God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  Mary examined the list. “You want me to look up their phone numbers and call them and ask what they actually do?”

  “Exactly. My sainted wife.” Homer shook his head in wonder. “I often ask myself how you got to be so perfect. I mean you were obviously born like that. For you it’s just plain natural. Whereas if I were to try to be perfect, it would be a tortuous process of trial and error, I’d be bumping into trees and falling off cliffs and struggling back up, while you just roll serenely along as though there were nothing to it. It’s amazing.”

  Mary groaned, turning the list over. There was more on the back. And there was a second sheet. “What’s this?” She held it up. “This isn’t part of the list.”

  Homer looked at it. “Oh, my God, I forgot to look at it.” Swiftly he ran his eye over it, then read it aloud.

  MR. GRANDISON, YOU’VE HAD ANOTHER THREATENING CALL FROM ARCHIE POUCH, THE ATTORNEY INTERESTED IN THE DISPOSAL OF LOT 17. HE WAS MOST INSISTENT! HE SPOKE OF DIRE CONSEQUENCES!

  “Homer,” said Mary disapprovingly, “you can’t go around stealing papers from people’s desks.”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Homer. “I’ll never do such a naughty thing again.” For a moment he sat staring at the piece of paper he had filched from Abigail Saltonstall. What did it mean? This attorney, Archie Pouch, was threatening Jefferson Grandison with some sort of dreadful catastrophe unless he did something or other about a mysterious entity called Lot Seventeen. “I wonder what she means by Lot Seventeen?”

  “Maybe it’s something that’s being auctioned off, like rugs or works of art.”

  “Well, maybe. This lawyer Archie Pouch is obviously very much interested in its disposal, whatever disposal means. I wonder if he’s in the phone book.”

  “Oh, Homer, you’re not going to call him up? What good would that do? No lawyer is going to tell you about the concerns of a client.”

  “No, I suppose not,” said Homer dreamily. “Still, I think I’ll just take a look at the Yellow Pages.”

  And then Homer had no trouble finding Archibald Pouch in the listings under “Lawyers.” He was not only in the phone book, he was all over the phone book. There were four large half-page ads recommending the services of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket. One of the ads showed them in person, lined up side by side, three rapacious-looking characters in three-piece suits. Their areas of expertise were listed in full:

  PERSONAL INJURY

  MEDICAL MALPRACTICE

  DEFECTIVE PRODUCTS

  NEGLIGENCE

  SLIP AND FALL

  TOXIC INJURIES

  UNDERGROUND STORAGE TANKS

  2I-E HAZARDOUS WASTE

  LEAD PAINT POISONING

  DRUNK DRIVING

  And finally, as a general catch-all invitation:

  LITIGATION

  The implicit message of all the ads was the same—“Consider yourself aggrieved? Sue the bastards!”

  For a while Homer sat musing, staring at the three drooping mustaches on the three faces of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket. Then he stood up, slammed the Yellow Pages shut, picked up the Boston phone book, and dumped it in front of his wife, who was finishing her breakfast and reading Barchester Towers. “Your turn, Mary dear. Good luck. I’m off to the city to bag Mr. Pouch.”

  Mary shook her head in a gesture that meant, Homer dear, you’re out of your mind. But she licked the butter off her fingers and kissed him good-bye. And at midmorning she got to work on the list of Grandison’s enterprises. With one finger holding her place in Barchester Towers, she dialed the number for Ah Wilderness.

  “Please hold,” said a faraway recorded voice. Mary held the receiver with its canned music away from her ear and lost herself in the machinations of Mr. Slope and the tyranny of Mrs. Proudie. Now and then the recording informed her that all lines were occupied. At last a human voice abruptly cut off the music. “Ah Wilderness Incorporated, may I help you?”

  “Oh,” said Mary, still caught up in the affairs of Barchester, “good morning. My name is Mary Kelly. I wonder if you could tell me what it is you do about wilderness?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I mean, what does your name mean, Ah Wilderness?”

  There was a chilly pause. “Who, may I ask, is calling?”

  “I told you. My name’s Mary Kelly. I live in Concord, Massachusetts. I’m trying to find out what your company is for.” Mary drummed her fingers on the table, thinking that Homer would have done better. He would have invented some plausible untruth, whereas she was incapable of lying.

