The Chatham School Affair

many years before, and so I stepped away from the tree and took a narrow footpath that hunters and swimmers and the occasional forest solitaire had maintained over the years, and which I knew to be the one Miss Channing had taken on that Saturday evening two weeks later, when she’d set out for Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of Black Pond. As I began to move down that same path, I heard Mr. Parsons say, So, from the beginning you were aware of their meetings? My answer, Yes, I was. And what were your impressions, Henry? I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Do you now? Yes.

A tangle of forest had surrounded Miss Channing that evening, and she might well have seen a lone white gull as it plummeted toward the surface of the pond. No doubt she heard the soft crunch of the leaves beneath her feet, but she may have heard an assortment of bird cries, too, or the scurrying of a field mouse, or the plop of a frog as it leaped into the water. For those were the things I saw and heard as I retraced her steps that morning, moving slowly, at an old man’s pace.

Her dinner at Mr. Reed’s house had been arranged several days before. By then my father had told Miss Channing that it was getting a bit too cold for her to continue walking back and forth from her cottage to Chatham School. He’d gone on to inform her that there was another teacher who lived on Black Pond. It would be a simple matter for him to drop by for her each morning and return her to Milford Cottage in the afternoon.

And so at some point before the end of October, I saw Mr. Reed escort Miss Channing to his car, a battered sedan, its wheels mud-spattered, its running board hardly more than a drooping sheet of rust, its windows streaked and scratched as if they’d been sandblasted with sea salt.

As to what they’d said to each other on that first drive, no one would ever have known had not Mr. Parsons later been so insistent on learning every word ever spoken between them, requiring revelations so detailed that I could still hear their voices whispering in the air around me as I struggled to make my way along the edges of Black Pond.

I live just on the other side of the pond. You can probably see my house from your cottage.

Yes, I’ve seen it.

You may have seen me on the pond too. I go rowing on it occasionally.

Do you row at night?

Sometimes.

Then I think I saw you once. It was my first night in the cottage. I went out to stand by the pond. It was overcast, but I think I saw you for just a moment. Not you, exactly. Just part of the boat, and your hand. Why do you go out at night?

For the solitude, I suppose.

You don’t live alone?

No. I have a wife and daughter. What about you? Do you live alone?

Yes.

You’re not afraid? Living out here?

No.

Some people would be.

Then they should live elsewhere, I suppose.

Listening to their voices as I continued my journey around Black Pond that morning, I realized that such a statement had to have struck Mr. Reed as amazingly self-possessed. How different she must have seemed from any other woman he had ever known.

I’ve seen you teaching. The boys seem very interested in your class.

I hope they are.

They look very attentive.

I’ve seen you with your class too. You were reading to them in the courtyard.

Oh, yes, a couple weeks ago. I wanted to take advantage of what I thought might be the last day we could go outside before winter sets in.

It was from Byron.

You recognized it.

Yes, I did. My father read a great deal of Byron. Shelley too. And Keats.

At that moment Miss Channing told him of her visit to the cluttered Roman apartment in which Keats had died. His books were still there, she said, along with pages written in Keats’s own hand.

The interest Mr. Reed by then had come to feel for Miss Channing can be gauged by what he did next.

I know this is rather sudden, Miss Channing. But I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with my family and me tomorrow evening?

I would like that very much, Mr. Reed.

Around six, then?

Yes.

Shall I pick you up?

No. I like to walk. Besides, your house is just on the other side of the pond.

?    ?    ?

Only a ruin remained of Mr. Reed’s house, and even that was so overgrown, I nearly missed it as I made my way along the water’s edge that morning. Hung with vines, its roof covered with