Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Laura thought, “He’s been teaching here twenty years, and it doesn’t get old!”

  She read the poem three times for that course. She slogged through it. She had no religious education and had to keep stopping to look things up. She admired the poem. “I mean, it’s great.” But she didn’t really enjoy it. Samuel Johnson had called it admirable and added, “None ever wished it longer than it is.” That was how she felt. She wasn’t very sorry when the course ended. She got a B, which was all she felt she deserved. Milton lay behind her, a chore completed. But pieces of the poem kept rattling around in her mind. One night during vacation, she went to bed and lay awake trying to remember a line from Paradise Lost. Finally, she got up and went to her living room, and took her volume of Milton from the bookcase that she’d borrowed from Smith. At the start of every semester she would make a reconnaissance of the college bookstore and figure out how much the books she needed cost, and then save up for them. Her Milton was pricey—$70. But she’d felt she had to own it. She liked to open it and inhale its smell. She liked its heft and the way the paper felt against her fingers. Now she opened it and found the passage that was keeping her awake. She still didn’t feel sleepy. So she turned to the beginning of the poem, and began to read again: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe …”

  Reading modern criticism this past semester, Laura had thought, “Milton probably was a misogynist. But so what?” In one course she had a professor who said the so-called great authors were best understood as creatures of time and circumstance, as producers of “texts,” some of which were “hegemonic.” Laura hadn’t studied the fading doctrines of the deconstructionists, but she knew that notion wasn’t right. It seemed temporal to her, tightly bound to the inessential time of academic fashion, which was exactly what the great books weren’t. She sat on her sofa now and read on and on through Paradise Lost. She didn’t stop to look up anything. She didn’t have to. The poem’s majestic, oceanic music carried her so far off that when she lifted her eyes from the book, she was startled to find herself in her apartment.

  In her living room window, a gray dawn was rising over the Holyoke Range. From the street below came the sounds of the day’s first two trucks, delivering bread and newspapers to Serio’s Market across the street. Adam and Eve were leaving the Garden. “They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” She closed the book. She thought, “I just read all of Paradise Lost. I can’t believe it.” Inside her apartment all was still. Benjamin, who was on vacation too, lay asleep in the room off the kitchen, sleeping the sleep of teenagers. “This is cool,” she thought. “There’s nobody here I have to explain myself to.” She had read effortlessly, and this time, she thought, she’d understood the poem to its depths, a poem, she now believed, that defined a word like “greatness.” Months ago she’d opened to those pages in ignorance and little by little she’d made her way through. Now she had come to the end. In the pattern of her earlier life, she committed a reckless act and got kicked out or dropped out or watched her life spiral downward, without really knowing why. That seemed like a pattern without natural progression, like no pattern at all.

  “There’s a religious thing that happens in literature,” Laura said later. “It is religious. Not churchy religious. I mean, we all want our lives to be important. You read a poem like Paradise Lost and you get your smallness, but somehow it matters. One thing that saddens me about my mother, I don’t think that she thought her life mattered, and it did! I mean, she had four children. I don’t think her suicide was a momentary lapse of reason. I think she suffered terribly behind what we today would call low self-esteem.” She went on, “I had a conversation with my little brother about literature and religion, and he knew nothing, and I could tell him some, and he was so impressed. ‘God, you’re smart,’ he said. He didn’t know anything about the Protestant Reformation. You have to know those things. Otherwise, there’s huge gaps.” She laughed at herself. What difference did knowing those things make? “If you don’t know any better, I guess it doesn’t, but illiteracy scares the hell out of me. And at some level I always knew that the lack of a formal education limited me. I would read things and find allusions and I wouldn’t know what they were. It was like living in a world with a language you don’t speak. Literature is an alternative to self-destructive things. I think literature is the way out. I mean, books saved my life.”

