by Tracy Kidder
There had been a lot of parliamentary maneuvering. Her opponents outflanked her and prevented her experts from speaking. But Mayor Ford made a forceful argument against the special pay. She thought she still had a chance, until O’Connor got up, walked confidently to the microphone, and said, “I thought I’d be up here by seven-fifteen, and I only paid for the bongo player until eight o’clock.”
It wasn’t that funny a line, but she had to admit that the timing was perfect. All around her, the mayor saw smiles, even on the faces of her allies on the council. Then O’Connor made his serious pitch. He talked about morale and public safety. But in the mayor’s view, he was really talking about a pay raise for some cops. “We shouldn’t be doing this here,” she thought. “This should be done in collective bargaining.” O’Connor talked about the costs to the city. He underestimated them, by her calculations. He didn’t even acknowledge the effect the incentive pay would have on retirement benefits. “He doesn’t know this, in spite of the fact that his father ran the county retirement system,” she thought. “His father only taught him how to get his way,” she said angrily to herself.
The mayor stewed, and at the same time, in that part of her mind removed from the moment, the part that was purely professional, she studied the young cop’s technique. He spoke briefly. He was straightforward. He threw in his jokes at just the right moments. She wasn’t handy with jokes herself. She hadn’t expected to be outdone in this way, not by a cop. She felt as if her jaw would drop if she let it. Then she thought, “It’s in the genes.”
In the end, the police got their raise, and for forty-eight hours she considered pulling out of her reelection campaign. Then she got over it. A year later, when the old police chief retired, she actually considered O’Connor for the job. It was out of the question, of course. He was much too young. Now on this first night of fall, 1995, Mary opened her eyes and smiled as the new chief, the one she’d selected—an excellent appointment, everyone agreed—declared, “Sergeant O’Connor has been selected as the new detective sergeant of the Detective Bureau.”
The councillors all clapped. Mayor Ford clapped, too. Then the chief described O’Connor’s largest drug bust, which had started in Northampton but taken him across state lines. Reading from the citation in his hands, the chief intoned: “In August of 1994, Sergeant O’Connor initiated a local investigation that led to the largest seizure of marijuana in New Hampshire to date. Therefore, in recognition of your valuable service to the Northampton Police Department and the city of Northampton, I hereby award you the exceptional service certificate.”
The mayor went on smiling, watching as O’Connor moved around the room, leaning over the councillors’ tables to shake each one’s hand. She thought she might be watching one of her successors perform.
Not everyone grows up wanting to be president. For Tommy, the chief’s announcement was more than just good news. It was the reward for ten years of striving. Detective sergeant. He had dreamed of becoming such a person since the days of the O’Connor Detective Agency. The chief had already told Tommy he wouldn’t assume his new duties at once—the department had to solve some personnel problems first. Tommy could wait. Street sergeant was the next best job he could imagine.
Tommy left the Puchalski building feeling proud and happy, and it was a while before he realized again that he wasn’t altogether comfortable in his mind. “Everything happens for a reason.” That was Tommy’s motto. He used it to console himself over disappointments. It meant things would eventually turn out for the best. But he found it hard to imagine a reason why Rick’s troubles had arisen at this time, just when his own professional world had become nearly perfect.
Since that day about a month ago when Rick had declared his innocence, Tommy had stopped worrying that his friend might kill himself. He’d stopped visiting Rick, and called him only occasionally, not knowing what to say. But Rick was often on his mind.
On a gray autumn afternoon, Tommy sat in his cruiser, in a back lot on King Street, watching a couple of shabbily dressed men root through a Dumpster. “If he did do it, now he’s all cleaned up and to realize he did it must be awful,” he said. “It’d be awful, too, if he didn’t do it and everyone in town thinks he did. But I’m out of it. If he did it, I have no knowledge. If he was molested as a child, I have no knowledge.”
Tommy paused. One of the men was climbing out of the Dumpster, as if up through the hatch of a submarine. “Poor bastards,” he murmured. “They go through the Dumpsters and find broken VCRs and try to fix them.”
