Good and Dead

by Jane Langton

  At the County Hospital, Ed Bell, too, was ready to go home. He said goodbye to Miss Stein and Mrs. Beddoes and Mr. Canopus and Mr. O’Doyle and Mr. Keizer and Howie Sawyer, and accompanied Joan to the parking lot. “You know, Joan,” he said, coming to the point without preamble, “there’s no reason why you should always be married to Howie.”

  Joan stumbled, and Ed had to grab her arm to keep her from falling.

  “You could get a divorce,” he went on. “Why not?”

  Joan stopped beside her car and fumbled for the key. “But I thought—” I thought people like you would be shocked if I did such a thing. “Oh, Ed, I couldn’t do that.” Could I? Could I?

  “Why not?”

  Joan opened the door of her car and tossed her pocketbook inside and began to cry.

  “You could still be responsible for him financially,” said Ed. “You could still visit him faithfully, just as you’re doing now. You could work it out with a lawyer. Me, for instance. But you don’t need to be tied to him in a formal way, a way that has no meaning any longer. You don’t need to ruin your own life because his has been destroyed.” Ed waited for her to stop crying. He looked around the parking lot, a dreary stretch of asphalt full of potholes.

  Joan took a tissue out of her pocketbook and mopped her eyes. “Thank you, Ed,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good for you,” he said, and left her.

  19

  Consider; your present state is deplorable, and if continued in will be irremediable.… Findest thou no relentings, 0 sinner, no movings of the heart?

  Reverend Daniel Bliss

  Concord, 1755

  The basement room where the precious documents belonging to the Nashoba public library were kept was colder, if anything, than the vaults of the Lincoln and Concord libraries. Homer had forgotten to bring his heavy sweater. He was wearing only a thin shirt and a pair of shorts. When Flo Terry, the reference librarian, brought him an afghan she was knitting during her lunch hour, he wrapped it around himself gratefully, knitting needles and all.

  But Flo had tribute to exact. “How’s your new minister?” she said, looking at Homer shrewdly. “Getting along all right, is he?”

  “Why, sure, I guess so,” said Homer, feeling sheepish in the fierce glare of Flo’s inquisitive eye.

  “What about his wife?” said Flo. “Mrs. Bold, how’s she doing?”

  “Well, a little better, I guess, last I heard,” said Homer uncomfortably.

  “And the congregation?” Flo towered over Homer like Jeremiah or Ezekiel. She was threatening and monumental at the same time. “All those parishioners are bearing up okay?”

  Stubborn resentment rose in Homer’s breast. Flo wanted him to tell her that Old West Church was breaking down, it was a valley of dry bones, it was afflicted with famine and pestilence. “Why, certainly! They’re fine, they’re just fine.” Then Homer yelped in anguish as one of Flo’s knitting needles pierced his thigh.

  For Jerry Gibby, too, the morning was taking on an Old Testament character. In Jerry’s case it was about to become a day of judgment.

  From the window of his office high above the courtesy booth in Gibby’s General Grocery, Jerry could see the inspector poking around his store. It was a new franchise inspector, not good old Gabby Fritz. Whenever Gabby came to Jerry’s store on an inspection tour, he always began by climbing the stairs to Jerry’s office to pass the time of day, and then he would look around a while and before long he’d come up and clap Jerry on the back and go away again. What the hell had happened to poor old Gabby? Jerry suspected Parker Upshaw had been at work once more. Gabby was probably out on his ear.

  Jerry squirmed in his chair uneasily, and watched the inspector move up and down the aisles, peering at the refrigerated shelves of cheese and margarine, the packaged baloney and boiled ham, the bread and rolls. He was scribbling in his notebook. It was apparent by the severity of his expression that something was wrong.

  “The pull dates,” said the inspector, standing beside Jerry’s desk, staring down at him angrily. “Nobody’s paid any attention to the pull dates. Half the stuff has been on the shelf too long.”

  “But that can’t be,” said Jerry indignantly. “Business has. been terrific. People are grabbing everything off the shelves. I can’t get ’em restocked fast enough.”

