Shortest Day (10 page)

As he stood gaping, a truck pulled up, its flatbed filled with tall blue Portapotties. There were cheers and whistles. The truck driver grinned and yelled, “Where do you want 'em?”

“Hold it, hold it,” shouted Sumner, waving his arms. “Is there somebody here named Tyler?”

Nobody was listening. They were all gathering around the Portapotty truck, which was backing up carefully beside the hedge, while a tall guy in dark glasses walked backward beside it, beckoning with both hands. He was obviously in charge.

Sumner adopted his most authoritative manner. “Is your name Tyler? Listen here—” And then he saw his mistake. “No, no, you're not Tyler. I've seen you before. You're Palmer Nifto, right? Well, I'm afraid I must ask you and your friends to leave.”

Palmer smiled, and stepped back to watch the descent of the Portapotties onto the frozen grass. Turning his inscrutable dark shades on Sumner, he said mildly, “May I ask what you think you're doing? Harvard Police, rights? Well, listen, friend, it's my understanding this overpass is the property of the city of Cambridge. Therefore, you have no right to evict us. I should warn you we are represented by legal counsel.” Palmer raised his voice. “Hey, Frank, you got your camera?”

Frank was a heavyset young guy with a bald head and yellow whiskers. He came running, snapping pictures of Officer Plover and Palmer Nifto as he ran.

Sumner stared at the camera openmouthed. Then he collected himself. “Your electric power—may I ask where it comes from? It doesn't matter who owns this property if you're stealing power from Harvard University.”

Palmer folded his arms. “Get Gretchen over here, will you?” he said to Frank.

“Hey, Gretchen,” bawled Frank.

Gretchen appeared at once, struggling out of a small tent. She was a very young girl in the last stages of pregnancy.

Sumner was trapped. He didn't back away in time. It took Frank only a minute to push Gretchen between him and Palmer Nifto and record for posterity the confrontation of police power with a homeless young mother-to-be.

“Good,” said Nifto. “Now, can you get it to the
Cambridge Chronicle
right away?”

Afterward, when Sumner made his report about the incident to the sergeant at headquarters on Garden Street, he was almost speechless. “Like he raised the question, did the overpass belong to Harvard or the city of Cambridge? I didn't know who the hell it belonged to.”

“We're too late, that's the trouble,” said the patrol supervisor gloomily. “We should have got in there as soon as they put up the first tent.”

“But suppose he's right? Suppose the overpass does belong to the city? I mean, the tunnel underneath where the traffic goes through, that must be Cambridge, right?”

“Oh, God,” said the supervisor. “I'll find out. I'll call the office of Harvard's General Counsel.” He shook his head sadly at Sumner. “We should have evicted them first thing, not given them a chance to take hold.”

“I know.” Guiltily Sumner remembered the breezy way he had swept his cruiser around the curve of Oxford Street. He should have parked the car, he should have walked around the building to the overpass, he should have found this little canker at the very beginning, before it metastasized into a tumor on the body of the university, before it became a Problem with a capital P. He should have said,
Out! Get out of here right now, you hear me? Get this tent out of here before I call the Chief of Harvard Police
.

But he hadn't, and it was too late now.

“Who else should we notify?” said Sumner's supervisor, with his hand on the phone. “The Harvard Planning Office? Wait, I know. I'll call Community Affairs. They're the ones should be handling a thing like this. What's that guy's name, the Vice-President in charge of Government and Community Affairs? Hernshaw, something like Hernshaw?”

“Henshaw, I think,” said Sumner. “His name is Ernest Henshaw.”

CHAPTER 11

Here comes I that never come yit
,

With my big head and my little wit
.

Traditional British Mummers' Play

S
ometimes one can think of marriage as a seesaw. Ideally, the husband and wife should be evenly balanced at the two ends.

But there are marriages in which it is the husband who possesses all the intellectual and psychological weight, so that his end of the plank is solidly, firmly on the ground, while his noodle-headed wife sits mooning aloft.

And there are others in which the situation is reversed. It was so with the marriage of Harvard's Vice-President in charge of Government and Community Affairs. Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Henshaw were no longer a well-matched pair. It was Helen Henshaw's common sense and commanding ways that now ran the household.

Not that Ernest was a failure—nothing of the sort. In his long attachment to Harvard University he had been highly successful in moving up from one administration post to another, until now he was very high indeed, with an office in Massachusetts Hall, in the same building as the office of the President. At the moment the President was away on sabbatical, but Helen Henshaw was proud that his empty rooms were close to the ones occupied by her husband.

She too was successful. Helen was an interior decorator with a budding practice among her friends and neighbors. Her own house on Berkeley Street was a perfect advertisement. It stood in a little enclave behind the Episcopal Divinity School. All her friends wanted living rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms just like Helen's. Her style was bouffant and bedecked with pillows, it was choked with flowery sofas, flouncy draperies, hanging plants, enormous lamps, canopied beds, patchwork quilts, antique dolls, duck decoys, old clocks, copper pots, ornamental chess sets, statuettes, and china dogs.

On the day the Portapotty truck arrived at Harvard Towers, a van pulled into the Henshaw driveway to deliver two pieces of antique furniture. When Ernest saw them in the dining room, he complained to his wife, “There isn't room in here for those cupboards. They're blocking the door to the hall.”

“They're not cupboards, they're armoires.”

“They're what?”

“Armoires, it's French, and the other door provides a perfectly adequate flow of traffic.”

Ernest said nothing more. Helen had won. She always got her way about the decoration of the house, because after all it was her business. Helen was happy in her new profession, but in her domestic life she was becoming more and more uneasy. It was beginning to be transparently clear that Ernest was no longer the man she had married.

One day she came upon him in her bedroom groping in a bureau drawer.

“Ernest, what on earth are you doing?”

“Counting,” mumbled Henshaw.

“Counting?” His wife stared at his crouched back. “You're counting my underwear?”

“Everything. I'm counting everything in this house. I want to find out how many things we own.”

“Oh, I see. Do you think I have too much underwear, Ernest?”

“No, no, it isn't that.” Absently Henshaw wrote down the number of his wife's slips and panties and girdles and brassieres and nightgowns. He was thinking of his great-great-great-grandfather, who had lived in rural Maine in the latter part of the eighteenth century. A list of his possessions had come down in the family:

Count them, that was twenty-five things his great-great-great-grandfather had owned, plus a horse, three cows, a calf, and two or three hogs. In his own house two centuries later, in an inventory of the kitchen alone he had listed 1,252 separate items.

He poked in a cupboard. “What's this basket here?”

“It happens to be my sewing basket.”

Under his wife's eye, Henshaw inspected the basket. There were nineteen spools of thread, three thimbles, a paper of snaps, another of hooks and eyes and one of needles, a packet of bias tape, and a pincushion with a multitude of pins.

“Ernest, what on earth are you doing with my pincushion?”

“Counting the pins.”

“
Ernest!
”

CHAPTER 12

And once more came the lady sweet

To stir Sir Gawain's dreams.…

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

M
organ Bailey sat up in bed. It was too early to get up, but his perpetual wariness had awakened him, as though it were necessary to keep watch against an invader in the bedroom, someone who might creep slyly under the covers and make love to Sarah.