PART 4
CHAPTER 16
Mr. Reed and his family returned to Chatham from Maine on the third of January in the new year of 1927. I’d just come out of Warren’s Sundries, a cup of hot apple cider steaming in my hand, when his car swept past me. Mrs. Reed was seated in the front seat, Mary in the back, an old trunk lashed to the top of the car, olive green, and with one of its corners slightly battered in.
Mr. Reed didn’t see me as he drove by, nor did Mrs. Reed, for both were staring straight ahead, Mr. Reed’s face cast in shadow beneath the brim of a floppy gray hat, Mrs. Reed’s locked in stony silence, Mary’s eyes drifting toward me as the car went by, a frail smile on her lips, her small hand lifted in a faint gesture of recognition. Hi, Henry.
It had been nearly two weeks since Mr. Reed’s departure, and the sight of him returning to Chatham filled me with anticipation, as if, after a long intermission, the curtain had risen again on the adventure in which I’d joined him.
When I rushed home and told Sarah that I’d just seen Mr. Reed drive past Warren’s Sundries, she’d seemed to share my excitement about his return. “You can get on with the boat now,” she said, smiling. “Maybe finish it by summer.”
During the Christmas break Sarah and I had often found ourselves alone in the house, my mother working at the church, helping other local women prepare for the Nativity play, my father busy in his office at Chatham School. The school vacation had given us a chance to talk more intimately and for longer periods than we ever had before. Sarah spoke eagerly of one day going to college, her glowing ambition no longer satisfied with attaining the most basic skills, but now set resolutely upon mastering the highest ones. In later years I sometimes thought that it was she who should have been my father’s child, a proud and grateful graduate of Chatham School, I an illiterate boy shipped in from far away, the future author of its ruin.
For by then my own character and ambitions had moved very far from my father’s teaching. It was Mr. Reed to whom I was drawn, particularly to the passionate discontent I could sense in him, his need to do more, be more, break free of Chatham, discover some new world, as if life were a horn of plenty, vast and infinite, rather than a small basket, inadequately stocked, and from which, in choosing one fruit, we must forever lose another.
I found him in the boathouse the day after his return to Chatham. Coming through the door, the Christmas gift I’d brought for him held firmly beneath my arm, I’d expected to find him as I usually aid, planing spruce for the rigging, caulking seams, or simply at work with sandpaper, paint, varnish.
But instead, he was sitting idly at the stern of the boat, his hands in his lap, the cane propped up against the bare, unpainted rail to his left.
He looked up sharply at my entrance, like someone pulled abruptly from a long period of deep concentration, his face still cast in that mood of troubled thoughtfulness I’d seen in it the day before.
“I thought you might be here,” I said. “I saw you drive through town yesterday.”
He smiled faintly. “Go warm yourself,” he said, pointing to the stove. “Then we can start to work.”
I walked over to the stove, then stood with my back to it, watching silently as Mr. Reed began to apply a coat of sealant to the inner frame of the boat. He seemed preoccupied, very nearly distracted, his eyes narrowing from time to time, his lower hp moving very slightly, as if he were reciting lines beneath his breath.
“Did you enjoy your trip to Maine?” I asked, though I could tell he hadn’t.
He shook his head, his eyes following the brush. “Not much.”
I offered a possible reason, though one I doubted. “It’s probably even colder there than it is here in Chatham.”
Mr. Reed didn’t look up from his work to answer me. “I don’t care for Maine. I’d rather have stayed here.” He added nothing else for a while. Then he said, “Did you go over to Milford Cottage during the break?”
“Once,” I told him. “With Sarah.”
The brush stopped. “And Miss Channing … how is she?”
“Fine, I guess.”
And yet, even as I answered him, I recalled that there’d been something in Miss Channing’s manner that had seemed somewhat different from the other times I’d accompanied Sarah to Milford Cottage, more subdued than she’d been before, locked in what appeared the same concentration that I now noticed in Mr. Reed. Throughout the lesson she’d occasionally glanced out her front window, peering through the parted curtains to the empty lawn, her eyes filled with a subtle but detectable agitation, the way I imagined the wives of sailors to have gazed out from their widow’s walks, apprehensively scanning the horizon for their husbands’ ships. I now had no doubt that it was Mr. Reed she’d been thinking of at those moments.
Mr. Reed returned to his work, the brush moving rhythmically right and left.
I watched him for a few moments, knowing that he was thinking about Miss Channing. I could feel the present I’d made for him still cradled under my arm. It seemed the perfect time to give it to him.
“I have something for you,” I said, rising from the chair. “A Christmas present. I finished it while you were in Maine. I hope you like it. Merry Christmas, Mr. Reed.”
I’d wrapped it in bright green paper and bound it together with a red ribbon. “Thank you,” he said, lifting it slightly, smiling. By its shape he must have known that it was a drawing, although when he opened it, I could tell that what I’d done both surprised and pleased him.
“Miss Channing,” he murmured.
I’d drawn her with pen and ink, though in a pose far different than Mr. Reed would have expected, her hair falling over her bare shoulders in a tangled mass, her eyes intense and searching, lips full and slightly parted, her head tilted forward, but her gaze directed straight ahead, a figure both real and unreal, ethereal, yet beckoning, rendered in an unmistakable attitude of seduction.
“It’s beautiful, Henry,” Mr. Reed said, his eyes fixed on the portrait. He gazed at it a moment longer, then walked over to the small table in the corner. “I’ll hang it here,” he said. He took a nail from his jacket pocket and drove it into the wall above the desk. But before he hung the portrait, he paused, as if another thought had come to him. “You know, Henry, we should show it to Miss Channing.”
“Do you think she’d like it?”
“Of course she would.”
I was not so sure, but Mr. Reed seemed certain, so a few minutes later we were backing out of the driveway of the boathouse, headed for Milford Cottage, Mr. Reed’s spirits considerably higher now, the framed portrait of Miss Channing pressed against his side.
And so, as it turned out, I didn’t do any work on the boat that day. But during the next few weeks I often returned to the boathouse to do what remained of the caulking and sealing, construct the mast and the boom, assemble the rigging. Enough work so that, four months later, after the Coast Guard had found the boat adrift in Cape Cod Bay, towed it back to Chatham, and moored it in the harbor, I could still walk down to the water’s edge, look out beyond the other boats to the far side of the marina, and see the white prow of the Elizabeth lolling emptily in the distance, my eyes forever focused upon that part of it, the naked mast, the rolled-up sail, that I had helped to make.