by Jane Langton
30
Farewell … our dear sister in Christ Jesus, farewell, but we trust not forever.
Reverend Charles Stearns
Lincoln, 1812
It was nearly Thanksgiving before Claire Bold died at last. The November air was thin and chill, purified of the heavy airs of summer. The glaring colors of October had given way to somber umbers and deep reds. There had been a thick fall of leaves, opening up astonishing forgotten vistas along roads that had been dark tunnels of shade all summer long. The sun rose late every morning and hurried to an early decline.
Thanksgiving at the County Hospital was a difficult time. The head nurse on Howie Sawyer’s ward confessed to Joan that the patients were especially troublesome. “They sense something is going on, that they’re being left out. It’s almost as tough as Christmas.” The head nurse shuddered. “How I dread Christmas.”
Joan looked around at the small company of broken men and women who had been shipwrecked on this antiseptic shore—Mr. O’Doyle was sitting on the floor against the wall, drowsily clutching his ball, Mrs. Beddoes was rocking in her chair, Mr. Canopus was talking to himself, his eyes bright, Miss Stein was smiling in her sleep, Howie was pacing heavily back and forth. “I’ll help at Christmastime,” she promised the head nurse. “I’ve got a few days off.”
“I thought you weren’t married to Howie anymore,” said the head nurse, looking at her sharply. “I don’t expect to see you around here much anymore.”
“Oh, it takes a while to get a divorce,” said Joan. “And anyway it won’t matter. I’ll keep coming just the same.”
“I’ll bet,” said the head nurse, but only to herself.
On the day before Thanksgiving, Joe Bold tried to focus his attention on the sermon for the holiday service. But he had been up with Claire all night. His papers kept sliding to the floor as he nodded off in the chair beside her bed. When Lorraine Bell knocked on the door, he jumped up and let her in, and they stood together looking down at Claire’s exhausted sleeping face. Her wasted body was almost invisible under the blanket.
“I think she’s a little better now,” murmured Joe, hoping against hope.
Without a word Lorraine settled herself beside the bed and took out her knitting.
Joe walked up the hill to the parish house. There he found Felicia, his secretary, in a vexed state of mind. “You’ve had a phone call from Maud Starr,” she said, frowning at him. “She wants you to call her back.”
“Oh, Joe,” cried Maud on the phone. “I’m all agog. I’ve had this idea. I want to start a singles group. What do you think? Could you come over and talk about it? I’m just brimming with ideas. If I don’t tell somebody, I’ll pop.”
“Now?” said Joe hollowly, staring at the paper turkey pasted to Felicia’s window. “You mean I should come now?”
“Why not?”
Joe’s brow furrowed as he tried to think of a reason why not, but nothing occurred to him. “Well, all right, I guess so.”
“You’re going over there?” said Felicia, shocked and disgusted as he put down the phone. “To Maud Slarr’s house?”
“Look,” said Joe anxiously, “call me over there if—if you need me.”
“I certainly will,” said Felicia sharply, giving him an accusing look. Then she punched the on button of the tape recorder, turned the volume way up, and began battering at her typewriter, pounding out last Sunday’s sermon for the next issue of the church bulletin. The quiet opening of the outer door and the soft sound of its shutting were drowned out by the stammering noise of Joe’s recorded voice echoing from the tall ranks of Felicia’s file drawers and the potted plants on the windowsill and the calendar of the Holy Places of Jerusalem and the oddly shaped pipe-fitting Joan Sawyer had left for the sexton and the stack of worn-out hymnals Felicia couldn’t bear to throw away.
Half an hour later, still hard at work, she almost didn’t hear the phone. But on the last ring she hopped up and grabbed it. Lorraine Bell was asking anxiously for Joe.
“I’m sorry,” said Felicia, “he’s not here. But I can give you the number where you’ll find him.” Felicia knew it by heart, and she recited it for Lorraine.
Lorraine knew it too. “But that’s Maud Starr’s number. Is that where he is?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Felicia angrily.
“Well, thank you, Felicia,” said Lorraine. But a moment later she rang again, panic-stricken. “There’s no answer at Maud’s. Where can Joe be? I’ve got to find him. I think Claire is sinking. I’ve called Dr. Spinney.”
