the middle of April, we went rowing, just as Mr. Reed had promised we would on that cold January day when the three of us stood at the end of the pier together and looked out over Black Pond.
It was a Saturday, warm and sunny, with what my father called “the glow of Easter” everywhere around us. During the preceding months I’d worked on the boat with Mr. Reed and attended classes with Miss Channing, but I’d actually seen them together only during their accustomed arrivals and departures from Chatham School. All their other “secret rendezvous,” as Mr. Parsons later called them, had been discreetly held outside my view.
I’d gotten to the boathouse early that morning, already at work when Mr. Reed arrived, fully expecting that we’d labor through the day, as we always did, finish up toward the end of the afternoon, then take a long walk on the beach near the marina.
Mr. Reed had arrived at the boathouse with a very different plan in mind, however, one he announced as soon as he opened the door and peered inside.
“It’s too pretty to be cooped up in here,” he said, one foot inside the boathouse, the other still on the walkway outside it. He stepped out of the door and into the warm spring air. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me to follow after him.
I followed him out the door, then down the wooden walkway toward the road. In the distance I could see his car, half-concealed behind one of the marina’s old outbuildings, but enough of it visible so that I could make out the small white rowboat roped to its top.
Mr. Reed was already pulling himself behind the wheel by the time I rounded the corner of the building. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me forward, hurrying me along. “We want to get an early start.”
It was then I saw Miss Channing sitting on the passenger side, a large basket in her lap, her pale blue eyes like distant misty lights behind the dusty windshield.
“Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I climbed into the backseat of the car.
She nodded but didn’t answer, and I suppose that it was precisely at that moment I first noticed the peculiar tension and uneasiness that would never leave her after that, a sense of being trapped or constricted, the world’s former breadth and expansiveness now drawing around her like a noose.
Mr. Reed leaned forward and hit the ignition. “We’re off to the Bass River,” he said in a cheerful tone that struck me as somewhat forced, as if he were trying to lift Miss Channing’s spirits. He looked at her for a moment, offering a slender smile. “We’ll have the whole day, Elizabeth,” he told her. “Just like I said we would.”
It took nearly an hour to reach the Bass River, a spot Mr. Reed had already selected, one he’d “chosen for its remoteness and seclusion,” as Mr. Parsons later described it, surrounded by high grass and at the bottom of a sloping embankment, so mat neither the car nor the boat was visible from the main road a short hundred yards or so away.
“At this point in the river, it’s nearly a mile from bend to bend,” Mr. Reed told us as he began to untie the ropes that bound the boat to the top of the car. “We can row downstream, then come back with the tide.”
Miss Channing walked to the bank of the river, and stood, watching, as the current swept past her, bearing bits of wood and marsh debris, its slowly moving surface reflecting a cloudless sky.
Once the boat had been untied, Mr. Reed grasped the bow, pulled it toward him, then down, so that it slid off the roof of the car at a deep angle, its bow nosing into the soft ground. “All right, Henry,” he said, “take hold of the back there.”
I did as he told me, the two of us lugging the boat toward the water, then setting it down in the moist earth that bordered the river.
Miss Channing remained in place, still facing the water, her eyes fixed on a yellow film of pollen gathered in a pool on the farther shore.
“Are you ready, Elizabeth?” Mr. Reed asked gently, almost delicately, as if her mood were a fragile tiling, a rare vase he feared breaking.
She nodded without turning around, and Mr. Reed offered her his hand. She took it and stepped inside the boat. “Thank you,” she said as she released it.
“You’re next, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.
I climbed into the boat, then looked back just as Mr. Reed pushed it forward again, drawing himself up and over the rail as he did so, a movement that struck me as very smooth and agile, his cane left on the bank behind us, the river lapping softly at its curved end.
I will always remember the few hours that followed, the slow drift of the boat down the narrow channel of the river, a wall of grass on either side, Mr. Reed at the oars, Miss Channing facing him from the opposite end of the boat, her right hand lowered toward the water, a single finger slicing it silently, leaving a glistening trail across its otherwise smooth surface.
At that moment she seemed as beautiful as any woman had ever been or would ever be. I picked up my sketchbook and began to draw, hoping to please her this time, to draw her as she really was. She was staring just off to the left as I began, her face in profile as she watched a gull prance along the far embankment. Turning back, she saw the sketchbook open in my lap, the drawing pencil in my hand, my eyes intent upon her. Her face suddenly grew taut, as if she thought I’d been sent to record her presence in the boat, use it later as evidence against her. “No, Henry,” she said.
“But I was just …”
She shook her head determinedly, her eyes locked in that steeliness Mr. Parsons would later associate with the coldness of her heart. “No,” she repeated firmly. “Put it down.”
I glanced at Mr. Reed, saw him turn away from me, fix his attention on the stream ahead, clearly unwilling to go against her.
“Yes, Miss Channing,” I said, then closed the book and placed it on the seat beside me.
There was an interminable silence after that, Miss Channing motionless on her seat as we drifted onward, the boat now moving through a labyrinth of narrow channels, Mr. Reed suddenly tugging more fiercely at the oars, as if already in flight from some grim, pursuing hand.
After a time we came to a bend in the river, but rather than rounding it, Mr. Reed rowed us to shore.
Once on the riverbank, we spread a checkered cloth a few feet from the water, the wind billowing it up briefly as we lowered it to the ground. Mr. Reed sat at one corner, Miss Channing at another, removing fruit and sandwiches from the basket.
