The Chatham School Affair (30 page)

O
nce we got back home, my father told me to change quickly and come downstairs. Sarah had been taken to Dr. Craddock’s clinic, he said, and all of us were to come to her bedside as soon as possible. I did as I was told, pulling off clothes that had once been soaked through but were now only damp, then rushed back downstairs to find my father waiting edgily on the front porch, my mother already in the car.

“I knew something bad was coming,” she said as I climbed into the backseat of the car. “A woman knows.”

Dr. Craddock’s clinic was situated in a large house on the eastern end of Chatham. It had once been the home of a prosperous sea captain, but now functioned as what amounted to a small hospital, complete with private rooms on the second floor.

He met us at the door, dressed in a long white coat, a stethoscope dangling from his neck.

“How is she?” my father asked immediately.

“She’s still unconscious,” Dr. Craddock replied. “I think you should prepare for the worst.”

“Do you mean she may die?”

Dr. Craddock nodded. “She’s in shock. That’s always
very dangerous.” He motioned us into the building, then up the stairs to where we found Sarah in her bed, her eyes still closed, but now motionless behind the lids, her breathing short and erratic.

“Oh, Lord,” my mother whispered as she stepped over to the bed. “Poor Sarah.”

Looking at her, it was hard to imagine that she was in such peril. Her face was unmarked and lovely, like a sleeping beauty, her long black hair neatly combed, as I found out later, by Dr. Craddock himself. A gesture that has always struck me as infinitely kind.

My father moved to touch her cheek, then drew back his hand and turned toward Dr. Craddock. “When will you know if she’s … if she’s going to be all right?”

“I don’t know,” Craddock answered. “If there’s no brain injury, then it’s possible she could—” He stopped, clearly unwilling to offer unfounded hope. “I’ll know more in the next few hours.”

“Please let me know if there are any changes, or if there’s anything I can do,” my father said.

Dr. Craddock nodded. “How long has she been with you?”

“Nearly two years,” my father answered. He looked down at her tenderly. “Such a lovely child. Bright. Ambitious. She was learning to read.”

Watching her from where I stood directly beside the bed, it was hard to imagine that only a few hours before she’d been so fully alive, so proud of the progress she’d made in her lessons with Miss Channing, drawing the African bracelet onto her wrist as if it were an emblem of her newfound mastery. Nothing had ever made life seem so tentative to me, so purely physical, and therefore utterly powerless to secure itself against the terrible assaults of accident or illness or even the invisible deadliness of time. It was just a little point of light, this life we harbored, just a tiny beam of consciousness, frail beyond measure, brief and unsustainable, the greatest lives like
the smallest ones, delicately held together by the merest thread of breath.

We returned home that afternoon in an icy silence, my mother in the front seat of the car, fuming darkly, my father with his eyes leveled on the road, no doubt trying to fix this latest catastrophe within his scheme of things, give it the meaning it deserved, perhaps even some imagined grace.

As for me, I found that I could not bear to think of what had happened on Black Pond, either to Sarah or to Mrs. Reed, could not bear to hold such devastation in my mind, envision Sarah’s shattered bones or the last hellish gasps of Mrs. Reed.

And so I concentrated only on Miss Channing, imagining her alone in her cottage or out wandering in the nearby woods. It seemed entirely unfitting that she should be left to herself under such circumstances. And so, as we neared Myrtle Street, I said, “What about Miss Channing? Do you think we should …”

“Miss Channing?” my mother blurted out, twisting around to face me.

“Yes.”

“What about her?”

“Well, she may be all alone. I was thinking that we might bring her …”

“Here?” my mother demanded sharply. “Bring her here? To our home?”

I glanced at my father, clearly hoping for some assistance, but he continued to keep his eyes on the road, his mouth closed, unwilling to confront the roaring flame of my mother’s rage.

“That woman will never set foot in our house again,” my mother declared. “Is that clear, Henry?”

I nodded weakly and said nothing else.

∗ ∗ ∗

The atmosphere in the house on Myrtle Street had grown so sullen by nightfall that I was happy to leave it. My father dropped me off in front of Dr. Craddock’s clinic, saying only that someone would relieve me at midnight.