“I’ll try Mary Kelly,” said Felicia crisply. “Mary might know what he was planning to do today.”
But Mary was not at home. When the phone rang in the small house on Fairhaven Bay, it was Homer who answered it. “She’s not here,” he said, sensing the desperation in Felicia’s voice. “Is anything wrong?”
The story tumbled out of Felicia. “He’s supposed to be at Maud Starr’s, but she doesn’t answer her phone.” Then Felicia couldn’t help interjecting, “With his wife on her deathbed!”
“Where does Maud live?” said Homer.
Felicia told him, and in a moment Homer’s pickup was once again lurching along Fairhaven Road. Maud’s house was easy to find. With its butterfly roof, it was a crumbling example of the modish architectural follies of the nineteen-fifties. Inside, Homer suspected, there would be a conversation pit lined with shaggy carpeting.
He had come to the right place. Joe’s car was in the driveway. And there was Joe himself, behind the house, sitting stiffly upright in the swing that dangled from a rangy oak tree. Maud was pushing him gaily back and forth.
Clever girl, thought Homer cynically as he threw open the car door. The old swing trick. Disarm the subject playfully, reduce him to the status of a vulnerable child, get the tender bird in flight, then pounce.
“Joe!” bawled Homer.
Joe looked up, sprang off the swing, lost his footing, and fell to the ground. Picking himself up, he ran limping across the yard. There was no need to ask why Homer was there.
“Hey, wait for me!” cried Maud.
But they didn’t.
Maud was disappointed. She went inside and lounged in her conversation pit and called up a friend she had once lived with for five tumultuous months.
The friend was wary. He was, he said, terribly sorry that they couldn’t get together, but he was just leaving for Cincinnati.
“When are you coming back?” said Maud sweetly.
“Oh, not for ages. I’ve got an awful lot to do in Cincinnati.”
31
No message will ever reach me from the cold grave where they have laid you!
James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849
Mary Kelly had spent the morning in the Concord public library among the busts of Hawthorne and Thoreau and Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. For Mary, the library was a familiar haunt. She had once been employed there. Every day she had inhaled the gummy fragrance of glued bindings, the good smell of dictionaries, the cold aura of marble ears and noses, the healthy aroma of middle-aged librarians, along with a certain indefinable transcendental essence like the scent of a pine grove on some bleak and windswept crag.
When she came home with her arms full of books, she was startled to see Homer looking down at her from the porch. “Claire’s gone,” he said.
“Oh, no,” cried Mary, bursting into tears. One by one the books fell from her arms as she sobbed up the steps, overcome by pity and anguished sympathy and, above all, by relief. “It’s over. It’s over at last.”
Mary’s sense of sad deliverance was felt throughout the parish as the word went around. It was as if they had all been holding their breath.
“No more suffering,” said Imogene Gibby, breaking the news by phone to Hilary Tarkington. “She won’t have to endure any more of those awful operations.”
“Oh, no, bless her heart,” echoed Hilary, her eyes filling with tears. In the next room, Hilary’s hus
band, George, was going through a bad spell, struggling to fill his lungs with air. “Has anyone said anything about the service for her? I suppose they’ll have to bring in another clergyman.”
But who should the clergyman be? In the end it was Ed Bell who made the arrangements, with the help of his wife and Mary Kelly. Joe Bold, the bereaved husband, roused himself from his brokenhearted misery long enough to suggest an old classmate at the Divinity School, and the old classmate agreed to come.
When it was over, the congregation fled in all directions, oppressed by the apparently endless burden of continuous sorrow. Parker Upshaw, for one, felt strongly that they had all endured enough. Striding out to his car, he turned the key and looked significantly at Libby as she climbed in beside him. “Well, thank God. Now maybe Old West can get on with its work. If the man doesn’t shape up from now on, I’m personally going to see to it that we get ourselves a replacement. I’m not kidding.”
“Oh, Parker, honestly,” said Libby, genuinely disturbed. “At a time like this—”
“I mean it.” Parker edged the new Subaru out onto Farrar Road, then waited impatiently for old Mrs. Pomeroy to struggle to the curb with her cane. “Somebody’s got to face facts. Nobody else seems to be willing to make the tough decisions. The nasty jobs always land on me.” Parker wrenched at the steering wheel and the car zoomed past the church, fluttering the skirts of Mrs. Pomeroy.
