by Tracy Kidder
A lot of friends eventually moved away. Tommy stayed in town, and he became a local cop. In his neighborhood this wasn’t an unusual thing for a boy to do when he grew up. Several had become cops—Tommy’s brother Jack in Richmond, Virginia; Tommy’s friend Mark on Martha’s Vineyard; and also Rick, who joined the Northampton force a couple of years after Tommy. But Tommy’s case was special. For as long as anyone could remember, he’d dreamed of becoming a policeman. At five years old he stood in the middle of Forbes Avenue dressed in a round postman’s hat and pretended to direct the scanty traffic. In fourth grade he founded the O’Connor Detective Agency. He borrowed his father’s old sewer commissioner’s badge. His family’s garage was the station house. Most of his friends were deputized. They made up flyers and distributed them around the neighborhood: “If you have any mysteries or anything missing call the O’Connor Detective Agency.” Soon bikes expanded their territory, and took them into the old downtown.
Back then, in the early seventies, Northampton’s Main Street looked like a lot of others in New England towns—the upper stories of many commercial buildings abandoned, some of their windows covered in plywood; moneylending and furniture stores occupying what once had been prime commercial space. Pleasant Street off Main was essentially a skid row, lined with buildings sheathed in tar paper and with what the local cops called fighting bars, where brawling men rolled around on sawdust-covered floors. The lovely old train station was crumbling, its roof half caved in. Downtown had its attractions, though: Charlie’s, where Tommy and his pals bought penny candy, and old drugstores with creaking wooden floors and soda fountains that produced ice cream sodas, cherry Cokes. On their bikes he and his deputies followed suspicious-looking cars down Pleasant Street. In Tommy’s memory, he got so good at mimicking a siren that now and then a driver actually pulled over, and he rode by looking innocent.
In junior high, he joined the Police Explorer Scouts and stayed with them through high school, and in due course he went from being a ward of the town to one of its wardens, dressed in blue polyester. In all his dreams, Tommy spent the rest of his life in Northampton. He made a plan. He would remain a cop and rise to sergeant—and no higher for a long time, because higher office meant mostly desks and paperwork. He would marry and have a bunch of kids who would reenact his own Northampton childhood—why not, when his had been so nearly perfect? And then after he retired, he would run for mayor.
By the end of high school he’d already met the woman he wanted to marry, Jean Kellogg, a Yankee girl from a small neighboring hill town. She wasn’t so sure about him. He courted her assiduously, and eventually won her over. They made an old-fashioned couple, for the 1980s. He and Jean bought a house. Tommy was supposed to move into it, alone: Jean didn’t want to live with him before their wedding. That was fine with him—he knew his parents wouldn’t approve. But when the day arrived for him to pack up and leave his childhood home, he felt overcome by the prospect. He said he couldn’t do it that day, he had to deal with an emergency at work. So Jean and his mother did the packing for him, and Jean fixed up the new place. Tommy was twenty-three, with his own bachelor pad, and he knew he should feel emancipated. But when he climbed into bed that night, all he could think about was home. This was the first time in his life he’d gone to bed without saying good night to his mother. He called her up.
“You did it to me,” he said. “Your youngest is gone.”
She didn’t take the bait. “Yes. Yes,” she said wearily. “Good night.”
After a few years of marriage he and Jean began trying to conceive a child. None appeared, but they assumed it was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, Tommy’s professional career proceeded much as planned. As the years went by, he rose through the ranks on the Northampton force, from patrol officer to detective, and finally, after ten years, to the sergeant in charge of patrol on the evening shift. He now commanded half a dozen young officers—a well-trained, grown-up version of the O’Connor Detective Agency.
