God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Well, she’s an old girl,” said the vet sympathetically. “Sometimes they turn nasty. Let me know when you make up your mind.”

  54

  GO BACK THREE SPACES.

  Chance card, Monopoly

  The telephone was like a part of Bonnie Glover’s body. She tucked it between ear and shoulder and chattered away, doing her nails at the same time or leaning over a mirror to stroke mascara on each individual eyelash. She had begun the telephone habit in junior high school, when she and all her friends had discovered this way of being perpetually together.

  Today she was doing something forbidden. She brought the phone out to the counter in the Porcelain Parlor and called Ananda Singh.

  “What’s it really, really like, living with the Frys?” Bonnie wanted to know.

  “What is it like?” Ananda was puzzled. “Oh, it is very nice. It is a good house. Very comfortable.”

  “But how about—you know, I mean Mr. Fry has a drinking problem. It must be kind of, you know, pretty gross sometimes, just really incredible?”

  “Oh, but that is calumny.”

  “Calumny, what’s that?” Bonnie laughed. “Oh, Ananda, you’re so intellectual. My girlfriend said to me, ‘Isn’t he just so incredibly intellectual?’ And I’m like, ‘God, you should see him sometimes.’“ Bonnie’s chuckle was sultry.

  “But I am an eyewitness. Mr. Fry is not—I assure you, it is not so.”

  “Listen, there’s another eyewitness, his own daughter, Hope, that darling friend of yours. She told Jack Markey, you know Jack Markey? She told him her father drinks a quart of whiskey every day, I mean it’s all over town.”

  Ananda was stunned. For a moment he had nothing to say.

  Bonnie went on babbling. When a customer came into the shop Bonnie turned her back and hugged the phone tighter to her shoulder. “His own daughter, how do you like that?”

  The customer stared at Bonnie’s back. “I wonder if I could interrupt you?” she said in a frosty voice.

  Bonnie turned farther away, crouching lower over the phone. She was alone in the universe with Ananda Singh. Behind her back she heard the customer leave the shop. The glass door sighed as it puffed open and slowly swung closed. “You don’t believe me? It’s the truth, honest to God.”

  Once again the door puffed open, and there was a sharp clack of heels across the floor. Bonnie turned to behold her boss, Mimi Pink.

  “Put—down—that—phone,” said Mimi.

  “Oh, sorry, I gotta go,” said Bonnie, pushing the hangup button.

  Mimi’s voice was edged with ice. “I have just met Mrs. Alexander Whittier on the sidewalk. She told me she drove all the way from Ipswich this morning in order to purchase the signature Lladro golden eagle for her husband’s birthday. It happens to be the most valuable piece of porcelain in the shop. She told me she was not able to get your attention.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I had this fabulously important phone call.”

  “You—are—fired.”

  Bonnie left in tears, and Mimi took over. She polished the glass counter. She wiped a speck off a porcelain madonna. She rearranged the golden eagle on its pedestal. Business in the Porcelain Parlor was slack.

  Then suddenly there was another crisis. Mimi’s assistant in the Den of Teddies came running in to report that a giant stuffed bear had been stolen by one of the homeless people.

  “How could such a thing possibly happen?” said Mimi, scandalized.

  “I don’t know,” sobbed the assistant. “One moment they were there, the mother and daughter, you know, and the next they were gone. By the time I noticed the big bear was missing, they were nowhere in sight on the street.”

  Mimi was outraged. Once more she called the police, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good, and it didn’t. Then later in the afternoon business picked up.

  The afternoon was always the best time. Customers from other towns never shopped in the morning, they came after lunch. Today it was a handsome older couple from Cohasset. First they fell in love with the porcelain ballerina. Then they got excited about the golden eagle.

  Marjorie Bland came into the shop, too, looking for a wedding present. She was in no hurry. She stood at the counter gossiping with Mimi about the homeless problem. Mimi told her about the theft of the teddy bear. Marjorie told Mimi about the vandalism to her house.

  “And you won’t believe this, but that crazy old lady keeps coming back. I think she’s in love with my horse.”

