by Jane Langton
“You mean the way I stamped my feet in jealous rage?”
Sarah laughed. “Well, yes, I guess so. Mmmm, this is delicious. What do you call these things?”
“Tastychox. My favorite. Want some more? Well, listen, it’s all right with me if we do ‘The Cherry Tree’ again. I’d forgotten about the jealous rage. That’s why people like it so much. Everybody’s jealous now and then, rights?”
Sarah got up and stared at one of the east windows above the rows of mezzanine seats. It was glimmering faintly in the vanishing twilight, flashing now and then with the headlights of cars moving slowly along Cambridge Street. That way lay Inman Square and her apartment on Maple Avenue, where Morgan was waiting for her, getting supper, still suffering from what had happened yesterday. “You’re right. Everybody’s jealous now and then.”
CHAPTER 4
Stir up the fire and make a light
And see our noble act tonight.
Traditional British Mummers’ Play
The days were shriveling toward the shortest of the year, as the sun groped its way around the wintry end of its trajectory. But in Harvard Yard at four-thirty in the afternoon of the Friday after the accident that killed the folk singer from West Virginia, the sky was still bright. A crescent moon like a delicate ship rode low above the skyline, jibing in the cold squall that shook the tops of the trees.
But the Yard itself was deep in shadow. Here the air was amber, clotted with the insect bodies of dead professors—Mathers and Wares, a Lowell, a Channing, a Longfellow—all mashed wings and tangled jointed legs like flies. Through the leafless branches of the trees ten thousand particles of paper sifted down, worn off the edges of pages riffled by scholars’ fingers in libraries and labs and offices scattered throughout the university. The dust swirled now in descending spirals in the light wind and drifted downward, falling in invisible granules on the cold cheeks of men and women passing to and fro.
Just north of the Yard, on the overpass above Cambridge Street, there was more glare and light. The setting sun glittered on the glass rooftops of the Science Center. Diagonally across the street the billion bricks of Memorial Hall massed themselves under a striped roof giddy with rosy color.
Homer Kelly had been teaching in Memorial Hall. All day long it had seemed to him like an ordinary day. No memorial wreath lay on the north steps deploring the death of Henry Shady. No black crepe was tacked over the door. The only memorials in all the vast spaces of the building were the marble tablets in the high corridor recording the names of the men of Harvard who had fallen in the battles of Gettysburg, Wilderness, Antietam, Bull Run.
The lecture hall where Homer taught a course in American literature with his wife, Mary, was an ugly auditorium at the west end. On his way out, hauling on his gloves and holding a sheaf of papers in his teeth, he ran into the homeless old black man who often huddled out of the wind on the steps of the ground-floor entry. As usual he was swaddled in a blanket, his head down, his face invisible. Homer dropped a quarter in front of him, as he always did, and murmured, “Good evening.”
There was no response. The quarter lay where it had fallen. But after Homer was gone the old man’s hand crept out of the blanket and grasped the coin. Then, like a mummy rising from a sarcophagus, he shambled to his feet.
Mary Kelly saw him a little while later as she climbed out of the subway at Church Street, emerging into the cold air of Harvard Square.
She looked around as she always did, savoring once again the zest and bite of the Square. The same tangle of streets had existed at this intersection since the seventeenth century. It was a crossroads for scholars of every stripe, and for students who had muscled their way through secondary school to enter Harvard’s narrow portals, and for the thousands of Harvard employees who shuffled paper and kept the buildings going, and for high-school kids high-shouldered in Raiders jackets laughing loudly around the public phones, and for bicycle cultists riding too fast through the flow on the sidewalk. Between the BayBank and the Harvard Coop, the Peruvian band blew into its panpipes, chuff-chuffa-chuff.
Across the street the brick buildings and wrought-iron gates of Harvard Yard were the frontier to another world, but here in the Square the two worlds nudged each other and overlapped, and the flow went both ways, in and out.
DON’T WALK, said the light. Mary waited, fumbling in her purse for a coin to give the old black man who was settling down beside the subway entrance. He was often there, swathed in a blanket, paying no attention to the passersby. Today his hand emerged from the blanket to take Mary’s quarter, then slid back inside. He did not look up.
