Then he told me what she’d said.
She had not wanted to go to the lighthouse that afternoon, Miss Channing told my father, had not wanted to meet Mr. Reed, be alone with him again. For it seemed to her that each time they were together, something unraveled inside of him. Still, he’d asked her to meet him one last time, asked her in letter after letter during that last month, until she’d finally agreed to do it.
He was standing against the far wall of the lighthouse when she entered it, his back pressed into its softly rounded curve, the old brown jacket draped over his shoulders, his black hair tossed and unruly.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you.”
She closed the metal door behind her but did not move toward him. “I’ve missed you too, Leland,” she said, though careful to keep a distance in her voice.
He smiled delicately, in that way she’d noticed the first time she’d seen him, a frail, uneasy smile. “It feels strange to be alone with you again.”
She remembered the few times they’d been alone in the way he meant, with his arms around her, his breath on her neck, the warmth of his skin next to hers.
“You haven’t forgotten, have you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No,” she admitted.
He drew himself from the wall, staring at her silently. The chamber’s single light glowed faintly from behind a cage of wire mesh, throwing a gray crosshatch of shadows over his face. “How has it been for you, Elizabeth? Being away from me?”
She looked at him sadly, mournfully, knowing that she would never allow herself to be taken into his arms again. “We have to go on, Leland,” she said.
“Go on to what?” he asked. “To nothing?” He seemed on the verge of sweeping toward her.
“I can’t stay long,” she told him quickly, then glanced out the small square window of the door, the playing field beyond it, the boys of Chatham School scurrying about in a game of touch football.
“Is it so hard to be with me now?” he asked, an edginess in his voice.
She shook her head wearily, now regretting that she’d come at all. “Leland, there’s no point in this. The only answer is for me to leave.”
“And what will I do then, Elizabeth?”
“What you did before.”
His eyes darkened, as if she had insulted him. “No. Never. I can never go back to the life I used to live.” He began to pace back and forth, his cane tapping sharply on the cement floor. “I can never do that, Elizabeth.” He stopped, his eyes now glaring at her. “Do you want to just throw me away? Is that what you want?”
She felt a sudden surge of anger toward herself, the fact that she had ever let him love her as he did, or loved him in return, ever pretended that they lived in a world where no one else lived, where no other hearts could be broken.
“We can go away, Elizabeth,” he said. “We can do what I always planned for us to do.”
The very suggestion returned her to her own childhood, to a father with grand notions of freedom he never followed out of love for her, how bereft she would have felt, how worthless and unloved, had he been taken from her by any force less irresistible than death. “You know I won’t do that,” she said. “Or let you do it.”
He stepped toward her, opening his arms. “Elizabeth, please.”
She lifted her hand, warning him away. “I have to go, Leland.”
“No, don’t. Not yet.”
She looked at him imploringly. “Leland, please. Let me leave, still loving you.”
He stepped forward again, closing the space between them, staring at her needfully, but now with a terrible cruelty in his eyes. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met you,” he told her. “Sometimes I wish that you were dead.”
She shook her head. “Stop it.”
He closed in upon her, his hands reaching for her shoulders.
She turned and grabbed the handle of the door, but he suddenly swept up behind her and jerked her around to face him, his hands grasping at her waist.
“Stop it,” she repeated. “Let me go.”
His grip tightened around her, drawing her into a violent embrace.
“Stop it. Leland … Leland …”
He thrust up and pushed her hard against the door, then spun her roughly to the right, away from the door, and pressed her against the wall, so that she could feel it, hard and gritty, at her back.
“I can’t let you go,” he said, his eyes now shining wildly in the gray light.
She pressed her hands flat against his shoulders. “Stop it!” she cried, now thrusting, right and left, desperately trying to get free.
But each time she moved, he pressed in upon her more violently, until she stopped suddenly, drew in a deep breath, leveled her eyes upon him, her body now completely still, her voice an icy sliver when she spoke. “Are you going to rape me, Leland? Is that what you’ve become?”
He rocked backward, stricken by her words.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, releasing her, stepping away, his eyes now fixed upon her with a shattered, unbelieving gaze. “Elizabeth, I only—” He stopped and looked at her brokenly, saying nothing more as she turned and fled toward the door, her red scarf flowing behind her like a blood-soaked cloth.
My father watched me silently for a moment, then rose and walked to the window, his hands behind his back as he stared out into the yard.
I kept my place by the door, my eyes fixed on the two leather valises beside the bed as I tried to keep the rhythm of my breath quiet and steady, so that it would not reveal the upheaval in my mind. “So it was all a lie,” I said at last. “What Miss Channing said in court. About never going beyond the ‘acceptable limits.’ They were lovers.”
“Yes, they were, Henry,” my father said. “But at the trial Miss Channing didn’t want Mary to ever know that.”
I saw the Elizabeth sailing in an open sea, a ghost ship now, drifting eerily through a dense, engulfing fog.
My father walked over to me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Miss Channing had a good heart, Henry,” he said, then added pointedly, as if it were the central truth of life, “Never forget, that it’s the heart that matters.”
We left Milford Cottage a few minutes later, took Miss Channing’s belongings to the post office, then returned home. My mother was preparing dinner, and so my father and I retired to his office. He sat down in his chair, took out his pipe. I sat opposite him, still thinking about what Miss Channing had told him, how much she must have trusted him to have done so, my eyes studying the portrait she’d painted of him, not as the staid schoolmaster I’d so despised at the time, but as a man who had something restless and unquenchable in him, something that stared out toward the thin blue lake that shimmered seductively in the distance. It was then I realized that Miss Channing had painted my father not as himself alone, but in some sense as herself as well, perhaps as ail of us, stranded as we are, equally tormented by conflicting loves, trying, as best we can, to find a place between passion and boredom, ecstasy and despair, the life we can but dream of and the one we cannot bear.
“I’m glad I told you what I did this afternoon,” he said. “You deserved to know the truth. Especially since you were there on Black Pond that day.” He shook his head. “The sad thing is that it was all over between Miss Channing and Mr. Reed. She was going away. And in the end, he would have taken up his life again.” He seemed captured by the mystery of things, how dark and unforgiving the web can sometimes be. “Nothing would have happened if Mrs. Reed hadn’t died in Black Pond that day.”
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”
He leaned back in his chair. “So that’s the whole story, Henry,” he said, bringing the pipe toward his lips. “There’s nothing more to know about the Chatham School Affair.”
I didn’t answer him. But I knew that he was wrong.