Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  Sarah Bailey joined the slow-moving crowd, grateful that the first performance was over but afraid to go home, hearing what people said, but not caring whether they had liked it or not.

  “Didn’t you think the Doctor was hilarious? Let’s hope the car doors aren’t frozen shut.”

  “It was even better than last year. Jesus, it’s a long walk to the parking lot.”

  “Oh, no, not half as good as last year. Oh, God, why didn’t I wear my boots?”

  “Why do they always have to kill poor old Saint George?”

  “Oh, sir, you must allow me to instruct you. I think you will be interested to learn that among the Musurongo of the Congo the king is put to death on the first day of his reign.”

  Sarah was on the edge of exhaustion. She wanted to cry. Where in this enormous building was there a hole she could crawl into?

  Pushing her way across the tide of people, she found her way to the steps leading upward to the balcony above the great hall. Halfway up she stopped. Below the balcony, on the floor of the enormous room, dozens of performers were changing into their street clothes, bundling up. The puppeteer covered his tall creations with a protective cloth. The Morris men laid out their sticks and swords in perfect order for tomorrow. Some of the children were sleepy and drooping, others raced around the hall.

  Here on the stairs, neither up nor down, Sarah was alone. The tears she had feared might come, did come. She leaned on the railing and gave way.

  “Sarah?” Someone spoke to her softly.

  Sarah turned and looked down. Arlo Field was climbing up to her, still wearing the shirt of the Red Cross Knight.

  At once Sarah knew what it was that had been missing in Morgan, what it was she had tried not to hunger for. It was Arlo, it was Arlo Field. He was a secret she had been keeping from herself. He was normalcy, he was common sense. He was clever and funny and kind. He was not twisted into a desperate knot of narcissism and suspicion and fear.

  Sobbing, she held out her arms, and Arlo reached up and gathered her in, murmuring her name, knowing that this time she wasn’t loving the whole world, she was loving him. It was his own face she was kissing and wetting with her tears.

  If Morgan had seen them, if he had happened to look up the stairway and catch his wife in the arms of Arlo Field, it would have been like a bad movie—the wrathful husband opening the door at just the wrong moment, while the guilty couple sprang apart.

  But if he did, they didn’t know it. They clung together for only a few minutes, and then Sarah pulled away and wiped her face and glowed at Arlo and ran down the stairs.

  Arlo changed his clothes in a lovesick daze. He almost forgot his camera, although the exposed film was waiting for him in the astronomy lab, with its image of forty-four suns in a giant figure eight above the roof of Memorial Hall. All he had to do now was remove it from the camera and dunk it in a tray of developer. Grinning to himself, he headed for the memorial corridor and the north door.

  The Henshaws and the Beavers had come to the Revels together. The arrangements for the evening’s entertainment had been made by Helen Henshaw, who was still trying to convince herself that life was perfectly normal, that her husband was not out of his mind, that he was only going through a rather peculiar phase.

  “Oh, wasn’t it grand?” she said, pulling on her gloves.

  “The usual riotous success,” said Ellery Beaver, winding his red scarf around his neck.

  “Utterly delightful,” said Margo Beaver, buttoning her coat.

  Ernest Henshaw said nothing.

  Ellery shouldered his way forward to walk beside his chief. “Oh, say, Ernest, did you hear the news? The General Counsel has determined that the overpass is definitely the property of the university. It’s too bad. It means we’ve got to do something.”

  Henshaw glanced at him nervously and muttered, “Do something.”

  “Oh, Margo,” said Helen, “I’ve been forgetting. I bought something for you. I’ve got it right here somewhere.” She fumbled in her bag. “Look!” Triumphantly she produced the little snow scene, and shook it to make the white flakes fall around the jolly carolers, who stood in a row with their mouths open. “It’s from that shop in the Holyoke Center. They’ve got ever so many more, from all over the world. You can have a real collection in your bedroom.”

  Margo was delighted. She took her new collectible and shook it. “Oh, how perfect. It’s like a scene from The Christmas Carol.”

  “Are you sure we can’t give you people a lift?” said Ellery Beaver.

