God in Concord Part 10

*24*

Money is not required to buy one necessary

of the soul. a"Walden, "Conclusion''

The United Parcel truck was just pulling up to Julian Snow's door when he got home from the landfill. "For Alice Snow," said the driver, hopping out of the truck with a big box.

Julian took the box inside and opened it suspiciously. Cautiously he felt around in the Styrofoam popcorn for the silly things Alice had ordered. He found a doork.n.o.b chime, a plastic whatnot with four triangular shelves, a musical toilet-paper holder, and a praying hands paperweight. Sadly, he set them side by side on the table.

Well, Honey and Mavis would take them. Julian picked up the box, intending to carry it to the dumpster behind laundry shack, when something else fluttered out. It was a handwritten message for Alice Snow: "Please in the future do not send cash."

Alice had paid for all this stuff in cash? Eighty dollars, the invoice said. Where had she got the cash money?

There was only one answer. Julian was so staggered, dropped the box, and the white popcorn scattered on the floor. Alice had been helping herself to their savings. She had all the hundreds and twenties out of the file box over the window and hidden them somewhere, and then she had stuck them in envelopes and sent for things from catalogs. Honey or Mavis or Shirley must have mailed the letters for her.

Julian thought about it. Some people had said that Alice was killed when she caught someone stealing the two thousand dollars. But it wasn't true after all. There was no connection between the disappearance of the money and the death of his wife. Alice had taken it herself and hidden it somewhere.

Julian ransacked every nook and corner. He found nothing.

Oh well, h.e.l.l, it didn't matter. Julian didn't begrudge Alice her little extravagances. If she'd told him she was taking fifty dollars here and eighty dollars there, he wouldn't have said no. But she would have had a fight on her hands, ordering doork.n.o.b chimes and plastic whatnots. Maybe that was why she had been so secretive.

Next day was Sat.u.r.day. Julian got up early, hauled his aluminum canoe out of the bushes, lifted it into the back of his truck, tossed in the paddles and his rod, and put the bucket of minnows from the bait shop on the floor of the cab. On the way out of Pond View he slowed down at Norman Peck's place, because he'd been planning to ask Norman to go along. Then he didn't stop after all, because he recognized the Toyota belonging to Norman's daughter parked beside Norman's car. So Julian went on by himself, driving down 126 and into the Walden Pond reservation and down the hill to the boat launch on the sh.o.r.e.

Julian was after rainbows. In the summer they were mostly too deep, down there in the cold water in the depths of the pond. But there were cold springs here and there, making chilly columns in which the trout rose closer to the surface. He had a thermometer. He could test for the cooler places.

In the early morning there was a lacy mist on the water. Julian reeled out his line and looked at the mist. He should have felt contented, but he didn't. He felt funny about Alice. The ugly objects on the kitchen table had brought her back so strongly. There she was, Alice Snow, right there in the kitchen. And then in spite of himself Julian thought about the note from Charlotte Harris, "It's just that I've always loved you." No sooner had Charlotte written those words than Alice had died. What about Pete Harris? Would he vanish, too, like Alice, at a single breath of betrayal?

It took Julian two hours to catch his limit. Afterward, on the way back into the trailer park, he was surprised when Stu LaDue stood up from his chair and waved his arms and waddled over importantly to stand beside the cab of the truck and tell him something. "Norman's pa.s.sed on," Stu said, staring at Julian, his round eyes enlarged by his thick gla.s.ses. He was obviously enjoying his role as the deliverer of tragic information. "Brain hemorrhage. The hea.r.s.e is there now. See, right beside his daughter's car. Fran, she come over from Watertown."

Julian's eyes filled with tears. Norman had been his closest friend at Pond View. They had been fishing companions from day one.

He pulled up beside the hea.r.s.e just as the men from the funeral parlor emerged from Norman's Landola with a covered object, all that was left of Norman Peck.

Sorrowfully Julian approached Norman's daughter, who was watching from the doorway. He could hardly get the words out as he told her he was sorry.