  “It must be your stock boys,” said the inspector. “They’re not moving the old stuff to the front and putting the new stuff in back. By tomorrow morning you’ve got to have every single item off the shelf that’s past its pull date. You hear me? Or I’ll close the store and take away your license.”

  “Show me,” said Jerry grimly. For the next half hour, he followed the inspector around the store, examining the frozen chicken pies and the cereal and the hot-dog rolls and the yogurt. And it was true. There were weevils in the boxes of Cap’n Crunch, skims of white mold on the olives. “Look at that,” said the inspector, tearing off the wrapper of an expensive coffee cake. “Stiff as a board. That’s bad.”

  “It’s bad, all right,” said Jerry.

  When the inspector left, Jerry looked around for the stock boys. He was perishing to bawl them out. The only one he could find was Paul Dobbs. Paul wasn’t exactly on the job. He was leaning against the wall beside the shipping door, smoking a cigarette.

  Accused, he merely shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn’t his fault. He always put the old stuff in front. But when Jerry demanded that Paul show him how he did it, Paul didn’t know how to read the pull dates. Jerry gave him hell. He took him by the shirt and threw him back against the wall. “Overtime, I’ll have to pay overtime to get this stuff off the shelf. A couple thousand dollars it’ll cost me, all on account of one lazy kid.”

  “Why don’t you sue me,” said Paul, rubbing the back of his head, and then he ambled away to the front of the store to bag groceries and flirt with the checkout girls.

  Steaming with rage, Jerry went back upstairs to make a sign, CLOSED SATURDAY FOR INVENTORY. He found Jeanie, from the basement office, putting a letter on his desk.

  The letter was from Parker Upshaw.

  Dear Mr. Gibby,

  It has come to my attention that the monthly payments on your franchise are three months in arrears.

  Unless the account is made fully current by the end of September, the entire loan will fall due, as per the original agreement.

  Yours truly,

  Parker W. Upshaw

  Jerry let the letter drop from his fingers, and tore at his thinning hair. What was he going to do now? He had bled his relatives dry. His credit was stretched to the limit. Why in God’s name had he bought a car and built a house when he was trying to start his own business? The house, Jesus! It would break Imogene’s heart if they had to sell the house. Well, at least he could do something about the car. Jerry walked out to the parking lot and looked glumly at his Coupe de Ville. It was a beautiful automobile, the car of Jerry’s dreams—pure white, with classy little windows cut out of the vinyl beside the back seat.

  “Well, the hell with it,” said Jerry, getting in and slamming the door. The Coupe de Ville came from Genial Jack’s, a glossy showroom on Route 9. Maybe Jack still had Jerry’s old car. Maybe Jerry could trade this one in and get his money and his old car back, even-steven.

  At Genial Jack’s Cadillac-Oldsmobile dealership, Jerry parked his car in front of the showroom, then walked around the lot, looking for his old Chevy. Yes, there it was, way around in the rear. They hadn’t even fixed the dent in the trunk where Imogene had backed into a tree. Jerry picked up his courage and walked into the showroom.

  Genial Jack was there in person, striding forward to meet him, his hand out. “Hi, there. You want another one for the wife, ha-ha, isn’t that right?”

  “No,” said Jerry abruptly. “I want to turn mine in. You’ve still got my old Chevy out there. I want it back. I just want to reverse the deal, okay?”

  “You want to do what?” Genial Jack couldn’t believe his
ears. His jaw dropped. His mouth hardened. “Listen, friend, this isn’t a secondhand store. That model we sold you, we sold it in good faith. You said you wanted the best. It was our premier model, the top car in the showroom. We ordered it special, the white. You want to turn it in secondhand? You must be kidding.”

  “Look,” said Jerry nervously, trying not to let himself be pushed around, “I know it won’t be as much money. You’ll have to take off a couple of hundred, maybe. But it’s still in perfect condition. Not a scratch on it. Only been a few hundred miles. It’s just like a brand-new car.”

  “A couple of hundred?” Genial Jack had never heard anything so ridiculous in his life. “A couple of hundred? Listen, friend, I don’t bother with stuff like this. Talk to my assistant.” Whirling around, Genial Jack inarched across the showroom to a desk in a far corner, where a young goon in a three-piece suit was standing up, staring at Jerry.

