God in Concord Part 16

"What a shame," agreed the other.

Sarah had some candies in her pocket, a bag of M&M's. She put a few on the flat of her hand, and Pearl took them neatly. It felt funny when the horse's big teeth picked them up, but it didn't hurt. Sarah fed her the whole bag.

Then she stood back and looked calculatingly at Pearl with the shrewd eye of the expert rider she had become on the merry-go-round at the fairground beyond the Ring and f.l.a.n.g.e Company. The horse had no saddle, but her back was smooth and strong-looking. There was a deep swaybacked hollow in front of her projecting hipbones. One day Sarah would try it. Then she and Pearl would circle the pasture, and they would plunge and surge forward, and plunge and surge forward, as though the cymbals were clas.h.i.+ng and the drums were beating and the horns were playing the "Skater's Waltz."

*38*

If you are going into that linea"going to besiege

the city of G.o.da"you must not only be strong in

engines, but prepared with provisions to starve

out the garrison. a"Th.o.r.eau, Letter to Harrison Blake,

December 19, 1853

Homer took his convictions about Pond View to Police Chief James Flower.

"It's just too many things at once," he told Jimmy. "Four deaths, two obviously criminal attacks on Julian Snow, one near electrocution, and one house fire."

"When you put it that way," said Jimmy, "it certainly looks bad, but you could put it another way, too. Three of those people died from natural causes, and the other one was probably an accident. And so was the house fire, and so was the electric iron. They're old, those people. They have accidents."

"That still leaves the hole in Julian's gas line and the sabotaging of his machine at the landfill. Those things weren't carelessness. They were deliberate."

Jimmy sighed. "Well, I'll send somebody over to talk to Mr. Snow and take a look. The truth is, Homer, we're really strapped for manpower. I've got my one and only inspector doing traffic duty. Work on it yourself, why don't you?"

"I am, but, look here, those people are in danger. They're all in danger. Somebody's trying to finish off everybody in the park."

"Look, even if it were true, what am I supposed to do, put a squad of police officers at Pond View around the clock? I told you, we haven't got the staff. Do you know how many motor vehicle accidents there were in Concord last year? Go ahead, guess."

"I don't know. A hundred or so?"

"Nearly seven hundred. And we had almost a hundred B and E's, three hundred and fifty cases of larceny, and over a hundred incidents of domestic violence. We can't keep up."

Homer was surprised. "I thought this was such a polite little law-abiding town."

"It is, compared with some. But, believe me, Homer, those figures are G.o.d's truth."

Homer went away, humbled and enlightened, and spent the afternoon in his vegetable garden.

Next morning he dropped off a bag of summer squash at Oliver Fry's house and stayed to enjoy a second breakfast.

Oliver too had a midsummer harvest to display. "Look here," he said proudly, displaying a basket of greenery. "I got these pitcher plants in Gowing's Swamp."

"Gowing's Swamp?" Homer was fascinated. "You mean that quaking bog that sucks you down?"

"Not if you exercise reasonable care." Then Oliver explained the cannibal mechanics of pitcher plants, which were notorious for being carnivorous. "My biology cla.s.s will get a kick out of these."

"Flies, right?" said Homer nervously. "Pitcher plants digest flies?"

"Flies, and anything else that wanders in."

"Oh, ugh," said Homer. "You know what? They remind me of Jefferson Grandison. He's the pitcher plant, d.a.m.n him, and the town of Concord is the fly. Right now we're all perched on his detestable carnivorous lip, ready to fall in."

Oliver's face fell. His enthusiasm faded, and he dropped onto a chair. "I'll bet he's some kind of crook. What do we know about him, anyhow? He's got a lot of money, that's all we know."

"Oh, I don't think he's a crook," said Homer dolefully. "Probably every low-down thing he does is strictly legal. He doesn't make a move, probably, without an army of lawyers." Homer banged down his coffee cup. "Tell you what, I'll see what I can find out. I'll beard Grandison in his den."

