Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  A commercial comes on. “Quality and variety from Serio’s Market. Your neighborhood grocery store for more than forty years. Remember the name, Serio’s Market.” The judge always shops there, when he does the shopping.

  His wife, a schoolteacher, arises. He lies in bed awhile, listening to the radio, one of many tethers to this place. Four generations of his family have lived here. What changes each saw and didn’t live to see. He wonders sometimes if it is only lack of adventurousness that has kept him here, moving on in his life by moving backward, back where he started, to the same town as his father, the same house, the same job. But even when he went away as a young man to Ireland, it was only in the hope of becoming a writer who would tell tales of Northampton. He never wanted to go far away after that. Now more than ever, when he gets a few miles from the Connecticut River, he feels, as he puts it, discombobulated.

  The judge listens on. “Cowls Building Supply. Come see what we saw.” The judge thinks of his son, not long out of college. He hopes that the young man will settle down here, and he wants to tell him to get out of town quick, before his life and this place become completely entangled.

  On the radio Dennis Lee’s voice has replaced Ron Hall’s. It’s a relatively new voice, only eighteen years on the local airwaves. “That’s our Pet Patrol for ya this morning, WHMP, the Fourteen Hundred team. This is your station! For information and conversation. Comin’ up, we’re gonna talk to Rose from the Oxbow Water Skiing Club.”

  With half an ear, the judge waits for his second alarm.

  “Here’s your morning polka for ya. On the Fourteen Hundred team!”

  So it’s 6:40. Time to get up. On the night before April Fool’s Day, the judge would lay out a needle and a full spool of thread on his bureau. In the morning he’d put the spool in his pocket and poke the end of the thread through his suit jacket. He’d let it dangle there until it was spotted by one of the women who work in the courthouse or a female friend encountered downtown. Since no woman alive can resist a loose thread, except for his sisters, who are wise to him, someone would always take hold of it and pull. And pull. And he’d cry out, “My jacket’s unraveling!” Most days provide opportunities for mischief. The judge arises to the polka. The music expresses some of what he knows about life in this town, but it is much too cheerful and innocent to express all. This is one reason the judge likes morning polkas.

  Henry James spent some time in Northampton, when it was much smaller and much more sedate. In a letter, James wrote of the town, “Life flows on as evenly as ever up here. Letters and scraps of news are very welcome. Sometimes it waxes so stupid that I swear a mighty oath that I will pack off the next day.” But in his first novel, partly set in Northampton, James let his protagonist feel the town’s beguiling side, on a night walk down what must have been Elm Street.

  As he looked up and down the long vista, and saw the clear white houses glancing here and there in the broken moonshine, he could almost have believed that the happiest lot for any man was to make the most of life in some such tranquil spot as that. Here were kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect hush of temptation. And as Rowland looked along the arch of silvered shadow and out into the lucid air of the American night, which seemed so doubly vast, somehow, and strange and nocturnal, he felt like declaring that here was beauty too—beauty sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it.

  Judge Ryan’s family home is situated on Dryad’s Green, an archway of giant hardwoods adjacent to Smith College, and everything looks much the same as in his youth, except for the trees, which are bigger. The judge still gets his gas at the same service station he went to the day he first got a license, and the walk to work—up Kensington Street to Elm, then down Bedford Terrace to State Street—is the same that he took to St. Michael’s parochial school. That building now serves as an apartment house for the elderly, but what used to be there grows more vivid to him each time he passes. He can see the St. Vincent de Paul box that used to sit in front of the school, like a big Dumpster. When they’d been drinking, he and his buddies would call their parents and say they were staying with friends. Then they’d climb into the box and make nests for the night among the soft, donated clothes.

  In the judge’s recollection, the older Janacek children make this walk with him and his siblings. Mike used to get in fights on the playground when his classmates teased the sweet Janacek girl who had cerebral palsy. Those fights led to others, when, after he’d defended her, classmates accused Mike of being her boyfriend. He put his head in his hands over lunch the day last August when he heard the youngest Janacek was being sent to jail. He imagines that had something to do with Tommy’s O’Connor’s departure. “Tommy O’Connor couldn’t leave Northampton! He couldn’t leave, could he?” Judge Ryan had wondered aloud when he’d first heard that news. He used to think that the young O’Connor was a dangerous kind of cop, not violent or dishonest, just too powerful. But even though they’d never agreed about much and had often butted heads in his courtroom, he thinks young Tommy’s departure is a loss to the town, another little hole in the native ground. To the judge the landscape is full of such spots, left by the dead and departed. They fill in, but they never look quite the same. In cops, as in most things, he prefers the local and native, people who know the town well, and, being known by it, are held accountable for what they do here. Newcomers have brought many improvements, he thinks, but newcomers tend to mistake what they see in the foreground for the place itself, as if they can’t imagine Northampton without themselves in it. His town needs its natives, he thinks, to keep it continuous.

