Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  She walked around the empty campus, down the asphalt paths, looking all around. “It’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time,” she thought. It was glorious. It had an old, settled kind of beauty, lodged in the buildings and trees. “There’s this history with this place and it makes you very much aware of your own smallness,” Laura thought. “But now I belong.”

  It was obvious that the past had enriched Northampton. All you had to do was look around at the things the wealthy had left behind. It would have been a different place without them.

  Real estate agents trying to sell Northampton to prospective settlers liked to drive them past the cows that grazed in the green, sloping fields of the Smith Vocational High School Farm. Look, the agents would say, we have it all right here, a farm and cows within a mile of our lively piece of city. A country squire named Oliver Smith had left the money to start that school and farm, and had created Northampton’s Smith Charities. Other gentry had bequeathed the Academy of Music, Look Park and Childs Park, both managed and maintained at no cost to the city, the famous Clarke School for the Deaf, the People’s Institute on Gothic Street, the Hill Institute in Florence, where nursery school and adult education classes were held nowadays, and Forbes Library, the town’s public library, both the grand stone edifice and also some of the money that still ran it.

  A lot of present-day Northampton would have felt uneasy about the sources of some of those gifts. Judge Charles Edward Forbes, for instance, created the town’s library to fight the religion immigrants were bringing in—like smallpox to the Indians, he seems to have believed. In his will Forbes wrote that the knowledge stored in his library would be Northampton’s best defense against the doctrines of the Catholic church, against “the progeny of the Purple and Scarlet clad Mother.” But within a couple of generations of Forbes’s death, Irish Catholics were running Northampton, and the library was none the worse in the 1990s for the piece of paper buried, so to speak, beneath its cornerstone. Childs Park across from the high school was once the estate of a Christian minister who owned a thousand slaves in Georgia, but the land wasn’t poisoned, and anyone could walk there now. The principle of noblesse oblige was a part of Northampton’s heritage. It had served the town better than no sense of obligation at all.

  Smith College represented the most important of the legacies, and not just for Northampton. From Smith’s sacred grove, many strong, accomplished women had emerged into the wider world—important bankers and lawyers and editors, media stars and notable feminists and poets, even a couple of influential first ladies. The college no longer adhered to every provision in the will of its founder, Sophia Smith—for instance, this command: “that the Holy Scriptures be daily systematically read and studied in said college, and, without giving preference to any sect or denomination, all the education and all the discipline shall be pervaded by the Spirit of Evangelical Christian Religion.” But for over a century, for many students, the college had certainly fulfilled the will’s most eloquent, most often quoted statement of intent—“to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.”

  Interest in Sophia had revived at the college. She was just now being rediscovered as a woman far ahead of her time, with an independent mind, whose own vision had created Smith. The evidence for this portrait was scant. It was far more likely that Sophia’s pastor, John M. Greene, a country Congregational minister, did most of the inventing. Sophia got credit mainly for listening to him and, with enthusiasm, putting up the money. In any case, almost everything known about the founding comes from Greene. There seems no way of knowing if he exaggerated his role, though more likely he did the opposite. After hearing one of Greene’s glowing eulogies after Sophia’s death, another minister who knew her wrote to him, “I fear you have over-estimated our plain Miss Smith.”

  Sophia was born in the late 1700s. She lived and died in Hatfield, a very sleepy little farm town near Northampton. If Greene had been a self-aggrandizing Svengali, he might have tried to talk Sophia into leaving Hatfield a cathedral-sized Congregational church. Sophia, too, might well have acted differently. Most of the money she left to create Smith came from her brother Austin, by virtually all accounts a nasty, pathologically miserly man. He was once quoted as saying that not even God would get his money. If she had resembled him, Sophia might have refused to make a will at all. Or she might have acted like her uncle Oliver. He had a larger fortune than Sophia, but he encumbered his will with instructions and prohibitions. He made it a dead hand of the past, and by now his legacy had shrunk to insignificance beside Sophia’s. Compared to Uncle Oliver’s, Sophia’s will reads like a love letter to the future.

