The Chatham School Affair (33 page)

Because of that, Miss Channing’s answer, coming on the heels of the proud figure she’d only recently begun to assume, utterly astonished me.

Witness: No, he did not want to be rid of his wife, Mr. Parsons
.

Mr. Parsons: He never spoke ill of Mrs. Reed?

Witness: No, he never did
.

Mr. Parsons: Nor conspired to murder her?

Witness: Of course not
.

Mr. Parsons: Well, many people have testified that Mr. Reed was very upset during the last days of the school year. Do you deny that?

Witness: No, I don’t
.

Mr. Parsons: And in that state he did peculiar things. He named his boat after you, Miss Channing, rather than his wife or daughter
.

Witness: Yes
.

Mr. Parsons: He made some rather ominous purchases as well. He bought a rope and a knife. He bought poison. It would seem that at least during his last Jew weeks at Chatham School, Mr. Reed surely wanted to rid himself of
somebody,
don’t you think, Miss Channing?

It was a question Mr. Parsons had asked rhetorically, for its effect upon the jury, knowing that he had no evidence whatever that any of these things had been purchased for the purpose of murdering Abigail Reed. Because of that, I’d expected Miss Channing to give him no more than a quick, dismissive denial. But that was not what she did.

Witness: Yes, he wanted to be rid of someone, Mr. Parsons. But it was not Mrs. Reed
.

Mr. Parsons: Well, if it wasn’t Mrs. Reed, then who did he want to be rid of, Miss Channing?

Witness: He wanted to be rid of me
.

Mr. Parsons: You? You’re saying he wanted to be rid of you?

Witness: Yes, he did. He wanted me to leave him alone. To go away. He told me that in the strongest possible terms
.

Mr. Parsons: When did he tell you these things?

Witness: The last time I saw him. When we met in the lighthouse. That’s when he told me he wanted to be rid of me. He said that he wished that I were dead
.

When I left the courthouse that afternoon, the final seconds of Miss Channing’s testimony were still playing in my mind:

Mr. Parsons: Leland Reed said that to you, Miss Channing? He said that he wished that you were dead?

Witness: Yes
.

Mr. Parsons: And is it also your testimony, Miss Channing, that Mr. Reed never actually loved you?

Witness: He may have loved me, Mr. Parsons, but not enough
.

Mr. Parsons: Enough for what?

Witness: Enough to abandon other loves. The love he had for his wife and his daughter
.

Mr. Parsons: You are saying that Mr. Reed had already rejected you and wished to be rid of you and return to his wife and daughter, that he had already come to that decision when Mrs. Reed died?

Witness: He never really left them. There was never any decision to be made. They were the ones he truly cared about and wished to be with, Mr. Parsons. It was never me
.

In my mind I saw Mrs. Reed rushing up the stairs as she had on that final day, calling to Mary, then back down them again sometime later, dragging her roughly toward the shed. After that it was a swirl of death, a car’s thunderous assault, Sarah’s body twisting in the air, Mrs. Reed staring at me from infinite green depths, Mr. Reed lowering his cane to the bottom of the boat, slipping silently into the engulfing waves. Had all of that come about over a single misunderstood remark?
Sometimes I wish that she were dead
. Had it really been Miss Channing whom Mr. Reed, rocked by such vastly conflicting loves, had sometimes wanted dead? Had I gotten it all wrong, and in doing that, recklessly done an even greater wrong? I thought of the line I’d so admired in Mr. Channing’s book—
Life is best lived at the edge of folly
—and suddenly it seemed to me that of all the reckless, ill-considered lies I’d ever heard, this was the deepest, the gravest, the most designed to lead us to destruction.

A
t the end of Miss Channing’s testimony, the prosecution rested its case. The jury began its deliberations. During the next two days, a hush fell over Chatham. The crowds no longer gathered on the front steps of the courthouse. Nor huddled in groups on street corners or on the lawn of the town hall.

In the house on Myrtle Street we waited in our own glum silence, my mother puttering absently in her garden, my father working unnecessarily extended hours at the school, I reading in my room, or going for long walks along the beach.

On the following Monday morning, at nine
A.M
., the jury returned to its place in the courtroom. The foreman handed the verdict to the bailiff, who in turn gave it to Judge Crenshaw. In a voice that was resolutely measured, he delivered the news that Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing had been found not guilty on the first count of the indictment, conspiracy to murder. I remember glancing at my father to see a look of profound relief sweep into his face, then a stillness gather on it as the verdict on the second count was read.

Court: On the charge of adultery, how do you find the defendant, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing?

A smile of grim satisfaction fluttered onto my mother’s lips as the foreman gave his answer:
Guilty
.

I glanced at the defense table where Miss Channing stood, facing the judge, her face emotionless, save that her eyes closed briefly and she released a soft, weary breath. Minutes later, as she was led down the stairs to the waiting car, the crowd pressing in around her, I saw her glance toward my father, nod silently. In return, he took off his hat with a kind of reverence, which, given the nature of her testimony, the portrait of herself as little more than a wanton temptress, struck me as the oddest thing he had ever done.

I don’t think Miss Channing saw me at all, since I’d stationed myself farther from her, the crowd wrapped around me like a thick wool cloak. But I could see her plainly nonetheless, her face once again held in that profound sense of self-containment I’d first glimpsed months before, her eyes staring straight ahead, lips tightly closed, as if determined—perhaps like proud Hypatia—to hold back her cry.