  He knows very well that the place owns him, but gradually it has allowed him to feel that it’s his. He found it hard to make his own way when Northampton seemed to belong to his father. But a long family history has also felt like protection, so that he’s had his answer ready when nasty rumors have finally come back to him—that, for instance, he once fixed a case for a friend, though in fact, when he heard that rumor, he only wished that he had—or when people criticized actions he took as district attorney, or when cops have groused about rulings he’s made as a judge. At times like that, the judge thinks, “Screw you. My people have been here for over a century. I know what’s best for this town.” And when people erupt over big local issues, or a local person’s travails make it into the papers and the mouths of gossips shine on the street corners, then, at those times above all, he can see the long view. Experience counts. It has taught him, for example, that bleeding-heart liberals usually make the most bloodthirsty prosecutors. And he knows that the town always rescues itself from the past. He has seen lots of storms come and go here. No trouble was ever so dire that it hadn’t finally become unimportant. So he can believe that redemption is always possible, both for defendants and him, and also for towns.

  A couple of blocks past the judge’s old school, around the corner from the Elks Club, the courthouse annex slides into view. He looks forward to going inside. Sessions of District Court always contain something unexpected, something amusing. They keep him very busy, but don’t usually upset him. For the schoolchildren who periodically visit his courtroom, Judge Ryan draws this distinction: “People who come here to District Court are accused of doing something naughty. People who go upstairs to Superior Court are accused of doing something evil.” He has no wish to ascend to the higher court. He feels that he spent enough time in the presence of evil when he served as the district attorney.

  Today he will hear short trials. Perhaps the lawyer most given to interminable arguments will come before him. She’d be a good victim for his dangling thread next April Fool’s Day. Tonight he’ll have dinner with Bertha, a favorite judge friend. He’ll go in now and give that garrulous lawyer a good listening to. He’ll feel the length of the law that can connect a local shoplifting case with Puritans on the frontier and the Magna Carta before them, when the clerk’s voice declares, “Mr. Foreman and members of the jury, hearken to this complaint. The defendant has
put himself upon the country, which country you are.” As long as he’s here—and it should be for a while; District Court judges are rarely impeached, as he likes to say—there will be mercy and geniality in one courtroom at least, to balance the inevitable harshness of law.

  On next St. Patrick’s Day, God willing, Judge Ryan will again wear his green robe to court, and Bill O’Connor will again preside at the annual breakfast, in the ballroom at the hotel by the Interstate. Bill will begin by reciting the same poem as always, his voice rising toward the end, his own variation,

  Oh, Ireland, how grand ya look,

  Like a bride in a rich adornin’,

  And with all the pent-up love in my heart

  I bid ya the top o’ the mornin’.

  Then Bill will laugh, and laugh at his own jokes, with the laugh that is his best joke of all, and make a few gentle digs at the mayor.

  In the Smith Quad the American Legion band will play “Pomp and Circumstance”; the bagpipers will march in, the seniors in a long train behind them; and Laura, inspired, her head full of Eliot, will stride forward, grinning, onto the stage. Extending her hand toward President Simmons, Laura will wobble on her high heels for an instant, almost tripping, just as in the dream she’s had all senior year.

  Alan will be sighted on Main Street carrying a Rottweiler puppy named Otto, which he bought for Suzanne and adopted himself when she changed her mind. Walking along, the puppy noisily chewing on a slice of pizza, he’ll remark, “I wish I had a photograph of this.” He’d send it to the behavioral psychologist at McLean with a note that said, “Cured!”—which would be true enough, for most practical purposes.

  The mayor will have delivered her speech on the State of the City, before the council and a small live audience, and whoever still watches those polite meetings on cable TV. A great announcement. The city’s budget is balanced at last! Problems remain: the fire station, the high school, homelessness. Mayor Ford’s voice cracks when she speaks to the town about the Northampton children who are inadequately cared for and guided, and about the still-rising drug use among them. But, all in all, the state of Northampton is good. She has made some decisions that were both difficult and harsh and has enraged a few more factions in town. But because the ultimate job security is having a job that nobody else really wants, there will be stability in city hall for at least two more years: the mayor, it seems, will run unopposed again next November.

