?”

Mr. Reed didn’t hesitate in his reply. “Yes. Thank you.”

We went directly into the cottage.

“When did you get back?” Miss Channing asked Mr. Reed after she’d prepared the tea and served us.

“Just yesterday,” Mr. Reed answered.

“And how was Maine?”

“Like always,” Mr. Reed muttered. He took a quick sip, then said, “And you? What did you do while I was away?”

“I stayed here,” she replied. “Reading mostly.”

Mr. Reed drew in a slow breath. “Tell me, Elizabeth … do you sometimes think that you’re living only in your head?”

She shrugged. “Is that such a bad place?”

Mr. Reed smiled gravely. “It depends on the head, I suppose.”

“Yes, of course,” Miss Channing said.

There was an interval of silence before Mr. Reed said, “The boat will be finished by summer.”

Miss Channing said nothing, but only raised the cup to her lips, her eyes on Mr. Reed.

“After that it would be possible to”—he stopped, as if cautioning himself against speaking too rashly, then went on—“possible to go anywhere, I suppose.”

Miss Channing lowered the cup to her lap. “Where would you like to go, Leland?”

Mr. Reed stared at her intently. “Places you’ve already been, I suppose.”

For an instant, they stared at each other silently, but
with an unmistakable intensity and yearning that made the shortest distance between them seem more than they could bear. It was then I first recognized the full depth of what they’d come to feel for each other. It had emerged slowly, incrementally, building every day, word by word, glance by glance, until, at last, it had broken the surface of their long decorum, something irresistibly powerful now blazing up between them, turning all show of mere friendship into a lover’s ruse.

We walked out of the cottage a few minutes later, Mr. Reed and Miss Channing just ahead of me as we strolled out toward the pond, then turned to the right and walked to the end of the old wooden pier that stretched out over the water.

“In the spring we’ll go rowing,” Mr. Reed said. “On the Bass River. All of us together.”

I could see his house in the distance, the small white boat pulled up on dry land. I remembered that only a few weeks before, as we’d stood in the snow on the hill, the sight of his own house had appeared to disturb Mr. Reed, work in his mind like an unpleasant memory. Now it seemed very nearly invisible to him.

It did not seem so to Miss Channing, however, and as she looked across the water toward it, I saw something in her eyes darken, a little light go out. “You should be getting home, Leland,” she told him.

“Yes, I should,” he said, though he made no effort to do so. “That was the first boat I ever built, that little rowboat you can see on the bank there,” he said, his words now turned deeply inward, as if it had been in the process of building it that he’d discovered some abandoned part of himself, a part that had grown steadily since then, and was now poised to consume him. “I guess I wanted something that would let me drift by things,” he added. “Not sail toward them. But just drift by. Hardly make a mark.” He drew in a slow, troubled
breath. “Your father would have despised me, Elizabeth,” he said.

Her eyes flashed toward him. “Don’t ever think that, Leland,” she told him. “It isn’t true.” She glanced at me, then away, clearly trying to determine exactly what she could do or say in my presence. Then, as if suddenly alarmed by the fact that I was there at all, she said sharply, “You’d better go, Leland.”

Mr. Reed nodded silently, turned, and headed off the pier, Miss Channing at his side, the two of them moving slowly across the yard toward where his car rested in the driveway, I off to the right at a little distance, trying to give them all the privacy I could, knowing that it was far less than they desired.

“Well, I’ll come for you on Monday morning,” Mr. Reed said to Miss Channing when we reached the car. “We’ll drive into school together, just like always.”

Miss Channing smiled very faintly, then, in a gesture that seemed to come from deep within her, she suddenly stepped forward and pressed her hand against the side of his face. “Yes,” she whispered. “Monday morning.”

It was the only act of physical intimacy I ever saw between them. And yet it was enough so that when Mr. Parsons asked his question several months later—
Was it your impression, Henry, that Miss Channing was in love with Mr. Reed at this time?
—I could answer, as always, with the truth:

Witness: Yes
.

A
nd so it never surprised me that in the photograph taken nearly two months later, they were still together, standing side by side, Mr. Reed holding to his cane, Miss Channing with her arms at her sides, the trees that tower over them still locked in the grip of that long winter, their limbs stripped and frigid, as bare and fruitless as a bachelor’s life can sometimes be.

Mr. Reed and Miss Channing are not alone in the picture, however. To Mr. Parsons’ dismay, no photograph of them alone was ever located. Instead, they stand amid a throng of teachers and students from Chatham School, along with its office and janitorial staff, everyone assembled on the school’s front lawn, with my father standing proudly in front of them, the lordly captain of their tidy ship, dressed, as always, in his black suit and starched white shirt. The boys fan out to the left and right behind him, all of them dressed in their winter uniforms, shoes shined brightly, wool scarves around their necks, dark blue with gold fringes, the colors of Chatham School. I stand near the end of one flank, my sketchbook pressed manfully against my chest, a warrior behind his sturdy shield.

In every way, then, it was a picture typical of the time, a group photograph artlessly taken and presumed to have little value save to the people pictured in it. Nor would I ever have specifically recalled it had my father not cut it out of the school annual some months after its publication, then added it to his little archive, his reason for doing so made obvious by what he wrote on the back:
Chatham School, 7 March 1927, Last known photograph of Leland Reed
.

But for Mr. Parsons, the principal importance of the photograph was that it showed Mr. Reed and Miss Channing standing beside each other as late as the first week of March 1927, their “illicit affair,” as he called it, still clearly going on. For their arms are touching lightly, as he noted for the jury, a fact that indisputably suggested, as he said in his closing argument, “that Elizabeth Channing and Leland Reed remained united in a relationship whose adulterous and malevolent nature witness after witness has already made clear.”