Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Inside the van, the lieutenant of detectives said, “Careful, Tommy, don’t hurt yourself.” Jean, who was sitting on Tommy’s lap because the rest of the space was filled with presents, shook her head, cast her eyes upward, and smiled, a little wanly. She looked especially small on Tommy’s knees. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, which made her look younger than thirty. Then again, when Jean was sixty, she’d still probably look young, and her eyes would still look serious.

  “Everybody likes Santa Claus. If people knew it was me, they’d flip me off,” said Tommy. The startled pedestrians looked angry enough to do that anyway.

  Earlier, while they were passing over the Coolidge Bridge to get the candy canes at the mall, the image of this year’s river jumper and the floating Christmas tree out there in the frigid water conjoined in Tommy’s mind. “The last Noel,” he said, by way of acknowledging that the festive mood in town wasn’t universal. His own was made of nervous hope. Jean might be pregnant. A couple of weeks ago the doctors in Boston had said the chances were only three in ten, but now the odds had risen. Jean had just told Tommy the news. The latest reading of her blood was “low positive,” which meant she was precariously pregnant. Confident thoughts might jinx their chances, Tommy felt, and so might negative ones. So he had to entertain both. Underneath his beard and bellowings, Tommy was scared, Tommy was excited. High expectation and anxiety. He let it out on Northampton. He was a public nuisance for a morning.

  They passed a pedestrian with a stogie in his mouth. “Merrr-eee Christmas, Harold! You should give up those cigars!”

  They passed a well-known drug dealer. Tommy tossed a candy cane at him, and called back as the van sped on, “Merr-eeee Christmas, Johnny! I’ve been checking my list and I’m checking it again right now! Ho ho ho! Merrr-eee Christmas!”

  Every Christmas he dressed as Santa and distributed some of the presents that local charity assembled for poor children. One year, up at Florence Heights, the door to a unit opened and before him stood a man he’d been trying to find for weeks. Tommy had pulled off Santa’s beard. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said.

  “Oh, shit!” said the wanted man.

  He and Jean spent the morning carrying gifts to the children inside the apartments at Hampshire Heights. This year he made no arrests.

  Jean’s face lit up at moments, when the children screeched in the crepuscular doorways at the sight of burly Santa and the presents, Tom bellowing out his “Ho, ho, ho!” But she was generally withdrawn, as if listening to other voices and not liking what she heard.

  Tommy met Jean when he was still molting adolescence. He saw her at a party, he liked the look of her, and he showed it by making a hostile remark as she was leaving: “Hey, little English girl, where you goin’?” She walked off haughtily, saying it was none of his business. He thought she was stuck-up. Some people still made the same mistake. Jean could seem severe and full of disapproval. Sometimes she seemed shy. It took a while to get to know her, because actually she was reserved, which came with being a Yankee, Tommy supposed. The first time she had dinner at the O’Connor house she’d been shocked into silence and indigestion. Six kids all trying to talk at once, all arguing with what seemed like great intensity. She’d felt in triple exile. “I was English, Protestant, and from a Republican family. But, I did the dishes.”

  Jean’s fantasy of true delight, she once told Tommy, would be to jump out of the basket of a hot-air balloon, free-fall with a bungee cord tied around her ankle, then parachute to earth. She looked back with nostalgia at her years as the daughter of farmers. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything now,” she said. But she hadn’t forgotten the hard side of that life. In the era of her childhood, New England hill farms had grown scarce. The ones that remained had to struggle for survival. Her family couldn’t get away for a vacation. For Jean downtown Northampton was far away, as Florence was for Tommy. The difference was that Jean came to adulthood yearning for travel.

