In later life, after I’d returned to Chatham and begun my legal practice, I had only to glance out my office window to see the name of the man who’d cross-examined Miss Channing on that August afternoon in 1927. For in those days, Mr. Parsons’ office had been located just across the street from where I now have mine, and which his son, Albert Parsons, Jr., still occupies, a lawyer who specializes in personal injury litigation and contract disputes, rather than the prosecution of criminal cases for which his father was renowned throughout the state.
The younger Parsons’ shingle swings above the same little rectangle of grass where his father’s once swung, and which I must have seen quite clearly on the very day my father picked up Miss Channing at the bus stop, our old Ford sweeping past it as we drove to our house on Myrtle Street, my father at the wheel, Miss Channing in the passenger seat, I crowded in the backseat with her luggage, so young and inexperienced, so lost to the iron laws of life that even had they been presented to me, I would have denied their right to hold me down. Certainly, I could not have known how often I would glance at Mr. Parsons’ shingle in the coming years, hear his voice thunder out of the past: It was you, Miss Channing, you and you alone who brought about this death.
In those days Albert Parsons held the office of commonwealth attorney. A short, stocky man with wire-rimmed glasses, I often saw him making his way along the wooden sidewalk to his office, puffing his briar pipe and doffing his gray homburg to passersby. He’d appeared perfectly self-assured back then, confident in his own abilities, a man who expected to live out his life in a world whose rides were clear to him, a paradise, as he must have considered Chatham, poised on the rim of heaven.
I remember seeing Mr. Parsons in old age, when he would sit on the wooden bench in front of the town hall, tossing broken pieces of soda cracker to the pigeons gathered at his feet, his eyes watching them with a curious lack of focus. But before that, in the first years of his retirement, he’d built a workroom in his backyard, furnished it with metal bookshelves, a wooden desk, a brass reading lamp, and an old black typewriter. It was there that he’d written his account of the Chatham School Affair, utterly convinced that he had unearthed the darkest of its secrets.
Down through the years I’ve often thought of him, the pride he took in having discovered the cause of so much death, then the way he later strode the streets of Chatham, boldly, proudly, as if he were now the exclusive guardian of its health, Miss Channing no more than a dark malignancy he’d successfully cut out.
It was a Saturday, clear and sunny, the last one before school was scheduled to begin, when I next saw Miss Channing.
My rather had already left for Osterville, as my mother told me that morning, but he’d left instructions for me to look in on Milford Cottage, see if Miss Channing needed anything, then run whatever errands she required.
Milford Cottage was almost two miles from the center of Chatham, so it took me quite some time to walk there. I arrived at around ten, knocked lightly at the door, and waited for Miss Channing to open it. When there was no answer, I knocked again, this time more loudly. There was still no answer, so I rapped against the door a third time.
That’s when I saw her. Not as I’d expected, a figure inside the cottage, or poised beside its open door, but strolling toward me from the edge of the woods, no longer dressed formally as she’d been before, but in a pale blue summer dress, billowy and loose-fitting, her black hair falling in a wild tangle to her shoulders.
She didn’t see me at first, and so continued to walk in the woods, edging around trees and shrubs, her eyes trained on the ground, as if following the trail of something or someone who’d approached the cottage from the surrounding forest, lingered a moment, then retreated back into its concealing depths. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, plucked a leaf from a shrub, lifted it to the sun, and turned it slowly in a narrow shaft of light, staring at it with a kind of childlike awe.
When she finally glanced away from the leaf and saw me, I could tell she was surprised to find me at her door.
“Good morning, Miss Channing,” I called.
She smiled and began to walk toward me, the hem of her skirt trailing lightly over the still-moist ground.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.
She appeared amused by such a notion. “Scare me? You didn’t scare me, Henry. Why would you think that?”
I shrugged, finding her gaze so penetrating that I began to sputter. “Anyway, my father sent me to make sure that everything is all right. Particularly with the cottage. He wanted to know if anything else needed fixing. The roof, I mean. How it held up. Against the rain, that is. Leaks.”
“No, everything’s fine,” Miss Channing said, watching me intently, as if memorizing my features, carefully noting their smallest dips and curves, the set of my jaw, the shape of my eyes.
It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of being exposed, my skin peeled away layer by layer, revealing what lay beneath, the bony tower, the circuitry of arteries and veins, the resentment I so carefully suppressed. I felt my hand toy with the button at my throat.
“Well, is there anything else you need?” I asked, still mindful of my father’s instructions, but eager now to get away. “I mean, between now and Monday, when school starts?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“All right, then,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you at school on Monday.”
With that, I nodded good-bye and started back toward the road, ambling slowly, not wanting to give an impression of flight.
I was halfway down the path that led from her door to the road when I heard her call to me.
“Are you walking back to the village, Henry?”
I stopped and turned toward her. “Yes,” I said.
“Would you mind if I came along with you? I haven’t really seen it yet.”
I didn’t relish the idea of being seen with a teacher outside a classroom setting. “It’s a long way into town, Miss Channing,” I said, hoping to dissuade her.
She was undeterred. “I’m used to long walks.”
Clearly, there was no way out. “All right,” I said with an unenthusiastic shrug.
She came forward, quickening her pace slightly until she reached my side.
Sometime later, after I’d read her father’s book and realized all the exotic places he’d taken her during the years they’d traveled together, it would strike me as very strange mat she’d wanted to go into the village at all that morning. Certainly, given the breadth of her experience, Chatham could only have seemed quaint. And yet her curiosity seemed real, her need to explore our small streets and shops not in the least diminished by the fact that she’d strolled the narrow alleyways of Naples and the plazas of Madrid, her father at her side relating gruesome stories of Torquemada’s Inquisition and the visions of Juana the Mad in that same tone of ominousness and impending death that later fathers would use as they led their children along the banks of Black Pond, grimly spinning out a tale whose dreadful course they thought had ended there.
CHAPTER 4
I have always wondered if, during that first walk down Plymouth Road with Miss Channing, I should have noticed some hint of that interior darkness Mr. Parsons later claimed to have unearthed in her. Often, I’ve tried to see what he saw in his first interrogation of her, the “eeriness” he described in his memoir, the sense that she had “delved in black arts.”
She carefully kept pace with me that morning, a breeze playing lightly in her hair, her conversation generally related to the plant life we saw around us. She asked the names of the trees and flowers that bordered the road, often very common ones like beach plum or Queen Anne’s lace.