  Sophia never married. No evidence has yet turned up that she ever had a lover, male or female. In middle age she was, in the words of a fellow townswoman, “short of stature, plain in face, limping in gait, with a partial deafness.” She came into her fortune late in life, after everyone else in her family had died. On December 26, 1864, when she was sixty-eight years old, Sophia wrote in her journal: “Sunday morning. In the house all alone. Oh how solitary is this home! I look forward, but it looks more dark. I only see old age in the distance, and sickness and death. Backward all these ties broken that connected me with them and with life.” She had become almost completely deaf. Greene was one of the few people whose speech she could decipher, fortunately enough.

  They were frequent companions, and it is pleasing to imagine the two of them dreaming up the college, in the parlor of her family’s farmhouse, Greene speaking to her through her ear trumpet. Perhaps he talked about how college education would make women better wives, especially wives for ministers; he is known to have harbored that theory. Perhaps it was Sophia herself who came up with these lines for her grand bequest: “I would have the education suited to the mental and physical wants of woman. It is not my design to render my sex any the less feminine, but to develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood, and furnish women with the means of usefulness, happiness, and honor, now withheld from them.” Words embarrassingly tentative to sensibilities at Smith today. But Sophia lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She didn’t think that women ought to have the right to vote. Most likely it was just a good impulse of her heart that led to this wonderful college. But there is wisdom in a simple generosity like hers. For one thing, it avoids the often costly error of trying to imagine the future in great grasping detail.

  As recently as a couple of decades ago Smith College might have seemed vaguely familiar to Sophia and her pastor. Not now, not at ten P.M. on the night before exams, called Primal Scream Night, and not at Convocation or at Rally Day, when a few students were bound to show up wearing only bras and britches. And certainly not on National Coming Out Day, when some of the lesbian students chalked messages on asphalt paths all over the campus. Recently, a student found herself giving her parents a tour of the campus on that day. She spent the whole time frantically pointing up at trees, hoping to keep her parents from looking down. One chalking declared:

  I FUCK WOMEN

  Another said:

  I’M A VAGITARIAN

  Another looked like this:

  TOP 5 REASONS

  TO

  1. SMARTER

  2. BREASTS

  3. CUTER

  4. BETTER IN BED

  5. NO DICKS

  No one alive in Northampton in 1870, when Sophia signed her will, could have imagined the Smithies who wrote those naughty words. Sophia could not have conceived of a college that admitted a grown woman who arrived with a child instead of a lady’s maid, wasn’t even married, didn’t go to church, and smoked a brand of cigarettes called Kools. Sophia couldn’t have imagined Smith. She couldn’t have imagined Laura.

  It was going to take a while for Northampton to notice the change in Alan Scheinman. As always, he scurried in shorts down the snowbound streets, following his theory that being cold in the morning kept one warm the rest of the
day. But Alan was taking steps to rejoin the contaminated world.

  He hadn’t realized how much time and energy he’d consumed by being depressed, until his depression lifted. He had begun to attack his compulsions. His psychiatrist came up with the general plan, and a behaviorist suggested that Alan keep track of the time he spent at each of his cleaning rituals. He took this on as assiduously as he had once prepared law cases, searched titles, devised real estate deals, as compulsively as he had decontaminated his world for the past ten years. He made up charts and hung them on his wall. He had to beat the charts, just had to. And what a pleasure of accomplishment it gave him to see the hours he spent at showering and tooth-brushing diminish. He stared at the charts. The pattern was dramatic.

  His father had died about two and a half years ago. The old man hadn’t left him any money, only his favorite treasures—three very costly Patek Philippe wristwatches and a powder-blue Rolls-Royce, the only Rolls in Northampton. Alan often thought about his father now. He felt proud of the way the old man had departed, refusing to be kept alive on respirators.

