God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Mr. Domingo?” Mimi said again.

  Still no answer. Inquisitively Mimi peeked through the curtains at the back of the shop and pushed through them. The farther room was empty. It was a sort of locker room with a dirty sink, a sloppy desk, a grubby window, a worn linoleum floor, and an overflowing trash barrel—Alphonso Domingo’s sanctum sanctorum.

  Mimi stared at the heaps of papers on his desk. Without hesitation she slipped her long manicured fingernails among the piles and shuffled them, turning them over, examining them with practiced eyes, reaching deeper down, pulling out buried invoices and bills, surveying them swiftly.

  One piece of paper was more interesting than the rest. Mimi plucked it out and read it carefully. It was a bill from the Sonesta Hotel on the Charles River in Cambridge—“Michelle LaFitte, occupancy three weeks, $2,100.”

  There were other bills clipped to it. Michelle LaFitte’s hair had been done, her teeth had been fixed, her corns attended to. She had bought a fur coat.

  Alphonso Domingo was a married man. Who was Michelle LaFitte?

  With the incriminating papers in her hand, Mimi hurried outside and dodged into Corporate Gifts, where she kept a copy machine. In a trice she was back in Alphonso’s office, returning the originals.

  Strolling back along the sidewalk to the Parfumerie, Mimi smiled. Perhaps there would soon be no ugly hole in her row of smart shops. Another bright awning might soon be filling the gap.

  Later that week Mimi Pink made another assault and captured another enemy fortress. The bank at last came through with her new loan, and she completed the transfer of the commercial building housing Taylor Baylor’s shoe store.

  Taylor moved out at once, not waiting for his lease to expire. Selling his stock of shoes at a loss to a competitor in Framingham, he moved south, intending to spend the rest of his days ambling around a golf course in Orlando, Florida, flailing glumly at a golfball amid showers of exploding turf, telling himself that this was the life. Day after day Taylor whapped the ball high in the air and watched it bound into the rough, or bury itself in the sand, or plummet into a waterhole. Taylor was bored and disgusted. He was homesick for Concord, Massachusetts.

  As for Mimi Pink, she wasted no time in taking over the abandoned ruins of Taylor’s shoe store. Standing victorious in the shambles, she looked around in cool disdain at the debris he had left behind.

  “We’ll take down that wall, I think,” she said to her decorator. “A pink carpet, pearl-gray walls. How soon can that woodcarver deliver a new sign?”

  The decorator shook his head. “I don’t know. He says it’s getting harder and harder to get gold leaf. The price is going up. How about plain gold paint?”

  But Mimi had her standards. She closed her eyes in disgust and shook her head. “It’s gold leaf or nothing. He’s probably gouging me. I’ll talk him down.”

  Look at me, Lee-Ann! Look at me, Annie! Look at me, Buzzie! Who’s winning now? Me, that’s who! Me, me, me, Mimi Pink!

  23

  When were the good and brave ever in a majority?

  “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

  It wasn’t only the town boards that were meeting in Concord that summer, and the Chamber of Commerce and the Consortium of Concord Boutiques. Down on the shore of Fair Haven Bay where the Sudbury River turned the corner and spread itself out like a lake, another planning session was under way.

  Homer and Mary Kelly, Oliver Fry, and Ananda Singh were deep in conspiratorial consultation. They sat on the porch high in the air above the river and put their heads together. Mary’s common sense, Oliver’s anger, Homer’s euphoria, and Ananda’s fresh enthusiasm trembled on the verge of possible action.

  Ananda recognized Oliver Fry at once as the angry father of the handsome girl at the railroad station. But Ananda was unknown to Oliver Fry. At first Oliver looked at him suspiciously. Was this another Jack Markey, with smoking nostrils and lashing pointed tail? But when Homer related his first conversation with Ananda, Oliver was disarmed.

  “Do you know what he said?” reported Homer. “He said, ‘The wood thrush sings to amend our institutions,’ that’s what he said.”

  Oliver was charmed. He melted at once, and beamed, and shook Ananda’s hand.

