God in Concord Part 9

Reverently they listened as Mimi held forth. "I've got people begging me for s.p.a.ce right now, with the darlingest ideas. Potpourris Unlimited has been after me for a year. And Loving Heartsa"you know, those specialty shops that sell heart-shaped thingsa"they want a shop here, too, and there's a new little chain, Ladybugs, exclusive knitwear with the ladybug emblem. I'm d.i.c.kering for more s.p.a.ce. And I'm hiring the interior designer for Hyatt Hotels."

Mimi Pink was throwing the dice, throwing the dice, hopping over the less important properties on the Monopoly board, aiming for some ultimate perfection of real estate, some glorious Park Place, some supremely up-market Boardwalk with towers of alabaster.

Everyone in the room felt part of something important. It was especially fantastic to be here in the Porcelain Parlor surrounded by the most expensive merchandise in town. The fabulous price tags on the china figures cast a spell. The track lighting was artfully arranged to s.h.i.+ne on the gla.s.s shelves with their fragile images of bluebirds among apple blossoms and mothers cuddling babies and nubile girls with windblown skirts. In the place of honor perched a porcelain imitation of azalea twigs adorned with lifelike magenta flowers. Its price tag was seven hundred and fifty dollars.

Across Route 2 on the south side of town, deep in the woods between Walden Pond and the Sudbury River, Homer Kelly and Ananda Singh were ankle deep in the cus.h.i.+ony moss covering the surface of the fourth Andromeda Pond. Above them on the hillside stood a row of oaks, vast round globes of moving leaves, nodding in the soft breeze like dreaming old men who had lost the power of speech.

Swamp azaleas blossomed here and there. No price tags hung from their fragrant branches. They were altogether free.

*22*

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed,

and in such desperate enterprises? a"Walden, "Conclusion"

In the dining room of the Colonial Inn at the far end of Monument Square, the Concord Chamber of Commerce was enjoying its monthly breakfast. "Enjoying" was perhaps not the right word. Most of them were suffering, but they ate their eggs and bacon and their pancakes and sausages with a will, forking them up hungrily while they exchanged outraged exclamations and shook their heads in bewilderment, wondering what in the h.e.l.l to do.

"It's not fair," complained Melanie Dew, proprietor of the lunch room that was wedged between Mimi Pink's Porcelain Parlor and her new Bridal Boutique. "She tripled my rent overnight. I can't possibly pay that much." Melanie's voice disappeared upward in a little squeak as she started to cry.

The others were embarra.s.sed, but they were intensely sympathetic. There were growlings and mutterings, and then Taylor Baylor spoke up. Taylor had been heavily fined in the county courthouse for his verbal a.s.sault on Mimi Pink, he was deeply resentful. "I think I speak for all of us when I say that Melanie is not alone. Mimi Pink is trying to force all us honest merchants out of town, people who've been here fifteen or twenty or thirty years. They tell me she's d.i.c.kering with that out-of-town real estate firm that owns my block. If she gets her hands on that, I might as well give up."

"It's war, that's what it is," said Isabelle Moseley, who had a small notions shop on Walden Street. "It's the battle of Concord all over again, only this time it's not the minutemen and the British, it's us and Mimi Pink. Only this time the enemy is winning."

Taylor Baylor stretched out his fork like a musket. "Fire, fellow soldiers, for G.o.d's sake, fire," he cried, quoting Major b.u.t.trick at the North Bridge.

Everybody laughed uneasily, and the breakfast meeting broke up.

Taylor Baylor was too sore in spirit to go back to work in his shoe store. He stayed on at the breakfast table with the barber, Alphonso Domingo, to drink second and third cups of coffee and indulge in angry gossip about Ms. Pink.

Therefore when Mimi took her usual morning stroll along Walden Street from one shop to another, she noticed that Alphonso Domingo's barbershop was empty.

She paused. The barbershop was the only remaining interruption in her row of pretty stores, a ghastly hole like a missing tooth. Mimi's repeated offers to buy out Alphonso had been steadfastly rejected.

The door of the shop, she noticed, was slightly ajar. Mimi pushed it open. "Mr. Domingo?" she said loudly.

One of the barber chairs creaked slightly and turned a fraction of a degree. Mimi looked at herself in the big mirror. It seemed strange that an old mirror like that would have the capacity to reflect her modish silhouette, her smart hairstyle, after all those years of giving back only the reflections of Alphonso and his aging customers. Mimi winced at the sagging vinyl-covered couch, the shelves of sticky bottles, she recoiled from the dusty hair clippings on the floor, not yet swept up. What a slob the man was.

"Mr. Domingo?" Mimi said again.

Still no answer. Inquisitively Mimi peeked through the curtains at the back of the shop and pushed through them. The farther room was empty. It was a sort of locker room with a dirty sink, a sloppy desk, a grubby window, a worn Linoleum floor, and an overflowing trash barrela"Alphonso Domingo's sanctum sanctorum.

