by Tracy Kidder
It has long been fashionable to speak of the importance of public spaces, but all over town doors were mercifully closed on affairs too frail to withstand public view. In their separate offices, the town’s army of psychologists listened as patients tried to specify their fear. Behind the closed door of his office, the evangelical pastor Dave McDowell sat beside a troubled parishioner, who said, “I’m emphasizing the material part of my life. I’m not open to God. I want to be.”
“I’m only a man,” said Dave. “Why don’t you just tell Him?” Dave knelt on the rug. “Let’s pray together, man.”
Behind a door at the rear of the Unitarian church, the minister, Victoria Safford, sat at her old oak desk, helping a couple plan their wedding. Victoria was thin. She had a boyish haircut and couldn’t have looked more feminine. The couple sitting before her were young and wearing sneakers. The young woman said, “We’ve got a bed now.”
Victoria smiled. “Well, that’s a good start,” she said, and then turned gently solemn. “What I presume is that a couple is ready to be married, and unless you prove otherwise, I presume that it’s true. But I will put to you a few questions, because I feel that as your accompanist, I can’t not ask them. Because for half of the people who do this, it doesn’t work out.”
A great deal lay hidden and half-hidden in this small, peaceful town. Well before you understood all of it, you would feel you understood too much. Northampton wasn’t New York or Calcutta. It wasn’t even as large as the little cities to its south. As places go, it seemed so orderly. But what an appalling abundance it contained. If all of the town were transparent, if the roofs came off all the buildings and the houses and the cars, and you were forced to look down and see in one broad sweep everything that had happened here and was happening, inside the offices, the businesses, the college dormitories, the apartments, the hospitals, the police station, and also on the playing fields and the sidewalks, in the meadows and the parks and the parking lots and graveyards and the boats out on the river, you’d be overcome before you turned away. And not just by malignancy and suffering, but by all the tenderness and joy, all the little acts of courage and kindness and simple competence and diligence operating all the time. To apprehend it all at once—who could stand it? No wonder so much remains invisible in towns.
On Pleasant Street, just around the corner from Main, stands a little brick building, wedged between two bigger ones. They have fancy cornices, like tiaras in a wealthy matron’s hair. This building’s façade is plain, and some of its windows lean slightly toward each other, like rhombuses. Some colonial English diarists and poets imagined human form in buildings. This building was not unstable—it had settled to its present shape more than a hundred years ago. But it looked a little drunk, standing there with its slightly lopsided windows.
Tommy drove up Pleasant Street. As he approached the odd little building, a figure emerged through the narrow doorway beside the ground-floor wool shop. Tommy noticed a lot—a drug deal in progress that to other eyes would look like just a handshake; the silhouette of a wanted man hastily turning down a side street; the glances that other drivers gave him and, usually more significant, the ones they didn’t give. All were like figures in a carpet that only trained and eager eyes could see. But it would have been hard for anyone to overlook the person coming out of the doorway.
He was a man of slightly less than medium height, with a bushy mustache meant to hide his damaged teeth. He wore shorts and running shoes and calf-length socks. And he came out onto the sidewalk at a fast, dangerously athletic-looking pace, a gait like an Olympic race walker’s, wearing a hunted look on his face, and holding his forearms locked together and pressed against his chest, his hands encased in plastic bags. Sometimes he wore rubber gloves.
“That’s Alan Scheinman. Another local nut,” said Tommy. “Actually, he’s not a bad guy.”
Tommy had met him once. A few years ago Scheinman came up to him on the corner of Main and Pleasant while Tommy was dressing down a kid for public drinking. Scheinman told him he’d seen the kid put a half-full, uncapped liquor bottle in the corner mailbox. Another boy standing there said, “Hey, don’t pay any attention to him. He’s a fuckin’ nut.” And Scheinman pushed that kid, hard, which surprised Tommy, because he’d thought that Scheinman couldn’t touch anyone.
“He assaulted me! Officer, you saw him assault me!” the kid said.
Tommy had turned to Scheinman. “I didn’t see anything. Did you, Mr. Scheinman?”
