The Chatham School Affair (32 page)

By nightfall the rain had subsided, but a few hours later it began again. It was still falling when Dr. Craddock’s car came to a halt in front of our house. The doctor was wearing a long raincoat and a gray hat which he drew from his head as he mounted the stairs to where my father sat in a wicker chair a few feet away, I in the swing nearby.

“I’ve come about the little girl,” he said. “Mary Reed.”

My father got to his feet, puzzled. “Mary Reed? What about her?”

Dr. Craddock hesitated a moment, and I could tell that something of vast importance lay in the balance for him. “I’m sure you know that my wife and I … that we’ve … that we have no children.”

My father nodded.

“Well, I wanted to let you know that we would be very interested in taking Mary in,” Dr. Craddock said. “My wife would be a good mother for her, I’m sure. And I believe that I would be a good father.”

“Mary has a father,” my father answered with an unexpected sternness, as if he were talking to one who wished to steal a child.

Dr. Craddock stared at him, surprised. “You’ve not heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

I remember rising slowly and drifting across the porch toward my father as Dr. Craddock told him that Mr. Reed’s boat had been found adrift in the bay, with nothing but his old wooden cane inside it, save for a note written on a piece of sail and tacked to the mast.
Please see to it that Mary is treated well, and tell her that I do this out of love
.

I think that over the years Mary Reed was well-treated, that, overall, despite the many problems that later arose, the howling phantoms that consumed her, the bleak silences into which she sometimes fell, that despite all that, Dr. Craddock and his wife continued to love her and strive to help her. At first it looked as though they had succeeded, that Mary had come to think of them as her parents, put her own dreadful legacy behind her. By the time she entered the local school, she’d come to be called by her middle name, which was Alice, as well as that of her adoptive parents, which was Craddock.

It was a deliverance my father had hoped for, and perhaps even believed to be possible. “In time, she’ll
heal,” I heard him say as Dr. Craddock took her small white hand and led her down the stairs and out into the rain.

But she never did.

Mr. Reed’s death left only Miss Channing upon whom the law could now seek retribution, and so, after a few more days of investigation, and at Mr. Parsons’ direction, the grand jury charged her in a two-count indictment, the first count being the most serious, conspiracy to murder Abigail Reed, but the second also quite grave at that time, adultery.

It was my father who delivered the news of the indictment to Miss Channing, allowed to do so by Captain Hamilton, whose duty it otherwise would have been.

“Get in the car, Henry,” my father said the morning we made our final drive to Milford Cottage. “If she becomes … well … difficult … I might need your help.”

But Miss Channing did not become difficult that morning. Instead, she stood quite still, listening as my father told her that the two indictments had been handed down, that she would have to stand trial, then went on to recommend a local attorney who was willing to defend her.

“I don’t want a lawyer, Mr. Griswald,” Miss Channing said.

“But these are serious charges, Miss Channing,” my father said somberly. “There are witnesses against you. People who should be questioned as to whatever it is they’re claiming to have seen or heard.” I could feel the pain his next words caused him. “My wife will be one of those witnesses,” he told her. “Henry too.”

I’d expected her eyes to shoot toward me at that moment, freeze me in a hideous glare, but she did not shift her attention from my father’s face. “Even so” was all she said.

We left a few minutes later, and I didn’t say a single word to Miss Channing that morning, but only gazed at her stonily, my demeanor already forming into the hard shell it would assume on the day I testified against her, answering every question with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing all the while that there was one question Mr. Parsons would never ask me, nor even remotely suspect that I had the answer to:
What really happened on Black Pond that day?

M
iss Channing came to trial that August. During that interval I never saw her, nor knew of anyone who did. My father was now more or less banned from any further contact with her by my mother’s abject fury.

As to the charges against her, the evidence was never very great. But bit by bit it was presented to the jury, tales of odd sightings and snatches of conversation, a portrait hung in a boathouse, an old primer curiously inscribed, a nautical map with what Mr. Parsons called an “escape route” already drawn, a boat named
Elizabeth
, a pile of letters hastily burned in an otherwise empty hearth, a knife, a piece of rope, a bottle of arsenic.

