But it had not been the only response my father made, as I had known long before Mrs. Abercrombie took the stand. For one day during the very next week, he dropped in on Mr. Reed’s afternoon class.
I remember how I’d entered Mr. Reed’s room to find my father already stationed in one of the desks at the back. He nodded to each of us as we came into the room, then silently watched as Mr. Reed began his lesson, leaning back, trying to appear casual, but with a clearly visible sense of vigilance in his eyes.
My father remained in that position during the entire class, his gaze only occasionally drawn toward the courtyard, Miss Channing’s room at the far end of it. Instead, he kept his attention intently focused upon Mr. Reed, no doubt listening not only to what he said, but how he said it, observing not just a teacher going through the motions, but the man behind the teacher, looking for that broken part of Mr. Reed that he so deeply feared and distrusted, not the part that had been shattered in the war, but long before, as he conceived it, in Adam’s dreadful fall.
When the class was over, my father rose quietly and walked to the front of the room. He said something to Mr. Reed, nodded politely, then walked down the corridor to his office. I watched as he made his way down the hallway, his dark, ponderous frame like an ancient ship cutting through a stream of youthful, darting boys, silent, meditative, a melancholy figure in a black coat, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath the burden of our lost and implacable hearts.
CHAPTER 18
Spring came at last, and toward the middle of April, we went rowing, just as Mr. Reed had promised we would on that cold January day when the three of us stood at the end of the pier together and looked out over Black Pond.
It was a Saturday, warm and sunny, with what my father called “the glow of Easter” everywhere around us. During the preceding months I’d worked on the boat with Mr. Reed and attended classes with Miss Channing, but I’d actually seen them together only during their accustomed arrivals and departures from Chatham School. All their other “secret rendezvous,” as Mr. Parsons later called them, had been discreetly held outside my view.
I’d gotten to the boathouse early that morning, already at work when Mr. Reed arrived, fully expecting that we’d labor through the day, as we always did, finish up toward the end of the afternoon, then take a long walk on the beach near the marina.
Mr. Reed had arrived at the boathouse with a very different plan in mind, however, one he announced as soon as he opened the door and peered inside.
“It’s too pretty to be cooped up in here,” he said, one foot inside the boathouse, the other still on the walkway outside it. He stepped out of the door and into the warm spring air. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me to follow after him.
I followed him out the door, then down the wooden walkway toward the road. In the distance I could see his car, half-concealed behind one of the marina’s old outbuildings, but enough of it visible so that I could make out the small white rowboat roped to its top.
Mr. Reed was already pulling himself behind the wheel by the time I rounded the corner of the building. “Come on, Henry,” he said, motioning me forward, hurrying me along. “We want to get an early start.”
It was then I saw Miss Channing sitting on the passenger side, a large basket in her lap, her pale blue eyes like distant misty lights behind the dusty windshield.
“Hello, Miss Channing,” I said as I climbed into the backseat of the car.
She nodded but didn’t answer, and I suppose that it was precisely at that moment I first noticed the peculiar tension and uneasiness that would never leave her after that, a sense of being trapped or constricted, the world’s former breadth and expansiveness now drawing around her like a noose.
Mr. Reed leaned forward and hit the ignition. “We’re off to the Bass River,” he said in a cheerful tone that struck me as somewhat forced, as if he were trying to lift Miss Channing’s spirits. He looked at her for a moment, offering a slender smile. “We’ll have the whole day, Elizabeth,” he told her. “Just like I said we would.”
It took nearly an hour to reach the Bass River, a spot Mr. Reed had already selected, one he’d “chosen for its remoteness and seclusion,” as Mr. Parsons later described it, surrounded by high grass and at the bottom of a sloping embankment, so mat neither the car nor the boat was visible from the main road a short hundred yards or so away.
“At this point in the river, it’s nearly a mile from bend to bend,” Mr. Reed told us as he began to untie the ropes that bound the boat to the top of the car. “We can row downstream, then come back with the tide.”
Miss Channing walked to the bank of the river, and stood, watching, as the current swept past her, bearing bits of wood and marsh debris, its slowly moving surface reflecting a cloudless sky.
Once the boat had been untied, Mr. Reed grasped the bow, pulled it toward him, then down, so that it slid off the roof of the car at a deep angle, its bow nosing into the soft ground. “All right, Henry,” he said, “take hold of the back there.”