“Stop it,” she repeated. “Let me go.”
His grip tightened around her, drawing her into a violent embrace.
“Stop it. Leland … Leland …”
He thrust up and pushed her hard against the door, then spun her roughly to the right, away from the door, and pressed her against the wall, so that she could feel it, hard and gritty, at her back.
“I can’t let you go,” he said, his eyes now shining wildly in the gray light.
She pressed her hands flat against his shoulders. “Stop it!” she cried, now thrusting, right and left, desperately trying to get free.
But each time she moved, he pressed in upon her more violently, until she stopped suddenly, drew in a deep breath, leveled her eyes upon him, her body now completely still, her voice an icy sliver when she spoke. “Are you going to rape me, Leland? Is that what you’ve become?”
He rocked backward, stricken by her words.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, releasing her, stepping away, his eyes now fixed upon her with a shattered, unbelieving gaze. “Elizabeth, I only—” He stopped and looked at her brokenly, saying nothing more as she turned and fled toward the door, her red scarf flowing behind her like a blood-soaked cloth.
My father watched me silently for a moment, then rose and walked to the window, his hands behind his back as he stared out into the yard.
I kept my place by the door, my eyes fixed on the two leather valises beside the bed as I tried to keep the rhythm of my breath quiet and steady, so that it would not reveal the upheaval in my mind. “So it was all a lie,” I said at last. “What Miss Channing said in court. About never going beyond the ‘acceptable limits.’ They
“Yes, they were, Henry,” my father said. “But at the trial Miss Channing didn’t want Mary to ever know that.”
I saw the
My father walked over to me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Miss Channing had a good heart, Henry,” he said, then added pointedly, as if it were the central truth of life, “Never forget, that it’s the heart that matters.”
We left Milford Cottage a few minutes later, took Miss Channing’s belongings to the post office, then returned home. My mother was preparing dinner, and so my father and I retired to his office. He sat down in his chair, took out his pipe. I sat opposite him, still thinking about what Miss Channing had told him, how much she must have trusted him to have done so, my eyes studying the portrait she’d painted of him, not as the staid schoolmaster I’d so despised at the time, but as a man who had something restless and unquenchable in him, something that stared out toward the thin blue lake that shimmered seductively in the distance. It was then I realized that Miss Channing had painted my father not as himself alone, but in some sense as herself as well, perhaps as ail of us, stranded as we are, equally tormented by conflicting loves, trying, as best we can, to find a place between passion and boredom, ecstasy and despair, the life we can but dream of and the one we cannot bear.
“I’m glad I told you what I did this afternoon,” he said. “You deserved to know the truth. Especially since you were there on Black Pond that day.” He shook his head. “The sad thing is that it was all over between Miss Channing and Mr. Reed. She was going away. And in the end, he would have taken up his life again.” He seemed captured by the mystery of things, how dark and unforgiving the web can sometimes be. “Nothing would have happened if Mrs. Reed hadn’t died in Black Pond that day.”
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”
He leaned back in his chair. “So that’s the whole story, Henry,” he said, bringing the pipe toward his lips. “There’s nothing more to know about the Chatham School Affair.”
I didn’t answer him. But I knew that he was wrong.
CHAPTER 32
Many years have passed since then, and all the others have departed now, taking with them, one by one, small pieces of the Chatham School Affair, my mother and father, Mr. Parsons and Captain Hamilton, the last of the teachers who taught at Chatham School that year, even the boys who went there, all dead now, or living far away, probably in decrepitude, near death, with their final year at Chatham School no more than a faint remembrance of a curious and unhappy time.
Through all these many years, only Alice Craddock has remained to remind me of what happened on Black Pond, first as a little girl with melancholy eyes, then as a teenager, sullen and withdrawn, later as a woman of late middle age, grown monstrously fat and slovenly by then, friendless, alone, the village madwoman, chased by little boys, and finally as an old woman, rocking on her porch, with nothing but Dr. Craddock’s steadily dwindling fortune to sustain her.
I know that sometimes I would simply shake my head as she went by, dressed so strangely, as she often was, her toenails painted green, her mind so often lost in a sea of weird imaginings. Once, standing beside Mrs. Benton on the village square, I saw her attention drawn to Alice as she drifted vacantly down the opposite street, wrapped in a ragged shawl, feet in rubber thongs. “Now, there’s a tatty one,” Mrs. Benton said, then added in a tone so casual it shocked me with its flippancy. “Probably end up like her mother.”
But as the years had proven, Alice had not “ended up” like Mrs. Reed, so that after I’d done my work for Clement Boggs, gotten the zoning variance he needed to sell the land around Black Pond, it finally became my duty to deliver the money he’d received for it to the old house where Alice still lived, wandering aimlessly through its many dusty rooms, a candle sometimes in her hand, so people said, despite the fact that all the lights were on.
At first I’d declined to do it, not wanting to face Alice up close, see what time had wrought, along with suicide and murder. But Clement, determined that his gift remain anonymous, had refused the task himself, and so it had fallen to me to do it for him. “It’s only right that it should be you who tells her about the money, Henry,” he said. “After all, you knew her father, and it was you at the pond when her mother died.”
It was an argument I had no defense against. And so, late on a clear December night, I drove to the house on the bay, the very one that had once housed Dr. Craddock’s clinic, and in which Sarah Doyle had died so many years before.
It was quite cold, but she was sitting on the large side porch when I arrived, wrapped in a thick blanket, her huge frame rocking softly in a high-backed chair.