Superficially, Tommy had changed. He had been a chubby little boy, and trim and handsome in his twenties. Now he was about six feet tall and burly, not fat but with a layer of flesh concealing muscle, and his curly hair was gone. If he was going to be bald, he’d decided, he’d be bald emphatically. Sergeant O’Connor shaved his head into a great expanse of skin and shined it up with aftershave before he went on duty. “Helmet Head,” one of the other sergeants called him. Without hair above, Tommy’s large nose looked larger. At times on duty, his face looked hard, which was the effect he aimed for. The skinhead look was meant to be part of his policeman’s uniform, but it didn’t entirely conceal the softness of his hazel eyes.
In crayon on the wall inside his bedroom closet on Forbes Avenue Tommy had written:
TOM O’CONNOR SEPTEMBER 29, 1972
I WANT TO BE A POLICEMAN
I AM IN SIXTH GRADE.
Twenty-three years later, the inscription remained in the closet. Tommy went up to his old room and looked at it once in a while. It was like opening a scrapbook.
Sometimes Tommy O’Connor would be out on patrol at the summer evening hour when streetlights began competing with the sky, a thick forearm resting on the windowsill of the supervisor’s cruiser, and he would find himself driving down Elm Street on the hill above downtown. As he approached the Smith College gate, Northampton’s quintessential landscape filled his windshield—a green wedge of the Holyoke Range above the Victorian rooftops of Main Street. For a moment he’d imagine he was driving, not toward the center of Northampton, but into a western place at sunset, into a cowboy, frontier town, framed against real mountains.
The Mount Tom and Holyoke Ranges arise just beyond the southern border of the town. The Connecticut cuts a gap between them. They aren’t really mountains, just a line of steep green hills. But in Tommy’s windshield, they always looked more distant and much taller than they are. They looked grand and not quite real. They looked like Northampton’s painted backdrop, and they gave him both a faraway and a comforting feeling. They made Northampton seem like places that he’d never seen, and yet defined the cozy scale of a place he knew by heart—miniature mountains for the miniature city that lay before him down Main Street.
A real Main Street, U.S.A., in general outline much the same as the dying downtown he’d known as a boy, but utterly transformed. Trees along the sidewalks decorated rows of refurbished nineteenth-century commercial buildings, three and four stories tall. Most were made of brick, with fancy Victorian cornices at their rooflines, all slightly different and all of a piece, like faces in a human crowd. Most of the public buildings stood apart, some behind tall trees and little lawns—the old stone courthouse, the old First Church, the Unitarian Universalist Society, city hall (the Castle, as some called it, because it looked just like one, with crenellated turrets on the corners of its roof). Downtown had a little park, Pulaski Park, wedged between Memorial Hall and the Academy of Music, America’s first municipally owned theater, where Jenny Lind sang in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tommy couldn’t drive down Main Street—no one could—without feeling the presence of history. Layers and layers of past were sedimented under the broad, curving avenue, the bottommost layer dating back to 1654, to a settlement made of wood on the first dry land above the ancient riverside cornfields of the Indians. Downtown’s principal streets still followed the Puritan settlers’ paths. Main Street still climbed their Meeting House Hill.
In the downtown now before him, the old crumbling train station was entirely restored. It had become a busy, fancy restaurant. So had a lot of other once moribund storefronts. Downtown encompassed only half a dozen city blocks. It was just a patch of city. But it now contained about forty restaurants serving a variety of national cuisines, eleven jewelry and twenty-two clothing shops, a dozen bookstores, seven crafts and art galleries, several nightclubs, two movie theaters. The plywood had come off all the upper-story windows of the commercial blocks. Lawyers and psychologists and hair salons now occupied the sec
ond floors. Tommy vividly remembered the era when, after graduation day at Smith, a stillness settled over Main Street and lingered for the summer. Now it was as if he’d blinked and looked again and the place was packed.
