God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Good-bye, good-bye!” she cried as the train pulled out. Then she stood back, gasping, feeling she had handled the crisis superbly. Niceness had done its utmost. She would tell Roger all about it, and he would congratulate her for quick thinking. Marjorie raced for the car as the first big drops of a summer storm fell out of the sky.

  But as the train moved away from the Concord depot on the shining track and rolled past Walden Pond and plunged into the woods, Sarah thought of the horse in Marjorie’s stable, the pretty white horse named Pearl, the horse that belonged to Sarah.

  “Just you wait,” Sarah promised Pearl. “Don’t you worry. I’ll be back.”

  Alphonso Domingo, the barber, was also leaving Concord on the train. He sat across the aisle from Sarah Peel, leaning forward, staring at the floor, his hands clasped between his knees.

  Alphonso had not intended to leave his shop so early, but after a surprise visit from Mimi Pink, he had hung a Closed sign on the door and locked the place up.

  Mimi’s visit had been a disaster. She had taken pieces of paper out of her handbag and rattled them at Alphonso. She had proof, she said, of his intimate friendship with a woman. She slapped down her copies of the bill for Michelle LaFitte’s three weeks at the Hotel Sonesta, and the bills from Michelle’s podiatrist and dentist, and the receipt for Michelle’s mink coat.

  And then Mimi offered to buy Alphonso out.

  Alphonso was cornered. He said yes.

  28

  There is never an instant’s truce between

  virtue and vice.

  Walden, “Higher Laws”

  Jack Markey sat in Hope’s kitchen on the morning of the television debate. Before them lay the plans and elevations for Walden Green.

  “Where’s your father?” said Jack, looking around nervously.

  “Don’t worry,” said Hope. “He’ll be gone all day. He’s on a collecting expedition. He’s looking for pitcher plants in Gowing’s Swamp.”

  Jack shivered. “Isn’t that the quaking bog where they used to bury horses? What if he falls in?”

  Hope laughed, but Jack had an image of Oliver Fry’s mad eyes rolling as he went down, down, down into the swamp. It was a pleasant thought, and Jack smiled as he explained the layout of Walden Green. “This building that looks like a church is really housing for the elderly. The town hall at the other end has shops downstairs and offices above.”

  “It’s nice,” said Hope, leaning over to study the plan in detail while Jack looked around the old-fashioned kitchen. He couldn’t help thinking how he would transform it. The soapstone sink would go, naturally, and he’d open up that wall with sliding glass doors and eliminate the back porch. Maybe someday he’d get a chance to do a lot of things to this house. Jack looked at Hope’s long brown hair trailing over the plans he had drawn with his own hand. He couldn’t believe his good luck. This stunning girl had turned up as if by magic and offered herself to him as a spy in the enemy camp. Maybe she would offer herself to him in another way, if he played his cards right.

  Hope was impressed by Jack’s plan, she couldn’t deny it. He had conceived of Walden Green as a village green with white clapboard houses all around it. “It’s really pretty.”

  There was a shriek from the drying porch. “My God, what’s that?” said Jack.

  Hope laughed. “It’s just Father’s owl. Don’t worry.” But the owl’s cry was like the voice of her father, it was a warning straight from Oliver Fry. Hope knew very well that he would not be impressed by Jack’s charming scheme for the woods across Route 2 from Walden Pond. “Phony,” he would say angrily. “The whole thing is completely phony.” This morning he had looked at her silently across the breakfast table, his tragic eyes accusing her, and she had felt terrible, really terrible. Somehow she had to get away, she had to move out. It was too painful living with her father, sharing the same house with all that steaming intensity and wrongheaded passion.

  Hope felt a constriction in her stomach, and she knew what it was—another Hope, a larger Hope, wedged inside her, crowded up against her skin, all elbows and knees, trying to get out. Squeeze down, commanded Hope, stop shoving.

  She looked anxiously at Jack. “What about this other person on the program, this guy from India? Do you know what he’s like? I’m scared.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. He’s probably some mystical freak with a yellow robe and a shaved head.” Jack did a comic imitation of a generic Oriental, bobbing his head obsequiously, his palms together prayerfully.