Mimi stared at the heaps of papers on his desk. Without hesitation she slipped her long manicured fingernails among the piles and shuffled them, turning them over, examining them with practiced eyes, reaching deeper down, pulling out buried invoices and bills, surveying them swiftly.

One piece of paper was more interesting than the rest. Mimi plucked it out and read it carefully. It was a bill from the Sonesta Hotel on the Charles River in Cambridgea""Mich.e.l.le LaFitte, occupancy three weeks, $2,100."

There were other bills clipped to it. Mich.e.l.le LaFitte's hair had been done, her teeth had been fixed, her corns attended to. She had bought a fur coat.

Alphonso Domingo was a married man. Who was Mich.e.l.le LaFitte?

With the incriminating papers in her hand, Mimi hurried outside and dodged into Corporate Gifts, where she kept a copy machine. In a trice she was back in Alphonso's office, returning the originals.

Strolling back along the sidewalk to the Parfumerie, Mimi smiled. Perhaps there would soon be no ugly hole in her row of smart shops. Another bright awning might soon be filling the gap.

Later that week Mimi Pink made another a.s.sault and captured another enemy fortress. The bank at last came through with her new loan, and she completed the transfer of the commercial building housing Taylor Baylor's shoe store.

Taylor moved out at once, not waiting for his lease to expire. Selling his stock of shoes at a loss to a compet.i.tor in Framingham, he moved south, intending to spend the rest of his days ambling around a golf course in Orlando, Florida, flailing glumly at a golfball amid showers of exploding turf, telling himself that this was the life. Day after day Taylor whapped the ball high in the air and watched it bound into the rough, or bury itself in the sand, or plummet into a waterhole. Taylor was bored and disgusted. He was homesick for Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts.

As for Mimi Pink, she wasted no time in taking over the abandoned ruins of Taylor's shoe store. Standing victorious in the shambles, she looked around in cool disdain at the debris he had left behind.

"We'll take down that wall, I think," she said to her decorator. "A pink carpet, pearl-gray walls. How soon can that woodcarver deliver a new sign?"

The decorator shook his head. "I don't know. He says it's getting harder and harder to get gold leaf. The price is going up. How about plain gold paint?"

But Mimi had her standards. She closed her eyes in disgust and shook her head. "It's gold leaf or nothing. He's probably gouging me. I'll talk him down."

Look at me, Lee-Ann! Look at me, Annie! Look at me, Buzzie! Who's winning now? Me, that's who! Me, me, me, Mimi Pink!

*23*

When were the good and brave ever

in a majority? a""A Plea for Captain John Brown"

It wasn't only the town boards that were meeting in Concord that summer, and the Chamber of Commerce and the Consortium of Concord Boutiques. Down on the sh.o.r.e of Fair Haven Bay where the Sudbury River turned the corner and spread itself out like a lake, another planning session was underway.

Homer and Mary Kelly, Oliver Fry, and Ananda Singh were deep in conspiratorial consultation. They sat on the porch high in the air above the river and put their heads together. Mary's common sense, Oliver's anger, Homer's euphoria, and Ananda's fresh enthusiasm trembled on the verge of possible action.

Ananda recognized Oliver Fry at once as the angry father of the handsome girl at the railroad station. But Ananda was unknown to Oliver Fry. At first Oliver looked at him suspiciously. Was this another Jack Markey, with smoking nostrils and las.h.i.+ng pointed tail? But when Homer related his first conversation with Ananda, Oliver was disarmed.

"Do you know what he said?" reported Homer. "He said, 'The wood thrush sings to amend our inst.i.tutions,' that's what he said."

Oliver was charmed. He melted at once, and beamed, and shook Ananda's hand.

So that was all right.

Oliver was full of news. He had been inquiring around and attending hearings. He had collared one of the selectmen, he had bawled insults at the chairwoman of the school committee, he had burst into a meeting of the planning board, a wild apparition with sandy hair, inflamed freckles, and bulging eyes. " 'Who hears the fishes when they cry?' " he had shouted, quoting Th.o.r.eau in the middle of a request by a pet.i.tioner to add a rumpus room to his garage.

"Fishes?" the pet.i.tioner had said, bewildered. "What fishes?"

Homer listened to Oliver's tirade and wondered why idealists were often so absurd. Realists were always sober and sensible. They spoke in measured tones and quoted the bylaws and belched discreetly behind their handkerchiefs. They won, that was the trouble, while the frustrated idealists grew more and more ridiculous and cut off their ears and stopped taking baths and adopted a hundred and fifty cats.

Concord was selling out to Jack Markey and Jefferson Grandison, that was the substance of Oliver's story. If n.o.body did anything about it, there would soon be a mixed-use complex of housing units and commercial properties on land now belonging to the high school, right across the highway from Walden Pond. All that was needed was a slight change of zoning at the special town meeting in October. With the town boards behind it, the motion would probably pa.s.s.

"This Jack Markey," said Mary Kelly, "does he live here in town?"

"No," growled Oliver, "he comes from Brookline."

"Then how did he find out about all the boards? How did he know who to talk to? How did he figure out all these trade-offs?"