  “No, no, we’ll just walk across the Common.” Helen Henshaw wrapped her coat more tightly around her as they stepped out the door into a blast of icy wind. She glowered at her husband. “Ernest is such a great walker.”

  “Terrible night,” said Ellery. He gave his boss a mock salute and went off with his wife in the direction of the parking garage, calling back over his shoulder, “One good thing … bitter night … tent city … throw in the towel … problem … become moot.”

  “What?” said Henshaw, and through the blizzard the words came back faintly, “Moot, I said moot.”

  There were no Dickensian carolers on the overpass as the Henshaws took a shortcut to the Common. Nor was the snow falling in feathery flakes as it did in the enclosed world of the little glass ball. It was coming down with a finespun violence that promised a heavy accumulation by morning. On the overpass the fabric walls of the tents billowed in the wind. A clumsy muffled shape swept snow from a sagging roof.

  A tall, anxious-looking woman moved from tent to tent, putting her head inside to ask the same questions again and again: “Has anyone seen Gretchen? Where the hell is Maggody?”

  The shortcut took Ernest and Helen Henshaw across Cambridge Common. Ernest hardly noticed the blowing snow. He was thinking once again about excess. He dared not look back as they approached the Civil War Memorial, because the dreaded procession of boxes was trailing after him, mounding up around him, engulfing him, threatening to block his way.

  Nor did Helen concern herself with the real snow falling on the Common. As her fur-lined boots moved along the path, her vision was filled with the magical little scenes in the shop, the carolers, the snowmen, the laughing Santa Claus, the Christmas angel, the deer with her fawn. They were such perfect little worlds, so fanciful, so charming!

  Therefore they both failed to see the snow-covered form of Maggody lying stiff and cold and lifeless at the foot of the memorial to the Union dead.

  CHAPTER 32

  Now bitter winter binds the earth

  And whistling winds bring snow,

  And New Year’s Day is almost come

  So Gawain now must go.

  “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

  The shortest day was prelude to the longest night and the worst storm in a couple of years.

  Sarah Bailey didn’t learn about the death of Jeffery Peck until she and Morgan struggled through the snow all the way home to Maple Avenue. Then they had a phone call from Kevin Barnes, who had heard about it from his girlfriend, Chickie Pickett, who said the news was all over the Science Center.

  For Sarah it was the final bursting of the boiler. Scalded, she turned furiously to Morgan and cried, “Where were you this afternoon? Where were you?”

  Morgan was ready. He smiled at her. “What are you talking about? I was right here. I called you, remember? I couldn’t find the graph paper.” Then he showed her the work he had been doing, the population curves for the pied-billed grebe, and talked about his exciting new theory about diving ducks. He was tender and loving. He gathered her in his arms, and said how worried he had been about the stress she was under, and promised they would go somewhere when her work was done, somewhere sunny and warm. Then he brought up the ugly thing that had lain buried between them, the thing they never talked about.

  “I’m sorry about the baby’s dress,” he said, murmuring into her hair, holding her close. “I’ve been under stress too, but it was a terrible thing to do
.” And then he took out of a drawer a new little piece of infant clothing. “Look,” he said, showing her the Donald Duck embroidery on the front, “a pied-billed grebe.”

  As a peace offering it was so charming, Sarah’s fears diminished. In bed with Morgan she lay quietly, her thoughts in turmoil, thinking about the violent deaths of Jeffery Peck and Tom Cobb and Henry Shady. Her doubts rose and fell, then rose again. But overwhelming her misery was her memory of the warm pressure of Arlo’s lips and the tender embrace of his arms. Even with Morgan lying asleep beside her, she did not feel guilty. She lay in the dark staring at the window, watching the snow swirl around the streetlight—but every now and then she held her breath, hoping to feel a thump from the baby in her womb. There was none.

  Mary and Homer Kelly were a long time getting home. It wasn’t the awful driving that kept them out of bed, or the fact that Albert Maggody lay dead on Cambridge Common. They didn’t know what had happened to Maggody. They were ignorant too of the death of Jeffery Peck. They were late because of their anxiety about the tent dwellers at Harvard Towers.

