The Chatham School Affair

We stood in a ragged line at the crest of the hill, facing east, across Black Pond, to where a curl of chimney smoke could be seen rising from the trees along its most distant bank.

“That smoke must be coming from your house, Mr. Reed,” Sarah said, pointing to it.

Mr. Reed nodded, his manner now strangely somber. “I should be getting back home,” he said, glancing toward Miss Channing. “Abigail is waiting.”

“It looks just like a Christmas card, if you ask me,” Sarah said happily. “The house by the pond. The snow. Just like a Christmas card, don’t you think so?”

Mr. Reed smiled, but with a curious wistfulness, as if it were something he remembered fondly from a distant past. “Yes,” he said, his eyes now fixed on the far bank of the pond. “Yes, it looks just like a Christmas card.” Then he turned away and I saw his eyes light upon Miss Channing, linger upon her profile for a moment.

“And are you going away for the Christmas holiday then?” Sarah asked him. The cold air had caused the color to rise in her cheeks and her eyes sparkled with excitement.

He seemed reluctant to answer, but did so anyway. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to Maine for a couple of weeks. We always do that, go to Maine.”

With that, he turned quickly and led us back down the hill to Miss Channing’s cottage.

Mr. Reed stopped when he reached his car. “I’ll be getting home now,” he said, his eyes on Miss Channing.

“I’m glad you dropped by,” she told him, her voice quite soft, almost inaudible.

“Perhaps I’ll come again,” Mr. Reed said in a tone that struck me as subtly imploring, as if he were asking for some sign from her that he should return.

If she gave him one, I didn’t see it. Instead, she shivered slightly. “It’s really quite cold.”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Reed answered, his voice now entirely matter-of-fact. “Would you like a ride into the village?” he asked Sarah and me.

We accepted his offer and climbed into the car. Mr. Reed remained outside it, facing Miss Channing, the snow falling between and around them. He spoke to her again, words I couldn’t hear, then stepped forward and offered his hand. She took it, held it for just an instant, then let it go, smiling quietly as he stepped away. It was then I saw it in all its naked force, the full measure of the love that had begun to overwhelm Mr. Reed, perhaps even some hint of the exquisite agony that was inseparable from it, not yet fierce, and certainly not explosive, but the fuse already lit.

Instead of going directly to Chatham, Mr. Reed swung to the right and drove to his own house on the other side of the pond. “I should tell my wife that I’m going to the marina,” he told us.

“The marina?” Sarah asked.

Mr. Reed nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I rented a boat-house there a few years ago. I’m building a boat in it. A fifteen-footer.”

Sarah stared at him admiringly, the thought of such a grand endeavor playing in her eyes. “When will it be finished?” she asked.

“With a little help, I could probably finish it by summer,” Mr. Reed answered.

Impulsively, without giving it the slightest thought, I suddenly made an offer that has pursued me through the years, following me through time, like a dog through the night, its black muzzle forever sniffing at my heels. “I could help you finish it,” I said. “I’d like to learn about boats.”

Mr. Reed nodded, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Really, Henry? I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing.”

“Yes, I am,” I told him, though even now I don’t know why I felt such an interest. I do know that it had not come from the seafaring adventure novels I often read, though that was the reason I offered Mr. Parsons the day we walked through the boathouse together. More likely, it had sprung from a voyeur’s dark urge, the allure of the forbidden already working like a drug in my mind.

We reached his house a few minutes later. Sarah and I remained in the car while Mr. Reed went inside.

“He’s such a nice man,” Sarah said. “Not an old fogy like some of them at Chatham School.”

I nodded. “Yes, he is.”

He came back out of the house almost immediately, a long roll of white paper beneath his arm, bound with twine, like a scroll. I watched as he made his way across the yard, his daughter Mary rushing down the stairs behind him while Mrs. Reed stood at the edge of the porch, wiping her hands on her apron as she watched him trudge back toward us through the falling snow. She was still in that position when he pulled himself into the car, but Mary had bounded toward us, then stopped, smiling mischievously as she attempted to roll a snowball in her hands.

Once inside the car, Mr. Reed started the engine and began to pull away. We’d drifted back only a few feet, when Mary suddenly rushed forward and hurled the snowball toward us. It landed on the hood and exploded just at the base of the windshield, sending a flurry of white onto the glass. Mr. Reed turned on the wipers, and as they swept across the windshield, I saw Mrs. Reed still standing on the porch, watching motionlessly as Mr. Reed continued backward, away from her, leaving two dark cuts in the snow.

I told my father about that scene as we stood together on the hill overlooking Black Pond.

“Do you think she’d already sensed it?” my father asked me when I’d finished the story. “I mean, before Christmas. Before they all went to Maine together? Do you think Mrs. Reed already suspected something?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

His eyes shifted to the left, and I could tell he was gazing in the general direction of where Mr. Reed had once lived with his wife and daughter. “If she did know, or if she already suspected something by that time, then she had to have dealt with it for a long time before …”

“Yes, she had,” I said. And with those words I saw her again, Abigail Reed standing beside me as she had in the boathouse that day, her eyes staring down into a cardboard box, fixed on the things that lay inside it—the rope, the knife, a nautical map with a route already drawn in red ink.

“So what finally broke her, I wonder. Sent her over the edge, I mean.”

I said nothing.

He looked at me, his puzzlement returning once again. “We’ll never get to the bottom of it, will we, Henry? We’ll never know what she was thinking in the end.”

I did not answer him, but in my mind I saw her in that final moment, a face pressing toward me out of the murky depths, her red hair waving behind her like a shredded banner.

CHAPTER 13

But despite those times when I was forced to consider the end of it, as I had that day on the hill with my father, I found that I more often hearkened back to its beginning, particularly to a story Miss Channing told in class only a few days after we’d all had fruitcake and gone for a walk in the snowy woods.

At Chatham School, the lunch break was one hour, from twelve to one, and after having lunch in the upstairs dining hall I’d walked into the village, made my way to Peterson’s Hardware Supply, idly fiddled with a fancy new fishing pole, then headed back up the snow-covered hill toward the school.

As I neared Myrtle Street, I saw Miss Channing sitting on a wooden bench near the edge of the cliff, Mr. Reed standing behind her, leaning on his cane, the wind blowing back his jacket and riffling through his hair, so that he seemed momentarily captured in that passionate wildness Mr. Parsons would later describe as the origins of murder. I saw his hand touch her shoulder, then leap back, as if from a red-hot stove. Then he said something, and she glanced back at him and smiled.

That’s when she caught me with her eye, peered at me an instant, then rose and began to stride toward me. She was wearing a long, dark coat, and as she moved toward me from the crest of the bluff, the high collar raised up against the back of her neck, I remember thinking that she looked like someone from an earlier century, one of those women we’d read about in Mr. Reed’s literature class the previous year, Eustacia Vye, perhaps, or Madame Bovary, wild and passionately driven, capable of that lethal wantonness Mr. Parsons later described to the jury, and in whose presence, he said, Mr. Reed was “little more than a piece of kindling before a raging flame.”

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.

CHAPTER 14

But 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?”

I shrugged. “Maybe because he thought they saw it more clearly.”

“Saw what?”

“Life.”

He laughed again. “You’re a pistol, Henry,” he repeated.

We’d just come to a settlement that each of us felt our clients would accept, his being the aggrieved party in a construction contract dispute, mine, a local contractor named Tom Cannon.

“You know, Henry, I was a little surprised that Tom ever got named in a lawsuit like this,” Albert said. “He’s done plenty of work for me, and I’ve never had any trouble with him.” He took a sip of the celebratory brandy I’d just poured him. “He even built that little office my father used when he was working on his memoirs.”

Some part of the old time abruptly reasserted itself in my mind, and I saw Mr. Parsons as he’d stood before the jury on the last day of Miss Channing’s trial, a man in his early forties then, still young and vigorous, no doubt certain that he’d found the truth about her, revealed for all to see the murderous conspiracy she’d hatched with Leland Reed.

“How is Mr. Parsons these days?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s as good as can be expected, I guess,” Albert answered. “Of course, the way he is now, there’s not a whole lot he can do but sit around.” He took a greedy sip from the brandy. “He likes to hang around the courthouse for the most part. Or on that bench in front of the town hall.” He shrugged. “He mutters to himself sometimes. Old age, you know.”

I saw Mr. Parsons on his lonely bench, his hand rhythmically digging into a paper bag filled with bread crumbs or popcorn, casting it over the lawn, a circle of pigeons sweeping out from around him like a pool of restless gray water.

Albert took a puff on his cigar, then flicked the ash into the amber-colored ashtray on my desk. “He talks about my mother, of course, along with my sister and me,” he went on absently. “Some of his big cases too. They come to mind once in a while.”

Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “The Chatham School Affair.”

Albert looked at me, perhaps surprised that it had leaped into my mind so quickly. “Yes, that one in particular,” he said. “He got quite a shock from that woman … what was her name?”

“Channing,” I said. “Elizabeth Channing.”

Albert shook his head. “Nobody could have imagined that that woman would cause so much trouble,” he added with a short laugh. “Not even your father.”

Inevitably I recalled how the people of Chatham had finally laid a large portion of the blame for what happened on Black Pond at my father’s feet. It was the price he’d paid for hiring Miss Channing in the first place, then turning what everyone considered a blind eye to her behavior, a delinquency that his neighbors had never been able to forget, nor his wife forgive.

“You think he ever suspected anything, Henry?”

I remembered the look on my father’s face as he’d closed the door of his office that day, with Mr. Parsons in his dark suit, reaching into the box he’d placed on the chair beside him, drawing out a book with one hand, a length of gray rope with the other, Miss Channing standing before him in a white dress. “Not of what they thought she did. No, I don’t think he ever suspected her of that.”

“Why, I wonder,” Albert said casually, as if he were discussing no more than a local curiosity, “I mean, she was pretty strange, wasn’t she?”

For a moment I thought I saw her sitting silently on the other side of the room, staring at me as she had that last time, her hair oily, matted, unwashed, her skin a deathly pale, but still glowing incandescently from out of the surrounding shadows. In a low, unearthly whisper I heard her repeat her last words to me: Go now, Henry Please.

“No, she wasn’t strange,” I said. “But what happened to her was.”

Albert shrugged. “Well, I was just a little boy at the time, so really, about all I remember is that she was very pretty.”

I recalled my father’s eyes the day she’d approached him across the summer lawn of Milford Cottage, her bare feet in the moist green grass, then the look on Mr. Reed’s face as he’d gazed at her on the hill that snowy November morning. “She was beautiful,” I told Albert Parsons, my eyes now drifting toward the window, then beyond it, to the lighthouse she’d fled from that terrible afternoon. “But she couldn’t help that, could she?”

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Albert said. “It was the man who was the real shocker in the whole thing. The other teacher, I mean.”

“Leland Reed.”

“That’s right.” Albert released a quick, mocking laugh. “I mean, God almighty, Henry, who’d have thought that a man like him would interest a young woman as pretty as that Channing woman was?” He shook his head at the curiousness of human beings, their woeful randomness and unpredictability, the impenetrable wilderness they make of life. “Why, hell, that Reed fellow looked like a damn freak, as I remember it, always limping around, his face all scarred up. Just a rag of a man, mat’s what my father said. His very words. Just a rag of a man.”

I drew my eyes away from the lighthouse and settled them on the old oak that stood across the way, its bare limbs rising upward, twisting and chaotic, a web without design. Beyond it, down a distant street that led to the marina, I could make out the gray roof of the old boat-house where Mr. Reed and I had labored to build his boat. In my memory of those days I could see him working frantically through the night, painting, varnishing, making the final preparations for its maiden voyage. Like someone whispering invisibly in my ear, I heard mm say, Disappear, disappear, the grim incantation of his final days.

“Of course that Channing woman certainly saw some thing in him,” Albert said. He smiled. “What can you say, Henry? The mysteries of love.”

But the nature of what Miss Channing might have seen in Leland Reed seemed hardly to matter to Albert, Jr. He crushed his cigar into the ashtray. “They didn’t get away with it though,” he said. “That’s the main thing. I once heard my fattier say that he’d never have gotten to the bottom of it—that he’d have just thought it was all some kind of terrible accident—if it hadn’t been for you.”

I felt something give in the thick wall I’d built around my memory of that time. In my mind I saw Mr. Parsons standing in front of me, the two of us on the playing field behind Chatham School, facing each other in a blue twilight, Mr. Parsons suddenly twisting his head in the general direction of Black Pond before returning his gaze to me, his hand coming to a soft paternal rest upon my shoulder. Thank you, Henry. I know how hard it is to tell the truth.

The newspaper headline stated the fact baldly: STUDENT TESTIFIES IN CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR.

There’d been a photograph beneath the headline, a young man in dark trousers and a gray jacket, his black hair now slicked back and neatly combed, a figure that had not in the least resembled the wild-eyed boy who’d stood at the top of the lighthouse some weeks before, madly drawing one frenzied portrait after another, rendering Chatham as a reeling nightmare world.