Rumors abounded. One had it that Alan Scheinman paid women to cover themselves in plastic wrap and have sex with him. Another, conversely, held that he was afraid of menstrual blood and avoided women altogether. None of it was true.
Alan had come to town about twenty years ago, when he was in his early thirties and still trying to get out from under his fierce, successful father’s shadow. His father had been crippled from infancy by polio and had made a fortune as a courtroom lawyer, conquering the world on atrophied legs. He was a man of many accomplishments, and he’d tried to make Alan one of them. Alan had become a lawyer, too, trained at Boston University, because it was his father’s alma mater. After about ten years his father decided it was time for Alan to come home to New Bedford and join his firm. But Alan wanted to move to Northampton and become a publisher of fine hand-bound books. He wanted to be connected to an enterprise of beauty that he’d chosen for himself. He couldn’t make the choice until, on an August night back in 1975, he drove into Northampton and through his windshield saw an array of shooting stars. Alan didn’t believe in God, though his family was religious, but right then he was willing to accept outside help. He believed, not in a divinity behind the shooting stars, but in the effect they had on him. “There are things that override,” he said later. “You believe in a thing even though you don’t believe in it. It was hard to argue with my father. Even harder to argue with meteors.” Looking back, Alan was amused. “A meteor shower is like a horoscope. The message is so general that you can get anything out of it. It’s like the fortune cookie that says, ‘You’re secretly admired.’ ”
A lot of Alan’s hometown, New Bedford, had gone through urban renewal: that is, it had been torn down. He arrived in Northampton during the early days of downtown’s restoration. All sorts of people were moving into town, some equipped with capital, most exuding youthful confidence: artists looking for cheap loft space and musicians looking for a scene, American Buddhists who’d heard of an authentic lama living in the area, graduates from local colleges and idealists disillusioned with communes in Vermont, young architects with their heads full of high-sounding phrases about the human need for human scale and quirky symmetries. Some newcomers already knew, and others soon discovered, that they were also entrepreneurs. Alan looked around and he saw all sorts of new enterprises growing up on Main Street: a health food store, a natural food restaurant, new bookstores, an imported-wine-and-cheese shop, arts-and-crafts galleries. Youngish people like Alan were tearing down plaster walls and ripping up linoleum, exposing the brick and wooden floors underneath. Some people were beginning to reinhabit the upper floors on Main Street.
Alan liked all this. Here was a place where his generation seemed to be taking charge. But they faced a lot of obstacles. The first of the region’s malls had opened, in Hadley, across the river. Downtown rents had fallen, while property taxes remained high. Many merchants had grown old and their children weren’t joining the family businesses. Alan hoped that restoration would succeed, but for a while he wasn’t willing to bet money that it would.
He published several books after settling in town, but the artisans and artists had so little sense of deadlines that they nearly drove him mad. So he set himself up as a lawyer, and then he met Sam Goldman, the Medici of Northampton’s little downtown renaissance, a newcomer who above all others had foreseen the possibilities and invested in them. Before Goldman left Northampton, in search of other challenges, he imparted to Alan both a passion for real estate and the craft of ma
king it pay. “Making money on real estate is very simple,” Alan later said. “The only mystery was why everyone in Northampton wasn’t doing it.” The details of an Alan Scheinman deal looked complex only if you weren’t Alan.
There was, for example, the four-story building on Main Street that Alan bought from Goldman. The transaction stretched out over years. “That building made me a lot of money,” Alan said once, as he walked past. “I love every brick in it.” Alan bought it with three partners. Calculations could always be upset, say by the failure of the furnace, and Alan liked to spread the risk. He brought in his law partner, partly to make him indebted, and he brought in a tenant, a bookstore owner already on the premises, because he wanted someone in the building who had a stake in its upkeep. And he asked Goldman to take a share, in the form of a second mortgage, which Goldman granted Alan on extremely favorable terms—if the building failed to break even in its rents, Goldman would defer payments on that second mortgage. Thus Alan arranged to own part of the building with virtually no risk.
