Shortest Day

by Jane Langton

  “Well, look who’s here,” said Harley Finch. “For a while we thought you were a goner.”

  “What’s up?” murmured Arlo, leaning over the solar image on the observation table, watching the slow change of the granular surface, inspecting the latest crop of sunspots foreshortened on the eastern limb.

  “Chairman wants to see you whenever you can make it.”

  “He does, does he?” breathed Arlo. “I can’t guess why.”

  Harley grinned. “Sorry, Arlo.”

  Oh, well, he’d known it was coming. Arlo put his finger on a bright speck near the western limb of the sun. What was that? The sun was hot and fiery, but it didn’t give off sparks. Could it be a planet, Venus or Jupiter, there on the path of the ecliptic, right next to the sun? He had never observed a planet so near the sun, not even with more powerful instruments.

  His heart quickened. Turning, he snatched the Nautical Almanac off the shelf.

  “What are you doing?” Harley Finch came closer and looked inquisitively at the solar image.

  Oh, no, you don’t, you bastard. That star is mine.

  Harley saw nothing. He looked blankly at the observing table, then drifted away and turned over his papers, keeping a cautious eye on Arlo.

  No, the bright speck wasn’t the planet Venus. Venus was in Capricorn. And it wasn’t Jupiter either, because the sun had already passed Jupiter earlier in December. Saturn was out of the question too, moseying along through Aquarius.

  Arlo went back to the observing table and looked again, fearful that the little spark would have disappeared, that it was some momentary anomaly. But it was still there, brighter than ever. It must be, it had to be, what else could it be but a nova, a supernova, a tremendously bright supernova, visible in the daytime smack up against the sun?

  He didn’t want to make his phone call with Harley listening. Somehow Harley would horn in, claim credit, say, Oh, yes, I saw that before you came in.

  Arlo ambled out into the hall, shut the door, ran to the elevator, pressed the button, and waited in a fever of impatience. Suppose some other solar astronomer was already announcing the discovery of a supernova at right ascension eighteen hours, twenty-eight minutes, declination minus twenty-three degrees, thirty-two minutest? There must be hundreds of optical devices of one kind or another aimed at the sun right now on the daylight side of the planet.

  The elevator arrived. Arlo dodged in and dropped to the ground floor, laughing at his own greed for recognition. But the supernova was his, damnit, it was all his.

  Thank God, one of the public phones was free. Arlo dialed the number of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams with a trembling finger, muffed it, dialed again. “Hello, Johnny, has anybody reported a supernova?”

  “Not lately. Is this Arlo? Aren’t you supposed to be in the hospitals? But, hey, that’s great. Why didn’t you call it in right away? I’ve been here all night.”

  “Because I only just found it—just now, in broad daylight—that’s why. I mean, this must be some spectacular nova. It’s right up against the sun.”

  “God, Arlo, are you sure it’s not a mistake? Some kind of drug you’re taking? Because, Jesus, it would be the brightest goddamn nova in history. Oh, you bet, I’ll phone Kitt Peak. Got to have confirmation before I tell everybody else. My God, Arlo, visible in the daytime! I hope to hell you’re right. We’ll both look like damn fools if it’s just some fluke.”

  Arlo hung up. His stitches hurt and he wanted to lie down, but he was overjoyed.

  Before the day was out, his supernova was confirmed by the solar astronomers at Kitt Peak, and the news was flashed all over the world. His exploding star in the constellation Sagittarius was the brightest in recorded history. It was bright because it was near, only six hundred light-years away, within the galaxy, close enough to escape being veiled by interstellar gas and dust. It was brighter than Tycho’s supernova, brighter than Kepler’s, brighter than Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It might even be as bright as the exploding star Geminge, whose remnants enclosed the solar system, the supernova that must have astonished the Neanderthals. For a week or ten days before Arlo’s star began to fade, it was brighter than the planet Venus.

  Astronomers all over the world turned away from whatever they were doing to look at it. The shutters of observatory domes on a Chilean mountaintop rolled back, they rumbled open in Japan and Arizona and Switzerland and South Africa. NASA astronomers in Florida abandoned the regular schedule for their satellite and aimed it at the newly exploded star, and so did the men and women guiding the Hubble telescope poised seven miles above the earth. The Very Large Array in New Mexico aimed its twenty-seven dishes at Arlo’s star. The X-ray satellite Rosat examined it too, from the emptiness of outer space. The rapidly changing spectrum, with its extraordinary alternation of dark and bright lines, was recorded by excited observers everywhere.

  Since the supernova was discovered not long after Christmas, the Boston Herald proclaimed on page 1—

  ASTRONOMER DISCOVERS CHRISTMAS STAR

  Another Herald editor had a mawkish stroke of genius. Remembering the story about Gretchen Milligan’s baby, NO ROOM AT THE INN, he combined it with the one about the star with stunning effect—

  CHRISTMAS STAR SHINES ON HOMELESS CHILD

  Arlo saw the Herald that day and thought sardonically that if the star had anything at all to proclaim it would be about some event 170,000 years ago, when the explosion had actually happened. And the burst of neutrinos shooting out of the star’s surface would certainly have destroyed whatever life forms existed on its own planets, if there were any, frying everything, including any infant saviors who might happen to have been lying in Sagittarian mangers.

  Chickie Pickett was thrilled about the supernova. “Golly, Arlo,” she said, “will they name it after you?”

