God in Concord Part 4

"Right across the way." Charlotte looked at Homer soberly. "Thank you," she said with formal dignity.

From her window she watched Homer walk across the driveway and knock on Stu LaDue's door. Then she went quickly to her desk and cut her terrible letter into small pieces with a pair of scissors.

As the pieces fluttered from her fingers into the wastebasket, she tried not to think of Julian, who was all alone now, as though in answer to her dangerous desire. And she tried not to think of Pete, but he loomed very large in her mind, overwhelming in his obesity, in his rude good health, in the monotony of his dullness. The last sc.r.a.p of paper sifted from her fingers, and she turned away abruptly. She mustn't think such things. She mustn't think them ever again.

Across the driveway in the mobile home belonging to Stuart LaDue, Homer was a different man from the one who had interviewed Charlotte Harris. He towered over Stu, he loomed. A few minutes later he left him cowed and subdued, swearing to say nothing about Charlotte's letter to Julian Snow.

Then Homer went off to entreat Honey Mooney to keep quiet about it, too. If the police interviewed her, well and good, she was to tell the truth. But there was no point in embarra.s.sing Mrs. Harris unless it was absolutely necessary.

Stu LaDue watched Homer Kelly come out of Honey's house and walk back down the drive to where the foreign kid was lying asleep on the gra.s.s. Stu snickered to himself. Oh, so he wasn't supposed to tell on Charlotte Harris? Well, what if he'd already blabbed it to one or two people? Jesus, it was a free country. A filthy thing like that, what the h.e.l.l, people had a right to know what was going on under their noses. That stuck-up Charlotte Harris, everybody thought she was so fine, but, Christ, she was just another scheming woman, a f.u.c.king home wrecker, maybe even a murderer, so, Jesus, what the h.e.l.l?

*10*

We check and repress the divinity that stirs within us,

to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us. a"Journal, November 16, 1851

The unctuous voice was back on the line. "Good morning, Mr. Grandison, sir. How are you this morning?"

Jefferson Grandison bared his teeth. What right did this interfering fool have to ask him how he was? "I am in good health."

"Good! What I was calling about, Mr. Grandison, sir, I was calling to ask if you could tell us when you will be taking Lot Seventeen off our hands. I mean, when they stopped burning these things down in Connecticut because of the smell and the air pollution, we relied on you to fulfill your contract, because you said you'd take away anything and dispose of it, right? Anything, you said. And you said it would be soon."

"I will be calling shortly to announce a date."

"Thank you, Mr. Grandison, sir. That's all we ask. Thank you so very much, sir. Good-bye, sir."

Grandison put the receiver down softly. "Idiot," he said, enraged.

Jack Markey laughed. "Lot Seventeen?"

"Look here," said Grandison, summoning Jack to the map table, "this is the only place." He pointed. "It makes perfect sense. I mean, look at it. It's right next to the landfill. We dig a pit, a deep pit."

"Right you are."

"So keep working on it."

"I am. Oh, I am."

"Those other people out there in Concord, they're doing what they can?"

"Oh, you bet. Don't worry about it."

"Well, let's get on with the other thing." Together they bowed over the a.s.sessors' map, quadrant H16 of the town of Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, and after that Jack displayed his preliminary sketches of Walden Green. "Good," said Grandison, well pleased. "But this part of the complex doesn't look right to me. Look at this access road, the grade's too steep." Stretching out his arm over the map, Jefferson Grandison separated the light from the darkness. He had never actually set foot in Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Jack sometimes wondered about his intense interest in the town. Whimsically it occurred to him that a man like Grandison didn't actually have to appear on the scene in person. After all, wasn't he universally omnipresent at every moment at every point in the universe? All he had to do was dispatch someone like Jack to take his place on the spot, to carry out his will as a local avatar of the deity.

So Jack went back and forth between Concord and the gla.s.sy high rise on Huntington Avenue, riding up and down in the gla.s.s elevator, zooming up into the sky and plunging earthward again as if on wings. Sometimes he couldn't believe his own good fortune. Why had Grandison chosen him as his confidant and princ.i.p.al a.s.sistant?

