Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  It was Palmer Nifto.

  CHAPTER 34

  When they bereaved his life so good,

  The moon was turned into blood,

  The earth and temple shaking stood,

  And graves full wide did open.

  Carol, “Wondrous Works”

  It was a snow emergency in Cambridge. The city plows had begun working in the middle of the night, but by morning the cleared streets were once more inches deep, and they had to start over.

  The emergency line was jammed with complaints. People on streets lined with three-deckers complained that Brattle Street always got the best service, and when were they going to plow Aberdeen Avenue? I got to get to work, the kids are hungry, I need milk for the baby. We been waiting all morning, where the hell are you?

  The callers from Brattle Street said there was entirely too much political correctness in the Public Works Department, which was ignoring the needs of the property owners who paid the highest taxes. And, please, would you kindly avoid leaving a mountain of snow at the end of my driveway?

  Ernest Henshaw did not call the Public Works Department. Nor did he call the police to say that there was a dead man on his doorstep. When he put on his coat and hat and galoshes and opened the front door, expecting to slog through the snow to Harvard Yard, he was stopped cold by the obstacle that lay across his path.

  He stared down in shocked surprise at the body of Maggody, and for several moments he did not move or speak.

  Then, very quiedy, he closed the door, slipped down the hall, and descended softly into the cellar to hide behind the furnace. He remained there the rest of the morning. His wife Helen sat at her desk riffling through sample books of wallpaper and upholstery fabric, picking out favorites, telephoning the wholesalers for ten rolls of this and a dozen yards of that. She had no idea her husband was still at home.

  But Ernest Henshaw was too shaken to budge. The body on his doorstep was yet another piece of excess. It was like a bulky object delivered by UPS. He wanted no part of it, no part of it at all.

  Therefore, when Palmer Nifto came back to his command tent at Harvard Towers and swept the snow off the roof and burrowed inside to watch the noontime news, he was dismayed that there was no scandalized report about Maggody. The jocular guy on the screen chattered about a couple of drug arrests and the latest loss by the Boston Celtics. Turning solemn for a moment before droning through the no-school announcements, he mentioned the death of Jeffery Peck. But he did not purse his lips in sorrow and announce that a poor old homeless man had frozen to death on the doorstep of Harvard’s Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs.

  Angrily Palmer switched off the set and hurried back to Berkeley Street, hardly bothering to greet his fellow protesters as they drifted back to Harvard Towers in twos and threes.

  Gretchen Milligan, peering out the window of the Henshaws’ garage, saw Nifto standing across the street staring at the front porch. The poor dead person was still there. She didn’t know what it all meant—why Palmer had dumped the person there in the first place, why no one had done anything about it, and why Palmer had come back to the scene of the crime.

  She didn’t really care. She was having too good a time playing with all the perks in the Mercedes. Where was the key? It wasn’t in the glove compartment. Gretchen soon found it under the carpet on the driver’s side. At once she pushed it into the ignition and turned it one click. There! Now she could try the tape deck, inserting one cassette after another from the bin in the dashboard. But the tapes weren’t Gretchen’s kind of music. Oh, it was okay for these rich people to like classical music, but it always sounded the same to Gretchen, so she turned on the radio to her favorite heavy-metal station, very softly, and lay down on the back seat to listen, reaching into her bag of brownies, feeling the baby lurch inside her. Oh, ouch.

  The storm was over. The sun was out, bright and clear in the blue sky, casting bold blue shadows on the dazzling white snow in the Henshaws’ front yard as Palmer Nifto stopped to stare at it from across the street. Knobs and domes of snow lay on the foundation planting around the front porch.

  Shit! The fucking body was still there.

  Standing on the corner of Berkeley Street and Phillips Place, Palmer took only a few minutes to decide what to do. He’d make an anonymous phone call to the office of the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, which was right around the corner. “I’m afraid the person is dead,” he would say gravely. “I rang the bell, but I couldn’t rouse the occupants, and I have an emergency in my place of business, so I’m calling from work. Perhaps you could send someone over to take a look?”