“Like foreclosing on Jerry Gibby?” said Libby, pinned against the back of the seat, looking sharply at her husband.
“Well, naturally I’m foreclosing on Jerry Gibby. The man should never have had a franchise in the first place. Those financial supervisors, they were far too lax and permissive before I came along. Too easygoing, too pusillanimous.”
“Pusillaminous?” Libby giggled. “Oh, I love it, pusillaminous. You don’t say pusillaminous, you dumb cluck. It’s pusillanimous. You don’t even know how to pronounce pusillanimous.”
The signal at the railroad crossing on Hartwell Road was flashing and ringing. Parker Upshaw could have killed his wife. He snarled at her ferociously and raced the Subaru across the tracks, as the descending gate wobbled over the car roof, savaging the perfect paint.
On the way home husband and wife engaged in gentle debate. Whose fault was it, really and truly? Husband’s? Or wife’s?
32
We have had a very severe snowstorm.…
James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848
Early in December there was a heavy fall of snow. It was a Sunday morning. Everyone on the north Atlantic seaboard woke to a shadowless gray light, reflected on walls and ceilings from the snow-covered ground and the branches of snow-laden trees.
Snow was still falling on Nashoba and Concord, on Boston and Worcester and Manchester, on Bar Harbor and Burlington and New Haven. It fell on the ugly strip roads of Routes 9 and 1, it fell on gas stations and discount drugstores, on liquor stores and three-deckers, on condominiums and shopping malls. Schoolchildren in Massachusetts and Connecticut and New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine hoped the snow would last until Monday morning. They longed to hear the hoarse bah-bah that meant no school, sounding across neighboring rooftops and snowy fields.
In the woods around Jerry Gibby’s house every twig was layered in wads and blobs of white, as though the world had been remade by some clumsier person. Between the trees the wind picked up the powdery snow in fountains and tossed it into the gray air. Snowflakes ticked on the brown leaves of the oak trees, they mounded on the rocks in Jerry’s front yard, as if the big granite boulders were part of the natural landscape, as if they had been paid for by Adam in the Garden of Eden, as if Jerry didn’t owe the landscape contractor a lot of money for lowering them into place with a power shovel.
“Pa, wake up, it’s snowing.” The three tubby Gibby boys were bouncing on the king-size bed.
“Oh, boys,” said Imogene, pulling the sheet over her head.
“Hey, stop it,” said Jerry. “Come on, you guys, get down.”
They were bouncing in unison now, rosy and laughing. The bed creaked. Something went crack.
Jerry rolled out of bed and looked out the window and began worrying about the store. What if the storm brought a power line down somewhere? What if the power went out in the store?
“Isn’t it pretty?” said Imogene, putting her hand out the window to catch a few flakes on the sleeve of her nightgown. “Oh, look, boys.” Quickly she pulled in her arm to show them the tiny crystal wheels before they vanished.
Homer Kelly, too, admired the small frozen patterns melting on his coat as he shoveled a path from the porch steps to his car. Looking out past the white pines, he could see snow stretching in a flat sheet across the brittle ice of Fairhaven Bay to the blue haze of the farther shore. Driving the shovel ahead of him, scraping it along the path, Homer muttered to himself as much as he could remember of Thoreau’s rhapsody about the sweeping of heaven’s floor and the mysteries of the number six.
In church that morning, a small but determined congregation assembled after floundering through snowdrifts on foot or driving along roads just cleared by the town plows. It was Joe Bold’s first Sunday back on the job after his wife’s death. Getting out of bed each morning in his empty house, Joe found the rooms larger, more hollow, more cavernous. The shade cast by the spruce trees in the front yard had thickened since Claire’s death, and multiplied in all the concavities and hallways and alcoves of the house in tissues of darkness, concentrated smudges of gloom. The snow this morning had temporarily brightened his bedroom, and Joe was grateful for that. In church he gathered his small flock around the organ in the balcony and talked impulsively about Emerson’s pastor who had preached the dry bones of theological doctrine while the beautiful snow fell outside. Even Parker Upshaw had to admit that the little spontaneous discourse passed muster.
