For a moment Miss Channing seemed thrown into a quandary by Sarah’s invitation. Finally, she said, though still with some reluctance, “Well, yes, I suppose I could do that.”
We set off right away, the three of us walking at a leisurely pace down Plymouth Road. It was deep enough into spring for the first greenery to have appeared, budding trees and ferns and a few forest wildflowers, a rich pungency in the air around us. “There was once a French king who was very fond of sweet smells,” Miss Channing said after a moment, “and when he gave parties in the ballroom, he would have his servants pour different perfumes over live pigeons, then release them into the air.” She stopped and drew in a long breath. “It must have been like this,” she told us, “a tapestry of smells.”
She began to walk again, adding nothing more, but I would always remember that this was the final story I would hear from her, the slender smile she offered at the end of it, the last that I would see upon her face.
At noon the streets of Chatham were already filled with people who’d come into the village for the day’s festivities. We found a vacant spot on the hill in front of the town hall and stood, along with everyone else, waiting for the parade. Below us, on the crowded sidewalks, we could see the people moving back and forth, trying to find a clear view of the street. Miss Channing remained silent most of the time, nearly motionless as well, save that her eyes had a tendency to follow knots of children as they darted along the sidewalk or across the lawn.
We were still standing on the lawn of the town hall when the local fife and bugle corps marched by, followed by a ragged gang of villagers dressed in Revolutionary costumes, my father among them, doffing a tricornered hat. The town’s new fire engine came next, festooned with flags and bunting, and after it, a small contingent of the Massachusetts State Police, riding horseback, a tall, slender man in the lead, with gray hair and a formal manner, his silver badge winking in the afternoon light, and whom I later recognized as Captain Lawrence Hamilton.
The crowd began to disperse soon afterward, children rushing here and there as their parents summoned them to their sides, groups of young people heading off toward Quilty’s for ice cream and soda, couples strolling idly toward the outskirts of town, no doubt headed for the beach, where a clambake had been scheduled for later in the day.
“Well, I guess that’s it for the parade,” I said absently, looking to the right, toward Miss Channing.
She didn’t answer me, or even turn her eyes in my direction. Instead, she continued to peer across the street. I glanced toward where she was staring, and saw Mrs. Reed standing on the opposite corner, with Mary in her arms.
For a moment Mrs. Reed held her attention on the parade. Then, at a pace that seemed surreally slow, she turned to face us, her gaze suddenly leveled upon Miss Channing, cold, steady, hateful, yet strangely haunted too, features that seemed locked forever in a ghostly rage.
It must have been a look that Miss Channing could not bear, for she whirled around immediately, like someone wrenching herself from a murderous, invisible grip, and began to push forward through the crowd, leaving Sarah and me in her wake, watching, astonished, as she plunged away from us, darting left and right through the milling crowd until she finally disappeared into the throng.
“What’s the matter with Miss Channing?” Sarah asked, both of us still staring off in the direction where she’d gone.
“I don’t know,” I answered. But I did.
For a long time I believed that it was what Miss Channing saw that afternoon, Mrs. Reed in all her wounded anguish, little Mary helpless in her arms, that determined the nature of the conversation I overheard the very next day.
It happened late in the afternoon, a blue haze already settling over the school courtyard, hovering in the trees and over the pebbled walkway Miss Channing had just completed a portrait session with my father, for I remember seeing her in his office only moments before, my father at the window where she’d placed him, she a few feet away, peering toward him from around the side of her easel.
He’d offered to drive her home, as he later told me, but she had declined, telling him that she wanted to begin work on the other project she had proposed, the column of faces that was to be her gift to Chatham School. After that she’d returned to her classroom, brought out a lump of clay, and begun to fashion a model of the sculpture she was soon to make.
She was still at it sometime later when I walked through the courtyard, glanced to the right, and saw her standing at her sculpting pedestal, her hands sunk deep in the pockets of her smock. She was looking toward the front of the room, but until I moved farther west, heading toward the rear door of the school, I couldn’t make out what she was looking at, for the large tree that stood near the center of the courtyard blocked my view. And so it was not until I’d passed beyond it that I saw Mr. Reed standing at the entrance to her room.
It was a scene that startled me, the two of them facing each other so silently and at such a physical distance that they looked like duelists in an evening shade. And so I stopped and drew back behind the tree, listening like a common eavesdropper as their voices came toward me from the open windows of Miss Channing’s room.
“What do you want, Leland?”
“Something impossible.”
“You know what has to be done.”
“How do you want me to do it?”
“Without looking back.”
There was a pause, then I heard Mr. Reed speak again.
“Because I love you, I can do it.”
“Then do.”
“Let me take you home now. We can—”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You know why, Leland.”
Another pause. Then he said it.