His rise had been so rapid! Jack had begun at Grandison Enterprises as a mere draftsman, but soon he was designing bathrooms and closets, and before long he was a full-fledged architect of suburban malls and urban high rises, and finally he had become a senior planner, privileged to sit at a huge table with the others at meetings attended by Grandison himself. And at last he had been plucked from all the rest to sit at Grandison's right hand. How on earth had it happened?- The truth was beyond Jack's power of guessing. At the planning meetings around the big table, Jefferson Grandison had noticed a certain audacity and brashness in the good- looking kid whose name was Markey. The boy had a way of running a bold finger across the plan of a shopping mall and saying, "Sc.r.a.p it. Turn all the units the other way." Or he would suggest something crazya""Why not put it in the water? Build it on pilings, the whole thing, with islands and bridges and catwalks"a"and everybody would gasp and laugh and say, "Why not?"

There was something in Jack Markey's eye that Grandison was drawn to, a certain wildness, as though he had been brought up by wolves in the forest.

Actually Jack had been reared in a respectable working-cla.s.s household as the son of a fundamentalist minister. Respectable was certainly the right word for the Markeys of Chester, Pennsylvania, but there had been wildness there as well, a boisterous delirium that came straight from the last book of the Bible.

The book of Revelation had been the holy of holies to Jack's father. Its intoxicating prophecies had enlivened all his sermons with a savage vitality. Little Jack had grown up with them. The pa.s.sionate phrases were as normal to his life as sofa cushions, the Mother of Harlots was as comfortable as Mother Goose, the wild poetry of the blood from the winepress no more shocking than the pail of water fetched by Jack and Jill.

As a pudgy little child Jack had been precocious, a quick learner. He had stood on a table at the front of the church in his tiny white suit, and the mad verses had come out of his innocent mouth, and everyone had smiled and clapped and praised him.

It couldn't last, his acceptance of the world he had been born into. In adulthood he had come to his senses, he had repudiated church, mother, father, Bible, and his own little white-suited self.

And yet that childhood had branded him. Perhaps the odd fervor that Grandison saw in Jack's eyes was a light put there by the falling stars of the Apocalypse, and the star called Wormwood, and the scorching fire. Jack's logical adult mind had long since put aside the stars and the fire and the beast that spake as a dragon and the terrifying hors.e.m.e.n, but they were engraved on his collarbone and his elbow. They were coiled within liver and spleen.

Now, working for Jefferson Grandison, riding up in the gla.s.s elevator to the seventieth floor, Jack Markey couldn't help seeing the door that was opened in heaven, he couldn't help hearing the voice of a trumpet talking, which said, "Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter."

And whenever he rode down again and walked once more on the lowly ground where others walked, whenever he saw someone like the bag lady in the doorway of the Grandison Building, Jack remembered the bottomless chasm and the smoke rising out of the pit, "as the smoke of a great furnace. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth."

*11*

ADVANCE TOKEN TO NEAREST UTILITY.

IF UNOWNED YOU MAY BUY IT FROM THE BANK.

a"Chance card, Monopoly

The little world of Mimi Pink was very different from the powers and princ.i.p.alities of the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building. Instead of an immense landscape spreading to the horizon, Mimi's universe was a miniature playing board.

The commanding myth of Mimi's childhood had not come from the Bible. Her own girlish obsession had been the game of Monopoly, that great right-angled odyssey, that pilgrim's progress to the celestial city of Park Place and Boardwalk. For Mimi the journey out of Egypt to the promised land of Go (COLLECT $200) had been fabulous enough. Her wandering fortunes had been subject to chance bolts of fate, sometimes a shattering blowa"YOU ARE a.s.sESSED FOR STREET REPAIRSa"and sometimes a glorious windfalla"BANK ERROR IN YOUR FAVOR. Her business career was a reliving of those summer days of long ago, those endless afternoons with her sister, Lee-Ann, and the kids from the neighborhood, Annie Finney and Buzzie. But today's game was happier. Mimi was winning. In the awful days of her childhood she had never won. Her sister had won, Buzzie had won, but never Annie Finney and never, never Mimi.