  “Can’t you have her arrested?”

  “Oh, well, the problem won’t be with us much longer. The vet’s coming over Thursday night. We’re putting the horse to sleep.”

  There was a squeaking noise from the front of the shop. Marjorie and Mimi turned to see Sarah Peel staring at them with her mouth open.

  “That’s her,” whispered Marjorie. “That’s the very one I was talking about.”

  Mimi looked at Sarah sternly. This particular bag lady had been forbidden to enter the Porcelain Parlor. She was the most dangerous one of the lot, because her stroller bristled with appendages—an umbrella, a bulging plastic bag, a pillow, a pile of clothing, a blanket, an overflowing basket. There was even a folding chair.

  “No,” cried Sarah, “you can’t do that to Pearl.”

  It was the last straw. “Out,” cried Mimi, striding forward. “Out with you! Out, out!” Grasping Sarah by the arms, she turned her around and dragged her out the door. Sarah fought back. There was a furious tussle. The golden eagle rocked on its pedestal, and fell, and smashed on the floor, followed by the ballerina. The Cohasset couple were spattered with chips of broken china. Sarah’s stroller, abandoned in the middle of the floor, rolled this way and that.

  It was at this moment that Jack Markey walked in, carrying a pink plastic bag. Dodging the stroller, he put the bag on the counter, then turned abruptly and walked out again, tripping over the stroller, which sailed across the floor and slapped against the counter. The pink bag fell off the counter into the stroller and nestled between Sarah’s umbrella and the folding chair.

  Regaining his balance, Jack marched out to the street, ignoring Mimi Pink, who was standing on the sidewalk shouting angrily after the shambling figure of Sarah Peel.

  Mimi didn’t notice his departure. She was too angry. She tramped back into the shop, crunching underfoot the splintered pieces of the porcelain eagle. Her breast heaved, adrenaline coursed through her body. She stared at the stroller. It was a hideous blot, a foreign object in her glittering store. One hand grasping the handle, she rushed it through shop and office and back door into the alley beside the Mill Brook, where a dumpster was parked. Violently she hurled the contents of the stroller into the dumpster. By the time she had tossed the stroller in after the basket and the umbrella and the folding chair and the coats and the blanket and the pillow and the pink plastic bag, she was shaking, she felt really ill. She stood for a moment, gasping for breath, and then she stalked back into the shop to apologize to the couple from Cohasset.

  They were gone. Marjorie Bland was gone.

  It was typical, absolutely typical of the chilling effect those homeless troublemakers were having on local trade. The time had come to take the case to court.

  55

  I am like a feather floating in the atmosphere; on

  every side is depth unfathomable.

  Journal, February 21, 1842

  Charlotte Harris woke up at five o’clock in the morning to find herself alone. The other side of the bed was not sagging under her husband’s weight. The room was gray with dawn light. Where was Pete?

  It wasn’t like him to be late. Whenever he had night duty at the hospital he came home exactly at four in the morning and ate a dish of Wheaties and came to bed, making a lot of noise, talking to Charlotte, waking her up so completely she couldn’t get back to sleep.

  Charlotte got out of bed and looked out the window. Pete’s car was not parked at the edge of the driveway. She called the hospital. “May I have
the kitchen? Mrs. Heppleman? This is Charlotte Harris. Is Pete still there?”

  “Why, no, Mrs. Harris. He left at his usual time. You mean he hasn’t come home?”

  “I suppose he stopped off for breakfast somewhere. Well, thank you.”

  But they both knew there was no place in the neighborhood to get breakfast in the middle of the night. Charlotte hung up, aware that Mrs. Heppleman would assume the Harrises were having marital troubles.

  She called the police.

  “How long has he been missing, Mrs. Harris?” said the sleepy voice of the officer on duty.

  “Well, he left the hospital at quarter of four, and it’s five-thirty now. He always comes straight home.”

  There was a pause. Once again Charlotte knew what the man was thinking—marital problems. “Tell you what, Mrs. Harris. If your husband is still missing tomorrow morning at this time, call us back. We don’t usually issue a missing person bulletin until somebody’s been gone for several days.”