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, Homer!" Hope burst into the kitchen, fresh from the shower, a tall girl in a baggy blouse, her brown hair misty with drops of water like dew on a flower, her fingers wrinkled and pink.

Oliver looked at his daughter tenderly. "Hopey dear, is our boarder coming down for breakfast?"

Hope turned away and began fussing with the coffeepot. "Oh, I think he's moving around up there."

And then Ananda appeared, smiling radiantly. "It is very comfortable, my bed. Oh, good morning, Mr. Kelly."

"Coffee, Ananda?" said Hope in a strangled voice.

"That would be splendid," said Ananda heartily.

"Thank you, Hopey dear," said Oliver, grateful to his daughter for so politely disguising her antagonism toward the unwelcome guest at the table.

Homer had bitten off more than he could chew. His teaching duties in Cambridge were no joke, and the plight of the people at Pond View had become his responsibility alone, since Chief Flower seemed to have washed his hands of the whole thing.

And now he had promised Oliver Fry that he would look into Jefferson Grandison's empire and try to find some loophole in the legitimacy of his dangerous a.s.sault on Concord's woods and fields.

The teaching duties came first. In the next few days the final papers of the summer semester came flooding in, followed by stacks of final exams. It took Homer a week to work his way through them. Not until he had graded them all could he turn his attention to his promise about Grandison.

As usual Homer failed to adopt the sensible approach of going through channels. Instead he simply flung himself at the problem, starting at the top, making a random attack with a blunderbuss.

He made no appointment. He appeared at Grandison's door.

It was his first ride in the gla.s.s elevator. For a man with a child's pleasure in sensation, it was a stunning surprise to find himself hurtling upward from the dark chasm of the city street into the bright sky. Stepping out into the blaze of noontime suns.h.i.+ne on the seventieth floor, Homer felt dizzy and vaguely discomfited, manipulated by demons of the air.

The lobby of Grandison's office was an enormous cube. At first glance it looked empty. It occurred to Homer that emptiness was the best sort of conspicuous display in a building where every cubic yard was of stupendous dollar value.

Squinting, he detected a human being at the far end, and he approached her at once, his feet sinking into the white carpet. Halfway across the pure expanse he looked back to see if there were footprints in the snow.

The woman at the desk was, he guessed, some sort of high-cla.s.s receptionist. Probably an executive vice president. She was dressed in the apogee of fas.h.i.+onable taste. To Homer, who identified high fas.h.i.+on with the s.h.i.+ny exaggerations of Mimi Pink, it was a revelation. She had gone past the artifices of Mimi Pink, way past Mimi's glossy surfaces and football shoulders. Her face was unsullied by makeup. Her blond hair was long and flowing. Her dress was of a white gauzelike material draped on her lank body in loops and swags. She was telephoning.

As Homer approached, she put down the phone and scribbled something on a sheet of paper. Only then did she look up at him and smile.

"Good morning," said Homer genially. "My name is Kelly. I wonder if I could see Mr. Grandison?" The woman put one pale hand over her sheet of paper. "What do you want to see him about?" Her gaze was frank, her accent impeccable. Three centuries of Brahmin ancestors had scattered umlauts in her speech. Her name, decided Homer, was Abigail Saltonstall.

He shuffled his shoes on the rug, depositing mud from his great-grandfather's potato field in Ireland. "I'm doing an article on Mr. Grandison for ... ah, Harvard magazine. They're running a series on prominent graduates of the Harvard Business School." Homer smiled ingratiatingly, wondering if Grandison had ever been to the business school.

"I see. Won't you sit down?"

