“All you do is think about that woman,” my mother said. “That Miss Channing. How romantic it all is. Her and Mr. Reed. Walking on the beach. Sailing in the boat. Where do you think Mrs. Reed was while all that was going on?”
In my mind I suddenly saw Mrs. Reed as she’d appeared on the porch the day we’d returned from the Bass River, heard her daughter’s words again, the vast suffering and loneliness they now so powerfully conveyed. She’s been sitting there all day.
“I’m ashamed of you, Henry,” my mother snapped angrily, her words hitting me like small iron pellets. “Ashamed of the way you think.”
Staring at her mutely, I realized that I’d never understood how from the moment the trial began, my mother had done nothing but consider not the tale spun by my willful romantic imagination, but the dreadful anguish of Abigail Reed, the unbearable fear and rage and sense of betrayal that must have overwhelmed her as she’d watched her husband slip away.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” I whispered.
What she said next stunned me with its uncompromising force. “You’re all alike, Henry, all you men.”
She stared at me for one long, ghastly moment, then turned and walked away, leaving me in a world that had begun to move again, though differently than it had before, filled with greater complications, a weave of consequences and relations that seemed larger than romance, deeper and more enduring, though still distant from my understanding, a world I’d only just briefly glimpsed, as it were, through my mother’s eyes.
My mother never again spoke to me directly about the Chatham School Affair. And I remember that a few hours later, after a nearly silent dinner, I went upstairs to my room, lay down upon my bed, and tried to think about Mrs. Reed, not in the panic and despair of her last seconds, as I’d continually thought of her throughout Miss Channing’s trial, but before that, when she’d been a wife and mother.
Toward dawn I awoke, and there she was before me. Abigail Reed, as if she were alive again, with red hair and green eyes, watching me silently from the ruins of her shattered faith. And for the first time, as I lay in the shadowy early morning light, I found that I was able to imagine what it must have been like for her during those weeks when Mr. Reed had begun to drift from her, spending long hours with me in the boathouse, the two of us working deep into the night to complete his boat, while she remained at home, tending to their daughter, bathing her, clothing her in thick flannel sleeping gowns, putting her to bed.
I saw all those many nights when the hour had grown late, and still Mr. Reed had not returned. How she must have wondered about the changes that had come over her husband, how preoccupied and distracted he had be come, as if he could not keep his mind from wandering away from her, and toward some distant attachment whose nature she could not let herself consider.
And yet she had to have considered it, had to have noticed that he no longer touched her with the same affection, nor with any great desire, and that although he still frolicked with Mary, he more often preferred to be alone with his daughter, taking her on long walks or even rowing her out into the center of Black Pond, where, bundled up against the cold of that long winter, they fished in the icy water.
Perhaps, in order to escape the unbearable implications of the changes she noticed in him, Mrs. Reed had sometimes recalled the moment when she’d first seen him, a tall, slender man, leaning on a cane as he bought his weekly supplies at the village store, the way they’d walked out together, he holding the door for her, nodding quickly as she passed, then falling in behind her for a little distance before she’d stopped, turned toward him and asked him bluntly if he was not Leland Reed, the new teacher at Chatham School.
But where had he gone, this man who’d lived with her for more than five years, who was the father of her daughter, and who’d provided for her and loved her as no man ever had or ever would again, but who now seemed to have receded, perhaps even beyond the promised gravity of home.
How Mrs. Reed must have suffered during all those long nights, I thought as the air lightened outside my bedroom window that morning. How she must have yearned to regain Mr. Reed once again, not just for a night, but forever.
But as I well knew, Mr. Reed had never returned to her. So that as the days passed one after the other, and the nights deepened and grew colder, I knew that she must have walked to the window at regular intervals, parted the curtains, and peered out into the darkness, her eyes now fixed on the empty road, searching for some sign of his approaching car. At such a moment, locked in dread, Mrs. Reed’s face could not have looked at all like the women of romantic myth, Iseult beneath her billowing white sail, or Guenevere waiting heroically to be burned alive. And yet, for all that, she now seemed heroic to me somehow, as my mother had certainly thought of her when she fled the court that day, convinced, as she had every right to be, that no man, her son included, could ever conceive or even remotely comprehend the depth of her long pain.
CHAPTER 20
Nor do I think that my father ever really understood it. At least not at that time. For although he must have felt the deepest sympathy for Mrs. Reed, I believe that he remained captured in a different orbit, one that spun around Miss Channing, had her life, her loss, as its central star.
And so it never surprised me that he labored to defend her on that August afternoon when it came his turn to take the stand.Mr. Parsons: Now, you hired Miss Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing as a teacher at Chatham School, did you not, Mr. Griswald?Witness: Yes, I did.Mr. Parsons: And early on, did you have any reason to doubt the wisdom of choosing Miss Channing for her post at Chatham School?Witness: No, I did not.Mr. Parsons: Well, at a later time, did you begin to have reservations about Miss Channing’s character?Witness: Not exactly.Mr. Parsons: But as you have already heard, Mr. Griswald, an earlier witness has testified that she told you about certain rumors having to do with Miss Channing’s relationship with Leland Reed.Witness: Yes, I was informed that certain people felt that way.Mr. Parsons: But you chose to ignore their warnings?Witness: I had no proof of anything, Mr. Parsons.Mr. Parsons: But you had observed some rather odd behavior, had you not? In regard to both Mr. Reed and Miss Channing. Certain alarming behavior?Witness: I wouldn’t call it alarming.Mr. Parsons: Well, isn’t it true that both Mr. Reed and Miss Channing appeared extremely strained during the final weeks of the school year?Witness: Yes, they did.Mr. Parsons: And didn’t this strain become obvious at one point in your own house, Mr. Griswald? At a party on, I believe, April twenty-third.Witness: Yes, it did.Mr. Parsons: Did Miss Channing and Mr. Reed come to that party together?Witness: No. Miss Channing came into my office the afternoon before the party and asked if I might pick her up.Mr. Parsons: You, Mr. Griswald? She didn’t wish to be picked up by Mr. Reed?Witness: Evidently not.Mr. Parsons: And did you agree to do that, to bring Miss Channing to your house that evening?Witness: Yes, I did.