Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  “Yes, I do,” says Alan, walking past.

  “Well, can I have it?”

  “No.”

  Alan is prone to charity but discriminating. Even at the height of his illness, he used to keep a lookout for the interestingly needy. He had loved Northampton most in the days when the state hospital had first begun to empty onto Main Street. He loved to watch the man who walked along holding an opened book at arm’s length in front of him. Suddenly he’d stop, and stand rigidly, as if he’d just read an arresting passage. Alan studied the man’s battered shoes. Alan had walked all over town carrying a new pair, looking for him.

  Alan had angrily refused to participate in last fall’s memorial service for Ben, the homeless man. He’d known Ben at least as well as anyone else in town had. Ben had greatly admired Alan’s Rolls. Alan couldn’t let anyone inside the car back then, so he’d started giving Ben copies of the quarterly Rolls-Royce owners’ magazine, and Ben would wander off toward his home by the railroad tracks, studying the glossy photos of polo matches and picnics in the Alps. Alan gave him money regularly. One time he offered Ben a job, but Ben just walked away.

  American Christmas can be painful for a Jew. But for Alan, it was an exciting potlatch. He’d study his friends’ children, then go shopping. He’d buy toy trains and drums for the boys, art sets and wristwatches and fourteen-carat gold chains with pendant amethysts for the girls. A couple of years ago the four-year-old daughter of a friend made a book for him. He bought her a small gold chain with an emerald on it. Every year thereafter another book had arrived, and Alan headed out for downtown’s jewelry stores, laughing happily, saying, “I could be in trouble for a lot of years. Until she reaches her twenties and decides all this is stupid.” Alan thought the cause of his gift-giving lay in his childhood home. He couldn’t remember hearing the word “love” used there, and presents from his father were usually the result of arduous negotiations. Maybe the array of wants and needs and stratagems gift-giving served could be subsumed under a term like “control.” But it would have been as accurate to say that acts of largesse gave Alan chances to act in the world with some visible effect.

  A psychologist at Smith—he’d never met Alan—had for years conducted clinical research on obsessive-compulsive disorder. He’d begun to think that many victims shared the most civilized of traits. These weren’t obvious, but dig beneath the bizarre behavior, then down below the crippling fears, and, he said, you’d often find a kind of thinking that looked out on the world with great concern. “It’s like having the world in your head,” the researcher explained. “And it’s your responsibility to keep the world safe, to fix it.” Believing that their own thoughts had power, obsessive-compulsives tended to try to worry theirs toward harmlessness. Some—so-called checkers—fretted endlessly over the fear that they might have done somebody harm. They seemed like model citizens gone mad with conscientiousness.

  Alan’s political philosophy was libertarian. He’d voted against the Domestic Partnership Ordinance because he felt it granted too much power to the city government. The power to license various kinds of cohabitation implied the power to forbid them, he thought, and he wanted none forbidden. But if it had been even remotely possible, Alan would have taken care of the world, one needy individual after another. He was especially susceptible to youth, and to pretty waifs. In town, rumors abounded that Alan hunted little girls, but this was untrue. He had asked young women to pose for him, but he’d always made sure they were over eighteen. He imagined having an affair with one of them but, sensing that she wasn’t interested, he’d lost interest, too. And then for a time she became virtually his ward. “I feel another subsidy coming on,” he said happily of her a while back. She needed help, unquestionably. “I want to be someone, I guess. I don’t want to be just another statistic,” she told him once. She said, “I think a lot of teenagers go through a stage of feeling rejected, feeling really awkward. Sometimes I still feel like I’ve grown an extra arm or something.” He helped her go back to school. He counseled her relentlessly. But for some reason that Alan couldn’t fathom, she attracted truly psychotic young men. Worse, she was attracted to them. She had a brief affair with one young man who soon afterward was sent to a mental hospital, and Alan thought, “I hope she never hooks up with him again.” Then she did. Alan told her over the phone, “One of these days one of these people is going to do you great harm.”

  “Well,” she said, “why are people always telling me I’m about to ruin my life?”

