The Chatham School Affair (28 page)

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.

I
t’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.

I arrived at his house a few minutes later. His car was sitting in the driveway, but the yard was deserted, and I heard no sounds coming from the house.

Then I saw her, Mrs. Reed walking toward me from the old gray shed that stood in the distance, her body lumbering heavily across the weedy ground, so deep in thought
she
did not look up until she’d nearly reached the front steps of the house.

“Good morning, Mrs. Reed,” I said.

She stopped abruptly, startled, her hand rising to shield her eyes from the bright morning sun, gazing at me with a strange wariness, as if I were a shadow she’d suddenly glimpsed in the forest or something she’d caught lurking behind a door.

“I’m Henry Griswald,” I reminded her. “The boy you—”

“I know who you are,” she said, her chin lifting with a sudden jerk, as if in anticipation of a blow. “You helped him with the boat.”

I could hear the accusation in her voice, but decided to ignore it. “Is Mr. Reed home?”

The question appeared to throw her into distress. “No,” she answered in a voice now suddenly more agitated. “He’s out somewhere, walking.” Her eyes shot toward the pond, the little white cottage that rested on its far bank. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No, I don’t,” she answered, her manner increasingly tense, brittle, a single reddish eyebrow arching abruptly, then lowering slowly, like a dying breath. “Why are you here?” she asked, peering at me with a grave distress, as if I were diving toward her from a great height, a black bird in fatal descent. “What did you come here for?”

“I just wanted to see Mr. Reed.”

Another thought appeared to strike her, her mind now twisting in a new direction.

“Is he running away?” she demanded, her eyes upon me with a savage spite, her voice very thin, a cutting wire drawn taut. “Leaving me and Mary?” She tilted her head to the left, toward the pond. “Running away with her?”

I shrugged. “I … don’t …”

Something seemed to ignite in her mind. “He wouldn’t be the first, you know. The first one to leave me.”

I said nothing.

She was watching me apprehensively, as if I were not a boy at all, but someone sent to do her harm, my fingers wrapped not around a frail glass necklace, but a length of gray rope, the steel grip of a knife.

“I just wanted to see Mr. Reed,” I told her. “I’ll come back some other time.”

She stared at me angrily. “You tell him I’ll not have it again,” she said loudly, distractedly, as if she were speaking to someone in the distance. “He said he would be home.”

“I’m sure he’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.

She remained silent, locked in what now seemed an impenetrable distraction, her eyes drifting, unhinged, so that they seemed unable to focus on anything more definite than the old apron her fingers now began to squeeze and jerk.

Looking at her at that moment, I could not imagine that she would ever embrace Mr. Reed again, draw him into her bed, or even go walking with him through the woods on a snowy afternoon. How could he possibly live the rest of his life with her, eating a milky chowder while she stared at him from the other side of the table, babbling about the price of lard, but thinking only of betrayal?

Suddenly, the alternative to such a fate presented itself more forcefully than it ever had, and I saw Miss Channing rushing from the lighthouse, Mr. Reed at her side, the two of them making their way down the coastal road, through the village streets, until they reached the
Elizabeth
, its broad sails magnificently unfurled, the trade winds waiting like white stallions to carry them away.

It was then, in a moment of supreme revelation, that the answer came to me. Someone else had to do it.
Someone else had to set them free. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed were helplessly imprisoned in the dungeon of Chatham School, my father its grim warden, Mrs. Reed the guardian of the gate. It was up to me to be the real hero of their romance, turn the iron key, pull back the heavy door.

And so I leveled my eyes upon Mrs. Reed and said, “Let them go, Mrs. Reed. They want to be free.”

Her eyes froze, everything in her face tightening, her features now a twisted rope. “What did you say?”

“They want to be free,” I repeated, now both astonished and emboldened by my own daring.

She stared at me stonily. “Free?”