Several years later, he perfected the deal. He bought out Goldman and his own law partner, who had by then become his former law partner, and, in one single transaction, he bought out the bookseller and sold him back a chunk of the building, then used that money to pay off the mortgage, which was exactly the same amount he received from the bookseller. He now owned the rest of the building—one storefront and a number of upper-story apartments. He sold most of the apartments, keeping the best and largest, which he easily rented. He sold the other storefront to its tenants. He liked to remember that Goldman had offered to sell them the entire building for $200,000, and had been rebuffed. Now Alan sold them a piece of the building for $205,000. He laughed, looking back. “It was a lovely thing.” That building would have made him money, he believed, even in a stagnant market. In the Northampton market of that time, he made a clear profit of about half a million dollars—and still owned part of the building.
Alan thrived financially during Northampton’s recent gilded age, its roaring eighties, an era of booming real estate and expensive partying and, at the town’s largest bank, the ironically named Heritage Bank, of phony letters of credit, secret partnerships, bribery, mismanagement. Many of that era’s players—they were mostly men and mostly newcomers—appear in a photograph taken at a party at the Hotel Northampton. Alan wore a turtleneck and tweed jacket. He had shoulder-length hair neatly parted in the middle. He was interestingly handsome—fit-looking, with a long nose and full lips, and clean-shaven. He had the sort of face that changes markedly with the light and the viewing angle and what surrounds it—with the length of hair and the style of clothing. A friend, the artist Barry Moser, borrowed his profile to depict Ichabod Crane’s severe and bony physiognomy for an illustration in one of the hand-bound editions Alan published. But viewed head-on, his face was sensitive and delicate, almost pretty. He was actually more sedate than many people at that party—he didn’t drink a lot and never touched cocaine—but he looked positively debonair.
A lot of funny money helped to finance downtown’s renovations, but the place came out of the crash beautified, all in all. Individuals got hurt, of course. One newcomer, who had come to town with zero capital and within a few years had been driving around town in two different Mercedes-Benzes, ended up completely broke and detoxifying from drug addiction in the York Street Jail in Springfield. Alan, who came to town with about $20,000, sold almost all his properties at the height of the boom and emerged about $2 million richer. Of course, he made some enemies, but no one could accuse him of illegal dealing. In Northampton, he felt, he had achieved the sort of stature he’d dreamed of—“a medium-sized fish in a small pond.” He had money, and he’d made it all without his father’s help. He had made a best friend, in Goldman. He had met a woman, a beautiful, fascinating woman to him, “a stunning woman.” And the place itself had taken hold of him. Northampton had some of him inside it now. He could look at downtown and feel he’d played a part in its survival and its sprucing up. When he was driving back from trips away and he came to the rise in the road beside the bowling alley and he saw the old buildings of downtown appear before him, he felt a great, unfamiliar comfort. “The relief of home,” he called it. That feeling survived, even when everything else started going wrong.
After Goldman left town, life with the stunning woman became increasingly contentious. Finally they parted. On a day not long afterward, Alan sat in an office at a local bank, at the end of another profitable real estate negotiation. The people at the table stood up and began being pleasant to one another. One of the men offered his hand to Alan. He couldn’t remember the man’s name anymore. This was just someone in a necktie, perfectly ordinary and presentable. After shaking hands with him, though, Alan felt that his own right hand had become, not dirty, but contaminated. Suddenly all of his attention focused on his hand. It might have just turned purple. And he realized with what seemed like great clarity—“an insight,” he called this, the first of many—that if he didn’t immediately remove whatever it was that made his hand feel so alarmingly strange, then everything he touched with it would become contaminated, too, and then all of those things would lie in wait for him to touch them again at a later time, contaminating his hand again. He excused himself and went to the men’s room. He stood over the sink and did what one does when one’s hand is dirty: he washed it. But it didn’t feel cleansed, so he washed it again. And again and again, about twenty times over—all motion and no progress. Finally, he realized, as if from a distance, that whatever had taken over most of the rest of his mind was saying he could stop. He couldn’t shake with anyone after that day. For a while he kept up appearances by tying an Ace bandage around his right hand and telling people he’d injured it.