"There must be a traitor in our midst," said Oliver, glowering. And then he had an excruciating thought. He remembered his first sight of Jack Markey, sitting at the kitchen table with Hope. The two of them had been bowed over a map of the town of Concord.

Oliver groaned aloud. Hope was the traitor, his own beloved daughter.

Then Ananda broke in. "But how can the people of Concord allow such things to happen?"

Homer and Mary looked at each other and made wry faces, but Ananda went on talking. He was like the child before the naked emperor, asking an innocent question. He was not blinded by the pragmatic crudities of local politics, he was not deafened by rote phrases of long custom, nor was his tongue thickened with trite phrases about the sacred heritage of history. His view was large and ample. "All over the world there are disciples of Henry Th.o.r.eau. People of every nation will care what happens to this wooded hill near Walden Pond. Surely the people of Concord will wake up, will remember, will be ashamed."

Ananda stopped talking and lowered his eyes.

For a moment no one else said anything. The sun threw s.h.i.+mmering sparkles into their eyes from the river. A pair of white gulls floated high over the water, blown all the way from the landfill where they had been scavenging choice bits of garbage.

Oliver gaped at Ananda. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Mary smiled. What a darling the boy was.

Then Homer came to his senses and laughed. "Do you know what we've got here? A spokesman. We've got to send him out into the world to carry the flag."

"I know," said Mary promptly, getting to her feet, "the television station. Concord's got one. Why can't he appear on television?"

"Brilliant." Homer thumped the table. "They're always looking for issues and causes, people to talk about something. Anything to use up time. Call them up."

Ananda looked frightened. "You mean I am to make a public speech?"

"Just say what you said just now, that's all. Tell the world. Well, it won't exactly be the world. It will be a few people only half listening because they're getting supper and they forgot to switch channels, or they're looking for the ball game and they can't find it, or they tuned in by mistake. But it's better than nothing."

Mary made the call at once. To her surprise the station manager accepted the idea with enthusiasm. "But we'll have to get somebody to talk on the other side. I mean, we can't just show one side."

"What do you mean, the other side?"

"You know, the side that wants to see Walden Green built on that site. We've got to be fair, after all."

"You mean, you've always got to balance right with wrong, and truth with falsehood?"

The station manager let this sarcasm pa.s.s, and they arranged a date for Ananda's appearance.

"Tuesday evening, is that all right, Ananda?" said Mary. "It will be a sort of debate, with somebody speaking for what they call the other side."

Ananda was dismayed. "I know so little about local matters. You must instruct me. I am so ignorant, so uninformed. "

"I wonder who they'll get to speak for the developer?" said Oliver Fry darkly.

"Maybe they'll go right to the top," said Homer, "and get Grandison himself."

But it was not Jefferson Grandison. The manager of the television studio called Jack Markey and asked him to do it. But Jack thought of a better candidate.

He discussed his choice with Grandison on the phone. "After all, she's a local citizen. She'll carry more weight than some foreigner. And she's the daughter of that Th.o.r.eau nut, Oliver Fry. She'll undercut their side, knock the bottom out of it."

"I see," said Grandison, staring out the window of his vast office in the direction of the blue haze that was the western suburbs, where Jack Markey was an invisible microscopic speck in a tiny telephone booth.

So Jack arranged it with Hope, who was too surprised to say no. Next morning at breakfast she broke the news to her father as he took his container of dead frogs from the freezer. "Oh, by the way," said Hope carelessly, "I'm going to be on television."

"Oh?" said Oliver, prying off the top of the container to inspect the frogs. "What for?"

"Well, the truth is," said Hope with a laugh, as though it were just a joke, "I'm going to be defending Walden Green, the new shopping center. Now, Father, don't get upset. Jack asked me to do it, and I didn't see why not, so I said yes."

Oliver dropped the container. The slippery brick of frozen frogs slid out on the floor. "You didn't see why not?" He gasped and pursued the frogs across the linoleum. "Why not? Because it will make a fool of your father, that's why not."

"You mean, they asked me just because I'm your daughter?" Hope laughed cruelly. "Maybe they think I'm something in my own right, not just the daughter of Oliver Fry."

Oliver was silent. He picked up the frogs, feeling his heart break.

Hope's conscience lashed at her, but she flounced out of the room and ran lightly upstairs. In a moment Oliver could hear her typewriter rattling in her bedroom. The noise battered at him. He couldn't bear it.

Tackety-tackety-tack went Hope's typewriter, clattering without cease. But when she heard the screen door slam she stood up to watch her father ride his bicycle up Walden Street in the direction of the high school.

He was hunched over the handlebars like an old man. For the first time Hope saw how much power she had over him, and she was dismayed. She didn't want his happiness to be dependent on her. People should be free and self-sufficient. as if they lived in separate narrow shafts without connecting doors and windows.

But now, looking through her own bedroom window as her father pumped his bicycle away around the curve of the street, Hope threw up the sash and called after him. It was too late. His bicycle grew smaller and smaller and disappeared behind the blank wall of the light-plant substation across the road.