From one summer evening to another, the scene through the cruiser’s windows looked much the same. The yellow streetlights and gaily colored lighted signs above storefronts illumined crowded sidewalks, down which flowed a mainstream of the middle-aged—mostly white, but with some black, brown, and Asian faces. They made up the human background of downtown, normal-looking and casually dressed, in slacks and jeans and khakis, in sandals on these summer nights. Men and women, women and women, strolled arm in arm past the street musicians. Now and then Tommy would see a cellist seated on a chair outside a coffee shop, or a troupe of Bolivian panpipers on the sidewalk by the Unitarian church. Most evenings the more ordinary sounds of a steel drum, a guitar, an accordion, a saxophone, came in the cruiser’s open windows as he drove slowly by. Lines spilled out the doors of restaurants. People with that drifty academic look headed for the readings at the bookstores, and people of the avant-garde, in collarless shirts, the occasional beret, headed for the old bank building that had been recycled into an art gallery. Tommy would glance, and glance again, at the little knots of costumed youth loitering in Pulaski Park and by the Information Booth—skateboarders with their baseball caps turned backward, homeboys with baggy pants and gold chains, Goths in torn black clothes, adorned with spiky jewelry. Often, out in front of the Haymarket coffee shop, a group of Gothically attired youths sat in a circle on the sidewalk—some of Northampton’s vegetarian anarchists, talking revolution and for now impeding only foot traffic.
The new downtown was lively and various. And, remarkably to Tommy, it was very peaceful. In the crowds, he spotted the familiar faces of city officials, local entrepreneurs, lawyers and judges he knew from court, doctors and professors from his old neighborhood—people who rarely got in the kind of trouble that he dealt with, though some of their children did. He would watch through his cruiser’s windows as, unbeknownst to them, those respectable citizens walked down the sidewalks right beside drug dealers, local felons, a paroled murderer or two. Many of the people on the summer streets came from out of town, looking for a good time. From years of checking license plates, Tommy knew that on any given summer evening some visitors, sometimes more than a few, had long and violent criminal records. Yet there hadn’t been a murder on the streets of Northampton for two years or, for several, anything more than minor disturbances on Main Street. Tommy thought his department deserved some of the credit. “I think some local officers have made it hard to be a criminal here,” he said. But he felt that something more mysterious than good policing had to be at work. He gazed out the cruiser’s windows at busy, peaceful Main Street, and he shook his head. “I don’t know what it is about this place. We get some serious criminals here, but they always seem to do their bad deeds someplace else.” He put on a homeboy’s accent. “Up here they’re chillin’, chillin’.”
Tommy had a gift for mimicking accents. His own had the plain sound of what linguists call standard American English, a sound typical of Northampton and the region. One heard many nonnative accents around town these days—Brooklyn, Asian, East Indian, Latino. But once an accent is established in a place, it tends to stick, surviving immigrations. Probably because Northampton was settled by people from Connecticut, the local accent lacked the broad “a” of Boston. Tommy’s was as plain as New England accents get.
Northampton was an old Yankee town twice altered fundamentally, first by nineteenth-century immigrations from Ireland, Canada, and Poland, and much more recently by an influx of generally well-heeled members of the well-educated class, the people largely responsible for restoring downtown, and for redefining it. Current local theory divided Northampton in two opposing camps: a trendy, liberal-minded part made up of newcomers and nicknamed Noho, and a mostly native part called Hamp. According to this theory, natives were supposed to take politically conservative stands on every issue and to resent the changes newcomers had wrought, especially the revision of downtown.
The distinction was too neat, but not entirely inaccurate. Most of the natives Tommy knew did their shopping on King Street, the town’s shopping strip, a slice of chain department stores, auto dealerships, fast-food restaurants. They didn’t shop downtown much because its stores were expensive and didn’t sell many necessities—in all of downtown now, you couldn’t buy a wrench or a tenpenny nail.
Tommy never shopped here anymore. “What would I buy?” he said, glancing at the boutiques. “Maybe a pair of sandals to write my Ph.D. thesis in.” He wasn’t fond of his hometown’s new, prevailing politics, a kind of Democratic liberalism that described itself as progressive. In recent years it had displaced the old ethnic Democrats like Tommy’s father, and, it seemed clear to Tommy, now wanted to exclude them altogether—conservative “old Democrats,” in the parlance of the new ones now in control of city government. For years Tommy’s father had presided at every Democratic mayor’s inauguration, but not, rather pointedly, at the most recent of those. His father’s jokes, it seemed, were thought to be unsuitable for current sensibilities.
