Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  Traditional British Mummers’ Play

  Sometimes one can think of marriage as a seesaw. Ideally, the husband and wife should be evenly balanced at the two ends.

  But there are marriages in which it is the husband who possesses all the intellectual and psychological weight, so that his end of the plank is solidly, firmly on the ground, while his noodle-headed wife sits mooning aloft.

  And there are others in which the situation is reversed. It was so with the marriage of Harvard’s Vice-President in charge of Government and Community Affairs. Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Henshaw were no longer a well-matched pair. It was Helen Henshaw’s common sense and commanding ways that now ran the household.

  Not that Ernest was a failure—nothing of the sort. In his long attachment to Harvard University he had been highly successful in moving up from one administration post to another, until now he was very high indeed, with an office in Massachusetts Hall, in the same building as the office of the President. At the moment the President was away on sabbatical, but Helen Henshaw was proud that his empty rooms were close to the ones occupied by her husband.

  She too was successful. Helen was an interior decorator with a budding practice among her friends and neighbors. Her own house on Berkeley Street was a perfect advertisement. It stood in a little enclave behind the Episcopal Divinity School. All her friends wanted living rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms just like Helen’s. Her style was bouffant and bedecked with pillows, it was choked with flowery sofas, flouncy draperies, hanging plants, enormous lamps, canopied beds, patchwork quilts, antique dolls, duck decoys, old clocks, copper pots, ornamental chess sets, statuettes, and china dogs.

  On the day the Portapotty truck arrived at Harvard Towers, a van pulled into the Henshaw driveway to deliver two pieces of antique furniture. When Ernest saw them in the dining room, he complained to his wife, “There isn’t room in here for those cupboards. They’re blocking the door to the hall.”

  “They’re not cupboards, they’re armoires.”

  “They’re what?”

  “Armoires, it’s French, and the other door provides a perfectly adequate flow of traffic.”

  Ernest said nothing more. Helen had won. She always got her way about the decoration of the house, because after all it was her business. Helen was happy in her new profession, but in her domestic life she was becoming more and more uneasy. It was beginning to be transparently clear that Ernest was no longer the man she had married.

  One day she came upon him in her bedroom groping in a bureau drawer.

  “Ernest, what on earth are you doing?”

  “Counting,” mumbled Henshaw.

  “Counting?” His wife stared at his crouched back. “You’re counting my underwear?”

  “Everything. I’m counting everything in this house. I want to find out how many things we own.”

  “Oh, I see. Do you think I have too much underwear, Ernest?”

  “No, no, it isn’t that.” Absently Henshaw wrote down the number of his wife’s slips and panties and girdles and brassieres and nightgowns. He was thinking of his great-great-great-grandfather, who had lived in rural Maine in the latter part of the eighteenth century. A list of his possessions had come down in the family:

  1 blue great coat 3 sickles

  1 fine shirt 2 pails and piggin

  2 woosted caps 1 pair horse traces and hames

  1 feather bed 1 plow share

  6 joiners chairs 1 dung fork

  1 case of draws 1 horse

  1 gridiron 3 cows

  1 teakittle 1 heifer calf

  2 brine tubs 600 weight of live hogs

  Count them, that was twenty-five things his great-great-great-grandfather had owned, plus a horse, three cows, a calf, and two or three hogs. In his own house two centuries later, in an inventory of the kitchen alone he had listed 1,252 separate items.

  He poked in a cupboard. “What’s this basket here?”

  “It happens to be my sewing basket.”

  Under his wife’s eye, Henshaw inspected the basket. There were nineteen spools of thread, three thimbles, a paper of snaps, another of hooks and eyes and one of needles, a packet of bias tape, and a pincushion with a multitude of pins.

  “Ernest, what on earth are you doing with my pincushion?”

  “Counting the pins.”

  “Ernest!”

  CHAPTER 12

  And once more came the lady sweet

  To stir Sir Gawain’s dreams.…

  “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

  Morgan Bailey sat up in bed. It was too early to get up, but his perpetual wariness had awakened him, as though it were necessary to keep watch against an invader in the bedroom, someone who might creep slyly under the covers and make love to Sarah.

