by Jonathan Dee
Gerry sat down. There was not a sound in the hall. He turned and looked behind him, hoping Penny was there—he thought he’d seen her car in the lot—and while he couldn’t find her face in the crowd, he could feel she was present.
The idea of a referendum on new taxes was a hoot, Allerton thought. As if any such vote would ever be decided in the affirmative. It was intimidating, though—the idea of a genuine popular will. The negative energy it could unleash. He and Waltz would have the full force of the law behind them if they raised everyone’s property taxes overnight, in order to pay for the services everyone expected to receive. But that didn’t mean he was going to risk it. And the risk didn’t involve anything as mundane as reelection, either. Reelection was about the last thing on his wish list right now.
—
The mood in the town was dark; everyone felt under attack. The response was not to come together but rather to protect everything one had against the depredations, real or imagined, of others. People became fiercely, philosophically self-centered. Whatever your problem might be, its origin was within you, and for that reason, Allerton came to understand, your problem was not my problem.
Any sort of collective action was automatically suspect, suspect by definition. It couldn’t work. Because if it worked, then we wouldn’t be in the mess we were now in, would we? The idea of unselfishness was discredited and shameful.
So the people wanted austerity, and they were going to get it and see how they liked it. Still, there remained a distinction, at least in Allerton’s mind, between austerity and anarchy. There were other ways to generate revenue besides raising taxes. The problem with taxes generally was that they were too fair, too evenhanded and democratic: to justify taking money from your constituents, you needed to single people out, you needed to introduce a moral element, an element of punishment. So Allerton went through every permit law on the books—for sidewalk displays, for signage, for use of the bandstand, for yard sales—and doubled the fees. He pulled the zoning-permits list and did the same. Waltz was useless; he would agree passively to anything rather than have to develop an argument to the contrary. There were low-level criminal affairs for which the punishment was a fine; Allerton raised those too, and then he asked Trooper Constable to take a walk with him.
They walked down Main Street to Melville; it was an unseasonably hot June day, and many people flowed around them. On foot, they were faster than the Main Street traffic. Two storefronts on Main—Diabolique and Creative Kidz—had FOR RENT OR LEASE signs in the windows, larger signs than Allerton thought was strictly necessary.
“That’s not a good look,” he said. “For the town, I mean.”
“No, sir,” Constable said.
“Right on Route 7 too. Like an advertisement. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about something. A kind of new initiative. There are pretty strict parking regulations in Howland, did you know that?”
“I guess I did.”
“Laws of the land. Literally.”
Constable nodded.
“But you don’t enforce them. I mean, I’m not putting it all on you, I’m saying that, traditionally, they’re not that strictly enforced.”
“The way it’s traditionally worked,” Constable said, “is that I’ll only come ticket in response to a complaint from a merchant—like if the same car’s been parked in front of his window for two days, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, right. Well, that’s about to change. The fines for parking offenses of all sorts have just gone up. And I’m instructing you to enforce them vigorously. In fact, I am giving you a target in terms of the number of violations you should cite. A monthly target.”
“A quota, then,” Constable said.
“Not a quota per se. Let’s call it a target. Things like your performance review will take those targets into account.”
“Why not just install parking meters?” Constable said, reddening.
“With what money?” Allerton said. “Whereas you, we’re already paying. Also, everybody has to feed a meter, but only lawbreakers have to pay a fine. It’s more just this way.”
“I do have other duties,” Constable said, trying to keep his tone respectful. “More important duties.”
“It’s not like I’m asking you to do anything corrupt. In fact I resent the suggestion. I’m asking you to enforce existing laws, which is, I think it’s fair to say, your fucking job. If you consider certain duties to be beneath you, or certain laws to be laws you won’t enforce because you disagree with them, I’m sure I could find someone a little less activist. But I would have to replace you with that person, since the time is not really right for a town payroll increase at the moment.”
They’ll hate me, is what Constable was thinking—sullenly, for he knew that he should not care about such a thing from a professional standpoint, yet he did—and over the summer and fall that came to pass. People he’d known for years, casually at least, swore openly at him when they saw him patrolling the street on foot. He knew it was important not to shrug or apologize. He told them tersely that if they didn’t like it, they should take more care to park legally. Amazingly, they wouldn’t do it. They refused to change their behavior. If anything the financial quota the selectman had set for him was too low, yet Constable always stopped ticketing once he had reached it, an act of passive solidarity with no audience.
—
Christmas shaped up as less than pleasant because Mark and Gerry weren’t really speaking to each other. Neither of them discussed the matter with Candace because they knew they could expect no sympathy there. She heard what little she heard mostly from Haley. As for Karen, she was all but paralyzed by bafflement over why she should have to cook some elaborate holiday dinner for a group of people who now seemed to enjoy each other’s company even less than she enjoyed any of theirs.
“It’s tradition,” Mark said tersely.
