The Chatham School Affair

I shrugged. “There’s not much to draw around here. Just the sea. The lighthouse. Stuff like that.”

“But you put something into them, Henry,” Miss Channing said. “Something extra. You should get a sketchbook and take it around with you. That’s what I did in Africa. I found that just having it along with me made me look at things differently.” She waited for a response, then continued when I failed to offer one. “Anyway, when you’ve done a few more drawings, bring them in and let me look at them.”

I’d never been complimented by a teacher before. Certainly none had ever suggested that I had a talent for anything but moodiness and solitude. To the other teachers I had always been a disappointment, someone tolerated because I was the headmaster’s son, a boy of limited prospects and little ambition, a “decent lad,” as I’d once heard my father describe me in a tone that had struck me as deeply condescending, a way of saying that I was nothing, and never would be.

“All right, Miss Channing,” I said, immensely lifted by her having seen something in me the other teachers had not seen.

“Good,” she said, then returned to her work as I headed down the aisle and out the door.

I walked into the courtyard and drew in a deep, invigorating breath. It was autumn now, and the air was quite brisk. But my mood had been so heated up by Miss Channing’s high regard that I could not feel its hint of winter chill.

A few hours later I took my seat for the final class of the day. I glanced out the window, then at the pictures that hung on the wall. Shakespeare. Wordsworth. Keats. My attention was still drifting aimlessly from one face to another when I heard the steady thump … thump … thump of the approaching teacher’s wooden cane, soft and rhythmic, like the distant muffled beating of a drum.

Was he handsome, the man who came into the room seconds later, dressed, as always, in a chalk-smeared jacket and corduroy pants?

Yes, I suppose he was. In his own particular way, of course.

And yet it never surprised me that the people of the village later marveled that such fierce emotions could have stormed about in a so visibly broken frame.

He was tall and slender, but there was something in his physical arrangement that always struck me as subtly off kilter, the sense of a leaning tower, of something shattered at its base. For although he always stood erect, his back pressed firmly against the wall of his classroom while he spoke to us, his body often appeared to be of another mind, his left shoulder a few degrees lower than the right, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a bust whose features were classically formed yet eerily marred, perhaps distorted, the product of an unsteady hand.

Still, it was his face that people found most striking, the ragged black beard, lined here and there with gray, and the dark, deep-set eyes. But more particularly the cream-colored scar that ran crookedly from just beneath his left eye, widening and deepening until it finally disappeared into the thick bramble of his beard.

His name was Leland Reed.

I often recall my first glimpse of him. It was a summer afternoon several years before. I’d been slouched on the front porch of our house when I looked up to see a man coming down the street. He walked slowly, his shoulders dipping left and right like a little boat in a gently swelling sea. At last he came to a halt at the short metal gate that separated our house from the street. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Arthur Griswald.”

“That’s my father,” I told him.

He did not open the gate, but merely peered at me like someone who could see both my past and my future in a single glimpse, how I had been reared, what I would become as a result.

“He’s inside the house,” I said, stung by his inspection.

“Thank you,” Mr. Reed answered.

Seconds later I heard my father say, “Ah, Mr. Reed,” as he opened the door and let him in. Not long after that I found my father and Mr. Reed in the parlor, my father so engrossed in interviewing Mr. Reed that he never noticed me standing at the door, listening with a little boy’s curiosity for the world of men.

Mr. Reed had come from Boston, as it turned out, where he’d taught at the Boston Latin School for the past three years. He’d grown tired of the city, he said, then went on to provide other details in a self-confident, manly voice, but with something distant in it, too, a voice that later struck me as somewhat similar to his face, strong and forthright in its own way, but irreparably scarred.

“I’m surprised a man like yourself doesn’t want to live in Boston,” my father said. “I’ve always found it very stimulating.”

Mr. Reed gave no answer.

“Would you mind if I asked your age?”

“Twenty-eight.”

I could tell that my father had thought him older, perhaps because of the wisps of gray visible in his beard, or, more likely, because his manner was so deliberative, his eyes so still.

“Twenty-eight,” my father repeated. “And … single?”

“Yes.”

They talked for well over an hour that afternoon, and although I drifted past the parlor’s open door on several occasions, idly listening as their conversation continued, there was onto one small fragment of it that later struck me as revealing of the kind of man Mr. Reed actually was. It had come toward the end of the interview, my father’s pipe now lying cold and smokeless in the ashtray beside his chair, Mr. Reed still seated opposite him, both feet pressed firmly on the floor.

“And what about travel,” my father asked. “Have you done much of that?”

Mr. Reed shook his head. “Only a little.”

“Where to, if I may ask?”

“France.”

My father seemed pleased. “France. Now, that’s a beautiful country. What part did you visit?”