God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Goodness,” said Marjorie, “a shopping mall in Walden Woods! Those conservation people aren’t going to like it.”

  “They’ll talk about our historical heritage, I suppose,” said Roger. “No matter what comes up in this town, somebody fastens the word heritage to it. It’s a pain in the neck.”

  “Oh, poor Roger. But of course we’re lucky to live in a place with so much history. I tell myself that every time I drive around in less fortunate places.”

  “But there has to be a limit somewhere,” protested Roger.

  “Oh, of course!” Marjorie stirred her coffee and added a wee dollop of cream. “I must say, those people in the Thoreau Society are just a little bit …”

  “Far out?” suggested Roger boldly, and Marjorie laughed and agreed.

  Far out—it was something no one would ever say about Roger Bland. Roger could be relied on to stay close to the sensible center of public opinion. He would never crawl out on some nutty limb all by himself. He walked down the narrow path in the middle of every road. His clothes walked down the middle, too, his coat lapels, his necktie, his shirt, his pants. Oh, let there be no pleating at the waist when I go out to sea! Something in Roger Bland recoiled, withdrew, shrank back from extreme positions. Unconsciously he dreaded expansiveness. There was a lid within him, controlling, calming, pressing down. It was unimaginable that any large and generous impulse would ever induce him to push up the lid and burst free, shouting “Huzzah!”

  “There’s one good thing anyway,” said Roger, picking up the morning paper. “We don’t have to lift a finger to get back another piece of Walden Woods. Those Pond View people are dying off. Remember? There are only fourteen of them left.”

  “And they’re terribly old, I’ll bet,” his wife said optimistically. Marjorie always looked on the bright side.

  When Roger left for the office that morning, Marjorie went to the stable to set out a bucket of feed for her horse, ducking in and out quickly before Carmencita could race across the paddock and plunge at her or bite her or misbehave in some other upsetting way. That job done, she came in again and sat down at her desk to pursue her own personal good cause, her new hobby.

  Marjorie had joined the recycling movement. This morning she was writing a letter to the editor of the Concord Journal, urging her fellow citizens to bring their old newspapers to the recycling area at the landfill. “And what about saving your grocery bags and using them over again next time? Save, save, recycle! (signed) Marjorie Bland, Musketaquid Road.”

  Marjorie loved her recycling campaign. It was such fun. But then everything Marjorie did was fun, even her severest duties, even caring for her senile old horse and rolling the tennis court. Marjorie’s fun was the pitiful remnant of the sturdy resignation to the will of God on the part of the forefathers, who had endured without complaint death-dealing plague, hunger and privation, and savage spells of bitter winter cold.

  18

  Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

  Walden, “The Ponds”

  “Mr. Grandison, sir? I’m calling again about Lot Seventeen. I wonder, sir, if perhaps it’s slipped your mind?”

  Jefferson Grandison looked at the telephone with disgust. He had given specific instructions to his receptionist that this particular caller was not to be put through. “Of course,” he said after a moment’s delay, “we will attend to the matter at once.”

  “I knew you would, Mr. Grandison. I knew it was merely an oversight on your part. I wonder if you could speak in terms of an exact time?”

  “Excuse me, but my other phone is ringing.” Grandison put down the phone and walked out to the anteroom to speak sharply to Martha Jones.

  Later on, when Jack Markey stepped out of the elevator and said good morning, Martha cautioned him, “Watch out. He’s in one of his funny moods.”

  “Right,” said Jack, but he felt confident that he knew how to handle his chief in all his funny moods. He smiled conspiratorially at the receptionist. In her white dress she was an astonishingly beautiful girl, but he had given up trying to charm her. There was something, perhaps, about living in the clouds that had unsexed her. Perhaps it was the altitude. Perhaps medical people should look into the effect on the sex drive of height above sea level. Jack wondered if he should stay the hell away from the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building before his own healthy urges slipped away from him.

