God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Look at that,” he said to Audrey. “He’s been selling Boeing, but wait a sec, look at this.” Palmer punched a couple of keys and brought up on the monitor the latest figures from Standard & Poor’s. “Transports are going up, way up, you see that?”

  He shook his head in pity for poor Roger Bland, who was not at home to guide his fortunes from day to day. The man needed help. “I’ll take care of his portfolio for him,” Palmer said. “It’s the least I can do while he’s away.” In a jiffy he figured out how to send a buy order to the broker. And then his first transaction gave him such a feeling of power that he began frolicking among the rest of Roger’s accounts, consulting the daily listings in The Wall Street Journal, selling this and buying that. It was exhilarating.

  For Doris Harper the use of the telephone was equally stimulating. Doris made a lot of long-distance calls. Her limited vocabulary of four-letter words flashed across the nation at the speed of light to acquaintances in San Francisco, Juneau, Honolulu. Once when the phone rang only a few seconds after she put it down, she snatched it up and shouted at her old boyfriend in Sausalito, “Bullshit! Shut your fucking trap,” only it wasn’t her old boyfriend, it was Wally Bland, calling his parents’ house from Camp Watcheehatchee in Maine, where he was a counselor.

  “Hey, who’s that?” said Wally.

  Doris rolled her eyes at Sarah.

  Sarah took the phone. “Who did you want to speak to?” she said cautiously.

  “My parents,” said Wally. “Is Mrs. Bland there?”

  “No Blands here,” said Sarah. “Sorry, wrong number.”

  Wally hung up. When the phone rang again a moment later, they all stared at it and let it ring.

  “No more phone calls,” said Sarah firmly, glowering at Doris.

  But Doris made an awful fuss. Palmer Nifto shouted at her to shut up, for Christ’s sake, and Doris screamed back at him, and Dolores told her not to say things like that in front of Christine, and then Doris fell silent and looked at them evilly, and later they found the yellow brocade upholstery of the Sheraton sofa slashed front and back. Goose down floated in the air and settled on everything.

  At the moment when Roger and Marjorie returned from their vacation and drove up to the house on Musketaquid Road, all the squatters happened to be quiet. Only the television set was making a lot of noise. It was “The Young and the Reckless” once again. Vanessa had awakened from her coma, but then the doctor became her lover, and pretty soon Vanessa was pregnant, and then she had an abortion, and now she was undergoing severe postpartem suicidal depression, which involved a lot of screaming. The actress who played Vanessa was giving it all she had. Scream after scream rent the air of the Blands’ family room and shrilled out the doors and windows onto the lawn.

  “Good heavens,” said Roger, “what’s that noise?”

  Marjorie stared dumbfounded at Baronesa Carmencita de Granada. The horse was trampling the flower bed, eating the petunias, draped in Marjorie’s best boudoir gown, a delicate garment of mousseline de soie and Belgian lace. While Marjorie looked on in horror, Carmencita stepped on a trailing end and ripped the gown from neck to hem.

  Trembling, Marjorie got out of the car and faltered up the front steps and stood behind Roger as he grimly threw open the door.

  51

  Our whole life is startlingly moral.

  Walden, “Higher Laws”

  “For you,” muttered Mary, reaching the telephone across the bed. It was six o’clock in the morning.

  Homer groaned and rolled over. “Homer Kelly here.”

  “Homer?” It was Police Chief Jimmy Flower. “Hey listen, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” murmured Homer, getting up sleepily on one elbow. “What kind of favor?”

  “We’ve got some people here, locked up for breaking and entering, malicious destruction of property. What they need is counsel. You know, somebody to act for them, arrange bail.”

  “Listen, Jimmy, it’s true I’ve got a law degree, but I haven’t practiced in years. Why pick on me?”

  “Because you’re such a goddamned famous old-fashioned liberal, everybody knows that.”

  “What’s being a liberal got to do with it?”

