Byron had had what Mr. Reed called “an adventurous nature,” throwing wild parties at his own castle, drinking burgundy from a human skull. “He lived his ideas,” Mr. Reed declared. “Nothing ever stood in his way.”
Class was nearly over by the time Mr. Reed finished telling us about Byron’s life. But before releasing us completely, he opened the book he’d brought with him. “I want you to listen now,” he said as he began flipping the pages briskly until he found the lines he’d been searching for. Then he looked toward us and smiled in that strange way I’d already noticed, a smile that seemed to require an undisclosed amount of effort. “Words need to be heard sometimes,” he said. “After all, in the beginning all poetry was spoken.”
With that he read the lines he’d selected for us, his voice low, almost a whisper, so that the words themselves sounded inordinately private, an intimate message sent by one whose peculiar sadness seemed at one with Mr. Reed’s.Every feeling hath been shaken;
Pride, which not a world could bow,
Bows to thee—by thee forsaken
Even my soul forsakes me now;But ’tis done—all words are idle—
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way without the will.
His voice trailed off at the end of the recitation, though his eyes remained on the lines a moment longer, his head bowed wearily, as if beneath the weight of thoughts he himself could not bridle.
“I think it’s sometimes a good idea to end class with a poem,” he said at last. Then he paused, watching us silently, perhaps hoping for a response. When none came, he closed the book. “All right, you may go,” he said.
We scrambled to our feet quickly, gathering our books into our arms, and began to disperse, some heading back into the building, others toward the rear entrance of the courtyard and the playing fields beyond. Only Mr. Reed stayed in place, his back pressed against the tree, the volume of Byron’s poetry dangling from his hand. He looked as if he might crumple to the ground. But then I saw him draw in a long, reviving breath, straighten his shoulders, step away from the tree, and begin to make his way toward the building. “Good night, Henry,” he said as he went by me.
“Good night, Mr. Reed,” I answered.
I picked up my books and turned to the right. Miss Channing’s classroom was directly in front of me, and when I glanced toward it, I saw that she stood at one of the three large windows that overlooked the courtyard. Her eyes were fixed upon Mr. Reed with a clearly appreciative gaze, taking in the slight limp, the narrow cane, perhaps even the jagged cream-colored scar. I’d never seen a woman look at a man in exactly the same way, almost as if he were not a man at all, but a painting she admired for the boldness of its execution, the way the standard symmetries had been discarded in favor of jaggedness and instability, her earlier sense of beauty now adjusting to take it in, finding a place for mangled shapes.
CHAPTER 8
From my place beneath the willow, staring out across the water, I could barely make out the house in which Mr. Reed had lived so many years before, and so I stepped away from the tree and took a narrow footpath that hunters and swimmers and the occasional forest solitaire had maintained over the years, and which I knew to be the one Miss Channing had taken on that Saturday evening two weeks later, when she’d set out for Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of Black Pond. As I began to move down that same path, I heard Mr. Parsons say, So, from the beginning you were aware of their meetings? My answer, Yes, I was. And what were your impressions, Henry? I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Do you now? Yes.
A tangle of forest had surrounded Miss Channing that evening, and she might well have seen a lone white gull as it plummeted toward the surface of the pond. No doubt she heard the soft crunch of the leaves beneath her feet, but she may have heard an assortment of bird cries, too, or the scurrying of a field mouse, or the plop of a frog as it leaped into the water. For those were the things I saw and heard as I retraced her steps that morning, moving slowly, at an old man’s pace.
Her dinner at Mr. Reed’s house had been arranged several days before. By then my father had told Miss Channing that it was getting a bit too cold for her to continue walking back and forth from her cottage to Chatham School. He’d gone on to inform her that there was another teacher who lived on Black Pond. It would be a simple matter for him to drop by for her each morning and return her to Milford Cottage in the afternoon.
And so at some point before the end of October, I saw Mr. Reed escort Miss Channing to his car, a battered sedan, its wheels mud-spattered, its running board hardly more than a drooping sheet of rust, its windows streaked and scratched as if they’d been sandblasted with sea salt.
As to what they’d said to each other on that first drive, no one would ever have known had not Mr. Parsons later been so insistent on learning every word ever spoken between them, requiring revelations so detailed that I could still hear their voices whispering in the air around me as I struggled to make my way along the edges of Black Pond.
I live just on the other side of the pond. You can probably see my house from your cottage.
Yes, I’ve seen it.
You may have seen me on the pond too. I go rowing on it occasionally.
Do you row at night?
Sometimes.
Then I think I saw you once. It was my first night in the cottage. I went out to stand by the pond. It was overcast, but I think I saw you for just a moment. Not you, exactly. Just part of the boat, and your hand. Why do you go out at night?
For the solitude, I suppose.
You don’t live alone?
No. I have a wife and daughter. What about you? Do you live alone?
Yes.
You’re not afraid? Living out here?
No.
Some people would be.
Then they should live elsewhere, I suppose.
Listening to their voices as I continued my journey around Black Pond that morning, I realized that such a statement had to have struck Mr. Reed as amazingly self-possessed. How different she must have seemed from any other woman he had ever known.
I’ve seen you teaching. The boys seem very interested in your class.
I hope they are.
They look very attentive.
I’ve seen you with your class too. You were reading to them in the courtyard.
Oh, yes, a couple weeks ago. I wanted to take advantage of what I thought might be the last day we could go outside before winter sets in.
It was from Byron.
You recognized it.
Yes, I did. My father read a great deal of Byron. Shelley too. And Keats.
At that moment Miss Channing told him of her visit to the cluttered Roman apartment in which Keats had died. His books were still there, she said, along with pages written in Keats’s own hand.
The interest Mr. Reed by then had come to feel for Miss Channing can be gauged by what he did next.
I know this is rather sudden, Miss Channing. But I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with my family and me tomorrow evening?