Against all that, as well as Chatham’s ferocious need to “make someone pay,” Miss Channing stood alone. She listened as the witnesses were called, people who had seen and heard things distantly, as well as the more compelling testimony that I gave, shortly followed by my mother.

Through it all she sat at the defense table in so deep a stillness, I half expected her not to rise when the time finally came and the bailiff called her to the stand.

But she did rise, resolutely, her gaze trained on the witness box until she reached it and sat, waiting as Mr. Parsons approached her from across the room, the eyes of the jurors drifting from her face to her white, unmoving fingers, peering at them intently, as if looking for bloodstains on her hands.

I will always remember that my father watched Miss Channing’s testimony with a tenderness so genuine that I later came to believe that understanding and forgiveness were the deepest passions that he knew.

My mother’s expression was more severe, of course, less merciful thoughts no doubt playing in her mind—memories of people she had known, a husband’s career now in the balance, a school teetering on the brink of ruin. Her eyes were leveled with an unmistakable contempt upon the woman she held responsible for all that.

As for me, I found that I glanced away from Miss Channing as she rose and walked toward the witness box, unable to bear the way she looked, so set upon and isolated that she resembled a figure out of ancient drama, Antigone or Medea, a woman headed for a sacrificial doom, and in relation to whom I felt like a shadow crouched behind a tapestry, the secret agent of her fall.

She wore a long black dress that day, ruffled at the throat and at the ends of the sleeves. But more than her dress, more than the way she’d pulled back her hair and bound it tightly with a slender black ribbon, I noticed how little she resembled the young woman I’d seen get off a Boston bus nearly a year before, how darkly seasoned, as if she’d spent the last few weeks reviewing the very events about which she’d now, at her own insistence, been called to speak.

I know now that even at that moment, and in the wake of such awesome devastation, some part of me still lingered in the throes of the high romantic purpose that had seized me on Black Pond, driven me to the reckless and destructive act I was still laboring to conceal. And yet, despite all the pain and death that had ensued, I still
wanted Miss Channing to speak boldly of love and the right to love, use the same brave and uncompromising words her father had used in his book. I wanted her to rise and take the people of Chatham on like Hypatia had taken on the mobs of Alexandria, standing in her chariot, lashing at them with a long black whip. I wanted her to be as ruthless and determined with Mr. Parsons and all he represented as I had been toward Mrs. Reed, to justify, at least for a brief but towering moment, the dreadful thing that I’d done to her, and through her, to Sarah Doyle. For it seemed the only thing that might yet be salvaged from the wreckage of Black Pond, a fierce, shimmering moment when a woman stood her ground, defied the crowd, sounded the truth with a blazing trumpet. All else, it seemed to me, was death and ruin.

But Miss Channing did not do what I wanted her to do on the stand that day. Instead, she meekly followed along as Mr. Parsons began to question her about the early stages of her “relationship” with Mr. Reed, convinced, as he was, that everything that had later transpired on Black Pond had begun in the quiet drives she and Mr. Reed had taken back and forth from Milford Cottage to their classes at Chatham School, their leisurely strolls into the village, the idle hours they’d spent together, seated on a bench on the coastal bluff, all of which had flowed like an evil stream toward what he insisted on calling the “murders” on Black Pond.

Through it all, Miss Channing sat rigidly in place, her hands in her lap, as prim and proper as any maiden, her voice clear and steady, while she did the opposite of what I’d hoped, lied and lied and lied, shocking me with the depths of her lies, claiming that her relationship with Mr. Reed had never gone beyond “the limits of acceptable contact.”