  Several times every year, and always before he went on a trip, Alan’s father used to visit his own mother’s grave. He never spoke about it, and never took Alan with him—he wasn’t a demonstrative man, except in the courtroom. On a drizzly, dismal-looking day, Alan drove to the little Jewish cemetery in Connecticut where his grandmother was buried. The place contained about three hundred headstones. As he searched for his grandmother’s, Alan noticed that the dates on many stones were old, and that no one had left pebbles on them. “There’s no one alive who would have known these people ever,” he thought. “No one alive would have known these people.” When he found his grandmother’s grave, he began to speak out loud to her, to this woman whom he’d never met. He told her that her son had died and wouldn’t be coming to visit her anymore. He didn’t imagine that she could hear him. He didn’t imagine that she couldn’t. He simply felt obliged to deliver this news to this place. And once he’d done that, he thought again of all the other people buried there. “No one alive is likely to have ever mentioned their names. Ever said their names.” He walked from one stone to the next, in the rain, and read each name aloud. There was no one else around, but he felt as though he were repopulating the place. He felt as if he were shaking dust off all those names.

  He still had a horror of things that touched the ground, but now, back in Northampton, he put on rubber gloves and began to clean ten years of trash out of his apartment. It filled about two hundred large garbage bags. He lost count. Perhaps he used three hundred. While cleaning, he found about $3,000 in soiled currency on the floors.

  One day, as he drove alone across the state, heading for his psychiatrist’s office, Alan put on a tape of old rock-and-roll tunes. Over the Rolls’s sound system came the song “Angel Baby,” by Rosie and the Originals. The lead singer had a high, tinny voice. “It’s just like heaven bein’ here with you.” It took him right back, to Friday night record hops at the Y in New Bedford, all the girls on one side of the room and all the boys on the other, the boys standing around discussing the things they knew least about, such as women. When that lovely, sexy girl Donna and her lovely friend Elaine walked in, in their Ivy League button-down shirts and tight, knee-high sheath skirts, everything would stop, and the boys would stare and the girls would make catty remarks, and Alan, socially one of the least of the boys, shy and retiring, not popular enough to be dating anyone, would gaze longingly at Donna until he finally worked up the nerve to ask her to dance. He wouldn’t dance with anyone else, and back then he wasn’t coordinated enough to manage anything faster than slow dancing. Back then slow dancing was a clinch, the girl’s arms around the boy’s neck, the boy’s arms around her waist, every square inch of the fronts of their bodies pressed together. It was the closest thing to sex he ever had with Donna. He didn’t talk to her before they danced, while they danced, or after they danced. He did get to drive nice cars to the record hops, and sometimes Donna would let him drive her home in his father’s T-Bird or Lincoln, and sometimes they’d stop at the Orchid Diner for a toasted Danish, and they would talk a little but not about much. He was aware even then that he had no real control over his future and assumed that she didn’t either. He would follow his father’s program, while she would probably become a hairdresser.

  Driving along now, Alan could feel Donna in his arms—he was plastered to her again, swaying to “Angel Baby”—and he had what felt like a compulsion, like the one he’d felt in his grandmother’s graveyard, to let her know that he possessed this warm memory of her. “I don’t want to get together with her, I don’t really want to know what she’s been doing for the last thirty years, I just realize how grateful I am to her, to dance with this kind of geeky guy, this nerdy guy, and what a thrill it was for me.”

  Back home above Pleasant Street, once he’d decontaminated himself and could use his phone—rituals he still had to perform—Alan spent a long time tracking down Donna’s mother. She told him that Donna had gotten married and divorced and had gone back to college. The mother was hard to talk to, though, and Alan quickly realized that she would never give him Donna’s phone number or address. So he said, “I’d like to write a little note to Donna. If I do that, would you forward it to her?” And, of course, the woman said she would.