  It seemed like a long time ago when they first started trying to have children. After a year or two with no result they’d started talking about adoption. Tommy kept running into candidates. He found a man and woman smoking crack in a Northampton motel room while the woman’s baby lay on the bed, its bottle empty, its diaper unchanged for at least a day. He arrested the man and got the woman into a rehabilitation program. She got cleaned up and then relapsed and asked him if he’d take the baby for a month or so. But Jean said she could imagine the moment when they’d have to give the baby up. She wanted one for keeps. Then there was Felix, the handsome little Puerto Rican boy who used to get in trouble just so he could hang out at the station. Tommy would look at him sitting on the wooden bench outside the Booking Room, swinging his feet from side to side, and he could imagine Felix his son. Also the child named Brownie, whose mother was addicted to crack; Brownie used to steal bikes that were much too big for him to ride, so that the cops would pay attention to him. They seemed to be the only adults who did. Tommy looked at him and thought, “I should take you home.” But he didn’t act, and now he thought it was just as well. Little Felix had grown up to join a gang. Recently he’d turned state’s evidence in some nasty shootings. And Brownie had gotten arrested elsewhere for molesting a child. Maybe they’d already been damaged when he met them, maybe irreparably, Tommy thought.

  Jean thought they should adopt a Chinese girl. She talked to him about the plight of baby girls in China. Tommy had been getting comfortable with that idea, gazing at Asian children on his rounds, when, on a winter night in 1993, he was called to a unit at the Meadowbrook apartment complex. The largest cop on hand kicked in the apartment’s door, the others spread out through the rooms of the apartment, and Tommy headed for the bedroom. He looked in from the doorway and for a moment he froze. A woman and a child with Asian features lay on the rug at the foot of the bed. Both were covered with bloody wounds, dozens of them. A wooden-handled steak knife stuck out of the young woman’s cheek, below her right eye. It was buried to the hilt.

  That case was easily solved. The woman’s common-law spouse and the child’s father, a man named Sean Seabrooks, confessed that he had hacked both of them to death in the midst of an argument about child support and baked potatoes. In the aftermath, several of the officers who had been at the scene said it left them deeply troubled. Rick was one of them. He had brought up Seabrooks again when he’d talked to Tommy about the reasons for his drinking problem. Tommy accepted this. The other cops’ feelings belonged to them. Tommy assumed they were genuine. He had tried to describe his own to a reporter shortly after the murders. “There’s no training, no preparing yourself for the worst, that can prepare you to see what I saw,” he was quoted as saying. “It doesn’t go away after you get off shift. It’s times like this when you wish you’d become a teacher.” The words looked wrong when he read them in the paper, not inaccurate, but a little self-serving, as if he were trying to take something for himself that rightfully belonged to the victims and their relatives. He still regretted saying that much. Out in the air, some thoughts spoiled. They also became vulnerable, out where other people could mess around with them. When others told him how he must have felt, he thought, “Sure, it had an effect on me, but it’s not the one they want to make it.” He didn’t talk much about the case again, until he testified at the trial. He got some satisfaction from helping to send Seabrooks off to Walpole for life without parole. “If there was a door to hell, I’d gladly push him through.”

  Tommy would say about that case, “If you work at a grocery and the fruit spoils, you deal with it. It’s part of the job. You do your job. You deal with it.” But inadvertently he ensured that the case would invade his private life. By law, a detective had to attend a murder victim’s autopsy. Tommy volunteered to attend the child’s. Volunteering was a habit, formed during his Police Explorer days. Besides, all the other detectives had children of their own. He figured the postmortem wouldn’t bother him as much. So he ended up standing, in gown and rubber gloves, inside th
e grubby little abattoir in West Springfield, staring down at the waxen face of a cute little boy with slightly slanting eyes.

  Jean worried about Tommy out on duty, and never more than during the aftermath of the Seabrooks case. “Not that he won’t come home,” she said. “But his seeing too much of things.” He wouldn’t have thought that possible himself; ever since he was a boy he’d imagined himself dealing with nefariousness. But he rarely forgot a face once he had seen it. Faces just accumulated, like stuff in a garage. A day, maybe two after the autopsy, he drove through one of Northampton’s housing projects, he saw an Asian child walking with its mother on the sidewalk, and on the instant he was looking at the image of the Seabrooks baby, laid out on a steel table, blood blossoming under the coroner’s knife, superimposed on the living child. This kept on happening. He lay awake many nights with the lights on. He didn’t talk about his nightmares to anyone but Jean. He was afraid they sounded like the invented stories he sometimes heard from arrestees, the ones who claimed to have flashbacks from Vietnam, even though they’d been in diapers when that war had ended. Jean remembered, “I was afraid he’d crawl into a little shell and never come out.” She worked on him until she got him to shed some therapeutic tears. But when she brought up the idea of adopting a Chinese girl again, Tommy said he couldn’t, just couldn’t, adopt an Asian baby.