  Of course, that was absurd. But his vision of the night had put him on guard. He had been dreaming about the girl who lived downstairs, Chickie Pickett. Chickie was a graduate student doing some kind of astronomical dissertation, living with a roommate. Morgan and Chickie met sometimes on the front porch, coming or going. The roommate was a student of feminist theology at the Divinity School. She was sociable and talkative, but it was Chickie’s curvaceous loveliness that attracted Morgan. In his dream he had been tearing off her clothes, carrying her to bed, fondling her, passionately kissing her.

  The dream was only a goad to his fears about Sarah. If he had dreams like that, surely she did too.

  If only she had some sense! If only she knew friend from foe, lamb from tiger. She was so stupid! She was always throwing her arms around people, making them think she was ready for any adventure, like those women in the personal columns, Good-time girl, meaning hot and ready to fuck. He had warned her, he had told her over and over, For Christ’s sake, Sarah, hold back, show a little common sense!

  He looked down at her now, lying there beside him, her face so fresh and soft, her features blurred by sleep, her thick hair spread all over the pillow. She was smiling.

  Why was she smiling? Was she dreaming about someone? Who was it? Tom Cobb? “Sarah,” Morgan whispered, “wake up.”

  Sarah sighed, and murmured something, then turned over on her side, still asleep.

  What had she said? Was it someone’s name? Morgan shook her arm. “What did you say? Sarah, wake up!”

  “Oh, Morgan, dear, what is it?” Sarah lifted her head and looked at him.

  Morgan repented. She was so drowsy, so innocent! “Nothing, it’s nothing.” He lay down and turned away from her.

  Sarah snuggled against his back, and fell asleep again.

  Oh, Christ, what was she dreaming now?

  It galled him, it seared him, that he could not control his wife’s dreams.

  Tuesday morning, and there was to be a technical rehearsal of the Revels. At the breakfast table Sarah made notes on her script. Morgan looked at her cautiously, and tried to sound offhand. “Do you mind if I come along?”

  Sarah looked up in surprise. “I thought you were going to spend the day in the field? I thought you said it was important?”

  “Oh, well, it doesn’t really matter.” But Morgan knew it did matter. He wanted to catch the moment when the Canadas took off for good, when they stopped going from pond to pond and went south in earnest. It wouldn’t be long now. In this cold weather most inland lakes were frozen over. Soon the geese would stop their noisy descents to the few remaining spaces of open water, they would no longer graze in the stubbled cornfields. They would take off for the last time, squawking and shouting, heading south.

  But Morgan couldn’t bear the idea that Sarah would be spending the entire day in the company of Tom Cobb. Tom had grown taller in Morgan’s mind, his black hair was curlier, his muscular shoulders were broader, his encroachment on the territory that was Sarah Bailey was ever more dangerous.

  “But you explained it to me,” said Sarah, “how important it is, trying to catch the day they fly away.”

  “I know, that’s what I said, but I’d really like to see—yo
u know—the way the performance begins to come together.”

  Sarah looked at her husband and guessed what was troubling him. She smiled and reached across the table to take his hand. “All right, then, come on. We’ll walk over together.”

  For a moment Morgan’s bluff was called. Then his new protective intelligence took over. His jealousy had made him smarter. Spikes of cleverness bristled from his head like thorns of glass. “No, no, you’re right. You go ahead. I’ll drive out to Concord. The geese have been coming down on the cornfield on Route 117. If they leave there, I’ll try Fairhaven Bay and Flint’s Pond, all the usual places. Maybe this time they’ll take off and not come back.”

  The thing was, if he spent the day with Sarah, he wouldn’t see anything. If she knew he was there, she’d be careful. Morgan wanted to see what she was like when she thought he was nowhere near. Could he trust her? No, no! He couldn’t trust her!

  So he waited only a moment after Sarah clattered down the stairs before hauling on his jacket and following her.

