by Jane Langton
“Well, who gives a damn anyway?” said Marjorie.
Certainly Julian and Charlotte had no intention of giving up and fading away. “Let’s spite them all,” said Charlotte. “Let’s live to be a hundred.”
And they did. Sometimes they lived in Charlotte’s place, sometimes in Julian’s. The commonwealth of Massachusetts offered to buy them out, but they refused to sell, and since their two mobile homes were at opposite ends of the park, the whole thing had to be preserved just the way it was.
Far into the next millennium they had the run of the place. One day during the first decade Charlotte, a woman of taste, did something surprising. She bought a pair of orange plastic flamingoes and stuck their wire legs into the grass facing Route 126. All the Thoreauvians and bird lovers had to look at them as they trudged by. Later on, Charlotte added a couple of gnomes and a whirly windmill.
Charlotte and Julian went right on living at Pond View until they were very, very, very, very old.
In the commercial center, the part of town where Walden Street intersected with the Milldam, all the boutiques were gone. No one regretted their departure. When Taylor Baylor heard that Mimi Pink had sold out, he abandoned his retirement in Florida and came roaring back to Concord. Before long his old shoe store was back on the Milldam, occupying the former premises of Hugo’s Hair Harmonies.
But perfection is elusive. The Concord landfill was still a vast hole in the ground. Five thousand people went right on trailing across Route 126 on torrid summer days to swim in Walden Pond. And every piece of private unoccupied land in the town was up for grabs. Fifteen houses went up on the Burroughs farm, to be offered for sale at a million dollars apiece.
And therefore Oliver Fry still found it necessary to do battle for Thoreau country. Sometimes his fellow citizens wished Henry Thoreau had been born in some other town, some village far away. Then Henry would have written Winnipesaukee, or Moosehead, not Walden, and Oliver Fry would have left them all alone.
Unfortunately Thoreau had been born right here in Concord. It was a simple fact, and they were stuck with it.
Sometimes when Oliver was oppressed with the hopelessness of it all, sometimes when he saw bulldozers assaulting a new piece of virgin Concord soil, Homer Kelly took him by the arm and led him back, back, back, through tangles of catbrier and honeysuckle and buckthorn, to an abandoned orchard not far from his own house. Red cedars towered among the bristling apple trees. Homer and Oliver had to force their way in, torn by prickling blackberry canes, inhaling the fragrance of the air—ah, such smells!—the heady aroma of fox grapes, the hot perfume of sunlit leaves, the thrilling scent of wild apples dangling from neglected boughs, and now and then, faintly from far away, the whiff of a passing skunk.
And sometimes, once in a while, they heard again the song of the wood thrush. But whether its singing amended any human institution in the world, even in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, was still very much in doubt.
Author’s Note
What about Thoreau’s wood thrush? Was he mistaken? Was he really listening to the song of the hermit thrush?
In the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s journal, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen, there are doubting footnotes to some of Thoreau’s entries about the wood thrush.
Here, for example, is Thoreau on April 27, 1854:
The wood thrush afar,—so superior a strain to that of other birds … This is the gospel according to the wood thrush. He makes a sabbath out of a week-day. I could go to hear him, could buy a pew in his church.
And here is the footnote:
Probably it was the hermit thrush, not the wood thrush, for which the date is too early, whose song he had been praising.
One might add a cautionary footnote to the footnote: Thoreau was such a keen observer and wrote so often about both the hermit thrush and the wood thrush, perhaps he was not mistaken after all.
But in this book I have gone along with the notion that he was indeed wrong, that the heavenly note of his wood thrush was really that of the hermit. Therefore, when Homer Kelly hears it at last, “a watery warbling, a bell-like melody … repeated in a higher register, the last notes rising out of hearing,” it is a description of the hermit thrush’s song as I have been introduced to it in Concord by my friend Walter Brain.
The setting of this book more or less resembles the actual town of Concord, Massachusetts, but all the shops are imaginary. The Walden Street house of Oliver and Hope Fry is real however—in some of my children’s books it was home to the family of Frederick Hall.
