God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  At once Palmer Nifto took command. Palmer had been a wide receiver on the football team at Belmont High, and his school had often played in Concord. He knew his way around. “Forward,” he cried playfully, lifting the briefcase in which he carried his small store of possessions.

  “Hey, where the fuck you going?” demanded Doris Harper. “What the shit’s all this?” But she moved along smartly after Palmer, not wanting to miss anything. Audrey Beamish said nothing as usual, but she trailed after the others. Christine Marshall held her mother’s hand and stared at the big comfortable houses on Main Street. An orange cat emerged from a hedge and rubbed against her legs. “Oh, kitty,” cooed Christine, and picked it up.

  “No, no,” said her mother, who lived in fear of the diseases of the street. “It’s probably got germs.”

  The only one who didn’t accompany the procession up Main Street was Sarah Peel. Unnoticed, she slipped away and hurried across the street to the Nashawtuc bridge. From there she could see her horse in the pasture across the river.

  Pearl was looking at her intently, waiting for her, just as Sarah had known she would.

  Mimi Pink usually spent part of the afternoon visiting Corporate Gifts. Today, approaching the glittering Lucite door, she had to step over a bulky string bag. An odd-looking woman with dyed orange hair was leaning against the shop window, obscuring the display of talking alarm clocks.

  Mimi went at once to the rear of the store and called the police.

  The fire and police station was only a block or two away on Walden Street. An officer appeared almost at once. Mimi watched as he bent over the offensive object slumped beside the door. She watched him help the woman up and hand her the string bag.

  The woman was the hysterical Bridgie Sorrel. In a moment she was screaming and striking the officer with her fists.

  There were two customers in Corporate Gifts, a pair of well-dressed women from Dedham. They turned blank white faces toward the disturbance. Their button earrings trembled, their bifocals flashed with indignation.

  “How dreadful,” said the first woman, who had been examining a digital yo-yo.

  “That person should be locked up,” said the second woman, fondling a giant hourglass.

  They craned their necks as the officer bundled Bridgie out of sight, still yelling.

  The episode was so disconcerting, the two women left the shop without buying anything, and Mimi was furious.

  Palmer Nifto was more successful with the two women from Dedham. While the other expatriates from Boston distributed themselves here and there among the shopfronts like shells washing up on a beach, Palmer was more subtle. Conscious of his own air of respectability, he at once put into practice a stratagem that had worked for him many times before.

  Approaching the two prosperous-looking women, he stopped short and began ransacking his trouser pockets and slapping his seersucker jacket. “My billfold,” he cried, “it’s gone.”

  The two women stopped, too, and looked at him sympathetically. “It’s those people,” said one of them, glaring in distaste at Audrey Beamish, who was sitting on the broad step in front of the drugstore, her head bowed on her knees. “They picked your pocket.”

  “My God,” said Palmer Nifto. “I don’t know how I’m going to get home. All my credit cards are gone, my driver’s license.” He groped again in his trousers pocket and brought out a penny. “I can’t even make a phone call.”

  The poor fellow was really quite good-looking. “Here, dear,” said one of the women from Dedham, handing him a five-dollar bill.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” said Palmer Nifto.

  “No, no, you must. I insist.”

  “This too,” said the other woman, not to be outdone, proffering ten dollars.

  Palmer thanked them profusely, wrote down their names and addresses conscientiously, and walked away, pocketing the fifteen dollars. It was a useful tactic, especially in a new place.

  The two women hurried back to their car, vowing never to return to Concord.

  “The town has certainly changed,” sighed one.

  “What a shame,” agreed the other.

  Sarah had some candies in her pocket, a bag of M&M’s. She put a few on the flat of her hand, and Pearl took them neatly. It felt funny when the horse’s big teeth picked them up, but it didn’t hurt. Sarah fed her the whole bag.

  Then she stood back and looked calculatingly at Pearl with the shrewd eye of the expert rider she had become on the merry-go-round at the fairground beyond the Ring and Flange Company. The horse had no saddle, but her back was smooth and strong-looking. There was a deep swaybacked hollow in front of her projecting hipbones. One day Sarah would try it. Then she and Pearl would circle the pasture, and they would plunge and surge forward, and plunge and surge forward, as though the cymbals were clashing and the drums were beating and the horns were playing the “Skater’s Waltz.”

