The Chatham School Affair (24 page)

“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.

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?

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.