which Miss Channing had written the alphabet in large block letters.
I heard Miss Channing say, “All right. Begin.”
Sarah kept her eyes fixed upon Miss Channing’s, careful not to let them stray toward the page as she began. “A, B, C…”
She continued through the alphabet, stumbling here and there, pausing until Miss Channing finally provided the missing letter, then rushing on gleefully until she reached the end.
“Good,” Miss Channing said quietly. “Now. Once more.”
Again Sarah made her way through the alphabet, this time stopping only once, at U, then plunging ahead rapidly, completing it in a flourish of pride and breathlessness.
When she’d gotten to the end of it, Miss Channing offered her an encouraging smile. “Very good,” she said. “You’re a very bright girl, Sarah.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said, a broad smile lighting her face.
They continued their work until almost noon, when I heard Miss Channing say, “Well, I think we had a very good lesson, Sarah.”
Sarah rose, then did a small curtsy, a servant girl once again, taking leave of her superior. “Thank you, Miss Channing.” Her earlier nervousness had now completely returned. “Do you think we could have another lesson sometime, then?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yes, of course we could,” Miss Channing told her. “Actually, we should have a lesson once a week. Would Sunday mornings be all right?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Sarah burst out, a great relief and happiness sweeping over her. “You can depend on it, Miss Channing. I’ll be here every Sunday morning from this day on.”
“Good,” Miss Channing said. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She turned to me. I could see that something was on her mind. “You didn’t bring a sketchbook with you, Henry,” she said.
I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t …”
“You should have it with you all the time,” Miss Channing told me. She smiled, then said a line I later repeated to Mr. Parsons. “Art is like love. It’s all or nothing.
With that she quickly walked into the cottage, then returned, this time with a sketchbook in her hand.
“Take one of mine,” she said as she handed it to me. “I have a few left from my time in Africa.”
I looked at the book, the soft burgundy cover, the clean, thick paper that rested beneath it. Nothing had ever looked more beautiful to me. I felt as if she’d passed me a golden locket or a strand of her hair.
“Now, don’t let me see you without a sketchbook ever again, Henry,” she said with a mocking sternness.
I tucked the book beneath my arm. “I won’t,” I told her.
She gazed at me a moment, then nodded toward the table and chairs. “Would you mind taking all this back into the cottage?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
I grasped one chair in each hand and headed for the cottage. On the way I heard Sarah say, “So you were painting this morning, were you?” And Miss Channing’s reply, “Yes. I often do in the morning.”
Inside the cottage I placed the chairs at the wooden table in the kitchen. Through the rear window I could see Miss Channing and Sarah as they strolled toward the easel that still stood at the water’s edge, the pages of the drawing book fluttering slightly in a breeze from off the pond. Miss Channing had opened the drawing book and was showing one of her sketches to Sarah. Sarah had folded her hands before her in the way Miss Channing often did, and was listening attentively to her every word.
After a while I turned and walked back into the small living room at the front of the cottage. The picture of Miss Channing’s father still hung in the same place. But since that time, several sketches had been added to the wall, carefully wrought line drawings that she had brought out of Africa and which portrayed vast, uncluttered vistas, borderless and uncharted, devoid of both animals and people, the land and sky stretching out into a nearly featureless infinity. This, I knew, was her father’s world, unlimited and unrestrained.
I stared at her drawings a few seconds longer, then walked outside again, retrieved the table, placed it just inside the cottage door, and made my way over to where Miss Channing and Sarah still stood at the edge of the pond.
“I like that one,” Sarah said brightly, her eyes on one of the drawings Miss Channing had just displayed.
“It’s not finished yet,” Miss Channing told her. “I was working on it this morning.”
I peered at the drawing. It showed a body of water that only faintly resembled Black Pond. For it was much larger, as well as being surrounded by a world of empty hills and valleys that appeared to roll on forever. So much so, that the mood of the drawing, its immensity and sense of vast, unbounded space struck me as very similar to the ones I’d just seen inside the cottage. But there was something different about it too. For near the center of the drawing, hovering near the middle of a huge, unmoving water, Miss Channing had drawn a man at the oars of a small boat. His face was caught in a shaft of light, his eyes locked on the farther shore.
Sarah leaned forward, looking closely at the figure in the boat. “That man there, isn’t that—”
“Leland Reed,” Miss Channing said, the first time I’d ever heard her say his name.
Sarah smiled. “Yes, Mr. Reed. From Chatham School.”
Miss Channing let her eyes settle upon the painting. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, a gesture which, months later, after I’d described it to Mr. Parsons, he forever called “a lover’s sigh.”
CHAPTER 10
I was still thinking of Miss Channing’s drawing a few minutes later when I brought my car to a halt in front of Dalmatian’s Cafe. It had long been my favorite place in Chatham, not only because it had been the place where the boys of Chatham School had sometimes gathered after a game or on the weekends, but
