God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Only ten pretty soon,” said Bernie.

  “Ten?”

  “We’re leaving,” said Mavis. “Moving to Miami. I mean, look, our best friends are gone. Well, not counting you, Julian. And Bernie’s got glaucoma. Our daughter’s been trying to get us to come down. Everything’s cheaper there. And the winters—well, you know what they’re like around here. So we’re packing up, driving down next week. Dot and Scottie are coming, too. We’re going down together.”

  “It’s just a holiday,” said Scottie.

  Dot looked at him severely. “No, it’s not. I’m going to look for someplace nice. You might like it down there better than you think.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Scottie, grinning at Julian. “She’s just kidding. We’re not moving away.”

  “I sure hope not.” Julian got back in his truck and drove to his own place. Then he sat in the cab and looked at the sunlight dappling the roof of his mobile home. They had all known it would be like this, ever since the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management had taken over the property. Oh, sure, they’d all known there would be a slow subtraction of residents until only a few of them were left, and then only two, then one, and at last, some fine day, they would all be gone. But he hadn’t expected it to feel so bad.

  Next day, the last Sunday in July, Madeline Raymond keeled over with an embolism, as if sudden death were catching. Her nephew didn’t come to her funeral, but he arranged long distance from Philadelphia to have her trailer hauled away and sold. Talk about efficiency!

  It took Roger Bland a couple of weeks to catch up with the new statistics on the number of living souls remaining at Pond View. He didn’t know the Buonfestos had left for Miami, he didn’t know the Ryans were arguing between themselves about moving to Florida, too.

  But he was pleased. Only eleven! It was wonderful the way nature, left to itself, simply took its course.

  25

  In the street and in society I am almost invariably

  cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean.

  Journal, January 7, 1857

  Homer had lots of things to look up in the Boston Public Library. He parked at the Concord depot and went in on the train.

  It was a frustrating morning. The Boston Public was one of the great libraries of the western world, but it was troubled by the same spending cuts afflicting the town of Concord. As a result the computer screen told Homer that the whereabouts of one of the books he wanted was unknown, and the other had been stolen from the collection.

  Homer gave up and walked out of the library into the moist heat of late July in Copley Square.

  At once his attention was caught by a woman groping in a trash can on the corner of Dartmouth Street. As he waited for the light to change he watched her turn over the trash with the pointed end of an umbrella and fish out a bedraggled T-shirt. Bulging plastic bags packed into a baby stroller held her belongings.

  Homer had heard a lot about homeless people, but he rarely saw them in the flesh. Furtively he took a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet and held it out to her, wondering if it was the wrong thing to do. Perhaps the woman would be insulted.

  She was not. She accepted it, giving him a piercing look. Embarrassed, Homer smiled at her and plunged down the subway stairs. The Green Line took him to Park Street and the Red Line to Porter Square, where he boarded the train for Concord. But when the conductor passed through the train and stood beside him to punch the return half of his round-trip ticket, Homer couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in his billfold, where it should have been. It wasn’t in any of his pockets. “Sorry,” he said, rummaging for the price of another. He was short ten cents. The conductor looked at him strangely and let it pass.

  The truth was that Homer’s ticket had flown out of his billfold when he removed the ten-dollar bill. The ticket landed on the sidewalk in front of Sarah Peel. Homer didn’t see it, but Sarah did. She reached down and picked it up, examined it carefully, and tucked it away for safekeeping.

  Back at the house on Fair Haven Bay, Homer found Ananda in the cellar. Ananda was examining the household collection of nails and screws. He shook his head sorrowfully at Homer. “I can’t get them straight, you see. Some of the screws are flat on top, some are round, some have a cross. People ask me for them in the store, and I don’t know which is which. And a six-penny nail does not cost six cents.”

  Homer tried to imagine the life of a young man who had never used a screwdriver. Patiently he explained, while Ananda made careful notes. “There,” said Homer, “that’s enough. Let’s go out on the river and cool off.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Ananda, his anxious face transformed.