  Arlo Field was with them as they pushed open the door of Memorial Hall and stopped short on the steps to take in the magnitude of what was happening.

  “Those homeless people can’t stay out in this,” said Mary, “not tonight.”

  “Hell, no,” said Homer. “Come on, let’s get ’em out of there.”

  Arlo was still dizzy with the thought of Sarah. He had to force himself to remember the completed film waiting for him in his camera, the fulfillment of his year of work. “Right,” he said, “but where can they go?”

  “There are a couple of shelters,” said Mary. “And, good Lord, what about Gretchen? We’ve got to find Gretchen first. She can’t give birth in a tent in a snowstorm.”

  But when they put their heads inside the tents they found most of the people in Palmer Nifto’s encampment already gone, including Gretchen.

  The girl called Millie, one of the kids from Phillips Brooks House, was unplugging her coffeepot and pouring the coffee out into the snow. Her eyes were all that showed between hat and scarf. “Gretchen?” she said. “No, she hasn’t been back.”

  “Maybe she’s in Saint Elizabeth’s, having her baby,” said Mary hopefully.

  “Nope,” said Millie, “I called there. Nobody’s seen her for a couple of days. Maggody’s missing too.”

  Homer took the heavy pot from Millie. “Maggody too? My God.”

  Mary looked at Homer fiercely. She scowled at Arlo. “We’ve got to find them.”

  Blinding flurries of snow hurled themselves at the crevices between Homer’s scarf and his neck and lodged in his hair and beard. He uttered a sepulchral laugh. “Well, goddamnit, of course we’ve got to find them.”

  “Me too,” said Arlo. “I’ll look too.” He pulled his knitted hat down over his ears, mopped at his glasses, and tried to dismiss his camera from his mind.

  They helped Millie carry her stuff back to Phillips Brooks House, and then they fanned out—Mary to Harvard Square and Homer to the Yard. Arlo’s bailiwick was the subway entrances and train platforms and the levels where all the buses came and went.

  It was no use. Gretchen Milligan and Albert Maggody were nowhere to be found.

  At two in the morning, Homer and Mary met Arlo for coffee in an all-night bistro on JFK Street. They were stiff with cold. Their hats and coats were clotted with snow. Arlo warmed his hands on his coffee mug and passed along a piece of shocking news. In his exploration of the outbound subway platform he had run across a student of his, who had told him about Jeffery Peck’s fall from a balcony at the Science Center.

  “Jesus!” said Arlo. “Which balcony?” The student didn’t know.

  In the all-night café Homer and Mary were too numb to do more than shake their heads in horror. The three of them sat wordlessly around the plastic table, crouched under the hideous glare of the fluorescent lights, sipped their coffee with blue lips, and went home to bed.

  So it wasn’t Homer or Mary or Arlo who found the dead body of old man Maggody. It was Palmer Nifto.

  At three o’clock in the morning, while a snowplow clattered and banged along Garden Street, clearing the thoroughfare for the morning traffic, Palmer left his bar in Harvard Square and crossed Cambridge Common, pushing his rubber boots through the drifted snow, heading for his cozy office bedroom in Memorial Hall.

  Palmer felt pleasantly lit, and warm as toast in the fur coat flapping around his knees. The coat was a lucky find from the secondhand bin of First Parish Unitarian. He had managed to get there right after a new batch of stuff came in.

  Palmer’s mind was hot and racing, making plans for the morrow. He would have missed the sight of old man Maggody if the flashing headlights of the snowplow had not flickered over the body stretched out in the snow at the foot of the Civil War Memorial. Then something at the side of his eye registered the familiar shape of homeless-man-asleep, and he stopped to take a look.

  He knew at once that it was Maggody, and that Maggody was dead. There was a stiffness in the form under the blanket. The face was white with hoarfrost, the beard a nest of icicles. Palmer touched Maggody’s old cheek, and his hand drew back. Maggody’s face was cold as the bitter air.

