“No, not at all. Please, come in,” my father told him, though not with his usual enthusiasm. There was something rather stiff in the way he rose from his chair to shake Mr. Reed’s hand. “I hope Mrs. Reed is feeling better.”
Mr. Reed nodded. “Yes, she is,” he said.
“Please, sit down,” my father told him.
Mr. Reed took a seat near the door, glancing about until his eyes fell upon Miss Channing. And though his lips lifted in a thin smile, his eyes seemed utterly mirthless and unsmiling. “Hello, Miss Channing,” he said.
She nodded coolly. “Mr. Reed.”
My father glanced back and forth between them. “Well, now,” he said loudly, clearly trying to draw Mr. Reed’s attention back to the group, “we were all discussing the possibility of adding a course in Shakespeare to next year’s curriculum.”
Mr. Reed turned toward him but offered no reply.
“We were wondering who might best be able to teach such a course,” my father went on.
Mr. Reed stared my father dead in the eye. “I really don’t know,” he said with what must have struck my father as a shocking sense of indifference, as if Chatham School had ceased to play any significant part in his life, but only continued to hang from it, numb, limp, useless, like an atrophied appendage waiting to be cut away.
It was a tone that clearly disturbed my father, and which he could not confront, so he merely drew in a quick, troubled breath and returned his attention to the others. “Well, how about a round of port?” he asked them.
All heads nodded, and with that my father summoned Sarah to serve the port.
“We’re so lucky to have Sarah,” my mother said after she’d finished serving and left the room. “We had a wonderful Negro girl before her. Amelia was her name, and she was quite able.” She glanced at Miss Channing. “As a matter of fact, Amelia would have been very interested in talking to you, Elizabeth.”
Miss Channing’s fingers tightened around her glass. “Why is that?” she asked evenly.
“Because she’d have wanted to hear all about your life in Africa,” my mother answered. She’d picked her knitting from a basket beside her chair and the long silver needles flashed in the lamplight as she flicked them right and left.
“Amelia was a follower of Marcus Garvey, you see,” my father said. “She was quite taken with this idea of going back to Africa, living free, and all that.” He shrugged. “It was all terribly unrealistic, of course, the whole business.” Drawing a pipe from the rack that rested on the table beside his chair, he began to fill its dark briar bowl with tobacco. “But what can you do about such a romantic notion?”
It was a question he’d asked rhetorically, not expecting an answer, least of all a brutal one.
“You can crush it,” Mr. Reed blurted out harshly, his eyes darting over to Miss Channing, then back to my father.
My father looked at him quizzically, his hand now suspended motionlessly above the bowl of his pipe, his eyes widening to take him in. “Crush it, Mr. Reed?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Mr. Reed said. “You can tell her how foolish such an idea of freedom is. How foolish and preposterous it is to believe that you can ever escape anything or change anything, or live in a way that—”
He stopped, his eyes now turning toward Miss Channing, who only glared at him, her face taut and unmoving.
Then my father said, “Well, that would be rather cruel, wouldn’t it, Mr. Reed?” His voice was surprisingly gentle and restrained as he continued, his eyes leveled upon Mr. Reed’s. “Perhaps you could simply remind her—Amelia, I mean—that there is much in life beyond such extreme desires.”
Mr. Reed shook his head, drawing his gaze from Miss Channing, and waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said wearily.
There was an exchange of glances among the guests, then, as if to lower the heat within the room, Mrs. Benton chirped, “It’s a lovely room you have here, Mrs. Griswald. The curtains are … lovely.”
With that, the conversation took a different and decidedly less volatile turn, although I can’t remember what was said, only that neither Mr. Reed nor Miss Channing said anything at all. Mrs. Abercrombie left within a few minutes, then Mrs. Benton, each of them nodding cordially as they bade my father and mother good night.
Mr. Reed rose directly after that. He seemed weary beyond measure, as if his earlier outburst had weakened him profoundly. At the entrance to the parlor he turned back. “Do you need a ride home, Miss Channing?” he asked, though with an unmistakable hopelessness, her answer already made clear to him by the ravaged look in her eyes.
“No,” she said, adding nothing else as he turned from her and moved silently out the door.
And so it was my father and I who drove Miss Channing home that night, gliding through the now-deserted village, then out along Plymouth Road to where we finally came to a halt at the very end of it, the headlights of my father’s car briefly illuminating the front of Milford Cottage before dissolving into the impenetrable depths of Black Pond.
“Well, good night, Miss Channing,” he said to her quietly.
I expected Miss Channing to get out of the car, but she remained in place. “Mr. Griswald,” she said. “I wonder if I might ask you something?”
My heart stopped, for I felt sure that she was about to tell him everything, reveal the whole course and nature of her relationship with Mr. Reed, ask my father for that wise guidance I know he would have given if she had done so.
But she did nothing of the kind. Instead, she said, “I was thinking of making something for the school. A piece of sculpture. Plaster masks of all the boys and the teachers, everyone at the school. I could arrange them on a column. It would be a record of everyone at Chatham School this year.”
“That would be a lot of work for you, wouldn’t it, Miss Channing?” my father asked.
“Yes, it would. But for the next few weeks—” She stopped, as if trying to decide what to say. “For the next few weeks,” she began again, “I’d just like to keep myself busy.”
My father leaned forward slightly, peering at her closely, and I knew that whatever he had refused to see before that moment he now saw in all its fatal depth, Miss Channing’s misery and distress so obvious that when Mr. Parsons finally asked his question, You knew, didn’t you, Mr. Griswald, that by the night of your party Miss Channing had reached a desperate point?, he could not help but answer, Yes.
But that night at Milford Cottage he only said, “Yes, very well, Miss Channing. I’m sure your sculpture will be something the school can be proud of.”
Miss Channing nodded, then got out of the car and swiftly made her way down the narrow walkway to her cottage.
My father watched her go with an unspoken sympathy for a plight he seemed to comprehend more deeply than I would have expected, and which later caused me to wonder if perhaps somewhere down a remote road or along the outer bank, some woman had once waited for him, one he wished to go to but never did, and in return for that refusal received this small unutterably painful addition to his understanding.
If such a woman ever lived, her call unanswered, he never spoke of it.
And as to Miss Channing, as he watched her make her way toward the cottage that night, “God help her” was all he said.
CHAPTER 21
I think it was the somberness of my father’s words that awakened me early the next morning, sent me downstairs, hoping that I wasn’t too late to catch up with Sarah as she set off for her weekly reading lesson.
She was already at the end of Myrtle Street when I called to her. She waited, smiling, as I came up to her.
“I thought I’d go with you this morning,” I told her.
This seemed to please her. “That would be grand,” she said, then turned briskly and continued on down the street, the basket swinging between us as we made our way toward Milford Cottage.