  Mary Kelly spotted the two of them as she strolled along Cambridge Street, coming away from Niki’s Market, where she had bought a couple of sandwiches. It struck her as odd—Sarah was hurrying on ahead, with Morgan hastening after her half a block behind. Look at him! He was pausing, watching Sarah, not trying to catch up. How very strange. At once Mary’s pop psychology reasserted itself. Should she tell Homer? No, he would laugh and she’d get mad again. She was mad already, in anticipation. Better shut up.

  But a few minutes later, in Sanders Theatre, Mary saw Morgan’s shadowy figure on the upper balcony, nearly hidden behind the woodwork supporting the wooden vault. Watching, he was still watching.

  Then Mary forgot Morgan Bailey as the technical director got to work trying different effects of lighting, moving his switches up and down, adding here and subtracting there. He called to Sarah, “Hey, Sarah, where’s Tom?”

  “Sick today,” said Sarah. “I was supposed to meet him for breakfast, but they had a message. He’s down with a stomach bug. We’ll have to get along without him.”

  The tech director laughed. “A stomach bug, it’s all that chocolate. God, that guy sure has a sweet tooth. Hey, Sarah, how’s this for ‘The Moon Shines Bright’?”

  The lighting effects were for Walter Shattuck, the Old Master. He stood on the stage with spotlights playing over him. “No, not the yellow,” said Sarah. “Wait, I like the blue one.”

  Then Walt began to sing. Mary Kelly, listening from the mezzanine, understood once again that everything in the Revels hung on the thread of Walt’s voice—all the singers and dancers, all the mummers, all the Morris men with their sticks and swords. Even the rising tiers of seats in Sanders Theatre seemed spellbound, and the great bulk of Memorial Hall itself. Whatever was foolish in the Revels, whatever was artificial, vanished as he sang—

  The moon shines bright and the stars give a light

  A little before it is day;

  Our Lord our God He called on us

  And bids us awake and pray.

  It was a voice that summoned the ghosts of men and women who had sung in village streets in Scotland and England and Wales, in Kentucky and Tennessee—men black from the mines of Northumberland or West Virginia, girls crowned with flowers in the Cotswolds, hunters in Abbots Bromley blessing the deer, lusty men in Ireland singing for pennies at cottage doors. He sang them into being without antiquarian fuss, without the pedagogical moralizing of Dr. Box. He sang simply, and the years rolled back and all times and places were one—

  Awake! O awake, good people all,

  Awake, and you shall hear:

  Our Lord, our God was born on this day

  For us whom He loved so dear.

  The song came to an end, and Mary glanced up to see if Morgan Bailey was still up there on the second balcony keeping an eye on his wife.

  No, he was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  The lord rode forth to hunt the fox

  Before the next day’s beams.

  “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

  Morgan drove out to Concord with relief in his breast. Tom Cobb was not going to be with Sarah, not today, because he was sick. Morgan grinned to himself. Sick from eating candy bars! Poor self-indulgent bastard.

  Smiling, Morgan turned off the Concord Turnpike and headed through the town of Lincoln in the direction of Route 117. It was a good day for winter fieldwork. The weather was surprisingly warm. All those homeless people on the mall outside Mem Hall had been standing around outside their tents or sitting on folding chairs in the milky sunshine. But the tent city couldn’t last long. A little more bitter weather like last week, or one big snowstorm, and they’d be gone.

  The geese too would enjoy the balmy winter day. In weather like this they’d be unlikely to leave for good. Of course, if they did, if they flew south on a day like this, it would mean something important. It would mean that the amount of daylight was more important than the temperature.

  The question was complex. Why did a flock at last make up its mind to leave? Morgan was keeping track, comparing notes from year to year, trying to associate the migration with the weather, with the food supply, with human interference, with disasters of one kind of another.

  As he approached the cornfield, he began to worry. What if they had flown already? But they were still there, the same big flock, moving slowly around the field, gleaning the detritus left from the harvested stalks.