Others in the village have no doubt forgotten what I said upon the stand, but I never have, nor ever will. So that on that day over forty years later, when I’d sat in my office with Albert Parsons, Jr., watching him light his second cigar, I’d seen it all unfold once again, myself in the witness box, dressed in the black trousers and gray jacket of Chatham School, my hair neatly combed, all my wild ideas of flight and freedom now brought to heel by Mr. Parsons’ first question: When did you first meet Elizabeth Channing?

After that he’d continued gently, pacing back and forth while I sat rigidly in the witness box, a bright morning sun pouring in from the high windows, flashing rhythmically in the lenses of his glasses as he moved through blinding shafts of light.Mr. Parsons: Now, you are a student at Chatham School, are you not, Henry?Witness: Yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: And you took English with Mr. Leland Reed, I believe, and art with the defendant, Miss Elizabeth Channing?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: And would you say that Mr. Reed took a special interest in you?Witness: Yes, he did.Mr. Parsons: And Miss Charming too?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: How would you describe the interest Miss Channing took in you, Henry?Witness: Well, mostly she was interested in my drawing. She told me that she thought I had talent, and that I should get a sketchbook and draw in my spare time.

Sitting in the witness box, listening to my own voice, I remembered all the times I’d tucked that same sketchbook beneath my arm and set out from my house on Myrtle Street, a lone figure marching solemnly into the village or strolling down the beach, fired by the idea of an artistic life, of roaming the world as Miss Channing’s father had, a creature with no fixed abode.Mr. Parsons: And did you do a great deal of drawing at this time?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: But that was not your only activity at this time, was it, Henry?Witness: Activity?Mr. Parsons: Well, you also became involved in another project during that year at Chatham School, didn’t you? With Mr. Reed, I mean.Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: And what activity was that?Witness: I helped him build his boat.

Even as I’d said it, I recalled how often I’d gone down to the boathouse Mr. Reed had rented near the harbor, the two of us drifting down the coastal road in his old car, Mr. Reed talking quietly, I listening silently, my fingers drumming incessantly on the sketchbook in my lap, increasingly extravagant visions playing in my mind, the vagabond life I so desperately wanted, trains hurling through mountain tunnels, night boats to Tangier.

But it hadn’t been my boyish fantasies, nor even my relationship with Mr. Reed, that Mr. Parsons had been intent upon exploring the day he’d questioned me in court, and I remember how my body had tensed as he began to close in upon what I knew to be his sole intended prey:Mr. Parsons: So during this last year you spent at Chatham School, you came to know Miss Channing well?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: And sometimes you visited her at her cottage on Black Pond, isn’t that so?Witness: On Black Pond, yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: In the company of Sarah Doyle, is that right?Witness: Yes.

I saw all those many occasions pass through my mind as the questions continued, my answers following, Mr. Parsons now beginning to lead the silent courtroom spectators into a steadily more sinister tale, my own mind working to avoid that part of it Mr. Parsons had not yet discovered, trying not to see again what I’d seen that fateful day, a woman seated on a porch, snapping beans from the large blue bowl that rested on her lap, dropping their severed ends into a bucket at her feet, then rising slowly as I came toward her from the distance, peering at me intently, a single freckled hand lifting to shield her eyes from the bright summer sun.

Concealing all of that, my answers had continued to take the form of Mr. Parsons’ questions, adding nothing, going along with him, responding to questions that sounded innocent enough but which I knew to be lethally aimed at the only villain in the room.Mr. Parsons: Did you have occasion to meet with Miss Channing in her classroom at Chatham School on Friday afternoon, December 21, 1926?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: Could you tell the court the substance of that meeting?

It had happened during the last week of school before the Christmas break, I told the court, nearly a month after the time I’d come up the coastal road and noticed Miss Channing and Mr. Reed talking together at the edge of the bluff. I had left her class later that same afternoon, feeling rather low because she’d not seemed terribly enthusiastic about some of the drawings I’d shown her, wide seas and dense forests, suggesting that I try my hand at what she called “a smaller canvas,” a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit.

During most of the next day I’d brooded over her suggestion. Then an idea had occurred to me, a way of regaining some measure of the esteem I so craved at that time. With that goal in mind, I’d returned to Miss Channing’s classroom at the end of the following day.Mr. Parsons: Miss Channing was alone when you came to her classroom?Witness: Yes, she was.

Up until that moment in my testimony I’d answered Mr. Parsons’ questions directly and with little elaboration. Then, rather suddenly, I began to supply unnecessary details. I’d gone to Miss Channing’s room with a particular purpose in mind, I told him, my eyes fixed directly on Mr. Parsons, my voice low, almost a whisper, as if I’d convinced myself that whatever I said from then on would be kept strictly secret between Mr. Parsons and me, that there was no jury present, no benches filled with spectators, no reporters to record the things I said and send them out into the larger world.

Miss Channing had been preparing for the next day’s classes, I told the court. I’d come through the door silently, so that she’d been slightly startled when she saw me.Mr. Parsons: Startled? Why was she startled?Witness: Probably because she’d been expecting someone else.Mr. Parsons: Who?Witness: Mr. Reed, I suppose.Mr. Parsons: What happened after that?Witness: She spoke to me.Mr. Parsons: What did she say?

“Henry?” she said.

I stood at the door, facing her. From the way she looked at me, I could tell that she hadn’t expected to see me there.

“What is it, Henry?” she asked.

I wanted to answer her directly, tell her frankly why I’d come to see her at that hour, but the look in her face silenced me.Mr. Parsons: What look was that, Henry?Witness: Well Miss Channing had a way of looking at you that made you … made you.Mr. Parsons: Made you what?Witness: I don’t know. She was different, that’s all. Different from the other teachers.Mr. Parsons: In what way was she different?Witness: Well, she taught her classes in a different way than the other teachers did. I mean, she told us stories about the places she’d been to, about things that had happened in these places.Mr. Parsons: These “things that had happened,” were they pleasant things?Witness: Not always.Mr. Parsons: In fact, many of them were often very cruel things, weren’t they? Stories about violence? About death?Witness: Sometimes.Mr. Parsons: She told the class about a certain Saint Lucia, isn’t that right? A woman who’d gouged out her own eyes?Witness: Yes. She told us about the church in Venice, where her body is.Mr. Parsons: Another one of her stories involved the murder of children, didn’t it?Witness: Yes. The little princes. That’s what she called them.

Mr. Parsons had continued with similar questions, unearthing other of Miss Channing’s stories, tales of children who’d been buried alive, women who’d been drowned, before returning at last to the afternoon I’d gone to her room.Mr. Parsons: All right. Now, tell me, Henry, did you finally tell Miss Channing why you’d come to her classroom?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: What did you tell her?

“I want to draw you,” I told her.

“Draw me?” she asked. “Why?”

“I tried to do it once before,” I said, concealing my true purpose in wanting a portrait of her. “But it didn’t come out very well.” I lifted the sketch pad I’d tucked beneath my arm. “I thought I’d try again if you wouldn’t mind.”

“You want me to pose for you, Henry?”

I nodded. “Just until you … go to Mr. Reed.”

I could see that the expression I’d used, the way I’d said “go to Mr. Reed,” had sounded suggestive to her, but I added nothing else.Mr. Parsons: And so you could tell, even at that early time, that Miss Channing was already aware that you were suspicious of her relationship with Mr. Reed?Witness: I think so, yes.Mr. Parsons: And how did she react to the fact that she might be coming under suspicion?Witness: Like she didn’t care.Mr. Parsons: What gave you that impression?Witness: What she said, and the way she said it.

She lifted her head in a gesture that made her look very nearly prideful, and said, “As a matter of fact, Mr. Reed will be here in just a few minutes.”

“I could draw you until he comes,” I told her. “Even if it’s only for a few minutes.” I took a short, uneasy step toward her, the afternoon light flooding over me from the courtyard window. “Just for practice.”

“Where do you want me?” she asked.

I nodded toward the wooden table that served as her desk. “Just sitting at your desk would be fine,” I said.Mr. Parsons: And so Miss Channing posed for you that afternoon?Witness: It wasn’t exactly a pose. She just sat at her desk, working, while I drew.Mr. Parsons: How long did she do that?Witness: For about an hour, I guess. Until Mr. Reed came for her. By then it was getting dark.Mr. Parsons: As a matter of fact, it was already dark enough for you to turn on the light in the room, isn’t that right, Henry?Witness: Well, I could see her, but I needed more light, yes.Mr. Parsons: What I’m trying to make clear is that it was very late in the afternoon by the time Mr. Reed came to Miss Channing’s room.Witness: Yes, it was.Mr. Parsons: Could it reasonably be said that all the other teachers had left Chatham School by then?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: And where were the other students?Witness: In the dormitory, most of them. On the second floor. It was almost time for dinner.Mr. Parsons: And so, when Mr. Reed arrived at Miss Channing’s room, he probably expected to find her alone, is that right?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: And when Miss Channing saw Mr. Reed come into her room, did you notice any reaction from her?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: What was that reaction?

Miss Channing’s eyes suddenly brightened, I told the court, and she smiled. “I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said, her eyes gazing toward the front of the room.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Mr. Reed standing at the door, leaning on his cane.

“Am I interrupting something, Elizabeth?” he asked as he stepped farther into the room, his eyes drifting over to me, then back to Miss Channing.

“No,” she answered. “Henry just wanted to practice his drawing.” She rose and began to gather up her things. “We’ll have to continue this some other time,” she said to me.

I nodded and started to close the sketchbook, but by that time Mr. Reed had come down the aisle, his eyes on my drawing.

“Not bad,” he said, “but the eyes need something.” He looked at Miss Channing. “It would be hard to capture your eyes.”

She smiled at him softly. “I’m ready,” she said as she walked toward the front of the room. Mr. Reed stepped back and opened the door for her, then watched as she passed through it. “Coming, Henry?” he asked, glancing back into the room. I closed my sketchbook and walked out into the courtyard, where Miss Channing stood beside the tree, a few books hugged to her chest.

“Well, good night, Henry,” she said as Mr. Reed joined her, the two of them now moving through the courtyard and into the school, I trailing behind at a short distance.Mr. Parsons: So you were more or less following Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, is that right?Witness: Yes. But I stopped at the front door of the school. They went on to the parking lot. Toward Mr. Reed’s car. Then they drove away.Mr. Parsons: Do you know where they went?Witness: I later found out where they went.Mr. Parsons: How did you find that out, Henry?Witness: Mr. Reed told me. The next day. On the way to Boston.Mr. Parsons: So by this time you and Mr. Reed had developed the sort of relationship that allowed him to confide such things in you?Witness: Yes, we had.Mr. Parsons: Could you describe the nature of that relationship?

It was in answer to that question that I told my only he upon the witness stand, one whose enduring cruelty I had not considered until I told it. “Mr. Reed was like a father to me,” I told Mr. Parsons, then glanced over to see my own father staring at me, a mournful question in his eyes. Then what was I to you, my son?

CHAPTER 15

Despite the answer I gave to Mr. Parsons that day, Mr. Reed was never really like a father to me. Nor like a brother nor even a friend. Instead, we seemed to move forward on parallel conspiracies, the two of us lost in separate but related fantasies, his focused on Miss Channing, mine upon a liberated life, both of us oblivious of what might happen should our romantic dreams converge.

It had developed rapidly, my relationship with Mr. Reed, so that only a few weeks after we’d begun to work on the boat together, it had already assumed the ironclad form that would mark it from then on, Mr. Reed still vaguely in the role of teacher, I in the role of student, but with an unexpected collusion that went beyond all that, as if we were privy to things others did not know, depositories of truths the world was too cowardly to admit.

To the other teachers and students of Chatham School during those last few months, we must have seemed a curious pair, Mr. Reed walking slowly with his cane, I trailing along beside him with a sketchbook beneath my arm, the two of us sometimes making our way up the lighthouse stairs, to stand at its circular iron railing, Mr. Reed pointing the tip of his cane out to sea, as if indicating some far, perhaps impossible place he yearned to sail for. “Past Monomoy Point, it’s open sea,” he told me once. “There’d be nothing to stop you after that.”

We drove to Boston together the day before he was set to leave for Maine with Mrs. Reed and his daughter. He’d wanted to buy a breastplate for the boat, along with some rigging. “The really elegant things are in Boston,” he explained. “Things that are made not just to be used, but to be … admired.”

We took the old route that curved along the coast, through Harwichport and Dennis, past Hyannis, and farther, until we reached the canal. It was no more than a muddy ditch in those days, Sagamore Bridge not yet built, so that we rumbled across the wooden trellis that had been flung over the water years before, a rattling construct of steel and timber, functional but inelegant, as Mr. Reed described it, the way much of life appeared to be.

Once over the bridge, the Cape receding behind me, I looked back. “You know what Miss Channing said when she saw the Cape for the first time?” I asked.

