Shortest Day (12 page)

CHAPTER 14

Oh, good man and good wife, are you within?

Pray lift the latch and let us come in
.

We see you a-sitting at the boot o' the fire
,

Not a-thinkin' of us in the mud and the mire
,

So it's joy be to you and a jolly wassail!

Kentucky wassail

T
he residents of Harvard Towers were a mixed lot. Palmer Nifto had gathered them up from all over, beginning with old friends he had met in shelters here and there.

For reasons of public relations, his favorite was Gretchen Milligan. Gretchen was a slightly retarded nineteen-year-old girl with a plump childish face. She had given birth already to two children, and turned them over at once for adoption. She was about to have another. Gretchen knew that pregnancy was a useful condition for a homeless woman. When you got beyond the second trimester there were benefits, and you could stay at Bright Day House in Somerville, a home for unmarried pregnant teenagers. It was warm and comfortable at Bright Day, and the food was good.

When her time came, she would certainly get herself right over there in a taxi. But for now she would stay at Harvard Towers to support the cause. Gretchen was really impressed by Palmer Nifto's leadership. Harvard was going to give them apartments, that was what Palmer said. He said he had Harvard wrapped around his little finger.

And she liked being right here in the middle of Harvard College. Gretchen had a taste for dignity and grandeur, for the finer things, for fancy doorways with white columns and iron gates with vases on top. She loved to trail along the streets in the elegant part of Cambridge and look at the beautiful houses—oh, not just on Brattle Street! Gretchen had made wonderful discoveries on some of the side streets. Nobody else knew about them, the little secret corners where the luckiest people lived.

Somehow Harvard College and the big houses on Gretchen's secret streets had something in common, a distinction, a kind of majesty. It was something she yearned for.

Of course, the people at Bright Day were after her. They found her right away at Harvard Towers. “Gretchen,” her counselor said, “you're almost due. It's not good for your baby for you to be out in the cold like this. What if you couldn't get to us in time? What if you delivered your baby on the street? And, Gretchen, you're missing your group discussions, you're not doing your chores.”

But Gretchen was loyal to Palmer Nifto. “We need you, Gretchen,” Palmer kept saying. “You're the most important person at Harvard Towers.”

She knew her big belly helped the cause. Already she had been photographed by the
Cambridge Chronicle
and the
Cambridge Tab
and the
Harvard Crimson
and even by the
Harvard Gazette
. She had stuck her stomach out proudly, and now she was going to be on TV, because yesterday a crew from Channel 4 had come to Harvard Towers and Palmer had pushed her right out in front.

Bob Chumley was an old regular from the chancy world of Cambridge homelessness. He was smart and capable and could lend his hand to anything, but an addiction to cocaine kept him from holding down a job. Bob was unacceptable in the shelters of Cambridge, because he had a couple of dogs, big handsome golden retrievers, and you couldn't have dogs in a shelter.

Guthrie Jones was a homeless man whose beat was Harvard Square. There was a fey charm about Guthrie, but you had to be on the lookout or he would talk your ear off, wanting to tell you something, something that could never be quite articulated, something terribly important if only he could utter it, some anguished fury against the world.

Linda Bunting should never have been homeless at all, because she was the mother of two small children. Somehow she had dropped through the cracks of the welfare system. She had a nice tent full of stuffed toys and sleeping bags, and a space heater blasting out its orange comfort twenty-four hours a day. And the children were perfectly warm. Their tiny noses barely showed between knitted hats and woolly scarves.

Some of the other citizens of Harvard Towers were less beguiling. Oh, Vergil Taylor was all right. He made good copy, because he almost never took off his Rollerblades. Vergil skimmed around the edges of the tent city and rattled over the uneven surfaces of the brick walks and whizzed along the asphalt paths of Harvard Yard, swooping in graceful arcs, leaning left, leaning right, in a perpetual dance. He made a good courier whenever Palmer had an urgent message to deliver.