  38

  If you are going into that line,—going to besiege

  the city of God,—you must not only be strong

  in engines, but prepared with provisions to

  starve out the garrison.

  Thoreau, Letter to Harrison Blake,

  December 19, 1853

  Homer took his convictions about Pond View to Police Chief James Flower.

  “It’s just too many things at once,” he told Jimmy. “Four deaths, two obviously criminal attacks on Julian Snow, one near electrocution, and one house fire.”

  “When you put it that way,” said Jimmy, “it certainly looks bad, but you could put it another way, too. Three of those people died from natural causes, and the other one was probably an accident. And so was the house fire, and so was the electric iron. They’re old, those people. They have accidents.”

  “That still leaves the hole in Julian’s gas line and the sabotaging of his machine at the landfill. Those things weren’t carelessness. They were deliberate.”

  Jimmy sighed. “Well, I’ll send somebody over to talk to Mr. Snow and take a look. The truth is, Homer, we’re really strapped for manpower. I’ve got my one and only inspector doing traffic duty. Work on it yourself, why don’t you?”

  “I am, but, look here, those people are in danger. They’re all in danger. Somebody’s trying to finish off everybody in the park.”

  “Look, even if it were true, what am I supposed to do, put a squad of police officers at Pond View around the clock? I told you, we haven’t got the staff. Do you know how many motor vehicle accidents there were in Concord last year? Go ahead, guess.”

  “I don’t know. A hundred or so?”

  “Nearly seven hundred. And we had almost a hundred B and E’s, three hundred and fifty cases of larceny, and over a hundred incidents of domestic violence. We can’t keep up.”

  Homer was surprised. “I thought this was such a polite little law-abiding town.”

  “It is, compared with some. But, believe me, Homer, those figures are God’s truth.”

  Homer went away, humbled and enlightened, and spent the afternoon in his vegetable garden.

  Next morning he dropped off a bag of summer squash at Oliver Fry’s house and stayed to enjoy a second breakfast.

  Oliver too had a midsummer harvest to display. “Look here,” he said proudly, displaying a basket of greenery. “I got these pitcher plants in Gowing’s Swamp.”

  “Gowing’s Swamp?” Homer was fascinated. “You mean that quaking bog that sucks you down?”

  “Not if you exercise reasonable care.” Then Oliver explained the cannibal mechanics of pitcher plants, which were notorious for being carnivorous. “My biology class will get a kick out of these.”

  “Flies, right?” said Homer nervously. “Pitcher plants digest flies?”

  “Flies, and anything else that wanders in.”

  “Oh, ugh,” said Homer. “You know what? They remind me of Jefferson Grandison. He’s the pitcher plant, damn him, and the town of Concord is the fly. Right now we’re all perched on his detestable carnivorous lip,
ready to fall in.”

  Oliver’s face fell. His enthusiasm faded, and he dropped onto a chair. “I’ll bet he’s some kind of crook. What do we know about him, anyhow? He’s got a lot of money, that’s all we know.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’s a crook,” said Homer dolefully. “Probably every low-down thing he does is strictly legal. He doesn’t make a move, probably, without an army of lawyers.” Homer banged down his coffee cup. “Tell you what, I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll beard Grandison in his den.”

  “Oh, hello, Homer!” Hope burst into the kitchen, fresh from the shower, a tall girl in a baggy blouse, her brown hair misty with drops of water like dew on a flower, her fingers wrinkled and pink.

  Oliver looked at his daughter tenderly. “Hopey dear, is our boarder coming down for breakfast?”

  Hope turned away and began fussing with the coffeepot. “Oh, I think he’s moving around up there.”

  And then Ananda appeared, smiling radiantly. “It is very comfortable, my bed. Oh, good morning, Mr. Kelly.”

  “Coffee, Ananda?” said Hope in a strangled voice.