  “What, may I ask, is your interest in wilderness?”

  “I don’t have any particular interest. I’m just looking for information.”

  “I think perhaps you should speak to Mr. Thor.”

  “Mr. Thor? Well, all right. Could you transfer me?”

  “Mr. Thor is in conference.”

  “Well, could he call me back when he’s finished?”

  “What is the nature of the subject you wish to discuss with Mr. Thor?”

  Mary spent the morning fighting her way out of similar paper bags.

  Seashores Unlimited was closed for the day. Dreams of the Maine Coast put her on hold and forgot her. Breathe Free told her to call back between four and four-fifteen. Serene Harbors transferred her to five different departments and at last informed her that the individual to whom she wished to speak had left for the day. Save the World Services wanted her to punch buttons with which her old-fashioned telephone was not equipped. Birdsong Incorporated put her on hold.

  By midafternoon Mary had come to the chapter in Barchester Towers in which the gown of the overbearing Mrs. Proudie is ripped by the sofa of the ravishing Signora Neroni, and she was almost irritated when Pride of the Earth awoke from its musical slumber and asked her what she wanted.

  “Oh, hello! My name is Mary Kelly, and I wonder if you could tell me what Pride of the Earth means, what it is exactly that you people do.”

  “May I ask the nature of your interest?”

  “Just curiosity. The name sounds so grand, I just wondered what it means.”

  “Do you represent the media?”

  “The media? Oh, no.”

  “Well, I’m afraid we are too busy here to respond to random questions.”

  “Too busy doing what?”

  The phone went click.

  41

  Every maggot lives down town.

  Journal, October 15, 1840

  The offices of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket were housed in a pink marble building on Federal Street. The luxurious lobby, too, was lined with marble. It was obvious to Homer that Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket were doing well. Other people’s personal injuries were their personal happy times, the sordid miseries of litigious customers their chuckles and merriment. Some poor wretch fell off a scaffolding and broke his back, and Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket rubbed their hands with glee.

  Homer took the elevator to the seventh floor, chastising himself for his disdain. Somebody had to help people out when ghastly things happened to them, and why not Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket?

  POUCH, HEAVISIDE AND SPROCKET

  ATTORNEYS AT LAW

  said the brass plate on the door. Homer walked in and flinched. What was the matter with him? He had become absurdly sensitive to high-toned swank. He blamed it on the year he had spent in Florence, surrounded on every side by perfection of proportion and effortless grace. He would have to get over it, if he was going to go on consorting with the likes of Jefferson Grandison and Archie Pouch.

  Homer tried to avoid looking at the extravagant flossiness of the waiting room. He concentrated instead on the receptionist. She was very different from Abigail Saltonstall. Something about her plucked eyebrows and the abandon with which she was chewing gum made her look like a film star of the 1930s.

  “You can’t see Mr. Pouch without an appointment,” she “said, her jaw going around and around. Her gum was pink. Homer hoped she would blow a bubble.


  “Oh, I think Mr. Pouch will see me,” said Homer. “My name is Kelly, Homer Kelly. I’m Mr. Jefferson Grandison’s attorney.” It was only half a lie. Somewhere in Homer’s attic lay a mildewed diploma from Suffolk University Law School.

  The girl was impressed. Her jaw stopped rotating. She hoisted herself from her chair, pushed open a door, and disappeared.

  Homer occupied himself while she was gone by picking up an old Celebrity magazine from an immense glass coffee table. The magazine fell open at a picture of a goodlooking young man stepping into a limousine in New Delhi under the heading THE TEN MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELORS IN THE WORLD. Homer gasped. It was Ananda Singh.

  The receptionist came back. “Okey-doke,” she said, like a true thirties movie star, “you can go right in.”

  Archie Pouch too seemed a throwback to the silver screen of days gone by, as he came striding forward to shake hands with Homer. His suit was sharp, his tie was white, his shirt was black. “Mr. Kelly, pleased to meet you. Now maybe we can get this whole can of worms straightened out, the whole ball of wax, right?”