There is a trailer park in Concord, but in this story its residents and their mobile homes are invented. So are the members of town government, as well as the various building projects and real estate enterprises that come before them. In fact, all the characters in this book have no connection with actual people, although some are descended from certain residents of Anthony Trollope’s cathedral city of Barchester.
There is no seventy-story Grandison Building on Huntington Avenue in Boston.
I can’t close without thanking Tom Blanding and Anne McGrath for spreading so generously their knowledge and enthusiasm for the work and the landscape of Henry Thoreau.
WARNING: Quaking bog enthusiasts are advised not to go unaccompanied into Gowing’s Swamp. Titcomb’s Bog, on the other hand, is perfectly safe, since it does not exist.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries
PROLOGUE
“Gloria” from the Magnificat by J. S. Bach
Two introductions must be made at once.
The first is to the new pipe organ in the Church of the Commonwealth in Boston’s Back Bay.
It is an American organ, made in Marblehead, trucked down to Boston and installed in the balcony of the church by the local representative of the maker, organist and organ builder Alan Starr. Eagerly hovering over Alan as he works is the music director of the Church of the Commonwealth, James Castle. It is Castle who chose the builder and the specifications. When the organ is ready, Castle will play it.
Starr has spent weeks setting it up, fastening in place the tall wooden cases and standing in their racks thirty-nine of the ranks of pipes above their wind chests, and settling the console into its niche at the front of the balcony. All the delicate tracker mechanisms have been assembled. Henceforth a pulled stop knob will withdraw the gag from a row of pipes and a struck key will activate a hinged rod, permitting a single pipe to sound its note.
There is still much work to be done. Alan will spend months adjusting the open mouths of the pipes with his delicate tuning and voicing tools, listening and changing, nicking and prying, until each reed and flue pipe speaks its note correctly in the reverberating chamber that is the sanctuary of the Church of the Commonwealth.
Not everyone is happy about the new organ. “There we were with the finest pipe organ in Boston,” complains church treasurer Kenneth Possett. “Granted, it was half destroyed in the fire, but surely it could have been repaired. I must say, I blame Reverend Kraeger. Oh, not just because it was his carelessness that started the fire. It’s his whole attitude toward Castle. Whatever Castle wants, Castle gets. And damn the expense.”
“You’d think Castle would have been satisfied with the biggest instrument in New England,” grumbles old Dennis Partridge, a member of the Music Committee. “Five keyboards and fourteen thousand pipes!”
“Oh, the man’s a musical snob. The old organ was out of style, that was the trouble. The rage right now is for this old-fashioned kind. Everybody wants to abandon their magnificent electropneumatic pipe organs and go back to mechanical action. It’s as if the advancements of science had never happened.”
“Maybe it was a conspiracy, the fire that destroyed the organ and killed that poor sexton. Maybe Kraeger and Castle set the fire together. I’m only joking, of course.”
“Maybe it’s no joke.”
But there are supporters as well as detractors for Castle’s new organ. Martin Kraeger him
self, the minister, is its principal champion. On the day the first truckload arrived from Marblehead he was there on the sidewalk, eager to lend a hand. He carted in some of the pipe trays himself, supporting them on his belly with his powerful arms, shouting questions, wanting to know what the labels meant—Nazard, Tierce, Prestant.
Edith Frederick is another staunch defender. Mrs. Frederick is even more ignorant about pipe organs than Kraeger—she doesn’t know Bourdon from Chimney Flute or Mixture from Diapason—but she is the sole trustee of the music endowment that has come down in her late husband’s family. The endowment is enormous.
After the fire Mrs. Frederick came forward with her arms full of money. “The best,” she said to James Castle. “Get the very best.”
And he had. On the day the organ arrived, Castle astonished his student, Alan Starr, by saying something sentimental as they carried one of the sixteen-foot pipe trays into the church. Normally a wry and witty man, he said baldly, “Glory, that’s what we’re going to have here. Glory, nothing less.”
“Well, sure,” agreed Alan. “Glory it is. Hey, watch out for that corner.”
The glory, of course, was bound up in the sensitive mechanisms of the tracker rods and in Castle’s choice of stops. Any organist, reading the list of specifications, would recognize their possibilities.
