The Chatham School Affair

“It’s done,” she said as she dropped the towel into a basket by the table. “You can go.”

I pulled myself to a sitting position, then got to my feet. By then Miss Channing was several feet away, where many other masks lay faceup on a wide table, eyes closed, lips pressed tightly together, cadaverously gray.

“Well, good night, Miss Channing,” I said when I reached the door.

“Good night, Henry,” she answered, her eyes now fixed on the mask she’d just made of my face as she wrapped it in a length of white cloth.

I remained at the door, wanting to reach her somehow, remove her from the pall she seemed imprisoned in, tell her what she should do, how she must follow her father’s lead, live the life he’d prepared her for. I could almost see her rushing through the dark marina, a red cape flowing behind her, Mr. Reed waiting in the boat, lifting her into it, the hunger of their embrace, that thirsty kiss.

“Is there something else, Henry?” she asked, now staring at me intently, her fingers still wet and glistening, bits of moist clay in her hair. She appeared strikingly similar to the way I’d later see her, rising from the water, her hair soaked and stringy, hung with debris from the depths of Black Pond, her question asked in the same bloodless tone, Is she dead? My answer delivered as passionlessly as my life would be lived from then on, Yes.

Miss Channing finished the column only a few days later, and it was erected on the eighteenth of May in a ceremony my father arranged for the occasion. The ceremony took place on the front lawn of the school, and in the photograph taken that morning, and later included in my father’s archive of Chatham School Affair, Miss Channing stands to the right of the sculpture, her arms clasped to her sides, my father to its left, one hand tucked beneath his coat, Napoleonic fashion. All the teachers and students of the Chatham School are gathered around them, along with Sarah, who stands just off to the side, dressed up for the occasion, smiling brightly, her long black hair tucked inside a straw hat with a wide ribbon trailing off the back.

Miss Channing didn’t speak to the assembly that morning, but my father did. He thanked her for her work, not only on the sculpture, but as a teacher who, he said, had done a “remarkable job all ‘round.” At the end of the speech he announced that Miss Channing would not be returning to Chatham School the following year, and that she would be “deeply, deeply missed.”

Mr. Reed was the only teacher who did not attend the ceremony that morning. Nor did I expect him to. For during the preceding two weeks he’d grown increasingly remote, arriving alone at school just before his first class and leaving alone directly after the last one. During the school day he no longer lingered in the hallway with students, nor took them into the courtyard for a recitation, despite the unseasonable warmth of those first days of summer. Instead, he conducted his classes in the usual manner, lecturing and reading, but with much of the spirit he’d once brought to it now drained away. From time to time, as he stood at the front of the room, he would let his gaze wander toward the window, where, across the courtyard, he could see Miss Channing with her own students before her. At those moments he appeared frozen in a grim and futile yearning, and seemed unable to draw his eyes away from her, until, at last, they would dart back to us, his head jerking slightly as they did so, like someone who’d been slapped.

Still, despite the furious melancholy that so clearly hovered around him, Mr. Reed continued to work on his boat. It was finished by the third week in May, and the following Saturday he asked me to join him for the maiden voyage.

The boat had already been taken from the boathouse when I arrived at the marina that morning, the wooden rack that had once held it now empty, the tools and supplies that had been used in its construction put away. The top of the desk had been cleared as well, the cardboard box in which Mrs. Reed had found such an assortment of disturbing things already taken to the house on Black Pond and placed in the attic where Captain Hamilton would later find it, the small brown bottle of arsenic still huddled in the corner, its cap tightly fitted, but the contents nearly gone.

Only my drawing of Miss Channing still remained in its former place, though it now hung slightly askew, its surface coated with a thin layer of dust. It would still be there two weeks later, when I showed it to Mr. Parsons, his comment destined to linger in my mind forever after that. She’s what did it to him, Henry, she’s what drove him mad.

But on that foggy Saturday morning, so strange an eventuality seemed inconceivable, and the boathouse appeared merely like a structure that had weathered a violent but departed storm rather than one about to be blown apart by an approaching one.

“All right, let’s try her out,” Mr. Reed said as he led me out of the boathouse and down the wooden pier to where I could see the Elizabeth lolling softly in the undulating water, its tall mast weaving rhythmically left and right, a white baton in the surrounding fog.

Once we’d climbed into the boat, Mr. Reed untied the rope that held it to its mooring, adjusted the sail so that we briefly drifted backward, then took the rudder and guided it out of the marina.

We followed what appeared to be a predetermined course, exactly like the one I’d seen drawn on Mr. Reed’s nautical map, along the western coast of Monomoy Island, past Hammond’s Bend and Powder Hole, and finally around the tip of the island at Monomoy Point and into the open sea. Mr. Reed kept his eyes forward for the most part, but from time to time he would peer about, like someone scouting dangers all around, so that for a single, exhilarating instant I felt once again a party to some desperate and wildly romantic conspiracy, this early morning voyage, begun before the harbor master had arrived at work, with the marina deserted and the coastline shrouded in mist, serving as our practice run. “A man could vanish into a fog like this,” he said at one point. “Disappear. Disappear.”

It was nearly ten o’clock when we sailed back into Chatham harbor. The early morning fog had now burned off entirely; the air around us was crystal clear. Mr. Reed guided the boat into its place in the marina, then looped the rope to the wooden pylon, mooring it in the same dock where we’d found it earlier that same morning.

But rather than being uplifted by the maiden voyage of a boat he’d been working on for three years, Mr. Reed remained solemn and downcast. I moved along beside him, down the long wooden pier and into the boathouse, wondering what I might do to lift his spirits, draw him out of the dreadful despair that had fallen over him, renew the vitality and soaring discontent I’d so admired before, perhaps even point the way to some victory that might still be his.

Mr. Reed drew himself up on the desk in the corner of the boathouse, resting his cane against it, his hands folded one over the other. For a few minutes he talked about the Galapagos Islands, the ones off the coast of South America that Darwin had written of in The Voyage of the Beagle. “Everything must have looked new to him,” he told me. “Everything in life brand new.” He shook his head with a strange mirthlessness. “Imagine that,” he said. “A whole new world.”

Watching him from my place a few feet away, I felt coldly stricken, like a boy at a deathwatch, helplessly observing the slow disintegration of someone he’d admired.