  The stratagem worked perfectly. “Good heavens,” said the scandalized Dean of EDS. “Thank you very much for calling. I’ll take a look right away.” In his excitement he failed to asked who was calling, hung up, threw on his coat, and ran across the street.

  Good Lord, there was a body on the Henshaws’ front porch. The Dean knelt over it, lifted back the blanket, and looked in horror at the dead face of Albert Maggody. A homeless man, obviously it was an old homeless man. The poor soul had hoped to find refuge from the cold in the warm house of Harvard’s Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs, but Henshaw had turned him away.

  Grimly the Dean rang the bell. At once Helen Henshaw came to the door and jerked it open, then started back in surprise at the sight of the body of Maggody. She gaped at the Dean. “What on earths? Who’s this?”

  “I’m afraid this man has frozen to death on your doorstep,” said the Dean, not without a feeling of reproachful satisfaction. “A homeless man, I think. Perhaps you’d better call the police.”

  “But he can’t have been here long. Ernest would have seen him when he left for work.” Then a suspicion dawned on Helen. Turning away from the Dean, she cried, “ERNEST?”

  There was a muffled thump in the cellar. Helen abandoned the Dean and the dead man at the door, ran down the hall, threw open the cellar door, and called loudly, “Ernest, are you down there?”

  Sheepishly Ernest Henshaw emerged from behind the furnace and followed his wife upstairs. In shaking fury Helen spoke to the Dean, who was still standing in the open door, silhouetted against the sunlit snow. “Won’t you come in and shut the door? I suppose we have to leave the—the body just where it is without disturbing it.”

  “No, thank you,” said the Dean. “I won’t come in. I’ll just stand here and watch beside the poor old soul.”

  Why this remark should have inflamed Helen’s anger is a mystery. She was about to say something sharp when there was a scream from the garage.

  Ernest Henshaw’s instinct to vanish from the face of the earth was a good one, but the vultures of the press soon found him and tore at his bowels.

  “Is it true, Mr. Henshaw, that your office of Government and Community Affairs has failed to respond to the pleas of the homeless community camped out on Harvard property in the bitter cold? Is it also true that you failed to open your own door to this pitiful old man, with the result that he froze to death on your front porch? Is it also a fact that a homeless teenager gave birth in your garaged?”

  Well, it was superb. Palmer Nifto was delighted. There it was on the national news, the grim follow-up to the hilarious sofa story of the day before. In ecstasy Palmer watched the camera zoom in on the body on the doorstep, with joy he gazed at Ernest Henshaw blanching and stuttering at the camera and Ellery Beaver blustering in his office in Massachusetts Hall, his boiled eyes bulging.

  Of course it wasn’t true about Gretchen Milligan. Her baby was born in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, not in the Henshaws’ garage. When a scandalized Helen Henshaw discovered Gretchen in Ernest’s Mercedes, shrieking in the throes of childbirth, she simply called a taxi and popped her into it, thus rescuing from unspeakable abominations the clean cushions of the car.

  When the news began spreading among the members of the Revels cast on Saturday that the old black man at Harvard Towers had frozen to death during the nig
ht, Mary and Homer Kelly were dressing in the great hall for the afternoon performance. They looked at each other grimly and swore, and Mary quoted William Blake. “It puts all Heaven in a rage.”

  “Right you are,” said Homer gloomily. “I guess Heaven was occupied with something more important last night.”

  And that was the trouble, thought Mary. There had been no rage at all. Everyone had let the matter drift.

  None of them had seen it, that Maggody was the crux, the center, the hub around which the world should have been turning. Harvard University should have fixed its multitudinous clever eye on Maggody. He should have been the object of scholarly study, of laboratory investigation, of mighty decisions by the President and Fellows and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Board of Overseers. All the professors in all the learned disciplines, all the assistant professors and associates, all the teachers of syntactic typology and Chinese historiography and expository writing should have dropped their lecture notes and abandoned their blackboards and blue books and rushed to Maggody’s aid. It was an appalling and general failure of imagination and justice and pity.