He drove out of the parking lot, back on his rounds, saying, “He could be innocent. He’s pleading innocent, the way a really good guy would.”
These days he and Jean didn’t have abundant opportunities to talk. Jean worked regular hours. She had to get up early and was often asleep when he got home near midnight. Some conversations were brief—the night Tommy came home after dealing with a suicide, for instance. He usually left his clothes outside after dealing with a corpse, but this body hadn’t been dead very long. He felt too tired to shower. Eyes closed, still asleep, Jean wrinkled up her nose. “What smells in here?”
“Me. You want me to take a shower?”
She stirred and rolled over. “No, I’ll just hold my breath.”
Sometimes they chatted for a long time, Jean answering him from out of her dreams and almost making sense. Tommy tape-recorded a few of those chats for her. Those were some of their longest conversations for days at a time.
Jean had always listened patiently to troubles he’d brought home from work. But now, when they did have an evening together, she seemed unable to let him talk about Rick. If he brought him up, she’d say, “Oh, he’s such a jerk. I’m so mad at him.” Rick wasn’t her friend. She’d never felt warm toward him. The charges against him offended her, and she didn’t find it very hard to believe them. Tommy understood. But when Jean responded that way, referring to Rick as “Richard” in an icy voice, he didn’t feel like continuing the conversation. He didn’t want to talk to anyone else about Rick’s case. So, for the most part, he was left alone with his thoughts.
Many nights, he came home, found Jean asleep, got into bed, and read until the page began to blur. He turned off the light, and woke right up in the sudden dark. An old familiar feeling washed over him. He remembered times when he’d gotten in some trouble as a boy and had awakened the next morning imagining all was right with the world, and suddenly realized he was still in trouble—“Oh, shit!” He stared at the ceiling. His thoughts came braided. “I hope he’s innocent. What if he is? If you had good times with a kid long, long ago in another world, what’s the whole concept of a friend? Someone who’s there for you when you’re in trouble. What if he didn’t do it? Then I’m a schmuck.”
On the perimeter of sleep, Tommy had often imagined making the wrong snap decision out on a Northampton street or in a Northampton rooming house. Shooting someone by mistake seemed the likeliest of the possible irreversible errors he could make. He imagined being hauled into court before one of the local liberal judges, who would fry him. This old argumentum ad horrendum usually ended with him in jail. He couldn’t imagine being accused of sexually abusing a child. He wouldn’t let himself imagine that. But if he were accused of a wrongful shooting, he’d expect his best friends to defend him loudly and in public. Not refuse to discuss the facts with him. Not offer evidence against him. You never ratted out a friend to his parents.
His old friend Mark, who was Rick’s friend, too, got in a lot of little trouble when they were teenagers. Mark didn’t do anything they didn’t do. He just got caught. One time Mark’s father called Tommy and said, “I’d like to discuss Mark with you.” Tommy had thought fast. He’d said, “But, sir, I’m only seventeen.” The memory made him smile. Then it reproached him. Shouldn’t he be protecting Rick? What kind of friend hears his old buddy say, “I didn’t do it,” and goes off thinking, “I hope he didn’t.”
What if Rick was guilty and the motive had
been planted a long time back, right under his nose, inside the house three doors down Forbes Avenue, and had lain there dormant until a year or two ago? If he’d stayed closer to Rick the last few years, he might have seen what was happening and intervened and gotten Rick into treatment, without charges being filed, without a public scandal to humiliate Rick’s mother, without a trial.
Tommy stared at his bedroom ceiling. “It’d be better if he robbed a bank. I’d much rather he shot someone in a bar.”
Tommy wished all those thoughts away. And little by little, first for a week, then for two, then for whole months at a time, he nearly succeeded.
