The Chatham School Affair

We ate slowly, in what I later recognized as the kind of silence that falls when the last resort has been reached, all debate now closed, nothing to be taken back or reconsidered, the final decision irrevocably made, though perhaps still unstated.

In an effort to lighten that very atmosphere, Mr. Reed suddenly looked at Miss Channing and said, “Tell us a story, Elizabeth.”

She shook her head.

Mr. Reed leaned forward slightly. “Something from your travels,” he said softly, almost gingerly as if her feelings were a red-hot coal he feared to touch.

She shook her head again.

“Just one, Elizabeth.” Mr. Reed’s tone was now so imploring it seemed almost beggarly.

Without a word she got to her feet and strode away from us, down along the water’s edge, to where a tangle of driftwood lay on the bank, its limbs rising like fleshless bones from the moist ground.

Mr. Reed watched her leave us, then, moving slowly and unsteadily without his cane, walked down to where she stood.

I tried to turn away, but I found myself continually drawn back to them, their bodies so fully surrounded by walls of grass and coils of water, they looked utterly ensnared, like two animals captured in an invisible net, thrashing about, desperate to break free, and yet with every thrust and movement growing more fatally entangled. I thought of the delight in Mr. Reed’s eyes as he’d ought the glass necklace in Boston, then of the look on Miss Channing’s face as she’d pressed her hand against his cheek, traced its jagged scar, and finally of the hopelessness and futility that appeared to have overwhelmed them since that time. That the passion I was certain I’d seen between them should now be in the process of disintegration seemed inconceivable to me, and watching them, as they continued to talk intently only a few yards away, I felt a scalding surge of anger against the whole design of life, its web of duties and obligations, Chatham like a dark pit in which Miss Channing and Mr. Reed were now imprisoned, Mrs. Reed standing on its rim, grim and unrelenting, dressed in black, her implacable arms folded over her chest, the female version of my father.

“Well, Henry, I suppose we’d better be on our way now,” Mr. Reed told me solemnly when he and Miss Channing rejoined me. I helped them gather up the cloth and the basket.

At the boat Mr. Reed offered Miss Channing his hand. She grasped it lightly, stepped inside, and took her seat again at the stern.

“It’ll be quick going back,” Mr. Reed told her as he pushed us off. “The tide’s coming in now.” He pulled himself over the rail and took hold of the oars, his gaze upon Miss Channing as he said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, and all that.”

It was a line from Romeo and Juliet, of course, and it must have lingered in Miss Channing’s mind, for when the bend in the river had disappeared behind us, she broke her silence. “I went to Juliet’s house in Verona when I was sixteen,” she said. “There were lots of people there. It was like a shrine.” She gathered her arms more tightly around the basket that rested in her lap. “My father pointed to the balcony and told me to stand where Juliet had, looking down at Romeo.” Her eyes took on an unmistakable intensity, as if she were reliving the moment again, she on the stone balcony, her father in the courtyard below, their eyes fixed upon each other. “That’s what he was searching for, I think,” she said. “An ideal love.”

Mr. Reed drew back the oars slowly. “If he’d ever found a love like that,” he said, “I’m sure he’d have found a way to keep it too.”

Miss Channing said nothing, but only stared rigidly ahead as the boat moved swiftly inland, the nightbound tide now exerting its vast pull. No one ever looted more tortured by a grave resolve.

It was nearly night when we reached Milford Cottage. An evening mist drifted over the pond. I sat in the car while Mr. Reed walked Miss Channing to her door. They lingered on the threshold, Mr. Reed on the step beneath Miss Channing, she looking down at him. Finally, he took her hand, held it very briefly, then released it and headed back toward where I sat.

She’d lit a candle by the time Mr. Reed got into the car, a soft yellow glow now coming from the windows of the front room.

“It’s so hard, Henry,” Mr. Reed said, his eyes on the cottage as he began to back away. “It’s the hardest thing in the world.”

I never mentioned his words to Mr. Parsons, since they’d seemed directed toward something larger than the Chatham School Affair, not the crime of forbidden love, which was Mr. Parsons’ sole interest, but some deeper one, plotted at the core of life, and which inflexibly decrees that one love in flower must leave another in decay.

When we arrived at Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of the pond, Mary was playing in the front yard, building a house of sticks and leaves as she sat near the water, nearly obscured in a blue twilight. She ran toward the car as we got out, then stood watching while we unlashed the boat and carried it toward its usual mooring by the tree at the water’s edge.

“Did you catch a fish?” she asked Mr. Reed brightly as she skipped along beside him.

“We didn’t go fishing,” he told her. “Just rowing.” He glanced back toward me. “Just Henry and me,” he added.

We set the boat down, and Mary climbed into it as Mr. Reed tethered it to the tree, taking a seat at the bow, bouncing slightly, her small hands clapping rhythmically to some beat in her mind.

“Where’s your mother?” Mr. Reed asked her once he’d secured the boat.

Mary pointed to the porch. “She’s been sitting there all day”

I turned toward the house. In the evening shade I had not seen her, but now I could make her out quite clearly. She sat in the far corner of the porch, rocking quietly, her green eyes peering dully out of the shadows like two small, unpolished stones.

CHAPTER 19

After the Chatham School Affair, my father always believed that the deepest tragedies inevitably unfolded slowly, reached their climaxes in seizures of violence and grief, then lingered on forever in the minds of those who were near enough to feel their lethal force and yet survive.

Some, of course, do not survive at all.