  They had turned to technology. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong enough with Jean to account for infertility. Tommy got checked, too.

  Superstitiousness asserted itself. He imagined he was being punished for a sin he had forgotten. Or maybe all the hours he used to spend running a radar gun had left him sterile—the motorists’ revenge. He sat in the gynecologist’s waiting room, surrounded by pregnant women. He knew half of them from high school, and they knew him, of course. They smiled at him and went back to their magazines, and then they all must have looked up again—he felt the weight of many eyes behind him—when the receptionist called out in a loud voice, “Tom O’Connor for a sperm-washing.”

  He went to the counter quickly. Maybe she’d lower her voice if he stood close to her. But she didn’t.

  “Mr. O’Connor, you didn’t put down when this sperm was produced.”

  She might as well have gone around the room and whispered to all the pregnant ladies, “Do you know what Tom O’Connor did in the bathroom just a while ago?”

  He stared at her. Then he looked at his watch. “Oh, about five minutes ago, ma’am.”

  He wasn’t sterile, it turned out. He almost wished he were. Then at least he and Jean would know the cause.

  They continued with technology. High, then higher, and now, for the past year, highest—trips to Boston, more Latinate terms, and shots that Tommy had to give Jean in the butt. A heroin addict would have been better prepared for this, he thought. He didn’t know anything about hypodermic needles. The first time he used one, upstairs in their house, he accidentally blunted the tip. Jean yelped, and, without thinking, reverting to one of his boyhood means of self-mortification, Tommy ran out of the room and down to the kitchen. He cowered in a corner, until Jean came looking for him and he had recovered enough to wonder at the strangeness in himself. Frankie might have understood. But if the psychotic tough guy who had told a rat of his, “I don’t mess wit’ O’Connor. He’s a wrangler,” or any of the homeboys, felons, and drug dealers who thought the same, could have seen him then, hiding in a corner because he had inadvertently inflicted a little pain on a woman …

  Unlike some colleagues’ wives, Jean had never asked him to work the day shift. She knew he hated Days. They tended to be dull, he disliked the lieutenant usually on duty then, and the shift had several cops who seemed to have gone, whining, into on-the-job retirement. “Boy, Jean’s tough,” Tommy often said. And this was truer than he knew. He figured she had to be lonely, in their house at night with only their dog, Murphy, for company. But he didn’t know how lonely, because she didn’t tell him. She’d only said she’d rather he worked Evenings than Midnights, because at least on Evenings he got to see some people who were normal. And she never complained about the trips to Boston or the surgical procedures or the hormone shots.

  Because of their mismatched schedules, he often had to give her the shots at the police station. He’d find an empty room with a door that locked, always a shabby-looking room, because those were the only kind the station had. It was more humiliating for her than for him, the open surreptitiousness of the procedure, the backseat-of-a-Chevy air it had about it. Through the window in the station’s side door, he’d see her walking toward him, carrying her little bag with the needle and the drugs in it, like a toy doctor’s bag. If she’d asked him to sign up for Days, he probably would have then.

  Jean loved Christmas. The other day she dressed up the dog in his Christmas necktie and took him to the mall in Hadley, where Murphy sat on the lap of a department-store Santa. As usual, she had their house decked out with ornaments and lights and figurines and a toy New England village, cottony white cloth representing snow. The only thing missing was a child to enjoy it. They held the O’Connor Christmas party at their house this year, the usual raucous affair. Tommy had a fine time. He always did. After everyone went home, Jean told him she’d miscarried. She’d mourned the death inside her silently, because she hadn’t wanted to spoil the party.

  As usual, Tommy tried to hide his disappointment and to cheer her up. He got control of his face, put on his wild, grinning look, and said, “Hey, you’ve still got some eggs in Boston, right? Think we oughta send ’em Christmas cards?”