  Most of her high school friends had gone on to college. She’d had a baby instead. She had kept up with some of those friends. She remembered one talking about the books she was reading in college. “And I wasn’t doing that,” Laura thought, with her volume of Milton closed on her lap. “And now I am. And now I am. And it isn’t too late and I’m not too old, and I don’t have to punish myself for not doing things the way other people did.” As the trucks of the Honor Court rattled down Main Street a couple of blocks away, Laura put her Milton carefully back in the bookcase and went to bed. While Northampton awakened, she slept well.

  A rectangular piece of granite rests, entirely hidden, under a yew bush in front of Forbes Library. It was once a front doorstep, and is all that remains of the Northampton home of Jonathan Edwards. The town has kept some other mementos—a monument to the Edwards family in the old Bridge Street Cemetery; a plaque on the steps of the First Church, noting that he preached near that site. (The church actually named after him, a modern Swiss-chalet-style building, is one of downtown’s few eyesores.) A small cul-de-sac near a supermarket bears his name. But the elm trees he planted along Main Street were cut down long ago, and his homestead demolished.

  The brownstone steeple of the First Church rises like a tall wizard’s hat above Main Street. Both Congregationalists and Baptists use the building now, so “First Churches” has become its proper name. It descends directly from the meetinghouses near this site in which the town’s church used to gather, Northampton’s only church for almost two centuries. The town built the first two meetinghouses in the 1600s, the third in the mid-1730s, during the first stirrings of the Great Awakening. Jonathan Edwards preached in both the second and third buildings.

  It isn’t hard to imagine that third church, an ordinary white wooden structure on a dirt Main Street in a small, sleepy town: outside, farmers’ wagons and a carriage or two and a great noise coming through the wide wooden doors. Perhaps they stood open, affording a view down the central aisle, past the pews where most of the town sat, to the pulpit where Edwards stood. He wore a bib collar and a periwig, like an English judge’s hairpiece. “Tall in person, and having even a womanly look, he was of a delicate constitution,” one commentator writes. But Edwards put on a rousing show, the best show in town, the best in the region. The historian Perry Miller conjures up the scene:

  The people yelled and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded up to the pulpit and begged him to stop, they cried for mercy. One who heard him described his method of preaching: he looked all the time at the bell rope (hanging down from the roof at the other end of the church) as though he would look it in two; he did not stoop to regard the screaming mass, much less to console them.

  Most anthologies of American literature offer only that picture of Edwards, through his fire-and-brimstone sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” That one exhortation puts to shame all the rants of TV evangelists, but it doesn’t fully represent the man. Edwards felt great solicitude for his flock, and nature could put him in raptures. In frontier New England the Puritans had seen “a hideous and howling wildernesse.” In the landscape of the settled Connecticut River Valley of the 1700s, Edwards saw God’s beautiful works. He went outdoors to gather inspiration for sermons and dissertations. He had a famous habit of coming back with notes pinned to his coat—“quite literally covered with his thoughts,” writes the historian Daniel Aaron. After he’d spent twenty-three years as Northampton’s eloquent spiritual guide,
the church threw him out.

  Scholarly opinions vary on the main reasons, whether they were economic, political, theological, or all of those and more. It’s clear that Edwards worried mightily about Northampton’s morals. He worried about its tendency toward un-Christian fractiousness. He worried about the decline of family discipline, about the fact that local youth went out walking after dark, wasted time in levity, misbehaved in church. He had exacting standards and he expected the town to hew to them. By this period, the tithing-men seem to have lost their clout. Maybe the town had grown tired of moral goading.

  Or maybe the cause lay in the death of his most powerful ally, or in his lack of political savvy. In one incident, some young Northampton men passed around a midwife’s manual and made jokes about it in the presence of young ladies. Edwards named both suspects and witnesses from the pulpit, failing to distinguish between them, and some of them were children of the town’s leading citizens. His grandfather, the town’s minister for almost sixty years, had made it fairly easy to become a member of the single church—an important matter, because membership in the church was equivalent to full membership in the town. After long study, Edwards decided his grandfather’s liberal policy went against the word of God. Only those who could say they had experienced a “true conversion” should be admitted, he finally declared. That did it for the parishioners. A majority rebelled and voted to get rid of him.