  So that was all right.

  Oliver was full of news. He had been inquiring around and attending hearings. He had collared one of the selectmen, he had bawled insults at the chairwoman of the school committee, he had burst into a meeting of the planning board, a wild apparition with sandy hair, inflamed freckles, and bulging eyes. “‘Who hears the fishes when they cry?’” he had shouted, quoting Thoreau in the middle of a request by a petitioner to add a rumpus room to his garage.

  “Fishes?” the petitioner had said, bewildered. “What fishes?”

  Homer listened to Oliver’s tirade and wondered why idealists were often so absurd. Realists were always sober and sensible. They spoke in measured tones and quoted the bylaws and belched discreetly behind their handkerchiefs. They won, that was the trouble, while the frustrated idealists grew more and more ridiculous and cut off their ears and stopped taking baths and adopted a hundred and fifty cats.

  Concord was selling out to Jack Markey and Jefferson Grandison, that was the substance of Oliver’s story. If nobody did anything about it, there would soon be a mixed-use complex of housing units and commercial properties on land now belonging to the high school, right across the highway from Walden Pond. All that was needed was a slight change of zoning at the special town meeting in October. With the town boards behind it, the motion would probably pass.

  “This Jack Markey,” said Mary Kelly, “does he live here in town?”

  “No,” growled Oliver, “he comes from Brookline.”

  “Then how did he find out about all the boards? How did he know who to talk to? How did he figure out all these trade-offs?”

  “There must be a traitor in our midst,” said Oliver, glowering. And then he had an excruciating thought. He remembered his first sight of Jack Markey, sitting at the kitchen table with Hope. The two of them had been bowed over a map of the town of Concord.

  Oliver groaned aloud. Hope was the traitor, his own beloved daughter.

  Then Ananda broke in. “But how can the people of Concord allow such things to happen?”

  Homer and Mary looked at each other and made wry faces, but Ananda went on talking. He was like the child before the naked emperor, asking an innocent question. He was not blinded by the pragmatic crudities of local politics, he was not deafened by rote phrases of long custom, nor was his tongue thickened with trite phrases about the sacred heritage of history. His view was large and ample. “All over the world there are disciples of Henry Thoreau. People of every nation will care what happens to this wooded hill near Walden Pond. Surely the people of Concord will wake up, will remember, will be ashamed.”

  Ananda stopped talking and lowered his eyes.

  For a moment no one else said anything. The sun threw shimmering sparkles into their eyes from the river. A pair of white gulls floated high over the water, blown all the way from the landfill where they had been scavenging choice bits of garbage.

  Oliver gaped at Ananda. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Mary smiled. What a darling the boy was.

  Then Homer came to his senses and laughed. “Do you know what we’ve got here? A spokesman. We’ve got to send him out into the world to carry the flag.”

  “I know,” said Mary promptly, getting to her feet, “the television station. Concord’s got one. Why can’t he appear on television?”

  “Brilliant.” Homer thumped the table. “They’re always looking for issues and causes, people to talk about something. Anything to use up time. Call them up.”

  Ananda looked frightened. “You mean I am to make a public speech?”

  “Just say what you said just now, that’s all. Tell the world. Well, it won’t exactly be the world. It will be a few people only half listening because they’re ge
tting supper and they forgot to switch channels, or they’re looking for the ball game and they can’t find it, or they tuned in by mistake. But it’s better than nothing.”

  Mary made the call at once. To her surprise the station manager accepted the idea with enthusiasm. “But we’ll have to get somebody to talk on the other side. I mean, we can’t just show one side.”

  “What do you mean, the other side?”

  “You know, the side that wants to see Walden Green built on that site. We’ve got to be fair, after all.”

  “You mean, you’ve always got to balance right with wrong, and truth with falsehood?”

  The station manager let this sarcasm pass, and they arranged a date for Ananda’s appearance.

  “Tuesday evening, is that all right, Ananda?” said Mary. “It will be a sort of debate, with somebody speaking for what they call the other side.”