  “Well, it’s these homeless. It’s a typical bleeding-heart case. Everybody else in town is mad at them, mad as hell. You know what they did? They moved into Roger Bland’s house while he was on vacation and wrecked the whole place. Bunch of freeloaders. Welfare Cadillac types, if you ask me. Just your meat.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Homer sat up in bed. “You mean we’ve got homeless people here on the streets of Concord?”

  “Homer Kelly, where have you been? Haven’t you been downtown lately? Haven’t you seen them on the Milldam? I tell you, the merchant community is giving me a hard time. That Ms. Pink, she calls me every day, wants ’em run out of town.”

  Homer was dumbfounded. He couldn’t speak.

  “Homer? Are you still there?”

  “Of course. It’s just that I didn’t know we had people like that here in Concord. I guess I’ve had my head in the clouds. I’ve been listening for wood thrushes. You know, stuff like that.” Homer sat up and rubbed his frowsy head. “Well, okay, I’ll come over and talk to them.”

  At the police station on Walden Street he found the ten of them sorted into three lockups. Little Christine was officially too young to be locked up, but she had been permitted to stay with her mother.

  At first Homer talked to Palmer Nifto, who was by far the most presentable and articulate. But in the end it was Sarah Peel who commanded his attention. Homer liked her laconic truthfulness. Her speech was not encumbered with excuses, fanciful stories, and elaborate sociopolitical jargon like Palmer’s.

  “We’ve got no place to sleep,” said Sarah.

  It was enough. The words rang in Homer’s head like a gong. The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head.

  “That’s terrible,” he told Sarah, and she said nothing, she just looked at him, while the others jabbered and told their stories. The worst was Doris Harper, with whom it was difficult to feel any sympathy. In a few minutes Doris had exhausted all the obscenities in her repertoire—religious, excretory, sexual—and now she was repeating herself. Somebody should invent a new religion, decided Homer, just to give Doris new words to swear with.

  Before Homer left the police station he promised to arrange bail for all ten of them, volunteered to be their public defender, and obtained the immediate release of Dolores and Christine Marshall. “I’ll be back,” he said earnestly to Sarah Peel, but she just looked at him silently.

  Homer felt an urgent need to talk to Oliver Fry, but first he delivered Dolores and Christine to his astonished wife. Then he drove back into town and pulled up beside Oliver’s back porch. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

  Homer was in distress. Until today he had been juggling only two things in his head, the splendor of the natural world on the one hand and its bloody teeth and claws on the other. Now there was this huge third thing to worry about, the fall of man, and Homer couldn’t handle it. How could there be any excuse for preserving these lovely fields and forests in the face of all this human need? Let them build low-income housing all around Walden Pond, and erect cheap apartments on Thoreau’s sacred cliffs, and comfortable dwellings along the river all the way from Sudbury to Bedford. He could no longer find it in his heart to fight against such things.

  But, oh, God, those places were so precious, so sacred. Homer burst into Oliver’s kitchen, full of doubt. “We can’t do it, Oliver,” he proclaimed, while the alarmed owl screeched at him. “We’ve got to drop the whole thing.”

  Oliver was eating breakfast with his daughter Hope and Ananda Singh. They looked up in surprise as he poured out the news about the helpless people in the police lockup.

  Oliver fought back. “Drop it? Never,” he thundered, lowering his mighty brows. He st
ood up and prodded Homer with his forefinger. “Those homeless people don’t have anything to do with whether or not we should save the countryside. They’re beside the point. We can take care of them and save the land, too. Those developers, you think they’re going to do anything about homeless people? Hell, no.”

  Ananda listened in dismay. The existence of people without homes of their own was not new to him. With his own eyes he had seen the teeming streets of Calcutta. He had seen lepers lying among open sewers. It was terrible that such things should be.

  Hope listened, too. Silently she set a fourth plate of pan cakes on the table. Ananda leaped up and pulled out a chair for Homer.