"Boardwalk," shrieked Lee-Ann, "you landed on Boardwalk. That's mine. You owe me a thousand dollars." And Lee-Ann screeched with gloating laughter and s.n.a.t.c.hed at Mimi's yellow hundred-dollar bills.

"I hate you, I hate you!" screamed Mimi. She couldn't stand it: she picked up the Monopoly board and threw it at her sister. Little green houses and red plastic hotels were scattered all over the floor.

"Stop it, you dumb kid, stop it," cried Buzzie.

"Oh, Mimi, no," cried Annie Finney.

But Lee-Ann was still laughing at Mimi, still taunting her sister. "You're ugly and fat and dumb. You'll never win. You're just too dumb."

So what could Mimi do? Sobbing, she threw herself at Lee-Ann and shoved her hard and made her fall down, and then Lee-Ann shrieked and jumped up and clawed at Mimi, and Annie tried to help, and Buzzie dragged them apart, and then Mimi's mother came running in and sent Annie and Buzzie home, and Lee-Ann wept pitifully and blamed Mimi, and Mimi couldn't explain her rage and frustration, so her mother slapped her and sent her bawling to her room and took her little honey-child to the movies.

Next time they played the game, Buzzie cheated, and he won, and Mimi got mad again, and he jeered at her, and so did Lee-Ann, and after that it was Lee-Ann's turn to win, and Mimi cried and cried, but it never did any good because Lee-Ann and Buzzie always won, and when Lee-Ann grew up she got in the movies because she was a whole lot cuter than Mimi.

But now Lee-Ann wasn't working in films anymore. She had lost her looks and her money. She had married some old fart, and she was a n.o.body now, just a n.o.body. She had come crawling for help to Mimi.

Mimi had married, too, but she soon discovered her mistake and shucked d.i.c.kie Pink. Now there was n.o.body to slow her down as she surged out of the sleazy back lots of the Monopoly board, throwing the dice and throwing the dice, working her way tirelessly in the direction of Boardwalk and Park Place. Mimi was a h.e.l.l of a businesswoman, that was what everybody said.

In Concord she had begun with the cheap down-market purple properties, the Mediterranean and Baltic avenues of the town, and then she had gone on to acquire the middle-market parcels, the plum-colored St. Charles Places of Concord and the orange Tennessee Avenues. Now she hungered for Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Pacific avenues, those choice green pieces of real estate that Mimi identified with the Milldam, the up-market commercial section of Main Street.

And now there was the exciting prospect opened up by Jack Markey, the new shopping center he wanted to build across Route 2 from Walden Pond. That would be the final Eldorado, Mimi's true Park Place and Boardwalk.

She had certainly chosen the right town at the right time. She had selected Concord only after shrewd investigation of a number of suburban centers west of Boston. The place had seemed so unspoiled. It didn't occur to Mimi that she herself might spoil it, that her proprietary takeover was an invasion like that of some shrieking horde of barbarians galloping down on the huddled village, burning, raping, and pillaging. No indeed. She was intensely proud of her transformation of Walden Street and Main. She prided herself on the new look she was giving to the town.

Others were not so sure. People complained that they couldn't get anything useful in Concord anymore. They couldn't buy a yard of fabric or a book or a pair of shoes or a set of pillowcases, they couldn't find any of the necessities once supplied by the dime storea"a length of ribbon, a bag of potting soil, a pancake turner, a skein of embroidery thread, a set of jelly jars, a plastic bag of goldfish, a pair of cotton panties.

