Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Tommy could see the scene then, a female detective and a little girl sitting under a tree on a summer day over a year ago. But who was this whose acts the trooper was describing? “The guy up there is not the guy he’s being made out to be. He’s the guy playing Talking Football, making models.” Everyone here probably looked at Rick and thought, “Child molester.” But they didn’t know him. The scene in front of Tommy was afloat, entirely familiar and entirely improbable, like a dream except that dreams relent.

  “Did you form any judgment as to what she felt about her father at that time, whether or not she loved her father at that time?” the prosecutor asked the trooper.

  “Clearly, she did.”

  “And was it difficult for her to say those things to you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Rick’s lawyer stood up. “You also elicited from this girl and corroborations from the family that there were occasions as very small children that they showered with their parents,” he said to the trooper. “With the knowledge of the other parent?”

  “That’s correct,” said the trooper.

  Soon Rick was summoned back to the witness stand. He walked across the courtroom with his shoulders erect. Watching him, Tommy saw again that hint of a smile. He knew what Rick was feeling, he knew Rick so well. Inside, Rick was struggling to keep his outside looking strong. That little smile, that flash of pride—there was more pain in it than in the sobs Rick had heaved a while back.

  “So I want to be clear as to what you’re saying now, sir,” the judge said to Rick. “You’re saying you have no reason to question what your daughter said happened on the night in question; is that correct?”

  “That is correct,” said Rick.

  The judge asked Rick’s lawyer to explain why he thought this plea was in his client’s best interest. The lawyer rose and said that he believed the prosecution’s case was “most substantial,” and the plea bargain “eminently fair.” He added that Rick “at no moment desired to have his child, despite his inability to recall, come into this court or, in fact, any other member of the family, and go through these proceedings. And that has played a substantial part as well.”

  Tommy watched Rick’s shoulders begin jerking up and down, puppet-like. Rick was crying again. Tommy thought about the many times he’d seen defendants sit weeping in that chair. Often their families wept too, and he sat out here in the gallery thinking he could feel their eyes on him, and hear their voices asking him, “How could you do this?” Usually he’d felt glad when a defendant pled out and ended matters quickly and he could get out of court and back to work. He remembered wondering what it would be like to be the person in that witness box, pleading out, being sent to jail. “A living hell,” he thought.

  All the trials and pleas he’d witnessed in this room had to do with someone else’s problems. This one came from three doors down the street. This was what could have happened to him, if he had shot that boy downtown the other evening. If he had, maybe he’d be sitting there, where Rick was.

  The judge was questioning Rick again. “Did you just hear what your attorney said to me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you agree with him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You would acknowledge to me, then, that in your judgment, the Commonwealth’s case against you is a strong one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think that your defenses are tenuous at best?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And do you believe it is in your best interest to offer an Alford plea of guilty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. Thank you very much. Now are you pleading guilty willingly, freely, and voluntarily?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Has anybody forced you to plead guilty?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Has anybody threatened you or promised you anything to make you plead guilty? ”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you had enough time to fully discuss your case, including your rights, your defenses, and possible consequences of this guilty plea, with your attorney?”

  “Yes, sir, I have.”

  “Has your attorney explained to you all of the rights and choices that you would have in the event you chose to have a trial?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think that your attorney has acted in your best interest?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Do you think you’ve been fairly and competently represented by your attorney?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you confused by any of my questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And so, as I understand it then, you are pleading guilty because you think it’s in your best interest to do so and for no other reason; is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  The solemn process of the law had become like incantation. Right before his eyes, Rick was being officially transformed into a confessed child molester, a convicted felon, an inmate of the county jail. For most of the people who were sentenced to serve time there, the place was just an extension of their former lives. Like another rooming house. Of course, they weren’t free there, but they could count on being surrounded by acquaintances and friends. But the Rick he’d known did not belong in jail. An intelligent man who had lived in a fine house he’d built with his own hands, with a hot tub, with a wife and children. “And he has to live with what he did, and whether he did it or didn’t, he’ll probably have to live next to a little worm he would have arrested last year. Watching TV all day. That’s gotta be hell.” Staring at Rick, Tommy thought—as he remembered later—“Six months in this county jail is not a long time. But six months’ incarceration with those mental midgets that I put in there, I’d take the pipe. As my mother would say. Oh, I wish my mother was alive today.”

  The clerk, one tier below the judge, was standing now. He intoned Rick’s name and asked, “How do you now plead to Count Two of Hampshire County indictment number ninety-five-dash-zero-seven-eight, charging you with indecent assault and battery on a child under fourteen?”

  “I plead guilty.”

