The Chatham School Affair (10 page)

From behind me, a second, disembodied voice called her name.
Mary, Mary
.

I turned and saw Mrs. Reed standing at the door of a house that was no longer overgrown with vines, its paint no longer peeling from wood gone black and sodden in the years since its abandonment. She seemed to stare directly through me, as if I were the ghostly one, she brought back to life. Then her eyes narrowed, and she brushed back a loose strand of red hair as she called to her daughter once again, her words echoing in the air, bounding and rebounding across the unresponsive surface of Black Pond.
Mary, come inside
.

I felt a cold wave rush through me, then saw Mary dart past her mother and into the house, laughing happily as she dissolved into its darkened space, her laughter growing faint in the distance, as if she were still running, though now down the passageway of a vast, unending tunnel.

Like a blast of arctic air, I felt all the terror of the past
sweep over me in a breathless shiver, as if it were Mrs. Reed and her daughter who had drawn me back into their world rather than I who had returned them unwillingly to mine.

I peered into the interior of the house, its front door long ago pulled down. The walls were now stripped and bare, the fireplace crumbling, the floor little more than a loose assemblage of sagging wooden slats. The kitchen was at the rear of the house, silent, empty, a dusky shaft of light pouring in from the rear window, and with nothing but four rust-colored indentations in the floor to indicate the heavy iron stove Mrs. Reed had used to prepare dinner for her family.

From court testimony I knew that Mrs. Reed had made a special meal for Miss Channing that night, that it had consisted of cabbage and boiled ham, deviled eggs, and a rhubarb pie. I knew that after dinner Mary Reed had busied herself in the front room while the Reeds and Miss Channing lingered over a pot of coffee whose phantom aroma I could almost smell, as if, down all the passing years, it had continued to waft out of the deserted kitchen, filter through the long-abandoned rooms, drift out onto the creaky, leaf-strewn porch where I stood.

Throughout dinner Mr. Reed had kept the conversation centered on Miss Channing, forever returning her to one place or another from her travels, so that during the course of the dinner she’d described everything from the look of Vesuvius as it loomed menacingly over the ruins of Pompeii to the tiny Danish village beloved by Christian Andersen. “How interesting,” had been Mr. Reed’s repeated responses. “How the boys at school must enjoy listening to you.”

As for Abigail Reed, she’d listened quietly, watching her husband as he watched Miss Channing, smiling politely from time to time, nodding occasionally, perhaps already beginning to sense that something unexpected had entered her life, a woman in a pretty dress, talking
of the books she’d read, the things she’d seen, a world Mrs. Reed had never known, nor thought it important to know. Mr. Parsons’ voice echoed in the air around me.
How well did you know Abigail Reed?
Her face appeared before me, floating wide-eyed in the green depths.
Not very well
.

The dinner had come to an end at around ten o’clock. By then Mary had drifted out of the front room and disappeared into the darkness surrounding the house. On the porch Miss Channing had politely thanked Mr. Reed and Abigail for the dinner, then turned and headed down the stairs and out toward the narrow path that followed along the water’s edge. From a distance she heard Mr. Reed calling for his daughter, then Mrs. Reed’s assurance that there was nothing for him to be worried about, that she was only playing near the shed.

It had never occurred to me that it might still be there, but as I eased myself down the stairs of what was left of Mr. Reed’s house, I looked to the left and saw it. In contrast to the house, it was remarkably well-preserved, an unpainted wooden shed, tall and narrow, with a roof of corrugated tin. It stood in a grove of Norway spruce, perhaps a hundred yards on the other side of the Reed house. The trail that had once led to it was overgrown, and the tin roof was covered with pine needles, but the terrible weathering and neglect that had left the Reed house and Milford Cottage in such disrepair seemed hardly to have affected it.

I approached it reluctantly, as anyone might who knew the terror that had shivered there, the sound of small fingers clawing at its door, the whimpering cries that had filtered through the thick wooden slats,
Daddy, Daddy
.