Mr. Reed shook his head.

“That it looked tormented,” I told him. “Like a martyr.”

“Yes, she would say something like that,” he said with a quiet, oddly appreciative smile. He grew silent for a moment, his eyes fixed on the wider road that led to Boston. “I guess you noticed Miss Channing and me leaving school together yesterday afternoon.”

I pretended to make nothing of it. “You always leave together.”

He nodded. “I usually take her straight home,” he said. “But yesterday we went to the old cemetery on Brewster Road.” He waited for a question. When none came, he continued. “We wanted to talk awhile. To be alone.” He stared at the road, the strand of dark hair that had fallen across his brow now trembling slightly with the movement of the car. “So we went to the cemetery. Just to get away from … other people.” He smiled. “I promised Miss Channing that I’d have her home before dark.”

The landscape swept by on either side. I had not been off the Cape in well over a year, and I felt an unmistakable exhilaration in the forward thrust of the car, the unfolding of the landscape, the vast, uncharted world that seemed to he just beyond my grasp.

“I don’t know why I picked that cemetery,” Mr. Reed went on as if he were circling around something he was not sure he wanted to reveal. “Something about it, I suppose. Probably the quiet, the solitude.”

“Did Miss Channing like it?” I asked.

“Yes, she did. There’s a little grove near the center of it. Some evergreen trees, with a little cement pool.” He forced a small laugh. “I did most of the talking. You know, about my life.”

After that Mr. Reed told me a great deal of what he’d said to Miss Channing in the cemetery the previous afternoon, how he’d been born in a working class section of Boston, a noisy, pinched world of clattering factories and grimy tenements where people lived beneath clouds of industrial vapor and coal dust.

“My father left when I was just a boy. My mother was a … well … not like your mother, Henry.” He smiled. “She looked a little like Sarah, though. With long black hair, I mean, and a light complexion. Black Irish, we call it. My mother wanted me to be a clerk of some sort. In a bank, something like that. To wear a white shirt and tie, that’s what she wanted me to do, look respectable.” He peered down at the brown jacket, its worn sleeves, the chalk dust. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”

“How did you happen to become a teacher?” I asked.

“Just by reading books, I guess. There was a school in Braintree. That’s where I went. The war interrupted things, but when I got back, I got a job at Boston Latin School.” I saw his fingers draw more tightly around the steering wheel. “It’s funny how you have to make so many decisions before you’re prepared to make them. All the important ones, I guess. About your life. Your work. The person you marry.” Suddenly he looked at me with a striking earnestness. “I hope you make all the right decisions, Henry. If you don’t, life can be so … treacherous…. You can end up wondering why you should even bother to live it through.”

No one had ever talked to me so intimately, nor with such urgent regard for my own future happiness. It seemed to me that my father had spoken only of the rules of life, never of its possibilities, his world a straight, unbending road, Mr. Reed’s a narrow lane of pits and snares and hairpin curves, a place I should be warned about before it was too late and I had become not what I wanted to be, but what my father already was.

“The main thing is not to settle too quickly,” Mr. Reed added after a moment. “In life … or in love.”

An immense longing swept into his face, as if he’d recognized for the first time just how lonely and bereft he was. I wanted to offer him something, a token of the high regard I had for him. “Chatham School would be very different without you, Mr. Reed,” I said.

He appeared wholly unmoved by what I’d said. “Yes, of course,” he replied dryly. “What would the boys do without me?”

I said nothing else, but only watched as Mr. Reed continued to stare toward the road ahead, his face fixed in that intense yearning I’d wanted to ease somehow, and which I remembered in all the years to come, so that it finally seemed to me that we were not created in God’s image at all, but in the image of Tantalus instead, the thing we most desire forever dancing before our eyes, and yet forever beyond our grasp.

∗ ∗ ∗

Once in the city, Mr. Reed led me through a series of shops, picking up the items he’d come to buy, brass knobs and hinges that he often touched softly before buying, moving his fingers lightly over the smooth surface of the metal, or holding it up to the light, staring at it wonderingly sometimes with an admiring smile, like a pirate of the old time, his eyes feasting on a gold doubloon.

It was noon by the time we’d finished buying what Mr. Reed had come for. Bundled up in our winter coats, we had lunch on a bench in the Common, near the botanical gardens, facing the great facade of the Ritz Hotel, the two of us munching sandwiches Mrs. Reed had prepared for us, and which Mr. Reed took from a metal lunch pail, along with a thermos of lemonade.

“I was tired of Boston before I moved to Chatham,” Mr. Reed told me. “But now—”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now I think I’m tired of Chatham.”

“Where do you want to go?”

He shrugged. “Anywhere,” he said.

“Is Mrs. Reed tired of Chatham too?”

“No, she’s quite content to live in Chatham,” he said, his eyes taking on a strange agitation. “She always has been … content.” He thought a moment, then added, “She’s afraid of things, Henry.” His eyes drifted toward me. “Even afraid of me sometimes, I think.”

With that, he turned away, placed the thermos in the lunch pail, and snapped it shut. “We’d better be on our way,” he said as he got to his feet, determined, or so it seemed, to end any further conversation about Mrs. Reed.

It was then I realized that Mr. Reed had already removed his wife to some remote and inaccessible place in his life, locked her in an imaginary attic or down in a dark cellar, where she sat in the shadows, isolated and alone, listening with whatever combination of anticipation or fear to his footsteps on the stairs.

∗ ∗ ∗

On the way back to the car, Mr. Reed suddenly stopped at the window of a jewelry store on a side street not far from where we’d parked. “Look how beautiful that is, Henry,” he said, pointing to a necklace made of colored glass. He stared at it as if it were a talisman, something that could magically transform an all too lusterless world.

“It’s pretty expensive,” I said, my eyes on the small white price tag.

He looked at me as if I’d offered him a challenge. “Maybe once in a while you have to do something foolish,” he said. “Just to prove that you’re still alive.” With that, he smiled and walked into the shop.

I followed him inside, then stood at the counter while the shopkeeper retrieved the necklace from the window and handed it to Mr. Reed. He turned it slowly, so that the colored glass in his hands glinted in the light. “I’ll take it,” he said.

The shopkeeper wrapped it in a piece of tissue and placed it in a small red box. Mr. Reed thanked him and put the box in his jacket pocket.

We were on the road a few minutes later, Mr. Reed’s spirits suddenly quite high, as if he’d proved himself in some way by buying the necklace, his hand from time to time crawling into the pocket of his jacket, moving slowly inside it, turning the box over delicately, fondling it with his fingertips, a curious excitement in his eyes.

It was nearly nightfall by the time we got back to Chatham. Mr. Reed drove me directly to my house on Myrtle Street, the old car shaking violently as it came to a halt in my driveway.

“Thanks for coming along, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.

I nodded, then glanced toward the house. I could see my mother peering down at me from behind the parlor curtains. “I’d better get inside,” I said. “My mother’s suspicious.”

“Of what?” Mr. Reed asked.

I gave him a knowing smile. “Everything.”

He laughed. “Most people are, Henry,” he said.

I got out of the car and headed toward the stairs. I’d almost reached them when I heard Mr. Reed call to me. “Henry? Are you going to Milford Cottage with Sarah tomorrow?”

“I guess.”

“Tell Miss Channing I’ll drop by when I get back from Maine.”

“All right,” I answered, then turned and moved on up the stairs.

The rest of that evening went along routinely. I had dinner with my mother and father, then went for a short walk with Sarah, the two of us sitting on the bench by the bluff for a few minutes before the cold drove us back inside.

“I don’t like winter on the Cape,” she said with a shiver.

“I don’t either,” I told her. “Or the fall or spring or summer.”

She laughed and gave me a playful nudge with her shoulder. “You should have more patience, Henry,” she said. “You’ll be off to college soon enough. You don’t ever have to come back here after that.”

I looked at her squarely. Only half jokingly, I said, “If I do come back here, kill me.”

Her face darkened. “Don’t say things like that, Henry. Not even as a joke.” Then she said a line that has never left me since that time. “I wish we could be happy just to be alive.”

A few minutes later, now alone in my room, I went back over the day I’d spent with Mr. Reed, my affection for him growing, along with my admiration, particularly for the boldness I could see rising in him, making it possible that he might actually break free from whatever it was that bound him so. I thought of the necklace he’d impulsively bought, then of the fact that Christmas was coming on. It struck me that I wanted to give Mr. Reed a present. I thought of something for the boat, a brass nameplate, perhaps, or a lantern for the small cabin we’d nearly completed by then. Then I noticed my sketchbook lying on top of my desk, and knew what the perfect gift would be.

But several months later, near the conclusion of my first hour of testimony, it was clear that Mr. Parsons was not interested in what I’d later decided to give Mr. Reed for Christmas. He was interested in another gift entirely. The necklace brought back from Boston.Mr. Parsons: What happened after Mr. Reed bought the necklace?Witness: He put it in his pocket and we walked back to his car and came back to Chatham.Mr. Parsons: Did Mr. Reed ever tell you who the necklace was for?Witness: No, he didn’t.Mr. Parsons: Well, did you ever see it again?Witness: Yes, I saw it again.Mr. Parsons: Where did you see it?Witness: At Milford Cottage. In Miss Channing’s bedroom. It was lying on the bookshelf beside her bed.Mr. Parsons: How did you happen to see it?Witness: It was the Friday night before … the deaths. Miss Channing went into her bedroom. That’s where I saw it. She took it off the bookshelf, and gave it to me.Mr. Parsons: What did she say when she gave it to you, Henry?Witness: She said, “Get rid of this.”Mr. Parsons: And did you do that for her?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: What did you do with the necklace?Witness: I threw it into Black Pond.

I will always remember the low murmur that rose from the people in the courtroom when I said that, then the rap of Judge Crenshaw’s gavel, calling them to order. It was late in the afternoon by then, and so he adjourned the court for the day.

At dinner later that night, my father and mother and I sat silently at the table for a long time, a newly hired servant girl flitting in and out of the dining room, her hair a dazzling red. Then, her eyes aflame, my mother suddenly glanced at me. “They thought they were above everything,” she said with that bitterness that would mark her life from then on, “that woman and Mr. Reed. They thought they could do anything, and no one would ever know.”

My father’s head jerked up from his plate, his eyes nearly bulging. “Mildred, please.”

“Above all the rest of us, that’s what they thought,” my mother went on relentlessly, her glare now leveled directly upon my father. “They didn’t care who they hurt.”

“Mildred, please,” my father repeated, though with little force. “This is not the time or place to—”

“But they started in death and they ended in death,” my mother declared, referring now to the meeting in the cemetery I’d described in the courtroom only hours before. I could hear again the things I’d said, the answers I’d given, always careful to tell nothing but the truth, yet all the while listening as one truth followed another, the body of evidence accumulating one answer at a time, until, truth by truth, it assumed the shape of a monstrous lie.

My mother lifted her head proudly. “I’m proud of you, Henry,” she said. “For remembering the ones they murdered.”

I heard my father gasp. “Mildred, you know perfectly well that—”

She raised her hand and silenced him. Her eyes fell upon me with a lethal force. “Don’t ever forget the ones that died, Henry.”

I never did. But in remembering them, I also remembered Miss Channing and Mr. Reed in a way my mother would have abhorred. For despite everything, and for a long, long time, I persisted in thinking of them as romantic figures, modern-day versions of Catherine and Heathcliff, standing together on a snowy hilltop or strolling beside a wintry sea rather than rushing toward each other across a windswept moor.

And yet, for all that, there were other times when I’d glimpse a row of marble headstones in the same cemetery where they’d gone to be alone that long-ago afternoon, and see Mr. Reed and Miss Channing as they’d appeared that final spring, Mr. Reed staring toward the courtyard, his eyes trained on Miss Channing as she worked on her column of faces.

But that had been toward the end of it, the curtain poised to close, all the characters already beginning to assume their positions for the final scene: Abigail Reed, scratching at her hands as she peered out across Black Pond; little Mary at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes trained on the distant, darkened shed; I trudging grimly down Plymouth Road through the sweltering summer woods, a single phrase circling in my mind, taken from William Blake and quoted by Mr. Reed, facing the courtyard when he said it, Miss Channing at work on her column only a few short yards away. Sooner murder an infant in its bed than nurse unacted desire.

PART 4

CHAPTER 16

Mr. Reed and his family returned to Chatham from Maine on the third of January in the new year of 1927. I’d just come out of Warren’s Sundries, a cup of hot apple cider steaming in my hand, when his car swept past me. Mrs. Reed was seated in the front seat, Mary in the back, an old trunk lashed to the top of the car, olive green, and with one of its corners slightly battered in.

Mr. Reed didn’t see me as he drove by, nor did Mrs. Reed, for both were staring straight ahead, Mr. Reed’s face cast in shadow beneath the brim of a floppy gray hat, Mrs. Reed’s locked in stony silence, Mary’s eyes drifting toward me as the car went by, a frail smile on her lips, her small hand lifted in a faint gesture of recognition. Hi, Henry.

