“Did you catch a fish?” she asked Mr. Reed brightly as she skipped along beside him.
“We didn’t go fishing,” he told her. “Just rowing.” He glanced back toward me. “Just Henry and me,” he added.
We set the boat down, and Mary climbed into it as Mr. Reed tethered it to the tree, taking a seat at the bow, bouncing slightly, her small hands clapping rhythmically to some beat in her mind.
“Where’s your mother?” Mr. Reed asked her once he’d secured the boat.
Mary pointed to the porch. “She’s been sitting there all day”
I turned toward the house. In the evening shade I had not seen her, but now I could make her out quite clearly. She sat in the far corner of the porch, rocking quietly, her green eyes peering dully out of the shadows like two small, unpolished stones.
CHAPTER 19
After the Chatham School Affair, my father always believed that the deepest tragedies inevitably unfolded slowly, reached their climaxes in seizures of violence and grief, then lingered on forever in the minds of those who were near enough to feel their lethal force and yet survive.
Some, of course, do not survive at all.
Those who perished return to me most often in a newspaper photograph published during the trial, which I saw lying on my father’s desk at Chatham School one evening, my father at his office window, his hands clutched behind his back, staring out into the courtyard, where the remnants of Miss Channing’s sculpture had been gathered into a pile of gray rubble, an almost surreal mound of shattered faces.
In the photograph Mrs. Reed is seated in her husband’s small white boat. Mary is on her wide lap. Both smile happily in a picture taken, according to the newspaper, by Mr. Reed during what it called “happier times.”
I can still remember how wrenching I found that photograph the evening I first saw it. Because of that, it never surprised me that I sometimes took it from the little archive I inherited at my father’s death, staring at it by the fire, letting it remind me of Mrs. Reed and her daughter, what they’d been, no longer were, and thus warn me away from the temptation I occasionally felt to find a wife, have children of my own.
Of course, there’d been plenty of testimony to remind me of them at the time, particularly of Mrs. Reed, neighbors and relatives who’d come at Mr. Parsons’ bidding, and who, by answering the questions he put to them, had labored to bring her back to life, consistently portraying her as a dutiful and, for the most part, cheerful woman, faithful and hardworking, a good mother and a good wife, incontestably entitled to her husband’s unswerving devotion.
I remembered Mrs. Hale, the coroner’s wife, talking quietly of how well Mrs. Reed had taken care of her parents in their illness and old age. Then Mrs. Lancaster after her, speaking no less quietly about Mrs. Reed’s kindness toward her feebleminded sister, the way she’d never failed to bring her a cake and a jar of apple cider on her birthday.
But of all the people who testified about Abigail Reed, the witness I most remember was my mother.
As it turned out, she’d known Mrs. Reed almost all her life, remembered her as Abbey Parrish, the only daughter of William and Dorothy Parrish, he a fisherman who moored his boat in Chatham harbor, she a fisherwife of the old school, who hauled tubs of lobster and baskets of quahogs and slabs of smoked bluefish to the local market every day. As a child, Abigail had often accompanied her mother there, standing at her side, helping her sell the day’s catch from behind a wooden table that had been placed beneath a tattered canvas roof, her hands made rough by the work, scarred by scales and fins.
On the stand, my mother had spoken in a somewhat more agitated manner than either Mrs. Hale or Mrs. Lancaster. Her voice took on an unmistakable edginess as she answered Mr. Parsons’ questions, her eyes sometimes involuntarily flitting over to Miss Channing, little sparks of anger glinting in them, especially as she related the afternoon Mrs. Reed had turned up at our house on Myrtle Street, her manner quite desperate by then, as my mother described it, a chilling terror in her red-rimmed eyes.
Still, for all the impact of her testimony, my mother didn’t do or say anything on the stand that stunned me as much as what happened only a few minutes after she left it.
“Walk your mother home, Henry,” my father told me as she stepped from the witness box and began to make her way down the aisle toward the back of the courtroom.
She was already passing through its large double doors by the time I caught up with her, moving at that brisk, determined pace she often assumed, as if something were chasing after her, she trying to outrun it.
“Are you thirsty, Mother?” I asked her as we made our way through the dense, crowd that had gathered on the courthouse steps. “Do you want to stop and have something to drink?”
She stared straight ahead as she answered, roughly elbowing her way through the mob, her eyes glaring hotly toward the street. “No, I want to go home,” she said.
At the bottom of the stairs, she wheeled to the right and strode up Main Street at the same nearly frantic pace, taking short, quick steps, her heavy black shoes thumping loudly along the walkway.
For nearly a block she kept silent, then, suddenly, under her breath, in a kind of bitter hiss, I heard her say, “That woman should be hung.”
My eyes widened in dreadful horror at what she’d said. “Miss Channing?” I gasped, my complicity in her fate sweeping over me in a bitter wave. “But she didn’t …”
My mother waved her hand, silencing me, as she continued forward at the same merciless pace, her eyes now glowing furiously.
I could tell by the hard look in them that she had no intention of saying more. So I simply rushed along beside her, glancing at the bustling crowds, the knots of people that had gathered on every street corner and in front of every shop. It looked as if the whole world had suddenly descended upon our village, all drawn by the dark specter of the Chatham School Affair.
“I don’t understand why everybody is so caught up in this,” I said to my mother as she surged forward along the crowded street, an observation I only half believed but felt safe in making, so utterly neutral, as it seemed to me, edging neither toward my mother’s testimony nor my own, neither to the error of her suspicions, nor the unbearable actuality of my crime.
Still she said nothing, oblivious, or so it appeared, not only of my last remark, but of the steady stream of traffic in the streets, the cars and people moving past us, the scores of men and women who spread out over the broad lawn of the town hall.
In that ceaselessly agitated surrounding, it seemed equally safe to offer another observation, one I’d desperately clung to during the previous weeks, as if, by clinging to it, I could stay afloat above the tragedy that had by then engulfed so many others. “It’s the love story that attracts them, I guess. Just that it’s basically a love story.”
At that, my mother came to a halt so abrupt and violent, she appeared to have run into an invisible wall.
“A love story?” she asked, her eyes igniting with a fire I had never seen in them before and of which I had not believed her capable.
“Well, that’s what Miss Channing and Mr.—”
“You think it’s a love story, Henry?” My mother’s words burst from her mouth like puffs of steam.
I could feel the air heat up around us, my mother’s body begin to smolder.
“Well, in a way it is,” I said. “I mean, Miss Channing just—”
“Miss Channing?” my mother cried. “What about Mrs. Reed? What about her love for her husband? Isn’t that a love story too?”
It seemed the sort of question Mr. Parsons might have posed to the twelve jurors who’d been asked to judge Miss Channing, and ultimately to condemn her, and I realized that I had no answer for my mother, that I had never known the kind of love she had just spoken of, one based on ancient vows and meant to last forever, the “love story” of a marriage.