  Ananda was dismayed. “I know so little about local matters. You must instruct me. I am so ignorant, so uninformed.”

  “I wonder who they’ll get to speak for the developer?” said Oliver Fry darkly.

  “Maybe they’ll go right to the top,” said Homer, “and get Grandison himself.”

  But it was not Jefferson Grandison. The manager of the television studio called Jack Markey and asked him to do it. But Jack thought of a better candidate.

  He discussed his choice with Grandison on the phone. “After all, she’s a local citizen. She’ll carry more weight than some foreigner. And she’s the daughter of that Thoreau nut, Oliver Fry. She’ll undercut their side, knock the bottom out of it.”

  “I see,” said Grandison, staring out the window of his vast office in the direction of the blue haze that was the western suburbs, where Jack Markey was an invisible microscopic speck in a tiny telephone booth.

  So Jack arranged it with Hope, who was too surprised to say no. Next morning at breakfast she broke the news to her father as he took his container of dead frogs from the freezer. “Oh, by the way,” said Hope carelessly, “I’m going to be on television.”

  “Oh?” said Oliver, prying off the top of the container to inspect the frogs. “What for?”

  “Well, the truth is,” said Hope with a laugh, as though it were just a joke, “I’m going to be defending Walden Green, the new shopping center. Now, Father, don’t get upset. Jack asked me to do it, and I didn’t see why not, so I said yes.”

  Oliver dropped the container. The slippery brick of frozen frogs slid out on the floor. “You didn’t see why not?” He gasped and pursued the frogs across the linoleum. “Why not? Because it will make a fool of your father, that’s why not.”

  “You mean, they asked me just because I’m your daughter?” Hope laughed cruelly. “Maybe they think I’m something in my own right, not just the daughter of Oliver Fry.”

  Oliver was silent. He picked up the frogs, feeling his heart break.

  Hope’s conscience lashed at her, but she flounced out of the room and ran lightly upstairs. In a moment Oliver could hear her typewriter rattling in her bedroom. The noise battered at him. He couldn’t bear it.

  Tackety-tackety-tack went Hope’s typewriter, clattering without cease. But when she heard the screen door slam she stood up to watch her father ride his bicycle up Walden Street in the direction of the high school.

  He was hunched over the handlebars like an old man. For the first time Hope saw how much power she had over him, and she was dismayed. She didn’t want his happiness to be dependent on her. People should be free and self-sufficient, as if they lived in separate narrow shafts without connecting doors and windows.

  But now, looking through her own bedroom window as her father pumped his bicycle away around the curve of the street, Hope threw up the sash and called after him. It was too late. His bicycle grew smaller and smaller and disappeared behind the blank wall of the light-plant substation across the road.

  24

  Money is not required to buy one necessary

  of the soul.

  Walden, “Conclusion”

  The United Parcel truck was just pulling up to Julian Snow’s door when he got home from the landfill. “For Alice Snow,” said the driver, hopping out of the truck with a big box.

  Julian took the box inside and opened it suspiciously. Cautiously he felt around in the Styrofoam popcorn for the silly things Alice had ordered. He found a doorknob chime, a plastic whatnot with four triangular shelves, a musical toilet-paper holder, and a praying hands paperweight. Sadly he set them side by side on the table.

  Well, Honey and Mavis would take them. Julian picked up the box, intending to carry it to the dumpster behind the laundry shack, when something else fluttered out. It was a handwritten message for Alice Snow: “Please in the future do not send cash.”

  Alice had paid for all this stuff in cash? Eighty dollars, the invoice said. Where had she got the cash money?

  There was only one answer. Julian was so staggered, he dropped the box, and the white popcorn scattered on the floor. Alice had been helping herself to their savings. She had taken all the hundreds and twenties out of the file box over the window and hidden them somewhere, and then she had stuck them in envelopes and sent for things from catalogs. Honey or Mavis or Shirley must have mailed the letters for her.

  Julian thought about it. Some people had said that Alice was killed when she caught someone stealing the two thousand dollars. But it wasn’t true after all. There was no connection between the disappearance of the money and the death of his wife. Alice had taken it herself and hidden it somewhere.