  On the way home in his old car, Jerry reflected grimly on the new life he and Imogene had begun only a few months ago. They had felt reborn, like those people on the radio on Sunday morning who fell on their knees and shouted “Hallelujah.” Redemption—that was what they called it. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had redeemed them, they had been born again. Well, this rebirth wasn’t coming off. The transformation of the Gibbys hadn’t worked. The new Jerry and the new Imogene were shriveling and dying in their bassinets.

  When Jerry got home, Imogene was working in the front yard with a bucket of soapy water. She was scrubbing the bird-bath, wearing her old slacks. There was a bright new kerchief on her hair. Imogene looked up in amazement as she recognized Jerry’s old car.

  “Bastard took off a thousand,” said Jerry. “Only six hundred miles on it, not a speck, not a single chip off the paint, clean as a whistle, and he took off a thousand.”

  “But, Jerry, what for? What’s happened?”

  Jerry stamped ahead of Imogene into the house, his head forward, his shoulders slumped. “Upshaw, he wants to call the loan on the store.”

  “Call the loan?” shrieked Imogene. “But he can’t do that, can he, Jerry? Can he?”

  “He can,” said Jerry, turning to her, his eyes red. “And he will.”

  20

  How the days pass! They fly like clouds before the wind.…

  James Lorin Chapin

  Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848

  Ed Bell’s retirement had been an active one from the beginning, but now he was busier than he had been in the old days when he went off to work every morning. In Boston there were more board meetings than ever, and the church canvass was taking a lot of his time, because whenever he called on Old West parishioners at home, they were always so sociable and welcoming he usually had to stay a while and pass the time of day.

  And then there was Rosemary’s group of people in various kinds of desperate physical trouble. They had started meeting at Ed’s house regularly every Sunday afternoon, and the whole thing was taking on more consequence all the time, more investment in the way of cogitation in the middle of the night. The group had expanded, and the formidable problems and perplexities of its members were more heavily on Ed’s mind with every passing week. Charter member Rosemary Hill was suffering from inoperable stomach cancer, Thad Boland had a similar sort of growth in his colon, Eloise Baxter’s kidneys were failing, and Agatha Palmer had been stricken by leukemia. George Tarkington was another charter member, but his emphysema often kept him home in bed or cooped up in the hospital attached to a respirator. A new member was Philip Shooky, with his threatening heart condition.

  At first Ed had felt out of place, an impostor, since he alone was perfectly healthy, not terminally ill like the others. But as time went on he almost forgot that he was well. More and more he began to feel like one of them, as if he too were under sentence of death. He was not alarmed by this sensation. In fact, it gave a pure beauty to every common thing, as though he were beholding it for the last time—the curved back of a chair, the rough bark of the maple tree, the mounded shape of Farrar’s Hill, the comfortable outline of his wife in middle age, the awkward loveliness of his daughter.

  With Phil Shooky’s appearance in the group, the meetings changed their character, becoming more gravely purposeful. As a veterinarian, Phil knew things that might be immensely helpful to all of them in their assorted plights. It was true he was getting pretty vague about a lot of things—everybody knew Phil was terrified of having another stroke and losing his mind entirely—but about the details of good medical practice he was as sharp as ever.

  Rosemary and Thad and Eloise and Agatha listened gravely as Ed explained the breadth and usefulness of Phil’s medical and pharmaceutical understanding.

  “That’s right,” said Phil earnestly, nodding his head. “I mean, I may not know everything about human diseases, but in some ways humans and animals are just alike. I mean, you know, at certain times you could do the same thing for humans that you do for animals, if you see what I mean.”

  Then Thad Boland told a long story about the time his angora cat had been put to sleep, and they all grew more and more depressed, and afterward Ed had to kid them back into good humor. He passed around a plate of peculiar cookies he had made himself, because Lorraine had washed her hands of the whole thing.

  But Rosemary, Thad, Eloise, Agatha, Phil, and George were not the only members of the parish who were the victims of hopeless disorders. Claire Bold and Howie Sawyer were two more. In fact, it had been the terrible spectacle of Howie Sawyer’s stroke, that day in church, and Claire’s interminable dying that were the double inspiration for the existence of the group in the first place.

