Shortest Day Page 4

  They would be poor, he said, but they could manage. With children it would be different. He just couldn’t handle the confusion and expense of fatherhood right now.

  So it wasn’t fair to him that this had happened, that she hadn’t told him while there was still time to put an end to things. Now it was too late. She wouldn’t blame him for being angry.

  And something else troubled Sarah. The baby had yet to assert itself by moving inside her. Why didn’t it begin to kick and tumble and lash out with its hands and feet? Perhaps it was dead!

  “No, no,” said the doctor. “Listen, you hear that? It’s got a strong heartbeat.” Sarah was not reassured. She tried to cheer herself with an image of the baby calmly reading a newspaper under a lighted lamp, just biding its time, but it didn’t work. A chill of fear went through her whenever she thought about her child. She kept her fears to herself because she had no one to talk to, but she was constantly aware of the infant in her belly, she was forever asking it to make itself known.

  What would Morgan say? How would they bear the expense? How could she jeopardize her husband’s career so selfishly when he was off to such a good start, when he was already so famous in his own fields How could she?

  Her failure to tell her husband was typical of the lack of candor between them. The biggest things never got said.

  Sarah had met Morgan Bailey at one of his public lectures. She had come up afterward to ask a question, and he had taken her out to dinner. He was attractive, witty, amusing, and he had the aura that goes with fame. Somehow famous people were more interesting than other people. Sarah had been drawn to him without being able to help herself.

  They were married, and for the first year they had been happy together. It didn’t matter that Sarah began to be so busy working for the Revels, because Morgan was away most of the time, tracking Canada geese to their breeding grounds in Hudson Bay, then following them south. But this year things were different. Morgan had become so watchful. Whenever Sarah went out, he wanted to know where. Who would be with her? When would she be back?

  Was this the day she should tell him about the baby? No, no, not this morning. Once again Sarah couldn’t face it.

  She dodged around the kitchen–living room of their apartment on the second floor of the three-decker on Maple Avenue, pulling on her coat and hat, gathering up papers and music and scripts and handbag, pulling on her gloves.

  Morgan was already at his desk, but he looked at her sidelong. Oh, God, she was so beautiful. If only she weren’t so lovely he wouldn’t have to worry. Oh, Christ, he should have married a homely girl, somebody nobody else would look at twice. It was a stab in his side, the way they all stared at her, the way they couldn’t take their eyes off her.

  It had started slow, this kind of pain in his marriage with Sarah. He told himself it was natural to be a little jealous, perfectly natural. Of course, some jerk of a psychiatrist would call it an obsession. He’d explore Morgan’s childhood and uncover the usual traumas of a middle child, he would learn about the radiant intelligence of the older brother who had drowned, and the adorable charm of the younger sister who still lived. But he would never probe deep enough to learn how the drowning had happened, he would never see the agonized drowning face of that good kind brother, so beloved by everyone and afterward so deeply mourned.

  The memory of Morgan’s older brother was so pinched and puckered with scar tissue and so cauterized with a hot iron that Morgan seldom picked off the scab.

  The accident the other day was entirely unrelated, it had nothing to do with it, nothing at all. Morgan admitted to himself that Sarah’s preoccupation with the attractive kid from West Virginia had become an anxiety, and then a threat, and finally a torment. But Morgan would never have planned to run over him! The accident had simply happened. There the kid had been, dodging out of Morgan’s way, and at once a high excitement had risen in Morgan’s head, in his chest, in his arms, in his hands on the steering wheel. It had been so easy, just a twist of the wheel and the kid had gone down!

  But the impact had burst open the cauterized scar—the shock of the collision and the ghastly thump of the body beneath the wheels. At once the face of Morgan’s drowning brother had reared up in the windshield and the tears of that awful day had burst out in a torrent.

  It was all the more strange that he had felt so much better the next morning, so calm and serene, so intensely relieved—so glad.