In the days before it had a town clock, Northampton paid a citizen to sound a trumpet, calling all to Sunday Meeting. Attendance was required. Proper Sabbath behavior was enforced by tithing-men, each one of whom was also charged with checking on the morals of a dozen families. They carried black canes tipped with brass as symbols of their office. In Northampton nowadays, local ordinances policed a great deal of what went on outdoors, such as skateboarding and street music, and the tobacco control coordinator prowled around with a camera, looking for violations of the ban against smoking in restaurants. Even downtown, for all its flamboyance, had a serious air. Off and on, little groups stood in front of Memorial Hall, protesting international arms dealing and whatever war was current. Battles against homelessness, racism, domestic abuse, the burning of black churches in the South, were carried on from pamphlet-laden tables in Pulaski Park, and in lectures and discussion groups inside the Unitarian Society and the First Church. In spite of the nightly masquerades and all the luxuries for sale, Northampton was a moral place.
On a billboard out by the Interstate, an ad for a Main Street shop read, STUFF YOU WANT; below that someone had written, in artfully drippy red paint, WHILE OUR GHETTOS BLEED. That message had lingered for months. The fading graffito on the back wall of Thorne’s Marketplace—GENTRIFICATION IS WAR, FIGHT BACK—had remained undisturbed for years. On Main Street, inside the shop that caters to recreational runners, a middle-aged customer tells the clerk that he must be fitted to only one brand of sneaker. “It’s the only kind that isn’t made by sweatshop labor in China,” he explains. In a dress and accessories shop a block away, a woman gazes longingly at a pair of shoes—black with a gold-colored adornment like a snaffle bit on top. Then she turns away. Of course, she could afford the shoes, she tells her husband that night. But she doesn’t actually need them, and there are so many problems in the world—starving children, threatened species, political prisoners—that she can’t help but think the money would be better spent elsewhere. Besides, she says, smiling sheepishly, she’s afraid she’d feel pretentious wearing fancy shoes in Northampton. People who dyed their hair green were more comfortable here, it seemed, than people who bought leather pumps.
Downtown had a tone, and the tone had a history. It probably stretched back to the Puritans’ sumptuary laws, which were intended to keep average citizens from aping the rich. There were exceptions, of course, but anecdotes from the town’s annals suggest that by the time of the Revolution the rich of Northampton were endeavoring not to look too different from everyone else. In the early 1800s a resident recorded in his diary a story he’d heard, an object lesson on this theme: In 1775 or thereabouts, a young tradesman came to seek his fortune in Northampton. He carried letters of introduction to the town’s leading men. First he visited the famous soldier Seth Pomeroy, hero of the French and Indian Wars, soon to fight, at the age of sixty-five, at the battle of Bunker Hill. “But to his surprise found Col. Pomeroy clothed with a leather apron and arms naked, busy at the Anvil …” Then he called on a Major Hawley. He found him living in an old, plain house, sitting in a ratty old armchair.
The young man had doubts whether this man could be the famous Major Hawley and received the affirmative reply that his name was Hawley—the young man presented his letter of introduction and soon found the Great Man and that Greatness did not consist in splendid buildings or courtly dress and was taught the useful lesson of not Judging a man by his outward dress.
Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, visited Northampton in the early 1800s and noticed a peculiarity about the town’s three hundred homes. “A considerable number of the houses are ordinary, many are good, and not a small proportion are handsome,” he wrote. But the handsome ones weren’t situated together. The rich hadn’t settled down in exclusive neighborhoods, the way Dwight seemed to think they should. The handsome houses were “so scattered on the different streets as to make much less impression on the eye than even inferior buildings in many other places.”
During the 1980s Northampton had indulged in a spree, extravagant by local standards, with money and real estate. But the boom had ended now. Many of the bon vivants of the eighties had moved away, been indicted, or simply calmed down. And the wealthy had generally become retiring again. Gossip had punished ostentation in the past. It still did today. The rich were especially vulnerable, because they were greatly outnumbered. For years the town’s median income had stood below the Massachusetts average, and as of the 1990 federal census, only seventy-nine households, fewer than one percent, considerably less than the national average, had incomes of $150,000 or more. Wealthy people here tended to live on remote hilltops, far away from inquiring eyes, or else discreetly, in houses with plain exteriors but interiors that contained kitchens good enough for restaurants, and private libraries, and art collections of great worth. The wealthy of Northampton drove good cars but not the very best. They didn’t have live-in servants, though some maintained the equivalents of staffs, in caterers, cleaners, gardeners. One tier below, there was a much larger prosperous class, the upper middle by local standards—academics, business owners, various professionals. Many people had given up a little something to live here, forsaking their chances to maximize profits.
