Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  He watched the pedestrians pass before his windshield. On any given summer night, they might include, mixed among the average-looking, a couple of young women with garlands in their hair, an earnest-looking young man with a slinky ferret on a leash, a woman in a pair of platform shoes so tall they nearly qualified as stilts. “How can she do anything serious in those shoes?” said Tommy. A man in a black cape, carrying a wand. “There goes Mr. Magico. Why doesn’t he make himself disappear?” A former mental patient, a special ward of Tommy’s and of some other cops, striding across the street, lifting his knees high, his fingers splayed rigidly apart. He wore a furry hat with a feather in it. “I believe he’d call that a plume,” said Tommy. A group of boys and girls with burgundy hair, orange hair, India-ink hair, hair that stood up in spikes like a rooster’s comb. He’d asked one of those kids for the secret: heavy applications of Ivory soap. He liked these motley promenades. They enlarged his town. He hadn’t had to leave Northampton to sample the sights of urban America. The world had come to him. “In downtown Northampton, every day is Halloween,” he said. “And every night is New Year’s Eve.”

  On a summer evening, stopped at the central traffic light on the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets—no right turn on red allowed—Tommy peered at the bumper sticker on the car in front of him. QUESTION AUTHORITY, it read. Sergeant O’Connor’s jaw stiffened. He started talking softly to himself, as if talking to the driver, saying, “Free Tibet. Save the whales. Hey, dude, go for it all. I hope you make a right turn now.” But then, a moment later, a beautiful young woman appeared on the sidewalk. Her hair was dyed green, yellow, and white. She had a ring in each nostril and, hanging from her septum, a beaded chain that looked just like the pull chain on a lamp. Tommy’s eyebrows rose. His eyes widened. His tongue came forward, almost between his teeth, almost ahead of his words. He looked ten years younger, or maybe ten years old, like the boy who used to go to special classes because he stuttered when he got excited. “This is the greatest community to live in!” he exclaimed. “All the lunacy, that’s half the beauty of it. This is a great town to work in. What other town this size has this much going on at night?”

  In a decade of police work, Tommy had seen a seamy side of Northampton, and through it a spectrum of dispiriting human qualities, including, in one appalling murder case, the very incarnation of what his parish priest had meant by the word “evil.” A lot of people never saw that side of the town. Tommy suspected that a lot of residents didn’t think that it existed. He felt impatient with their naïveté and he felt protective of it—rather like the parents who want their children to know the world has many dangers, which they don’t want them to encounter. “We deal with the same people over and over again, so that the rest of the people don’t have to deal with them. We’re like trash collectors,” Tommy said once, in a tone that carried more pride than complaint.

  Working here as a cop, he often said, had cost him his innocence. But the loss hadn’t simply come with the job. It had also been a project. As a young cop, he’d gone with older ones to houses and apartments that had corpses in them—some of which no mortician’s art could make presentable. Tommy often cracked jokes at the scenes. Once, while watching the medical examiner peel the scalp off a body, he was reminded of the reflection of his own shaved head in the mirror, and he said, “See, everyone’s bald in the end.” And everyone in the autopsy room had laughed. A joke made him feel alive in the presence of death, like carousing at an old-fashioned Irish wake, and when he was a younger man, a joke had also made him look worldly-wise in the presence of older cops at the scene.

  Maybe he had managed to lose his innocence, but he hadn’t lost his capacity for repossessing youth. One time he was rooting around in a trunk at home and found a wig and fake mustache that he’d worn in his years as Northampton’s drug detective. He held them in his hands, smiling at them. Utter boyhood reclaimed his face. “I’m saving these,” he said. “If we ever have a kid, he’ll love to play with them.” He added, “I know I do.”

  The town and childhood were inextricably connected for him, and in spite of all the newcomers and the alterations on Main Street, a great deal of Northampton still felt the same. When he drove away from festive Main Street near the end of the evening shift, he found himself almost at once in dim and quiet places. He might have left a party around a bonfire on a beach and, one sand dune away, found himself enveloped by the immensity of night. A mile from downtown, out past the college and the hospital and the fields of the Smith Vocational High School Farm, Northampton’s village of Florence would look as calm and quiet as a churchyard. Florence used to be Tommy’s beat. He’d patrolled it on the midnight shift for years as a young cop, through its almost always peaceful slumber. He passed through Florence often in the evenings nowadays, but he’d gone for years without seeing it in its early-morning hours.