  So Alan wrote a letter. Before he sent it, he decided to add a touch of glamour to it. From his Tiffany’s catalogue, he bought a little sterling silver heart-shaped perfume bottle, perfume included, for about $85. He enclosed it with the letter, and in due course he received a note, not from Donna, but from her mother, saying that Donna was much moved by the little remembrance he’d sent her. Alan laughed, imagining the mother dabbing perfume on her neck as she wrote the note. He’d wanted only to thank Donna. A typical performance, he thought afterward—to get obsessed about having contact with another person and to act in a way out of all proportion to the circumstances. To overdo it. On social matters, he was out of practice.

  In Northampton he dressed so raggedly sometimes that newcomers mistook him for one of the town’s street people. Standing in conversation, he would fold his arms on his chest in a fidgety way and rise up on tiptoe, and these seemed like signs of a self-consciousness that doesn’t know it’s visible. But he was not an unappealing dinner date. He could dress up again. He didn’t have to wear rubber gloves every time he went outside. He talked at immoderate length sometimes, but he also conveyed a genuine curiosity about the people he talked to, and the stories he told were frank and interesting. If you looked at him carefully, you saw he wasn’t bad-looking at all. And he drove a Rolls.

  Alan went out on a few dates. He grew quite fond of a certain woman, a little but not very much younger than he. It seemed there might be hope for a real relationship with her. But he let her slip away. “There’s a certain expectation of intimacy after you’ve gone out with someone a few times,” Alan explained. And intimacy was something that he still couldn’t manage.

  Alan understood the theory of what is called exposure and response prevention. In this clinically proven therapy, the patient is deliberately exposed to a fearful thing and is not allowed to respond with the usual anxiety-relieving rituals for at least forty-five minutes. A cleaner, for instance, might have to plunge his hands in dirt and refrain from washing them for most of an hour. After repeated sessions, most cleaners begin to relax in spite of their contaminated hands. The process terrifies the patient, but the great majority eventually become “habituated.” That is, the compulsion to perform the ritual diminishes greatly. Alan, who had rejected this approach earlier, now decided to employ it, but in his own way and for an unusual purpose: “to reacquaint myself with the female geography,” he said.

  Northampton didn’t have a strip club—imagine the uproar, if it had. But there was one nearby, called the Castaway Lounge. It was situated in a rural town, right next to a small swamp, Alan noticed, with a lot of pickup trucks in the parking lot. A banal sort
of place—a barroom that contained a raised rectangular platform with a linoleum floor and a low counter running all around it and cheap swivel chairs set up beside the counter railing, the inner walls of the counter strung with what looked like Christmas-tree lights. On the runway, to the strains of loud contemporary music, a naked young woman was doing what was called dancing, which meant striking poses—draping herself over the counter, lying on her back on the grimy linoleum floor of the runway with her legs spread, then kneeling with her naked buttocks lifted high, all the while wearing on her face, Alan noticed, a look of studied indifference. All around the counter lay dollar bills.

  The discriminating part of Alan’s mind didn’t find the entertainment sexy. It wasn’t even raunchy. It was gynecology in a flophouse. But gynecological exhibits were what he came for, the first times he entered that dingy place and sat down in front of a counter scarred with cigarette burns, in a vinyl-covered chair that looked truly contaminated. He felt frightened of the place, and more frightened of his reactions to the sights one purchased there. He had his hands covered with plastic bags again. He kept his chair several feet back from the edge of the runway, just in case. It was a little scary sitting there, a few feet away from a naked young woman, who was looking at him upside down from between her legs. But he didn’t want to get up and run away, as most people do in their first anguished sessions of exposure and response-prevention therapy. These were, after all, the first naked female bodies he had seen in years.

  So he sat there by the runway with his hands covered in plastic bags, his elbows against his chest, his wrists against his neck. He’d pull, not dollar bills, but fives from his shirt pocket, lay them down on the railing, then return to his defensive posture and watch.