and began to leaf through the pages.
“It’s Mr. Reed’s primer,” I said. “The one he had in grade school. Miss Channing wants you to bring it with you on Sunday.”
She continued to glance through the book until she reached the end. Then she turned back to its beginning. “Look, Henry,” she said, her eyes on the book’s front page.
I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her.
“Look at what Mr. Reed wrote to Miss Channing,” she said.
The words were in dark blue ink, Mr. Reed’s small, tortured hand immediately recognizable, though the words seemed far more tender than Mr. Reed himself ever had.My dear Elizabeth, I hope that you can make some use of this book, even though, like the owner of it, it is an old and worn-out thing.With love,
Leland
Sarah’s eyes lingered on the inscription for a time before she lifted them to me, her hand suddenly brushing mine very gently, almost silkily, with no more weight than a ribbon. “Have you ever been in love, Henry?” she asked, the words coming with an odd hesitancy, her eyes upon me with a softness and sense of entreaty that have never left me since then, and which I often recall on those nights when the wind blows and drifts of snow climb toward the window, and I am alone With my memories of her.
My answer was quick and sure. “No.”
I saw her shoulders fall slightly, felt her hand draw away. She closed the book and placed it on the bed beside her. “You’d better go now,” she said, her eyes now averted.
I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the narrow landing. “Well, good night, Sarah,” I said as I turned to close the door again.
She did not look up, but kept her head bowed slightly so that a dark curtain of black hair fell over the right side of her face. “Good night, Henry,” was all she said.
I closed the door and returned to my room. I don’t recall thinking of Sarah again that night. But I have thought of her often since then, wondered if things might have turned out differently on Black Pond had I lingered a moment longer in her room. Perhaps I might finally have grasped the ribbon that dangled from her gown, given it a slow, trembling pull, and thus come to know both the power of that first encounter, and then the later pleasures of enduring love. I don’t know if Sarah would have given herself to me that night, but if she had, I might have gone to her from then on rather than to the boathouse or Milford Cottage. I might have experienced love up close and through all its changing seasons, and by doing that, come to feel spring as something other than a cruel deception, winter the dreadful truth of things.
CHAPTER 14
But in the end, I chose to think of life rather than to live it.
I said as much in my office one afternoon. I’d been talking to Mr. Parsons’ son, Albert Parsons, Jr., the two of us in our middle fifties by then, with the elder Mr. Parsons now impossibly old and senile, a figure rooted on a bench outside the town hall, muttering to himself and flinging crumbs to the pigeons.
“So many books, Henry,” he said in a tone that seemed vaguely accusatory. “Have you read them all?”
I offered him a mirthless smile. “They’re what I have instead of a wife and children.”
Albert laughed. “You’re a pistol, Henry. A real barnyard philosopher.” He sat back and let his eyes roam the bookshelves in my office, squinting at the titles. “Greeks and Romans. Why them in particular?”
“They were my father’s favorites.”
“Why’s that?”
I shrugged. “Maybe because he thought they saw it more clearly.”
“Saw what?”
“Life.”
He laughed again. “You’re a pistol, Henry,” he repeated.
We’d just come to a settlement that each of us felt our clients would accept, his being the aggrieved party in a construction contract dispute, mine, a local contractor named Tom Cannon.
“You know, Henry, I was a little surprised that Tom ever got named in a lawsuit like this,” Albert said. “He’s done plenty of work for me, and I’ve never had any trouble with him.” He took a sip of the celebratory brandy I’d just poured him. “He even built that little office my father used when he was working on his memoirs.”
Some part of the old time abruptly reasserted itself in my mind, and I saw Mr. Parsons as he’d stood before the jury on the last day of Miss Channing’s trial, a man in his early forties then, still young and vigorous, no doubt certain that he’d found the truth about her, revealed for all to see the murderous conspiracy she’d hatched with Leland Reed.
“How is Mr. Parsons these days?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s as good as can be expected, I guess,” Albert answered. “Of course, the way he is now, there’s not a whole lot he can do but sit around.” He took a greedy sip from the brandy. “He likes to hang around the courthouse for the most part. Or on that bench in front of the town hall.” He shrugged. “He mutters to himself sometimes. Old age, you know.”
I saw Mr. Parsons on his lonely bench, his hand rhythmically digging into a paper bag filled with bread crumbs or popcorn, casting it over the lawn, a circle of pigeons sweeping out from around him like a pool of restless gray water.
Albert took a puff on his cigar, then flicked the ash into the amber-colored ashtray on my desk. “He talks about my mother, of course, along with my sister and me,” he went on absently. “Some of his big cases too. They come to mind once in a while.”
Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “The Chatham School Affair.”
Albert looked at me, perhaps surprised that it had leaped into my mind so quickly. “Yes, that one in particular,” he said. “He got quite a shock from that woman … what was her name?”