  “Well, of course Mr. Grandison certainly wishes to do the right thing.” Homer was surprised to find himself sounding stuffy and dignified, as though he were genuinely concerned with the best interests of Grandison Enterprises.

  “Okay, so tell me, when does old Jeff plan to give the heave-ho to Lot Seventeen? That’s what this bummer’s all about, right? Let’s get something straight right from the start. Grandison thinks he’s an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, right? Well, so what? So’s my client. Me, I’m a thousand-pound gorilla.” Archie Pouch thumped his chest with both fists like King Kong. “My client paid your client spot cash to deep-six Lot Seventeen. Grandison’s got to give it the bum’s rush, understand? My client’s fed up with the way he just sits there on his butt.”

  Aha, thought Homer gratefully, so Lot Seventeen wasn’t something Grandison had bought, it was something he had been paid to take away. So much for Mary’s notion that it was rugs and works of art! What kind of thing would someone be paid to remove? It would have to be something nobody wanted. Something toxic, putrid, poisonous, radioactive, evil-smelling. Homer gazed piously at the ceiling and phrased a careful response. “The toxic characteristics of Lot Seventeen are disputed in scientific circles.”

  “Toxic!” Archie Pouch stared at Homer in disbelief. “Nobody’s pretending Lot Seventeen is toxic.” He guffawed. “It’s just in our fucking way.”

  “May I ask,” ventured Homer, groping in the dark, “how much of your client’s space it now occupies?”

  “Jesus, Grandison knows how much space it occupies. Forty acres, that’s how much. It’s the biggest specialized dump in New England. The stuff’s gotta go.” Pouch leaned forward and put his nose close to Homer’s. His breath smelled of mint wafers and gin. “Get that shit out of there.”

  “Forty acres? Forty acres of … of …?” Homer waited encouragingly for Pouch to elucidate the nature of Lot Seventeen.

  But Pouch was suddenly on his guard. “What the hell, Kelly? You mean you don’t know?” He leaned still farther forward, and Homer had to arch his back to keep the Pouch nose away from his chin. It was easy to picture the man intimidating witnesses in a courtroom.

  Adopting a hoity-toity manner, Homer tried to bluff his way out. “I’m afraid Mr. Grandison has treated this matter as a strictly legal problem. He has not divulged to me what it is that he has contracted to remove. I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “Oh, Christ.” Pouch put his hand on Homer’s chest and shoved him toward the door. “What are you, some kind of media? Sprocket,” he shouted, “hey, Sprocket, come in here.”

  Homer looked over Pouch’s shoulder uneasily, expecting a thug in a fedora hat and double-breasted suit. Sprocket turned out to be a healthy-looking kid in baby blue suspenders, with overhanging brows like some small-brained early hominid, Australopithecus, or something like that. But small-brained or not, Sprocket had obviously passed the Massachusetts bar, and now he took Homer’s arm in a mighty grip and dragged him out of Pouch’s office.

  “Never mind, Sprocket,” said Homer, shaking himself free, speaking through his teeth, trying to retrieve some shred of dignity. “I shall leave of my own free will.”

  At home he found Mary still lost in the internecine affairs of the cathedral city of Barchester. Looking up from her book, she admitted to Homer her failure at extracting information on Grandison’s enterprises by telephone. “It was zilch all the way, I’m afraid. I can tell you all you want to know about the state of the Anglican church in nineteenth-century England, but as for Mr. Grandison’s undertakings, I haven’t got a clue. They’re all wrapped in veils of awful music and answering machines and sullen switchboard operators who don’t know anything, and the people who do know something are in conference and can’t be disturbed until Tuesday.”

  “It’s Grandison’s celestial conglomerate,” said Homer darkly. “You can’t expect to reach God on the telephone, nor anybody sitting at his right or left hand. When you get down on your knees to say a prayer, the angel Gabriel puts you on hold.” Then he confessed his own humiliating failure in the pink marble sanctuary of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket. “I did find out one thing, however,” he said, pouring himself a drink. “Lot Seventeen isn’t Oriental rugs and Rembrandts, it’s something putrid Grandison has agreed to remove.”

  “Well, good, that’s some kind of progress.” Mary ran into the kitchen to take a pot off the stove, then poked her head out again. “Listen, I’ve been thinking. What about Jerry Neville? Remember Jerry? Jerry knows everything.”