  In the end, he had to give up trying to help her. He lay awake nights worrying about her, and the worries began to feel familiar.

  There was an odd nobility, a knight-errant quality, about Alan—in his willingness to suffer for the sake of life itself, in his tendency to view himself under harsher light than he would turn on others, in his impulsive generosity. Alan wasn’t about to divest himself of his fortune on behalf of the interestingly needy, but he was prepared to divest himself of a sizable percentage for love.

  Suzanne had come back now, and his life was exciting again. “Without her in my life, my life would be okay. I would go to Sylvester’s every morning, read the paper, do the crossword, schmooze, shop, read, watch TV, maybe have a date or do some photography. Take a trip here and there. That would be my life. That isn’t my life with her. I’m out learning about computers now. I bought one. It’s capable of editing film.” They were going to make videos together, designed for foot fetishists. “I would never have been interested,” he said. “It’s like hitting passing gear. We run our separate lives and talk about people we’re seeing. Whether we have a hot, exclusive romantic relationship or not, we’ll have a hot something.” He said, “If I walk away from this minus fifty thousand dollars, with all that I’ll have learned and the excitement, you know you can’t buy that for fifty thousand dollars.”

  But the new relationship, what Alan later called round two, followed much the same course as the old. Suzanne got into a scrape with some people she met at a strip joint. She told Alan about it. For the first time since he’d met her, he heard fear in her voice. He felt greatly moved. He gave her $10,000 so she could quit stripping. But then an old boyfriend came to town, and round two ended. Round three began some months later, when she called him from a police station. She’d gotten caught in the middle of a fight between two boyfriends. In due course, Alan put on a jacket and necktie and made a brief return to his lawyering past. She’d done nothing wrong and he easily got her off. Not long afterward he heard her say, “I met this really mellow guy.” Alan told her, “Don’t call me again, unless you’re interested in an exclusive romantic relationship.” Several months later, she called.

  When Alan talked about the relationship now, his tone was weary and determined and fatalistic. “I have to say that in my own demented way I did love, I still do love Suzanne.” In part he felt indebted. “Suzanne represents for me, if not hope, the willingness to strive, to try something different, to keep moving on. She opened doors for me I would never have opened myself.” He’d house her in a separate apartment, replace her dying car, call in an old favor and get her a job, pay for her therapy. “I’ll be there, be a rock for her,” he said. He didn’t sound happy or unhappy. He seemed to feel this was an obligation, not a burden, that fate had settled on him. This, he thought, had become his job. (Not the most productive line of work, though it was interesting to imagine a Northampton in which every resident with means felt compelled to assume obligations of that sort.)

  Alan continued to visit his old psychiatrist, the one he’d met at McLean. Alan liked him. The man was wry, judicious, open-minded. From time to time he uttered prophecies. One afternoon Alan sat in the psychiatrist’s office relating the latest episode in the relationship. It was failing again, and this time it was Alan who planned to end it. He talked on and on, and then finally had no more to tell.

  A pause ensued. “I have good news and bad news for you,” the doctor said at length. “You haven’t heard the last of h
er.”

  Tommy had an office in a basement room at home. Jean called it “Tom’s shrine.” On the walls around his desk hung the plaques and citations he’d received, and various mementos. A framed letter from a little girl—he’d caught the burglar who robbed her family’s house and took her piggy bank. A photograph of Tommy taking target practice, dressed in a T-shirt that read, NEVER QUESTION AUTHORITY. A snapshot of a man lying on his back on Elm Street—he told Tommy he was trying to contact people from outer space. Another of some automatic weapons he once found at Hampshire Heights.

  A sticker on his locker at the police station read, HAVING FUN AT OTHER PEOPLE’S EXPENSE. He’d put it there years ago, where fellow cops could see it. It expressed one way he felt about his job. This room expressed another, privately. The souvenirs in here were like the pieces of a story that he told only to himself. Read backward, it went from the citations and photographs to a snapshot of the days when he had hair and was marching in the department color guard, then to a portrait of his police academy class, then to the bookcase behind him where in neat array sat many little models of police cars, a collection of policeman figurines, a couple of dozen old badges. At the beginning, on the wall to his right, hung a framed reproduction of a Norman Rockwell print—a uniformed cop leaning down from his cafeteria stool to befriend a child.