Norman's daughter was businesslike. "I suppose you people want this thing out of here," she said, jigging her elbows sideways to indicate the trailer. "Well, I can't do it. First I've got to clear out Dad's junk, and then who the h.e.l.l wants a thirty-five-year-old mobile home? I'll have to advertise. I'm not going to give it away, I'm telling you that. You already got a bunch of empties here. Well, one more won't hurt you."

It was true. People died, and their relatives didn't get around to removing their mobile homes. The old trailers weren't worth much on today's market, that was the trouble. People looking for mobile homes now, they wanted big fancy Burlingtons with cathedral ceilings and fancy kitchens and glamorous bathrooms and wall-to-wall carpeting. Some of the new ones were seventy-two feet long.

Julian watched Norman's daughter get into her car with the trophy Norman's dog had won thirty years ago for being the best pug dog in the state of New Hampshire. He couldn't believe that the man he had joked with yesterday was reduced to a round mound under a tarpaulin, a hardhearted daughter in a Toyota, and a silver-plated trophy for a prize-winning pug.

Another shock was waiting for him. Bernie and Mavis Buonfesto hailed him from their screened porch. Dot and Scottie Ryan were there, too. Julian pulled his truck over and got out and walked up to the porch, looking for sympathy, for tender memories of Norman. "Now there's only twelve of us left," he said, smiling at them wanly.

"Only ten pretty soon," said Bernie.

"Ten?"

"We're leaving," said Mavis. "Moving to Miami. I mean, look, our best friends are gone. Well, not counting you, Julian. And Bernie's got glaucoma. Our daughter's been trying to get us to come down. Everything's cheaper there. And the wintersa"well, you know what they're like around here. So we're packing up, driving down next week. Dot and Scottie are coming, too. We're going down together."

"It's just a holiday," said Scottie.

Dot looked at him severely. "No, it's not. I'm going to look for someplace nice. You might like it down there better than you think."

"Don't listen to her," said Scottie, grinning at Julian. "She's just kidding. We're not moving away."

"I sure hope not." Julian got back in his truck and drove to his own place. Then he sat in the cab and looked at the slight dappling the roof of his mobile home. They had all known it would be like this, ever since the Ma.s.sachusetts Department of Environmental Management had taken over the property. Oh, sure, they'd all known there would be a slow subtraction of residents until only a few of them were left, and then only two, then one, and at last, some fine day, they would all be gone. But he hadn't expected it to feel so bad.

Next day, the last Sunday in July, Madeline Raymond keeled over with an embolism, as if sudden death were catching. Her nephew didn't come to her funeral, but he arranged long distance from Philadelphia to have her trailer hauled away and sold. Talk about efficiency!

It took Roger Bland a couple of weeks to catch up with the new statistics on the number of living souls remaining at Pond View. He didn't know the Buonfestos had left for Miami, he didn't know the Ryans were arguing between themselves about moving to Florida, too.

But he was pleased. Only eleven! It was wonderful the way nature, left to itself, simply took its course.

*25*

In the street and in society 1 am almost invariably cheap and

dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. a"Journal, January 7, 1857

Homer had lots of things to look up in the Boston Public Library. He parked at the Concord depot and went in on the train.

It was a frustrating morning. The Boston Public was one of the great libraries of the western world, but it was troubled by the same spending cuts afflicting the town of Concord. As a result the computer screen told Homer that the whereabouts of one of the books he wanted was unknown, and the other had been stolen from the collection.

Homer gave up and walked out of the library into the moist heat of late July in Copley Square.

At once his attention was caught by a woman groping in a trash can on the corner of Dartmouth Street. As he waited for the light to change he watched her turn over the trash with the pointed end of an umbrella and fish out a bedraggled T-shirt. Bulging plastic bags packed into a baby stroller held her belongings.

Homer had heard a lot about homeless people, but he rarely saw them in the flesh. Furtively he took a ten-dollar out of his wallet and held it out to her, wondering if it was the wrong thing to do. Perhaps the woman would be insulted.