“Jesus. Well, it used to be tradition to go to your parents’ old place before they sold it, and before that it was tradition for us to have Christmas with my family.”
“I know you’re not suggesting we go all the way up there,” Mark said.
“My point is that a thing’s not a tradition just because you declare it a tradition. Sometimes it’s just a habit. These things end, for all kinds of reasons. A house is just a house, a table is just a table.”
“They should come here. We have the most room by far. And if they resent that, too bad.”
“Well,” Karen said acidly, “as long as we’re all together.”
She’d never told her husband what she’d discovered about his sister running some kind of half-assed, off-the-books youth hostel at the Howland Free Library. The days when every single interesting thing she saw or learned was reflexively to be shared with her husband, if those days had ever really existed, were long gone. She didn’t mean to keep it from him; she just resisted entering into yet another Firth family drama. And she could not escape feeling that the whole thing, at least as it involved Haley, represented a failure on her part, a failure that would have given Mark, whether he admitted it or not, some petty satisfaction. She thought she could put it right.
That part wasn’t going so well. Haley had an animal instinct for every attempt her mother made to Get Closer, or to Talk About Feelings, and eluded her in those moments with a callous finality that left Karen frustrated and afraid. She scoured the internet for danger signs in Haley’s behavior but frankly there weren’t any. She just seemed to have found affinities of her own. She wasn’t outwardly rebellious. Karen knew mothers who had trouble just keeping their kids in the house all night; Haley wasn’t like that, but Karen almost wished she were, because locking a bedroom door from the outside or standing beneath an upstairs window seemed relatively straightforward next to figuring out how to compel your child to stop contradicting you. No matter what you said to her, she was determined to imagine some opposing point of view and then defend it as if it were her own. Creative Kidz went out of business, Karen would say, r
emember how much you used to love that place? and Haley would answer, falsely, that in fact she’d always hated that place, with its expensive designer “IQ games” that were basically practice for the SATs, although she did feel sorry for the low-paid cashiers and stockboys who were now jobless, not that anybody ever gave much thought to them. Karen hadn’t even mentioned them, she was talking about something else entirely! She couldn’t say anything these days without being taken to task for something she hadn’t said instead.
Candace was late, so late that they went through the gift exchange without her. As had become the tradition, the only presents were for Haley, so it didn’t take long. Karen, standing at the stove, was just about to say fuck it and serve dinner when her sister-in-law finally arrived at the front door with her parents.
“Happy Boxing Day!” Mark said.
“Very funny,” Candace said, and pointed with her thumb at their mother and father, both of whom were still standing expectantly in the foyer with their coats on as if they had never been there before. Karen, even though she had several other things to do, finally went over to help them, since no one else was moving to do it.
“Little trouble getting them out the door,” Candace said to her brothers, not all that discreetly.
“No holiday for the ornery,” Gerry said.
They sat and ate. There was no grace said, nothing more than a two-word “Merry Christmas” toast from Mark at the head of the table, which still managed to irritate his siblings by virtue of its condescending, patriarchal tone, as if Christmas itself were something that took place under Mark’s auspices. Their parents eschewed the toast because both had declined the offer of a glass of wine.
Karen had ordered a ham by mail, bought fully cooked and spiral cut, from a smokehouse in Vermont. Nobody begrudged this, because it was not a family in which anyone had any major culinary skills. There were rolls, and peas, and scalloped potatoes that Karen was relieved had come out reasonably well—she’d had bad luck with that dish before. They ate in a silence punctuated only by occasional wordless sounds of appreciation. Her father-in-law mostly just pushed the food around his plate.
“Sure you won’t have some wine, at least, Dad?” she said.
Mark looked at her quizzically. It was rare for Karen to call him Dad, so rare he took there to be more sarcasm than affection in it. The old man said, “What the hell,” and poured some of the Chardonnay into his glass. He put the bottle down between his plate and his wife’s. She gazed at it while the others went on eating. She reached out for it once tentatively, pulled her hand back. Then she reached out again and took it by the neck and poured it over the ham and potatoes on her plate.
“Mom!” Candace said, pushing her chair back and starting around the table.
“Oh,” her mother said.
“I think you may be on to something there, Mom,” Gerry said, smiling.
“Here, let me have that. Haley, take Grandma’s plate to the kitchen and bring her a clean one, please,” Candace said.
Haley heard her but her eyes were on her grandfather’s face. He looked furious. At whom? she wondered. He looked as if one touch, one remark, would cause him to explode.
Karen said, “I’ll do it,” and cleared her mother-in-law’s place entirely, happy for the excuse to be out of the room. The old lady sat expressionless, her hands in her lap. Candace went back around the table to her own chair, across from her mother’s, and sat, breathing heavily.
Mark, after a long moment so awkward it would have seemed to him impolite not to break it, started cutting off another bite of his ham.
“So no one is going to say anything,” Candace said.