It was windowless, its walls covered with tar paper, the heavy door trimmed in black rubber, creating a tight seal. Though very dark inside, it nonetheless gave off a
sense of spaciousness because of the high roof, the great boards that ran its length nearly ten feet above, the large, rusty hooks that pierced the base of the boards and hung toward the floor like crooked red fingers. During Miss Channing’s trial, Mr. Parsons had repeatedly referred to it as a “slaughterhouse,” but it had never been any such thing. Rather, it was one of those outbuildings, common at the time, in which large slabs of meat were hung for smoking or salting or simply to be carved into pieces fit for cooking. The floor had been slightly raised, with half-inch spaces between the boards, so that blood could trickle through it, be soaked up by the ground beneath. Mr. Reed had rarely used it, although it rested on his land, but Mary had often been seen playing both inside it and nearby.

It was this latter fact that had finally brought Captain Lawrence P. Hamilton of the Massachusetts State Police to its large gray door that afternoon. The captain had already searched Mr. Reed’s house by then, the little earthen basement beneath it, the cramped, unlighted attic overhead. That’s where he’d found a battered cardboard box, a knife, and length of rope inside, along with an old primer curiously inscribed. But Captain Hamilton had not been looking for such things when he’d first come to the Reed house that day. His concerns had been far more immediate than that. For although Mrs. Reed had already been found by then, Mary was still missing.

I
t was nearly ten in the morning when I returned to my car, pulled myself behind the wheel, and headed back toward Chatham. By then, the atmosphere of the places I’d just revisited—Milford Cottage, Mr. Reed’s house, the little shed Captain Hamilton had warily approached on that sweltering May afternoon—had sunk into my memory like a dark, ineradicable stain. I thought of all that had followed the events of that terrible day, some immediately, some lingering through all the intervening years. I remembered my father at his desk, desperately trying to reclaim some part of a dream already lost, my mother staring at him bitterly, locked in her own sullen disillusionment. I saw a young world grow old, the boys of Chatham School expanding into adulthood, then shrinking into old age just as I had, though with less than they had to show for my time on earth, wifeless, childless, a man known primarily for a single boyhood act.

Then, in the midst of all that dead or aged company, I glimpsed the youthful face of Sarah Doyle.

∗ ∗ ∗

I remember that it was a Saturday afternoon in early November, only a week following Miss Channing’s dinner with Mr. Reed and his family. I was sitting on a bench at the edge of the coastal bluff. On the beach below I could see several people strolling about or lounging under large striped umbrellas. There was no one in the water, of course, the season for swimming having passed by then. But far out to sea, I could make out the white sail of a fifteen-footer as it skirted along the shoreline. Watching it drift by, I yearned to be on it, to be cutting across an illimitable blue vastness.

Sarah was wearing a long blue skirt and red blouse when she came up to me that morning, and she’d wrapped a flowered scarf over her shoulders, the knot tied loosely at her throat. Her hair was long and extraordinarily dark, and had a continually frazzled and unruly look to it, as if she’d just been taken by the heels, turned upside down, and shaken violently, her hair left in tangled disarray.

Still, for all that, she was quite a lovely girl, the same age I was, and I often found my attention drawn to her as she swept past my room or bounded up the stairs, but most particularly when I found her lounging on the porch swing, her arms at her sides, her eyes half-closed and languid, as if lost in a dream of surrender.

In those days, of course, the classes were more rigidly divided than they have since become, and so I knew that whatever my feelings for Sarah might be, they would always have to be carefully guarded. For unlike the other deadly sins, lust is sometimes joined to love, and such a prospect would no doubt have met with stern disapproval from my mother. And so, up until that day, I’d allowed myself only those hidden thoughts and secret glances that were within my sphere, thinking of Sarah at night, but by day returning her to the status of a servant girl.

“And hello to you, sir,” she said as she approached
me, the Irish lilt now striking me as somewhat thrilling and exotic.

I nodded. “Hi, Sarah.”

She smiled brightly, but seemed unsure of what to do next. “Well, should I sit with you, then?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said casually, as if the nearness of her body meant no more to me than that of the lamppost a block away.