  Tommy watched as a court officer walked up to Rick and snapped handcuffs on him, shackling Rick’s hands in front of him. It gives a person a prayerful look. Then it was like a wedding. The heads around Tommy in the gallery turned. He turned too and watched the uniformed court officer escort Rick down the aisle. Rick held his head erect, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Out in the vestibule, as Tommy was leaving, the chief patted him on the shoulder and said Tommy was the man who had endured the worst today. Tommy liked the chief. More than anyone else, he thought, Russ deserved the credit for the department’s transformation. But Tommy didn’t like the pat or the sad-looking faces that turned toward him. “Don’t make me into some kind of victim,” he wanted to say. “If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for Rick. Feel sorry for the kid.”

  He walked over to the station and signed out. Then he went to Jake’s, the coffee shop across from the courthouse. Most of the legal establishment ate lunch there, or went there for coffee during delays in court. The place was nearly empty now. Tommy sat down at a table by a window.

  He thought back to his conversation with Rick a couple of hours ago, in the little room off the Superior Court vestibule. He remembered that Rick had told him, in words like these, “You know, the last time I went out and drank a lot was with you.” Had he been saying that Tommy was partly responsible for what had happened? If so, Tommy had an answer for his old friend. He uttered it aloud in the coffee shop. “Let me tell ya, Rick, your problem, if there was a problem, took place in the shower, and I wasn’t there.”

  Tommy’s face had hardened. He glared out the window as if glaring at the town, and his voice sounded fierce. He seemed to be talking to Northampton. “What’s right is right, what’s wrong is wrong, and the state of your internal being doesn’t matter,” he declared. He’d
never read philosophy, but at this moment he was reinventing Kant. “You do what’s right, even if it makes you feel bad.”

  His face relaxed. A gray weariness seemed to fall like a shadow over his pink cheeks. In the end he hadn’t had to testify against his friend, but in effect he had, in every way that mattered. “The right thing is the honest thing,” he said, cradling his coffee cup, staring out the window. “And if I wouldn’t have done well by an old friend of mine, I still did the right thing.”

  In a while, he got up and went outside. He felt very tired now. The coffee hadn’t helped much. Maybe tonight he would sleep, and tomorrow he’d feel better. He stood on the sidewalk, waiting for some cars to pass before he crossed King Street and headed home.

  The great advantage of plea bargains is efficiency. The court had disposed of Rick in less than a morning. The August sun was high. To the south, a green patch of the Holyoke Range stood in the frame of Pleasant Street. Tommy was surrounded by old stomping grounds—across the way, the tall façade of the Hotel Northampton, the D.A.’s office tucked into a corner of that building, the courthouse annex just beyond, and right behind him the old Calvin Theatre, its windows papered over. The message on the Calvin’s drooping marquee, TEMPORARILY CLOSED, had lost most of its letters and now read TEMP C O D. It seemed unlikely that the town’s capitalists would let it languish, but for the moment the building looked like a vision of what downtown might have become and, who could say, still might. He’d watched movies there for most of his life. A year or so before the theater closed, he quit going to it because kids he’d arrested would sit some rows behind him and Jean and shower them with pieces of candy. There were only a few public places left in town where he felt comfortable in civilian clothes, having a meal or a drink or coffee, and even in those he’d try to sit with his back against a wall in a spot where he could see the door. And there was hardly a place in sight, a place in town, where he hadn’t dealt with a corpse or a criminal, a domestic battle or a citizen in trouble.

  The other day he’d sat down in Jake’s and the waitress who brought his coffee had said, with a meaningful look, “I got a phone call the other night.” Cryptic remarks like that fell immediately into a gigantic structure in Tommy’s mind, like a genealogical chart. It had assembled itself over years. The waitress’s remark fitted into a small corner of it, a section composed in part, only in part, of the following: The waitress’s daughter was going out with a well-known scammer’s son, who had recently been in trouble. The son had a child by a woman whom Tommy liked, though he’d arrested her brother for robbery once, and had also arrested her brother’s son, who had slashed someone with a knife. The son also had a brother who was a good friend of Tommy’s young friend Luis, “a good kid,” who in his childhood had been a close friend of Felix, the boy Tommy once thought of adopting. The other night Felix’s pregnant girlfriend was wearing a gold chain, which Felix had bought from a boy whom Tommy had arrested many times. Judge Ryan had ordered that boy to sell that chain to pay his fines for beating up a girl, and he’d obeyed, then taken the money to Holyoke to buy marijuana, and had gotten mugged there. That boy’s mother was one of Tommy’s high school classmates … The skein of associations seemed endless.

  The chart in Tommy’s mind was the human chart of Northampton, the part he dealt with anyway, sometimes connecting to parts he didn’t want to deal with as a cop. It came with his map of the geographic city, which contained all the escape routes and hiding places a criminal might use, both the places where he and Rick used to play and the junkies’ lairs. Both chart and map had been very useful. The advantages of familiarity had always seemed to outweigh the liabilities. But he hadn’t been amused the other day when he took his best court suit to the dry cleaners and the young female clerk said, “Your name’s O’Connor, right?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “That’s not good, is it,” Tommy had said.