  Or almost unopposed. Out in the hallway after the speech, two of the audience confer. One is a young anarchist who often gives lectures during city council public comment time, lectures about corporate greed in America and homelessness in Northampton. His clothes are covered with hardware. A strap connects the legs of his blue jeans, maybe to symbolize his and the nation’s imprisonment. The other is a man in late middle age, with a gray ponytail, perennially homeless, who often runs for mayor and usually gets votes in two figures. He thinks he’ll improve his chances if he can sign up the anarchist as his speechwriter. “I think I can beat her this time,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” replies the anarchist. “It sounds like she’s on our side.”

  Eight years ago, a black university student named Michael Trotman drove into town, fresh from New Jersey, where he’d learned, “You don’t use your brakes until you use your horn.” He drove down Main Street, saw a pedestrian about to enter a crosswalk, speeded up so as to claim the right of way, as one did back where he came from, and then started yelling, leaning hard on his brakes and his horn. He stopped a few feet from the startled pedestrian. Not an auspicious beginning, and in the years since, Michael had found a lot here to annoy him. He grew up in a New Jersey project. Listening to the large fusses Northampton people tend to make out of small issues, he had sometimes wanted to get on a soapbox downtown, and say, “You’re not in college anymore. Get over it.” Most of the town’s women seemed deliberately dowdy to him. “The female toll takers on the New Jersey Turnpike have more sense of glamour.” Often when he passed other black people downtown, ones he didn’t know, he smiled at them and they smiled back, little smiles that seemed to say, “Isn’t this place weird?” and, “What are you doing here?” And yet he had begun to feel something like a booster’s pride. This past winter he’d attended a lecture by two famous black intellectuals, delivered at Smith. He’d listened with mounting anger. “White man bad. Black man good.” That, he thought, was the lecturers’ central message. He felt offended, not personally, but on behalf of his fellow townsfolk. “How dare you talk that way here,” he’d wanted to say. “These are some of the nicest white people you’ll ever meet.”

  Every year for the past eight, Michael had decided to leave. He’d taken scouting trips to New York City, Phoenix, Los Angeles. Near the end of every one, he began missing Northampton. He couldn’t fully account for the pull it had on him. He had a short answer for friends who asked: “No one’s called me a nigger in eight years.”

  There was, one had to admit, a certain harmony in Northampton. No committee had sat down and arranged the watches of the town, and yet they functioned as if by grand design, so that one’s doing this allowed the other’s doing that, even if the one didn’t know or didn’t like the other, even if neither the one nor the other was civic-minded. Here a little contentiousness was good for more than entertainment. The local cops were clearly better cops for feeling that some suspicious eyes observed them, the reformers better reformers for having their homes burglarized occasionally. Northampton wasn’t drenched in fellow feeling, and it didn’t have to be. The people couldn’t always see what they shared, but all their pieces of the town added up to one.

  For all its smallness, Northampton had great absorptive powers. The parts mattered less than their combination—geography and history and architecture, workable proportions of human frailty and virtue. If civilization implies more than TVs and dishwashers, more than artistic achievement and wise rules, it implies just this, a place with a life that shelters individual lives, a place that allows people to become better than they might otherwise be—better, in a sense, than they are. The town contained evil, but didn’t abide evil. It managed to keep it contained. Of course, dumb luck had helped out the old town, not the least of it the mysterious hold it had on residents’ affections. Many people had no better reason for living here than the place itself. For them it wasn’t just anywhere, but the place they chose because they felt it had chosen them.

  From the steps of city hall late at night, downtown looks like a pop-up card, the spire of the First Church rising up beneath a paper moon. One of the clock faces still tells the wrong time. Gradually, Main Street empties. In stillness, the streetlights burn on, the shadows lie undisturbed, and the façades grow taller, tall as the dark. All of downtown acquires a venerable air. Even the toy castle, city hall, which in daylight seems to say that government here isn’t much of a burden—even it acquires dignity.

