Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  So she left Mendocino, bound for Northampton, on a day late in August. She drove a small Chevrolet, a gift from an old man she’d helped take care of. After a few days on the interstates, she realized she was keeping company with several other cars, cars full of young men and women with college stickers like coats of arms on their rear windows, and she thought—it was a revelation to her—“This is something people do.” Other people were driving east to college, as she was. People must do this every year. But the people in those other cars were young. They were doing something that they had either done before or had expected all their lives to do. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman with an eleven-year-old son beside her, with a frying pan wedged under her seat and a housecat prowling the back.

  They started the journey with $600. It seemed like enough, but it was almost gone after four and a half days of gas and tolls and motel rooms. And what would she do when they got to Northampton? Her thoughts got away from her, gathering momentum in a frightening, familiar way. She and Benjamin would land in Northampton unable to afford even toilet paper!

  Laura had cut herself off from her father and stepmother, but they’d reentered her life recently. Smith was their idea. They’d encouraged her to do this. At a rest stop near Baltimore, she went to a pay phone, out of sight of Benjamin, and called her father in Oregon. She wept into the phone. “I don’t know how I’m going to buy toilet paper!” Her father told her that she had to trust herself and this enterprise. “But what if I can’t buy toilet paper?” To say out loud how she felt was a relief, of course, but his consoling words changed nothing. She remembered a conversation they’d had many years ago, when he was driving her to junior high. “Why do you feel that way, Laura? You’re pretty, you’re smart.” He’d meant well. He always did the best he could for her. But the words he’d intended as reassurance had only upset her more. If she was pretty and smart, then something really must be wrong with her, because she dreaded encounters with the junior high cheerleaders and wanted to cry when they called her Four Eyes. Now at the rest stop, after placing what her father would later christen “the toilet paper call,” Laura knew she wasn’t equipped for this great opportunity. Other people thought she was. So she still wasn’t what she ought to be, and she was going to let them down.

  In every place there are people too preoccupied to see what lies around them. They think it doesn’t matter where they are, or that they should be somewhere else. But maybe the best refuges allow a person not to notice them.

  The Smith campus is an arboretum designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the genius behind Central Park. The place reminds you of an old and polished piece of silver. All but a couple of Smith’s new buildings fit the old. Wood-framed ones had been left standing. There were gardens everywhere, and the whole place was a museum of trees. The little metal plaques on their trunks read like a catalogue from an emperor’s far-flung holdings: London plane tree, Japanese snowbell, hop-hornbeam, dawn redwood, Japanese pagoda tree, Chinese fringe tree, Kentucky coffee tree, devil’s walking-stick, Dahurian larch, California incense cedar, Tatarian maple, Amur cork tree. There were more than 150 different species. But Laura didn’t see them, not individually. She didn’t want to see them.

  Smith’s loveliest prospect is from the hill overlooking Paradise Pond. Huge hardwoods surround the still waters; a little island floats out in the middle. In the fall, the water reflects all the colors of autumn burning in the trees. Now the leaves were falling. Soon they would cover the pond. But Laura didn’t go there. She walked straight to class and straight back to her apartment, dressed now in the parka that her father had kindly sent her, and more than ever she kept her eyes lowered. Her apartment had a bay window with a view—downtown’s rooftops, the First Church’s steeple, the turrets of city hall, the cupola on the ancient fire station, and behind them, rising up, the wooded slopes of the Holyoke Range. But Laura was used to the Cascades and Sierras. When she first heard someone call those hills out her window a range, she felt like laughing scornfully. She missed the huge dark ocean off Mendocino, and when she looked out her window, the memory of sea sounds made her weak all over. Everything here felt small and confined. “It’s so quaint,” she said sarcastically to herself, hating the place for having her in it, and for the downward tugging in her stomach, which, she thought, must be what “homesick” meant.