  “That would be splendid,” said Ananda heartily.

  “Thank you, Hopey dear,” said Oliver, grateful to his daughter for so politely disguising her antagonism toward the unwelcome guest at the table.

  Homer had bitten off more than he could chew. His teaching duties in Cambridge were no joke, and the plight of the people at Pond View had become his responsibility alone, since Chief Flower seemed to have washed his hands of the whole thing.

  And now he had promised Oliver Fry that he would look into Jefferson Grandison’s empire and try to find some loophole in the legitimacy of his dangerous assault on Concord’s woods and fields.

  The teaching duties came first. In the next few days the final papers of the summer semester came flooding in, followed by stacks of final exams. It took Homer a week to work his way through them. Not until he had graded them all could he turn his attention to his promise about Grandison.

  As usual Homer failed to adopt the sensible approach of going through channels. Instead he simply flung himself at the problem, starting at the top, making a random attack with a blunderbuss.

  He made no appointment. He appeared at Grandison’s door.

  It was his first ride in the glass elevator. For a man with a child’s pleasure in sensation, it was a stunning surprise to find himself hurtling upward from the dark chasm of the city street into the bright sky. Stepping out into the blaze of noontime sunshine on the seventieth floor, Homer felt dizzy and vaguely discomfited, manipulated by demons of the air.

  The lobby of Grandison’s office was an enormous cube. At first glance it looked empty. It occurred to Homer that emptiness was the best sort of conspicuous display in a building where every cubic yard was of stupendous dollar value.

  Squinting, he detected a human being at the far end, and he approached her at once, his feet sinking into the white carpet. Halfway across the pure expanse he looked back to see if there were footprints in the snow.

  The woman at the desk was, he guessed, some sort of high-class receptionist. Probably an executive vice president. She was dressed in the apogee of fashionable taste. To Homer, who identified high fashion with the shiny exaggerations of Mimi Pink, it was a revelation. She had gone past the artifices of Mimi Pink, way past Mimi’s glossy surfaces and football shoulders. Her face was unsullied by makeup. Her blond hair was long and flowing. Her dress was of a white gauzelike material draped on her lank body in loops and swags. She was telephoning.

  As Homer approached, she put down the phone and scribbled something on a sheet of paper. Only then did she look up at him and smile.

  “Good morning,” said Homer genially. “My name is Kelly. I wonder if I could see Mr. Grandison?”

  The woman put one pale hand over her sheet of paper. “What do you want to see him about?” Her gaze was frank, her accent impeccable. Three centuries of Brahmin ancestors had scattered umlauts in her speech. Her name, decided Homer, was Abigail Saltonstall.

  He shuffled his shoes on the rug, depositing mud from his great-grandfather’s potato field in Ireland. “I’m doing an article on Mr. Grandison for … ah, Harvard magazine. They’re running a series on prominent graduates of the Harvard Business School.” Homer smiled ingratiatingly, wondering if Grandison had ever been to the business school.

  “I see. Won’t you sit down?”

  Homer looked around for a chair. He could see nothing but a small cumulus cloud. “Oh, is that a chair? Well, all right, here goes.” For an instant he was lost in its cushiony folds, but then the chair recoiled and bounced him to the surface. “Perhaps you could give me a little background before I take up any of Mr. Grandison’s valuable time. Then I could get right to the heart of things with the man himself. Of course we’ll want a picture or two, not just the usual captain of industry kind of thing. Mr. Grandison with his dogs, perhaps? Mr. Grandison in his boat in foul-weather gear?”

  Abigail Saltonstall was obviously won over. “What would you like to know about Mr. Grandison?” A little breeze from some remote ventilating duct fluttered her gauzy dress.

  “Well, perhaps you could just run down for me what it is that Mr. Grandison actually does. That is, what is his firm engaged in from day to day?”

  “His firm? Well, actually it’s not just one firm. Mr. Grandison has interests in many conservation organizations, enterprises concerned with environmental development, idealistic real estate.”

  “Idealistic real estate?”

  “Development that preserves the landscape, housing that respects the natural setting, that sort of thing.”

