CHAPTER 14
But in the end, I chose to think of life rather than to live it.
I said as much in my office one afternoon. I’d been talking to Mr. Parsons’ son, Albert Parsons, Jr., the two of us in our middle fifties by then, with the elder Mr. Parsons now impossibly old and senile, a figure rooted on a bench outside the town hall, muttering to himself and flinging crumbs to the pigeons.
“So many books, Henry,” he said in a tone that seemed vaguely accusatory. “Have you read them all?”
I offered him a mirthless smile. “They’re what I have instead of a wife and children.”
Albert laughed. “You’re a pistol, Henry. A real barnyard philosopher.” He sat back and let his eyes roam the bookshelves in my office, squinting at the titles. “Greeks and Romans. Why them in particular?”
“They were my father’s favorites.”
“Why’s that?”
I shrugged. “Maybe because he thought they saw it more clearly.”
“Saw what?”
“Life.”
He laughed again. “You’re a pistol, Henry,” he repeated.
We’d just come to a settlement that each of us felt our clients would accept, his being the aggrieved party in a construction contract dispute, mine, a local contractor named Tom Cannon.
“You know, Henry, I was a little surprised that Tom ever got named in a lawsuit like this,” Albert said. “He’s done plenty of work for me, and I’ve never had any trouble with him.” He took a sip of the celebratory brandy I’d just poured him. “He even built that little office my father used when he was working on his memoirs.”
Some part of the old time abruptly reasserted itself in my mind, and I saw Mr. Parsons as he’d stood before the jury on the last day of Miss Channing’s trial, a man in his early forties then, still young and vigorous, no doubt certain that he’d found the truth about her, revealed for all to see the murderous conspiracy she’d hatched with Leland Reed.
“How is Mr. Parsons these days?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s as good as can be expected, I guess,” Albert answered. “Of course, the way he is now, there’s not a whole lot he can do but sit around.” He took a greedy sip from the brandy. “He likes to hang around the courthouse for the most part. Or on that bench in front of the town hall.” He shrugged. “He mutters to himself sometimes. Old age, you know.”
I saw Mr. Parsons on his lonely bench, his hand rhythmically digging into a paper bag filled with bread crumbs or popcorn, casting it over the lawn, a circle of pigeons sweeping out from around him like a pool of restless gray water.
Albert took a puff on his cigar, then flicked the ash into the amber-colored ashtray on my desk. “He talks about my mother, of course, along with my sister and me,” he went on absently. “Some of his big cases too. They come to mind once in a while.”
Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “The Chatham School Affair.”
Albert looked at me, perhaps surprised that it had leaped into my mind so quickly. “Yes, that one in particular,” he said. “He got quite a shock from that woman … what was her name?”
“Channing,” I said. “Elizabeth Channing.”
Albert shook his head. “Nobody could have imagined that that woman would cause so much trouble,” he added with a short laugh. “Not even your father.”
Inevitably I recalled how the people of Chatham had finally laid a large portion of the blame for what happened on Black Pond at my father’s feet. It was the price he’d paid for hiring Miss Channing in the first place, then turning what everyone considered a blind eye to her behavior, a delinquency that his neighbors had never been able to forget, nor his wife forgive.
“You think he ever suspected anything, Henry?”
I remembered the look on my father’s face as he’d closed the door of his office that day, with Mr. Parsons in his dark suit, reaching into the box he’d placed on the chair beside him, drawing out a book with one hand, a length of gray rope with the other, Miss Channing standing before him in a white dress. “Not of what they thought she did. No, I don’t think he ever suspected her of that.”
“Why, I wonder,” Albert said casually, as if he were discussing no more than a local curiosity, “I mean, she was pretty strange, wasn’t she?”
For a moment I thought I saw her sitting silently on the other side of the room, staring at me as she had that last time, her hair oily, matted, unwashed, her skin a deathly pale, but still glowing incandescently from out of the surrounding shadows. In a low, unearthly whisper I heard her repeat her last words to me: Go now, Henry Please.
“No, she wasn’t strange,” I said. “But what happened to her was.”
Albert shrugged. “Well, I was just a little boy at the time, so really, about all I remember is that she was very pretty.”
I recalled my father’s eyes the day she’d approached him across the summer lawn of Milford Cottage, her bare feet in the moist green grass, then the look on Mr. Reed’s face as he’d gazed at her on the hill that snowy November morning. “She was beautiful,” I told Albert Parsons, my eyes now drifting toward the window, then beyond it, to the lighthouse she’d fled from that terrible afternoon. “But she couldn’t help that, could she?”
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Albert said. “It was the man who was the real shocker in the whole thing. The other teacher, I mean.”
“Leland Reed.”
“That’s right.” Albert released a quick, mocking laugh. “I mean, God almighty, Henry, who’d have thought that a man like him would interest a young woman as pretty as that Channing woman was?” He shook his head at the curiousness of human beings, their woeful randomness and unpredictability, the impenetrable wilderness they make of life. “Why, hell, that Reed fellow looked like a damn freak, as I remember it, always limping around, his face all scarred up. Just a rag of a man, mat’s what my father said. His very words. Just a rag of a man.”
I drew my eyes away from the lighthouse and settled them on the old oak that stood across the way, its bare limbs rising upward, twisting and chaotic, a web without design. Beyond it, down a distant street that led to the marina, I could make out the gray roof of the old boat-house where Mr. Reed and I had labored to build his boat. In my memory of those days I could see him working frantically through the night, painting, varnishing, making the final preparations for its maiden voyage. Like someone whispering invisibly in my ear, I heard mm say, Disappear, disappear, the grim incantation of his final days.
“Of course that Channing woman certainly saw some thing in him,” Albert said. He smiled. “What can you say, Henry? The mysteries of love.”
But the nature of what Miss Channing might have seen in Leland Reed seemed hardly to matter to Albert, Jr. He crushed his cigar into the ashtray. “They didn’t get away with it though,” he said. “That’s the main thing. I once heard my fattier say that he’d never have gotten to the bottom of it—that he’d have just thought it was all some kind of terrible accident—if it hadn’t been for you.”
I felt something give in the thick wall I’d built around my memory of that time. In my mind I saw Mr. Parsons standing in front of me, the two of us on the playing field behind Chatham School, facing each other in a blue twilight, Mr. Parsons suddenly twisting his head in the general direction of Black Pond before returning his gaze to me, his hand coming to a soft paternal rest upon my shoulder. Thank you, Henry. I know how hard it is to tell the truth.