  She knew she shouldn’t feel this way. Back in California, after she’d gotten her acceptance letter, a lot of people had told her she wouldn’t believe how beautiful fall was in New England. Now she could see from her apartment windows that it was almost over. One day she set her jaw and told herself she had to get out into the countryside. “You’re going to do this, Laura.” She drove alone, without any plan, heading northwest into the foothills of the Berkshires.

  In Northampton, the settlers built their houses close together and divided up the rich, flood-prone fields by the river. In the hills that Laura drove through, farmers had settled down beside their land, far from one another. Many of the fields and woods they’d cleared had returned to forest now. The beautiful old stone walls beside the roads made her wonder—all that abandoned labor. Every five or ten miles she’d come to a village center, a bunch of houses and a church, practically every building clapboarded and painted white. “Cool,” she thought. She was smiling now, actually smiling. She was driving slowly through the outskirts of one of those old-timey places when she came upon a vision. It was real enough, and it was homely—yet another white clapboarded house, with a yard full of leaves, and out in front a woman raking.

  The woman seemed ageless. “She could be anywhere from fifty to ninety,” Laura thought. She didn’t see her for long, but she told herself she was going to remember this picture: a woman in a man’s old brown fedora and rubber knee-length boots, wielding her rake adroitly, neither hurrying nor slacking. Laura drove on, and imagined a life. “You can tell she’s physically strong. She’s also alone. She’s, like, a solitary. This is what she does every year, at this time of year. It’s one of the many jobs she does. Each season has a corresponding job, and so it’s really her land. She’s just so humble, and she looks perfectly peaceful out there raking her leaves.” On the West Coast you didn’t see women like her. “Everyone out there seems to be obsessed with how they look and what they have. They’re always getting new things. That woman’s hat and boots, they must be thirty years old, at least.”

  As she drove back to Northampton—a long drive; she was lost on back roads for half of it—she thought, “I want that. That’s what I’d like to be when I’m old. Like that woman.” She said to herself, “Oh, I guess I’d really like to stay here in New England.” Then she felt very sad, because it was probably too late.

  She’d gotten by so far without being found out. She didn’t have any midterm exams. Her English professor had granted her still more extensions on her papers, no questions asked. She was still squeaking by in math, and all the way up to Thanksgiving, she kept thinking she’d soon figure out how to write her English papers. But when classes resumed after the holiday, she didn’t go to hers anymore. She told herself she’d been given one chance and she’d blown it. People had expected too much from her—her father and stepmother, her teachers back in Mendocino, the people at the Ada Comstock office. She couldn’t face them. She retreated into her apartment. She stopped answering the phone.

  A couple of long weeks passed before her so-called “big sister,” the veteran Ada assigned to look out for her well-being, knocked on her apartment door.

  “Go away. Leave me alone,” Laura called through the door.

  “No.”

  The knocking resumed.

  After a while Laura opened the door. Her big sister said, “I’m taking you to see Ellie Rothman.”

  “No, you’re not!” said Laura. Laura remembered the first time she’d met Mrs. Rothman. It was a very hot day and Mrs. Rothman, who was probably about sixty years old, was wearing a very fine-looking dress and nice jewelry and pumps, but no nylons
, and Laura had thought, “That’s just so cool.” Mrs. Rothman would not maintain a rigid dignity at the expense of being sensible and comfortable. That was real dignity. Talk about a confident woman. Everyone referred to her as Ellie, but the last time Laura tried, she choked on the name and ended up saying “Mrs. Rothman.” The woman looked you right in the eye. Laura imagined that she always knew what to say, and always said exactly what she thought.

  “I’m too scared,” Laura said.

  “You need to go and talk to Ellie Rothman,” the woman answered softly. If she’d yelled, Laura might have been able to refuse.

