Was he handsome, the man who came into the room seconds later, dressed, as always, in a chalk-smeared jacket and corduroy pants?
Yes, I suppose he was. In his own particular way, of course.
And yet it never surprised me that the people of the village later marveled that such fierce emotions could have stormed about in a so visibly broken frame.
He was tall and slender, but there was something in his physical arrangement that always struck me as subtly off kilter, the sense of a leaning tower, of something shattered at its base. For although he always stood erect, his back pressed firmly against the wall of his classroom while he spoke to us, his body often appeared to be of another mind, his left shoulder a few degrees lower than the right, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a bust whose features were classically formed yet eerily marred, perhaps distorted, the product of an unsteady hand.
Still, it was his face that people found most striking, the ragged black beard, lined here and there with gray, and the dark, deep-set eyes. But more particularly the cream-colored scar that ran crookedly from just beneath his left eye, widening and deepening until it finally disappeared into the thick bramble of his beard.
His name was Leland Reed.
I often recall my first glimpse of him. It was a summer afternoon several years before. I’d been slouched on the front porch of our house when I looked up to see a man coming down the street. He walked slowly, his shoulders dipping left and right like a little boat in a gently swelling sea. At last he came to a halt at the short metal gate that separated our house from the street. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Arthur Griswald.”
“That’s my father,” I told him.
He did not open the gate, but merely peered at me like someone who could see both my past and my future in a single glimpse, how I had been reared, what I would become as a result.
“He’s inside the house,” I said, stung by his inspection.
“Thank you,” Mr. Reed answered.
Seconds later I heard my father say, “Ah, Mr. Reed,” as he opened the door and let him in. Not long after that I found my father and Mr. Reed in the parlor, my father so engrossed in interviewing Mr. Reed that he never noticed me standing at the door, listening with a little boy’s curiosity for the world of men.
Mr. Reed had come from Boston, as it turned out, where he’d taught at the Boston Latin School for the past three years. He’d grown tired of the city, he said, then went on to provide other details in a self-confident, manly voice, but with something distant in it, too, a voice that later struck me as somewhat similar to his face, strong and forthright in its own way, but irreparably scarred.
“I’m surprised a man like yourself doesn’t want to live in Boston,” my father said. “I’ve always found it very stimulating.”
Mr. Reed gave no answer.
“Would you mind if I asked your age?”
“Twenty-eight.”
I could tell that my father had thought him older, perhaps because of the wisps of gray visible in his beard, or, more likely, because his manner was so deliberative, his eyes so still.
“Twenty-eight,” my father repeated. “And … single?”
“Yes.”
They talked for well over an hour that afternoon, and although I drifted past the parlor’s open door on several occasions, idly listening as their conversation continued, there was onto one small fragment of it that later struck me as revealing of the kind of man Mr. Reed actually was. It had come toward the end of the interview, my father’s pipe now lying cold and smokeless in the ashtray beside his chair, Mr. Reed still seated opposite him, both feet pressed firmly on the floor.
“And what about travel,” my father asked. “Have you done much of that?”
Mr. Reed shook his head. “Only a little.”
“Where to, if I may ask?”
“France.”
My father seemed pleased. “France. Now, that’s a beautiful country. What part did you visit?”
“Only the countryside,” Mr. Reed answered quietly, adding nothing more, so that my father had to finally coax him forward with another question.
“You were there on business?”
Mr. Reed shook his head, and I saw one of his large hands move down to a right knee that had begun to tremble slightly.
“Just there on vacation, then?” my father asked lightly.
“No,” Mr. Reed answered, a single coal-black eyebrow arching suddenly, then lowering again. “The war.”
I remember that his voice had become strained as he’d answered, and that his eyes had darted toward the window briefly. At that, both my father and I suddenly realized that the casualness of my father’s question had plumbed an unexpectedly raw aspect of Mr. Reed’s experience, miraculously revealing to us what Mr. Reed himself must have seen some years before, an exploded shell lifting mounds of muddy earth, men hurling upward, then plummeting down, his own body spinning in a cloud of smoke, bits of himself flying away in surreal tongues of flame.
“Oh,” my father said softly, glancing toward the cane. “I didn’t know.”
Mr. Reed drew his eyes back to my father but didn’t speak.
“In your letter you didn’t mention that you were a veteran. Most men do when they’re applying for a job.”
Mr. Reed shrugged. “I find it difficult to do that,” he said.
My father reached for his pipe, though I noticed that he didn’t light it. “Well, tell me why you think you’d like to teach at Chatham School.”
I don’t remember Mr. Reed’s answer, but only that my father had appeared satisfied with it, and that Mr. Reed left the house a few minutes later, presumably walking back to the bus stop in Chatham center, then boarding a bus for Boston. I didn’t see him again until almost two months later, and even then only briefly, a man moving down the corridor of Chatham School, one hand clutching a book, the other a cane, whose steady, rhythmic thump announced him like a theme.
As it still did when I heard it tapping down the hallway that autumn afternoon seven years later, followed by the inevitable cautionary whispers of, “Shhh. Mr. Reed is coming.”
However, on that particular day he didn’t come into the room as he usually did, but stopped at the door instead, leaning one shoulder into it, so that he stood at a slant. “There probably won’t be many more days as pleasant as this one,” he said, nodding toward the window, the clear, warm air beyond it. “So I thought we’d have class out in the courtyard this afternoon.”
With that, he turned and led us down the corridor to the rear of the school, then out into the little courtyard behind it. Once there, he positioned himself beside the large oak that stood near the center of the courtyard and motioned for us to sit down on the ground in a semicircle around him. Then, he leaned against the tree and glanced down at the book he’d brought with him. “Today we’re going to begin our study of Lord Byron,” he said, his voice a curious combination of something soft and rough, and which at times seemed almost physical, like the touch of a fine, unsanded wood. “You should pay close attention, for Byron lived the poetry he wrote.”
As always, Mr. Reed began by giving us the details of the poet’s life, concentrating on his travels and adventures, a wild vagabond existence that Mr. Reed clearly admired. “Byron didn’t settle for what the rest of us settle for,” he told us. “He would find the lives we lead intolerably dull.”
During the next hour we learned that Byron had been raised in a place called Aberdeen, that as a child he’d been stricken with infantile paralysis, his right leg and foot so terribly contracted that he’d walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. “Like me,” Mr. Reed said with a quiet smile, nodding toward his cane, “except that he refused to let it hinder him, or change his life in any way.”