  And Ed had Howie’s wife and Claire’s husband on his hands as well. Joan Sawyer’s tightlipped poise was extremely fragile, and Joe Bold was nearly prostrate. Ed had to keep picking Joe up off the floor and propping him against the wall, only to discover that he had slipped down again the next day into total despair.

  Still, with Ed’s help, Joe managed to give at least an appearance of doing his job. In his office in the parish house he was present most of the time, Tuesdays through Fridays, keeping Felicia Davenport, his secretary, fairly busy. He attended regular meetings with the church-school director, the religious-education committee, the Parish Committee, the canvass committee, and the prison-visiting committee, but the Bible-study class was getting along Without him, dutifully working its way through the Old Testament. Leaderless as they were, the members of the class were mired down at the moment in the Book of Ecclesiastes, becoming more and more dejected in the face of its suicidal cynicism. Wasn’t Bible study supposed, to improve your moral fiber and tone up your spiritual life? Well, this time it wasn’t working. At the last meeting Deborah Shooky had burst into tears over the passage, What gain has he that toiled for the wind, and spent all his days in darkness and grief?

  Even if Joe Bold had been able to summon the strength to join the Bible-study class on Thursday nights, it’s doubtful that he would have been useful to them in keeping their courage up. He was too sunken in gloom himself. But at the Parish Committee meetings on Tuesday evenings, under the jurisdiction of Ed Bell, Joe did his best to shape up. When new member Joan Sawyer offered to oversee the sexton and keep track of problems having to do with the physical plant, Joe promised to show her the rotten place in the eaves of the church. And he was there in his office, as agreed, on the morning she came to have a look.

  But when Joan arrived at the parish house and walked into Felicia Davenport’s office to say hello, Felicia looked at her darkly, and nodded her head balefully in the direction of her boss’s ministerial study. “You can’t go in yet. She’s in there.”

  “She?”

  “Maud Starr. Claimed it was an emergency. Stuck her nose in here and giggled at me and romped down the hall. What could I do? She’s been in there for an hour. Oh, watch it, here she comes.” Felicia turned back to stare at the sheet of paper in her typewriter, but both she and Joan were listening to Maud’s jolly farewells. Now Maud
was popping into Felicia’s office, grinning at the two of them, girlish in overalls and high-heeled sandals. To Joan, Maud didn’t look like a woman caught in the desperate grip of trouble, but of course one couldn’t really tell. Some people’s laughter was the same as other people’s tears.

  “Honestly,” gushed Maud, “isn’t he just great? I mean, I brought him my little problem, and we got down to the nitty-gritty right away. Oh, Felicia, he’s having supper with me tonight, so just put that on his calendar, okay?” Chuckling and nodding, Maud pattered to the door, her bag swinging jauntily from her shoulder, her hands in her pockets, her buzzard wings folded, her red wattles trembling.

  Felicia was deeply shocked. “How can he?” she whispered to Joan. “With his wife in the hospital, deathly ill?”

  But Joan Sawyer wasn’t shocked. She didn’t care. It was no concern of hers. Gratefully she approached Joe’s office, smiling, looking forward to a conversation about rotten wood and carpenter ants, because talking to Joe was medicine, the best kind of medicine. She would swallow it greedily, every drop, knowing it was doing her good.

  21

  But scarce the maid to thirteen summers lives;

  Ere with soft joys her ripening bosom heaves,

  The brilliant moisture sparkles from her eyes,

  And o’er her cheek the bloomy coloursrise.…

  But not in all the progress is the same,

  Some youths, till twenty scarce discern the flame.

  Reverend Charles Stearns, Lincoln

  The Ladies’ Philosophy of Love, 1797

  Next Sunday morning the sun rose bright and clear once again and hurled down radiant bolts of light through the windows of Old West Church. They sparkled on rings and bracelets and the wristbands of watches; they glittered on the metal frame of the wheelchair belonging to Claire Bold, who was home from the hospital at last. But today the sun had summoned the full force of its heat and light to illuminate young Eleanor Bell. It was Eleanor’s turn to be shone upon. Sitting between her mother and father, she was directly in the path of a blazing shaft.