  “Well, all right.” Charlotte put down the phone and took a deep, shaky breath.

  A mile away from Pond View in Oliver Fry’s house, just up the street from the police station, Ananda Singh came downstairs at seven-thirty and saw a letter lying open on the table. The heading at the top was clearly visible, and he couldn’t help reading it:

  TO THE VOTERS OF THE TOWN OF

  CONCORD FROM THE COMMITTEE TO

  ELECT ROGER BLAND

  Ananda was not an American citizen, not a voter, and therefore the letter was not addressed to him. But he didn’t think he would be invading the privacy of Hope and Oliver Fry by reading it. After putting a kettle on the stove, he sat down at the table and looked at the sheet of pale green paper. Behind him the shrews scrambled in their cage. The snakes writhed in the aquarium.

  The letter too was a snake, and it bit his hand. At the end of the printed text was a list of Bland’s supporters. At the head of the list was the name Hope Fry. Ananda closed his eyes in pain.

  Hope came running into the kitchen. She was cheerful and excited. She threw open the refrigerator door. “Isn’t this the day we’re going to Gowing’s Swamp? I’ll make a picnic lunch. There’ll be four of us, right?”

  Ananda stood up in torment. “Only three, I’m afraid. I cannot go. I am not—feeling very well.”

  Hope turned in surprise. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She watched as he crumpled a piece of paper, threw it in the wastebasket, and left the room in silent dignity.

  At once she went to the wastebasket, extracted the paper, recognized it for what it was, and read her own name at the top of the list of Roger Bland’s supporters. Overcome with misery and shame, she sank into a chair.

  From his bedroom window Ananda watched her open the back door of Homer Kelly’s car. She was carrying a bag of sandwiches and a pair of rubber boots.

  “Where’s Ananda?” said Mary, smiling at her from the front seat.

  “He’s not feeling very well today,” said Hope stiffly.

  Looking down from above, hearing his own falsehood, Ananda winced. He watched them drive away and murmured good-bye to Hope Fry. The girl who had attracted him so strongly with her open face and lovely smile was not the person he had thought her. That person had never existed.

  He was alone in the house. When the phone rang, he picked it up with a sense of desolation.

  “Ananda?”

  It was Bonnie Glover. Ananda cringed and muttered, “Hello.”

  Bonnie was in tears. “She fired me. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t pay my rent.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Bonnie’s sobs stopped, and her next words were perfectly clear. “So I’m moving in with you.”

  “No, no, you can’t do that!”

  “But I can’t afford to be by myself!” The sobs began again, running up into a high squeal.

  “Wait, wait.” Ananda thought rapidly. “I’ll find a place. But not here. You can’t come here.”

  “Because of Hope, right?” sneered Bonnie. “Your precious Hope.”

  Ananda was suddenly so full of anger, he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  Bonnie sensed her mistake and began sniffling again. “Okay, okay, that’s fabulous. I’ll be waiting. Kiss, kiss.”

  Ananda hung up, his life collapsing around him.

  56

  The devil goes on exacting compound interest …

  Walden, “Economy”

  Jack Markey had had enough. He had been clever, he had been responsible, he had done whatever was necessary, he had delegated the job whenever it was possible to do so and performed it himself when it was not. But this was the last goddamn time.

  The body of Pete Harris was so heavy, Jack had to drag it by the feet along the path beside Gowing’s Swamp. By the time he got it down beside the watery margin of the bog, he was worn out. He shoved the carcass under a bush, and ventured into the muddy water. Sinking down, hanging on to the brittle branches of dead trees, he heaved himself toward the middle of the swamp. Jack had not bothered to find a pair of rubber boots. His shoes were mired in mud. His pants dragged at him, soaked to the hip.

  He had no eyes for the strange beauty of his surroundings, no interest in the bird singing somewhere above him—only a desperate desire to lunge forward until he found the hole in the middle of the quaking bog, the place where people shot horses and watched them sink.