Therefore it was not the local citizenry who frequented Concord center. It was wealthy women from suburban towns like Weston and Newton and Wellesley. They strolled along the Milldam in pairs, looking sharply left and right for something to want. They didn't really need anything. They were well fed, well housed, and well clothed. But they had a gnawing inside them, a longing to buy something. Their pocketbooks trembled with eagerness, their checkbooks were at the ready, to pay for a brocaded fireplace fan, a Toby jug, a pillow embroidered with chickadeesa"something, anything they could bring home in a smart shopping bag puffy with tissue paper.

Mimi's stores were doing well. They were just what these women wanted.

But Mimi wasn't satisfied. Among the shops there were holdouts, merchants who were stubborn, who failed to see the handwriting on the wall. That pathetic little lunch room, for instance. Unfortunately there was nothing Mimi could do about the hardware store, because the proprietor owned the building and refused to sell. The Cape Verdean barber owned his place, too. He, too, was being stubborn. But Mimi was determined to win him over, to make him give up. His grubby establishment was a blot on the landscape. She had to do something about it.

On the day of Alice Snow's death at Pond View, Mimi walked boldly into the barbershop to try again.

There wasn't a single customer in either of the old-fashioned barber chairs. Alphonso Domingo was occupying one of them, reading the paper. Mimi knew that his only patrons were old geezers who had been coming to him for years. Alphonso didn't even notice the new haircutting fashions. Younger men had to go elsewhere to be properly styled.

Wrinkling her nose at the smell of cheap hair tonic, Mimi made Alphonso another offer, half again bigger than the first.

Once again he refused. It was a lot of money, he agreed, but no sale. "If I retire, what do I get? My wife, twenty-four hours a day. Don't get me wrong, she's a fine woman, but, holy Jesus, twenty-four hours a day?"

Well, Mimi had failed again. But she would keep at it. Alphonso Domingo's barbershop had to go. Sooner or later she would find a way.

Angrily she walked out and strode around the corner to the Den of Teddies. It was a good place to find comfort. The shelves were lined with cuddly animals, puppy dogs with pink felt tongues, kittens with green gla.s.s eyes, pigs with curly tails.

"I adore this shop, don't you?" said Mimi, confiding in the new girl she had hired as resident zookeeper.

"Well, it's okay," said the girl, "but subtibes the fuzz gets up by doze. I thigk I'b allergic." She sneezed and blew her nose, then sneezed again.

"Try not to do that in front of the customers," said Mimi severely. "Why don't you take care of your health problems in the office? Here, I'll take over for a while."

And then while the new girl was in the back room, Mimi sold a stuffed bunny to a shopper for forty-nine dollars and fifty cents. "For your grandchild?" said Mimi, stroking the bunny's furry back and squeezing it to make it squeak. Its gla.s.s eyes were pink, just like the eyes of the animal from which its white fur had been flayed.

"Oh, no, I want it for myself, it's so adorable." The customer held the bunny against her cheek and giggled. "I'm just a great big overgrown baby."

"Oh, look," said Ananda Singh, getting out of Homer's car in the driveway beside the house on Fair Haven Bay.

A rabbit was darting into the woods, bounding lopsided, showing its white tail.

"Did you see?" said Homer. "It's lost a leg." He led Ananda up the porch steps. "Foxes get them. And we've had an outbreak of coyotes lately."

They found Mary in the study, and Homer introduced Ananda. "Look what I found on my trip to Goose Pond, better than a wood thrush any day. Meet Ananda K. Singh, world traveler, disciple of Henry Th.o.r.eau, worshiper at the shrine of the transcendent in nature, devotee of beauty, justice, and truth."

"Well, how do you do, Ananda K. Singh," said Mary, getting up and shaking his hand. "Worshipers and disciples are always welcome in this house. Devotees, too. Make yourself at home."

Back at the Den of Teddies, Mimi Pink took another white bunny out of a box in the storeroom and set it on the shelf, where it peered at her blankly with its pink gla.s.s eyes, a.s.suring her that beauty, justice, and truth were hard to come by, but cuddliness was available any moment of the day.

*12*

Death is that expressive pause in the music

of the blast. a"Journal, December 29, 1841