  Morgan had a sheltered parking place in the woods. He left his car and approached carefully, moving among the trees beside the field, looking for the path that led to the river, keeping the birds in view.

  But suddenly they took off. With a wild croaking and shouting and a flapping of great dark wings, they lifted from the ground and flew away, making a hoarse clamor over the river.

  What had disturbed them? Surely it wasn’t his fault? Was it somebody else, blundering too close?

  Then Morgan caught a glimpse of the marauder. A fox was running off with a goose in its mouth. It was heading straight for Morgan.

  He yelled as it went by, and the shocked fox dropped the goose and ran away, skimming through the cornfield, a floating flash of color, the white band on its tail visible after the rest merged with the undergrowth.

  The goose was dead. Morgan bent down and turned it over. Its neck was bloody and broken. Its round black eye looked up at him blindly. And then he cursed. There was a green band on the bird’s left leg. It was his own band, the one he had fastened to the male of the nesting pair he had studied last spring. Shit!

  Morgan looked up, and was not surprised to see another bird circling above him, looking down, uttering plaintive cries. It was the female who had laid her clutch of eggs and tended them until they hatched, then guarded the four goslings all summer, paddling behind them while the male took the lead. The female too was banded. What would happen to her now?

  In a rage Morgan left the dead goose on the ground and hurried to his car. In a moment he was back with a little jar of dark paste and a table knife. The paste was something he kept in the trunk, a useful mixture of peanut butter and arsenate of lead.

  Bending over the goose, he dipped the knife in the jar and spread the dark stuff all over the injured neck. “Shoo!” he shouted at the hovering goose, which was still circling, landing nearby, and taking off again.

  Carefully and thoroughly Morgan pressed the poisoned knife deep into the open wound. When the fox came back to his kill, he would find a little surprise.

  Time now to look for the flock somewhere else. Morgan ran back to his car and returned the deadly jar to the padlocked toolbox in the trunk. As he drove away in the direction of White’s Pond, he understood why he felt so bereft. The two banded geese had been special birds. They were the very pair whose behavior he had recorded last spring with his video camera. The powerful action of the male was Morgan’s justification, his argument, his vindication, his defense. Its behavior under threat was written in the chromos
ome chains, emblazoned in the stars. It was the way of the world. It was normal.

  CHAPTER 14

  Oh, good man and good wife, are you within?

  Pray lift the latch and let us come in.

  We see you a-sitting at the boot o’ the fire,

  Not a-thinkin’ of us in the mud and the mire,

  So it’s joy be to you and a jolly wassail!

  Kentucky wassail

  The residents of Harvard Towers were a mixed lot. Palmer Nifto had gathered them up from all over, beginning with old friends he had met in shelters here and there.

  For reasons of public relations, his favorite was Gretchen Milligan. Gretchen was a slightly retarded nineteen-year-old girl with a plump childish face. She had given birth already to two children, and turned them over at once for adoption. She was about to have another. Gretchen knew that pregnancy was a useful condition for a homeless woman. When you got beyond the second trimester there were benefits, and you could stay at Bright Day House in Somerville, a home for unmarried pregnant teenagers. It was warm and comfortable at Bright Day, and the food was good.

  When her time came, she would certainly get herself right over there in a taxi. But for now she would stay at Harvard Towers to support the cause. Gretchen was really impressed by Palmer Nifto’s leadership. Harvard was going to give them apartments, that was what Palmer said. He said he had Harvard wrapped around his little finger.

  And she liked being right here in the middle of Harvard College. Gretchen had a taste for dignity and grandeur, for the finer things, for fancy doorways with white columns and iron gates with vases on top. She loved to trail along the streets in the elegant part of Cambridge and look at the beautiful houses—oh, not just on Brattle Street! Gretchen had made wonderful discoveries on some of the side streets. Nobody else knew about them, the little secret corners where the luckiest people lived.

  Somehow Harvard College and the big houses on Gretchen’s secret streets had something in common, a distinction, a kind of majesty. It was something she yearned for.