  It was painfully clear what must have happened. Maggody had shuffled away from the tent city, he had wandered in his aimless way across the intersection, clutching his blanket around him, and then, when he could go no farther, he had lain down under the monument. And the cold had worked its way inward through the blanket and the thin clothing and the wrinkled old skin, and penetrated to Maggody’s bones and vital organs and stopped his heart.

  Something rose up in Palmer Nifto’s breast, but it wasn’t pity. He saw at once that Maggody’s death was a sparkling opportunity, a gift from heaven. HOMELESS MAN FREEZES TO DEATH ON CAMBRIDGE COMMON—what a godsend!

  Then, standing in the blowing snow looking down at Maggody, Palmer realized that he could do better than Cambridge Common. Much better than Cambridge Common.

  It was a good thing the old man was so small and shriveled. Picking him up, Palmer was surprised at the lightness of his burden. He set off in the direction of Berkeley Street, hoping to meet no one on the way.

  CHAPTER 33

  What shall I give to the Child in the manger?

  What shall I give to the beautiful boy?

  Grapes I will give to him, hanging in clusters,

  Baskets of figs for the Child to enjoy.

  Spanish carol

  If Gretchen Milligan had been a reader, she might have thought of herself as Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, who sat barefoot in the snow beside the rich man’s house, envisioning the comfort and luxury within. Gretchen too was peering into someone’s glowing windows, eager to know what was going on inside.

  But the Little Match Girl had frozen to death in the cold. Gretchen was perfectly warm and comfortable. All through the afternoon and all night she holed up in the heated garage of the Henshaws’ beautiful house on Berkeley Street.

  Nor was she likely to starve like the Little Match Girl. Nestled on the plush upholstery of Ernest Henshaw’s Mercedes, Gretchen nibbled on goodies baked by the nice ladies from the church—brownies and muffins and oatmeal cookies. She had taken a big bagful from their table at Harvard Towers.

  Half sitting up because it was too uncomfortable to lie down, she lay snuggled in the cozy back seat with her baby bumping around inside her—playing basketball, it felt like.

  Gretchen was happy in the Henshaws’ garage. She didn’t know who they were, but she felt close to them just the same, as though she were living their lives at second hand. Sometimes she got out of the car and looked through the garage window into the window of the living room. There was also a clear view of the front door.

  The mistress of the house had been at home all afternoon. Gretchen could see her now and then, moving from room to room. Once she stood at the window, and Gretchen ducked back out of sight. But the
tall woman did not look out. She was unrolling some sort of fabric, trying it at the window, rolling it up again.

  For a while Gretchen worried that somebody would come for one of the cars. They would open the garage door and find her there. But nobody did. And when the master and mistress of the house went out for the evening, they didn’t take a car. They walked to the end of the street and turned the corner. Later on, Gretchen saw them returning the same way.

  The night was really dark, except for the white snow, which kept falling like anything. Gretchen lay down on the back seat of the car and ate the crumbled pieces of another brownie. Then she brushed away the crumbs and went to sleep.

  In the last month of pregnancy she always slept fitfully. At three-thirty in the morning it took only a small sound to jerk her awake—the click of the latch on the front gate.

  Drowsily Gretchen heaved herself out of the back seat and went to the window. Oh, Jesus, who was that? A lumpy shape moved stealthily toward the front porch. It was a man carrying something over his shoulder.

  Should she knock on the door between the garage and the kitchen and wake up the family? For a moment Gretchen had a vision worthy of the Little Match Girl—maybe they would thank her and take her inside and hug her and adopt her as their daughter and her baby as their grandchild. But Gretchen was too heavy, too sleepy. She couldn’t summon the will to do anything but gaze out the window.

  She saw the man creep up the steps and dump the thing he was carrying right against the door. The thing was a person. She watched as he rearranged the arms and legs, went down the steps, and turned to look back. At last he started up the walk, blowing on his hands.

  Then he made his only mistake. He stopped to light a cigarette. Through the curtain of falling snow the glare of the burning match was like the mystical illumination of the matches in the hands of the Little Match Girl. For an instant it lighted up his face, and Gretchen knew at once who he was.