  The woman was right about Grandison. He was indeed in one of his detached stratospheric moods. His vague gaze dodged away from Jack and lost itself in the mist outside the enormous windows. But Jack had long since discovered in that unfocused eye a remote and smoldering point of light. It was like peering into the smoky entrance to a cave, seeing far away within the cavern a bed of burning coals. Grandison was in there all right.

  Jack recounted his progress in preparing the Concord groundwork for the development to be called Walden Green. Then they got down to brass tacks, the massive business arrangements that would be necessary whenever the town gave them a binding agreement—the permanent commitment from the Paul Revere Insurance Company, the construction loan, the mortgage, the hard and soft costs, the timing. “There’ll be a saving on the design,” said Jack, smiling.

  “Of course. In-house. Your department.”

  “Right.”

  Not until then did they get down to the other Concord matter. “You’ve found an intermediary, I understand?” murmured Grandison.

  “Yes. Two, as a matter of fact. One of them’s free of charge.” Jack grinned.

  “I leave it in your hands entirely.” Grandison stared at his right hand, which was doodling in a notebook, leaving only the faintest trace on the white paper.

  “Oh, Mr. Grandison,” said Martha Jones, putting her head in the door, “Mrs. Grandison is on the phone.”

  The meeting was over. Jack excused himself and plunged earthward once again in the glass elevator.

  It was always a shock to find himself on the ground again, surrounded by the reality of Huntington Avenue with its drab street people. The same sorry-looking bag lady was occupying the glass portico of the Grandison Building.

  Once again Jack stumbled over her disordered belongings. Why didn’t the damned woman move out of the way? “Excuse me,” he said irritably.

  Sarah Peel glanced at him with her ancient reptilian eyes. She saw Jack speak to the guard before turning on his heel and striding away down the street. Slowly she got up.

  The guard walked toward her. He was a softhearted man, but he knew he had been too lenient already. “Look here, ma’am,” he said, not unkindly, “you’ve got to move on.”

  Without a word Sarah collected her possessions, stuffed them into her stroller, and trudged off in the direction of Copley Square.

  She had been asleep when Jack Markey tripped over her, or at least she had been lost in the half stupor with which she abolished time. It was the same daydream that had made her childhood bearable, in that sad house in East Boston next to the New England Ring and Flange Company, where the whole neighborhood echoed with the scream of the high-powered saws and the thundering noise of sheet metal racing between rolling drums. Young Sarah had dreamed of a green countryside with farms and trees, she had longed for cows with large soft eyes and ponies with flying manes and tails.

  Once a traveling fair had come to the empty lot beyond the Ring and Flange Company, and every day for a week Sarah took a ride on the merry-go-round. Every day she chose the same horse, the white one that looked back at her with a fiery eye. Down the horse plunged, and up, and then it rushed forward with a lovely surging bound, while the calliope wheezed the “Skater’s Waltz” and the drums banged magically by themselves, and the cymbals clashed. The horse belonged to her. She gave it a name, Pearl.

  The other kids didn’t know how to ride, they just sat there, but Sarah knew how. She felt it in her bones.

  19

  … put an extra condiment into your dish,

  and it will poison you.

  W
alden, “Higher Laws”

  It had been a month since the death of Alice Snow. Honey Mooney was up early to get ready for church. First she washed out the casserole in which she had cooked the pasta for last night’s party. She didn’t really need to scrub it so hard. It wasn’t her pasta that would be to blame, if anybody bothered to investigate. It was Mavis Buonfesto’s pecan pie, and Honey had tucked the stuff neatly into only one serving, the piece that went to Shirley Mills.

  Then she looked in her closet for something suitable to wear to church, although she doubted she would actually get to church this morning. Where was her knit blouse? Oh, of course, she had left it in the dryer in the laundry shack.

  Charlotte Harris too had a basket of dirty clothes to take care of. Carrying it to the laundry shack, she tried to smooth the sadness from her face. For weeks she had been struggling with depression. Normally she threw it off by getting mad and doing something about it, but this time there was nothing to do, since the only person to be mad at was herself. Charlotte was still aching with embarrassment about her letter to Julian Snow.

