“Only the countryside,” Mr. Reed answered quietly, adding nothing more, so that my father had to finally coax him forward with another question.
“You were there on business?”
Mr. Reed shook his head, and I saw one of his large hands move down to a right knee that had begun to tremble slightly.
“Just there on vacation, then?” my father asked lightly.
“No,” Mr. Reed answered, a single coal-black eyebrow arching suddenly, then lowering again. “The war.”
I remember that his voice had become strained as he’d answered, and that his eyes had darted toward the window briefly. At that, both my father and I suddenly realized that the casualness of my father’s question had plumbed an unexpectedly raw aspect of Mr. Reed’s experience, miraculously revealing to us what Mr. Reed himself must have seen some years before, an exploded shell lifting mounds of muddy earth, men hurling upward, then plummeting down, his own body spinning in a cloud of smoke, bits of himself flying away in surreal tongues of flame.
“Oh,” my father said softly, glancing toward the cane. “I didn’t know.”
Mr. Reed drew his eyes back to my father but didn’t speak.
“In your letter you didn’t mention that you were a veteran. Most men do when they’re applying for a job.”
Mr. Reed shrugged. “I find it difficult to do that,” he said.
My father reached for his pipe, though I noticed that he didn’t light it. “Well, tell me why you think you’d like to teach at Chatham School.”
I don’t remember Mr. Reed’s answer, but only that my father had appeared satisfied with it, and that Mr. Reed left the house a few minutes later, presumably walking back to the bus stop in Chatham center, then boarding a bus for Boston. I didn’t see him again until almost two months later, and even then only briefly, a man moving down the corridor of Chatham School, one hand clutching a book, the other a cane, whose steady, rhythmic thump announced him like a theme.
As it still did when I heard it tapping down the hallway that autumn afternoon seven years later, followed by the inevitable cautionary whispers of, “Shhh. Mr. Reed is coming.”
However, on that particular day he didn’t come into the room as he usually did, but stopped at the door instead, leaning one shoulder into it, so that he stood at a slant. “There probably won’t be many more days as pleasant as this one,” he said, nodding toward the window, the clear, warm air beyond it. “So I thought we’d have class out in the courtyard this afternoon.”
With that, he turned and led us down the corridor to the rear of the school, then out into the little courtyard behind it. Once there, he positioned himself beside the large oak that stood near the center of the courtyard and motioned for us to sit down on the ground in a semicircle around him. Then, he leaned against the tree and glanced down at the book he’d brought with him. “Today we’re going to begin our study of Lord Byron,” he said, his voice a curious combination of something soft and rough, and which at times seemed almost physical, like the touch of a fine, unsanded wood. “You should pay close attention, for Byron lived the poetry he wrote.”
As always, Mr. Reed began by giving us the details of the poet’s life, concentrating on his travels and adventures, a wild vagabond existence that Mr. Reed clearly admired. “Byron didn’t settle for what the rest of us settle for,” he told us. “He would find the lives we lead intolerably dull.”
During the next hour we learned that Byron had been raised in a place called Aberdeen, that as a child he’d been stricken with infantile paralysis, his right leg and foot so terribly contracted that he’d walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. “Like me,” Mr. Reed said with a quiet smile, nodding toward his cane, “except that he refused to let it hinder him, or change his life in any way.”
Byron had had what Mr. Reed called “an adventurous nature,” throwing wild parties at his own castle, drinking burgundy from a human skull. “He lived his ideas,” Mr. Reed declared. “Nothing ever stood in his way.”
Class was nearly over by the time Mr. Reed finished telling us about Byron’s life. But before releasing us completely, he opened the book he’d brought with him. “I want you to listen now,” he said as he began flipping the pages briskly until he found the lines he’d been searching for. Then he looked toward us and smiled in that strange way I’d already noticed, a smile that seemed to require an undisclosed amount of effort. “Words need to be heard sometimes,” he said. “After all, in the beginning all poetry was spoken.”
With that he read the lines he’d selected for us, his voice low, almost a whisper, so that the words themselves sounded inordinately private, an intimate message sent by one whose peculiar sadness seemed at one with Mr. Reed’s.Every feeling hath been shaken;
Pride, which not a world could bow,
Bows to thee—by thee forsaken
Even my soul forsakes me now;But ’tis done —all words are idle—
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way without the will.
His voice trailed off at the end of the recitation, though his eyes remained on the lines a moment longer, his head bowed wearily, as if beneath the weight of thoughts he himself could not bridle.
“I think it’s sometimes a good idea to end class with a poem,” he said at last. Then he paused, watching us silently, perhaps hoping for a response. When none came, he closed the book. “All right, you may go,” he said.
We scrambled to our feet quickly, gathering our books into our arms, and began to disperse, some heading back into the building, others toward the rear entrance of the courtyard and the playing fields beyond. Only Mr. Reed stayed in place, his back pressed against the tree, the volume of Byron’s poetry dangling from his hand. He looked as if he might crumple to the ground. But then I saw him draw in a long, reviving breath, straighten his shoulders, step away from the tree, and begin to make his way toward the building. “Good night, Henry,” he said as he went by me.
“Good night, Mr. Reed,” I answered.
I picked up my books and turned to the right. Miss Channing’s classroom was directly in front of me, and when I glanced toward it, I saw that she stood at one of the three large windows that overlooked the courtyard. Her eyes were fixed upon Mr. Reed with a clearly appreciative gaze, taking in the slight limp, the narrow cane, perhaps even the jagged cream-colored scar. I’d never seen a woman look at a man in exactly the same way, almost as if he were not a man at all, but a painting she admired for the boldness of its execution, the way the standard symmetries had been discarded in favor of jaggedness and instability, her earlier sense of beauty now adjusting to take it in, finding a place for mangled shapes.
CHAPTER 8
From my place beneath the willow, staring out across the water, I could barely make out the house in which Mr. Reed had lived so