  One night he agreed to work a tour as the substitute sergeant on the midnight shift. Florence still went to bed early. The morning of his brief return to Midnights, Tommy discovered that the village still woke up early, too. At four A.M. the lights went on inside the Miss Florence Diner—Miss Flo’s, the village’s old central landmark, quaint-looking enough to have made it into several coffee-table books. For old times’ sake, and feeling hungry, Tommy pulled up beside Miss Flo’s right at four, for the first time in half a decade. He opened the door, and he thought he must be dreaming. There behind the counter, scrambling eggs as always, stood the bent and twisted figure of Battlin’ Bob, the short-order cook, as ever undeterred by his disabilities. Tommy stood in front of the counter in his sergeant’s uniform, looking around, his eyes growing huge. The same small group of men, less one, sat in the diner’s booths. And not just any booth, but each in the same one he had occupied five years ago. In a moment, the paper man came in with a stack of the Springfield Union-News. Tommy looked at his watch. It was the same paper man, and he was right on time, five-years-ago time.

  Tommy turned to one of the men who sat drinking coffee in a booth. “Joe, you’re still here! How many years since I used to come in here?”

  Joe couldn’t remember. He filled Tommy in on what had happened since he’d been away. There wasn’t much to tell. The missing regular had died. Joe himself had retired from construction work but still got up and came to Miss Flo’s before dawn every morning.

  “You’re still here!” Tommy said again.

  “I’m in the same pew, too,” said Joe. “Nothin’ ever changes, huh?”

  One thing Tommy liked about his job was that every evening brought something unexpected, but he’d never liked unexpected changes in his own life—maybe because, on the whole, his own life had always seemed so well arranged.

  A few years ago he and Jean had moved. It was because of his job. Tommy found a message spray-painted on the Northampton bike path: FUCK O’CONNOR’S WIFE BECAUSE SHE LIKES IT. Then someone he arrested said he knew where Tommy lived and at what hour his wife walked their dog. So he and Jean bought a house in a neighboring town. The night they moved into it—he hated the whole experience—Jean pointed out to him that, so long as they lived here, he wouldn’t be able to run for mayor of Northampton.

  “I never thought of that!” Tommy had yelled. He’d felt sincerely upset.

  Their new town was rural, Republican, and Protestant, but only a few miles from downtown Northampton and from Mike Bouley’s garage, where Tommy still got his car serviced, and Ed’s Electric, where he got appliances fixed, and the Dunkin’ Donuts on King Street, where he went for his coffee while on duty and the woman at the cash register always called him “honey,” and the Look Restaurant, where he usually ate when he ate out and where, without his asking, the waitresses placed his order for him, saying, “I know. A tuna melt and a chocolate milk.” And he was just a short drive from Forbes Avenue and his childhood home, where his father still lived.

  Tommy’s mother had died suddenly, in 1994. He was on duty and made it to the emergency room just in time to say good-bye. He
couldn’t go back inside that place for months. Jean said he had to put a stop to this, and face the ghost in the ER. He finally forced himself. Walking into that brightly lit place, he felt sweat trickling down his back beneath his protective vest.

  Now, more than ever, his father’s house pulled him toward it. In the winter, after snowfall, he’d steal ten minutes from his sergeant’s duties and shovel out his father’s driveway. One morning he arrived at the front door and asked his niece, who was staying there for a few months, “How’s Himself today?”

  “I don’t know,” said the niece. “He hasn’t gotten up yet.”

  Tommy brushed past her, ran through the kitchen, and bounded up the stairs. He came back a few minutes later, his face flushed. “Sleeping like a baby. Phew.”

  Almost every evening around six, Tommy turned his cruiser back toward Forbes Avenue, heading for supper with his father. A meal eaten on duty was, in police parlance, a “forty.” He was allowed about half an hour for his. Sometimes Jean joined them, and did the cooking.

