The Chatham School Affair

Dr. Craddock hesitated a moment, and I could tell that something of vast importance lay in the balance for him. “I’m sure you know that my wife and I … that we’ve … that we have no children.”

My father nodded.

“Well, I wanted to let you know that we would be very interested in taking Mary in,” Dr. Craddock said. “My wife would be a good mother for her, I’m sure. And I believe that I would be a good father.”

“Mary has a father,” my father answered with an unexpected sternness, as if he were talking to one who wished to steal a child.

Dr. Craddock stared at him, surprised. “You’ve not heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

I remember rising slowly and drifting across the porch toward my father as Dr. Craddock told him that Mr. Reed’s boat had been found adrift in the bay, with nothing but his old wooden cane inside it, save for a note written on a piece of sail and tacked to the mast. Please see to it that Mary is treated well, and tell her that I do this out of love.

I think that over the years Mary Reed was well-treated, that, overall, despite the many problems that later arose, the howling phantoms that consumed her, the bleak silences into which she sometimes fell, that despite all that, Dr. Craddock and his wife continued to love her and strive to help her. At first it looked as though they had succeeded, that Mary had come to think of them as her parents, put her own dreadful legacy behind her. By the time she entered the local school, she’d come to be called by her middle name, which was Alice, as well as that of her adoptive parents, which was Craddock.

It was a deliverance my father had hoped for, and perhaps even believed to be possible. “In time, she’ll heal,” I heard him say as Dr. Craddock took her small white hand and led her down the stairs and out into the rain.

But she never did.

Mr. Reed’s death left only Miss Channing upon whom the law could now seek retribution, and so, after a few more days of investigation, and at Mr. Parsons’ direction, the grand jury charged her in a two-count indictment, the first count being the most serious, conspiracy to murder Abigail Reed, but the second also quite grave at that time, adultery.

It was my father who delivered the news of the indictment to Miss Channing, allowed to do so by Captain Hamilton, whose duty it otherwise would have been.

“Get in the car, Henry,” my father said the morning we made our final drive to Milford Cottage. “If she becomes … well … difficult … I might need your help.”

But Miss Channing did not become difficult that morning. Instead, she stood quite still, listening as my father told her that the two indictments had been handed down, that she would have to stand trial, then went on to recommend a local attorney who was willing to defend her.

“I don’t want a lawyer, Mr. Griswald,” Miss Channing said.

“But these are serious charges, Miss Channing,” my father said somberly. “There are witnesses against you. People who should be questioned as to whatever it is they’re claiming to have seen or heard.” I could feel the pain his next words caused him. “My wife will be one of those witnesses,” he told her. “Henry too.”

I’d expected her eyes to shoot toward me at that moment, freeze me in a hideous glare, but she did not shift her attention from my father’s face. “Even so” was all she said.

We left a few minutes later, and I didn’t say a single word to Miss Channing that morning, but only gazed at her stonily, my demeanor already forming into the hard shell it would assume on the day I testified against her, answering every question with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing all the while that there was one question Mr. Parsons would never ask me, nor even remotely suspect that I had the answer to: What really happened on Black Pond that day?

CHAPTER 30

Miss Channing came to trial that August. During that interval I never saw her, nor knew of anyone who did. My father was now more or less banned from any further contact with her by my mother’s abject fury.

As to the charges against her, the evidence was never very great. But bit by bit it was presented to the jury, tales of odd sightings and snatches of conversation, a portrait hung in a boathouse, an old primer curiously inscribed, a nautical map with what Mr. Parsons called an “escape route” already drawn, a boat named Elizabeth, a pile of letters hastily burned in an otherwise empty hearth, a knife, a piece of rope, a bottle of arsenic.

Against all that, as well as Chatham’s ferocious need to “make someone pay,” Miss Channing stood alone. She listened as the witnesses were called, people who had seen and heard things distantly, as well as the more compelling testimony that I gave, shortly followed by my mother.

Through it all she sat at the defense table in so deep a stillness, I half expected her not to rise when the time finally came and the bailiff called her to the stand.

But she did rise, resolutely, her gaze trained on the witness box until she reached it and sat, waiting as Mr. Parsons approached her from across the room, the eyes of the jurors drifting from her face to her white, unmoving fingers, peering at them intently, as if looking for bloodstains on her hands.

I will always remember that my father watched Miss Channing’s testimony with a tenderness so genuine that I later came to believe that understanding and forgiveness were the deepest passions that he knew.

My mother’s expression was more severe, of course, less merciful thoughts no doubt playing in her mind— memories of people she had known, a husband’s career now in the balance, a school teetering on the brink of ruin. Her eyes were leveled with an unmistakable contempt upon the woman she held responsible for all that.

As for me, I found that I glanced away from Miss Channing as she rose and walked toward the witness box, unable to bear the way she looked, so set upon and isolated that she resembled a figure out of ancient drama, Antigone or Medea, a woman headed for a sacrificial doom, and in relation to whom I felt like a shadow crouched behind a tapestry, the secret agent of her fall.

She wore a long black dress that day, ruffled at the throat and at the ends of the sleeves. But more than her dress, more than the way she’d pulled back her hair and bound it tightly with a slender black ribbon, I noticed how little she resembled the young woman I’d seen get off a Boston bus nearly a year before, how darkly seasoned, as if she’d spent the last few weeks reviewing the very events about which she’d now, at her own insistence, been called to speak.