As for Mr. Reed, he seemed hardly aware that I was in the room at all. At times his mind appeared to drift directionlessly from one subject to the next, his eyes sometimes fixed in a motionless frieze, sometimes roaming from place to place about the room, as if in flight from the one object he would not let them light upon, the portrait of Miss Channing that still hung on the far wall, her face forever captured in what must have come to strike him as a cruelly beckoning gaze.
During all that afternoon he spoke only once about the boat, the long labor of the last few years, his eyes locked on the empty rack that had once held its lofty frame. “Well, she was seaworthy, at least,” he said. Then he grasped his cane, edged himself off the desk, and walked to one of the windows that looked out into the harbor. It was still covered with a strip of burlap, and for a moment Mr. Reed simply stared at the rough, impenetrable cloth. Then, with a sudden, violent jerk he yanked it down, a sheet of dust and a shaft of hard incandescent light pouring over him, and into which, for a single, surreal instant, he seemed to disappear.
CHAPTER 24
I often felt as if I had disappeared as well, vanished into the same dusky light that had briefly engulfed Mr. Reed.
For with the boat now finished, I saw him only occasionally, either in his classroom or at a distance, a figure who seemed perpetually in flight, walking rapidly down a far corridor or turning the corner of Myrtle Street, silent, harried, like someone running beneath the lash of invisible whips.
As for Miss Channing, I rarely saw her anywhere but in her room, so I felt once again like one student among many, with nothing to distinguish me or set me apart from the rest, watching silently, just as they did, while she gave her final lessons with a formality that struck me as very nearly rigid, all the ease and spontaneity that had marked her former relationship with us completely cast aside, leaving her distant and preoccupied, her focus turned inward with a deadly gravity.
Left more or less to myself, I became increasingly agitated as the end of the school year approached. I fidgeted nervously through Miss Channing’s classes, my attention drifting toward the window, not with the lack of interest that sometimes afflicted the other boys, but in an attitude of barely controlled hostility and contempt, as if she were a lover who had led me on and then betrayed me, and whom I now despised.
I felt bereft and abandoned, deserted by my closest allies. And so I poured all my energy into my drawing, watching helplessly as those darker elements that had earlier marked it now took on a demonic blackness, the village forever hung in gothic shadows, the sea disappearing into a grim invading horde of thunderclouds. The angles and perspectives changed as well, tilting Chatham on a cruel axis, its crooked streets plunging in jagged lines toward a central maelstrom, houses careening left or right, a world of colliding shapes. Stranger still, I drew my distortions as if they were not really distortions at all, but our village seen rightly, caught in the actual warp and wrench of the world, a grotesque deformity its true face.
During this time I had only Sarah to remind me of everything that had once seemed so exciting, the piercing intensity I’d felt the day we’d all stood on the snowy hilltop together and gazed down at Black Pond, how open life had seemed at that moment, how thrillingly romantic. All of that now appeared smothered and inert. So much so that I even began to avoid Sarah, closing my bedroom door at the sound of her approach, as it she were nothing more than a bitter reminder of some lost ideal, a charred locket that had once hung from a lover’s neck.
Sarah no doubt sensed the way I felt, but she refused to withdraw from me despite it. Instead, she often came to where I lay in my room, knocked at the door, and demanded that I join her for a walk along the beach or accompany her on a shopping trip to the village.
On the final Thursday of that school year, she found me sitting at the edge of the playing field. It was late in the afternoon. The teachers had already gone home to prepare the final examinations of the coming week, and some of the boys had decided to play a game of touch football before going to their rooms for a night of study.
“What are you doing here, Henry?” she asked as she strode up and lowered herself onto the ground beside me.
I shrugged silently, pretending that my attention was on the boys as they continued at the game, their movements dictated by its unbending rides, no hitting, scratching, kicking, rules that must have, in the end, given them comfort, the limits laid out so clearly, but which I saw as yet another example of their strapped and adventureless lives.
“You hate it, don’t you, Henry?” Sarah demanded. “You hate Chatham School.”
The game dissolved. I looked at her evenly, the truth bursting from me. “Yes, I do.”
Sarah nodded, and to my surprise read my thoughts with perfect accuracy. “Don’t run away, Henry. You’ll be leaving for college soon. After that, you won’t have to …”
I turned away from her and nodded toward the boys. “What if I end up like them?”
She settled her gaze on the playing field, watching and listening as the boys darted about and called to one another. From the look in her eyes I could tell that she did not think them so bad, the boys of Chatham School, nor even the lives they would later make. For she was already mature enough to sense that the wilder life I so yearned for might finally come to little, the road less traveled end in nothing more than the dull familiarity of having traveled it.
But I lacked that same maturity, and so Sarah’s rebel spirit now seemed as dead as Mr. Reed’s and Miss Channing’s, the whole world mired in a vile dispiritedness and cowardice. “When you get right down to it, you’re just like them, Sarah,” I told her sneeringly, nodding toward the boys, my words meant to strike deep, leave her soul bleeding on the ground. “You’re a girl. That’s the only difference.”
I might have said more, struck at her with an even greater arrogance and cruelty, but a loud crash suddenly stopped me. It was hard and metallic, and it had come from the lighthouse. Glancing toward it, I saw Miss Channing rush out its open door, a red scarf whipping behind her as she made her way across the lawn.
Sarah’s eyes widened. “Miss Channing,” she whispered.
Miss Channing reached the street, wheeled to the right, and headed down it, her stride long and rapid until she came to the coastal road. For a moment she stopped, briefly dropped her head into her hands, then lifted it again and whirled around, glaring toward the lighthouse for an instant before she turned away and rushed down the road toward town.
It was then that we looked back toward the lighthouse. Mr. Reed stood in its still-open door, his head drooping forward as he leaned, exhausted, upon his cane.
“Why don’t they just run away together?” I blurted out with a vehemence so deep the words seemed directed less to them than to me. “Why are people such cowards?”
Sarah watched me softly, gently, the harsh words I’d just said to her already put aside. “They’re not cowards,