  As Tommy drove down Forbes Avenue, he noticed small changes in the old neighborhood. That house he remembered as run-down was newly painted. That old barn they’d used as a fort during those chestnut wars had been made into an artist’s studio. And there weren’t nearly as many children around. But oaks and maples taller than the houses still lined the narrow street, their roots wrinkling the sidewalks, and the O’Connor homestead was essentially unaltered. Tommy entered through the kitchen door, and on most evenings his father, Bill, turned from the stove and right away seemed to stand behind an imaginary podium. “Well, Tom, I was walking around this morning, and I was singing, and I thought of a great song for Northampton. ‘I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus.’ Now whaddaya think of that? It’s a hit, isn’t it?” Then his father made his laugh—it was famous in old-time Northampton, one grand exhalation, mouth opened wide.

  Tommy smiled, thinking, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I hope he doesn’t use that one at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast.”

  Bill O’Connor was seventy-nine, and spry. He had long ago retired from his day job as treasurer of Hampshire County; before that, he’d run an insurance business, so small that when he sold it and entered politics, the entire operation fit in a shoebox. His work now was entirely as an Irish storyteller, a seanachie. He always presided at Northampton’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, and the phone still rang with requests that he serve as master of ceremonies at functions in the city and region. Bill rarely refused.

  Physically, Tommy didn’t take after his father. For one thing, Bill still had his hair, and his nose made a fascinating sharp left turn. Bill used to tell Tommy and Tommy’s older brother Jack that his nose was wounded on the beaches of Normandy. Bill really had been there, in the navy. But his nose was congenital.

  Years ago, when Tommy and Jack were making noise at bedtime upstairs in this house, their mother would come to the door and say, “If I hear another peep out of you two, your father’s coming up.” “Peep, peep,” he and Jack would say in unison, and then, as threatened, Bill would arrive, sit down on their bed, and start telling stories. They had counted on this. A forty at Bill’s house was nearly as predictable. On the nights when Jean wasn’t there, Tommy and his father both pitched in at the stove. Then they sat down at the long kitchen table, the one Tommy had always known, Bill at the head and Tommy to his right, and in a moment, without preamble, Bill started telling a story.

  He had hundreds of stories. Many were tales of the good old days in Northampton politics, when the town still had more than a smattering of Republicans. There was the one about the bibulous city councillor—“He was a Democrat, usually,” Bill said—who went to a meeting to cast his vote on the Yankee Republican side of an important issue, but disappeared on the way to city hall. The mayor, a Yankee Republican, declared that the councillor had been kidnapped. Actually, two old Democrats, one Tunker Hogan and one Wally Puchalski, had intercepted the councillor and offered him the sort of bribe he found irresistible. The three men spent the evening drinking in the Polish Club bar across the river, where they watched the TV news story about the councillor’s kidnapping.

  Tommy gazed at the old man, and scraped his right thumbnail, deformed from high school football, against a front tooth. Jean liked to study him at these moments. Listening to his father’s stories over supper, dressed in his sergeant’s uniform and fearsomely equipped, his gun on the table, Tommy looked, Jean thought, just like an eager child.

  Bill took a bite of supper, and resumed. “Now it’s after midnight. As I found out later, they decided to bring him home.”

  “And you were nowhere around at that point,” said Tommy.

  “No. I was home with my wife,” said Bill.

  The councillor lived at the top of a steep grassy hill, and he was now asleep. His kidnappers, Hogan and Puchalski, had to carry him up the slope. They made an awkward pair of bearers, one too big, the other too small. “Hogan’s a big man, oh, Hogan’s over three hundred. I can see him now. He had a little pin head,” said Bill. He added, “Puchalski’s frail. Frail all over.” Puchalski once defeated Bill in a mayoral election and used to run the city from his candy store. The two kidnappers weren’t entirely sober themselves, and they managed to carry the councillor only halfway home before they slipped and fell in a heap on the grass. Then Tunker Hogan, who liked a bit of mischief, reached over and took the still-sleeping councillor’s pulse. “Son of a bitch, he’s dead!” Hogan said to Puchalski. “You killed him!”