GREAT DIVISION
Bourdon 16’ (wood) Tierce 1⅗’
Prestant 8’ (I–II) Cornet II–V
Spitzflute 8’ Mixture V–IX
Octave 4’ Double Trumpet 16’
Chimney Flute 4’ Trumpet en Chamade 8’
Nazard 2⅔’ Clarion 4’
Fifteenth 2’ (I–II) Zimbelstern
CHOIR DIVISION
Stopped Diapason 8’ Larigot 1⅓’
Prestant 4’ Mixture II–III
Spire Flute 4’ Glockenspiel ½’
Fifteenth 2’ Regal 8’
POSITIVE DIVISION
Violin Diapason 8’ Tierce 1⅗’
Chimney Flute 8’ Mixture IV
Italian Principal 4’ Cymbal III
Nazard 2⅔’ Cremona 8’
Doublet 2’ English Horn 8’
Quarte de Nazard 2’
SWELL DIVISION
Spindle Flute 8’ Night Horn 2’
Viola da Gamba 8’ Clarion Mixture V–VI
Voix Celeste 8’ Bärpfeiffe 16’
Gemshorn 4’ Trumpet 8’
PEDAL DIVISION
Prestant 16’ Mixture V
Bourdon 16’ Contra Bombarde 32’
Octave 8’ Trombone 16’
Rohrpipe 8’ Trumpet 8’
Superoctave 4’ Clarion 4’
COUPLERS
Great, Positive, Swell, Choir to Pedal Swell to Positive
Balanced Swell Pedal
Positive, Swell, Choir to Great Balanced Crescendo Pedal
So much for the first introduction.
The second is to an occupant of the house next door to the church. The name of this resident of 115 Commonwealth Avenue is Charles Hall. Charley was born fourteen months ago in Brigham and Women’s Hospital. At birth his specifications were as follows:
Weight: seven pounds, two ounces
Length: 21 inches
Hair: brown
Eyes: blue
Charley is a tractable child, although he does not yet walk or talk. His mother is sure he is not retarded, but sometimes she worries about him. Surely before long her child will say his first word?
But like the organ, which has yet to be voiced, Charley Hall is not ready to speak.
ADVENT
“Puer natus in Bethlehem”
Chorale harmonized by J. S. Bach
A boy is born in Bethlehem,
Alleluia!
Rejoice, rejoice, Jerusalem,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
CHAPTER 1
When I lay sucking at my mother’s breast, I had no notion how I should afterwards eat, drink, or live.
Martin Luther
The baby was wide awake, although it was after his bedtime. His mother had dressed him in shoes and warm socks and a woolly hooded zipsuit. He was hot. He stood up in his crib and bounced, enjoying the creak of the springs. The curtains were drawn and he could see nothing in his little room but the dark shapes of the dresser and the changing table, and a streak of light under the door.
From the next room he could hear music, and his mother talking to someone. Her voice was comforting, as always. The music flowed around his head, his mother’s words went up and down.
The other voice was sharper. “The car’s ready. Your stuff is in the back seat. Let’s go.”
“I’m not coming. I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’ve what?”
“I’ve got to tell them. I can’t let him take the blame. I’m not coming with you.”
“Look, I told you, it isn’t just this fire, it’s all of them. Not to mention manslaughter and murder. You’re not just in trouble, you’re in prison.”
“I don’t care. I want to tell them. I’ve got to.”
“My God, Rosie, Kraeger’s all right. His congregation has gorged itself on the pleasure of forgiving him. Forget about Kraeger. Come on.”
“No, no, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not coming. I can’t let him be blamed for what he didn’t do. Let go of me, let go! Let go!”
The baby stopped bouncing and listened to the unfamiliar sound of a scuffle, and his mother’s angry voice, shouting above the music. He began to cry.
CHAPTER 2
… the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music …
Martin Luther
Running up the dark steps of the Church of the Commonwealth, Alan Starr didn’t notice the baby at first, crawling up the stairs ahead of him, all by itself.