  Then he saw it, a small pool of open water in the middle of the encircling sphagnum. At once he turned and struggled back to the shore for the body of Pete Harris.

  God, it was impossible. First Jack tried hoisting Pete up on his shoulders, dragging him by the arms, bending himself double. But their combined mass was so great that his feet plunged too deep in the slimy mud and he nearly lost his balance. Then he let the enormous weight slip down his back until it was half-submerged. Grasping the feet again, he tried floating it behind him. The effort was almost more than he could handle. The body kept snagging on fallen trees and the roots of straggling bushes.

  The worst was yet to come. The big-bellied carcass was a spongy pneumatic mass of air cavities, and it floated high above the surface. It wouldn’t sink. Jack had to slosh back to the shallows and return with a water-soaked log. And then he barely had time to drop it on Pete Harris and retreat, because there were voices in the woods.

  They were near, very near, a man talking loudly, a woman laughing. Christ! Jack hauled himself back to the shore, catching at twigs, tripping and splashing up to his chest in muddy water. Full of dread, he crawled high on the bank and hid himself in a grove of pine trees, slumping down exhausted in the low undergrowth of blueberry and fern.

  He was only just in time. Soaked through and shivering, he watched through a gap among the whippy stems of buckthorn. What the bloody hell were they doing?

  Oliver had told Homer how to find his way in. With Mary and Hope slogging behind him, Homer led the way through the watery moat to the carpet of sphagnum moss supporting the bog garden in the middle of Gowing’s Swamp. Silently they stood gazing.

  “Better not all stand in one place,” whispered Mary, and they moved apart. The mossy surface billowed beneath their feet.

  It was not a place for talking. Slowly they walked around the green-gold garden among the dwarfed larches, the panicled andromeda, the swamp azalea and summersweet. Cotton grass lifted puffs of white on wiry stems.

  “Listen,” said Mary. They all looked up as a watery warbling began in the woods, a bell-like melody. A moment later it was repeated in a higher register, the last notes rising out of hearing.

  They didn’t need to be told what it was. Homer looked at Mary. The singing stopped, then began again, a little nearer.

  Hope listened, too. She was inundated with waves of regret. With the song of the wood thrush in her ears, she kept seeing the anguish on Ananda’s face as he crumpled the letter to which she had signed her name.

  Then there was a new sound, a blare of music from the direction of the housing de
velopment off Lexington Road. The thrush stopped singing. The boom box shouted, “Do it, do it, do it …”

  “Oh well, hell,” said Homer, and they turned to go.

  Again he led the way. With his arms held high before his face, he pushed through the surrounding barrier of thorny bushes, holding them aside for Mary and Hope. “Watch out for this one. Wait a sec, this way’s easier.”

  And then, turning for a last look at the Garden of Eden, he saw a hand rise up and sink among the dwarfed trees.

  “Shit,” whispered Jack Markey, watching from the shore.

  “Wait for me.” Homer turned around and started back and looked again. The hand was gone. Had he been mistaken? Now there was nothing in Gowing’s Swamp but miniature larches and green moss and cotton grass and the tyrannical vibrations of the world’s loudest radio.

  “Homer?”

  “Wait a minute.” Homer turned and stared at the green pool where the body of Pete Harris was now rolling slowly, floating just under the surface. Homer saw only the half-submerged log that held it down. The log bobbed slightly and lay still.

  “Come on, Homer.”

  “Coming.” Homer shrugged his shoulders and made his way out of Gowing’s Swamp, following Mary and Hope along the woodland path to the car. For the rest of the morning he tried to put the mirage of the disappearing hand out of his mind. But later in the day he had a call from Julian Snow.

  “Pete Harris is missing,” said Julian, his voice sounding faint and far away.

  “He is?” Homer thought about it. “Do you think he walked out on his wife?”

  “She doesn’t think so. She says this isn’t like him at all.”

  “Well, thank you, Julian. I guess I’d better speak to the police again.”

  “Okay, good.” Julian’s voice faded as though he were calling from the moon. “So long. I just thought I’d let you know.”