  Mary took her long gown off the rack and greeted Arlo Field. “Hello there, Saint George.” With a touch of accusation in her voice she said, “I must say, you’re looking awfully cheerful.”

  “I am?” Arlo tried to wipe the grin from his face. A ray from the stained-glass window at the west end of the enormous room made a purple blotch on his nose.

  Homer Kelly too was looking at him soberly. “Look here, Arlo, do you know which balcony Jeff fell from?” Homer disappeared for an instant as he pulled on his Father Christmas robe. When his head popped out again, he said, “What was he doing in the Science Center anyway? He wasn’t a scientist, was he? I thought he was some kind of historian.”

  “He fell from my balcony, I’m afraid.” Arlo buckled the belt of his Red Cross shirt. “Somebody saw him on the way down. I wasn’t there, but it was my fault that all the doors were open. I don’t know what the hell he was doing in our lab.”

  “Homer?” said Mary Kelly. Her psychological analysis on the subject of jealousy and its deadly ramifications had mushroomed during the night. It didn’t worry her that she had never studied the works of Sigmund Freud and knew nothing about criminal psychosis. After all, some things were obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense. She had been brooding about it all morning while helping Homer dig out the car. Sitting tensely beside him as they wallowed through the woods and skidded out onto Route 2 and plunged in the direction of Cambridge, she perfected her theory. Had Homer noticed, for instance—?

  But Homer was gone. He was running down the length of the great hall to help the set designer manhandle a collapsing piece of scenery. At the other end of the enormous room a little girl fell off a table and began to howl. “Oh, well, never mind,” said Mary, looking sorrowfully at Arlo as he hopped on one foot, pulling on his long black hose.

  Arlo grinned back, then tried to compose his expression to hide the glee he felt, in spite of the deaths of Jeffery Peck and that poor old homeless guy, and goddamnit, in spite of the failure of his year-long effort to capture the analemma on film.

  Well, it had been sickening, his first look at the negative. This morning he had at last removed the film holder from his camera and dropped the negative into a tray of developer and then into hypo, and turned on the light to take a look. At once the forty-four suns were visible, thank God, making a lopsided figure eight, and the exposure for getting the tower of Memorial Hall in the foreground had turned out just right, but—Christ!—what was that pale blob in the foregrounds?

  Arlo’s heart sank. What did it mean, another whole year before he could get a decent result? He hung up the negative to dry and emerged gloomily from the darkroom to find Harley Finch staring at him.

  “Well?” said Harley. “How did it come out?”

  “Don’t know yet,” mumbled Arlo. “Have to make a print.”

  But even this blow had not destroyed the happiness that had kept him awake last night while the blizzard raged outside and the snowplows clanked and rattled along Huron Avenue. “Have you seen Sarah?” he asked Mary Kelly.

  “No, not yet.”

  “She must be here somewhere,” said Arlo dreamily, and he went off to look for her.

  Mary gazed after him, making another instant psychiatric appraisal, feeling a little smug about her gift for probing the depths of human nature. It was too bad her husband, Homer, wasn’t more aware of this kind of thing. Oh, of course, he was terrifically well informed about all sorts of areas of scholarly knowledge. He knew everything there was to know about the literary movements of nineteenth-century America, he was familiar with the social and scientific revolutions of the time, he was a Thoreau scholar of distinction, and in criminal investigation he had a genius for pouncing on the truth. But in understanding the springs of human motivation the poor man was just another meatball.

  PART FIVE

  THE LAMENT

  Behold, behold, what have I done?

  I cut him down like the evening sun.

  Traditional British Mummers’ Play

  CHAPTER 35

  They bound Christ’s body to a tree,

  And wounded him full sore;

  From every wound the blood ran down,

  Till Christ could bleed no more.…

  Carol, “The Lamb of God”

  There were scraping sounds below the window. Someone was shoveling the walk. Sarah looked down and saw Chickie Pickett dump a shovelful of snow to one side.