  A long, tangled battle of words ensued. Edwards knew he would probably lose. In a letter to a friend in Boston, he wrote: “If I should be wholly cast out of my ministry, I should be in many respects in a poor case: I shall not be likely to be serviceable to my generation, or get a subsistence, in a business of a different nature.” He continued: “I seem as it were to be casting myself off from a precipice; and have no other way, but to go on, as it were blindfold, i.e. shutting my eyes to everything else but the evidences of the mind and will of God, and the path of duty; which I would observe with the utmost care.” Edwards stood firm, with magnificent stubbornness. He was not the sort of person who would bend a principle to save his job.

  He delivered his “Farewell Sermon” on June 22, 1750. In it, he issued a long and tightly reasoned threat. On Judgment Day, he told the church, they would meet again, and then it would be clear who was to blame for the rift between them. “But they that evil entreat Christ’s faithful ministers, especially in that wherein they are faithful, shall be severely punished,” he said. That is, some of the people listening might end up in hell for sending him away. He had described hell vividly to them for more than two decades, and now he delivered some frightening phrases—people who thought themselves “the most eminent saints in the congregation” were often, he said, “in a peculiar manner a smoke in God’s nose.” Northampton was still God-fearing, by and large; reading the farewell sermon, you half expect the people to rescind the church’s vote and beg Edwards to stay. It didn’t happen.

  For many years Northampton’s boosters had good reason to feel uncomfortable about the legacy of Edwards. For a long time Northampton was best known to the world as the place that had banished one of the pantheon. But no one cared much about that nowadays. If Edwards had left a lasting imprint on Northampton, it wasn’t obvious. He seemed to have become more to the world than to the town.

  Perry Miller insists that Edwards’s expulsion was a tragedy. And maybe it was, for the town and for Edwards. But not for intellectual history. His Northampton duties claimed a lot of his time and thought. After Northampton, he lived in Stockbridge, on the frontier. There he preached to Indians; evidently, he treated them well and with respect. And there he had time to think deeply and to write his doctrinal treatises Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, and The Nature of True Virtue. Historians generally regard Edwards as one of the eighteenth century’s greatest thinkers. One calls him “America’s first systematic philosopher.” That part of his reputation rests mainly on what he wrote after leaving Northampton.

  But for all the vehemence of his farewell sermon, Edwards felt attached to this place. “How often have we met together in the house of God in this relation!” he said to the people of Northampton. “How often have I spoke to you, instructed, counseled, warned, directed and fed you, and administered ordinances among you, as the people which were committed to my care, and whose precious souls I had the charge of! But in all probability this never will be again.” Toward the end of the sermon he offered them advice, rather tenderly. They should stop fighting with each other, he said, among other things, “and by all means in your power seek the prosperity of the town.”

  One small contingent remained loyal. They tried to persuade Edwards to start a new church in Northampton. He did not want to leave, but he refused. He believed the town should be unified. In the letter to his friend in Boston, he had written: “I am now comfortably settled, have as large a salary settled upon me as most have out of Boston.”

  But it was time for him to go.

  Tommy sat on his father’s front porch in the quiet of a late summer afternoon. He had a couple of hours to chat before going on duty. Bill said that yesterday he’d been playing around with his new cordless telephone. He’d decided to place a call to Tommy’s mother. “I picked it up and said, ‘Jane, where have ya been? I haven’t seen ya in two years.’ And suddenly the phone rang, and I was startled. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘I’m not foolin’ around with that stuff anymore. I’m more powerful than I thought.’ ”

  From the porch, Forbes Avenue looked like a bower, in dappled green shade. The conversation turned to Rick. “I won’t go to see him, because the only reason would be for curiosity,” Tommy said. “He’s being punished for something he did, and I don’t want to make it any easier for him.”