  Once when they were dating, he made her laugh so hard she sprained her stomach muscles. But as Rusty Luce once said, “O’Connor can wear ya out. He can.” This time Jean said to him, “Don’t make a joke out of everything. Just let me get through this.”

  Tommy wanted a child, ardently. He also felt he was expected to have one. He’d begun hearing that message from other cops years ago. He’d let it drop around the station that he and Jean were trying to have a kid, and after a while some of his colleagues started in on him. “Hey, Tom, want me to give it a try?” Cop humor. He had to smile through it. At one point Rick jumped in: “Hey, Tom, we’ll pass a cup around the station.” He couldn’t always count on Rick when other people were around, but when they were alone, and they got serious the way they had as boys, discussing the adult world while making models years ago, Rick asked him why he and Jean didn’t see a fertility expert. Rick and his wife had, and look how well it had worked.

  He’d told Rick that they were seeing more fertility experts than he could count. Right away Rick had apologized. He was an anxious person, just as Tommy was. Tommy simply covered up with more congeniality. But Rick wasn’t cruel. He’d been completely sympathetic since that time when Tommy let his anger show.

  All but one couple among their married friends had children now. While their friends’ kids were small, not much changed. But eventually, the kids got into sports and dancing lessons and their parents spent more and more time driving them around, and through the children they met other parents, and soon their social lives were entirely organized around the kids. Jean’s best friend confessed that the last time she’d gotten pregnant she hadn’t wanted to tell Jean. At parties where all the others talked about their children, Tommy and Jean would end up talking to each other. She felt defective, without having done anything to deserve it. He’d bring home stories of women who spent their pregnancies smoking and drinking, even taking drugs, and then gave birth successfully. She didn’t drink while trying to get pregnant. She even gave up coffee, which she missed much more than alcohol. It all seemed so unfair.

  More and more often, jaw-flexing anger seized Tommy when couples at parties started telling cute stories about their babies, when he ran into old acquaintances back in town to visit family and they asked him how many kids he had. Then sometimes he’d think, “Is that the only accomplishment in society? Having a kid? I got the Major John Regan Narcotics Investigator Award.
Did you?” Reunions and the stories told by people who had moved away made him envious. Family was the best of all his reasons for having stayed at home. Without a child, he felt the weight of all he might have done. Everywhere around him in Northampton, people he’d known for years were moving on in life. Now in the winter, in the aftermath of Jean’s miscarriage, he felt as though he’d come to a dead halt.

  One afternoon Tommy swung the cruiser into Hampshire Heights, with his window down and the heater on. A girl he knew slightly came up to his window. He got out to talk to her. She wore a winter coat, so he couldn’t tell that she was pregnant until she said, “Guess what!” and spilled the news.

  “How old are you?” asked Tommy.

  “I’m thirteen.”

  “What are you doing for your kid?”

  “I got these pills from the clinic.”

  She handed him the pill bottle. He looked at it and handed it back. “That’s good.”

  Then she lit up a cigarette. He snatched it out of her mouth and ground it under his boot. “Don’t be smoking!” She cowered at his stare.

  Tommy drove away, muttering. “I’ll go out on a limb and say that I think our population of idiots has increased. And a young kid like that. It really irritates me.” Then his voice grew quiet, musing: “Kids having kids, and we can’t seem to have one.”

  For years commonplace encounters like that had seemed designed to cut Tommy. On winter evenings now, they seemed sharper, as if the town itself were reproaching him. It wasn’t possible for Tommy to go through a whole shift feeling dour. But he was beginning to wonder if he was obsessed. He kept gazing at small children and imagining them his own. If one of them were, he’d dig in that trunk at home and watch the kid grin when he pulled out the wig and mustache. When the boy—a tomboy would be acceptable, too—was old enough, he’d show him the old neighborhood, all the backyard spots, the path down by the Mill River, the old hiding places on the Smith campus, White Rock across from the defunct state hospital. They’d walk up to the kitchen door of his father’s house, and he’d say, “Grandpa and his friends did some pretty goofy things. Ask him. I’m pretty sure he’ll tell you all about them.” He and Jean would save up. They’d make sure their child had the opportunity to go away to college.