  Homer’s gloom vanished. “Jerry Neville, of course. How could I have forgotten Jerry?”

  Jerry Neville was a criminal lawyer who had given up practice in the courts to pursue a personal investigation of the inner workings of the commonwealth of Massachusetts at the end of the twentieth century. His book, if he ever had the audacity to publish it, would scandalize the nation. Jerry had been working on it for years.

  When Homer reached him on the phone, Jerry was pleased with the nature of the problem. “Sure, sure, I know exactly how to go about it. I’ve got ten thousand file cards on the interlocking interests of big operators in this state. Read me the list.”

  Homer read the names on the piece of paper he had stolen from Abigail Saltonstall, and Jerry took them down, chuckling now and then.

  “What are you snickering about?” said Homer. “I mean, that was what I’d call a knowing snicker, if ever I heard one.”

  “I’ll tell you later,” promised Jerry.

  When he called back next day he was laughing. “Oh, Homer, thank you. I never enjoyed myself so much in my life. I should have guessed it. Jefferson Grandison has taken up the noble cause of toxic waste disposal. It’s a terrible problem in this state. No kidding, it really is. Nobody wants it in their backyard, especially the kind that emits low-level radiation. But the stuff has to be got rid of somehow, so Grandison obliges. For the right fee he’ll take any kind of crud and dispose of it for you, no questions asked. He’s the hazardous-waste king of New England, the emperor of toxic trash. God knows what he does with it. That Lot Seventeen of yours must be something highly undesirable.”

  “You mean Ah Wilderness and Breathe Free and Save the World and so on, they’re all just disgusting bilge of one kind or another, putrid petroleum gushing out of dirty pipes, raw sewage, that sort of thing?”

  “Worse stuff, probably. Well, that’s our century for you, a hundred years of swill. Translate all those pretty words of his into their proper names, and you get Foul Water instead of Seashores Unlimited, and Contaminated Air instead of Breathe Free. But give the man credit. The putrid stuff is there, and somebody has to dispose of it. The only question is how. Do you trust him to get rid of it safely? I don’t.”

  “But, listen, Jerry, it’s not toxic. That’s all I could get out of Archie Pouch. Lot Seventeen isn’t toxic, it’s just in the way.”

  “In the way?” Jer
ry was silent for a minute. “That’s strange. Hey, what’s that noise?”

  Homer laughed. “Can you hear it? Well, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s Birdsong Incorporated, it’s Pride of the Earth, it’s Dreams of the Maine Coast. It’s Canada geese, that’s what it is. They’re back already. They’re flying over the house making a hell of a racket.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, so long.”

  Homer hung up and went out on the porch to watch the long straggling line of Canadas flap low over the river. They were calling to each other hoarsely, gliding with widespread hovering wings, coming to rest on the water and rocking up and down.

  42

  I perceive that we partially die ourselves through

  sympathy at the death of each of our friends.…

  Journal, February 3, 1859

  “Homer? This is Julian Snow.” Julian’s voice was quiet but intense.

  “Just a sec.” Homer looked at his watch. It was five-fifteen in the morning. Unsnarling the telephone wire, he put his legs over the side of the bed. “Something else has happened, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s Porter McAdoo. He was changing a tire, and the jack collapsed, and the car came down on him. I’ve called the police ambulance, but it’s too late.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  When Homer drove into Pond View, people were standing around in a gloomy half circle—Honey Mooney in a turquoise wrapper, Pete Harris in an enormous bathrobe, Stuart LaDue in a nightshirt, his old man’s bow legs bare, Eugene Beaver with a winter coat buttoned over his nakedness, Julian Snow fully dressed in shirt and jeans.

  Who was missing? Homer ran over the list in his mind. Only Charlotte Harris. He got out of his car and stood with the others, watching a couple of paramedics from Emerson Hospital slam the ambulance doors on Porter McAdoo.

  “Who found him?” said Homer.

  The residents of Pond View shuffled uneasily and looked at each other. “It was Charlotte Harris,” said Stu LaDue. “She said he was already dead.” Stu rolled his eyes to imply that Charlotte’s word was not to be trusted.