  On the river the hot sun poured down, but cool exhalations rose from the slow-moving water, and the gentle ripples slapped against the aluminum canoe. Homer laughed at Ananda’s fumbling attempts to handle a paddle. Ananda apologized. He had spent a summer at New Hall College, Cambridge, and there he had become expert at handling a punt on the river Cam, standing up and propelling it with a pole. But canoes were new to him.

  “You just dip it straight in and out like this,” explained Homer. “Whenever the canoe begins to swerve, just hold the paddle close in on the other side. That’s right. Good for you.”

  Swiftly they moved downriver. By the time they had passed the hospital and skimmed under the whizzing traffic on Route 2, Ananda was paddling strongly. Soon they were moving briskly past the sloping backyards of the big houses along Main Street.

  In the shelter of the Nashawtuc bridge they paused to eat their cheese sandwiches. A blue heron flapped up in awkward flight, its huge wings curved to cup the air, its head hanging low. Ananda watched the duckweed swirl in spirals at the edge of the river like galaxies forming and dissolving. Everything was quivering, tossing, trembling. A bird made a snipping noise like scissors.

  “Look,” said Homer, “that’s a new house over there. It wasn’t here last year.”

  “It is very large,” said Ananda.

  They looked at the new house. It was a complicated structure with decks, terraces, a three-car garage, a greenhouse and outbuildings, and a scattering of the Palladian windows that were so popular that year.

  “What a pretty creature,” said Ananda, admiring the pale gray horse that looked at them from an enclosure beside the house. Its ears were pricked up, it leaned over the fence to stare at them. They watched as a woman came out of the house with a pail, opened the gate of the paddock, and stopped at a covered bin. They saw her lift the lid and scoop something up.

  A small gong went off in Homer’s head. Her gesture reminded him of something. Taking the binoculars from Ananda, he watched shamelessly as the woman approached the horse, carrying the pail, calling, “Here, Carmencita, here, girl, good girl.”

  Carmencita wasn’t having any. She sprinted to the other side of the paddock, whinnying in derision. Her mistress gave up and went indoors. But only for a moment. Soon she emerged from another door, carrying a basket.

  “Should we not continue?” murmured Ananda, embarrassed by the way Homer was watching the woman so inquisitively.

  But Homer was fascinated. “She looks so familiar. Wait, I know who it is. It’s Marjorie Bland.”

  Ananda glanced at her over his shoulder. “Her husband is president of the planning board?” Ananda had been doing his homework, getting ready for his appearance on television.

  “Right. He’s the chairman. She’s Mrs. Roger Bland.” Homer went right on staring. Now the woman was kneeling on the grass beside the deck. She was taking little pots out of the basket, transplanting flowers into the ground. Homer could see her profile, her pink nose, her pretty smile. (As usual, Marjorie was having fun.)

  Putting down the binoculars, Homer took in the larger scene—Marjorie’s house, Marjorie’s horse, Marjorie’s garden, Marjorie herself with her happy smile and pink shorts. It was like a commercial version of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Marjorie Bland was Eve before the Fall, as pictured on the co
ver of an L. L. Bean catalog. If somebody had sent a catalog to the original Eve, she wouldn’t have had to go naked, she could have worn a beach and town tank top in cornflower blue and walking shorts in cherry pink and flashing white Top-Siders, just like Marjorie’s.

  Ananda picked up his paddle. “Shall we carry on?”

  “Wait. There’s something about this woman that gives me a pain. And you know what it is?” Homer picked up the binoculars again and studied Marjorie Bland. “It’s her happiness, that’s what it is. Her horrible happiness. She’s probably the happiest woman in the whole wide world.”

  “She will see you,” murmured Ananda, staring carefully down at his sandwich.

  Then Homer knew what he had been reminded of when Marjorie reached into the feed bin with her pail. It was the woman in Copley Square, the homeless woman with all her possessions packed into a child’s stroller. She had reached into the trash can in just the same way. For a moment the two images coalesced.