  “Oh, Morgan, Chickie’s down there shoveling. Don’t you want to help?”

  Morgan was at his desk. He didn’t look up. “Oh, I think she can handle it.”

  Sarah looked at the intent curve of his back. This morning all her doubts had returned to torment her. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on her boots. “Are you coming, Morgan? We’ll be late if we don’t hurry.”

  Still he did not look up. “You go ahead. I’ll be along shortly. There’s something I’ve got to do first.”

  “Well, all right.” Feeling a terrible certainty, Sarah clumped down the stairs alone, and stopped on the front walk to thank Chickie.

  “No problem,” said Chickie, her face rosy in the cold.

  Left to himself, Morgan jumped up and went to the window. Sarah was heading for Inman Square to take the bus. Good. He would dodge over to Kirkland Street and run the whole way and get to Mem Hall first. Morgan snatched up his coat, pulled open his desk drawer, and put something in his pocket.

  His mood was triumphant, frenzied. He felt excited, a little crazy. But that was Sarah’s doing. It was Sarah who was driving him insane. She was incorrigible. Getting rid of one fucker, what good did that do? There was always another. Arlo Field! He should have seen all along that it was Arlo Field!

  The sharpness of the cold struck Morgan’s face, and he thrust his chin down into his parka. Chickie had finished clearing the walk. It was a bright day, with the sun smashing down on the heaps of snow thrown up by the plow. Morgan strode to the end of Maple Avenue, then zigzagged over to Kirkland and ran all the way to Memorial Hall, slipping on the icy cracked concrete, nearly falling, regaining his balance, and running on again.

  He entered by the north door to find the place already jumping. The memorial corridor was full of cheerful people, waiting to get into Sanders Theatre. Most of them had children clinging to them or hopping up and down beside them, because it was a Saturday-afternoon performance. Now the thick crowd began tunneling into Sanders, handing their tickets to Dotty and Linda, Spencer and Robbie, who stood by the two sets of stairs. “Up one flight to the mezzanine,” said Linda. “Through the door to Row B,” said Spencer.

  The building manager looked out from the door to his office and said hello to Morgan. “How did it go last night?”

  “Oh, fine,” said Morgan, but he could remember nothing about last night, nothing about his leaping and stamping with the Morris dancers, only his re
lief at the absence of Jeffery Peck, and then the revival of his agony as he stood watching at the bottom of the stairs while Sarah fell into the arms of Arlo Field.

  Slipping into the great hall, he hurried up to the table allotted to the Morris men. The hall was full of people in every state of undress. At one end the chorus had gathered in a ring to practice the “Sussex Mummers’ Carol”—

  God bless the mistress of this house,

  With gold chain round her breast;

  Where-e’er her body sleeps or wakes,

  Lord send her soul to rest.

  Morgan looked around for the other Morris dancers. A couple of them were talking to the puppeteer, helping him uncover his tall mannikins and lift them high. But no one stood at the table where the swords and sticks and bells had been laid down in perfect order. Morgan chose one of the swords and slipped it under his coat.

  He took it to the hallway beside the men’s room. No one was going in or out. No one saw him slip into the broom closet, pull the light string, and close the door.

  The closet was crowded with cleaning equipment, a set tub, a mop bucket, and a waxing machine. Morgan took the whetstone out of his pocket, held it under the faucet, and began sharpening the sword. It was slow work. Skillfully he drew the blade across the stone, sharpening the entire edge at each stroke. Now and then he turned the sword over and worked on the other side. He did not tire. He kept on and on, testing the edge now and then with his finger until at last the blade drew blood.

  Once again Sanders Theatre was jammed with jiggling people. By two-thirty there was a high excited noise in the big chamber, with everybody talking at once, leaning over the backs of benches, hailing friends across the hall, standing up, sitting down, rearranging coats, and telling one another it was too hot or too cold. Every ticket had been sold, but a bunch of the homeless people from Harvard Towers had filtered past the ticket-takers. They were sitting here and there, wherever there were empty seats.