  Unfortunately, the serenity was already beginning to give way—because Sarah didn’t have any sense! It was all her fault, he had seen it at the rehearsal, it was the way she threw herself at everybody, the way she hugged and kissed them all. Especially—God!—her codirector, that guy Tom Cobb. Sarah and Tom were always together, they were buddies, they were pals, they sat side by side, they were always touching. My God, Sarah! Goddamnit, Sarah!

  Morgan looked back at his book without seeing it, and wrapped his distrust around him like a blanket of thorns. It lacerated him, it tore at him, but he clutched it tighter.

  When Sarah came up behind him and put her arms around him, he stiffened. She didn’t love him, she couldn’t love him. She loved someone else, she loved—

  “Oh, Morgan, darling, what are you going to do today?”

  At once his suspicions were aroused. Was she trying to discover when he would be out? “Why do you want to know?”

  Sarah laughed, and kissed his ear. “I like to think of you, and know what you’re working on when I’m doing something entirely different.”

  “Oh, well, I guess I’ll be in the field part of the time.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yes. No! I mean, I’m not sure.” Craftily Morgan hedged his bets. “I might do it this afternoon.” Don’t give her a window of time safe from interruption.

  Sarah had fallen in love with Morgan Bailey because of his passionate commitment to his field of study, his fascination with migrating wildfowl—Canada geese and snow geese and tundra swans. And she loved him for his habit of mind, which was clever and subtle.

  But Sarah was clever too. She saw his trouble as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. He couldn’t hide it. In this matter which had begun to overwhelm him there was nothing witty, nothing subtle. It was a primitive force, huge and dark, blocking out the light.

  “What about you?” he said, glancing sideways at her.

  “It’s an all-day rehearsal. Tom and I have a lot to do. Oh, and that reminds me.” Sarah fumbled in her pocket-book. “He asked me to stop at Niki’s Market and get him some of those chocolate bars he’s so fond of. Oh, God, I’ve forgotten what they’re called. Tasty sweets, or something? I wrote it down. Where is it? Oh, here it is. Oh, that’s right, Tastychox. Poor Tom, he’s got this terrible sweet tooth.”

  Once again it was Tom Cobb.

  “So long, darling. I’ll be back about four-thirty.” Sarah’s feet thumped down the stairs.

  It was almost a relief to be alone. Morgan stood up and went to the window and craned his neck. There she was, hurrying to Inman Square to catch the Number 69 bus. When she turned the corner, he sighed, and hunched his shoulders to loosen the tension in his back. Then he pulled the curtains to darken the room, turned on the lamp, and looked over a stack of his own homemade videocassettes. He had recorded the mating of common eiders in Nova Scotia, the nesting of mute swans on the Elizabeth Islands, the rearing of families of great blue herons in the Everglades.

  All these things had been worked on by other people, but Morgan’s specialty was his gift for noticing simple things, basic things that no one else seemed to see.

  Choosing carefully, he plugged in one of his tapes on Canada geese. Canadas were one of the most heavily studied migrating birds in the world, and yet no one had written as thoroughly as Morgan Bailey on the aggressive behavior of the male during the nesting season.

  This morning he had a particular reason for looking at this tape. Morgan sat back in the darkened room and watched the pair of geese he had stalked so carefully
last May at that little lake in New Hampshire.

  There was the female, sitting patiently on her eggs, apparently asleep. Nearby stood the male, his head erect on his long dark neck. Now he stalked along the shore, darting glances left and right, stopping to lower his head and probe for parasites in his tail feathers.

  Pretty soon—yes, the zoom lens was picking up the interloper, far away, on the other side of the pond. It was a single male, all by himself, paddling grandly forward. How close would he be allowed to come?

  Here was the moment. Morgan’s male jerked his neck upright and uttered a honk. Then he took to the water with a rush and lunged at the enemy, eager for battle, beak hissing, wings flapping.

  Morgan always laughed at this point, because the other goose backed away as if he were saying, “Excuse me, no offense,” and took to the air, with Morgan’s male in hot pursuit.

  The female had been protected. The male had exercised his rights. It was the way any lover would feel when his possession of the female was endangered. He would see it as a threat, he would fend it off, he would keep his mate to himself.