  There was a word for it, “doppelgänger.” Marjorie Bland and the homeless woman were doppelgängers of one another. They were opposites in every respect, yet Homer knew he would never again catch sight of Marjorie Bland without seeing through her the woman at the library in Copley Square.

  Homer and Ananda stuffed their sandwich wrappers under the canoe thwarts, took up their paddles, and headed back up the river. Turning his head, Homer caught a last glimpse of Marjorie Bland. She was standing in an open doorway looking eastward. That way lay the city of Boston, beyond the willows draped with pale green hair, beyond the cloudy trees of French Meadow, beyond all the intervening suburbs, beyond the sprawling city of Cambridge.

  Homer guessed that Marjorie’s consciousness stopped short at the town line. Beyond the Concord horizon there might be a noise of some sort, an occasional tormented cry, but her ears were stopped up, and she would never hear.

  26

  … a successful life knows no law—Live free,

  child of the mist …

  Thoreau, “Walking”

  When Sarah Peel stepped off the train in Concord, bumping her stroller down the high step, having made the journey with Homer Kelly’s lost ticket, she made straight for the house of Marjorie Bland like a homing pigeon, as if she knew all about Homer’s doppelgänger theory that there was an ethereal bond between herself and Marjorie.

  But Sarah was merely following her nose, heading away from the Concord depot, looking for her imagined landscape of green trees and brown cows and horses with flying manes and tails. At the intersection of Thoreau Street and Main she saw a bridge, and beyond it a light-filled meadow. Pausing on the bridge, she looked down at the water flowing darkly underneath, then lifted her eyes to the green lawn on the other side.

  There was a horse on the lawn, standing behind a fence. The horse was looking at Sarah.

  Dragging the stroller behind her, she plodded across the bridge and found her way down a bushy slope to the pasture fence. Ducks flew up from the edge of the river. A bird threaded the air, swooping down from a great height and soaring up again.

  The horse was waiting for her. It trotted along the fence and stopped, its ears cocked eagerly. It was a small grayish white horse with a fiery eye, just like her own special horse on the merry-go-round. Whiffling gently, it reached its long neck over the fence. Small as it was, it towered above her. Its belly swelled, its rump was round, its eyes were brown and melting. Crowding up against the fence, it bent its great head to Sarah.

  She knew at once what to call it. “Pearl,” she said, stroking its nose tenderly. “Your name is Pearl.”

  All of Sarah’s past life welled up in a burst of affection. The white horse in the green field was a gift, a compensation for her impoverished childhood, her pinched adulthood and brutal old age. It was what she hungered for. The horse too had been waiting—waiting for her, for Sarah Peel.

  “I’ll never go back,” said Sarah, whispering in the horse’s ear.

  Looking around, she saw beyond the pasture a big house and a small shed. The door of the shed was open.

  27

  … our foe is the all but universal woodenness of

  both head and heart.…

  “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

  Marjorie Bland’s niceness was a golden principle. It was the rallying cry for her life on earth. She was nice in every possible way, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night.

  Since Marjorie was not an imaginative person, her niceness was confined to fashionable causes like her recycling campaign. But of course it was a truly worthy undertaking. The banner of her concern for the recycling of newspapers and bottles rippled over the town of Concord. Many of the citizens who read her jolly letters to the Concord Journal resolved to save their bottles, separating the green ones from the clear ones and taking them to the recycling area at the landfill and tossing them into the green bottle dumpster and the clear bottle dumpster. Some were diligent about it, some sorted their bottles when they remembered to do it, a lot of people threw them carelessly into the ordinary trash in particolored confusion.

  The day Sarah Peel arrived in Concord was the day of the week when Marjorie Bland sorted her own bottles, tossing the green wine bottles into one bag, the clear ketchup and vinegar bottles and the jam and mayonnaise jars into another. They were rather pretty, separated like that, each bottle lying among its mates, all matching like the upholstered furniture in her living room.

  Clutching the two bags to her chest, Marjorie walked out of the house and approached the shed where her horse, Baronesa Carmencita de Granada, had her stall. Nervously Marjorie skirted the side of the shed where Carmencita was munching on a bucket of horse pellets.