  But later on, looking out from the control room of the television studio, Jack recognized Ananda Singh at once as the foreign kid he had picked up that day on the road, the one who had held his surveying stick. He laughed. So this was the big expert on conservation and Henry Thoreau! Those people on the other side must be poorly supplied with experts if all they could find to represent them was an ignorant immigrant.

  Hope too remembered Ananda at once. He was the pilgrim who had come ten thousand miles to visit Walden Pond. She had forgotten about him, although his dark eyes had haunted her for the rest of the day. He was wearing a suit, of course, not a saffron-colored robe. As he bowed to her gravely, she was flustered. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”

  Ananda in his turn was astonished that the daughter of Oliver Fry had been chosen to speak for the new development in Walden Woods. How could there be such a difference of opinion in one family? The United States was full of puzzles. “How do you do?” he said formally, waiting until Hope sat down before taking a seat himself.

  Their interviewing host was a pretty girl with a mop of red hair. To Ananda’s surprise she began the program by reading the local news.

  “Heading the news this evening,” she said briskly, “is a fire at the Pond View Trailer Park. An unoccupied mobile home was completely destroyed by fire in the small hours of last night. By the time Concord fire fighters arrived on the scene, the home was a burned-out shell. The fire has been attributed to carelessness on the part of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Scott Ryan, in failing to turn off the electric stove before departing for a vacation in Florida.”

  Ananda and Hope waited nervously through a sewage-disposal issue in the town of Nashoba and a motor vehicle accident in Bedford. Then the redheaded girl put down her notes and smiled radiantly at the camera. “We turn now to our issue of the day. I know you will enjoy hearing the two sides of an interesting controversy that is shaking the old town of Concord to its very roots, right now as we speak, a little matter of a shopping mall in the woods near Walden Pond.” The redheaded girl turned to Hope. “Hope Fry, who was born in Concord, will speak on behalf of the project, which is a mixed-use development by Grandison Enterprises. Hope, will you kick off by telling us why you, as a Concord citizen, support Walden Green?”

  Hope looked sternly at the camera and opened her mouth. A stranger’s voice emerged from her lips, uttering crisp sentences. In her own ears it was sharp and hateful. Swiftly she listed her prepared arguments. “The development will increase the percentage of low-income housing in the town. It will not be an eyesore, as people have feared, not at all. It is a tasteful development that will improve the landscape. And it’s not on the shore of Walden Pond, it’s half a mile away on the other side of a heavily traveled highway. It will be completely invisible from the pond.” Hope’s face felt frozen. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She did not look at Ananda Singh.

  Nor did Ananda look at Hope when his turn came. He spoke with easy assurance. His words were spontaneous. They did not sound like memorized arguments. Once again he described the excitement he had felt in coming so far to see the place where Walden had been written, a book whose fame had spread around the world. Surely such an influential book, one that had changed the lives of millions, a book that was connected so fundamentally with the landscape from which it had sprung, surely that book and that landscape should be more honored in Concord, Massachusetts?

  He was winning. Hope could feel it. She stared at him, wor
dless, unable to muster a reply.

  The redheaded woman jumped into the silence to thank them both. She said something amusing, which Hope was too distraught to understand. Ananda laughed. Hope smiled tensely. It was over.

  “You were just great,” said the redheaded girl to Ananda, tenderly disentangling him from his microphone.

  They stood up. Ananda reached out his hand to shake Hope’s and say something courteous. She took his hand limply and gazed at him, transfixed.

  Confused, he backed away and said good-bye. As he left the studio he remembered that he had thought of the girl at the depot as the Statue of Liberty. Now, glancing back, he saw her raise her arm to him in impetuous farewell, as though she were holding a flaming torch.

  But the torch flamed for the wrong cause, and he put her out of his mind.

  “You were sensational,” said Jack Markey, appearing out of the control room.

  “Oh, I was not,” mumbled Hope. “I made a fool of myself.”

