The Transcendental Murder (2 page)

Outside it was March. Mary stood on the steps of the library looking up. A noisy flock of grackles had filled the elm trees like a convention of Shriners using up all the available hotels. The sky was blowing away like a silk scarf caught in the branches. High up in the blue air there was another flock of grackles, hovering over the shining ragged Y of the junction of the swollen rivers and over Walden Pond and over the hills named by the Indians—Punkatasset, Nashawtuc, Annursnac—and over the glistening dotted swamps and over the brown haze of elms and maples and buttonwoods that obscured the veering arrowheads of Concord's streets. The flock opened out, then collapsed and thickened and began to descend, wheeling over the bronze Minuteman at the North Bridge, flapping down on the rooftops of the Milldam stores that were slung sway-backed between their chimneys, screeching at each other from the gigantic white Woolworth false-front with its pseudo-Colonial urns, fluttering to the sidewalk momentarily between the Greek columns of the old bank building, then tossed up again like a blanket shaken out by a housewife to circle around the white belltower of the First Parish Church, banking sharply in alarm at the cracking of the tall-masted flag on the traffic island, and coming to rest at last for a screaming committee meeting on the Old Hill Burying Ground at the end of the street. Below the graveyard lay the Milldam with its stores, and Monument Square with its Civil War Memorial obelisk and its little temples devoted to Christian Science, the Knights of Columbus, the Masons and the Middlesex Fire Insurance Company. Running away out of sight were the tree-lined streets with their old wooden houses—to the southeast the simple ones with the small windows, and Emerson's place and the Alcotts' Orchard House and Hawthorne's Wayside and the Antiquarian Museum, and to the west beyond the Milldam on Main Street the bigger, finer houses with their broad flat pilasters and imposing doorways and their back yards sloping down to the river.

Mary walked down the library steps and started home, thinking about the movies. In the movies, when there was something energetic going on, the background music was “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Or if there was something sad, they played sad music, exalting the action into poetry, so that you turned with tear-filled eyes to your neighbor, whispering, beautiful, isn't it. That was what living in Concord was like—the movies. Only instead of music you had historical association, or something pungent that Waldo or Henry had said. And if you were cursed with a photographic memory you couldn't even walk down the street without the drums and fifes starting up, or the transcendental jukebox. Here was the Milldam. In Thoreau's day the mill had already been long gone, replaced by a row of stores. Henry had called it Concord's Rialto. There by the bank had been one of the blockhouses during King Philip's War. Beside the bus stop was the place where old Simon Willard and Peter Bulkeley had bought the original six miles square from Squaw Sachem and the Indians of Musketaquid in an atmosphere of peace and concord in 1636. You couldn't cross the square without remembering that Emerson never crossed it without feeling a wild poetic delight, you couldn't look at the Catholic church without thinking of its start in life as a home for the Universalists, and of the handsome invitation they had issued to everybody in favor of the universal salvation of all mankind to meet at Bigelow's tavern to choose officers. You couldn't even glance down Monument Street without thinking of the red backs of the British Regulars filing down it on their way to the North Bridge and the beginning of all that important trouble in 1775. That April day had been the first occasion when history had shone her spotlight on Concord, when a scattering of balls from a few fowling pieces and Brown Bess muskets had left a hole in the fabric of things-as-they-were that wasn't to be sewn up again. Then in the forties and fifties history had aimed her burning glass at Concord again, and in simple houses noble as Doric temples there had flamed up a kind of rural American Athens, with Margaret Fuller for a visiting oracle, Emerson and Thoreau and Alcott for philosophers and Nathaniel Hawthorne for a weird kind of Sophocles. And so important to the general blaze of utterance had been each particular pond or wood lot or boulder field that Emerson had make a joke, once, about the poor blockheads who were not born in Concord, but had to do the best they could, considering they had never seen Bateman's Pond or Nine Acre Corner or Becky Stow's swamp.

The next generation had sugared down into a Louisa May Alcott, no Transcendentalist, and after that Concord had been content to live in the shadow. But it was still a lively and ravishing suburban town. Mary would never have said as much out loud, but she felt herself walking on holy ground.

Muddy ground. Wherever the grass was thin, spring was trying to exhale itself through the frozen earth, and there were glutinous footprints everywhere from yesterday's wallowing galoshes. Mary picked her way carefully. In the shadow of the curb, under the metallic platelike masses of ice, dirty with sand and gravel, below the hardened drifts yellowed by dogs, there ran a stream of clear water. If you could live through March, the old trick would happen again, and March would be transmogrified into April and May.

“Mary!” It was Charley Goss, pulling up to give her a ride. Mary got into his car and accepted a jocular kiss. It was only half-jocular, she knew, because Charley was sweet on her. So was his older brother Philip. A year ago they had taken turns proposing to her. No, she had said—no. But it hadn't seemed to stick, and they were both still working on it. Mary had begun to feel like a sort of giant prize panda in a ring-the-bottle game. Charley and Philip took her out alternately. She was an official friend of the family. Part of the official position seemed to be that it was all right to maul her a bit, and Mary, apologetic for being hard-to-get, went along in a friendly spirit, but wished they wouldn't. Sometimes she wondered how long she could hold out.

“How are Emily and Margaret and Henry today? Still frustrated?” said Charley, getting a rise. Mary always took the bait.

“Don't forget, they lived before Freud and so they didn't know they were, if they were.”

“Well, I sometimes wonder if they didn't have their fun after all. Did it ever strike you as kind of funny that Henry Thoreau kept the home fires burning for Lidian Emerson while Waldo was away? And what about old Waldo and little Margie Fuller?”

“I don't suppose you'll believe it, but there was a time when men and women could be friends with each other.”