She was not. She accepted it, giving him a piercing look. Embarra.s.sed, Homer smiled at her and plunged down the subway stairs. The Green Line took him to Park Street and the Red Line to Porter Square, where he boarded the train for Concord. But when the conductor pa.s.sed through the train and stood beside him to punch the return half of his round-trip ticket, Homer couldn't find it. It wasn't in his billfold, where it should have been. It wasn't in any of his pockets. "Sorry," he said, rummaging for the price of another. He was short ten cents. The conductor looked at him strangely and let it pa.s.s.

The truth was that Homer's ticket had flown out of his billfold when he removed the ten-dollar bill. The ticket landed on the sidewalk in front of Sarah Peel. Homer didn't see it, but Sarah did. She reached down and picked it up, examined it carefully, and tucked it away for safekeeping.

Back at the house on Fair Haven Bay, Homer found Ananda in the cellar. Ananda was examining the household collection of nails and screws. He shook his head sorrowfully at Homer. "I can't get them straight, you see. Some of the screws are flat on top, some are round, some have a cross. People ask me for them in the store, and I don't know which is which. And a six-penny nail does not cost six cents."

Homer tried to imagine the life of a young man who had never used a screwdriver. Patiently he explained, while Ananda made careful notes. "There," said Homer, "that's enough. Let's go out on the river and cool off."

"Oh, yes," said Ananda, his anxious face transformed.

On the river the hot sun poured down, but cool exhalations rose from the slow-moving water, and the gentle ripples slapped against the aluminum canoe. Homer laughed at Ananda's fumbling attempts to handle a paddle. Ananda apologized. He had spent a summer at New Hall College, Cambridge, and there he had become expert at handling a punt on the river Cam, standing up and propelling it with a pole. But canoes were new to him.

"You just dip it straight in and out like this," explained Homer. "Whenever the canoe begins to swerve, just hold the paddle close in on the other side. That's right. Good for you."

Swiftly they moved downriver. By the time they had pa.s.sed the hospital and skimmed under the whizzing traffic on Route 2, Ananda was paddling strongly. Soon they were moving briskly past the sloping backyards of the big houses along Main Street.

In the shelter of the Nashawtuc bridge they paused to eat their cheese sandwiches. A blue heron flapped up in awkward fight, its huge wings curved to cup the air, its head hanging low. Ananda watched the duckweed swirl in spirals at the edge of the river like galaxies forming and dissolving. Everything was quivering, tossing, trembling. A bird made a snipping noise like scissors.

"Look," said Homer, "that's a new house over there. It wasn't here last year."

"It is very large," said Ananda.

They looked at the new house. It was a complicated structure with decks, terraces, a three-car garage, a greenhouse and outbuildings, and a scattering of the Palladian windows that were so popular that year.

"What a pretty creature," said Ananda, admiring the pale gray horse that looked at them from an enclosure beside the house. Its ears were p.r.i.c.ked up, it leaned over the fence to stare at them. They watched as a woman came out of the house with a pail, opened the gate of the paddock, and stopped at a covered bin. They saw her lift the lid and scoop something up.

A small gong went off in Homer's head. Her gesture reminded him of something. Taking the binoculars from Ananda, he watched shamelessly as the woman approached the horse, carrying the pail, calling, "Here, Carmencita, here, girl, good girl."

Carmencita wasn't having any. She sprinted to the other side of the paddock, whinnying in derision. Her mistress gave up and went indoors. But only for a moment. Soon she emerged from another door, carrying a basket.

"Should we not continue?" murmured Ananda, embarra.s.sed by the way Homer was watching the woman so inquisitively.

But Homer was fascinated. "She looks so familiar. Wait, I know who it is. It's Marjorie Bland."

Ananda glanced at her over his shoulder. "Her husband is president of the planning board?" Ananda had been doing his homework, getting ready for his appearance on television.