WALK, said the light. Mary moved forward, stepping out onto Massachusetts Avenue in front of the growling cars. Then she glanced back. Someone was yelling, making a disturbance—tent city for the homeless, come one, come all—the words faded as he turned the other way—put the screws on Harvard—moral responsibility—six-billion-dollar endowment!
The voice was familiar. Mary stepped back on the pavement. Sure enough, it was Palmer Nifto, good old Palmer Nifto with a new list of nonnegotiable demands. A couple of years ago he had turned Mary’s hometown of Concord on its ear, demanding housing for himself and his homeless friends, getting them all in trouble by breaking into a dwelling while its owners were away. Here he was again, making a public protest, trying to outshout a Cambridge policewoman who was yelling back at him, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Palmer, pipe down.”
Mary grinned and crossed to the other side. She was supposed to be meeting Homer, and she was late. Poor Homer, he was being such a good sport. After supper he’d have to hang around all evening through her Revels rehearsal in order to join her on the T to Alewife to pick up her car, because his own was having transmission trouble. He’d be bored to death.
Mary hurried through the gate, tucking her mittened hands into her coat pockets. It was very cold in the Yard. Already, in early December, the frost had penetrated the ground. Its cold fingers had gone far down under the grassy turf to stiffen the soil. Worms no longer nosed blindly in and out and up and down. The larvae of Japanese beetles were curled in yellow coils, clasped by the frozen sod, waiting for spring. Now, at five o’clock, the sky was already dark. John Harvard was nearly invisible on his granite base, except for the snow on his bronze lap. The thinnest curl of a moon hung over Massachusetts Hall, marking the place where the sun had gone down.
Mary waited at the bottom of the massive staircase of Widener Library, looking left and right for Homer, feeling guilty about the rehearsal. “You won’t have to be involved at all,” she had promised Homer. “I’ll come and go to rehearsals and performances by myself. I really want to do this, Homer.”
But here they were, welded together for the whole evening. Homer was going to loathe it. He hated the whole Revels idea, from first principles to the bells on the Morris men’s knees. Morris dancers, he said, gave him a pain. So did ethnic costumes worn by descendants of the Pilgrim fathers and phony folk art created by employees of IBM and Smith-Barney. Adult men and women frisking around in costume—why didn’t they grow up?
There he was, striding toward her along a path between patches of frozen grass. Mary looked at Homer critically as he came nearer, looking taller than ever in his long coat. His month-old beard looked terrible. She laughed. “Oh, Homer, when is it going to grow a little longer? It looks horrible.”
“No, no,” said Homer, “you don’t understand. It’s right in the forefront of fashion. La Mode Hobo. Haven’t you heard? Where have you been? Don’t you keep up? The style of the Great Depression, it’s all the rage.”
“Oh, Homer, you’re making that up.”
“No, I’m not, I swear. Look at those kids.” Homer nodded at a couple of boys in greasy fedoras and ragged overcoats. Mary watched them trot down the vast staircase. They were discussing the theory of least squares, their coats dragging behind them.
She took Homer’s arm. “Well, I don’t care whether it’s fashionable or not, your beard is at a
really gruesome stage.”
After supper they crossed the Yard again, and walked across the broad expanse of the mall above the sunken tunnel of Cambridge Street. A couple of homeless people had set up a crude shelter of wooden planks beside one of the hedges, and they were hammering it together, holding nails in their teeth.
Mary told Homer about Palmer Nifto. There he was in the square, still campaigning for homeless people, still being a thorn in somebody’s side. “You know, Homer,” she said, looking at the shapeless dwelling under construction, “I sometimes wonder how our ancestors survived the winter. How did they keep themselves alive?”
“Well,” said Homer, making up a theory, “suppose you had a cow. You could bring it inside and snuggle up beside it. I doubt many people froze to death or starved.”
Mary wasn’t so sure. She looked back at the two men with their hammers. One of them was Palmer Nifto. They might have been peasants in Yugoslavia with the cold funneling down between the mountains, or Irish farmers with their potatoes going rotten, or frostbitten muzhiks on the Siberian steppes. How many thousands of people had not made it through the winter? How many winter perishings had there been since the beginning of time?