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.

CHAPTER 17

And 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.”

The testimony of those witnesses was dutifully recorded in Mr. Parsons’ book, but even had I never read it, I would have remembered what they said, a catalogue of random sightings that stretched through the winter and nosed into the following spring, a scattering of words snatched from longer conversations, often innocent in themselves, but within the context of what later happened on Black Pond, as profoundly sinister and unnerving as a trail of bloody footprints around a scene of slaughter.Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 16, 1927.Witness: Well, I was sitting on one of the dunes there on First Encounter Beach. That’s when I saw two people coming up the beach, a man and a woman.Mr. Parsons: Is it unusual for people to be on the beach in late January, Mr. Fletcher?Witness: Yes, sir. The cold pretty much keeps people in. But I probably wouldn’t have made much of it, except that the man had a cane, and you don’t usually see a cripple like that out on the beach no matter when it is.Mr. Parsons: What did these two people do on the beach that morning?Witness: They walked on a little ways, then they sat down at the bottom of one of the dunes.Mr. Parsons: And what did you observe at that point?Witness: Well, they talked awhile, but I couldn’t hear what they said, of course. They were sort of snuggled up together, with the man’s arm around the woman’s waist, pulling her up against him. They sat that way awhile, then I saw the man take a piece of paper out of his coat pocket. It was all rolled up, but he unrolled it, and they both looked at it. The man was talking and pointing out things on the paper.Mr. Parsons: Do you remember the color of that paper?Witness: It was greenish looking. Sort of light green.Mr. Parsons: Did you recognize either the man or the woman you saw that morning?Witness: No, I didn’t recognize them until later. That is, when I saw their pictures in the paper.Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 17, 1927.Mr. Parsons: Now, as the harbor master of Chatham harbor, Mr. Porter, you’re in charge of maintaining various buildings and storage areas that are rented to people who use the harbor, are you not?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: Do you remember renting such a building to Mr. Leland Reed in November of 1923?Witness: Yes, I do. He planned to build a boat.Mr. Parsons: Did he subsequently build that boat?Witness: Yes, he did. He finished it toward the end of this last May.Mr. Parsons: During the last weeks of the boat’s construction, did you sometimes have occasion to step inside the building Mr. Reed rented?Witness: I went in sometimes. To see how things were going.Mr. Parsons: Did you ever happen to see a piece of paper unfolded on the desk inside that building?Witness: Yes, sir. It was a nautical map is what it was. Of the East Coast, and down through the Caribbean.Mr. Parsons: Did you notice anything about the map that struck you as unusual?Witness: Well, I noticed that somebody had drawn a route on it. In red ink.Mr. Parsons: Now, this route, this nautical route, it went from where to where?Witness: From Chatham to Havana, Cuba.Mr. Parsons: Do you remember the color of the paper?Witness: It was the usual color for nautical maps. It was pale green.Mr. Parsons: Now, Mr. Porter, did you ever see the defendant, Elizabeth Channing, with Mr. Reed in the building where he was building his boat?Witness: Not in the building, no, sir. But I saw them out walking through the marina one time.Mr. Parsons: And when was this?Witness: Around the same time I saw the map, I guess. Early February, I’d say. Mr. Reed was pointing out into the bay there, sort of wheeling his cane around, like he was telling Miss Channing directions.Mr. Parsons: And if a boat followed that route out of Chatham harbor, where would it go, Mr. Porter?Witness: Into the open sea.Mr. Parsons: On that occasion, did you notice anything else about Miss Channing and Mr. Reed?Witness: Only that when they turned back toward the boat-house, Miss Channing sort of threw her head back and laughed.Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 19, 1927.Mr. Parsons: What is your occupation, Mrs. Benton?Witness: I teach Latin at Chatham School.Mr. Parsons: Are you familiar with the defendant?Witness: Yes, sir. Her place … her room at the school, I mean … it’s just across the courtyard from mine.Mr. Parsons: So you have a good vantage point to see what goes on in that classroom, is that correct?Witness: Yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: Did you ever see Mr. Leland Reed in that room?Witness: Yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: Often?Witness: Just about every day. He would come there and have lunch with Miss Channing. Then he’d come again in the afternoon.Mr. Parsons: Tell me, Mrs. Benton, situated as you were, so close to Miss Channing’s room, did you ever hear any conversation pass between the defendant and Mr. Reed?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: How did that come about?Witness: Well, I was coming along the side of Miss Channing’s room, and I heard voices.Mr. Parsons: Do you recall the approximate date when you heard the voices?Witness: It was March fourth. I know because I had bought a birthday present for my son, and I was taking it home that afternoon.Mr. Parsons: And the voices you heard that day, they were coming from Miss Channing’s classroom?Witness: Yes, they were, and so I looked in, just as I was passing, and I saw Miss Channing sort of turned away, facing the wall over there by the cabinets, and Mr. Reed was standing behind her.Mr. Parsons: Did you hear any conversation at that time?Witness: A little. “We’ll find another way.” That’s what Mr. Reed said.Mr. Parsons: And that was all?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: Did Miss Channing reply to that?Witness: Well, she kept her back to him, but I heard her say, “There is no other way.”Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 20, 1927.Mr. Parsons: Now, Mrs. Krantz, you’re a clerk in Peterson’s Hardware, is that right?Witness: Yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: I want to show you a receipt for a purchase made at Peterson’s Hardware on March 15, 1927. Do you recognize this receipt?Witness: Yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: What items were purchased, according to the receipt?Witness: Well, the first one is a bottle of arsenic.Mr. Parsons: Do you recall the person who purchased that arsenic on March fifteenth?Witness: Yes, I do.Mr. Parsons: Who was it, Mrs. Krantz?Witness: Mr. Leland Reed.Mr. Parsons: Could you read the other items that Mr. Reed purchased that day?Witness: It says here, a knife and twenty feet of rope.Trial Transcript, Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, August 20, 1927.Mr. Parsons: What is your job, Mrs. Abercrombie?Witness: I’m Mr. Griswald’s secretary.Mr. Parsons: By “Mr. Griswald,” you mean Arthur Griswald, the headmaster of Chatham School?Witness: Yes, sir.Mr. Parsons: Mrs. Abercrombie, did you ever see or hear anything transpire between the defendant and Mr. Leland Reed that indicated to you that the nature of their relationship was somewhat beyond what might be expected of two professional colleagues, or even two friends?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: Could you tell the court, please.Witness: One afternoon—this was during the last week of March, I think—anyway, I was walking through the parking area. It was late. I mean, it was night already. Everybody had gone home. But Mr. Griswald had been preparing next year’s budget, so I’d stayed late to help him. Anyway, I saw that Mr. Reed’s car was still parked in the parking area, there beside the tree, where he usually put it, and as I went on by, I saw that he was sitting behind the wheel, and that Miss Channing was in the car with him.Mr. Parsons: Miss Channing was sitting in the front seat, was she?Witness: Yes, she was. And she had her hands sort of at her throat, and I saw Mr. Reed lean over and take her hands and pull them away.Mr. Parsons: Now, Mrs. Abercrombie, in your capacity as assistant to Mr. Griswald, did you ever have a conversation with the headmaster about the behavior of Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, the very scene that you witnessed that evening in the parking lot of Chatham School?Witness: Yes, I did. I felt like it was something he needed to know about. So I told him about what I’d seen that night in Mr. Reed’s car, and I also told him that there was a lot of talk about Miss Channing and Mr. Reed among the other teachers.Mr. Parsons: How did Mr. Griswald respond to what you told him?Witness: He said he wasn’t much for gossip.Mr. Parsons: And that was the headmaster’s only response to what you reported to him?Witness: The only one I know of, yes.

But it had not been the only response my father made, as I had known long before Mrs. Abercrombie took the stand. For one day during the very next week, he dropped in on Mr. Reed’s afternoon class.

I remember how I’d entered Mr. Reed’s room to find my father already stationed in one of the desks at the back. He nodded to each of us as we came into the room, then silently watched as Mr. Reed began his lesson, leaning back, trying to appear casual, but with a clearly visible sense of vigilance in his eyes.

My father remained in that position during the entire class, his gaze only occasionally drawn toward the courtyard, Miss Channing’s room at the far end of it. Instead, he kept his attention intently focused upon Mr. Reed, no doubt listening not only to what he said, but how he said it, observing not just a teacher going through the motions, but the man behind the teacher, looking for that broken part of Mr. Reed that he so deeply feared and distrusted, not the part that had been shattered in the war, but long before, as he conceived it, in Adam’s dreadful fall.

When the class was over, my father rose quietly and walked to the front of the room. He said something to Mr. Reed, nodded politely, then walked down the corridor to his office. I watched as he made his way down the hallway, his dark, ponderous frame like an ancient ship cutting through a stream of youthful, darting boys, silent, meditative, a melancholy figure in a black coat, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath the burden of our lost and implacable hearts.

CHAPTER 18

Spring came at last, and toward the middle of April, we went rowing, just as Mr. Reed had promised we would on that cold January day when the three of us stood at the end of the pier together and looked out over Black Pond.

It was a Saturday, warm and sunny, with what my father called “the glow of Easter” everywhere around us. During the preceding months I’d worked on the boat with Mr. Reed and attended classes with Miss Channing, but I’d actually seen them together only during their accustomed arrivals and departures from Chatham School. All their other “secret rendezvous,” as Mr. Parsons later called them, had been discreetly held outside my view.

I’d gotten to the boathouse early that morning, already at work when Mr. Reed arrived, fully expecting that we’d labor through the day, as we always did, finish up toward the end of the afternoon, then take a long walk on the beach near the marina.

Mr. Reed had arrived at the boathouse with a very different plan in mind, however, one he announced as soon as he opened the door and peered inside.

“It’s too pretty to be cooped up in here,” he said, one foot inside the boathouse, the other still on the walkway outside it. He stepped out of the door and into the warm spring air. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me to follow after him.

I followed him out the door, then down the wooden walkway toward the road. In the distance I could see his car, half-concealed behind one of the marina’s old outbuildings, but enough of it visible so that I could make out the small white rowboat roped to its top.

Mr. Reed was already pulling himself behind the wheel by the time I rounded the corner of the building. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me forward, hurrying me along. “We want to get an early start.”

It was then I saw Miss Channing sitting on the passenger side, a large basket in her lap, her pale blue eyes like distant misty lights behind the dusty windshield.

“Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I climbed into the backseat of the car.

She nodded but didn’t answer, and I suppose that it was precisely at that moment I first noticed the peculiar tension and uneasiness that would never leave her after that, a sense of being trapped or constricted, the world’s former breadth and expansiveness now drawing around her like a noose.

Mr. Reed leaned forward and hit the ignition. “We’re off to the Bass River,” he said in a cheerful tone that struck me as somewhat forced, as if he were trying to lift Miss Channing’s spirits. He looked at her for a moment, offering a slender smile. “We’ll have the whole day, Elizabeth,” he told her. “Just like I said we would.”

It took nearly an hour to reach the Bass River, a spot Mr. Reed had already selected, one he’d “chosen for its remoteness and seclusion,” as Mr. Parsons later described it, surrounded by high grass and at the bottom of a sloping embankment, so mat neither the car nor the boat was visible from the main road a short hundred yards or so away.

“At this point in the river, it’s nearly a mile from bend to bend,” Mr. Reed told us as he began to untie the ropes that bound the boat to the top of the car. “We can row downstream, then come back with the tide.”

Miss Channing walked to the bank of the river, and stood, watching, as the current swept past her, bearing bits of wood and marsh debris, its slowly moving surface reflecting a cloudless sky.

Once the boat had been untied, Mr. Reed grasped the bow, pulled it toward him, then down, so that it slid off the roof of the car at a deep angle, its bow nosing into the soft ground. “All right, Henry,” he said, “take hold of the back there.”

I did as he told me, the two of us lugging the boat toward the water, then setting it down in the moist earth that bordered the river.

Miss Channing remained in place, still facing the water, her eyes fixed on a yellow film of pollen gathered in a pool on the farther shore.

“Are you ready, Elizabeth?” Mr. Reed asked gently, almost delicately, as if her mood were a fragile tiling, a rare vase he feared breaking.

She nodded without turning around, and Mr. Reed offered her his hand. She took it and stepped inside the boat. “Thank you,” she said as she released it.

“You’re next, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.

I climbed into the boat, then looked back just as Mr. Reed pushed it forward again, drawing himself up and over the rail as he did so, a movement that struck me as very smooth and agile, his cane left on the bank behind us, the river lapping softly at its curved end.

I will always remember the few hours that followed, the slow drift of the boat down the narrow channel of the river, a wall of grass on either side, Mr. Reed at the oars, Miss Channing facing him from the opposite end of the boat, her right hand lowered toward the water, a single finger slicing it silently, leaving a glistening trail across its otherwise smooth surface.