She was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, the maximum allowed by Massachusetts law, and I remember that my father greeted the severity of her punishment with absolute amazement, my mother as if it had been handed down from heaven. “It’s finally over,” she said with obvious relief. She didn’t mention the trial again during the rest of that week, but she did insist upon visiting Sarah’s grave, as well as Mrs. Reed’s, carrying vases of fresh flowers for each of them. Mr. Reed had been buried only a short distance from them, but I never saw my mother give his grave so much as a sideward glance.

It was not over, of course, despite my mother’s declaration. At least not for my father. For there was still the matter of Chatham School to deal with.

During the next few weeks its fete hung in the balance.
My father labored to restore its reputation, along with that part of his own good name that had been tarnished by the tragedy on Black Pond. A governing board was established to look into the school’s affairs and consider its future prospects. One by one, over the few weeks that remained of that summer, benefactors dropped away and letters came from distant fathers to say that their sons would not be returning to Chatham School next fall.

At last, all hope for the school’s survival was abandoned, and on a meeting in late September, it was officially closed, my father given two weeks’ severance pay and left to find his way.

He found it in a teaching job at a public school in neighboring Harwichport, and during that long, rain-swept autumn, he rose early, pulled on his old gray duster, and trudged to the car from our new, much smaller house to the east of Chatham.

Others at Chatham School made similar accommodations to their abrupt unemployment. Mrs. Benton took a job as a clerk at Warren’s Sundries, Mrs. Abercrombie as a secretary for Mr. Lloyd, a prominent local banker. Other teachers did other things, of course, although most of them, in the end, drifted away from Chatham to take jobs in Boston or Fall River or other towns along the Cape.

The first snows did not arrive until the last of the village Christmas decorations had been pulled down and returned to their boxes in the basement of the town hall. By February, when the snows were deepest and the sky hung in a perpetual gloom of low-slung clouds, the building that had once housed Chatham School had been converted into a small dressmaking factory, its second floor stacked with bolts of cloth and boxes of thread and buttons, the sound of sewing machines humming continually from its lower rooms.

But in other ways, things went back to normal, and there seemed to be little thought of Miss Channing, with
only quick glimpses of Mary Reed sitting between Dr. and Mrs. Craddock at Quilty’s or building a snowman on her front lawn to remind me of her fate.

And so the years passed as they always do, faster than we can grasp where we have been or may be going to. New buildings replaced older ones. Streets were paved, new lights hung. And high above the sea, the great bluff crumbled in that slow, nearly undetectable way that our bodies crumble before time, and our dreams before reality, and the life we sought before the one we found.

Then, in December of the final year of Miss Channing’s imprisonment, when I was home for the Christmas break of my freshman year in Princeton, a letter came, addressed to my father, in an envelope sent from Hardwick Women’s Prison, and which he later slipped into the little brown folder that became his archive of the Chatham School Affair.

The letter read:

Dear Mr. Griswald:

I write concerning one of my prisoners, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, and in order to inform you that she has fallen ill. Her file lists neither relatives nor friends who, under such circumstances, should be contacted. However, in conversations with Miss Channing, I have often heard mention of your name, of her time in, I take it, your employ, and I wonder if you could provide me with the names and addresses of any relatives or other close associates who should be informed of her condition.

Best regards,
Mortimer Bly
Warden, Hardwick Women’s Prison

My father replied immediately, sending the name and address of Miss Channing’s uncle in British East Africa.
But he did more than that as well, did it with an open heart and against the firmly stated wishes of my mother, who seemed both shocked and appalled by the words he said to her that same night over dinner:
I’ve decided to look in on Miss Channing, and take Henry with me
.

Four days later, on a cold, rainy Saturday, my father and I arrived at the prison in which Miss Channing had been kept for the last three years. We were greeted by Warden Bly, a small, owlish man, but whose courtly manner seemed almost aristocratic. He assured us that Miss Channing was slated to be taken to the prison hospital as soon as a bed was available, and thanked us for coming. “I’m sure it will brighten her spirits,” he said.

After that, my father and I were directed into the heart of the prison, walking down a long corridor, the bars rising on either side, our ears attuned to the low murmur of the women who lived behind them, dressed in gray frocks, smelly and unkempt, their bare feet padding softly across the concrete floor as they shuffled forward to stare at us, their faces pressed against the bars, their eyes following us with what seemed an absolute and irreparable brokenness.

“She’s at the back, all by herself,” the guard said, the keys on the metal ring jangling as he pulled it from his belt. “She ain’t one for mixing.”

We continued to walk alongside him, our senses helplessly drawn toward the cells that flowed past us on either side, the dank odor that emanated from them, the faces that peered at us from behind the steel bars, women in their wreckage.

Finally, we reached the end of the corridor. There the guard turned to the left and stopped, his body briefly blocking our view into the cell. While we waited, he inserted the key, gave it a quick turn, and swung open the door. “In here, gentlemen,” he said, waving
broadly. “Step lively
.”

With that, he drew away, and my father and I saw her for the first time since the trial, so much smaller than I remembered her, a figure sitting on the narrow mattress of an iron bed, her long hair now cut short, but still blacker than the shadows that surrounded her, her pale eyes staring out from those same shadows like two small blue lights.

“Miss Channing,” I heard my father murmur.

Standing together, silent and aghast, we saw her rise and come toward us, her body shifting beneath the gray prison dress, her hand reaching out first to my father, then to me, cold when he took it, no warmer when I let