Finally, Miss Channing said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”
I expected my mother to let the answer go, but she didn’t. “You wouldn’t?” she said, clearly surprised. “So you’ve not become acquainted with any of the young men in Chatham since you arrived?”
Miss Channing shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”
My mother gave her a slow, evaluating look. “Well, I’m sure someone will come along,” she said with a stiff smile.
They went on to other topics after that. Each time I glanced Miss Channing’s way, she appeared fixed in the same position, her hands in her lap, her back erect, a plate of uneaten food nestled in the grass beside her chair.
By nine most everyone had departed. It was April, a chill still present in the evening air, and so my father invited the few guests who remained to join him in the parlor.
My mother took her usual chair by the fireplace, my father the wooden rocker a few feet away. Mrs. Abercrombie and Mrs. Benton shared the small settee, while Miss Channing chose a chair somewhat off to the side. I pulled out the piano stool and sat by the window.
I don’t remember what they talked about for the next few minutes, only that Miss Channing said very little, her face more or less expressionless as she listened to the others, her hands still in her lap, as they had been all evening.
It was an attitude she might have remained in for the rest of the night had she not caught the sound of a car rumbling down Myrtle Street. She clearly recognized its distinctive clatter, turned toward the window, parted the curtains, and peered outside, her face suddenly bathed in light as the car wheeled into our driveway and came to a halt. I saw her eyes widen, her lips part silently as she watched a figure move down the driveway and up the stairs to our front door. One of her hands crawled into the other as she turned away from the window, listening first to the knock at the door, then Sarah’s cheery greeting when she opened it. “Well, good evening, Mr. Reed.”
He came directly into the parlor, his hat in his hand, the old brown jacket draped over his shoulders, like a cape.
“Hello,” he said. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
“No, not at all. Please, come in,” my father told him, though not with his usual enthusiasm. There was something rather stiff in the way he rose from his chair to shake Mr. Reed’s hand. “I hope Mrs. Reed is feeling better.”
Mr. Reed nodded. “Yes, she is,” he said.
“Please, sit down,” my father told him.
Mr. Reed took a seat near the door, glancing about until his eyes fell upon Miss Channing. And though his lips lifted in a thin smile, his eyes seemed utterly mirthless and unsmiling. “Hello, Miss Channing,” he said.
She nodded coolly. “Mr. Reed.”
My father glanced back and forth between them. “Well, now,” he said loudly, clearly trying to draw Mr. Reed’s attention back to the group, “we were all discussing the possibility of adding a course in Shakespeare to next year’s curriculum.”
Mr. Reed turned toward him but offered no reply.
“We were wondering who might best be able to teach such a course,” my father went on.
Mr. Reed stared my father dead in the eye. “I really don’t know,” he said with what must have struck my father as a shocking sense of indifference, as if Chatham School had ceased to play any significant part in his life, but only continued to hang from it, numb, limp, useless, like an atrophied appendage waiting to be cut away.
It was a tone that clearly disturbed my father, and which he could not confront, so he merely drew in a quick, troubled breath and returned his attention to the others. “Well, how about a round of port?” he asked them.
All heads nodded, and with that my father summoned Sarah to serve the port.
“We’re so lucky to have Sarah,” my mother said after she’d finished serving and left the room. “We had a wonderful Negro girl before her. Amelia was her name, and she was quite able.” She glanced at Miss Channing. “As a matter of fact, Amelia would have been very interested in talking to you, Elizabeth.”
Miss Channing’s fingers tightened around her glass. “Why is that?” she asked evenly.
“Because she’d have wanted to hear all about your life in Africa,” my mother answered. She’d picked her knitting from a basket beside her chair and the long silver needles flashed in the lamplight as she flicked them right and left.
“Amelia was a follower of Marcus Garvey, you see,” my father said. “She was quite taken with this idea of going back to Africa, living free, and all that.” He shrugged. “It was all terribly unrealistic, of course, the whole business.” Drawing a pipe from the rack that rested on the table beside his chair, he began to fill its dark briar bowl with tobacco. “But what can you do about such a romantic notion?”
It was a question he’d asked rhetorically, not expecting an answer, least of all a brutal one.
“You can crush it,” Mr. Reed blurted out harshly, his eyes darting over to Miss Channing, then back to my father.
My father looked at him quizzically, his hand now suspended motionlessly above the bowl of his pipe, his eyes widening to take him in. “Crush it, Mr. Reed?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Mr. Reed said. “You can tell her how foolish such an idea of freedom is. How foolish and preposterous it is to believe that you can ever escape anything or change anything, or live in a way that—”
He stopped, his eyes now turning toward Miss Channing, who only glared at him, her face taut and unmoving.
Then my father said, “Well, that would be rather cruel, wouldn’t it, Mr. Reed?” His voice was surprisingly gentle and restrained as he continued, his eyes leveled upon Mr. Reed’s. “Perhaps you could simply remind her—Amelia, I