With their heads down against the wind, they scuttled along the south side of Memorial Hall, climbed the steps to the entry, and pulled open the heavy door.
CHAPTER 5
I open the door, I enter in.
I hope your favour we shall win.
Whether we stand or whether we fall,
We’ll do our best to please you all.
Traditional British Mummers’ Play
Gratefully Mary and Homer entered the high corridor. A throng of muffled shapes crowded through the door behind them, eager to get out of the wind. Inside the building there was no wind, only a cold breath moving down from the wooden vaults, sliding past the marble tablets with their sad memorials, flowing downward to creep past Mary’s scarf and stiffen her freezing fingers. Somewhere in the lower reaches of Memorial Hall there must surely be an enormous furnace, but no gushes of steamy heat found their way into this lofty corridor. How many rich alumni and alumnae would it take to install a dozen giant radiators among the memorials? Too many, apparently.
“Come on, Homer. It’ll be warmer in the great hall.”
And it was. The furnace, from whatever dark hole it inhabited, sent vast quantities of warm air on rising thermals to the summit of the ceiling of the great hall, where giant hammerbeams held up the roof. Downward currents warmed the lower reaches of the gigantic room, where a lot was going on. People were moving around in various stages of undress. Long rows of tables stretched into the distance, covered with props and costumes. There was an undercurrent of laughter and good humor. Well, of course, thought Mary, suppressing a feeling of bitterness, the show must go on. Time in its heartless way had closed over the memory of Henry Shady, leaving no seam.
“My God,” said Homer, goggling at the deer antlers, “what are those for?”
“The horn dance,” said Mary. “It’s really ancient. You’ll see.”
Homer looked up at the beams arching over the high rows of stained-glass windows, dark at this hour and colorless. Below the windows the drab walls were lined with portraits of Union generals and the busts of dead professors.
“I’ve always liked this place,” he said, remembering a time of crisis, a chase up the balcony stairs. It had been one of those foolish occasions when Homer had been forced back into his long-defunct role as an ex-lieutenant detective in the office of the District Attorney of Middlesex County. “What are they using this place for now? Sort of a giant dressing room?”
Mary introduced him to Tom Cobb, one of the stage directors, and Homer said, “How do you do,” but a gaggle of children rushed past them in an endless stream, and Tom said, “Hey, wait for me,” and took off after the children. Mary grasped Homer’s arm and led him to a harried-looking woman hunched over an ironing board. “Our wardrobe supervisor, Joan Hill.”
“I was just saying—” said Homer, but then a human cherry tree said, “Excuse me,” and wobbled past them, heading for a mirror to inspect the twiggy growths growing out of its head. At once there was a clatter of small objects on the floor. “Shit,” said the tree, “all my cherries fell off.”
“Oh, God,” said the wardrobe supervisor. She waved her iron at Mary, and at once the ironing board collapsed. “Oh, could you, dear? Would you? I’ve got to do something about his cherries.”
Mary picked up the ironing board. “Really, Homer, you don’t have to stay. Why don’t you go to a movie or something?”
“Don’t be silly. I want to see what it’s like.”
“Well, just as you wish.” Mary wet her finger and touched the iron. It hissed. Someone shouted for the Morris dancers.
“Oh, God,” said Homer, “Morris dancers. All this folksy stuff, Ph.D.s and computer scientists pretending to be peasants. How do you stand it?”
“Oh, Homer, I knew you wouldn’t like it.” Mary drove the iron along a length of wrinkled cloth. “It’s true, there’s a kind of Cambridge chic about the Revels. But the Morris dancers are really great. Why don’t you go into Sanders Theatre and watch?”
Grumpily Homer did as he was told. Once more he crossed the cold high corridor. After pushing through the swinging doors of Sanders, he was again in the warm air.
The place was already buzzing. Three people were hunched over the tech table at the back of the floor, their equipment on a board mounted over a couple of benches. Homer sat down nearby and folded his arms and looked grimly at the stage.