Homer looked around for a chair. He could see nothing but a small c.u.mulus cloud. "Oh, is that a chair? Well, all right, here goes." For an instant he was lost in its cus.h.i.+ony folds, but then the chair recoiled and bounced him to the surface. "Perhaps you could give me a little background before I take up any of Mr. Grandison's valuable time. Then I could get right to the heart of things with the man himself. Of course we'll want a picture or two, not just the usual captain of industry kind of thing. Mr. Grandison with his dogs, perhaps? Mr. Grandison in his boat in foul-weather gear?"

Abigail Saltonstall was obviously won over. "What would you like to know about Mr. Grandison?" A little breeze from some remote ventilating duct fluttered her gauzy dress.

"Well, perhaps you could just run down for me what it is that Mr. Grandison actually does. That is, what is his firm engaged in from day to day?"

"His firm? Well, actually it's not just one firm. Mr. Grandison has interests in many conservation organizations, enterprises concerned with environmental development, idealistic real estate."

"Idealistic real estate?"

"Development that preserves the landscape, housing that respects the natural setting, that sort of thing."

"Could you give me the names of these firms?"

"Certainly." Abigail pulled open an ethereal drawer and handed him a sheet of paper.

Homer ran his eye down the list. "Does Mr. Grandison actually run all these outfits?"

"Oh, no. He's on the boards of the charitable inst.i.tutions. He takes personal charge of a few of the commercial enterprises. And of course he's always creating more. Mr. Grandison is a man of the broadest vision, Mr. Kelly. He has an outlook that's really incredibly immense." Throwing out her arms, Abigail displayed the huge canvas of Grandisonian interest, extending from sea to sea and pole to pole.

"Well, what's this one, for instance," said Homer, "Breathe Free?"

"The name is perfectly clear. It represents Mr. Grandison's concern for clean air, his anxiety about toxic waste, his hope fora""

"How about Egret Country?"

"Florida real estate. It's a retirement community in the Everglades. Individual luxury apartments with hospital, golf course, concert hall, art museum."

"They got any egrets?" said Homer crudely.

"Why, of course. The heart of the community is an untouched piece of wetland, with blue herons, egrets, pelicans, alligators. I've been there myself. It's just beautiful."

For a moment Homer was swept away. He pictured himself standing on a greensward holding a golf club, with a blue heron nudging his golfball. He was wearing golf knickers, diamond-patterned socks, and big shoes with fringed flaps. "Move over," he said to the blue heron, and smacked the ball high into the air. It soared and soared, taken by the wind, and landed with a splash far out to sea.

He woke up as a buzzer sounded on Abigail's desk. "Oh, here's Mr. Grandison." She flicked a tiny switch. "His meeting is over."

A door opened on the other side of the gigantic room, and Abigail got to her feet. So did Homer, sucked upright by awe. Slyly he took the opportunity to put his hand on the piece of paper on which Abigail had been scribbling. Casually he slipped it under the list of Grandison's enterprises. Folding the sheets together, he tucked them in his pocket.

"Oh, Mr. Grandison," said Abigail, "this is Mr. Kelly. He's doing an article for Harvard magazine, part of a series on prominent business school graduates."

Homer strode forward and extended a hearty hand. "I hope, Mr. Grandison, you'll permit me an interview."

Homer had seen Jefferson Grandison at the Concord Planning Board hearing, but then the man had been seated, crowded in among sycophants and hangers-on. Standing alone, he had an even more majestic presence. His head was large and imposing, gus.h.i.+ng a sublime flow of whisker. He had probably spent the morning speaking to Moses from a burning bush.

"Ineffable Industries has canceled out," said Abigail dreamily.

"Well, in that case," said Grandison, "my time is at your disposal, Mr. Kelly. Come in."

Homer followed him into his office, wondering why he was thinking of flies drowning in pitcher plants instead of Dante at the summit of Paradise.

The office was staggering. The view in three directions made Homer gasp. The entire metropolis lay before him, an alabaster city undimmed by human tears. Well, maybe there were a few tears down there somewhere, but they were invisible from the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building.

