The Chatham School Affair (16 page)

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 boathouse 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.