  Tommy got two days off out of every six. On one of them, several weeks after the airport bust, he went down to his basement office and took the FBI’s application form out of his desk drawer. The heading read: “Preliminary Application for Special Agent Position (Please Type or Print in Ink).” Tommy stared at the form. He read over the attachment to the application again. “To qualify for training as an FBI agent, a candidate must be: 1. a U.S. citizen 2. between the ages of 23 and 37 when entering on duty 3. hold a bachelor’s degree obtained in an accredited four-year resident program at a college or university, and 4. have three years full time work experience.…” The sheet listed other hurdles—the written test, an interview, a lie-detector test, a physical, a background check. But he had the preliminary qualifications. This part of the process would be easy. The form was only five pages of simple questions. They asked only for his age and Social Security number and a few details of his education and experience.

  But he paused over the first question, in the box in the upper left-hand corner of the first page: “Name in Full: (Last, First, Middle, Maiden).” It suddenly seemed to be asking for more: What did it mean to be Thomas F. O’Connor?

  Things changed and changed again. That was the lesson of this past year. If he filled out this form and Jean got pregnant or he found he simply couldn’t leave, he could withdraw the application. Even if the FBI accepted him, he told himself, he’d probably turn them down. Chances were he’d fail the written test, but he’d never know if he didn’t try. In the meantime, he didn’t have to tell anyone he’d applied, except for Jean. She hadn’t talked him into doing this, but he knew she hoped he would.

  After a while, as if all by itself, the first box was filled in:

  O’Connor, Thomas Francis

  On a day in early June, a friend at the D.A.’s office told Tommy that Rick’s trial had advanced onto the Superior Court’s schedule. It would probably start sometime in August. That night Tommy had one of his jail dreams. He was sitting in a cell. He was guilty, though of what he didn’t know. The walls around him were painted a pale gray-blue, like the walls in the lockup at the station. He stared through the bars in his door down a long cellblock. Then he saw a jailer leading Rick in. He woke up to the sound of his own voice yelling, “Run, Rick! Run!”

  The dream hung around him until the following evening when he went to work. Then action dissolved it. The dispatcher’s voice on the radio announced “a family fight” at Hampton Gardens. “Gonna be busy tonight, eighty-three,” the dispatcher added.

  “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” Tommy said into his microphone. He hung it up and turned on his siren. He wore a manic grin. “I feel like I should have a bag of popcorn.”

  Summer nights passed quickly, as they always had. But many shifts still started slowly. On a hot afternoon in July, Tommy drove into Hampshire Heights and found the streets all but empty. A teenager came up to his window.

  “Can I play with the siren?”

  “No, Angel. You’re too old for that now.”

  Tommy drove away. “Boy. You know you’ve been working in a place a long time, when you start to deal with the kids of people you arrested as kids.”

  The radio was silent. He had some time to kill. He headed west toward Northampton’s countryside. The transition was so quick, from the Dumpster-adorned project, where tar was melting in the heat, to wooded roads, that the trip seemed dreamlike. He listened for duty calls on the radio, but drove as he sometimes did in his civilian car, slowing down to look at a house where he used to play, taking a turn to pass a piece of woods where he’d made an interesting arrest. In theory, a drive like this could go on almost forever, the landscape held so many remembered scenes. When Jean was in the car and he got sidetracked this way, she’d indulge him for a while, then say, “Stop driving around aimlessly, please.” Now, in the cruiser, he decided he should have a destination. On his way to work, on the outskirts of town, he’d noticed a newly bulldozed dirt road. When something new was built in Northampton, he liked to know it.