  Let the psychiatrists invent their theories. Let them pile theory on theory. The protection of mating rights was instinctive. It was the way of the world. It was natural, perfectly natural.

  CHAPTER 8

  O master and missus, are you all within?

  Pray open the door and let us come in.

  O master and missus a-sitting by the fire,

  Pray think on us poor travellers,

  A-travelling in the mire.

  “Somerset Wassail”

  The cold had settled in with a vengeance. There had been a few beguiling days at the end of November, days of fraudulent warmth when people thought, Oh, well, this winter may not be so bad. Now illusions were shattered. Winter was a hard, bad time. They had forgotten how awful it was. Heavy coats were pulled out of closets. Oh, God, the moths! Gloves were exhumed from drawers, the left one missing. Forty dollars? Just for gloves? The children had mislaid their winter hats and scarves and mittens, they had forgotten them at school, they had lost them in the rough and tumble of last March. Thermostats were turned up, furnaces roared into life, radiators rattled and steamed, hot air billowed through registers. Oil trucks rumbled up and down the streets of Cambridge.

  In Memorial Hall the huge hollow spaces to be heated were as vast as in any cathedral. The dilapidated auditorium where Mary and Homer Kelly taught their classes was often cold. It tended to be forgotten when the building manager twiddled his thermostats in the morning.

  The Saturday class was early. At home in Concord they had to get up at six in order to have breakfast and get one of their cold cars going by seven. Then it was a matter of rushing the car up the steep hill beside the Sudbury River, failing to make it the first time, rushing it up again, hurtling through the woods, tearing down Route 2 to the Alewife parking garage, and boarding the train to Harvard Square.

  One of the subway exits in the Square was right beside the Johnson gate, the most pompous of all the entrances to Harvard Yard. This morning the weather in the Yard was even colder than that of the Square. The buildings looked cold too, huge rectangular chunks of brick and stone. People were going to and fro, professors and students bundled against the chilly air, their breath steaming. Burly teenage kids were taking a shortcut to Rindge High. Some sentimental freshman had put a lighted Christmas tree in a second-floor window of Hollis Hall.

  Hurrying forward in the direction of Memorial Hall with her arm tucked into Homer’s, Mary boldly brought up again her doubts about the accident that had killed Henry Shady. “Listen, Homer, don’t you think we should say something to somebody in the Cambridge Police Department about what I heard?”

  “What you heard? Oh, you mean the way the brakes squealed at the wrong time?”

  “And the way the car was way off the street. And, you know, the goose.”

  “The goose!” Homer looked at his wife and burst out laughing. “You mean you want to go to an experienced officer of the law who has studied thousands of auto-vehicle accidents in the city of Cambridge and tell him a goose flew over this one? Mary, dear—”

  “It’s not silly. I heard it. It wasn’t just some goose flying from Fresh Pond to the Charles, nothing like that. It was really weird. You know, different.”

  Homer snickered. “Well, okay, tell him that too. There was this weird goose, this really huge goose, and it flapped up in Henry Shady’s face and knocked him down, so the car rolled right over him. And then the goose flew up over Mem Hall and came down on the clock tower and laid an egg.”

  Mary jerked her arm out of Homer’s.

  “Well, damnit, I’m sorry. Can’t you take a joke? What’s happened to you, anyway? You’re so prickly lately.”

  It didn’t help. Mary stalked along in stony silence. Not until they had passed through the iron gate onto the overpass above Cambridge Street did she forget her anger. “Homer, look. Something’s going on.”

  There was a village of tents on the overpass. Some were new dome tents in giddy colors, snapped up on plastic stiffening rods, some were old-fashioned tents spiked into the grass with a sledgehammer, one was a huge army tent like a survivor of the First World War. In the middle stood a couple of shacks made of ill-assorted pieces of lumber like flimsy structures knocked together by children in the branches of trees. People were milling around, ducking in and out of the tents. Someone had a noisy ghetto blaster, someone else was trying to squeeze a rolled-up mattress into a pup tent. Beyond Memorial Hall a siren began whining as a fire truck pulled out of the fire station. Was it coming this way? No, the siren was fading. The truck was heading for East Cambridge.

