Shortest Day (34 page)

“No kidding.” Homer winced as little Andrew Windsor Milligan threw back his head and howled.

Afterward everyone milled around and said hello to everybody else. Palmer Nifto kissed Gretchen and congratulated her, without uttering a word about her betrayal. He took his revenge on the world in another way.

“Okay,” said the deliveryman from the Boston Museum, “you're through with the christening bowl, right? I'll take it back. Where is it?”

“Well, it was right here on this table a moment ago,” said the dumbfounded clergyman.

“I saw it there myself,” said Mary Kelly. “Where can it be?”

“Listen, they'll skin me alive at the museum. That's a very valuable piece of seventeenth-century silver. What the hell did you do with it?”

They turned the church upside down, but the 250-year-old Dummer Christening Bowl was nowhere to be found.

Palmer Nifto too disappeared from the face of the earth. He was not seen again at Harvard Towers. And without his direction, sporadic and zigzagging though it had been, the tent city came apart.

On the first day of the new year there was another severe snowstorm, turning to sleet and rain. Next morning the tents began coming down. Mary and Homer Kelly slipped and splashed from tent to tent, helping to roll up sleeping bags and dismantle the command tent and dispose of miscellaneous baggage and say goodbye.

The homeless people of Harvard Towers were still homeless.

Why had the protest failed? Mary suspected a lack of the right kind of leadership. Oh, Palmer Nifto had been clever all right. He had checkmated every move of the police and the university, time after time. His fault had been a failure of sympathy with the very people he was trying to help.

The truth was, there was no heart in Palmer Nifto. The terrible problems of the people who had entrusted themselves to his care—old Guthrie with his senility, Gretchen with her teeming fertility, Maggody with his helplessness, Bob Chumley with his cocaine addiction, and bossy Emily Pollock—to Palmer they were merely cards in a hand of poker. The people he called the establishment had won because they sensed this fact about him.

If Palmer had been a different kind of leader, an idealist, no matter how foolish and wrongheaded, he might have been unconquerable. The lords of the earth could not have ignored a worthy cause in combination with honest saintliness. But a crusade led by a scheming tactician was an easy target.

They simply finessed Palmer Nifto.

E
llery Beaver and the Dean of Faculty peered through the tracery of the wrought-iron gate that was the gift of the class of 1879 and watched the tent city come down. “It's sad,” said the Dean of Faculty. “You have to admit, it's a little sad.”

They stared at Emily Pollock as she struggled with her grocery cart, trying to push it through the slush on its little wheels. The snow was filthy, covered with black specks. The edges of the grubby heaps mounded beside the brick walkway had been trampled into dark plates like sheet metal.

“Of course it's sad,” said Ellery Beaver. “God knows, it's sad. But you have to agree, this isn't the way to fix the situation. Protests and demands, you can't cure the homeless problem that way. It's all wrong. It's got to be solved rationally by people of intelligence and goodwill and every sort of expertise. They've got to sit down together and penetrate into the very heart of things.” Ellery waved his hands right and left, as though the bright cold air around him were peopled by men and women of godlike wisdom and compassion. He had a vision of noble figures in Grecian robes sitting on the steps of Memorial Church, counseling together.

“Intelligence and goodwill, that's right,” repeated the Dean of Faculty. “Expertise, exactly, that's all it would take.” He glanced sideways at Ellery Beaver. “Speaking of intelligence, what's the latest scoop on your boss? He's better, I hope?”

“Alas, no.” Ellery turned away with the Dean and they started back across the Yard. “He still hasn't shown up in the office. I don't know what the hell's going on. The man needs psychiatric evaluation, that's for sure. Sticky wicket.”

But as they parted company in Harvard Yard, Ernest Henshaw was at last ready to leave his house on Berkeley Street.

“Ernest, you're driving me crazy,” said his wife, “standing around mooning like that. Why don't you go for a walk? Get out of the house into the fresh air? It would do you a world of good.”

“Yes,” said Henshaw, brightening, as an idea occurred to him. He put on his coat and scarf and gloves and pulled on his galoshes, and walked straight out of the house. Helen Henshaw sighed with relief.

Walking in a dream, Henshaw headed for Harvard Square, looking neither left nor right.

The square was crowded, as usual, with a flood of people on their way somewhere, crossing the intersection to the kiosk in the middle of the street, standing on the curb and crossing again to the other side, emerging from the subway and flowing along the sidewalk past the Harvard Coop and the bank, heading for JFK Street.

It wasn't the people in motion who interested Henshaw. It was the still ones, the unmoving ones, the people sitting on the sidewalk or leaning against the iron fence beside the cemetery, or sitting on wooden benches smoking cigarettes.

To Henshaw they looked wonderful. They glowed with an adorable simplicity. No multiplying heaps of boxes were piled up beside them. They did not own half a million separate and individual objects. They were alone, they were themselves, they were nothing but themselves.

Twice he walked past a grim-looking old man with the stub of a cigarette between forefinger and thumb. He walked past him a third time, staring at him. The man avoided his gaze, lost in his own emptiness, his own lack of boxes, his pure isolation from tens of thousands of miscellaneous possessions.

Henshaw did not speak to him. Walking past for the fourth time, he slowed his steps, turned to the fence, walked up to it, turned his back to it, and leaned his Harris tweed coat against it.

Then—very slowly—he slid down until he was sitting on the sidewalk. It was amazingly comfortable. Henshaw pulled at his pants, hunched up his legs, and slumped forward.

The man beside him did not look up.

PART EIGHT

THE LUCK

Be there loaf in your locker

and sheep in your fold
,

A fire on the hearth

and good luck in your lot
,

Money in your pocket

and a pudding in the pot
.

Saint George and the Dragon

CHAPTER 45

Bells in the cold tower, 'midst the snow of winter
,

Sound out the Spring song
,

That we may remember

Bells in the cold tower, after the long snowing

Come months of growing
.

Traditional Hungarian carol

T
he sun was low in the sky, moving toward the horizon in a long shallow arc. Slanting rays touched the old tombstones in the ancient churchyard near Harvard Square, grazed the thin hair on Henshaw's head, skipped across Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Yard, struck the gold pennant on the steeple of Memorial Church, and glowed on the red-tile roof of Sever Hall.