“The roof didn’t leak?”
“No.”
“You asked Miss Channing that directly?”
“Yes, sir. I told her you were concerned about it. She said it was fine.”
He nodded, still looking at me in that questioning way of his. “Well, did you do anything at all for Miss Channing?”
“I walked her into town. That’s all she wanted me to do.”
He thought a moment, then said, “Well, get in the car, Henry. I want to make sure she’s got everything she needs.”
Had I not gone with my father to Milford Cottage that afternoon, I might never have seen what Miss Channing later captured in her portrait of him, the look on his face as he peered through the red curtains, his eyes fixed on the exotic blue lake that so clearly beckoned to him with an unmistakable sensuousness, but toward which he would not go.
The cottage looked deserted when my father brought the car to a halt in front of it. The front door was securely closed, no lamp yet lighted, despite the fact that it was late afternoon by then, the sun already setting.
“Maybe she’s still in the village,” I said as my father and I lingered in the car.
“Could be,” my father said. He stared at the cottage a moment longer, perhaps trying to decide whether to knock at the door or simply return to Chatham, content that he had at least done his duty in dropping by.
Then the door of the cottage opened, and Miss Channing walked out onto the cool grass of the front lawn. She was barefoot, and as she came toward us, I noticed that my father’s eyes dropped toward her feet, his lips parting. Then, just as suddenly, he returned to himself, opened the door of the car, and stepped out.
“I have only a moment,” he said a little stiffly and hurriedly, like a man who had more important things to do.
Miss Channing continued to move toward him, her feet padding softly across the grass.
“But I wanted to make sure that everything was in order,” my father added in the same vaguely harried tone. I remained inside the car, but despite its dusty windshield, I could see that she had washed her hair so that it now hung wet and glistening in the darkening air, giving her that appearance of female dishabille that has forever after seemed so beautiful to me.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” my father continued.
She came to a halt perhaps no more than three feet from where he stood. “Thank you for sending Henry to me this morning,” she said. “There was really nothing more for him to do.”
“Yes, he told me that.” My father paused for a moment, lifting his eyes upward slightly as he reached into the pocket of his jacket. “I wanted to bring you this,” he said, drawing out a large envelope. “It’s the schedule for the school. It tells you when your classes are held, when you take lunch, that sort of thing. You should bring it with you Monday morning. I would have mailed it to you, of course,” my father added quickly as she took the envelope from him, “as I generally do with the other teachers. But then, you were in Africa, and so … well …”
A silence fell over him and I expected him to break it with a quick good-bye, then get back into the car. Instead, he uttered a question that seemed very odd to me. “Do you ever plan to have a family of your own, Miss Channing?”
I could tell that she’d never been asked such a question, so ordinary and domestic, nor once considered the way of life it suggested. “I don’t know,” she answered quietly.
“It has its compensations,” my father said, though more to himself, it seemed, than to her. “Family life.”
She stared at him, puzzled, as I was, by his remark.
He looked suddenly embarrassed by what he’d said, like a man who’d inadvertently revealed some small, sad aspect of himself. Then he spoke hurriedly again, resuming his schoolmaster pose. “Well, Henry and I had best be getting home. Good night, Miss Channing.”
“Good night,” she answered, the same quizzical look in her eyes as she watched my father stride back to his car, get in, and pull away.
We arrived back home a few minutes later. My mother had prepared one of her pot roasts and throughout the meal my father appeared no different than usual, eating with the same careful attention to manners, dabbing the white cloth napkin at the corners of his mouth after almost every bite.
But when it was over, rather than retiring to the parlor as was his custom, he walked down Myrtle Street to the school, saying only that he had “a few last minute details” he wanted to look over before classes started the following Monday morning.
My mother didn’t question him. Nor did I. But toward sunset, while I was sitting on the front steps of our house, I glanced up and saw my father standing in the school’s bell tower, alone, facing out over the village. It was only minutes before nightfall, and a great stillness had settled over everything. I knew that from his place in the bell tower my father could stare out over all the roofs of Chatham and watch the low, unhurried beam of the lighthouse as it swept smoothly across the darkening sea, then over the village and finally beyond it, to the ebony waters of Black Pond.
I have always believed that at that moment he was thinking of Miss Channing, of her oval eyes and wet, glistening hair, seeing her again as he had earlier that afternoon, her bare feet nestled in a cool bed of dark green grass, his eyes closing for a moment as he reveled in that vision, then opening again, focused now upon the village, the school he’d labored all his life to build, the house on Myrtle Street, its small lights, his mind accepting without bitterness or rancor the path that he had taken, along with all the obligations it required, yet recognizing, too, as I believe he must have, that there was a certain shuddering ecstasy he would never know.
CHAPTER 5
I’ve kept only a single photograph to remind me of what I was, what I aid, all that followed after that. It is a grainy photograph, artlessly taken from the roof of one of the buildings across from the courthouse, its vista crosshatched with wooden poles and power lines, but clear enough to show the swarm of men and women who’d gathered around the building that day, their numbers pouring down its wide cement steps. And yet, it wasn’t the crowd of people that had caught my attention when I’d first seen it, but a single, crudely written