“For the love of God,” her father said, “will you shut up.”
“Dad!” Mark said.
“You amaze me,” Candace said. “The two of you.” Haley understood from her aunt’s gaze that she was referring not to her grandparents but to her uncle and her father. “Right in front of your eyes. But you’ll do anything to not see it.”
“See it and do what about it?” Gerry said. “Do what about it?”
“Because if I’m the only one who sees it,” Candace said, “then it’s only my problem.”
“It sure as hell isn’t your problem,” her father said.
“Old people make mistakes,” Mark said. “You always get so hysterical. You act like they’re the first people in the history of the world who ever got old.”
“Shut up now, all of you,” their father said.
Gerry rose out of his chair to reach across the table, grab the wine bottle from in front of his mother, and pour himself another glass.
“Every day now, it’s something like this,” Candace said. “Like this or worse.”
“You’re humiliating her,” Mark said.
“You’re their sons,” she said. “You have to do something.”
“When is Renee coming?” their mother asked.
“God damn it!” their father said. Neither the tone nor the volume of his voice caused his wife to react in any way.
“No, Mom,” Candace said. “I told you this in the car. Renee is not coming. Renee lives too far away.”
She looked briefly at Haley, almost as if she were sorry Haley was there.
“I’m not going to let you stick me with this, you sexist assholes,” she said, looking down into her lap. “They’re your mother and father. You owe them. You can’t just blow that off. It’s not right.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Haley’s grandfather said. “No one at this table owes me a god damn thing.”
—
After the school bus driver stopped showing up for work because he hadn’t been paid, Waltz scared up an old, retired buddy who said he was willing to do it as a civic duty, for free; that solution only took them up until Christmas, though, because he spent his winters in Fort Lauderdale. Merchants were still complaining to the board, months later, about Railroad Days, because their extra revenue had barely exceeded the various new permit fees for parking, signage, sidewalk sales, etc. It had led to hard feelings, no matter how delightful the old-timey atmosphere.
Even so, Allerton had calculated that the spike in revenue from fees and fines, while ingenious in its way (the zoning commissioner wasn’t even speaking to him anymore), would not get them through the winter. The Town of Howland had its own lawyer, as had been the case since at least the 1970s—a nice old guy in Springfield, at a fancy, white-shoe firm there—and Allerton planned to let him go in order to save the annual $16K retainer, but before doing so he put the lawyer onto a particular problem that had been on his mind for a while, which was how to dissolve or otherwise break the town’s land trust.
“There has to be a way,” Allerton said. “I mean come on.” It was the largest single parcel of land, by far, within the town limits, and the revenue from selling it, on top of the increase in taxes from whatever was built on it, would get them out of the hole in one motion.
The lawyer called back a week later and said there was no way. The trust had been drawn up by some of the most prominent men in Boston, which meant in the world, and the language of it banished ambiguity. “It’s actually quite impressive,” the lawyer said. “I’m glad I got to look at it. I teach a class at UMass’s law school in Springfield and I might—”
“Who does it benefit?” Allerton asked.
“Sorry?”
“Who is this trust for? What keeps it going? Who does it, you know, please?”
The lawyer thought about it. “The public,” he said. “The town. That was the idea.”
“So the people whom it gratified to create this trust are all long dead. Yet the trust itself just keeps hurtling forward forever, like a piece of space junk or something.”
“In a manner of speaking,” the lawyer said stiffly.
“Lawyers,” Allerton said, and hung up the phone. A few days later he called back and fired him, making no particular effort to correct the impression that it was due to his failure on the land-tr
ust issue. Next on his list—a mental list; he was careful these days not to write anything down if he could avoid it—was the library. That was a touchy one, though the more he thought about it, the less he understood why it should be: people just assumed a small town should have a library, it was a mark of civilization, and Howland had had a free library in some form since before the Civil War. But Tom had no room in his calculations for symbolism. The library itself was a building Howland owned outright. The operating budget seemed modest until you remembered that hardly anyone used the place at all, except for mothers looking for free daycare and a few old Yankees too cheap to pay for their own newspaper. And the librarian was salaried—the fifth-highest salary on the town payroll. Hadi had hired someone with no library science degree (whatever the hell that was anyway), no relevant previous experience, no qualifications whatsoever, and just installed her in the job because it pleased him, which was his rationale for everything. Her name was Firth but there was no way that could be the same family, except maybe distantly. There were Firths all over western Mass.
Having never once set foot in there, Allerton stopped by the library twice in two weeks, and Candace was smart enough to guess why. She couldn’t lose another job. She couldn’t start over; she didn’t have enough faith in the future to start over. With Haley watching from across the main reading room, Candace phoned Gerry the moment the selectman left for the second time.
“You have to talk to your boy,” she said. “He’s fixing to shut down the library. Probably turn it into a Rite Aid. And throw me out on the street, coincidentally.”
