Shortest Day (3 page)

I
t was a crisis. Henry Shady's death was a terrible shame, but there was no time to mourn. The hole in the program for this year's Revels had to be filled.

Sarah Bailey and Tom Cobb sat on one of the benches at the front of the mezzanine in Sanders Theatre, staring at the stage. Around Sanders all the immense volumes and compartmented spaces in Memorial Hall were empty. Sarah and Tom were alone in the building.

The bare stage was unlit. The marble figures of James Otis and Josiah Quincy gleamed pale at either side, but there was no life in their changeless gestures. Otis clutched a marble document labeled
STAMP ACT,
Quincy handed a diploma to no one in particular. The gold-and-scarlet Harvard shields praising
VERITAS
at the back of the stage glowed only dimly, and the carved wooden faces of the bears and foxes above the stage were noncommittal. It hardly seemed possible that a horde of dancers and singers would soon be capering and singing all over the dusty wooden stage, while a host of fiddlers fiddled and a crowd of pipers piped and seven trumpeters tooted their glittering horns, to fill the hall with the promised profusion of Christmas merriment.

Of course, it wasn't just the festival of Christmas they would be celebrating, it was also the winter solstice. Some of the Revels themes had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. They were pagan stories, they were magic, they were ancient rites challenging the cold of winter in its darkest time, awakening the growth and greenness of the spring. And some were wassails praising the joys of good brown ale, and some were haunting entreaties to the wild deer in the forest, appeals by the hunters to the hunted to allow themselves to be killed. And always there was the stamping and leaping of the Morris dancers, which had no connection with the Christian nativity at all.

But this year it wasn't enough. Tom Cobb was alarmed. What if they had to cancel the whole thing? If the program fell apart, there would be no Revels this year, no celebration of Christmas or the solstice or brown ale or the hunting of the deer, no Morris dancing. The death of Henry Shady had upset the entire schedule of dances, carols, choruses, children's songs and games, and the whole cluster of episodes centering around the story of Saint George.

Tom looked sideways at Sarah, his codirector. After Shady's death, how was she holding up? Sarah had been a sort of foster mother to Shady; in fact, you couldn't help wondering if she had been something even warmer and closer. And Henry had worshipped her, anybody could have seen that.

She seemed all right. But, poor Sarah, she must be walking an emotional tightrope. On the one hand she needed to grieve for Shady, but at the same time she had to comfort her fool of a husband, who had run over the poor kid from West Virginia. Her eyes were red, as though she had wept her share of tears, but otherwise she seemed like herself. Thank God, because there was nobody else who could fill her shoes.

Tom assessed the matter shrewdly. It was true, no one else in the entire Revels company could manage the annual production of the Christmas Revels with anything like Sarah's high-spirited competence and good judgment, certainly not Tom Cobb, her codirector. Of course, there was always Walter Shattuck, the Old Master, but Walt was no longer interested in running things. He was called the Old Master because he had founded the Revels in the first place, but he wasn't really old at all, and he had long since stopped acting as general manager. Now his only contribution to the annual celebration was his captivating voice—but that was a great contribution indeed. No one, not even the charismatic young folk singer from West Virginia, could sing like Walt. Now that Henry Shady was dead, they would surely have to fall back on Walt's spellbinding baritone to fatten their diminished program.

They had to decide. They had to choose something, and choose it right now—a whole chunk of guaranteed surefire Revels sorcery.

“We could always do ‘The Cherry Tree Carol' again,” said Sarah.

“Oh, God, Sarah, we've done it so often before.” Tom broke a chocolate bar in two and offered her a piece.

Sarah took it hungrily. “But everybody loves ‘The Cherry Tree Carol.' We've got the costumes. We've got that girl who took the part of Mary last year, and the guy who does the tree with the cherries growing out of his fingers, and we've got Walt to sing the song. And what about you? The way you took the part of Joseph was so perfect.”

“You mean the way I stamped my feet in jealous rage?”

Sarah laughed. “Well, yes, I guess so. Mmmm, this is delicious. What do you call these things?”

“Tastychox. My favorite. Want some more? Well, listen, it's all right with me if we do ‘The Cherry Tree' again. I'd forgotten about the jealous rage. That's why people like it so much. Everybody's jealous now and then, rights?”

Sarah got up and stared at one of the east windows above the rows of mezzanine seats. It was glimmering faintly in the vanishing twilight, flashing now and then with the headlights of cars moving slowly along Cambridge Street. That way lay Inman Square and her apartment on Maple Avenue, where Morgan was waiting for her, getting supper, still suffering from what had happened yesterday. “You're right. Everybody's jealous now and then.”

CHAPTER 4

Stir up the fire and make a light

And see our noble act tonight
.