“Listen, girly, men and women have only one kind of relation to each other, and that's all they've ever had or ever will have. Don't kid yourself.”

“Any luck in finding a job yet?” (Change the subject.)

“Why, certainly, certainly. Lots of them. Did you hear about my spin with the Acme Cement Company? I was supposed to straighten out their accounts. Perfectly simple, nothing to it, I was going great. But then they got a big contract with the highway department and all of a sudden they didn't want their accounts straightened out any more. Well, that was all right with me because I walked right into a jim-dandy job at Madame LaZarga's Superfluous Hair Removal Salon. And I was doing fine there, too, getting in on the ground floor with all kinds of opportunities for advancement and a glorious future, and Madame LaZarga had turned out to be a really great woman, truly noble. But then my father got wind of it and that was the end of that. He just couldn't see the dignity in the removal of superfluous hair. The whole world panting for it, too. Think of it—millions of hairy people with whiskers sprouting out all over, and idealistic Madame LaZarga devoting her life to them. I don't understand why, but my father couldn't see it at all.”

“Well, I'll bet the right thing will turn up yet.” Mary looked at Charley and wondered for the thousandth time why her heart refused to leap over the stile for him, or for his brother Philip either. They were attractive, surely, with their red heads? And tall enough to look her in the eye? What was wrong? Charley's forehead, perhaps, was against him—that empty expanse of bland pinkish skin, crowning his cherubic face. And of course his feet were clay—Charley was the black sheep, the ne'er-do-well. But there was nothing wrong with Philip Goss at all. His brow was high and thoughtful like some furrowed promontory, and his feet were anything but clay. Some noble material, rather, and set on rising ground.

Of course the difference between them was their father's fault, the old blowhard. Ernest Goss showed an outrageous favoritism for his successful son. No wonder Philip was a promising lawyer, going places, doing well at everything he tried, while Charley just went from failure to failure. Poor Charley. Philip's success was like a kind of standard and plumb line for him, demonstrating what he might have been, a sort of perpetual I.O.U.

Mary looked out the car window. They were crossing the Red Bridge over the Concord River. The river had risen with the spring thaw and it was spread out for hundreds of yards in its broad bed. There had been a girl Henry Thoreau had loved, and he had taken her out rowing on the river. She had turned him down soon after she had turned down his brother John. That was what Mary herself had done—she had refused two brothers, too. Mary imagined herself sitting in Henry's boat, gliding under the shadow of the bridge, with Henry's great burning eyes on her. Suppose Henry had asked
her?
Henry Thoreau—

Charley pulled up in front of Mary's house. It was her brother-in-law's house, really, and her sister Gwen's. There were signs all over it. On the post of the mailbox on a shirtboard Mary's niece Annie was advertising
KITTENS FREE FREE
. Across Barrett's Mill Road on the produce-stand was a big sign that said
SWEET CIDER, HONK YOUR HORN
. And attached to the house itself was an engraved bronze plaque—

HOUSE AND FARM OF COLONEL JAMES BARRETT COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE MIDDLESEX MILITIA

ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 19TH, 1775, THE BRITISH MARCH FROM BOSTON WHICH RESULTED IN THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR ENDED HERE WITH A SEARCH FOR MILITARY STORES. GUN CARRIAGES FOUND BY THE LIGHT INFANTRY WERE BURNED IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE. OTHER WEAPONS AND SUPPLIES WERE SUCCESSFULLY CONCEALED IN THE ATTIC OF THE HOUSE, IN FURROWS PLOWED NEAR THE FARMYARD AND IN SPRUCE HOLLOW BEHIND THE HOUSE
.

“Come on in,” said Mary.

There were bicycles tangled beside the door. It was Gwen's Girl Scout day. Three of the Girl Scouts were skipping rope on the dry ground beside the house. Two of them turned the two ends of the rope, and Annie stood leaning in, her thin body throbbing with the rhythm, getting ready to jump. Ready—ready—almost—almost—
now.
She jumped. She was in, jumping and jumping, chanting a jumping rhyme, breathlessly sucking in every other syllable—

Teddy bear, teddy bear, go upstairs,

Teddy bear, teddy bear, say your prayers,

Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn off the light,

Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

Mary stopped to watch, fascinated. That was lovely—the way Annie had looked when she was leaning in, getting ready. Then when she jumped, she had to keep jumping and jumping. Jump, Annie, jump.

Down by the river where the green grass grows,

There sat Annie, as pretty as a rose

Along came Frank (giggles) and kissed her on the cheek.

How many kisses did she get that week?

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven
…

Chapter 3

	Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood …
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Tom Hand had hornswoggled his wife Gwen and her Girl Scouts into helping him. They were walking around the round oak table in the dining room under the big picture of the Angelus, assembling the pages of his
Preliminary Report of the Committee on Public Ceremonies and Celebrations Relative to the 19th of April Ceremony.
Tom was general chairman of the April 19th parade. “As if raising apples, asparagus, corn, cabbages and kids wasn't enough for me to do,” he said. He was in high spirits. He snatched up a toppling pile of stapled reports, juggled it into a cube and dumped it into a cardboard box. “Is that you, Charley? Say, look here, we tried to get hold of you when we were typing this thing up. Are you going to ride again this year, or not? You sure as hell better, because it says in here you are.”

“What, me ride for Dr. Sam Prescott? You bet I am. Dolly's raring to go. I'm already putting vitamins in her hay.”

Tom's mother whammed the stapler on a pile of pages. “Now, Charley, you look out. If Sam Prescott hadn't got away when Paul Revere was captured, and if he hadn't brought the news to Concord, where would we all be right now, I ask you? Don't you go making a fool of him on that big horse of yours.”