  For the entire month she had scrupulously avoided Julian. She hadn’t even allowed herself to walk to the other end of the park. But at the same time it was unendurable to be incarcerated week in and week out with her husband.

  This morning even Pete noticed something different. “What’s the matter, baby doll?” he said, getting up from the table and putting on his cook’s white coat, ready for the Sunday morning shift at the hospital.

  Baby doll. If anybody in the world was not a baby doll, it was Charlotte Harris. Charlotte was a tall, angular woman with big hands and feet. There was nothing fluffy about her at all. She wanted to strangle him for calling her that. “Oh, I guess I’m just kind of down this morning.”

  Pete wasn’t listening. He gulped down the last of his coffee and tramped out of the kitchen, ready to dismember chickens all day long. Opening the door, he glanced back. Charlotte tensed and closed her eyes. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” said Pete. The door banged.

  For a moment Charlotte sat very still with her eyes closed, asking herself why she had married him. Well, that was a stupid question. She had been young, that was why. She had been a fool. Pete had been just as dumb, to have picked her from all the rest.

  The real question was why she stayed married, why she didn’t just walk out. Charlotte knew the answer to that question, too. She was afraid. If she left Pete, she would get sick, or else Pete would get sick. It was what happened to people who abandoned their mates or were abandoned by them. They got sick and died. It had happened to Charlotte’s father, who had walked out on her mother and promptly developed prostate cancer. It had happened to Charlotte’s older sister, who had left her husband, only to die of liver disease. It had happened to the wife of her cousin George when he went off with a younger woman. Poor Loretta had suffered a fatal stroke.

  So Charlotte hung on, timid, superstitious. At least she was able to get away from Pete every day at her job as bookkeeper in the hardware store. She liked the proprietor, she liked his new young clerk, the boy from India. Once in a while she set young Ananda straight about the merchandise. “The customer wants a box of washers,” she would say, drawing him aside. “Look, they’re in this drawer, in different sizes. They fit between things, like this, you see?”

  But at home things were going from bad to worse. It was strange the way Pete never seemed to notice her weary hostility. Well, he wasn’t exactly deprived. Pete took what he wanted when he wanted it. The more Charlotte despised him, the more she felt it her duty to go along.

  The laundry shack was not her favorite place. The machines were in a basement seven steps below ground level. Opening the door, she inhaled the dank underground smell and heard the buzzing hum of the washing machines and the tumbling noise of the clothes in the dryers.

  Julian Snow was there ahead of her, raising the lid of an empty washing machine. It was the only one that was not shaking and sloshing. “Oh, sorry,” he said, backing away. “After you.”

  “No, no, you were here first.”

  But he insisted. “Go ahead. I’ll be back later on. You just go right ahead.” And he went away.

  When Honey Mooney came in a moment later, she found Charlotte with tears running down her cheeks. “Charlotte, dear, can I do anything? Tell Honey what’s the matter.”

  You’re not my honey, Charlotte wanted to say. She rammed a quarter into the machine and turned to look straight at Honey. “Where does it come from, your name?”

  Honey giggled. “It was a pet name of my husband’s. And my mother used to call me that.”

  “Because you’re so sweet, is that it?” Charlotte said it with ironic intent, but she knew Honey would take it as a compliment.

  “Let me know, dear, if I can help in any way,” said Honey, smiling, pulling her clothes out of one of the dryers.

  Walking back across the driveway, Charlotte couldn’t help thinking that there was too much unnecessary love in the world. Of course it was important to have love between the sexes at a certain stage, so that people would have children and reproduce the race. But why should there be all this extra amount left over? Here she was, a woman past the reproductive age, yet she was still mooning over a person of the opposite sex. It was part of the overabundance and extravagance of nature. There were too many mosquitoes in the midsummer air, too many spiders building webs under the propane tanks of the mobile homes, too many tadpoles in the shallows of Goose Pond, too many stars in the sky—and now somebody had found a whole lot more galaxies in the infinite depths of space.