The only other Afro-American at Harvard Towers was old Albert Maggody. No one knew his history. No one had ever heard him speak. Maggody took no part in tent-city activities and he made no response to questions. He just sat there, wrapped in layers of blankets, his face nearly hidden. Only his hand appeared when someone passed a tray of sandwiches or proffered a cup of coffee. He never said,
Bless you
, like some of them. Maggody was life at its lowest terms.

To Mary Kelly, who was beginning to take an interest in the occupants of Harvard Towers, his was the most pitiful case.

One of the homeless women was a problem for Palmer Nifto. Of course he welcomed one and all, because he was anxious to increase the population of Harvard Towers, but Emily Pollock gave him a pain. Emily had been a flower child in the seventies, but now she was a fat bossy woman in giant earrings and full skirts and big woolly caftans. She was always offering screwy advice, and making decisions without consulting Palmer first, then screeching them to the world on the open mike. “We're going to organize a council,” bawled Emily, “and run this place democratically from now on.”

Palmer had no intention of handing over his authority to a democratic council. And when a delegation from United Harvard Ministries came to him, representing the pastors of a number of local churches, he was distinctly cool.

“Our coffeehouse is open to all comers,” said the minister of First Parish Unitarian, smiling at him graciously.

“Our public-relations expertise is at your service,” suggested the clergyman from First Church Congregational, his face bright with sympathy.

“Our copy machine is yours to command,” said the rector from Christ Church. “And our bathrooms are always open.” He made a joke. “We call it our Latrine Ministry.”

“You must know about our free dinners,” said the priest from Saint Paul's. “Some of our churches serve dinner to all comers one night a week. Monday at Massachusetts Avenue Baptist in Inman Square, Tuesday at First Parish Unitarian in Harvard Square, Wednesday—”

Palmer would have none of it. “Thanks,” he said, “but no thanks.”

The truth was, he didn't want to share his ragtag glory with any of these clever and powerful people. Oh, the churchwomen were all right, the ones who brought food—big containers of soup and coffee and spaghetti, laundry baskets of sandwiches, big bags of muffins and cookies. And the girl who collected leftovers from local restaurants was okay too—the day-old croissants from Au Bon Pain, the sausages and cheeses from the Wursthaus, and the vichyssoise from the Stockpot. Actually, there was a run on vichyssoise, and people were complaining. “Oh, no, not vichyssoise again.”

Palmer himself was a clever escapee from alimony and child support. He had been living by his wits on the street for years. He was contemptuous of all those people who thought there was only one way to live, who wanted to pin a person down with a mortgage and payments on a car and three levels of taxes and four kinds of insurance and lifelong responsibility for a wife and a couple of bratty kids.

Palmer had long since sloughed off wife and kids. It had been easy, like dumping kittens from a car window.

CHAPTER 15

I danced with the scribe and the pharisee
,

But they would not dance

And they would not follow me
.

“The Lord of the Dance”

T
he most annoying thing about the tent city at Harvard's very door was not its seventy-five homeless residents, it was the infection spreading in the student body and among the so-called liberal members of the faculty. Students and professors were flocking to the overpass, bringing along their expensive Arctic camping equipment, demonstrating their sympathy, sleeping out all night under the cold stars.

“It's politically correct, that's why,” said Ellery Beaver, Associate Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs, in his office in Massachusetts Hall. “They'll go along with anything dumb, as long as it's in behalf of the retarded, the alcoholic, the criminal, the drug-addicted, the promiscuous.”

Ernest Henshaw looked at him nervously. He had been bending over a file drawer, counting the files. “It's too much,” he said vaguely. “It's just too much.”

“You said a mouthful. It certainly is a bit much. So the question is, do we talk to the ringleader, this guy Nifto, or do we just ignore the whole thing and not give it the cachet of our official notice?”

Henshaw wasn't listening. “All these files,” he said, making a sweeping gesture at the four large cabinets in the corner of his office, “it's too much.” He walked to the window and stared across the Yard at the bare branches of the trees around University Hall. It occurred to him how much better they looked now than in the summertime, when they were clothed in tens of thousands of leaves. How many leaves were there really? He could imagine himself next summer, standing on a ladder to count them, one leaf at a time.