Homer lowered himself into another c.u.mulus cloud, took out his notebook, and began asking gentle questions, beginning with simple ones about Jefferson Grandison's childhood.

Mr. Grandison seemed flattered. He told all. Homer scribbled a few things down, to give the impression he was taking notes.

Happy childhood, death of dad, mom remarries, cruel stepdad, sorrow in luxury, prep school, college, marriage, Harv Bus School, onward, upward.

So far, so good. Facts were facts. But when Homer inquired about the progress of the great man since graduate school, he could catch at nothing to write down. He could make neither head nor tail of the language that came out of Grandison's mouth. It was all flabby phrasesa"speaking candidly, tangential maximization, in terms of, as far as, a.n.a.logous polarities, as it were, prevailing utilization, depending on the parametersa"and then Grandison would plunge into sets of interlocking parentheses, plummeting deeper and deeper into the swamp of a sentence and working his way up again, unlocking the parentheses one by one, finalizing brackets, bursting to the surface at last with the verb in his teeth.

Homer's mind fuzzed over. After an hour of his own increasingly befuddled questions and Grandison's increasingly amorphous replies, he emerged from the office in a daze, nodded vaguely to Abigail Saltonstall and fell to the earth in the gla.s.s elevator, closing his eyes in terror. As he drove home to Concord he was troubled by a humming in his ears. Feeble phrases undulated in his head, tumbling over and under, and under and over.

By the time he got home he was in a state of frantic deprivation. He wanted nouns, short Anglo-Saxon words like ax, rake, dog, horse; he wanted meaningful prose. He went to Th.o.r.eau's journal as to a medicine cabinet and opened the second volume at random.

As I climbed the hill again toward my old bean-field, I listened to the ancient, familiar, immortal, dear cricket sound under all others, hearing at first some distinct chirps; but when these ceased I was aware of the general earth-song, and I wondered if behind or beneath this there was not some other chant yet more universal.

Ah, that was speech. That was English speech.

Mary was not at home to complain to. Warmed by the tonic of Th.o.r.eau's language, Homer got back in his car and drove to the parking lot at Walden Pond. Striding across the road into the woods, he found his way to the place that had once been the beanfield. It was covered now by the successors of the trees Th.o.r.eau had planted when he left the pond.

Homer leaned against one of them and listened. Above him he heard the creaking of the trunk, the wind in the leaves making a sound like the sea. There was no birdsong, no thrilling unfamiliar note that might be a wood thrush. But the crickets were making their midsummer chant, their strong mutual pulse, all in the same rhythm. It was older than he was, older than Th.o.r.eau, older than Walden Pond, older perhaps than the great chunk of ice that had hollowed out the basin and filled it with water. In the broad sweep of geologic time, the small human turbulences afflicting these few square miles of Ma.s.sachusetts were nothing. Someday all the people shouting so angrily at each other in the woods around the pond would be gone. But the crickets would still be there, singing their earth-song, telling of antediluvian and everlasting things, praising the brightness of the moon, the light of the stars, the survival of insects.

As the door closed behind Homer in Jefferson Grandison's office, a buzzer sounded on Grandison's desk. He picked up the phone.

The voice was familiar. It belonged to Archibald Pouch, of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket, a firm of attorneys hired to intimidate Grandison. As usual Pouch was vulgar, imperious and threatening, demanding the instantaneous removal of Lot Seventeen. The conversation was disagreeable. Grandison threatened court action in return.

When he put down the phone, he stalked into the reception lobby to dress down his secretary-receptionist, Martha Jones, for putting the call through. Martha complained that Pouch had been so insistent, threatening her personally with litigation, she had had no choice.

Back in his office, Grandison made a call of his own. This time he used a pattern of speech totally unlike the tormented language he had inflicted on Homer Kelly. There were no parenthetical remarks, no elliptical parameters, no aforementioneds, no supplementary conditionalities or affiliated relations.h.i.+ps.