  Tommy’s voice had the kind of forceful determination that seems to undermine itself. Bill didn’t speak for a little while. Then he said, “So I wonder what he’s doing now, up there at the county jail.”

  The in vitro procedure had failed once more. Jean didn’t want to try again, not soon anyway, and Tommy, too, was ready to give up. All those hormones couldn’t be good for her, he reasoned. “I don’t want to be childless and wifeless.” He took Jean out to dinner in Northampton that night. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. He gazed at her, then lifted up a glass and said, “The only thing certain, you and me.”

  Jean lowered her eyes.

  She was readier than ever for a new life, Tommy knew, and he wasn’t sure he didn’t feel the same now. On a day in August he and Jean drove to Boston. She went shopping. He took the FBI’s written test. When he sat down and opened the booklet, the same old panicky feeling washed over him, but this time he told himself it didn’t really matter if he did badly. Life would be much simpler if he didn’t do too well. Questions on paper weren’t a true test of a cop. He didn’t have to sit here wishing he was smarter than he was. He’d do his best and leave.

  Afterward, in downtown Boston, Tommy found a bar, went in, and tossed down two pints of Guinness Stout, one right after the other. Then he went to his rendezvous with Jean. She asked him how he’d done. Her voice sounded expectant.

  “I think I did better drinking the Guinness,” Tommy said.

  The letter came two weeks later: he had passed.

  The news didn’t seem real. A few weeks after that, in mid-September, he went for a formal interview to New York City, which seemed more unreal still. The cabbie said, as he let him off at the Federal Building, “The FBI’s in there. That where you going?”

  “Could be,” Tommy said. He thought, “This guy could be a plant.” He got out. The cabbie called to him. Tommy had forgotten his change.

  He’d arrived an hour early. He’d never seen Manhattan before. The density of everything, the crowds rushing by, the car horns, the immense buildings—they’d have come as a shock to the system of anyone from a small place, never mind someone who made it his job to notice everything. Tommy wanted just to stand there and take it all in, but he didn’t dare. He thought he mi
ght get mugged. After all, this was New York. He began to feel conspicuous, standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk. “I look like Hillbilly Bob.” So he went to a fast-food restaurant. He got inside and looked around, and he realized he was the only white-skinned person in the place. “This is kind of cool. The complete opposite from Northampton.” He knew no one. No one knew him. “I’d love to work in a place like New York City,” he thought. “It would be something else to learn. I wouldn’t know all the players. Great! I never would. Even better.”

  On an evening in early October, out on his rounds, Tommy stopped his cruiser beside Pulaski Park, and in the dim glow from the streetlights, he read the letter again. It began

  I am pleased to offer you a conditional appointment as a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), United States Department of Justice.

  He still had to pass the lie-detector test and the physical. Finally there would be the background investigation. If they got that far, he figured, the feds wouldn’t find much to worry them, unless they didn’t like a colorless past. “It’s disgusting. I’m wearing the same freaking belt I had in seventh grade, as a Police Explorer.” He looked down at his belt. “And, I might add, it’s on the last hole.”

  He had weighed 220 pounds when he began his diet, a little before Rick’s trial. He had to get to 204 to meet the FBI’s standards. He now weighed 194. His uniform pants would hardly stay aloft. His stomach looked flat even with his protective vest strapped around it. His uniform collars defined a vanished girth and he looked a little silly in them, like a boy in his father’s shirt trying to wear a necktie. He was growing fitter and fitter. At the FBI Academy—if he got there—he’d have to pass a rigorous series of physical tests. He clocked a five-mile run through Northampton. At the end of each mile he got out with a can of spray paint, looked around to make sure the coast was clear, and, a graffiti vandal for the first time in his life, made a little mark on the road.