  Jack took her arm and led her to the parking lot. “No, you didn’t. You were great, just great. And you looked absolutely marvelous.” He handed her something as they got in the car. “Here, they made a copy of the whole thing.”

  They celebrated with an evening of dinner and dancing. Jack was really attractive, Hope had to admit it. If she hadn’t been so flustered by her encounter with Ananda Singh, she would have responded with more pleasure to Jack’s embrace when he stopped the car at her door.

  But the visitor from India had distracted her. The needles of her gauges were twitching back and forth, refusing to settle down. “Oh, Jack, I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away. “Thank you so much. I had a lovely time.”

  Disappointed, Jack drove away with his fingers trembling on the steering wheel.

  Hope felt a little contrite as she ran up the porch steps. But as she opened the door and glanced into the fierce yellow eyes of the caged owl, she forgot Jack Markey and remembered Oliver Fry. Surely her father had seen the television debate. Oh, God, what would he say?

  She need not have worried. Oliver was feeling no pain. He had taken his usual evening dose of four ounces of Tennessee sour-mash whiskey, and his soul was soothed. Apoplexy was staved off for one more day.

  Liquor was important to Oliver, and he knew it. He told himself he wasn’t an alcoholic because he didn’t pour his first jigger into an ice-filled glass until suppertime. And as medicine it worked like a charm. No matter how ferocious the battle into which he had been charging with lowered lance and spiked truncheon, it was wonderful the way a couple of jiggers of eighty-six proof brought peace to his heart. Not until the fumes cleared from his head around three o’clock in the morning would Oliver wake up uneasily and remember the causes of yesterday’s disquiet, and begin to thrash his limbs and throw himself from side to side.

  But at this time in the evening he was suffused with affection for all the world. Especially for his daughter. “Hello, there, Hopey dear,” he said fatuously. “You looked so pretty on TV. But that boy Ananda did us proud, you’ll have to admit that. Oh, say, somebody’s been calling you. The number’s beside the phone. Bonnie somebody.”

  Bonnie? Hope didn’t know any Bonnie. But she remembered her at once as soon as the breathless voice came on the line. “Hope Fry, how are you? It’s Bonnie Glover, remember me? I used to be Erline. You remember me, Erline Glover, at Regional?”

  “Oh, Erline, of course I remember you.” Erline from high school, Hope couldn’t believe it. Erline had been famous for having the most amazing measurements in the senior class. Hope couldn’t remember them exactly, but they were huge-tiny-huge. The only other thing Hope could remember about Erline was her cooing way of establishing intimacy. “How does it feel to be you?” Erline would say, leaning forward eagerly as if she really wanted to know.

  “Hey,” said Erline Bonnie Glover, “like I just caught your show on TV.”

  “Oh, that. I’m afraid I didn’t do very well. The trouble is, I was just—”

  “Ananda Singh! Tell me about him! Where is he? Did you see his picture in Celebrity magazine? Did you see that article last week on the most eligible bachelors in the world? The whole world?”

  “Celebrity magazine?”

  “There he was, getting into a big limousine. His father’s something really big and important, and he’s one of the richest men in the world.” Bonnie Glover was squealing. “And Ananda, he’s so good-looking, so sexy. Oh, God!” Bonnie stopped squealing and began to coo. “Tell me where he’s staying. I want to sit on his doorstep. Oh, God, I love celebrities!”

  Hope told Bonnie she didn’t know where Ananda was staying and hung up, feeling stunned.

  Her father was clumping cheerfully to bed, whistling, stumbling a little on the stairs. Hope had the kitchen to herself. Against her better judgment, she played the videocassette.

  Oh, it was bad. There she was in an unbecoming dress, sounding artificial, stiff, mechanical—and wrong. She could see it with perfect clarity. Ananda Singh, on the other hand, was simple and powerful and overwhelmingly persuasive.

  Hope rewound the tape and played it again, turning down the sound whenever it was her turn to speak, turning it up again when her opponent was talking. She played it through three times, mesmerized by the sight and sound of Ananda Singh, one of the most eligible bachelors in the whole world.