"Right. He's the chairman. She's Mrs. Roger Bland." Homer went right on staring. Now the woman was kneeling on the gra.s.s beside the deck. She was taking little pots out of the basket, transplanting flowers into the ground. Homer could see her profile, her pink nose, her pretty smile. (As usual, Marjorie was having fun.) Putting down the binoculars, Homer took in the larger scenea"Marjorie's house, Marjorie's horse, Marjorie's garden, Marjorie herself with her happy smile and pink shorts. It was like a commercial version of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Marjorie Bland was Eve before the Fall, as pictured on the cover of an L. L. Bean catalog. If somebody had sent a catalog to the original Eve, she wouldn't have had to go naked, she could have worn a beach and town tank top in cornflower blue and walking shorts in cherry pink and flashing white Top-Siders, just like Marjorie's.

Ananda picked up his paddle. "Shall we carry on?"

"Wait. There's something about this woman that gives me a pain. And you know what it is?" Homer picked up the binoculars again and studied Marjorie Bland. "It's her happiness, that's what it is. Her horrible happiness. She's probity the happiest woman in the whole wide world."

'She will see you," murmured Ananda, staring carefully down at his sandwich.

Then Homer knew what he had been reminded of when Marjorie reached into the feed bin with her pail. It was the woman in Copley Square, the homeless woman with all her possessions packed into a child's stroller. She had reached into the trash can in just the same way. For a moment the two images coalesced.

There was a word for it, "doppelganger." Marjorie Bland and the homeless woman were doppelgangers of one another. They were opposites in every respect, yet Homer knew he would never again catch sight of Marjorie Bland without seeing through her the woman at the library in Copley Square.

Homer and Ananda stuffed their sandwich wrappers under the canoe thwarts, took up their paddles, and headed back up the river. Turning his head, Homer caught a last glimpse of Marjorie Bland. She was standing in an open doorway looking eastward. That way lay the city of Boston, beyond willows draped with pale green hair, beyond the cloudy trees of French Meadow, beyond all the intervening suburbs, beyond the sprawling city of Cambridge.

Homer guessed that Marjorie's consciousness stopped short at the town line. Beyond the Concord horizon there might be a noise of some sort, an occasional tormented cry, but her ears were stopped up, and she would never hear.

*26*

...a successful life knows no lawa"Live free,

child of the mist... Th.o.r.eau, "Walking"

When Sarah Peel stepped off the train in Concord, b.u.mping her stroller down the high step, having made the journey with Homer Kelly's lost ticket, she made straight for the house of Marjorie Bland like a homing pigeon, as if she knew all about Homer's doppelganger theory that there was an ethereal bond between herself and Marjorie.

But Sarah was merely following her nose, heading away from the Concord depot, looking for her imagined landscape of green trees and brown cows and horses with flying manes and tails. At the intersection of Th.o.r.eau Street and Main she saw a bridge, and beyond it a light-filled meadow. Pausing on the bridge, she looked down at the water flowing darkly underneath, then lifted her eyes to the green lawn on the other side.

There was a horse on the lawn, standing behind a fence. The horse was looking at Sarah.

Dragging the stroller behind her, she plodded across the bridge and found her way down a bushy slope to the pasture fence. Ducks flew up from the edge of the river. A bird threaded the air, swooping down from a great height and soaring up again.

The horse was waiting for her. It trotted along the fence and stopped, its ears c.o.c.ked eagerly. It was a small grayish white horse with a fiery eye, just like her own special horse on the merry-go-round. Whiffling gently, it reached its long neck over the fence. Small as it was, it towered above her. Its belly swelled, its rump was round, its eyes were brown and melting. Crowding up against the fence, it bent its great head to Sarah.

She knew at once what to call it. "Pearl," she said, stroking its nose tenderly. "Your name is Pearl."

All of Sarah's past life welled up in a burst of affection. The white horse in the green field was a gift, a compensation for her impoverished childhood, her pinched adulthood and brutal old age. It was what she hungered for. The horse too had been waitinga"waiting for her, for Sarah Peel.