But he couldn’t maintain his cynicism. As always, the hollow chamber captured him with its nineteenth-century air of varnished wooden comfort, with its shadowy stage and enclosing semicircle of seats in rising tiers. Somehow the place had a quasi-medieval feeling. It was a Gothico-Victorian hall in a forest of oak trees in which wild boar and leaping stags were hiding, with huntsmen dodging behind the railings of the mezzanine. Ulysses S. Grant would appear in a moment in the robes of King Arthur, and so would John Ruskin, masquerading as Sir Galahad.
Homer winced. Oh, God, here came the Morris men, clumping onstage.
“Not yet,” shouted Tom Cobb. “Come on again. Wait for the music.”
The Morris dancers clattered off. A guy with a concertina struck up a tiddly tune, and they tramped in a second time.
“Hold it,” said Tom. “Wait for me.” He jumped up on the stage and joined them as they began to dance.
Homer slumped back on the bench and scowled as the six men stamped their feet and clashed their sticks together. Then he sat up and stopped scowling. Grudgingly he admitted to himself that they were very good. Thump went the stamping feet, crash went the sticks.
The dance was finished. The Morris men stopped leaping up and down and looked at Tom uncertainly as he backed away to become a stage director again. “Okay, that’s it, go off in procession.” Then Tom raised his voice and shouted, “Chorus? You’ve got to come on as they go off. Chorus, where are you?”
They filed onstage from the left, ten men in tunics and long hose, ten women in bright gowns. Homer looked for Mary, but she was the last because she was the tallest. In spite of his disbelief in the whole thing, Homer beamed at his wife and shook his clasped hands over his head.
Mary turned to her neighbor and grinned artificially, pretending to be part of a jolly Christmas festival. At once there was an interruption. Tom Cobb said, “Wait, here’s Sarah.”
There was a hush. Everyone stared offstage as Sarah came breezing in, and then, to their embarrassment, her husband appeared behind her. Morgan Bailey was a stranger to Homer Kelly, but everyone else recognized Sarah’s husband, the driver responsible for the death of her star performer, Henry Shady.
But the two Baileys were boldly grasping the nettle. Morgan followed Sarah up the steps to the stage and made a little speech about what had happened. His hours of weeping were over. His voice was clear, his words were sensible. �
��Of course the accident was my fault, but Henry appeared so suddenly, right in front of my car. I swerved to avoid him, but in trying to get out of my way he jumped in the same direction. Sarah has told me how much you all loved Henry Shady. I will bear the scar for the rest of my life.”
Well, good for you, thought Homer, giving him credit.
Then Sarah talked about the fund they were organizing in Henry’s memory, money to be collected for his family. “His mother,” whispered one of the technicians to Homer, “down there in West Virginia.”
There was loud applause from the Morris men and the members of the chorus, and from the technicians sitting beside Homer and the musicians clustered in the wings. Someone flourished a checkbook. Someone else tossed green bills in the air.
But of course it wasn’t funny. Gravely Sarah Bailey waved her arm, urging the performers to carry on, and hurried down the steps again. Her husband followed. Then Morgan Bailey walked solemnly to the back of the hall and sat down by himself on a darkened bench, silhouetted against the light of the encircling aisle.
But Morgan wasn’t really feeling solemn at all. Instead he was oddly exhilarated. It was so strange, after all that weeping and mortification, he had awakened yesterday morning feeling buoyant and lighthearted. A weight had been lifted from his chest. Smiling, Morgan filled his lungs with the glowing air of Sanders Theatre and held it a moment, then let it go.
Seventeen rows in front of Morgan Bailey, Homer Kelly glowered as the chorus began to sing. They were all pretending to frolic as if it were the jolliest party anybody ever saw—like a cocktail party on Fayerweather Street, thought Homer sardonically.
“Okay,” shouted Sarah, “time for the boar’s head. Boar’s head, where are you?”
In spite of himself, Homer was charmed as four girls in bright tunics carried onstage a giant tray on which lay a huge papier-mâché boar’s head in a nest of ivy. When the chorus struck up “The Boar’s Head Carol,” he couldn’t help nodding his shaggy head in time to the music.