  As downtown empties, it begins filling up. The genius of the place assembles, not an immortal but an enduring presence, made of everything local: both these streets and these buildings and also the dirt and wooden ones that preceded them, the young trees by the sidewalks and the towering elms all gone now. It’s a convocation. It consists of the long-vanished canal that used to carry vessels up to State Street and the bridge that now spans its route, under which a while ago boys and girls were smoking dope. It’s the tired young man who walks up with a knapsack to the door of the Grove Street Inn—if there’s room, he’ll get a bed and a decent meal, no questions asked; and the three sisters in hoop-skirts so wide that they filled all of Lyman’s Lane one eighteenth-century Sunday morning. The local businessman who recently became a shoplifter because he saw his ex-wife in a checkout line and couldn’t bear to have her see him buying condoms; and the young Irish woman whose century-old diary fell out of a ceiling a few years ago while a house was being renovated—she had filled page after page with her ardent desire to have her black lover buy her “a suit.” All the generations who have pa
ssed through town, all the generations to come. The people who have suffered here and the people who have prospered. The residents who traffic in gossip and the residents who add to the town’s charity. The natives who have stayed and the natives who have left. The ones who have departed in disgrace and the ones who dream themselves back here when they dream of home.

  For

  Nat and

  Alice

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I am grateful, above all, to the people who appear in this book, for letting me into their lives, for putting up with me, for teaching me.

  I want to thank my editor, Kate Medina, for her belief in this project at its inception and for her encouragement and cogent advice throughout. Richard Todd helped immeasurably once again, as did Georges Borchardt, John Graiff, and Jamie Kilbreth. I received generous help from Stuart Dybek, Jonathan Harr, Mark Kramer, and Sam Toperoff. Fran, Diane Harr, and Barnaby and Susan Porter all listened patiently. Jim Moran housed me. Jocelyn Selim performed a series of difficult and challenging tasks of historical research. I am grateful to the estimable copy editor Jolanta Benal and managing editor Amy Edelman.

  I must make the usual but entirely accurate disclaimer that none of the people whom I wish to thank bears any responsibility for what I have written.

  I am indebted to Corinne Philippides, Tom Hedderich, Mike Vito, and John Musante, all of the mayor’s office. Kerry Buckley and Elise Feeley helped to guide me into local history, as did Stanley Elkins, Dan Horowitz, Allison Lockwood, James Parsons, and Neal Salisbury. My thanks to all of the following: Lisa Baskin for letting me spend a very pleasant election day in her company; the management and staff of WHMP for their hospitality, especially Rick Heideman, Ron Hall, Dennis Lee, Mark Vandermeer, and Ted Baker; Tom Arny for a discussion of local weather; John McCarthy for information about the local accent; Polly Baumer for information about New Age beliefs in the area; Sam Brindis for a discussion of local public works; Andrea Cousins and Carolyn Hicks for a discussion about the state of local practices in psychology and psychiatry; Peter Nelson for a survey of the local music scene; Chris Brennan for allowing me to spend a day at Northampton High with Benjamin Baumeister, and the teachers whose classrooms I visited; Marge Bruchac for several conversations about the local Indians and about Jonathan Edwards in Stockbridge; various editors and reporters for the Gazette, including Jim Danko, Jim Foudy, Laurie Loisel, and Suzanne Wilson; Dave Reid of the Union-News; Frank Godek for a tour of the Hampshire County Jail and for his great courtesy when I interviewed prisoners there; Wayne Feiden and Nancy Denig for tours of downtown; Sam Goldman for a long conversation about downtown’s renaissance, and Brink Thorne and Mazie Cox for a long talk on the same subject; former mayors Sean Dunphy and David Musante for interviews they granted; and George Quinn for allowing me to accompany him during his election campaign. I want to say a special thanks to Mary Humphries, who gave me many valuable insights into the Ada Comstock program; to the nurses and doctors at the emergency room of the Cooley Dickinson Hospital; to the ministers Gene Honan, Peter Ives, David McDowell, James Munroe, and Victoria Safford; and to the staff at the Ada Comstock office. And many thanks to Richard Abuza, Michael Bardsley, David Borbeau, Paul Britt, Marcia Burick, Jim Cahillane, Vin Callo, Marisol Cruz, Judith Fine, Hal Gibber, Pat Goggins, Claire Higgins, Jon Hite, Cindy Langley, Ralph Levy, Ed Maltby, Barry Moser, Steven Murphy, Bill Newman, Nora Owens, John Richards, Peter Rose, Kim Rosen, Charles Ryan, Gary Schaeffer, Ruth Simmons, Lauren Simonds, Michael Sissman, Barry Smith, Melinda Sofer, Jim Stevens, Carol Stewart, Sam Topal, Diane Walsh, and Jill Walton.