He was absorbed in the muffled sound of the organ leaking through the closed doors. There were awful irregularities within each rank. No one would be able to judge the new instrument until he himself had voiced nearly three thousand pipes, nicking apertures, adjusting tongues, tuning wires and resonators.
Even so, even unvoiced, the organ responded brightly to James Castle’s catapulting counterpoint. The driving sixteenth notes fell on Alan’s ears like rain in a dry land. He had been born with a thirst for harmonious noise, for “Rock-a-bye, Baby” and all that came after. The sound of the new organ from Marblehead was piercingly clear. The old organ had never sounded like this, in spite of its fourteen thousand pipes and its swarming electropneumatic imitation of all the instruments in the orchestra.
But perhaps only James Castle was good enough to coax this sort of brilliance from the new organ. Castle was in a class by himself. He was, after all, the most famous student of the legendary Harold Oates. Since Alan in his turn was Castle’s pupil, he sometimes imagined himself a kind of musical grandson of the great Oates.
“Is it true?” he had once asked Castle. “Did he really play like that? You know the way people talk.” Alan rolled his eyes comically upward. “They say he was divinely inspired by God.”
Castle had guffawed. “Divinely inspired? Harold Oates?” But then he grinned at Alan. “Well, who knows? Perhaps in his own way he was.”
Now, hurrying up the church steps in the dark, Alan almost stumbled over the baby. He stopped short and looked at it in surprise. It was crawling up the cold stone steps of the Church of the Commonwealth, slapping down a hand on the step above, hauling itself up on one knee, sitting down with a thump, reaching up to the next step.
The baby was alone. No one else was climbing the steps behind it, or watching it from the sidewalk. What was a baby doing on the street alone in the dark? “Look here,” said Alan, “where’s your mother?”
The baby paid no attention. It caught sight of a man walking a dog along the sidewalk. At once it turned around and started down the stairs again, making extraordinary speed. Transfixed, Alan watched it patter after the dog, which was tugging its owner across Clarendon Street toward the building
excavation on the other side. The traffic slowed down, then charged forward.
“Hey,” said Alan. He galloped after the baby and snatched it up just as it put a hand down into the gutter. The cars rushed by, oblivious, while Alan stood on the curb, looking down at the child in his arms, breathing hard.
In the light of the street lamp he could see that it was quite a nice-looking baby with alert blue eyes. Its cheeks were plump and dirty, with clean streaks where tears had run down. Its face had a kind of hilarious expression.
Whose baby was it? Alan looked along the row of town houses and up and down the tree-lined park dividing the two lanes of traffic on Commonwealth Avenue. A few kids were moving past the marble bust of a long-forgotten mayor of Boston, heading for the bars on Boylston Street, their shoulders hunched against the cold. The baby’s mother was nowhere in sight.
Music flooded out of the church. Castle was trying the reed stops. Even through the closed doors the sound was thrilling—the brilliant clarion, the rampant trumpet.
Alan had an appointment with Castle. They were to spend the evening in a swift overview of all the ranks, and Castle was going to say exactly what tonal values he wanted, and Alan was going to write it down. He was late. What the hell should he do with the baby?
It occurred to him that its careless mother might be in the church, listening to the organ. Holding the baby with one arm, Alan walked quickly up the steps. He had never held an infant before, but there didn’t seem to be much to it. The baby fitted comfortably against his shoulder and chuckled in his ear.
He pushed open the door with one elbow, walked across the vestry and entered the sanctuary.
At once he was surrounded by the atmosphere of American Protestant holiness, circa 1887. The church had been built in obedience to the architectural ideals of John Ruskin. Ruskin’s lamps of Obedience! Truth! Power! Beauty! Life! Memory! Sacrifice! had shone upon the supporting pilings as they were driven into the damp silt and clay of the filled land of Boston’s Back Bay. The lamps had glistened on the rising walls of Roxbury pudding stone, on the checkered sandstone and granite of the tower, on the elaborate decoration of the interior. The winds of architectural fashion had long since blown out most of those noble lamps, one by one, but the usefulness of the building had not changed. It was still a sturdy and handsome structure, dark within, glowing with stained glass, gleaming with polished wood.