  It turned out he’d arrested her boyfriend. Not all that long ago, Tommy would have laughed. Now the thought of encounters like that made him think, “I’m sick of this.” He found it harder and harder to write tickets. As often as not, it seemed, the driver turned out to be the son of a teacher he had liked, or the girlfriend of an informant with whom he had to maintain good relations. He didn’t care much about traffic tickets, but more and more he found himself feeling slightly reluctant to arrest people for more serious things, because he’d arrested them before, or their fathers, or their mothers, or their brothers, or their sisters.

  Rick had pled guilty. Ron Hall would announce it on the news tomorrow. Maybe by then Tommy would feel better. It was just another downtown morning, but nothing in the landscape that he saw around him was as large as it had been. He was standing on a sidewalk in a shrunken town.

  Autumn, and the faces of young women, nervous and expectant, could be seen looking out at Northampton through the back windows of their parents’ cars—here and there a Mercedes or a limousine with diplomatic plates, more often a station wagon. Families emerged onto Elm Street, lugging pieces of households down the sidewalks toward the Smith College dorms.

  This was the most hopeful season in Northampton, the time of the return of the Smithies. For Laura, this fall seemed especially hopeful. She would graduate next spring. A commencement speaker might say that finishing college wasn’t an end but a beginning. Laura had a better set of lines in her head. She’d been reading T. S. Eliot. She walked around downtown and the campus, reciting in her mind: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

  The amended will of Sophia Smith required that the college be situated in Northampton, but only if the town put up $25,000. That was just a fraction of Sophia’s $400,000 gift, but a handsome sum back then, about half the cost of the college’s first thirteen acres off Elm Street. Soon afterward, the trustees had asked the town for $75,000 more, and after a lot of decorous argument, the town meeting had done what democratic governments find easiest and forever tabled the proposal. In an unsigned letter to the Gazette, dated March 11, 1873, one citizen listed seven objections. The second read, in part: “This is not a town school, and we are not called upon to appropriate this money to educate our own children, as we do when we vote money for our public schools, because the institution is a college, designed for the use of people in every state in the Union. Why should one town vote its money to aid all other towns?”

  Smith nowadays dispensed roughly $50 million a year in salaries, about half of that to people who lived in Northampton. It had become by far the city’s largest employer, since the state hospital had closed. To a degree unusual among private colleges, it opened its classrooms to the town. It paid Northampton more for sewerage and water than the real costs of the services. It had pledged $75,000 toward a new fire station. (Perhaps the amount of the pledge was ironically calculated. If so, the joke was, like most items of distant history, lost on most of the town.) Some professors served on city boards and committees. Some students and some faculty did charitable works in town. Officially, relations were cordial. But when the mayor was trying to get some money out of Smith, as she did periodically—and why not, when she was chasing money everywhere and Smith had a big endowment—she could count on at least one city councillor to say for her indignant words about elite institutions that live tax-free in towns with crumbling firehouses and underfunded public schools.

  In 1842, some years before Smith’s founding, a group of people, most of them from elsewhere, attempted to establish an ideal place inside Northampton. They bought a bankrupt silk mill in what later became Florence, and set up the Northampton Association for Education and Industry. It failed four years later, mainly for lack of capital. The name “utopian community” is usually applied to that early commune and the many others like it that arose in America around that time. But the term, connoting certain failure, applies only in retrospect. The members of t
he Northampton Association—over two hundred of them at one point—didn’t think their dreams impossible. They were abolitionists. Some were active in the Underground Railroad. Many were religious, but at odds with the convenient doctrines of established churches. They dreamed of sexual, racial, and economic equality, and they wanted to show the world that a society built on such principles could thrive materially as well as spiritually. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass visited. Nathaniel Hawthorne considered joining. Sojourner Truth was a member.

  Mainstream Northampton didn’t have much truck with its short-lived radical community, but the community had left some marks on today’s incarnation of the town—effects still traceable through some of the equipment left by nineteenth-century philanthropy, and less tangible effects, like those of distant ancestry. The utopian community had contributed to a continuing tradition here, a tradition of secularized virtue that fed on dreams of ideal places. Meanwhile, Smith had endured and grown. It had become that ideal place within a place. The college’s first female president, Jill Ker Conway, described her introduction to the campus in 1974 this way: “I could spend months at a time at the University of Toronto without hearing a female voice raised. Here the women were rowdy, physically freewheeling, joshing one another loudly, their laughter deep-belly laughter, not propitiary giggles. The muddy afternoon games on the playing fields produced full-throated barracking. I was entranced.” The case for female education made itself. “I realized that this was a real alternative society, a place of true female sociability, where women ran things for themselves.”