  Charlotte looked back at the woods beyond Julian’s house, where too many trees were vying with each other and too many leaves were thick on the too many branches. She opened the door of her own house and went inside. Her own excess of love was part of it. In a tidier universe a woman would die at the end of her hormonal usefulness. She would simply vanish from the earth.

  Honey Mooney, Mavis Buonfesto, and Shirley Mills were the only regular churchgoers at Pond View. On Sunday mornings they met at Honey’s at nine-thirty and drove in her car to St. Bernard’s for ten o’clock mass. They always sat in a pew halfway to the altar beside one of the stations of the cross, Christ falling for the third time. And afterward they went for coffee and sweet rolls at Brigham’s on Main Street, and then they liked to wander along the sidewalk and see what all the cute shops were selling—cunning teddies and fancy gift items and funny Garfield greeting cards. And then Mavis would buy a new lipstick at the drugstore and Shirley would pick up a dispenser of hand cream, and Honey would choose a new decorating magazine, because she loved to see all the new ideas for fixing up your home.

  This morning Shirley was late. Mavis kept looking out Honey’s window, expecting to see Shirley hurry along the driveway in her navy sport jacket and ruffled blouse, but she didn’t come, and she didn’t come, and finally they went to fetch her.

  Her door was locked. They knocked, but there was no answer.

  Mavis was tall. Standing on tiptoe, she could see into Shirley’s bedroom window. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Mavis, “she’s still in bed.”

  Mavis rapped sharply on the window, but Shirley didn’t stir. “Shirley,” called Mavis, “get up, it’s time for church.”

  Shirley still didn’t budge.

  “Oh, dear God,” said Mavis, turning to Honey with wide eyes. “She looks really strange.”

  They hurried down the road to the park manager’s house, because he had duplicate keys to all the mobile homes. The manager came back with them, and soon they were all standing over Shirley’s bed, looking down at her. Honey shook her and called her name.

  Shirley didn’t respond. She was curled up tight, her eyes squeezed shut, her features pinched together in a grimace.

  They looked at each other in horrified surmise. “I think she’s dead,” said the park manager.

  “Oh, no,” sobbed Mavis. “She was just fine yesterday.”

  “S
he was only fifty-two,” wept Honey. “I know, because she was exactly five years older than me, to the very day.”

  They called Dr. Stefano, the physician who took care of all the people at Pond View. He called them his private zoo.

  “But I don’t think I ever examined Shirley Mills,” he said, looking down at her sadly. “I just saw her once, when she had the flu.”

  “She had a heart condition,” explained Honey. “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “You know,” said Dr. Stefano, looking at Honey severely, “you people shouldn’t be living alone. If somebody had called me, I might have been able to save her life. It’s dangerous for all of you to be by yourselves. Why don’t you women double up and live together?”

  “I’m a married woman myself,” said Mavis proudly.

  “We all keep an eye on each other,” said Honey.

  “Think about it,” said Dr. Stefano, packing up his black bag.

  Roger Bland made a habit of reading the obituary page of the Concord Journal, and he noted with satisfaction the passing of one more resident of Pond View. “Look,” he said, showing the paper to his wife, “another one of them is gone.”

  Marjorie Bland’s face took on its automatic expression of sorrow before the transitory nature of life on earth. “Oh, too bad,” she said, sipping her sherry. Then her attention was caught by the birds fluttering around the feeder just outside the living room window. “Oh, Roger, look at the darling chickadees.”

  “That’s thirteen now,” said her husband, hardly glancing at the chickadees.

  “Oh, no, not as many as that. One, two, three. No, four. Five! Oh, Roger, look!”

  Thirteen, thought Roger, smiling to himself. Only thirteen more to go.

  20

  Instead of noblemen, let us have noble

  villages of men.

  Walden, “Reading”

  Under the guidance of Hope Fry, Jack Markey approached the town boards with good luck in his pocket.