  Julian ransacked every nook and corner. He found nothing.

  Oh well, hell, it didn’t matter. Julian didn’t begrudge Alice her little extravagances. If she’d told him she was taking fifty dollars here and eighty dollars there, he wouldn’t have said no. But she would have had a fight on her hands, ordering doorknob chimes and plastic whatnots. Maybe that was why she had been so secretive.

  Next day was Saturday. Julian got up early, hauled his aluminum canoe out of the bushes, lifted it into the back of his truck, tossed in the paddles and his rod, and put the bucket of minnows from the bait shop on the floor of the cab. On the way out of Pond View he slowed down at Norman Peck’s place, because he’d been planning to ask Norman to go along. Then he didn’t stop after all, because he recognized the Toyota belonging to Norman’s daughter parked beside Norman’s car. So Julian went on by himself, driving down 126 and into the Walden Pond reservation and down the hill to the boat launch on the shore.

  Julian was after rainbows. In the summer they were mostly too deep, down there in the cold water in the depths of the pond. But there were cold springs here and there, making chilly columns in which the trout rose closer to the surface. He had a thermometer. He could test for the cooler places.

  In the early morning there was a lacy mist on the water. Julian reeled out his line and looked at the mist. He should have felt contented, but he didn’t. He felt funny about Alice. The ugly objects on the kitchen table had brought her back so strongly. There she was, Alice Snow, right there in the kitchen. And then in spite of himself Julian thought about the note from Charlotte Harris, “It’s just that I’ve always loved you.” No sooner had Charlotte written those words than Alice had died. What about Pete Harris? Would he vanish, too, like Alice, at a single breath of betrayal?

  It took Julian two hours to catch his limit. Afterward, on the way back into the trailer park, he was surprised when Stu LaDue stood up from his chair and waved his arms and waddled over importantly to stand beside the cab of the truck and tell him something. “Norman’s passed on,” Stu said, staring at Julian, his round eyes enlarged by his thick glasses. He was obviously enjoying his role as the deliverer of tragic information. “Brain hemorrhage. The hearse is there now. See, right beside his daughter’s car. Fran, she come over from Watertown.”

  Julian’s eyes filled with tears. Norman had been his closest friend at Pond View. They had been fishing companions from day one.

  He
pulled up beside the hearse just as the men from the funeral parlor emerged from Norman’s Landola with a covered object, all that was left of Norman Peck.

  Sorrowfully Julian approached Norman’s daughter, who was watching from the doorway. He could hardly get the words out as he told her he was sorry.

  Norman’s daughter was businesslike. “I suppose you people want this thing out of here,” she said, jigging her elbows sideways to indicate the trailer. “Well, I can’t do it. First I’ve got to clear out Dad’s junk, and then who the hell wants a thirty-five-year-old mobile home? I’ll have to advertise. I’m not going to give it away, I’m telling you that. You already got a bunch of empties here. Well, one more won’t hurt you.”

  It was true. People died, and their relatives didn’t get around to removing their mobile homes. The old trailers weren’t worth much on today’s market, that was the trouble. People looking for mobile homes now, they wanted big fancy Burlingtons with cathedral ceilings and fancy kitchens and glamorous bathrooms and wall-to-wall carpeting. Some of the new ones were seventy-two feet long.

  Julian watched Norman’s daughter get into her car with the trophy Norman’s dog had won thirty years ago for being the best pug dog in the state of New Hampshire. He couldn’t believe that the man he had joked with yesterday was reduced to a round mound under a tarpaulin, a hardhearted daughter in a Toyota, and a silver-plated trophy for a prize-winning pug.

  Another shock was waiting for him. Bernie and Mavis Buonfesto hailed him from their screened porch. Dot and Scottie Ryan were there, too. Julian pulled his truck over and got out and walked up to the porch, looking for sympathy, for tender memories of Norman. “Now there’s only twelve of us left,” he said, smiling at them wanly.