He began having insights everywhere. He walked up to the door of the dry cleaners on Main Street, carrying his laundry bag. He shouldered the door open, so as not to touch the handle, and got in line behind a woman. She delivered a filthy-looking quilt to the clerk, who picked it up and put it in a basket. At that moment another clerk relieved the first, who headed over to another section of the store and started pulling plastic bags over freshly dry-cleaned clothes. And to his horror Alan experienced with what felt like every part of his body and mind a completely logical skein of thought, founded on illogic yet irresistible. “That clerk has been touching these filthy, contaminated, dirty clothes, and now she’s touching people’s clean clothes and she’s contaminating those clothes,” he thought, as he stood in line. “Okay, what’s going on here is that your clothes are going in here dirty and coming out dirty, and even if they had someone else whose whole job was to pack plastic onto clean clothes and that person never touched dirty clothes, the truth of the matter is that the dirty clothes are given to a man who puts them into a dry-cleaning machine. Now look at that. He doesn’t wash his hands after he puts them in the dry-cleaning machine, and he doesn’t disinfect or wash the handle of the door to the dry-cleaning machine. So even if he washed his hands after he touched the dirty clothing, which he doesn’t do, he’d contaminate his hands by opening the door to take out the dry-cleaned clothes, and then when he touched the clean clothes, he’d contaminate them again.” Soon all of Alan’s suits and sweaters and sports jackets and slacks lay piled among other trash in his apartment. His former life had ended.
He couldn’t wear clothes that had to be dry-cleaned, which meant that he couldn’t dress up for court. He couldn’t be a lawyer anymore. He couldn’t shake hands. He couldn’t touch doorknobs. Northampton’s banquet was spread before him. There was nothing he couldn’t afford to do here. Northampton was beautiful, and he couldn’t touch it. In Paradise Lost the fallen archangel says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” By the mid-1980s Alan would have said that the Devil had a point.
He knew he was a public spectacle. He went outside only when he had to, and he hurried home to his apartment in the tipsy-looking building. The win
dows were speckled with city grime and the floors were littered, mostly with discarded paper. Inside his rooms, he moved along narrow pathways, between chest-high piles of debris. For years he had watched the rubbish accumulate and for years he had wanted to clean up, but another insight stymied him: “There’s no way I can put that stuff in garbage bags without contaminating both my clothes and the bags, and there’s no way I could carry them down my staircase without touching the walls, and if my clothes or the bags are contaminated and they touch the walls, then I’ll have to spend hours cleaning up the walls and I already have far too much cleaning that I have to do, and besides, once I got the stuff outside, I’d have to deal with the lid of the Dumpster or the incinerator, and both of those are grossly contaminated.”
He could still function intellectually, but he had less and less time for anything except his illness. It had progressed to an extreme. He had to spend nearly eleven hours a day in ritual cleaning of himself. Before he could touch his telephone, his only truly functional connection to the world outside, he had to shower for about four hours. He had to wash every square millimeter of his body, and if, when he was almost done, he realized or imagined that he’d missed a spot, or accidentally brushed against the shower wall, he had to start washing all over again. He remembered that when he was a boy he would wash and wax his father’s cars and invariably his father would say, “You missed a spot.” Alan wondered if there was a connection.
He had to spend about an hour and a half brushing his teeth before they felt clean. Back in Boston years before, he’d had some of his teeth broken in a car accident. The repairs hadn’t weathered well, and now he brushed what remained so ardently that he began wearing ruts in them. A dentist told him that decay would destroy his teeth more slowly. But he had to brush for that hour and a half, then clean the spattered mirror and vanity—very carefully, lest he contaminate himself again. If the trash in his apartment had contained food, his only safe place in the world would have become unbearable. So he had to go out to restaurants, hoping someone would be there to open the door for him. At best, that meant sitting in chairs others had occupied. Contaminated by the world outside, his own clothes became dangerous objects. So he had to wash them often, and once he’d washed them, no matter how carefully, he felt dirty and in need of showering once more.