  “Oh, thank you,” Homer said, breaking off in midshout. He sat down, attacking the pancakes hungrily, and let Oliver pummel him with furious protestations. Then he stopped listening. An idea had occurred to him. He calmed down. The ugly housing he had built in imagination around the shore of Walden Pond faded, and the trees returned. The moment of ethical crisis was over. He knew what to do.

  “Look here,” he said, changing the subject, putting down his fork, and turning to Ananda, who was, he remembered, one of the ten most eligible bachelors in the world, “where shall we go next?”

  “Go next?” said Ananda blankly.

  “Following in Thoreau’s footsteps, where shall we go now?”

  Ananda’s stricken face cleared. He smiled. “Have you ever been to Gowing’s Swamp?”

  “Never. It’s a quaking bog, right?”

  “Oh, no,” said Hope, “you’re not thinking of going there?”

  Homer adopted the idea at once. “Of course we are. What about some day next week? Oliver can tell us how to get there.”

  “You’ll need rubber boots,” exulted Oliver, “because you’ll sink in up to your knees. Ananda, I’ll loan you mine.” Then he gave them a lecture on the nature of quaking bogs. “Sphagnum moss grows over the surface of a pond and gets thicker and thicker, and things grow in it, so that it looks like solid ground, but there’s water underneath, so you have to be careful.”

  “I’ll come, too,” said Hope, flinging off restraint, the seesaw of her alternating affections flinging her high in the air.

  Ananda beamed at her, and she turned away, smiling, to wash the dishes at the sink. Dumping them on the drain-board, she was pricklingly aware that Ananda was looking at her back, which was engulfed in a huge sweatshirt. In the competition with Bonnie Glover, Hope had fiercely made up her mind to be herself. The more lusciously Bonnie exposed the curviform parts of her anatomy, the more stubbornly Hope draped herself in her old clothes, the more violently she pulled back her hair into a tight pigtail.

  Ananda looked at her bony little skull and longed to caress it. He jumped up, snatched a damp dish towel, and dried the dishes, setting them down in the cupboard with extreme care, each chipped dish touching the one below with the most delicate of clinks.

  Tags from Walden ran through Hope’s head, and she wanted to say them aloud, to impress Ananda. But she couldn’t fit them into the conversation. “I love the wild, not less than the good”—it didn’t go with washing dishes.

  “Thank you for helping,” she whispered as Ananda picked up the last cup and wiped it around and around with the towel.

  “You are most welcome,” he said softly, hanging it tenderly on its hook.

  52

  I saw … some worldly miser with a surveyor

  looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken

  place around him, and he did not see the angels

  going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-

  hole in the midst of paradise.… I saw that the

  Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

  “Walking”

  Archie Pouch was back on the line. “Ten days, Grandison. You’ve got ten days to take Lot Seventeen off my client’s hands. Or else.”

  “Or else what?” said Jefferson Grandison.

  “Or else you’ll find it on your doorstep.”

  “Are you threatening me? May I remind you, sir, that I, too, have legal representation? Intimidating threats are, I believe, a felony in the state of Massachusetts.”

  “Legal representation? You’ve got legal representation? You call that stuffed shirt legal representation?” There was a loud guffaw from Archie Pouch’s end of the line, and he hung up.

  Grandison looked sourly at Jack Markey, and Jack laughed. “Is that true? Are threats really a felony?”

  “I have no idea,” said Grandison loftily.

  They spent the next hour spreading maps on the table, pulling out drawers to find other maps, leaning over them to study specific areas in greater detail, buzzing Martha Jones in the outer office to find certain files and bring them in at once.

  What they needed was a temporary holding facility for Lot Seventeen. At last they assembled a reasonable list of possibilities, and Grandison sat down and grasped the phone.

  Jack collapsed onto a chair, closed his eyes, and listened, his head drooping on his chest, his face relaxing into dejection.

  Call after call failed in its object.

  “Totally impossible,” said the town manager in Maiden.

  “Good God, think of the abuttors,” said the town counsel of Stow.