  Carmencita belonged to Marjorie’s son, Wally, who was spending the summer as a camp counselor in Bar Harbor. Actually the horse was too small for Wally now, and it was going through some sort of senile crisis. Marjorie winced and dodged out of the way as Carmencita caught sight of her and laid back her ears dangerously. Surely it was time to have the dear old thing put to sleep? Marjorie vowed to discuss the matter with Roger.

  The shed space allotted to her recycling studio was on the other side, safely removed from Wally’s impossible horse. Boldly Marjorie pushed the door open and walked in.

  At once she shrieked and dropped her bags of bottles with a splintering crash. An old woman was sitting on a pile of newspapers, looking at her.

  Homer Kelly would have relished the moment of confrontation between Marjorie Bland and her doppelgänger, Sarah Peel. But Homer was not there. Marjorie and Sarah were alone.

  Rallying, Marjorie faced the crisis, recognizing the nature of the problem at once, seeing Sarah for what she was, one of those homeless people she had read about in the paper. Their plight was very much in the public eye. Homelessness was a fashionable topic of conversation in Marjorie’s circle of friends. The question was always the same: Why didn’t somebody do something about it? Roger said it was the budget crisis in Massachusetts. With money so tight, the legislature couldn’t afford to address the situation. It was really a shame.

  What was Marjorie to do now? She stared at the weird creature in her shed, and Sarah Peel stared back. It was obvious to Marjorie at once that she couldn’t do anything about this pitiful case herself. But on the other hand, she couldn’t call the police and have the woman taken away. What if word got out that the Blands had thrown a homeless woman out into the street?

  They had to be so careful. Roger was about to run for the office of Concord selectman, and there was an even more important contest on the horizon. He had been asked to be a candidate for the board of overseers at Harvard.

  Roger was so excited about it! He was trying to figure out how to write the required self-description, so that the alumni and alumnae could read about him when they received their ballots in the mail. Together Marjorie and Roger had been studying the ballots from previous years. The candidates were always successful in business, but more important they were men and women
with deep public concerns. They were dedicated to the YMCA or the Salvation Army or endangered species. They certainly didn’t turn homeless people out on their ear.

  All these considerations flashed through Marjorie’s head in an instant. Then she knew what to do. She remembered her watchword. Niceness was the key. “Good morning,” she said brightly to Sarah Peel. “Would you like some lunch?”

  Sarah merely looked at her. There was something in her eyes that frightened Marjorie. Turning, she scuttled out the back door of the shed, carefully avoiding the paddock. In the kitchen she bustled around, arranging a pretty tray, and in a few moments she was back in the shed. On the tray lay a watercress sandwich, the crusts daintily removed, apple slices in a rosette, two cookies, and a marigold.

  The woman was still sitting on the pile of newspapers. “Bon appétit!” said Marjorie, setting the tray down on another stack and trotting away.

  For the next twenty minutes she kept looking out the window anxiously, hoping the queer old woman would depart.

  She didn’t. At last Marjorie popped back into her recycling studio. “All finished?” she said gaily, looking at the empty tray. Even the marigold was gone. The woman must have eaten it. Marjorie was amused to see a yellow petal stuck to her cheek.

  “Now!” she said in the tone of one who claps her hands and brings a class to order. “Let’s take a ride into town, shall we?”

  Swish, swish, poppity-pop. Before Sarah knew what was happening, she was bundled onto the backseat of Marjorie’s shiny red Nissan.

  It was a short ride to the depot. On Thoreau Street a parking place opened up before them like a miracle, the parting of the Red Sea. Hopping out, Marjorie ran around the car, plucked Sarah and her belongings out onto the sidewalk, and rushed them across the street.

  By another miracle the train to Boston was just pulling in. Swing low, sweet chariot! And then at the last minute, just as Sarah dragged her stroller up the high step of the railroad car, Marjorie thrust into one of Sarah’s bags all the green dollars in her purse.