  It seemed like a long walk, up Bedford Terrace and down Elm Street, past the art museum, which Laura hadn’t visited, to a side entrance of College Hall. Windows set in lancet arches lend it an air of the sacred. The building came at Laura in a blur. Three flights of beautiful old creaking stairs led to the Ada Comstock office on the top floor. Entering, Laura noticed again the collages of photos of Adas on the walls. Those pictures had already upset her. All those women smiling. All those confident, happy faces.

  Mrs. Rothman ushered her into her private office and closed the door. She said she wanted an account of Laura’s academic progress.

  “I haven’t written any papers,” Laura said.

  “Do you have finals?”

  “Two.”

  “Can you do this work, Laura?”

  “Yes, I can, if I can get more extensions,” Laura said. She sounded as if she meant it, and she thought she did.

  “Ellie’s so kind,” Laura remembered. “She believed me. She said, ‘Okay, you’ll have the extensions. All you have to do is write the papers and show up for your finals.’ ”

  As she left, all false smiles, it occurred to Laura that she had often put herself in impossible positions, and hadn’t known what she was doing until it was too late. Walking back down the stairs, she figured that she’d just made everything worse. She had wanted to avoid another expulsion and had cut herself off from any help she might have gotten, by lying to a person who trusted her. She had missed too many math classes to catch up now. There was no way she could write three papers in the last week and a half of the term, and if she didn’t write them, there would be no point in studying for exams, and no point in taking them.

  Benjamin had gone to school, unhappily as usual. Laura sat by the window in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and gazing out at nothing. She listened to the footfalls on the staircase just outside her kitchen door, the sound of other Adas passing. They were going to exams. Their footsteps sounded serious and sober. She didn’t hear any voices. She was still sitting there two and a half hours later, when she heard much louder sounds outside. Her fellow Adas were returning. They were running up the stairs. She heard shouts and laughter through the door.

  “I want to die,” she thought.

  “You have so much potential, Laura.” “We don’t know what to do with you, Laura.” She would be asked to leave. That was what happened when you failed. She decided to withdraw gracefully. She called the Ada office and asked to speak to Mrs. Rothman. But Ellie was away. She wouldn’t be back for a week, said the woman on the phone. She told Laura not to make any decisions until Ellie returned. Laura felt calmer. At least this ordeal was over. She spent that week planning to make plans. Then she found a letter in her mailbox, from Mrs. Rothman. It read:

  I am puzzled and distressed by your failure to contact me on Friday 12/20….

  Because you did not call or come in, the extensions have been negated. You are therefore in a very difficult position.…

  Please call to discuss this if I can clarify it for you, and good luck.

  Again Laura trudged up to the imposing façade of College Hall. She trudged up the stairs to the Ada Comstock office and into Ellie Rothman’s office. “I lied to you,” Laura said, when Ellie closed the door. “I was in your office a while ago, and if I’d been honest I’d have told you I knew I couldn’t do the work. I didn’t go to my finals.”

  “I know,” said Ellie.

  “I understand if you have to kick me out,” said Laura.

  Ellie raised her right hand, the palm facing Laura. “Wait a minute. You’re going too fast. No one has said anything about that.”

  Ellie was businesslike. Laura listened in astonishment as Ellie took charge, saying, “If you give me your permission I will go before the Academic Board and plead your case.”

  If you screwed up in school, you got kicked out. “But she’s saying that I’m someone worth helping,” Laura thought. She had never felt quite this way before. She thought, “What I’m having is what James Joyce would call an epiphany.” She looked at Ellie. “Will you help me?”

  “Yes.”

  Laura started to cry.

  Remembering that day, she said, “I didn’t fling myself across her desk or anything.” She cried quietly, and Ellie, looking at her sternly, said, “Laura, you are going to be on academic probation, and you’re going to meet with me once a week.”

  This seemed like a brand-new, brilliant strategy. Even she could be a student one week at a time.

  Winter came early this year. On November 28 the police found a body near the railroad tracks behind the lumberyard on Pleasant Street, a very thin black man in layers of coats. He lay near a portable toilet, a “Sani-Can.” To the cop at the scene it looked as though he’d lived in it. There was no question of foul play. He’d clearly died of exposure.