  “That parcel is in full view of the town green,” said the Nashoba town planner.

  “You must be kidding,” said the mayor of Lawrence.

  At last Grandison put down the phone and turned to Jack, who had apparently fallen asleep.

  Actually Jack was wide awake. He had heard every word. He had heard other words as well: “And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”

  “Jack?”

  Jack sprang out of his chair and gave a jocular salute. “Sir?”

  “It’s still in your hands, I’m afraid. Can’t you hurry it up a little?”

  Then Jack began talking about money. “I hope, Mr. Grandison, you’re not forgetting what you owe to me personally? I understood I was to receive a percentage of the profits, which were, I believe, turned over to you some months ago?”

  Grandison sighed and turned on Jack the look of one with the weight of the world on his shoulders. They dickered and agreed at last on a figure. But then Grandison craftily added a piece of extortion. “That sum is, however, to be shared with the others.”

  “The others! Well, how much, for shit’s sake?”

  “I leave that entirely to you and Ms. Pink. Please do not swear on these premises.”

  “Christ.”

  Then Jack had to call Mimi and make some sort of bargain. It was not pleasant. She was a fierce negotiator. They haggled. Jack shouted. Mimi threatened. Jack capitulated. “Well, all right,” he said in a steaming rage. “I’ll bring it out on Wednesday afternoon. Where will I find you?”

  “In the Porcelain Parlor. I’m always there on Wednesday afternoons.”

  53

  What is it to be born free and not to live free?

  “Life Without Principle”

  Sarah Peel’s people were back on the streets of Concord. Homer found them a bail bondsman, and they popped out of jail and trailed up Walden Street to the center of town and settled down again in nooks and corners.

  As usual Palmer Nifto landed on his feet. Blithely he walked into the theater at 51 Walden, where the Concord Players were casting The Madwoman of Chaillot, and tried out impulsively for one of the principal parts.

  “You’re marvelous,” cried the casting director. “Will you be our leading man?”

  “Why, sure,” said Palmer cheerfully. “Hey, listen, I don’t suppose any of you people would let me stay with you? See, I live in Worcester, and it’s kind of hard to get here for rehearsals.”

  In a trice Palmer had three offers, and in no time he was installed in a charming bedroom belongi
ng to the Whipples, an old Concord family. At once he sneaked Audrey into the house to share his room. Audrey lay low.

  In the meantime Roger and Marjorie Bland struggled to recover from the vandalism to their house. It wasn’t as hard for Roger as it was for Marjorie. Roger had not yet discovered Palmer Nifto’s interference with his computerized financial affairs, and therefore, being naturally of a phlegmatic disposition, he took the whole thing in stride.

  But Marjorie couldn’t get out of her head her first glimpse of her lovely living room with the sofa slashed and the goose down floating in the air and all those awful faces staring back at her. One of the women had been wearing Marjorie’s mink coat, even though the temperature was in the nineties.

  Roger had bravely taken charge. He had marched solemnly to the telephone and called the police. Some of the interlopers leaked out of the house before the cruiser arrived, but they were soon picked up.

  It was left to Marjorie to repair the damage. First she summoned a team of housecleaners, then she sent the sofa out to be reupholstered and the dining room table to be refinished. She junked the CD player and the washing machine, replaced them, paid the horrendous telephone bill, hired a carpenter to repair the liquor cabinet, replenished its contents, and refilled the freezer.

  “Of course it’s the spiritual damage that’s the worst,” said Marjorie to Jo-Jo Field. “We felt”—she paused dramatically—“raped.”

  “Oh, Marjorie dear, how dreadful. You’ve been so brave.” There was still the problem of the horse. Marjorie called the vet and asked him to give Carmencita a good once-over. When he came, she sat down with him and called a spade a spade. “It’s a wonder no one was hurt. She’s been so aggressive lately. She does her best to bite me whenever I come near. Roger and I have been thinking”—Marjorie looked at the vet soberly—“of having her put to sleep.”