  29

  We are children of light—our destiny is dark.

  Journal, October 3, 1840

  Homer and Mary Kelly watched the television encounter between Hope Fry and Ananda Singh. Mary was shocked to see Oliver Fry’s daughter in the role of a defender of Walden Green.

  “Her poor father,” she said, leaning forward to turn off the set. “How could she do it to Oliver?”

  Homer wasn’t listening. “Did you hear that, about the fire at the trailer park? One of the mobile homes burned down. You know, it’s just one thing after another over there. The place seems to be trying to self-destruct.”

  “Oliver thinks the world of that girl. I suppose she’s got a right to her opinion, but she doesn’t have to tell the world about it.”

  “And three more of them are dead. Three more in two weeks, not counting Alice Snow. I keep reading their obituaries in the paper. Two of them were really old, but Shirley Mills was only fifty-two.”

  “The trouble is, she was brought up without a mother. You know, a firm maternal guiding hand.”

  “Who, Shirley Mills?”

  “What?”

  Bewildered, Homer got up and stared out the window at the fading glimmer of light on the silvery bend of the river. Then he wandered away to the telephone and flipped through the Concord book, looking for Charlotte Harris. What was her husband’s name? Pete. Yes, here he was, Harris, Peter, 801 Walden Street.

  Homer sat down, gripped the phone, and dialed the number.

  “Hello?” said Charlotte Harris.

  “Mrs. Harris? Charlotte? This is Homer Kelly. I came to see you after the death of Mrs. Snow.”

  There was a pause, then Charlotte Harris said, “Yes, Mr. Kelly, I remember.”

  “I wonder if you can tell me something about the people whose mobile home burned last night, Mr. and Mrs. Ryan. I gather they’re on vacation in Florida?”

  “Yes, they left yesterday morning and flew down with the Buonfestos. That’s another couple from here, they’re retiring to Miami. The Ryans are just staying with friends for a week or two.”

  “Has anyone reached the Ryans to tell them what’s happened?”

  “Yes, Honey Mooney told me she called them.”

  “They must have been terribly shocked.”

  “Yes, of course.” Charlotte gave a wry laugh. “At least it will settle the argument.”

  “Argument?”

  “About whether to move to Florida for good or not. Scottie didn’t want to, and Dorothy did. Now I suppose they have no choice. There’s nothing here to come back to.”

  “Did Mrs. Mooney ask them if they might have l
eft the stove on?”

  “Yes, she did, and Dot said she was sure she had turned it off, she was positive, but Honey thinks she has a tendency to be absentminded.”

  “Do you think she’s absentminded, Mrs. Harris?”

  There was another pause. “No,” said Charlotte, “I don’t.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Mrs. Harris.”

  Charlotte’s good-bye was cool and polite.

  Homer hung up, then dialed the number of the Concord Fire Department. The fire fighter on phone duty turned out to be a friend of his, Melvia Pierce.

  “Oh, hi there,” said Melvin. “You got a fire to report, Homer?”

  “No, sorry, Melvin. I just want to ask about one. Can you tell me anything about the trailer fire at Pond View last night?”

  “Not much to tell. It was the middle of the night. Nobody over there woke up to call us until it was too late to do anything.”

  “Who finally called you?”

  “Man named LaDue. His rig is right next to the one that burned, so he was afraid his would catch fire, too. He was all excited. We hosed his place down. No problem.”

  “Is it true that the stove was on?”

  “Sure is. Of course all the electrical systems were burned out, but one of the knobs was turned to the high setting. Pretty careless of those people, if you ask me.”

  “Did the Ryans leave a key with anybody? Might somebody have come in after they left and turned on the stove?”

  “I don’t know about anybody else having a key, but the park manager has keys to all those mobile homes. But it doesn’t make sense, somebody else burning the place down, unless they were doing it for the Ryans, so they could collect the insurance.”

  “What’s the name of the park manager?”

  “Murchison, Guy Murchison. I’ve got his number right here.”