Traditional British Mummers' Play

T
he days were shriveling toward the shortest of the year, as the sun groped its way around the wintry end of its trajectory. But in Harvard Yard at four-thirty in the afternoon of the Friday after the accident that killed the folk singer from West Virginia, the sky was still bright. A crescent moon like a delicate ship rode low above the skyline, jibing in the cold squall that shook the tops of the trees.

But the Yard itself was deep in shadow. Here the air was amber, clotted with the insect bodies of dead professors—Mathers and Wares, a Lowell, a Channing, a Longfellow—all mashed wings and tangled jointed legs like flies. Through the leafless branches of the trees ten thousand particles of paper sifted down, worn off the edges of pages riffled by scholars' fingers in libraries and labs and offices scattered throughout the university. The dust swirled now in descending spirals in the light wind and drifted downward, falling in invisible granules on the cold cheeks of men and women passing to and fro.

Just north of the Yard, on the overpass above Cambridge Street, there was more glare and light. The setting sun glittered on the glass rooftops of the Science Center. Diagonally across the street the billion bricks of Memorial Hall massed themselves under a striped roof giddy with rosy color.

Homer Kelly had been teaching in Memorial Hall. All day long it had seemed to him like an ordinary day. No memorial wreath lay on the north steps deploring the death of Henry Shady. No black crepe was tacked over the door. The only memorials in all the vast spaces of the building were the marble tablets in the high corridor recording the names of the men of Harvard who had fallen in the battles of Gettysburg, Wilderness, Antietam, Bull Run.

The lecture hall where Homer taught a course in American literature with his wife, Mary, was an ugly auditorium at the west end. On his way out, hauling on his gloves and holding a sheaf of papers in his teeth, he ran into the homeless old black man who often huddled out of the wind on the steps of the ground-floor entry. As usual he was swaddled in a blanket, his head down, his face invisible. Homer dropped a quarter in front of him, as he always did, and murmured, “Good evening.”

There was no response. The quarter lay where it had fallen. But after Homer was gone the old man's hand crept out of the blanket and grasped the coin. Then, like a mummy rising from a sarcophagus, he shambled to his feet.

Mary Kelly saw him a little while later as she climbed out of the subway at Church Street, emerging into the cold air of Harvard Square.

She looked around as she always did, savoring once again the zest and bite of the Square. The same tangle of streets had existed at this intersection since the seventeenth century. It was a crossroads for scholars of every stripe, and for students who had muscled their way through secondary school to enter Harvard's narrow portals, and for the thousands of Harvard employees who shuffled paper and kept the buildings going, and for high-school kids high-shouldered in Raiders jackets laughing loudly around the public phones, and for bicycle cultists riding too fast through the flow on the sidewalk. Between the BayBank and the Harvard Coop, the Peruvian band blew into its panpipes,
chuff-chuffa-chuff
.

Across the street the brick buildings and wrought-iron gates of Harvard Yard were the frontier to another world, but here in the Square the two worlds nudged each other and overlapped, and the flow went both ways, in and out.

DON
'
T WALK
, said the light. Mary waited, fumbling in her purse for a coin to give the old black man who was settling down beside the subway entrance. He was often there, swathed in a blanket, paying no attention to the passersby. Today his hand emerged from the blanket to take Mary's quarter, then slid back inside. He did not look up.

WALK
, said the light. Mary moved forward, stepping out onto Massachusetts Avenue in front of the growling cars. Then she glanced back. Someone was yelling, making a disturbance—
tent city for the homeless, come one, come all
—the words faded as he turned the other way—
put the screws on Harvard
—
moral responsibility
—
six-billion-dollar endowment!

The voice was familiar. Mary stepped back on the pavement. Sure enough, it was Palmer Nifto, good old Palmer Nifto with a new list of nonnegotiable demands. A couple of years ago he had turned Mary's hometown of Concord on its ear, demanding housing for himself and his homeless friends, getting them all in trouble by breaking into a dwelling while its owners were away. Here he was again, making a public protest, trying to outshout a Cambridge policewoman who was yelling back at him, “Oh, for Christ's sake, Palmer, pipe down.”

Mary grinned and crossed to the other side. She was supposed to be meeting Homer, and she was late. Poor Homer, he was being such a good sport. After supper he'd have to hang around all evening through her Revels rehearsal in order to join her on the T to Alewife to pick up her car, because his own was having transmission trouble. He'd be bored to death.

Mary hurried through the gate, tucking her mittened hands into her coat pockets. It was very cold in the Yard. Already, in early December, the frost had penetrated the ground. Its cold fingers had gone far down under the grassy turf to stiffen the soil. Worms no longer nosed blindly in and out and up and down. The larvae of Japanese beetles were curled in yellow coils, clasped by the frozen sod, waiting for spring. Now, at five o'clock, the sky was already dark. John Harvard was nearly invisible on his granite base, except for the snow on his bronze lap. The thinnest curl of a moon hung over Massachusetts Hall, marking the place where the sun had gone down.