At that moment she seemed as beautiful as any woman had ever been or would ever be. I picked up my sketchbook and began to draw, hoping to please her this time, to draw her as she really was. She was staring just off to the left as I began, her face in profile as she watched a gull prance along the far embankment. Turning back, she saw the sketchbook open in my lap, the drawing pencil in my hand, my eyes intent upon her. Her face suddenly grew taut, as if she thought I’d been sent to record her presence in the boat, use it later as evidence against her. “No, Henry,” she said.

“But I was just …”

She shook her head determinedly, her eyes locked in that steeliness Mr. Parsons would later associate with the coldness of her heart. “No,” she repeated firmly. “Put it down.”

I glanced at Mr. Reed, saw him turn away from me, fix his attention on the stream ahead, clearly unwilling to go against her.

“Yes, Miss Channing,” I said, then closed the book and placed it on the seat beside me.

There was an interminable silence after that, Miss Channing motionless on her seat as we drifted onward, the boat now moving through a labyrinth of narrow channels, Mr. Reed suddenly tugging more fiercely at the oars, as if already in flight from some grim, pursuing hand.

After a time we came to a bend in the river, but rather than rounding it, Mr. Reed rowed us to shore.

Once on the riverbank, we spread a checkered cloth a few feet from the water, the wind billowing it up briefly as we lowered it to the ground. Mr. Reed sat at one corner, Miss Channing at another, removing fruit and sandwiches from the basket.

We ate slowly, in what I later recognized as the kind of silence that falls when the last resort has been reached, all debate now closed, nothing to be taken back or reconsidered, the final decision irrevocably made, though perhaps still unstated.

In an effort to lighten that very atmosphere, Mr. Reed suddenly looked at Miss Channing and said, “Tell us a story, Elizabeth.”

She shook her head.

Mr. Reed leaned forward slightly. “Something from your travels,” he said softly, almost gingerly as if her feelings were a red-hot coal he feared to touch.

She shook her head again.

“Just one, Elizabeth.” Mr. Reed’s tone was now so imploring it seemed almost beggarly.

Without a word she got to her feet and strode away from us, down along the water’s edge, to where a tangle of driftwood lay on the bank, its limbs rising like fleshless bones from the moist ground.

Mr. Reed watched her leave us, then, moving slowly and unsteadily without his cane, walked down to where she stood.

I tried to turn away, but I found myself continually drawn back to them, their bodies so fully surrounded by walls of grass and coils of water, they looked utterly ensnared, like two animals captured in an invisible net, thrashing about, desperate to break free, and yet with every thrust and movement growing more fatally entangled. I thought of the delight in Mr. Reed’s eyes as he’d ought the glass necklace in Boston, then of the look on Miss Channing’s face as she’d pressed her hand against his cheek, traced its jagged scar, and finally of the hopelessness and futility that appeared to have overwhelmed them since that time. That the passion I was certain I’d seen between them should now be in the process of disintegration seemed inconceivable to me, and watching them, as they continued to talk intently only a few yards away, I felt a scalding surge of anger against the whole design of life, its web of duties and obligations, Chatham like a dark pit in which Miss Channing and Mr. Reed were now imprisoned, Mrs. Reed standing on its rim, grim and unrelenting, dressed in black, her implacable arms folded over her chest, the female version of my father.

“Well, Henry, I suppose we’d better be on our way now,” Mr. Reed told me solemnly when he and Miss Channing rejoined me. I helped them gather up the cloth and the basket.

At the boat Mr. Reed offered Miss Channing his hand. She grasped it lightly, stepped inside, and took her seat again at the stern.

“It’ll be quick going back,” Mr. Reed told her as he pushed us off. “The tide’s coming in now.” He pulled himself over the rail and took hold of the oars, his gaze upon Miss Channing as he said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, and all that.”

It was a line from Romeo and Juliet, of course, and it must have lingered in Miss Channing’s mind, for when the bend in the river had disappeared behind us, she broke her silence. “I went to Juliet’s house in Verona when I was sixteen,” she said. “There were lots of people there. It was like a shrine.” She gathered her arms more tightly around the basket that rested in her lap. “My father pointed to the balcony and told me to stand where Juliet had, looking down at Romeo.” Her eyes took on an unmistakable intensity, as if she were reliving the moment again, she on the stone balcony, her father in the courtyard below, their eyes fixed upon each other. “That’s what he was searching for, I think,” she said. “An ideal love.”

Mr. Reed drew back the oars slowly. “If he’d ever found a love like that,” he said, “I’m sure he’d have found a way to keep it too.”

Miss Channing said nothing, but only stared rigidly ahead as the boat moved swiftly inland, the nightbound tide now exerting its vast pull. No one ever looted more tortured by a grave resolve.

It was nearly night when we reached Milford Cottage. An evening mist drifted over the pond. I sat in the car while Mr. Reed walked Miss Channing to her door. They lingered on the threshold, Mr. Reed on the step beneath Miss Channing, she looking down at him. Finally, he took her hand, held it very briefly, then released it and headed back toward where I sat.

She’d lit a candle by the time Mr. Reed got into the car, a soft yellow glow now coming from the windows of the front room.

“It’s so hard, Henry,” Mr. Reed said, his eyes on the cottage as he began to back away. “It’s the hardest thing in the world.”

I never mentioned his words to Mr. Parsons, since they’d seemed directed toward something larger than the Chatham School Affair, not the crime of forbidden love, which was Mr. Parsons’ sole interest, but some deeper one, plotted at the core of life, and which inflexibly decrees that one love in flower must leave another in decay.

When we arrived at Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of the pond, Mary was playing in the front yard, building a house of sticks and leaves as she sat near the water, nearly obscured in a blue twilight. She ran toward the car as we got out, then stood watching while we unlashed the boat and carried it toward its usual mooring by the tree at the water’s edge.

“Did you catch a fish?” she asked Mr. Reed brightly as she skipped along beside him.

“We didn’t go fishing,” he told her. “Just rowing.” He glanced back toward me. “Just Henry and me,” he added.

We set the boat down, and Mary climbed into it as Mr. Reed tethered it to the tree, taking a seat at the bow, bouncing slightly, her small hands clapping rhythmically to some beat in her mind.

“Where’s your mother?” Mr. Reed asked her once he’d secured the boat.

Mary pointed to the porch. “She’s been sitting there all day”

I turned toward the house. In the evening shade I had not seen her, but now I could make her out quite clearly. She sat in the far corner of the porch, rocking quietly, her green eyes peering dully out of the shadows like two small, unpolished stones.

CHAPTER 19

After the Chatham School Affair, my father always believed that the deepest tragedies inevitably unfolded slowly, reached their climaxes in seizures of violence and grief, then lingered on forever in the minds of those who were near enough to feel their lethal force and yet survive.

Some, of course, do not survive at all.

Those who perished return to me most often in a newspaper photograph published during the trial, which I saw lying on my father’s desk at Chatham School one evening, my father at his office window, his hands clutched behind his back, staring out into the courtyard, where the remnants of Miss Channing’s sculpture had been gathered into a pile of gray rubble, an almost surreal mound of shattered faces.

In the photograph Mrs. Reed is seated in her husband’s small white boat. Mary is on her wide lap. Both smile happily in a picture taken, according to the newspaper, by Mr. Reed during what it called “happier times.”

I can still remember how wrenching I found that photograph the evening I first saw it. Because of that, it never surprised me that I sometimes took it from the little archive I inherited at my father’s death, staring at it by the fire, letting it remind me of Mrs. Reed and her daughter, what they’d been, no longer were, and thus warn me away from the temptation I occasionally felt to find a wife, have children of my own.

Of course, there’d been plenty of testimony to remind me of them at the time, particularly of Mrs. Reed, neighbors and relatives who’d come at Mr. Parsons’ bidding, and who, by answering the questions he put to them, had labored to bring her back to life, consistently portraying her as a dutiful and, for the most part, cheerful woman, faithful and hardworking, a good mother and a good wife, incontestably entitled to her husband’s unswerving devotion.

I remembered Mrs. Hale, the coroner’s wife, talking quietly of how well Mrs. Reed had taken care of her parents in their illness and old age. Then Mrs. Lancaster after her, speaking no less quietly about Mrs. Reed’s kindness toward her feebleminded sister, the way she’d never failed to bring her a cake and a jar of apple cider on her birthday.

But of all the people who testified about Abigail Reed, the witness I most remember was my mother.

As it turned out, she’d known Mrs. Reed almost all her life, remembered her as Abbey Parrish, the only daughter of William and Dorothy Parrish, he a fisherman who moored his boat in Chatham harbor, she a fisherwife of the old school, who hauled tubs of lobster and baskets of quahogs and slabs of smoked bluefish to the local market every day. As a child, Abigail had often accompanied her mother there, standing at her side, helping her sell the day’s catch from behind a wooden table that had been placed beneath a tattered canvas roof, her hands made rough by the work, scarred by scales and fins.

On the stand, my mother had spoken in a somewhat more agitated manner than either Mrs. Hale or Mrs. Lancaster. Her voice took on an unmistakable edginess as she answered Mr. Parsons’ questions, her eyes sometimes involuntarily flitting over to Miss Channing, little sparks of anger glinting in them, especially as she related the afternoon Mrs. Reed had turned up at our house on Myrtle Street, her manner quite desperate by then, as my mother described it, a chilling terror in her red-rimmed eyes.

Still, for all the impact of her testimony, my mother didn’t do or say anything on the stand that stunned me as much as what happened only a few minutes after she left it.

“Walk your mother home, Henry,” my father told me as she stepped from the witness box and began to make her way down the aisle toward the back of the courtroom.

She was already passing through its large double doors by the time I caught up with her, moving at that brisk, determined pace she often assumed, as if something were chasing after her, she trying to outrun it.

“Are you thirsty, Mother?” I asked her as we made our way through the dense, crowd that had gathered on the courthouse steps. “Do you want to stop and have something to drink?”

She stared straight ahead as she answered, roughly elbowing her way through the mob, her eyes glaring hotly toward the street. “No, I want to go home,” she said.

At the bottom of the stairs, she wheeled to the right and strode up Main Street at the same nearly frantic pace, taking short, quick steps, her heavy black shoes thumping loudly along the walkway.

For nearly a block she kept silent, then, suddenly, under her breath, in a kind of bitter hiss, I heard her say, “That woman should be hung.”

My eyes widened in dreadful horror at what she’d said. “Miss Channing?” I gasped, my complicity in her fate sweeping over me in a bitter wave. “But she didn’t …”

My mother waved her hand, silencing me, as she continued forward at the same merciless pace, her eyes now glowing furiously.

I could tell by the hard look in them that she had no intention of saying more. So I simply rushed along beside her, glancing at the bustling crowds, the knots of people that had gathered on every street corner and in front of every shop. It looked as if the whole world had suddenly descended upon our village, all drawn by the dark specter of the Chatham School Affair.

“I don’t understand why everybody is so caught up in this,” I said to my mother as she surged forward along the crowded street, an observation I only half believed but felt safe in making, so utterly neutral, as it seemed to me, edging neither toward my mother’s testimony nor my own, neither to the error of her suspicions, nor the unbearable actuality of my crime.

Still she said nothing, oblivious, or so it appeared, not only of my last remark, but of the steady stream of traffic in the streets, the cars and people moving past us, the scores of men and women who spread out over the broad lawn of the town hall.

In that ceaselessly agitated surrounding, it seemed equally safe to offer another observation, one I’d desperately clung to during the previous weeks, as if, by clinging to it, I could stay afloat above the tragedy that had by then engulfed so many others. “It’s the love story that attracts them, I guess. Just that it’s basically a love story.”

At that, my mother came to a halt so abrupt and violent, she appeared to have run into an invisible wall.

“A love story?” she asked, her eyes igniting with a fire I had never seen in them before and of which I had not believed her capable.

“Well, that’s what Miss Channing and Mr.—”

“You think it’s a love story, Henry?” My mother’s words burst from her mouth like puffs of steam.

I could feel the air heat up around us, my mother’s body begin to smolder.

“Well, in a way it is,” I said. “I mean, Miss Channing just—”

“Miss Channing?” my mother cried. “What about Mrs. Reed? What about her love for her husband? Isn’t that a love story too?”

It seemed the sort of question Mr. Parsons might have posed to the twelve jurors who’d been asked to judge Miss Channing, and ultimately to condemn her, and I realized that I had no answer for my mother, that I had never known the kind of love she had just spoken of, one based on ancient vows and meant to last forever, the “love story” of a marriage.

“All you do is think about that woman,” my mother said. “That Miss Channing. How romantic it all is. Her and Mr. Reed. Walking on the beach. Sailing in the boat. Where do you think Mrs. Reed was while all that was going on?”

In my mind I suddenly saw Mrs. Reed as she’d appeared on the porch the day we’d returned from the Bass River, heard her daughter’s words again, the vast suffering and loneliness they now so powerfully conveyed. She’s been sitting there all day.