As long as they avoided ostentation, people could be wealthy in Northampton and still be called “progressive.” In fact, the combination was likely. One way to achieve it was to open one’s house to fund-raisers for a worthy cause. Mayor Ford once remarked, “It does seem to me that the rich here are quite benign.” Of course, she was a beneficiary of fund-raisers, but she had a point. In Northampton inequality was more muted than in many American places.
Not that unanimity prevailed. A while ago the progressive forces had gone too far for some, and now the town was fighting over a proposed local statute, called the Domestic Partnership Ordinance, a gay rights initiative of sorts.
In other places, this kind of argument usually came mixed with practical questions about municipal finance and economic fairness, about discrimination in the workplace and freedom from harassment. Not in Northampton. The ordinance would allow an unmarried couple, whether heterosexual or homosexual, to license themselves as domestic partners at city hall for a ten-dollar fee. In return, one partner would have the right to view the school records of the other partner’s child, with the partner’s written permission. But anyone could do that already. One domestic partner would also have the right to visit the other in any city-owned jail or hospital. But Northampton didn’t own a hospital, and the only jail under its control was the lockup at the police station, which didn’t allow visitors of any sort. So the ordinance would grant rights that either didn’t exist or that everyone already possessed. It wouldn’t cost the town a penny. Maybe in other places the DPO wouldn’t have seemed worth arguing about. But it had any number of symbolic meanings here. It set the town up for an election of great purity, an election about principle alone.
“This has always been a tolerant community,” some natives liked to say. But not all that long ago, in the 1950s, the police had arrested a Smith College professor named Newton Arvin, winner of the National Book Award for a biography of Melville. His crime was possessing pictures of scantily clad young men. Exposed as a homosexual, and too weak to resist pressure from police, Arvin snitched on some of his best gay friends, was retired from Smith, and checked himself int
o the state mental hospital.
Gay-bashing in Northampton seems to have grown, along with the numbers of openly gay residents, until the early 1980s, when Judge Ryan, then the district attorney, prosecuted a man for making harassing phone calls to a local lesbian. Ordinarily the culprit would have gotten a stern warning, but the people who spoke for gay residents had been demanding action. Ryan pressed to have the man be given jail time. The judge remembered that case with mixed feelings. “He was just some poor slob and we made an example of him. But it seemed to work.”
A place often gets known for one of its parts. In tabloids as far away as England, Northampton was now described as overrun by lesbians, teeming with weird and florid sexuality. The city census didn’t ask the citizens what kind of sex they preferred, but a careful, between-the-lines analysis by the city planner suggested that lesbians constituted only one of many sizable minorities in town. Perhaps they only seemed more numerous than retired persons, because here they felt safe enough to come out of hiding. Several churches now performed gay marriages and the Gazette carried the announcements alongside traditional ones. Lesbians had become some of the city’s sturdiest burghers. They ran thriving businesses. They served on civic boards. Three of the city’s cops were openly gay, after all, and so were two city councillors. The first cop to come out had found FAGGOT written on his locker, but that was years ago, and if some people on the force still didn’t like the idea of gay colleagues, they knew better than to say so. The First Church, scion of the Puritan church, had, after a little struggle, officially declared itself to be “open and affirming”—that is, to people of all sexual persuasions.
Nowadays so many people in Northampton, both gay and straight, referred to their significant others as “my partner” that you might have thought it was almost entirely a town of lawyers. So when the council proposed the Domestic Partnership Ordinance, it hadn’t seemed likely to arouse much opposition. But an organization called Northampton for Traditional Values hastily assembled, and in no time at all they collected three thousand signatures, forcing the ordinance onto the ballot.