She sat down and looked out over the water. I did the same, careful to conceal the fact that all I could think of was her skin, the color of milk, her hair black as coal, the mysteries of her body infinitely enticing.

As to her history, I knew only the broad details. But from the bits and pieces of conversation I’d overheard as I roamed the house on Myrtle Street, I’d learned of her mother’s early death in Limerick and had some picture of the bleak coastal village she’d grown up in after that. She’d had three brothers, two killed in the Great War, one an aimless drifter who’d disappeared into the dreary slums of East London. As to her father, he’d died of tuberculosis five years before, leaving her with only enough money to book passage to America. I’d heard my father speak grimly of that passage, the horrors of the steerage, the way the men had leered at her in the dank quarters of the ship’s belly, the stale bread and dried beef that alone had sustained her until she’d finally disembarked at the Port of Boston.

After that Sarah had fallen upon the mercy of the Irish Immigrant Aid Society, who’d fed, clothed, and given her shelter until she’d landed a job as a serving girl in a great Boston house. It was there she’d met my father three years later, told him how much she longed for village life again, particularly if the village happened to be located near the sea. By all accounts she had spoken to my father with great earnestness, and my father, never one to remain deaf to such heartfelt solicitations, had first cleared it with her employer, then offered her a place in our house at Chatham, one she’d taken without
a moment’s further thought and performed dutifully ever since.

But as I looked at her that morning nearly two years later, she seemed not altogether pleased with her earlier decision. There was a melancholy wistfulness in her eyes, a deep dissatisfaction.

“Something’s bothering you,” I said bluntly, my own intense restlessness now spilling over into a general sense of radical impatience.

Her eyes shot over to me, as if I’d accused her of stealing the silverware. “Now, why do you say that?” she asked in a sharp, defensive tone.

I gave her a knowing look.

She turned her head away, touched her cheek. “I’ve nothing to complain about. I’ll not be thought of as a whiner.”

I was too consumed with my own complaint to feel much tenderness toward Sarah’s, so I said nothing more.

This seemed to jar her. “Well I want you to know that I don’t at all regret coming to Chatham. Not at all, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t ever want your father to think I wasn’t grateful for what he’s done for me. It’s just that I didn’t come to America to be a serving girl. I’m after more than that. I want to better myself, to break away from the cleaning and cooking. To
be
something, don’t you know. Not just a serving girl … like I am now.” She shook her head violently. “It’s no good, feeling like I do. Like I’m all tied up in ropes.”

I could see it in her face, a vast, billowing need to leap beyond the mundane and unglamorous life she otherwise seemed destined for, and which, since reading Mr. Channing’s book, I had also begun to feel far more powerfully than I ever had before. Watching her agitation, the restlessness that swept over her, I suddenly felt absolutely in league with her, the two of us castaways on a narrow strip of land whose strictures and limitations both appalled and threatened to destroy us. I saw my father as grimly standing in our way, reading his ancient
books, mouthing their stony maxims. In my mind I heard his steady drone:
Do this, do that. Be this, be that
. I had never felt such a deep contempt for everything he stood for.

“Maybe you should just take off, Sarah,” I told her. “Just take the train to Boston and disappear.”

Even as I said it, I saw myself doing it. It would be a moment of wild flight, the real world dissolving behind me, all its gray walls crumbling, the sky a vast expanse before me, my life almost as limitless as the unbounded universe.

“You should do whatever you have to, Sarah,” I continued boldly. Then, as if to demonstrate my zeal, I said, “If I can help you in any way, let me know.”

Her response came as a question that utterly surprised me. For it had nothing to do with flight, with night trains to Boston, or disappearing into the multitude. Instead, she studied me intently, then said, “Do you remember Miss Channing? The lady that came to the house at the end of summer, the one that’s teaching art?”

“I’m in her class.”

“Such a fine lady, the way she talks and all. So smart, don’t you think?”

“Yes, she is.”

Sarah hesitated, now suddenly reluctant to ask what she had perhaps come to ask me all along. Then the wall fell, and she spoke. “Do you think that such a fine lady as Miss Channing is—talking so fine the way she does—that she might be of a mind to teach me how to read?”