The doctor met me at the door. He said that Sarah’s condition hadn’t changed, that she appeared reasonably comfortable. “There’s a nurse at the end of the corridor,” he added. “Call her if you notice Sarah experiencing any distress.”

“I will,” I told him, then watched as he moved down the stairs, got into his car and drove away.

Sarah lay in the same position as before, on her back, a sheet drawn up to her waist, her shattered arm in a plaster cast. In the light from the lamp beside her bed, her face took on a bloodless sheen, all its ruby glow now drained into a ghostly pallor.

I watched her a moment longer, touched her temple with my fingertips, then settled into the chair beside the window to wait with her through the night. I’d brought a book with me, some thick seafaring tale culled from the limited collection available from the school library. I would concentrate on it exclusively, I’d told myself as I’d quickly pulled it from the shelf, let it fill my mind to the brim, allow no other thoughts inside it.

But I’d gotten through only twenty pages or so when I saw someone emerge out of the dimly lighted hallway, tall and slender, her dark hair hung like a wreath around her face.

“Hello, Henry,” Miss Channing said.

I got to my feet, unable to speak, her presence like a splash of icy water thrown into my face, waking me up to what I’d done.

“How is she?”

I let the book drop onto my chair. “She hasn’t changed much since the … since …”

She came forward slowly and stood by the bed, peering down. She was wearing a plain white dress, the shawl
Sarah had knitted for her draped over her shoulders. She watched Sarah silently for a time, then let her eyes drift over to where I continued to stand beside my empty chair. “Tell your father that I’d like to sit with Sarah tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Channing.”

“For as long as she needs me.”

“I’ll tell him.”

She pressed her hand against the side of Sarah’s face, then turned and walked past me, disappearing from the room as quickly as she’d entered it.

I know that for the rest of that long night she remained alone in her cottage, no doubt staring at the old wooden pier as she sat in her chair by the window, the unlighted hearth only a few feet away, the ashes of Mr. Reed’s letters still resting in a gray heap where, three days later, Mr. Parsons would find them when he came to question her about what he called “certain things” he’d heard at Chatham School.

As for me, I remained at Sarah’s bedside, trying to lose myself in the book, but unable to shut out the sound of her breathing, the fact that as the hours passed, it grew steadily more faint. From time to time a soft murmur came from her, but I never saw any sign of the “distress” Dr. Craddock had warned me about. If anything, she appeared utterly at peace, so that I often found myself looking up from my book, imagining her unconsciousness, wondering if, locked so deeply within the chamber of herself, she could feel things unfelt by the rest of us, the slosh of her blood through the valves of her heart, the infinitesimal firings of her brain, perhaps even the movement of those tiny muscles Miss Channing had once spoken of, and which any true artist must come to understand.

And so I didn’t know until nearly midnight when Dr. Craddock came into the room, walked over to her bed,
took hold of her wrist, held it briefly, then released it, shaking his head as he did so, that whatever small sensations Sarah might have felt from the depths of that final privacy, she now could feel no more.

My father had already been told that Sarah had died when he came for me. As he trudged toward me from down the hallway he looked as if he were slogging through a thick, nearly impenetrable air. He drew in a long breath as he gathered me into his arms. “So sad, Henry,” he whispered, “so sad.”

We went directly home, drifting slowly through the center of the village, its shops closed, the streets deserted, no one stirring at all save for the few fishermen I saw as we swept past the marina. Glancing out over its dark waters, I could see Mr. Reed’s boat lolling peacefully. The
Elizabeth’s
high white mast weaved left and right, and for a moment, I remembered it all again, he and Miss Channing sitting together on the steps of Chatham School or on the bench beside the bluff, the cane like a line drawn between them. By spring, as I recalled, they’d begun to stroll through the village together, companionably, shoulder to shoulder, their love growing steadily by then. No, not growing, as I thought suddenly, but tightening around them like a noose, around Mrs. Reed and Sarah, too, and even little Mary, so that love no longer seemed a high, romantic thing to me at all, no longer a fit subject for our poems and for songs, nor even to be something we should seek.

And so I never sought it after that.