  The man’s name was Ben. He was a former mental patient. He’d come from the eastern part of the state, and had hung around Northampton for a couple of years. The town stirred at the news. Tommy had a little interest in the case. He used to see Ben on the nighttime winter streets downtown and call to him from the cruiser, “Hey, you want a ride to the cot shelter?” But Ben never accepted help from him. Local social service professionals called Ben another terrible example of someone who had “fallen through the cracks.” It might have been more accurate to say that Ben walked out the door, but you knew what those people meant, and of course they were right. Northampton had more people on boards that worried about homelessness than it had beds for the homeless.

  Some of the people who had known Ben a little, and others who felt his life should be marked, arranged a memorial service at the Unitarian church. A good-sized crowd attended, reporters included. At the service one of the speakers said of Ben, “He was such a sweet and gentle person.” Another said he’d seen in Ben’s eyes “softness and sweetness, an incredible love.” Ben had changed his life, that speaker declared. A musician had composed a song. It was called “For Ben.” Another eulogist said that while he and Ben had never actually talked, they had communed. “We spent a lot of time reading newspapers together in the laundromat. I miss him.” Several people told the Gazette reporter that they used to buy Ben coffee.

  Tommy read the newspaper accounts of the memorial service with mounting irritation. The reported speeches reminded him of Frankie, who often said that he meant well. “I’ll put that on your tombstone,” Tommy told him once.

  The first substantial snowstorm hit early, too, on November 29, but Northampton’s winter always arrived before the solstice, sometimes with snow and invariably with the unhoused taking desperate measures to get indoors. Old-timers remembered when the ancient county jail was situated near downtown, and how Sheriff Boyle, God rest his soul, used to run it like a shelter. A lot of reprobates made sure to get arrested at this time of year. Judge Ryan remembered, from his days as a probation officer, the autumn day when a judge tried to sentence a drunk to probation instead of jail. The drunk yelled at him, saying he was entitled to a sentence of ninety days. One night in late fall a few years ago, a man stole a bus and drove it to the police station on Center Street, so the cops would have no choice but to give him a bed for the night. And now, sure enough, one dark cold morning, Ron Hall’s voice announced, with the pregnant pauses that had filled the morning air for going on forty years: Last night the glass in the front door of city hall was. Kick
ed in.

  One of Tommy’s officers found the culprit sitting on the steps of the Castle, evidently waiting to be arrested. He came from Peru. He didn’t speak much English. Tommy told him that he could make his phone call. The young man tried to call his mother collect from the Booking Room, and she hung up on him. Tommy saw to it that Northampton treated him better, and gave him a bed for the night behind bars.

  Notoriously, the holiday season spreads despair to people who feel they have nothing to celebrate. The Christmas season and the river often claimed a Northampton resident or two. This year, on a December afternoon, some people driving over the Coolidge Bridge saw a young man climb the railing and jump off, the body falling feet first toward the icy waters of the Connecticut. The lighted Christmas tree was moored out there again, on a float in the current south of the bridge. Christmas lights winked from evergreens beside ranch houses in the suburban neighborhoods. White lights made halos in the trees downtown and arches over Main Street, where a man from St. Kitts played yuletide tunes on his steel drum. The old place looked dressy and rather pleased with itself.

  Early in the morning two days before Christmas, a van traveled through Northampton with a Santa Claus in the back, his head out the window, his white beard flowing in the wind like a dog’s ears. He was bellowing and throwing candy canes. He threw one at a startled pedestrian—“Too much caffeine will make you jumpy, young lady! Merrr-eee Christmas!” He threw one at a jogger—“Merrr-eee Christmas, young man! I’ll get you a skateboard!” He threw one at a mailman—“Oh, Charlie! You’re a hardworking postal employee! Here’s something to suck on!”