“I’m ashamed of you, Henry,” my mother snapped angrily, her words hitting me like small iron pellets. “Ashamed of the way you think.”

Staring at her mutely, I realized that I’d never understood how from the moment the trial began, my mother had done nothing but consider not the tale spun by my willful romantic imagination, but the dreadful anguish of Abigail Reed, the unbearable fear and rage and sense of betrayal that must have overwhelmed her as she’d watched her husband slip away.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I whispered.

What she said next stunned me with its uncompromising force. “You’re all alike, Henry, all you men.”

She stared at me for one long, ghastly moment, then turned and walked away, leaving me in a world that had begun to move again, though differently than it had before, filled with greater complications, a weave of consequences and relations that seemed larger than romance, deeper and more enduring, though still distant from my understanding, a world I’d only just briefly glimpsed, as it were, through my mother’s eyes.

My mother never again spoke to me directly about the Chatham School Affair. And I remember that a few hours later, after a nearly silent dinner, I went upstairs to my room, lay down upon my bed, and tried to think about Mrs. Reed, not in the panic and despair of her last seconds, as I’d continually thought of her throughout Miss Channing’s trial, but before that, when she’d been a wife and mother.

Toward dawn I awoke, and there she was before me. Abigail Reed, as if she were alive again, with red hair and green eyes, watching me silently from the ruins of her shattered faith. And for the first time, as I lay in the shadowy early morning light, I found that I was able to imagine what it must have been like for her during those weeks when Mr. Reed had begun to drift from her, spending long hours with me in the boathouse, the two of us working deep into the night to complete his boat, while she remained at home, tending to their daughter, bathing her, clothing her in thick flannel sleeping gowns, putting her to bed.

I saw all those many nights when the hour had grown late, and still Mr. Reed had not returned. How she must have wondered about the changes that had come over her husband, how preoccupied and distracted he had be come, as if he could not keep his mind from wandering away from her, and toward some distant attachment whose nature she could not let herself consider.

And yet she had to have considered it, had to have noticed that he no longer touched her with the same affection, nor with any great desire, and that although he still frolicked with Mary, he more often preferred to be alone with his daughter, taking her on long walks or even rowing her out into the center of Black Pond, where, bundled up against the cold of that long winter, they fished in the icy water.

Perhaps, in order to escape the unbearable implications of the changes she noticed in him, Mrs. Reed had sometimes recalled the moment when she’d first seen him, a tall, slender man, leaning on a cane as he bought his weekly supplies at the village store, the way they’d walked out together, he holding the door for her, nodding quickly as she passed, then falling in behind her for a little distance before she’d stopped, turned toward him and asked him bluntly if he was not Leland Reed, the new teacher at Chatham School.

But where had he gone, this man who’d lived with her for more than five years, who was the father of her daughter, and who’d provided for her and loved her as no man ever had or ever would again, but who now seemed to have receded, perhaps even beyond the promised gravity of home.

How Mrs. Reed must have suffered during all those long nights, I thought as the air lightened outside my bedroom window that morning. How she must have yearned to regain Mr. Reed once again, not just for a night, but forever.

But as I well knew, Mr. Reed had never returned to her. So that as the days passed one after the other, and the nights deepened and grew colder, I knew that she must have walked to the window at regular intervals, parted the curtains, and peered out into the darkness, her eyes now fixed on the empty road, searching for some sign of his approaching car. At such a moment, locked in dread, Mrs. Reed’s face could not have looked at all like the women of romantic myth, Iseult beneath her billowing white sail, or Guenevere waiting heroically to be burned alive. And yet, for all that, she now seemed heroic to me somehow, as my mother had certainly thought of her when she fled the court that day, convinced, as she had every right to be, that no man, her son included, could ever conceive or even remotely comprehend the depth of her long pain.

CHAPTER 20

Nor do I think that my father ever really understood it. At least not at that time. For although he must have felt the deepest sympathy for Mrs. Reed, I believe that he remained captured in a different orbit, one that spun around Miss Channing, had her life, her loss, as its central star.

And so it never surprised me that he labored to defend her on that August afternoon when it came his turn to take the stand.Mr. Parsons: Now, you hired Miss Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing as a teacher at Chatham School, did you not, Mr. Griswald?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: And early on, did you have any reason to doubt the wisdom of choosing Miss Channing for her post at Chatham School?Witness: No, I did not.Mr. Parsons: Well, at a later time, did you begin to have reservations about Miss Channing’s character?Witness: Not exactly.Mr. Parsons: But as you have already heard, Mr. Griswald, an earlier witness has testified that she told you about certain rumors having to do with Miss Channing’s relationship with Leland Reed.Witness: Yes, I was informed that certain people felt that way.Mr. Parsons: But you chose to ignore their warnings?Witness: I had no proof of anything, Mr. Parsons.Mr. Parsons: But you had observed some rather odd behavior, had you not? In regard to both Mr. Reed and Miss Channing. Certain alarming behavior?Witness: I wouldn’t call it alarming.Mr. Parsons: Well, isn’t it true that both Mr. Reed and Miss Channing appeared extremely strained during the final weeks of the school year?Witness: Yes, they did.Mr. Parsons: And didn’t this strain become obvious at one point in your own house, Mr. Griswald? At a party on, I believe, April twenty-third.Witness: Yes, it did.Mr. Parsons: Did Miss Channing and Mr. Reed come to that party together?Witness: No. Miss Channing came into my office the afternoon before the party and asked if I might pick her up.Mr. Parsons: You, Mr. Griswald? She didn’t wish to be picked up by Mr. Reed?Witness: Evidently not.Mr. Parsons: And did you agree to do that, to bring Miss Channing to your house that evening?Witness: Yes, I did.

And so, as he had so many times in the past, my father demanded that I come with him to Milford Cottage that evening, the two of us driving through a soft blue twilight to retrieve her. On the way, I remember that he had a certain agitated look in his eyes, like someone pressed into a service he’d rather have avoided but felt it his duty to perform. By then, of course, he must have known that something very grave had begun to darken the atmosphere of Chatham School, something he found it difficult to confront, or simply knew no way of confronting. I have often wondered what I might have said had he turned to me that evening and asked me bluntly what I knew about Miss Channing and Mr. Reed. Perhaps I would have lied to him, as I later did, claiming an innocence I did not deserve

But he talked of the party instead, the long tables that had been placed on the back lawn, the Chinese lanterns he’d hung over them, how festive everything looked.

It was not until we neared Milford Cottage that he grew silent.

Miss Channing came out immediately, dressed in a long black skirt and a dark red blouse, her hair bound tightly in a bun. Her eyes seemed feverish and her skin was very pale.

I got out of the car, and held the door open for her. “Thank you, Henry,” she said as she got into the front seat beside my father.

“Good evening, Miss Channing,” my father said.

She nodded softly. “Good evening, Mr. Griswald.”

They hardly spoke for the first few minutes of the drive back toward Chatham. Then, out of nowhere, my father suddenly blurted out, “I was thinking of offering you a commission, Miss Channing. A private commission, that is. A portrait of myself.” He glanced toward her, then back to the road. “Do you do portraits?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve done a few. My uncle. His wife. When I was in Africa.”

“So, do you think you’d like to take a crack at it?”

She smiled slightly. “Yes, I would.”

My father seemed pleased. “Splendid.”

They went on to arrange various times when my father would be available to sit for her, and during the next few weeks I saw them often in his office together, the door always open, of course, Miss Channing in her gray smock, standing behind her easel, my father posed beside the window, looking out onto the courtyard, his body caught in a shaft of light.

During the rest of the drive, my father talked rather absently about the spring term, how brief it always seemed compared to fall and winter, warning Miss Channing that the boys would become “increasingly rambunctious” as the end of the school year approached. “So keep a firm hand on them,” he told her, “because they’ll certainly need it.” It was not until we’d turned onto the main road back to Chatham that he suddenly said, “By the way, Mr. Reed may not be able to join us this evening.”

My attention sprang to Miss Channing, and I saw her body grow tense at the mention of Mr. Reed’s name.

“It seems that Mrs. Reed has taken ill,” my father went on. “Something to do with her stomach.”

Miss Channing turned away from my father and toward the window at her side, a quick reflexive gesture made, or so it seemed to me at the time, in order to shield her face from his view. Watching her, I recalled the way she’d sat so stiffly in the boat as we’d made our way down the Bass River only a week or so before, her manner now even more enclosed than it had appeared that day, so that she seemed oddly frightened of the very movement her life had taken, as if it were a blade swinging above her head.

It was warm enough for my father to have rolled the window down on the driver’s side, and as we made our way along the coastal road he peered out over the fields of sea grass that rose from the marshes and the bogs. “I love the spring on Cape Cod. Summer, too, of course. Do you plan to stay here on the Cape for the summer, Miss Channing?”

“I haven’t really thought about the summer,” she murmured as if such a possibility had not occurred to her.

“Well, there’s still plenty of time to think about it,” my father told her, then let the subject drop.

We pulled into the driveway of our house seconds later. I got out and opened the door for Miss Channing. “Thank you, Henry,” she said as she stepped out of the car.

Some of the other teachers had already arrived, the rest coming only a few minutes later, everyone serving themselves from the plentiful buffet my mother and Sarah had arranged on a long table in the backyard, then sitting in small groups on chairs my father and I had placed throughout the grounds earlier that afternoon.

It was my job to help Sarah serve the guests at the buffet table, and from that position I could see Miss Channing as she sat with a group not far away, my mother facing her directly, Mr. Corbett to her right, Mrs. Benton, the Latin teacher, to her left, and finally Mrs. Abercrombie, my father’s assistant, just a bit outside the circle, her long, thin legs requiring somewhat more room.

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 determined 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.

“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 kept 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.”

In the brief period that remained before it closed for the summer, a similarly bare and withered peace appeared to descend upon Chatham School, turning it into a passionless world, as it seemed to me at the time, very nearly a void, all its former vibrancy, the tingling sense of intrigue and desire, now buried beneath a layer of stark propriety.

During this time Miss Channing no longer arrived and departed with Mr. Reed, but walked back and forth from Milford Cottage alone. In the morning I would often see her moving up our street, her pace slow, meditative, so that she appeared to be in continual conversation with herself. At school she remained in her room, eating her lunch there, or sitting by the cabinet, reading, between classes. There were no more strolls into the village with Mr. Reed, no more meetings with him by the coastal bluff. And when the day was over, she would head back toward Black Pond, moving through the evening shade with the same thoughtful air with which she’d arrived at school that same morning.

Her classes took on a similar mood of withdrawal. She became more formal than she had before, her demeanor more controlled, as if she now felt it necessary to conceal every aspect of her life, both past and present, from the many prying eyes she’d sensed around her for so long.

During these final three weeks it was the column of faces that occupied most of her time. She covered a table with a dark green tarpaulin, and one by one the teachers and students of Chatham School came to her room and lay down upon it to have plaster masks made of their faces. Once I saw Mrs. Benton lying there, her eyes closed, her body tense and rigid, Miss Channing poised above her, staring down, a single finger daubed with moist clay drawing a line across her throat.

My turn came during the middle of May.

“Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I stepped into her classroom.

It was after six in the evening, the air outside growing dark, a soft breeze rustling gently through the late spring leaves of the old oak that stood in the courtyard.

She was wearing a long blue dress, but she’d thrown on one of the gray smocks she used to protect her clothing. Her hair was pulled back and tied with what appeared to be a piece of ordinary twine.

“Hello, Henry,” she said in that aloof and oddly brittle tone she’d fallen into by that time. “What do you want?”

“I’ve come to get a cast made of my face,” I told her. “For the column.”

She nodded toward the table. “Lie down,” she said.

I walked to the table, pulled myself onto it, and lay on my back, my eyes turned toward the ceiling.

“I’m sorry I’ve come so late,” I said.

She stepped up to the table, dipped her fingers in the wet clay, then began to apply it smoothly, first across my forehead, then along the sides of my face. “Close your eyes,” she said.

I did as she told me, breathing softly as she coated my eyelids, her touch very tender, almost airy.

“This is the way they make a death mask, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.” She continued to work, covering my face with a cold, thin layer of clay.

Once she’d finished applying the clay, I lay on the table while it dried, listening as she moved about the room. I could hear the soft tread of her feet as she walked from the tables to the cabinet, putting things away, and I recalled how she’d drifted across the summer grass toward my father on that now-distant afternoon, the look in his eyes as he’d caught sight of her bare feet.

After a time she returned to me, removed the cast, then wiped away the residue from my face with a moist towel.

“It’s done,” she said as she dropped the towel into a basket by the table. “You can go.”

I pulled myself to a sitting position, then got to my feet. By then Miss Channing was several feet away, where many other masks lay faceup on a wide table, eyes closed, lips pressed tightly together, cadaverously gray.

“Well, good night, Miss Channing,” I said when I reached the door.

“Good night, Henry,” she answered, her eyes now fixed on the mask she’d just made of my face as she wrapped it in a length of white cloth.