“We’ll have to make an announcement in school tomorrow morning,” my father told my mother as he came into the parlor. “The boys have to be told. And Captain Hamilton wants to question a few people tomorrow afternoon.”

My mother, working fiercely at her knitting, so much death burning in her mind, aid not seem in the least surprised by such a development. “No doubt there’ll be plenty of questions,” she said without looking up.

“Who do they want to question?” I asked my father.

“Me, of course,” he answered, now trying to pretend that it was merely some kind of police routine, a formality. “Some of the teachers.”

“They’ll want to talk to me as well,” my mother said, her eyes glowing hotly, clearly looking forward to the prospect.

“Why would they want to talk to you, Mildred?” my father asked.

“Because of what Mrs. Reed told me,” she answered, her eyes fixed on her knitting. “About that woman and Mr. Reed.”

For the first time, I saw my father bristle. “You’re not to be spreading tales, Mildred,” he told her.

My mother’s head shot up, her eyes narrowing fiercely. “Tales?” she said. “I’m not talking about tales, Arthur. I’m talking about what Mrs. Reed told me right here in this room, things she asked me to keep quiet about, and so I did … until now.”

“And what are these ‘things,’ may I ask?”

“She thought that there were bad things afoot,” my mother replied. “In the boathouse. Down at the marina. She thought there was a plot against her.”

Aghast, my father looked at her. “You can’t be serious.”

My mother stood her ground. “She thought he might murder her. Mr. Reed, I mean. She was terrified of that.”

“But Mrs. Reed wasn’t murdered, Mildred,” my father replied. “It was an accident.”

The needles stopped. My mother leaned forward, glaring at him. “She saw a knife, Arthur. A rope too. And they’d already mapped out where they were running to.” Her eyes narrowed menacingly. “And poison too.”

I felt my breath abruptly stop. “Poison?”

My mother nodded. “A bottle of arsenic. That’s what she saw. Right there with the knife and the rope.”

I could hardly believe my ears. “That was for the rats,” I told her. “In the boathouse. I helped Mr. Reed spread it myself.”

She appeared not to have heard me, or to have ignored what she heard. She eased herself back, the needles whipping frantically again. “Oh, there’re going to be questions all right,” she said. “Lots of questions, that’s for sure.”

I suppose it was at that moment that the further consequences of what had happened on Black Pond that afternoon first occurred to me. It would not end with Mrs. Reed dead behind the wheel or Sarah dead in her bed at Dr. Craddock’s clinic. Their deaths were but the beginning of more destruction still.

T
hroughout that long night I floated in green water, saw Mrs. Reed’s head plunge toward me from out of the murky depths, her features pressed frantically against the glass, eyes wide and staring.

By morning I was exhausted, and I felt as if I could barely stand with the other boys when they assembled on the front lawn of Chatham School and listened as my father told them all he thought they needed to know about the previous day’s events, the fact that “a tragic accident” had occurred on Black Pond, that Mrs. Reed’s car had “gone out of control,” and that both she and Sarah Doyle were now dead.

As to the state of Mr. Reed and Miss Channing, my father told them nothing whatsoever, save that they remained in their respective homes, Mr. Reed tending to his daughter, Miss Channing continuing to prepare for her departure from Chatham. He did not know if either of them would return to Chatham School before it closed for the summer, and asked the boys to “keep them in their thoughts.”

∗ ∗ ∗

For most of the rest of that long day I stayed in my room, almost in an attitude of concealment, not wanting to meet my mother’s gaze as she stormed about the house, nor talk to any of the boys of Chatham School, since it was only natural that they’d ply me with questions about what had happened on Black Pond. Most of all, however, I wanted to avoid any chance meeting with Captain Hamilton, the way I felt when he looked at me, as if I were a small animal scurrying across a strip of desert waste, he the great bird diving toward me at tremendous speed and from an impossible height, looking only for the truth.

And so I was in my room when I heard a knock at the front door, cautiously peered downstairs and saw Mr. Parsons, his hat in his hand, facing my mother in the foyer. “Is Mr. Griswald here?” he asked.

“No. He’s at the funeral parlor,” my mother told him. “Making arrangements for Sarah.”