“Yes, she would say something like that,” he said with a quiet, oddly appreciative smile. He grew silent for a moment, his eyes fixed on the wider road that led to Boston. “I guess you noticed Miss Channing and me leaving school together yesterday afternoon.”
I pretended to make nothing of it. “You always leave together.”
He nodded. “I usually take her straight home,” he said. “But yesterday we went to the old cemetery on Brewster Road.” He waited for a question. When none came, he continued. “We wanted to talk awhile. To be alone.” He stared at the road, the strand of dark hair that had fallen across his brow now trembling slightly with the movement of the car. “So we went to the cemetery. Just to get away from … other people.” He smiled. “I promised Miss Channing that I’d have her home before dark.”
The landscape swept by on either side. I had not been off the Cape in well over a year, and I felt an unmistakable exhilaration in the forward thrust of the car, the unfolding of the landscape, the vast, uncharted world that seemed to he just beyond my grasp.
“I don’t know why I picked that cemetery,” Mr. Reed went on as if he were circling around something he was not sure he wanted to reveal. “Something about it, I suppose. Probably the quiet, the solitude.”
“Did Miss Channing like it?” I asked.
“Yes, she did. There’s a little grove near the center of it. Some evergreen trees, with a little cement pool.” He forced a small laugh. “I did most of the talking. You know, about my life.”
After that Mr. Reed told me a great deal of what he’d said to Miss Channing in the cemetery the previous afternoon, how he’d been born in a working class section of Boston, a noisy, pinched world of clattering factories and grimy tenements where people lived beneath clouds of industrial vapor and coal dust.
“My father left when I was just a boy. My mother was a … well … not like your mother, Henry.” He smiled. “She looked a little like Sarah, though. With long black hair, I mean, and a light complexion. Black Irish, we call it. My mother wanted me to be a clerk of some sort. In a bank, something like that. To wear a white shirt and tie, that’s what she wanted me to do, look respectable.” He peered down at the brown jacket, its worn sleeves, the chalk dust. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”
“How did you happen to become a teacher?” I asked.
“Just by reading books, I guess. There was a school in Braintree. That’s where I went. The war interrupted things, but when I got back, I got a job at Boston Latin School.” I saw his fingers draw more tightly around the steering wheel. “It’s funny how you have to make so many decisions before you’re prepared to make them. All the important ones, I guess. About your life. Your work. The person you marry.” Suddenly he looked at me with a striking earnestness. “I hope you make all the right decisions, Henry. If you don’t, life can be so … treacherous…. You can end up wondering why you should even bother to live it through.”
No one had ever talked to me so intimately, nor with such urgent regard for my own future happiness. It seemed to me that my father had spoken only of the rules of life, never of its possibilities, his world a straight, unbending road, Mr. Reed’s a narrow lane of pits and snares and hairpin curves, a place I should be warned about before it was too late and I had become not what I wanted to be, but what my father already was.
“The main thing is not to settle too quickly,” Mr. Reed added after a moment. “In life … or in love.”
An immense longing swept into his face, as if he’d recognized for the first time just how lonely and bereft he was. I wanted to offer him something, a token of the high regard I had for him. “Chatham School would be very different without you, Mr. Reed,” I said.
He appeared wholly unmoved by what I’d said. “Yes, of course,” he replied dryly. “What would the boys do without me?”
I said nothing else, but only watched as Mr. Reed continued to stare toward the road ahead, his face fixed in that intense yearning I’d wanted to ease somehow, and which I remembered in all the years to come, so that it finally seemed to me that we were not created in God’s image at all, but in the image of Tantalus instead, the thing we most desire forever dancing before our eyes, and yet forever beyond our grasp.
? ? ?
Once in the city, Mr. Reed led me through a series of shops, picking up the items he’d come to buy, brass knobs and hinges that he often touched softly before buying, moving his fingers lightly over the smooth surface of the metal, or holding it up to the light, staring at it wonderingly sometimes with an admiring smile, like a pirate of the old time, his eyes feasting on a gold doubloon.
It was noon by the time we’d finished buying what Mr. Reed had come for. Bundled up in our winter coats, we had lunch on a bench in the Common, near the botanical gardens, facing the great facade of the Ritz Hotel, the two of us munching sandwiches Mrs. Reed had prepared for us, and which Mr. Reed took from a metal lunch pail, along with a thermos of lemonade.
“I was tired of Boston before I moved to Chatham,” Mr. Reed told me. “But now—”
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now I think I’m tired of Chatham.”
“Where do you want to go?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere,” he said.
“Is Mrs. Reed tired of Chatham too?”
“No, she’s quite content to live in Chatham,” he said, his eyes taking on a strange agitation. “She always has been … content.” He thought a moment, then added, “She’s afraid of things, Henry.” His eyes drifted toward me. “Even afraid of me sometimes, I think.”
With that, he turned away, placed the thermos in the lunch pail, and snapped it shut. “We’d better be on our way,” he said as he got to his feet, determined, or so it seemed, to end any further conversation about Mrs. Reed.
It was then I realized that Mr. Reed had already removed his wife to some remote and inaccessible place in his life, locked her in an imaginary attic or down in a dark cellar, where she sat in the shadows, isolated and alone, listening with whatever combination of anticipation or fear to his footsteps on the stairs.