I glanced toward the pond. In the distance I could see the willow behind Milford Cottage, the pier that stretched out over the water. I thought of the moment when Miss Channing had pressed a trembling hand against Mr. Reed’s cheek, the look in his eyes as he’d felt her touch.

It was a vision that urged me onward with a ruthless zeal. “Yes,” I said coldly. “To be free. That’s what they want. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed.”

For a moment she stared at me silently, her eyes now strangely dull, her features flat and blunted, as if they’d been beaten down by a heavy rod. Then her body stiffened, like someone jerked up by a noose, and she whirled around and bolted away from me, calling out as she did so,
Mary, come inside
, her voice pealing through the surrounding woods as she swept up the stairs and disappeared into the house, a little girl darting around its far corner only seconds later, climbing up the wooden stairs, laughing brightly as she vanished into its unlighted depths.

Miss Channing and Sarah were inside Milford Cottage when I arrived there a few minutes later, standing very
erectly in their midst, still in awe of the great thing I felt sure I had just accomplished.

Sarah had obviously waited for my arrival before giving Miss Channing her present. “This is for you,” she said, smiling delightedly, as she brought the shawl from her basket.

“Thank you,” Miss Channing said, taking it from her gently, as if it were an infant. “It’s beautiful, Sarah.”

We were all standing in the front room of the cottage. Many of Miss Channing’s belongings were now packed into the same leather traveling cases I’d brought there nearly a year before, along with a few boxes in which she’d placed a small number of things she’d acquired since then. In my mind I saw myself loading them onto Mr. Reed’s boat, then standing at the edge of the pier, waving farewell as they drifted out of the moonlit marina, never to be seen again at Chatham School.

“I have something for you too,” Miss Channing said to Sarah. She walked into her bedroom, then came out with the African bracelet in her hand, its brightly colored beads glinting in the light. “For all your work,” she said as she handed it to Sarah.

Sarah’s eyes widened. “Oh, thank you, Miss Channing,” she said as she put it on.

Miss Channing nodded crisply. “Well, we should start our lesson now,” she said.

They took their seats at the table by the window, Sarah arranging her books while Miss Channing read over the writing she’d assigned the Sunday before.

I left them to their work, strolled to the edge of the pond. In the distance I could see Mr. Reed’s house half concealed within a grove of trees, his car sitting motionless in the driveway.

I was still at the water’s edge an hour later, when I saw Sarah and Miss Channing come walking toward me, Sarah chatting away, as she often did at the end of a lesson.

“Where is it you will be going now?” she asked Miss Channing as they strolled up to me.

Miss Channing’s answer came more quickly than I’d expected, since I hadn’t heard anyone in my household mention her intentions.

“Boston, perhaps,” she said. “At least for a while.”

Sarah smiled excitedly. “Now, that’s a fine city,” she said. “And what do you plan to be doing once you’re settled in?”

Miss Channing shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was a subject that appeared to trouble her. To avoid it, she said to me, “Henry, I have some books from the school library. Would you mind taking them back for me?”

“Of course, Miss Channing.”

She turned and headed toward the cottage, walking so briskly that I had to quicken my pace in order to keep up with her. Once inside, she retrieved a box of books from her bedroom. “Henry, I’d like to apologize for the state I was in when you came to the cottage the other night,” she said as she handed it to me.

“There’s nothing to apologize for, Miss Channing,” I told her, smiling inwardly at how much she might soon have to thank me for, the fact that I’d taken the fatal step, done what neither she nor Mr. Reed had been able to do, struck at the heavy chain that bound them to Chatham.

After that we walked out of the cottage to stand together near the willow. It was nearly noon by then, quiet, windless, the long tentacles of the tree falling motionlessly toward the moist ground. To the right I could see Sarah moving toward the old wooden pier. At the end of it she hesitated for a time, as if unsure of its stability, then strolled to its edge, a slender, erect figure in her finest dress.

“I hope you’ll look after Sarah,” Miss Channing said, watching her from our place beside the willow. “Encourage her to keep at her studies.”