  Homer stopped and gawked at the biggest tent. It had a painted sign—

  HARVARD TOWERS

  COMMAND HEADQUARTERS

  “My God,” said Homer, “what’s this all about?”

  “I’ll bet I know,” said Mary. “Yesterday in Harvard Square—”

  But there he was in person, Palmer Nifto, bustling out of the command tent with a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  Homer recognized him at once. “Well, Palmer Nifto, hello there. We meet again. Homer Kelly here. Remember a couple of years ago in Concord, when I sprang you and your friends out of jail?”

  Palmer grinned at Homer, his breath steaming in the frosty air, and handed him a couple of handbills. “Listen, friend, how’d you like to pin these up someplace? You know, any old place.” Homer stared at the handbills, which said,

  HARVARD TOWERS

  TENT CITY PROTEST

  FOR THE HOMELESS CITIZENS OF CAMBRIDGE!

  PRESSURE CITY’S BIGGEST LANDLORD,

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY!

  HARVARD ENDOWMENT:

  SIX BILLION DOLLARS!

  WE DEMAND

  HARVARD REAL ESTATE!

  A thickset guy in a Bruins cap approached Palmer Nifto with the end of an extension cord in his hand, yanking it out of a snarled heap of yellow cable. “Where the hell we going to plug in this one?”

  Palmer took the plug and looked at Homer and Mary. “Hey, how about you guys plugging this in someplace in Mem Hall? Like we’ve got all kinds of requirements for electric power. I’ve got press releases to get out, gotta get my computer going.”

  Mary was dumbfounded. “Good grief, Palmer, you haven’t got a computer in that tent?”

  Palmer handed the end of the extension cord to Homer. “Just plug it in anywhere. We’ve got a couple other outlets, and we’re negotiating with the Science Center.”

  “God, I don’t know, Palmer,” said Homer, staring doubtfully at the rubber plug in his hand.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” said Palmer indignantly. “The students are way ahead of you. They’re supplying a power source. I must say it’s a sad day when the older generation is too timid for the courageous actions of the young.” Nifto pointed to a plump young man approaching from Phillips Brooks House, carrying a tray of doughnuts. “Welcome, Scottie,” he shoute
d. “What have you got there?”

  The plump young man was at once surrounded by eager takers. Mary recognized some of them. She had seen the hugely pregnant young teenager in Porter Square. The old man who never stopped talking usually sat on the sidewalk in front of the Harvard Coop. And here was the other old man, the one who never spoke, who huddled beside the subway entrance at Church Street and turned up sometimes on the steps to their own classroom. Some of the others were familiar too, people who sold newspapers on the street, and the guy on Rollerblades who swooped like a dancer in and out among the cars on Massachusetts Avenue. They were homeless, all these people. Until now they must have been spending the night in local shelters.

  “But, Palmer,” said Mary, “it’s wintertime. You people aren’t sleeping here, are you? Not overnight?”

  “The Peasants’ Revolt,” proclaimed a loud voice at Mary’s elbow. It was Dr. Box in her purple hat, surveying the scene, casting it into historical perspective. “Wat Tyler defying the king. A chancy business,” she said, scowling at Palmer Nifto. “Do you know what happened to Wat Tyler?”

  Palmer Nifto reached out to grab the last two doughnuts from Scottie’s tray, but Mary adroitly snatched one of them, while Dr. Box cried, “Murder! That’s what happened to Wat Tyler!”

  “Won’t you take it?” said Mary, holding out the doughnut to the old man in the blanket.

  For a moment she thought the old black man was asleep, but then his hand crept out and took the morsel from her fingers, and snaked back out of sight.

  “Well, okay, Palmer,” said Homer, “I’ll see what I can do.” With Mary’s help he dragged a length of sixteen connected extension cords across the brick and asphalt and grass of the overpass into the lecture hall, and found an outlet at the back. Guiltily, taking leave of his senses, he plugged it into the wall.