The snow continued to fall, harder than ever, all through the service. During the final hymn, the wind made the windows rattle, and the lights went out. There was a dying drone from the organ. Everybody sang on anyway, thinking regretfully about cold stoves and furnaces at home, and kerosene lanterns and candles, and soup warmed up over cans of Sterno.
Jerry Gibby couldn’t bear it. Nodding apologetically to Joe Bold, he nudged Imogene and drew her out into the storm before the closing rituals of the service. Then he dropped his wife at home and drove to Bedford, burdened by a hopeless sense of doom. Why was he still struggling? The ax had fallen. He was to be out of the store on the first day of the new year. And in the store itself things were going from bad to worse. His customers had begun to stay away in droves, as though they sensed Jerry’s failure. The place had a curious uninhabited feeling, and Jerry could tell that his remaining customers were uneasy and anxious to get away, as they scuttled up and down the empty aisles.
This morning the store looked dark as pitch. The power was out, all right. Jerry unlocked the door and stared down the blind aisles, then groped his way up to his office to summon help by phone. But the phone didn’t work either. Gazing down from his high window at the huge compartmented dimness below him, Jerry wondered angrily if any of his employees would come to his aid without being summoned. The meat manager, damn him—didn’t he care what happened to all those expensive cuts of beef he had got in for Christmas? Or the turkeys? The whole Christmas stock was threatened. What if the pipes froze? Well, the hell with the meat manager. There was no time to waste.
Jerry found a flashlight, then ran downstairs and began ripping empty cartons and laying them flat over the open freezers.
“Hey, is anybody here?” It was a shout from the front door. “Is that you, Jerry?” Johnny Fallon, the meat manager, loomed up in his snow-covered parka, mopping his glasses, grinning at Jerry. “Nice weather for penguins,” he said.
“Oh, wow, Johnny,” said Jerry, clapping him on the arm. “Am I glad to see you.”
33
Faithful parishioner, dear friend, servant of Christ, farewell!
Earth is better that thou hast lived. Heaven shall gain by thy presence!
Funeral sermon
by Reverend Barzillai Frost
Concord, 1856
On Sunday evenings, George Tarkington usually paid a visit to his brother Bob, who was confined to a nursing home in Norwood, way down Route 128. On this stormy Sunday, George insisted on going to see Bob just as usual, snow or no snow.
“Oh, George, I wish you wouldn’t,” said Hilary. “What if your old car breaks down? Why don’t you call Bob and tell him you’re not coming? He’ll understand.”
“Oh, I’ll be okay,” said George, pulling on his heavy parka. He patted the dog. “Goodbye, Pixie.” He embraced his wife. “Goodbye, Hil, honey.” Then he climbed into his car and took off into the blizzard.
Hilary watched him vanish in the snow. She could hear the bleat and rattle of his engine for a little while after she lost sight of the car altogether.
George never made it to Norwood. At midnight his wife made an anxious call to the nursing home, and learned that George had not been seen there. Frantic with concern, she telephoned Peter Terry at the police station. Pete had received no message on the teletype about a fatal accident on Route 128. “There’s a lot of abandoned cars out there,” he told Hilary. “It’s like the blizzard of ’78. Remember that? You wait. He’ll call you from somebody’s house where he’s taken shelter. You’ll see.”
But George did not call. All night long, Hilary kept starting up out of bed, thinking she had heard the phone, but she hadn’t. She didn’t find out what had happened until next morning.
“It was the end of my run,” said the snowplow driver, an employee of the Sudbury public works department, explaining the whole thing to Pete Terry. He was shouting into the phone, and Pete could picture him calling from some snowy telephone booth, his big yellow plow throbbing at the side of the road. “I was just cleaning up the last side street. You know, I left it till last because it didn’t go anywhere in particular. It was a dead end deep in the woods. And then I saw this buried car. I would have gone right on by, only I noticed it was sort of like shaking, as though the motor was on. Old cars, sometimes they shake when the engine’s running. So I pulled up and got out of the cab and wiped away the snow that was stuck to the car window in front, and there was this shape in there, leaning up against the window as though the guy was fast asleep. I yelled and knocked on the window, but he didn’t wake up.”