I remained at the door, wanting to reach her somehow, remove her from the pall she seemed imprisoned in, tell her what she should do, how she must follow her father’s lead, live the life he’d prepared her for. I could almost see her rushing through the dark marina, a red cape flowing behind her, Mr. Reed waiting in the boat, lifting her into it, the hunger of their embrace, that thirsty kiss.

“Is there something else, Henry?” she asked, now staring at me intently, her fingers still wet and glistening, bits of moist clay in her hair. She appeared strikingly similar to the way I’d later see her, rising from the water, her hair soaked and stringy, hung with debris from the depths of Black Pond, her question asked in the same bloodless tone, Is she dead? My answer delivered as passionlessly as my life would be lived from then on, Yes.

Miss Channing finished the column only a few days later, and it was erected on the eighteenth of May in a ceremony my father arranged for the occasion. The ceremony took place on the front lawn of the school, and in the photograph taken that morning, and later included in my father’s archive of Chatham School Affair, Miss Channing stands to the right of the sculpture, her arms clasped to her sides, my father to its left, one hand tucked beneath his coat, Napoleonic fashion. All the teachers and students of the Chatham School are gathered around them, along with Sarah, who stands just off to the side, dressed up for the occasion, smiling brightly, her long black hair tucked inside a straw hat with a wide ribbon trailing off the back.

Miss Channing didn’t speak to the assembly that morning, but my father did. He thanked her for her work, not only on the sculpture, but as a teacher who, he said, had done a “remarkable job all ‘round.” At the end of the speech he announced that Miss Channing would not be returning to Chatham School the following year, and that she would be “deeply, deeply missed.”

Mr. Reed was the only teacher who did not attend the ceremony that morning. Nor did I expect him to. For during the preceding two weeks he’d grown increasingly remote, arriving alone at school just before his first class and leaving alone directly after the last one. During the school day he no longer lingered in the hallway with students, nor took them into the courtyard for a recitation, despite the unseasonable warmth of those first days of summer. Instead, he conducted his classes in the usual manner, lecturing and reading, but with much of the spirit he’d once brought to it now drained away. From time to time, as he stood at the front of the room, he would let his gaze wander toward the window, where, across the courtyard, he could see Miss Channing with her own students before her. At those moments he appeared frozen in a grim and futile yearning, and seemed unable to draw his eyes away from her, until, at last, they would dart back to us, his head jerking slightly as they did so, like someone who’d been slapped.

Still, despite the furious melancholy that so clearly hovered around him, Mr. Reed continued to work on his boat. It was finished by the third week in May, and the following Saturday he asked me to join him for the maiden voyage.

The boat had already been taken from the boathouse when I arrived at the marina that morning, the wooden rack that had once held it now empty, the tools and supplies that had been used in its construction put away. The top of the desk had been cleared as well, the cardboard box in which Mrs. Reed had found such an assortment of disturbing things already taken to the house on Black Pond and placed in the attic where Captain Hamilton would later find it, the small brown bottle of arsenic still huddled in the corner, its cap tightly fitted, but the contents nearly gone.

Only my drawing of Miss Channing still remained in its former place, though it now hung slightly askew, its surface coated with a thin layer of dust. It would still be there two weeks later, when I showed it to Mr. Parsons, his comment destined to linger in my mind forever after that. She’s what did it to him, Henry, she’s what drove him mad.

But on that foggy Saturday morning, so strange an eventuality seemed inconceivable, and the boathouse appeared merely like a structure that had weathered a violent but departed storm rather than one about to be blown apart by an approaching one.

“All right, let’s try her out,” Mr. Reed said as he led me out of the boathouse and down the wooden pier to where I could see the Elizabeth lolling softly in the undulating water, its tall mast weaving rhythmically left and right, a white baton in the surrounding fog.

Once we’d climbed into the boat, Mr. Reed untied the rope that held it to its mooring, adjusted the sail so that we briefly drifted backward, then took the rudder and guided it out of the marina.

We followed what appeared to be a predetermined course, exactly like the one I’d seen drawn on Mr. Reed’s nautical map, along the western coast of Monomoy Island, past Hammond’s Bend and Powder Hole, and finally around the tip of the island at Monomoy Point and into the open sea. Mr. Reed kept his eyes forward for the most part, but from time to time he would peer about, like someone scouting dangers all around, so that for a single, exhilarating instant I felt once again a party to some desperate and wildly romantic conspiracy, this early morning voyage, begun before the harbor master had arrived at work, with the marina deserted and the coastline shrouded in mist, serving as our practice run. “A man could vanish into a fog like this,” he said at one point. “Disappear. Disappear.”

It was nearly ten o’clock when we sailed back into Chatham harbor. The early morning fog had now burned off entirely; the air around us was crystal clear. Mr. Reed guided the boat into its place in the marina, then looped the rope to the wooden pylon, mooring it in the same dock where we’d found it earlier that same morning.

But rather than being uplifted by the maiden voyage of a boat he’d been working on for three years, Mr. Reed remained solemn and downcast. I moved along beside him, down the long wooden pier and into the boathouse, wondering what I might do to lift his spirits, draw him out of the dreadful despair that had fallen over him, renew the vitality and soaring discontent I’d so admired before, perhaps even point the way to some victory that might still be his.

Mr. Reed drew himself up on the desk in the corner of the boathouse, resting his cane against it, his hands folded one over the other. For a few minutes he talked about the Galápagos Islands, the ones off the coast of South America that Darwin had written of in The Voyage of the Beagle. “Everything must have looked new to him,” he told me. “Everything in life brand new.” He shook his head with a strange mirthlessness. “Imagine that,” he said. “A whole new world.”

Watching him from my place a few feet away, I felt coldly stricken, like a boy at a deathwatch, helplessly observing the slow disintegration of someone he’d admired.

As for Mr. Reed, he seemed hardly aware that I was in the room at all. At times his mind appeared to drift directionlessly from one subject to the next, his eyes sometimes fixed in a motionless frieze, sometimes roaming from place to place about the room, as if in flight from the one object he would not let them light upon, the portrait of Miss Channing that still hung on the far wall, her face forever captured in what must have come to strike him as a cruelly beckoning gaze.

During all that afternoon he spoke only once about the boat, the long labor of the last few years, his eyes locked on the empty rack that had once held its lofty frame. “Well, she was seaworthy, at least,” he said. Then he grasped his cane, edged himself off the desk, and walked to one of the windows that looked out into the harbor. It was still covered with a strip of burlap, and for a moment Mr. Reed simply stared at the rough, impenetrable cloth. Then, with a sudden, violent jerk he yanked it down, a sheet of dust and a shaft of hard incandescent light pouring over him, and into which, for a single, surreal instant, he seemed to disappear.

CHAPTER 24

I often felt as if I had disappeared as well, vanished into the same dusky light that had briefly engulfed Mr. Reed.

For with the boat now finished, I saw him only occasionally, either in his classroom or at a distance, a figure who seemed perpetually in flight, walking rapidly down a far corridor or turning the corner of Myrtle Street, silent, harried, like someone running beneath the lash of invisible whips.

As for Miss Channing, I rarely saw her anywhere but in her room, so I felt once again like one student among many, with nothing to distinguish me or set me apart from the rest, watching silently, just as they did, while she gave her final lessons with a formality that struck me as very nearly rigid, all the ease and spontaneity that had marked her former relationship with us completely cast aside, leaving her distant and preoccupied, her focus turned inward with a deadly gravity.

Left more or less to myself, I became increasingly agitated as the end of the school year approached. I fidgeted nervously through Miss Channing’s classes, my attention drifting toward the window, not with the lack of interest that sometimes afflicted the other boys, but in an attitude of barely controlled hostility and contempt, as if she were a lover who had led me on and then betrayed me, and whom I now despised.

I felt bereft and abandoned, deserted by my closest allies. And so I poured all my energy into my drawing, watching helplessly as those darker elements that had earlier marked it now took on a demonic blackness, the village forever hung in gothic shadows, the sea disappearing into a grim invading horde of thunderclouds. The angles and perspectives changed as well, tilting Chatham on a cruel axis, its crooked streets plunging in jagged lines toward a central maelstrom, houses careening left or right, a world of colliding shapes. Stranger still, I drew my distortions as if they were not really distortions at all, but our village seen rightly, caught in the actual warp and wrench of the world, a grotesque deformity its true face.

During this time I had only Sarah to remind me of everything that had once seemed so exciting, the piercing intensity I’d felt the day we’d all stood on the snowy hilltop together and gazed down at Black Pond, how open life had seemed at that moment, how thrillingly romantic. All of that now appeared smothered and inert. So much so that I even began to avoid Sarah, closing my bedroom door at the sound of her approach, as it she were nothing more than a bitter reminder of some lost ideal, a charred locket that had once hung from a lover’s neck.

Sarah no doubt sensed the way I felt, but she refused to withdraw from me despite it. Instead, she often came to where I lay in my room, knocked at the door, and demanded that I join her for a walk along the beach or accompany her on a shopping trip to the village.

On the final Thursday of that school year, she found me sitting at the edge of the playing field. It was late in the afternoon. The teachers had already gone home to prepare the final examinations of the coming week, and some of the boys had decided to play a game of touch football before going to their rooms for a night of study.

“What are you doing here, Henry?” she asked as she strode up and lowered herself onto the ground beside me.

I shrugged silently, pretending that my attention was on the boys as they continued at the game, their movements dictated by its unbending rides, no hitting, scratching, kicking, rules that must have, in the end, given them comfort, the limits laid out so clearly, but which I saw as yet another example of their strapped and adventureless lives.

“You hate it, don’t you, Henry?” Sarah demanded. “You hate Chatham School.”

The game dissolved. I looked at her evenly, the truth bursting from me. “Yes, I do.”

Sarah nodded, and to my surprise read my thoughts with perfect accuracy. “Don’t run away, Henry. You’ll be leaving for college soon. After that, you won’t have to …”

I turned away from her and nodded toward the boys. “What if I end up like them?”

She settled her gaze on the playing field, watching and listening as the boys darted about and called to one another. From the look in her eyes I could tell that she did not think them so bad, the boys of Chatham School, nor even the lives they would later make. For she was already mature enough to sense that the wilder life I so yearned for might finally come to little, the road less traveled end in nothing more than the dull familiarity of having traveled it.

But I lacked that same maturity, and so Sarah’s rebel spirit now seemed as dead as Mr. Reed’s and Miss Channing’s, the whole world mired in a vile dispiritedness and cowardice. “When you get right down to it, you’re just like them, Sarah,” I told her sneeringly, nodding toward the boys, my words meant to strike deep, leave her soul bleeding on the ground. “You’re a girl. That’s the only difference.”

I might have said more, struck at her with an even greater arrogance and cruelty, but a loud crash suddenly stopped me. It was hard and metallic, and it had come from the lighthouse. Glancing toward it, I saw Miss Channing rush out its open door, a red scarf whipping behind her as she made her way across the lawn.

Sarah’s eyes widened. “Miss Channing,” she whispered.

Miss Channing reached the street, wheeled to the right, and headed down it, her stride long and rapid until she came to the coastal road. For a moment she stopped, briefly dropped her head into her hands, then lifted it again and whirled around, glaring toward the lighthouse for an instant before she turned away and rushed down the road toward town.

It was then that we looked back toward the lighthouse. Mr. Reed stood in its still-open door, his head drooping forward as he leaned, exhausted, upon his cane.

“Why don’t they just run away together?” I blurted out with a vehemence so deep the words seemed directed less to them than to me. “Why are people such cowards?”

Sarah watched me softly, gently, the harsh words I’d just said to her already put aside. “They’re not cowards, Henry,” she told me firmly.

“Then why don’t they just go ahead and do what they want to do and forget everything else?”

She did not answer me. And when I recall that moment now, I realize that she could not possibly have answered. For we have never discovered why, given the brevity of life and the depth of our need and the force of our passions, we do not pursue our own individual happiness with an annihilating zeal, throwing all else to the wind. We know only that we don’t, and that all our goodness, our only claim to glory, resides in this inexplicable devotion to things other than ourselves.

I turned back toward the lighthouse. Its open door was now empty, for Mr. Reed had mounted the stairs to its top by then. I could see him standing there, staring out over the village, his hands gripped to the iron rail, posed exactly as I would no doubt have painted him, a crippled silhouette against a bloodred sky.

“She’s killing him,” I said, my mina now so fierce and darkly raging that I all but trembled as I said it. “They’re killing each other. Why don’t they just get in his boat and sail away from all this?”

Sarah looked at me intently. I could tell that she hardly had the courage for her next question, but felt that she had to ask it anyway. “Is that what you were doing, Henry?” she asked. “Building a boat for them to run away in?”

I thought of all I’d seen and heard over the last few weeks, the hours of labor I’d devoted to helping Mr. Reed build his boat, the unspoken purpose I’d come to feel in the building of it. I looked at her boldly, proud of what I’d done, regretful only that so much work had come to nothing. “Yes,” I told her. “That’s what I was building it for. So that they could run away.”

