I could see my mother and Mrs. Reed sitting beside the empty hearth of the parlor, our best china teacups in their hands, Mrs. Reed tormented beyond measure, telling of her husband’s betrayal, my mother growing more and more angry and alarmed as she listened to her story.
“I couldn’t hear what they said,” Sarah added. “But it looked serious.”
“Where are they now?”
“They went for a walk, the two of them.” Sarah gave me a piercing look. “What’s this all about, Henry?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I lied, then turned away and mounted the stairs to my room.
I was still there an hour later when my father returned from his office at Chatham School. He called me downstairs and asked me directly where my mother was. I glanced toward where Sarah stood silently at the entrance of the dining room, waiting for my answer.
“She went out for a walk,” I said.
“A walk?” my father asked. “At this hour? With whom?”
“With Mrs. Reed,” I told him.
He could not conceal his troubled surprise at such a visit. “Mrs. Reed? Mrs. Reed came here?”
“Yes. She came by this afternoon.”
“What did she want?”
“Just to see Mother, I guess.”
He nodded casually, determined to put the best possible light on such a meeting. “Well, they were neighbors, you know,” he said. “Your mother and Mrs. Reed. They’re probably talking about old times, that sort of thing.”
“I didn’t know they were neighbors,” I said.
“Yes, they were,” my father said, obviously reluctant to provide any further details. “Well, go on about your business, then, son,” he added, then turned and walked into the parlor.
I stood at the parlor door, “When were they neighbors?” I asked.
He sat down, picked up the newspaper from the table beside his chair, and began turning the pages, still trying to avoid any further discussion of the matter. “When they were young. Your mother lived next to the people Mrs. Reed worked for after she was—” He stopped and looked at me suddenly. “Mrs. Reed was abandoned, Henry. When she was a young woman.”
“Abandoned?”
“Left at the altar, as they say.” My father’s eyes now retreated behind the paper once again. “And so your mother has a certain … well, a certain sympathy, I suppose you’d call it. For Mrs. Reed, I mean.” He drew in a long breath. “For what she’s gone through in her life.”
He said nothing more about Mrs. Reed, so that I left the parlor shortly after, returned to my room upstairs, and stayed there until I heard the creak of the front gate, glanced out the window, and saw my mother striding up the walkway to the front stairs.
I had one of those premonitions children often have, moments when they sense that things are about to fly apart. Perhaps it was the firm, heavy-footed way my mother took the stairs, or the hard slap of the screen door as it closed behind her.
In any event, I went downstairs to find her in the parlor with my father. He’d lowered the paper and gotten to his feet, facing her from what looked like a defensive position beside the mantel.
“A woman knows, Arthur,” I heard my mother say.
“That’s preposterous, Mildred, and you know it.”
“You won’t face it, that’s the problem.”
“There has to be some sort of—”
“A woman knows,” my mother cried. “A woman doesn’t need proof.”
“Yes, but I do, Mildred,” my father told her. “I can’t just bring two respected teachers into my office and—”
“Respected?” My mother spat out the word. “Why should they be respected?”
“That’s enough,” my father said.
My mother sank briefly into a fuming silence. Then, in a calm, deadly voice she said, “If you won’t do something about this, Arthur, then I’ll have no respect for you either.”
My father’s voice filled with dismay. “How can you say such a thing to me?”
“Because I mean it,” my mother said. “I married you because I respected you, Arthur. You seemed like a good man to me. Honest. Steady. But if you don’t do something about this situation between Mr. Reed and that woman—well, then, the way I see it, you’re not the man I married.”
What I have always remembered most from that dreadful moment is that as my mother listed those things that had drawn her to my father, she never once mentioned love.
For a few smoldering seconds they faced each other without speaking. Then my father walked to his chair and slumped down into it. “It doesn’t matter anyway, Mildred,” he said softly, his eyes now drifting toward the window. “Miss Channing is leaving Chatham School. She will not return next year.” He picked up the newspaper from the floor beside his chair but did not open it. “She resigned this afternoon. Whatever it is that Mrs. Reed thinks must be going on between Miss Channing and … well … you can tell her that it has come to an end.”
My mother stood rigidly in place. “You men always feel the same way. That when it’s over, a woman can just forget that it ever happened.”
Wearily, my father shook his head. “I didn’t say that, Mildred, and you know it.”
What my mother said next amazed me. “Have you ever betrayed me, Arthur?”
My father looked at her with an astonishment exactly like my own. “What?” he blurted out. “My God, Mildred, what’s gotten into you? How could you ask me such a question?”
“Answer it, Arthur.”
He stared at her, curiously silent, before he finally took a breath and gave his answer. “No, Mildred,” he said evenly. “I have never betrayed you.”
I looked at my mother, her eyes upon my father with a lethal gaze, and it struck me that she did not believe him, or at least that she would never be sure that he’d told her the truth.
For a moment they simply faced each other silently. Then my mother walked past him, edging her way through the parlor door as she headed for the kitchen. “Dinner in an hour” was all she said.
The dinner we sat through an hour later was extremely tense. My father and mother spoke only of trivial things—my father’s plan to include a couple of new courses in the curriculum, my mother’s to have a larger summer garden at the back of the house. When it was over, my mother walked into the parlor, where she stayed, knitting by the unlighted hearth, until she went up to her bed. My father went back to the school, where he worked in his office until nearly nine, returning home only after my mother had already gone upstairs.
I was sitting in my customary spot in the swing on the front porch when I saw him coming down the street, his gait very slow, his head lowered slightly, the posture he always assumed when he was deep in thought.
He nodded to me as he came up the stairs.
“Nice evening, isn’t it, Henry?”
I expected him to go directly into the house, as he usually did. But instead, he came over to the swing and sat down beside me. At first I didn’t know what to do in regard to the exchange I’d heard between him and my mother a few hours before, but after a time my curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to bring it up.
Still, I didn’t want to approach things too directly, so I said, “When I was coming downstairs this afternoon, I thought I heard you say that Miss Channing was leaving Chatham School.”
He did not appear surprised that I’d overheard him, nor particularly alarmed by it, so that I felt the faint hope that, perhaps for the first time, he’d begun to see me not as a little boy from whom life must be concealed behind a wall of secrecy and silence, but as someone on the brink of adulthood to whom, however painfully, its truths must be revealed.
“Yes, she’s leaving, Henry.”
“Where’s she going?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced toward me, then away again. “But I wouldn’t worry about Miss Channing. She’ll do quite well, I’m sure. She’s a very able teacher. Very able. I’m sure she’ll find another post somewhere else.”