  “Puchalski believed it,” said Bill. “I think he was thinking of resigning from politics, and isn’t it funny, he went on to be mayor four terms. And Hogan says, ‘I’m not gonna get caught in this thing. I’m goin’ to my car. If you want to come, all right.’ So. They both ran away.”

  “They left him lying on the grass?” said Tommy.

  “They left him lying on the grass,” said Bill sadly.

  “One of them thinking he was dead!” said Tommy.

  “And the Recreation Department picked him up later in the morning,” said Bill.

  The next night he might tell about the time when he was a boy and his mother sent him to pay a long-overdue doctor’s bill: he hands over the dollar bill his mother has given him, and the doctor says to his nurse, “My God! This boy is paying for his own delivery.” And maybe the night after that, the one about Puchalski and his cronies stealing the U.N. flag from city hall and pleading patriotism when they got caught, Bill saying, “I never laughed so much. That was politics. It made no sense at all.” Sometimes he told a story that Tommy hadn’t heard before, but the routine was always about the same. After supper Tommy helped clean up, then strapped on his laden gunbelt. As Tommy headed for the door, Bill said, “Hey, thanks. Thanks for visiting an old man.”

  Tommy looked back quickly, in time to see his father winking.

  Like one loved long ago, Northampton has saved many keepsakes, among them old journals and diaries, and stored them in Forbes Library instead of in bureau drawers. The most important come from a nineteenth-century newspaper editor and antiquarian named Sylvester Judd. He gathered up a huge assortment of documents and memorabilia about the town in its colonial youth. He recorded this story from the time of the seventeenth-century Indian wars: Samuel Strong and his son left town one morning to fetch some grain and were ambushed by Indians. Other townsfolk heard the shots and came running. The boy was dead, Strong only wounded. But he imagined he was dying as he was carried back toward town. “He used to say that when they reached a hill where Northampton could be seen, he took, as he supposed, one last look at his beloved home and town, with feelings that cannot be described.”

  As for his own feelings about Northampton, Judd was usually reserved. In his journals, he mainly recorded small details of the place, the locations of its houses, the clothes its people wore, its daily temperature. But there is feeling here. Surveying Judd’s old documents, so intensely local and precise, you sense that he was working in an already
retrospective frame of mind, trying to construct the entire place without him in it. Once in a while he got carried away and made what, for him, amount to exclamations. He might have been writing to an old flame to tell her how she once appeared. Of a Northampton winter scene in the 1840s, he wrote, “The night was very still; no wind, and the trees this morning are if possible more resplendent and glittering in the morning sun than yesterday. It seems an enchanted scene from the Arabian Nights. The trees seemed filled and covered with transparent silver like foliage.” After you have spent some time with him in his journals, you can feel the disappointment with which he wrote this entry, recording the town’s nighttime and early-morning sounds during the summer of 1842: “I have heard no whippoorwills this season.” Judd must have been overwhelmed with pleasure when, three summers later, he sedately wrote: “A whippoorwill was heard at Broughtons Meadow April 28th and it has been heard there every day since—early in the morning and evening.”

  People who spend their lives in one small town don’t necessarily grow blind to it. Some natives of a comely place take its beauties in so deeply that the place becomes almost identical with the senses that perceive it. Since marrying Jean, who was geographically adventurous, Tommy had traveled some, on vacation trips. But his journeys were few. He’d never seen the West Coast. He’d never seen New York City, though it was only a three-hour drive away. When he did travel, he carried Northampton with him. If he saw a pretty hillside belonging to another place, or smelled another place’s river, he knew those things by contrast and comparison with the hills around Northampton and the great river that made its eastern boundary. These were, for him, reality. And if he woke up somewhere else, on a vacation trip or in the neighboring town where he now lived, and heard a whippoorwill outside—three syllables, the first and last accented “Whip-poor-weel, Whip-poor-weel”—he would be transported back to his bedroom on Forbes Avenue. Opening his eyes to the gray daylight in the window and listening to that ancient song, he’d remember himself remembering, “Oh yeah, oh boy, it’s summer.” In his mind’s eye, his frayed shorts lay on the floor, right where he had left them. He’d pull them on, hurry through breakfast, then run out to meet Rick and his other friends on the street.