At those words, I saw myself again at Milford Cottage on a cold January day, her fingers trembling as she pressed them against Mr. Reed’s cheek, then, weeks later, in the cottage, the rain battering against the window,
the anguish in her face when she’d said, “I can’t go on.” That she could now deny the depths of her own passion appalled me and filled me with a cold contempt, made everything I’d done, the unspeakably cruel step I’d taken on her behalf, seem like little more than a foolish adolescent act that had gone fatally awry.

Watching her as she sat like a schoolmarm, politely responding to Mr. Parsons’ increasingly heated questions, I felt the full force of her betrayal. For I knew now how Mrs. Reed must have felt, that I had given love and devotion, and in return received nothing but lies and deception.

And so I felt a kind of hatred rise in me, a sense that I’d been left to swing from the gallows of my own conscience, while Miss Channing now attempted to dismiss as mere fantasy that wild romantic love I’d so clearly seen and which it seemed her duty to defend, if not for me, then for Mr. Reed, perhaps even her own father.

In such a mood, I began to root for Mr. Parsons as he worked to expose Miss Channing, ripping at her story even as she labored to tell it, continually interrupting her with harsh, accusatory questions.
When you went driving with Mr. Reed, you knew he was married, didn’t you, Miss Channing? You knew he had a child?

As she’d gone on to give her answers, I recalled the many times I’d seen her in Mr. Reed’s car, growing more animated as the days passed, happy when he dropped by her cottage on that snowy November day when we’d all eaten Sarah’s fruitcake together, happy to sit with him on the bluff, stroll with him along the village streets, chat with him in her classroom at the end of day. If, during all that, the “limits of acceptable contact” had never been breached, then I’d played my fatal card for nothing, worshipped at the altar of a love that had never truly existed, save in my own perfervid imagination.

And yet, as Miss Channing continued, so self-contained and oddly persuasive, I began to wonder if indeed I
had
made it all up, seen things that weren’t
there, eyes full of yearning, trembling fingers, a romantic agony that was only in my head.

Because of that, I felt an immense relief sweep over me when Mr. Parsons suddenly asked, “Are you saying, Miss Channing, that you were
never
in love with Leland Reed?”

Her answer came without the slightest hesitation:

Witness: No. I am not saying that. I would never say that. I loved Leland Reed. I have never loved anyone else as I loved him
.

In a voice that seemed to have been hurled from Sinai, Mr. Parsons asked, “But you knew that he was married, didn’t you, Miss Channing? You knew he had a child?”

Witness: Yes, of course I knew he was married and had a child
.

Mr. Parsons: And each time Mr. Reed left you—whether it was at your cottage or in some grove in the middle of a cemetery, or after you’d strolled along some secluded beach—he returned to the home across the pond that he shared with his wife and daughter, did he not?

Witness: Yes, he did
.

Mr. Parsons: And what did the existence of a wife and child mean to you, Miss Channing?

Her answer lifted me like a wild wind.

Witness: It didn’t mean anything to me, Mr. Parsons. When you love someone the way I loved Leland Reed, nothing matters but that love
.

Heroic as her statement seemed to me, it was the opening Mr. Parsons had no doubt dreamed of, and he seized it.

Mr. Parsons: But they did exist, didn’t they? Mrs. Reed and little Mary?

Witness: Yes, they did
.

Mr. Parsons: And had Mr. Reed told you that he and Mrs. Reed had had terrible arguments during the past two weeks, and that his daughter had witnessed these arguments?

Witness: No, he had not
.

Mr. Parsons: Had he told you that Mrs. Reed had become suspicious of his relationship with you?

Witness: No
.

Mr. Parsons: That she had even come to suspect that he was plotting her murder?

Witness: No, he didn’t
.

Mr. Parsons: Well, isn’t it true that Mr. Reed wanted to be rid of his wife?

Sitting in the courtroom at that moment, I recalled the last time I’d heard Mr. Reed speak of Mrs. Reed, the two of us in his car together, a yellow shaft of light disappearing down the road ahead, his own house in the distance, his eyes upon its small square windows, the coldness of his words:
Sometimes I wish that she were dead
.