  He drove down the dirt track into a woods. The hot air coming in the cruiser’s windows had a sudden vein of coolness in it, falling from the foliage, all that green water suspended overhead. Then abruptly, as if the cruiser had just passed through the dark entrance of a cathedral, the view expanded and Tommy was looking out across a huge clearing, surrounded by trees, a brand-new opening in Northampton’s forest, soon to be another subdivision. Right now it looked like a wasteland. The ground had baked to a light brown. He drove across it raising dust and stopped beside a tall, fat mound of loam. Weeds sprouted from it here and there. It was just a dump truck’s sculpture, its value to the adult world calculated by its price per cubic foot and the quality of lawns to come. Tommy stared at it, remembering. “We’d have loved this.”

  He smiled. He thought of Rick and his other friends gathering on Forbes Avenue on hot summer mornings. “Let’s play Grunts and Gorillas.” “No, let’s go to the dirt mounds.” Mounds like this were always temporary things, of course, but they could usually find some. This one would have kept them busy for a week, sliding down it, burrowing into it, constructing forts—unless the contractor showed up and scared them away, as sometimes used to happen. “You never have friends like you did when you were twelve,” Tommy said. Then his expression turned sour. “Yeah, sure, until he goes and …” Tommy put the cruiser back in gear and drove away.

  These western parts of town didn’t get patrolled much. Tommy could always say that out here aimless driving wasn’t aimless, that it was his duty to check this quiet territory now and then. The radio remaining silent, aimless driving continued. He turned north on Sylvester Road, and in a little while the cruiser was bumping up the dirt road toward the place he called Turkey Hill. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d driven up here, it had been so long. “There’s a zillion-dollar place up at the very top.” He stopped before the house came into view, as he always had on those mornings long ago when he’d come up here to watch the sunrise. He got out and looked around. The trees had grown, as trees will. He craned his neck, but only a narrow vista remained. There wasn’t much point in standing there staring at leaves, so he headed out and drove around aimlessly for a while longer, a twisting, turning route that eventually led him back toward Main Street.

  In the first week of August, Tommy and Jean went to the Cape for summer vacation with Steve and Jane. They were the last of their childless friends, but were about to be childless no longer. Jane was very pregnant. Tommy and Steve dug a belly hole in the sand, so she could sunbathe comfortably. Every year he and Jean would come to the beach and Tommy would imagine that next year they
would have a child with them. He’d dream of how, in a few years, the kid would discover beach glass and learn how to get mauled safely in the waves, as he himself had done on the O’Connor summer camping trips. He was glad for his friends, but sitting on the beach, staring out to sea, he felt again as though his life had come to a dead stop.

  At night in the cottage, he studied math, for the FBI’s written test. He didn’t enjoy the studying, but it let him feel that he was trying to create some progress in his life. Besides, he didn’t have much choice. Jean tutored him, and none of his old schoolboy ruses worked on her. She’d tell him to knock it off and get back to work. He returned to Northampton and his uniform a week before Rick’s trial. The date for it was fixed now. Jury selection and hearings would begin on the fourteenth of August, and the trial proper on the fifteenth probably.

  On the evening of the eleventh, Tommy was driving in the cruiser south of downtown, when the dispatcher called him over the radio, saying in a slightly elevated voice, “Eighty-three, we have a report of an individual pointing a gun out a window, over Main Street Cleaners.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Tommy. He unclipped the microphone from the dashboard. “All right. I’ll check it out.”

  Old South Street rises steeply toward Main. Tommy stopped at the intersection, at the crest of the hill. Main Street was packed. Before him lay a typical summer evening scene. Women being led along the sidewalks by their dogs—notable how many dog owners Northampton had—a young woman in the crosswalk blowing bubbles through a little bubble-blowing wand, wobbly, rainbow-colored spheres rising in the air. There was the usual human background of ordinary-looking couples, some with ice cream cones, strolling down the sidewalk past the cleaners, and also, above the cars and crowd, leaning out a second-story window, the figure of a thin young man with dark hair. He held a black object in his right hand. “Jesus Christ!” yelled Tommy, leaning forward toward the windshield. His eyes looked almost cartoonlike, as if bulging at the sight.