  “Could you give me the names of these firms?”

  “Certainly.” Abigail pulled open an ethereal drawer and handed him a sheet of paper.

  Homer ran his eye down the list. “Does Mr. Grandison actually run all these outfits?”

  “Oh, no. He’s on the boards of the charitable institutions. He takes personal charge of a few of the commercial enterprises. And of course he’s always creating more. Mr. Grandison is a man of the broadest vision, Mr. Kelly. He has an outlook that’s really incredibly immense.” Throwing out her arms, Abigail displayed the huge canvas of Grandisonian interest, extending from sea to sea and pole to pole.

  “Well, what’s this one, for instance,” said Homer, “Breathe Free?”

  “The name is perfectly clear. It represents Mr. Grandison’s concern for clean air, his anxiety about toxic waste, his hope for—”

  “How about Egret Country?”

  “Florida real estate. It’s a retirement community in the Everglades. Individual luxury apartments with hospital, golf course, concert hall, art museum.”

  “They got any egrets?” said Homer crudely.

  “Why, of course. The heart of the community is an untouched piece of wetland, with blue herons, egrets, pelicans, alligators. I’ve been there myself. It’s just beautiful.”

  For a moment Homer was swept away. He pictured himself standing on a greensward holding a golf club, with a blue heron nudging his golfball. He was wearing golf knickers, diamond-patterned socks, and big shoes with fringed flaps. “Move over,” he said to the blue heron, and smacked the ball high into the air. It soared and soared, taken by the wind, and landed with a splash far out to sea.

  He woke up as a buzzer sounded on Abigail’s desk. “Oh, here’s Mr. Grandison.” She flicked a tiny switch. “His meeting is over.”

  A door opened on the other side of the gigantic room, and Abigail got to her feet. So did Homer, sucked upright by awe. Slyly he took the opportunity to put his hand on the piece of paper on which Abigail had been scribbling. Casually he slipped it under the list of Grandison’s enterprises. Folding the sheets together, he tucked them in his pocket.

  “Oh, Mr. Grandison,” said Abigail, “this is Mr. Kelly. He’s doing an article for Harvard magazine, part of a series on prominent business school graduates.”

  Homer strode forward a
nd extended a hearty hand. “I hope, Mr. Grandison, you’ll permit me an interview.”

  Homer had seen Jefferson Grandison at the Concord Planning Board hearing, but then the man had been seated, crowded in among sycophants and hangers-on. Standing alone, he had an even more majestic presence. His head was large and imposing, gushing a sublime flow of whisker. He had probably spent the morning speaking to Moses from a burning bush.

  “Ineffable Industries has canceled out,” said Abigail dreamily.

  “Well, in that case,” said Grandison, “my time is at your disposal, Mr. Kelly. Come in.”

  Homer followed him into his office, wondering why he was thinking of flies drowning in pitcher plants instead of Dante at the summit of Paradise.

  The office was staggering. The view in three directions made Homer gasp. The entire metropolis lay before him, an alabaster city undimmed by human tears. Well, maybe there were a few tears down there somewhere, but they were invisible from the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building.

  Homer lowered himself into another cumulus cloud, took out his notebook, and began asking gentle questions, beginning with simple ones about Jefferson Grandison’s childhood.

  Mr. Grandison seemed flattered. He told all. Homer scribbled a few things down, to give the impression he was taking notes.

  Happy childhood, death of dad, mom remarries, cruel stepdad, sorrow in luxury, prep school, college, marriage, Harv Bus School, onward, upward.

  So far, so good. Facts were facts. But when Homer inquired about the progress of the great man since graduate school, he could catch at nothing to write down. He could make neither head nor tail of the language that came out of Grandison’s mouth. It was all flabby phrases—speaking candidly, tangential maximization, in terms of, as far as, analogous polarities, as it were, prevailing utilization, depending on the parameters—and then Grandison would plunge into sets of interlocking parentheses, plummeting deeper and deeper into the swamp of a sentence and working his way up again, unlocking the parentheses one by one, finalizing brackets, bursting to the surface at last with the verb in his teeth.