Sarah’s eyes widened in dismay. “But, Henry, what about—” She stopped, and for a moment we faced each other silently. Then, with no further word, she rose and walked away, taking her place, as it seemed to me, among that numb and passionless legion forever commanded by my father.

For the next few hours, lying sullenly in my bed upstairs, I felt nothing but my own inner seething. The most ordinary sounds came to me as an unbearable clamor, the heaviness of my mother’s footsteps like the thud of horses’ hooves, my father’s voice a mindless croaking. The house itself seemed arrayed against me, my own room closing in upon me like a vise, the air inside it so thick and acrid that I felt myself locked in a furiously smoldering chamber.

It was nearly nine when I finally rushed down the stairs and out into the night. My mother had gone to a neighbor’s house, so she didn’t see me leave. As for my father, I could see the lights of his office at Chatham School as I slunk down Myrtle Street, and knew that he was at work there, curled like a huge black bear over the large desk beside the window, his quill pen jerking left and right as he signed “important documents.”

I didn’t know where I was going as I continued toward the bluff, only that it vaguely felt like I was running away, doing exactly what Sarah had warned me not to do, fleeing Chatham School on a wave of impulse, casting everything aside, throwing my future to the wind.

I knew that I was not really doing that, of course, but I kept moving anyway, down through the streets of the village I so despised, past its darkened shops, and further still, out along the road that ran between the marshes and the sea, to where Plymouth Road suddenly appeared, a powdery lane of oyster shells, eerily pale as a bank of clouds parted and a shaft of moonlight fell upon it, abruptly rendering it as gothic and overwrought as I would no doubt have drawn it, its route stretching toward me like a ghostly hand.

In my mind I saw Miss Channing as she’d rushed from the lighthouse hours before, the red scarf trailing after her, Mr. Reed left behind, his head bowed, his hand clutching his cane. They had never appeared more tragically romantic to me than at that moment, more deserving to be together, to find the sort of happiness that only people like themselves, so fierce and passionately driven, can find, or even deserve to find.

I turned onto Plymouth Road with little specific intention in mind, recalling the many times I’d strolled down it with Sarah to find Miss Channing sitting on the steps of Milford Cottage or standing beside the pond. I remembered the snowy day in November when we’d all walked to the top of a nearby hill, how happy everyone had been that day, how open all our lives had briefly appeared, how utterly and permanently closed they now

I reached Milford Cottage with no prior determination to go there. Had I found the lights off, I would have turned away. Had a car been parked in the drive, I would have retreated back into the darkness and returned to Myrtle Street. But the lights were on, and no car blocked my path. Perhaps even more important, it began to rain. Not softly, but with a deafening burst of thunder, so that I knew it would be over quickly, that I would need the shelter of Milford Cottage only just long enough for the storm to pass, and then be on my way.

When she opened the door, I saw a face unlike any I had ever seen, her eyes so pale they seemed nearly colorless, two black dots on a field of white, dark crescents beneath them, her hair thrown back and tangled as if she had been shaken violently, then hurled against a wall. Never had anyone looked more cursed by love than Miss Channing did at that dreadful instant.

“Henry,” she said, squinting slightly, trying to bring me into focus, her voice a broken whisper. “What are you doing here?”

“I was just out walking,” I explained, speaking rapidly, already stepping back into the night, aware that I had come upon her in a grave moment. “Then it started to rain and so …”

She drew back into the cottage, opening the door more widely as she did so. “Come in,” she told me.

Candles were burning everywhere inside the cottage, but there was also a fire in the hearth, a stack of letters on the mantel, some of them, as I could see, already burning in the flames. The air inside was thick and overheated, a steam already gathering in the corners of the windows.

“I was just getting rid of a few things,” Miss Channing told me, her voice tense, almost breathless, beads of sweat gathered on her forehead and along the edge of her upper lip, her long fingers toying distractedly at the collar of her blouse. “Before I leave,” she added. Her eyes shot toward the window, the rain that could be seen battering against it. “Things I don’t want,” she said as she glanced back to me.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said only, “What can I do to help?”

Her gaze was directed toward me with a terrible anguish, all her feeling spilling out. “I can’t go on,” she said, her eyes now glistening in the candlelight.

I stepped toward her. “Anything, Miss Channing,” I said. “I just want to help.”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing you can do, Henry,” she told me.

I looked at her imploringly. “There must be something,” I insisted.

I saw a strange steeliness come into her face, a sense of flesh turning into stone, as if, in that single instant, she had determined that she would survive whatever it was that love had done to her. With a quick backward step she drew away from me and walked into the adjoining bedroom. For a moment she stood beside the bookshelf near her bed, staring down at it with a cold, inflexible glare. Then she plucked a necklace from its top shelf, her fingers clutching it like pale talons as she returned to me. “Get rid of this,” she said.

“But, Miss Channing …”

She grabbed my hand, placed the necklace in its open palm, and closed my fingers around it. “That’s all I want you to do, Henry,” she said.

The rain had stopped when I left Milford Cottage a few minutes later, Miss Channing standing in the door, framed by the interior light. She was still there when I rounded the near bend and, with that turn, swept out of her view.

I walked on in darkness, moving slowly over the wet ground, thinking of what I’d glimpsed in Miss Channing’s face, shaken by what I’d seen, the awful ruin of the passions she’d once shared with Mr. Reed, unable to imagine anything that might return her to its earlier joy save for the one that had always presented itself, the two of them in Mr. Reed’s boat, a high wind sweeping through its white sails, propelling them around Monomoy Point and into the surging, boundless sea.

For a time I was locked in pure fantasy, as if I were with them, sweeping southward, a Caribbean wind whipping the tropical waters off the coast of Cuba, Miss Channing’s face radiantly tanned, her black hair flying free in warm sea breezes, Mr. Reed at the helm, miraculously cured of his limp, the scar erased forever from his face, the winters of New England, with all their frozen vows, unable to reach them now or call them back to anything.

It was the headlights of an approaching car that brought my attention back to Plymouth Road. They came forward slowly, almost stalkingly, like two yellow eyes, covering me in so bright a shaft of blinding light that it was only after the car had come to a halt beside me that I saw Mr. Reed behind the wheel, his eyes hidden beneath the shadows of his hat.

“Get in,” he said.

I got in and he pulled away, continuing down Plymouth Road, but turning to the left at the fork, moving toward his house on the other side of the pond rather than Milford Cottage.

“What are you doing out here, Henry?”

“Just walking.”

He kept his eyes trained on the road, his fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel. “Were you with Miss Channing?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Why?”

“I was out walking and it started to rain. I went there to get out of the rain.”

The car continued forward, two shafts of yellow light dimly illuminating the glistening road ahead.

“What did she tell you?” Mr. Reed asked.

“Tell me?”

His eyes swept over to me. “About this afternoon. At the lighthouse.”

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I answered.

For a moment he seemed not to believe me. We sped on for a few seconds, his attention held on the road ahead. Then I saw his shoulders fall slightly, as if a great weight had suddenly been pressed down upon them. He lifted his foot from the accelerator and pressed down on the brake, bringing the car to a skidding halt. In the distance I could see the lights of his house glowing softly out of the darkness. “Sometimes I wish that she were dead,” he whispered. Then he turned to me, his face nearly as gray and lifeless as the masks of Miss Channing’s column. “You’d better get home now, Henry” was all he said.

I did as he told me, then watched as he pulled away, the taillights of his car glaring back toward me like small mad eyes.

Mr. Reed did not come to school the next day, but Miss Channing did, her mood very somber, the agitation of the night before now held within the iron grip of her relentless self-control.

It was the Friday before final examinations, and we all knew that since she was leaving Chatham School, it would be the last class we would ever have with her. Other departing teachers, those who had retired or found better posts, even the few whose abilities my father had found unacceptable and sent packing, had always taken a moment to say good-bye to us, usually with a few casual words about how much they had enjoyed being with us and hoped we’d stay in touch. I suppose that as the class neared its final minutes that day, we expected Miss Channing to do something similar, perhaps give a vague indication of what she intended to do after leaving Chatham School.

But Miss Channing didn’t do any of that. Instead, she raced through a review of the major things she’d taught us, her manner brittle, giving only the most dipped answers to our questions, ending it all with a single, lifeless comment. “It’s time to go,” she said only a few seconds before the final bell. Then she strode down the aisle and stationed herself at the entrance to her classroom.

The bell sounded, and as we all rose and filed out of the room, Miss Channing nodded to each of us as we went past, her final word only a quick, barely audible, “Good-bye.”

“We don’t have to say good-bye now,” I told her when I reached the door. “I’ll be coming over with Sarah on Sunday.”

She nodded briskly. “All right,” she said, then swiftly turned her attention to the boy behind me. “Good-bye, William,” she said as he stepped forward and took her hand.

For the rest of the day Miss Channing spent her time cleaning out the small converted shed that had served as her room and studio for the preceding nine months. She put away her materials, stacked the sculpting pedestals, folded up the dropcloth she’d placed over the tables on which she’d fashioned the masks for the column on the front lawn.

By four in the afternoon she’d nearly finished most of the work and was now concentrating upon the final details of the cleanup. Mrs. Benton saw her washing the windows with the frantic wiping motions she later described to Mr. Parsons and Captain Hamilton. Toward evening, the air in the courtyard now a pale blue, Mrs. Abercrombie saw the lights go out in her classroom, then Miss Channing step out of it, closing the door behind her. For a moment she peered back inside it, Mrs. Abercrombie said, then she turned and walked away. A few seconds later Mr. Taylor, a local banker who lived in the one great house on Myrtle Street, saw her standing beside the column on the front lawn of Chatham School, her fingers lightly touching one of its faces. And finally, just before nightfall, with a line of storm clouds advancing along the far horizon, my father came out of the front door of the school, glanced idly to the left, and saw her standing on the bluff, the tall white lighthouse to her back, her long black hair tossing wildly in the wind as she stared out over the darkening sea.

During the next day, Saturday, May 28, 1927, no one saw Miss Channing at all. The local postman said the cottage was deserted when he delivered her mail at eleven o’clock, and a hunter by the name of Marcus Lowe, caught in the same sort of sudden thunderstorm that had swept over the Cape two nights before, later said that he’d stood for nearly half an hour on the small porch of Milford Cottage and heard no stirring inside it. Nor had any of its lamps been lighted, he added, despite the gloom that had by then settled along the outer reaches of Black Pond.

CHAPTER 25

It’s quite possible that from the time Miss Channing left Chatham School on that last Friday before final exams, no one at all saw her until the following Sunday morning, when Sarah arrived for her final reading lesson.

The storm of the previous evening had passed, leaving the air glistening and almost sultry as we walked down Plymouth Road that morning. Sarah appeared hardly to have remembered the sharp words I’d said to her as we’d sat at the edge of the playing field two days before. Once she even took my arm, holding it lightly as we continued down the road, her whole manner cheerful and confident, the timid girl of a year before completely left behind.

“I’ll miss Miss Channing,” she told me. “But I’m not going to stop studying.”

She had mastered the basics of reading and writing by then, and from time to time during the past few weeks I’d seen her sitting in the kitchen, an open book in her lap, her beautiful eyes fiercely concentrated on the page, getting some of the words, clearly stumped by others, but in general making exactly the sort of progress I would have expected in one so dedicated and ambitious and eager to escape the life she might otherwise have been trapped in.

She released my arm and looked at me determinedly. “I’m not going to ever give up, Henry,” she said.

She’d dressed herself quite formally that morning, no doubt in a gesture of respect toward Miss Channing. She wore a white blouse and a dark red skirt, and her hair fell loosely over her shoulders and down her back in a long, dark wave. She’d made something special as well, not merely cookies or a pie, but a shawl, dark blue with a gold fringe, the colors of Chatham School.

“Do you think Miss Channing will like it?” she asked eagerly as she drew it from the basket.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I answered, recalling how distant and unhappy Miss Channing had seemed in her final class on Friday, the way she’d only nodded to us as we’d left her room. But even that distance seemed better than the torment I’d seen two nights before, the look in her eyes as she’d placed the necklace in my hand, the cold finality of the words she’d said, Get rid of this.

But I hadn’t gotten rid of it, so that by the time Sarah and I reached the fork in Plymouth Road, I could feel it like a small snake wriggling in my trouser pocket, demanding to be set free.

I stopped suddenly, knowing what I would do.

“What’s the matter, Henry?” Sarah asked.

I felt my hand slide into my pocket, the glass necklace curl around my fingers. “I have to go over to Mr. Reed’s for a minute,” I told her.

“Mr. Reed’s? Why?”

“I have to give him something. I’ll come to Miss Channing’s after that.”

Sarah nodded, then turned and headed on down the road, taking the fork that led to Milford Cottage while I took the one that led to Mr. Reed’s.