One evening Tommy spotted a man dealing drugs right out in the open, in front of a Main Street coffee shop. A small scene ensued: On a crowded sidewalk, a bald-headed, burly cop running his hands up and down the pants legs of a young black man, who stood with his hands behind his head, protesting loudly, “Man, why you hasslin’ me?” And, about ten feet away, a white woman with a silk scarf around her neck, watching the proceedings like an angry sentinel, hands on hips, glaring at the cop.
No doubt this woman was a well-intentioned citizen, summoned to moral outrage. It was reasonable enough to see what she saw—one of society’s vulnerable members suffering from the prejudice of an agent of the law. She couldn’t have known that the man Tommy was frisking often worked for him as a drug informant and also dealt drugs himself, or that he had a long criminal record and a history of psychosis. But to Tommy, the angry-looking woman was the prejudiced one. He imagined that he knew exactly what was going through her mind. “Obviously I’m hassling a black man, and the next thing I’m gonna do is call him the n-word,” he’d thought as he’d glanced at her. Her silent reproach got to him. “It almost makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong,” he told a fellow cop afterward, back at the police station. Then he repaid the woman in kind. He put on a falsetto, a parody of the voice he imagined for her: “ ‘How can that bald-headed cop indiscriminately pick on that nice man just because he’s black. I know a black man. I don’t know his name, but I’ve actually sat down at a table and spoken to him.’ ” Angrily, Tommy had concluded, “Yeah, well, she wouldn’t like it if T.C. was selling drugs to her kid.”
Some natives, particularly those of Tommy’s father’s generation, actively avoided Main Street and its spectacles—the people in outlandish costumes and the women with butch haircuts holding hands and kissing. The people of Hamp were supposed to feel deeply aggrieved that their town had acquired a national reputation as an enclave of lesbians. Unquestionably, some natives did feel that way.
Tommy couldn’t claim that some of his best friends were homosexuals, but three of his favorite colleagues on the force were openly gay. So were two of his favorite crime victims, a lesbian couple whose house had been robbed—he’d solved the crime and they were grateful, and so was he, for their gratitude. Imagining homosexual sex made him uneasy, and he couldn’t keep from imagining it. But lesbians here didn’t commit any crimes to speak of, and they’d shown themselves to be some of Northampton’s most conscientious parents. “Lesbians are great!” he once exclaimed, catching sight of several female couples as he cruised down Main Street. “Gimme more! Why? They don’t cause any trouble.”
One thing that had certainly improved in Northampton was the police force. In the late 1970s, a local cop was indicted for attempted murder, and two others went to jail for bu
rglarizing stores. Other malfeasance was dealt with quietly, and the force had essentially been rebuilt around the time Tommy joined. A young cop once said to Tommy that he couldn’t imagine cops beating up prisoners in Northampton. “It used to happen,” Tommy replied. “And that’s one reason why it doesn’t now.” On this subject his tone was as righteous and reflexive as the one he imagined around him on Main Street. “There’s an extreme brotherhood among police,” he liked to say. “But I wouldn’t stick up for a dirty cop. No way, shape, or form.”
Tommy expressed most of his views as declarations, and his views of Main Street were declaratively mixed. He stopped the cruiser at pedestrian crosswalks before people had even left the curb. He did this partly to set a good example for the other drivers, but it wasn’t really necessary. Once they hit downtown, most drivers seemed to become pacified, to rediscover manners, to remember driver’s education. People could amble across Main Street with alarming carelessness. Some cast lofty glances at the cars. Especially at cop cars, Tommy thought. “Gets my ass out,” he muttered, remembering a young woman who had walked, slowly and haughtily, in front of his cruiser the other night, even though he had his blue lights on.