  “Oh, no. It’s just Supernova 1995K.” But Arlo knew with a warm sense of vainglory that his name would always be linked with the brightest supernova in history. People were already calling it Field’s Star.

  The director of the observatory called him in and congratulated him.

  “I understand you should have been in bed, you idiot,” he said, beaming. “But thank God you weren’t. Nobody else might have noticed the thing until it had gone halfway through its cycle, and that would have been a terrible loss. Oh, by the way, we’re about to appoint an associate professor in stellar photometry. Are you interested? Oh, I know you’ve been working on solar stuff, but the sun is a star, after all.”

  “But I thought Harley was in line for that job,” said Arlo innocently.

  “Harley?” The director seemed puzzled. “Oh, you mean Harley Finch? I—uh—think he’s accepted a position at the university in Pancake Flat, Arizona.”

  PART SEVEN

  THE WOOING

  Madame, I have come to court you,

  If your favor I should win.

  If you make me kindly welcome,

  Then perhaps I’ll come again.

  Madame, I have rings and jewels,

  Madame, I have house and land.

  Madame, I’ve a world of treasure,

  If you’ll be at my command.

  What care I for your world of jewels?

  What care I for your house and land?

  What care I for your world of treasure?

  All I want is a handsome man.

  Saint George and the Dragon

  CHAPTER 43

  O then bespoke the baby

  Within his mother’s womb—

  “Bow down then the tallest tree

  For my mother to have some.”

  Then bowed down the highest tree,

  Unto his mother’s hand

  Then she cried, “See, Joseph,

  I have cherries at command.”

  O eat your cherries, Mary,

  O eat your cherries now,

  O eat your cherries, Mary,

  That grow upon the bough!

  “The Cherry Tree Carol�
��

  Sarah Bailey had suffered terrible things. She had loved her husband and feared him, he had tried to kill her and then had killed himself instead, and her baby was frozen inside her. But Sarah carried on as usual in a trance of coolness and calmness. Under her guidance the Revels went on and on, one perfect performance after another.

  There were six between Christmas and the New Year. The Morris men danced; Saint George fell dead and was revived again in the person of Walt, the Old Master. The children skipped and chirped, the cherry tree bowed down to Mary, the chorus sang and danced, the dragon raked the air with his claws, Homer Kelly was sometimes Father Christmas and sometimes the fierce giant, and the Abbots Bromley horn dancers paced in and out, weaving their mysterious patterns on the darkened stage.

  Sanders Theatre was as packed as ever. Enraptured people filled all the benches, basking in the glow from the stage, and at intermission they trailed after the performers into the high corridor and danced in a giant spiral, singing about the lord of the dance. Some danced in rhythm and some fell over their own feet, but they all bobbed up and down, working their way into the middle of the spiral and out again, until the music stopped and they found their way back to their seats.

  Sarah didn’t dance. She was stiff and cold in head and body. Her child too was stiff and cold, rigidly asleep in some sort of fetal coma—dead perhaps, most probably dead. When the Revels were all over she would see the doctor again, but she knew what he would tell her. He would listen for the baby’s heartbeat and then say solemnly, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bailey.”

  But when Arlo Field came back to the Revels to take the part of Saint George in the last performance of the season, Sarah felt warmth flush her cheeks and spread along her arms and legs. She sat in the front row and watched the sword dancers cut him down, and the Fool revive him with a sprig of holly. She beamed at Arlo as he sprang up and pronounced himself cured—

  Good morning, gentlemen,

  a-sleeping I have been.

  I’ve had such a sleep

  as the like was never seen.

  He looked gravely down at Sarah as he sang, and the ardor of his look flooded through her, turning keys and loosening locks all over her body. When it was time for intermission and Arlo danced off the stage and took her hand, leading the procession into the hall, he murmured, “It’s already three minutes longer.”

  “What is?” said Sarah, smiling at him, although she didn’t care, it didn’t matter what he meant. She was hardly aware of her dancing feet. The people surging past her were a grinning blur. She saw only Arlo’s face, looking at her so kindly.

  “The sunlight, it lasts three minutes longer than on the shortest day. The sun has started to come back.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m glad.” And then the warmth sank deep into Sarah, and she felt something move inside her. Her child was awake, it was alive. Her baby too was dancing.

  CHAPTER 44

  Then afterwards baptized I was,

  The Holy Ghost on me did glance.

  My Father’s voice heard from above,

  To call my true love to the dance.

  Carol, “My Dancing Day”

  “Well how about it, Homer? Aren’t you going to tell me I was right?”

  “Right? What about?”

  “Right about Morgan Bailey. Right about the goose when Henry Shady was killed. Right about Morgan’s obsessional jealousy.”

  Homer had to admit it. He apologized handsomely for having disbelieved in the goose, and for not having recognized the menace of Morgan Bailey. He was abject and humble. “It’s true,” he said sheepishly, “I was a rotten observer. I didn’t understand what was happening. You tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen.”

  Mary laughed. She felt justified at last. The seesaw of her marriage, out of balance for so long, with Homer at the heavy end and Mary herself dangling sky-high, was dead-level once again.

  In triumph she exacted an act of atonement. “I’m going to the baptism,” she said, “and you’re going with me.”

  “Baptism! Whose baptism?”

  “Gretchen Milligan’s baby’s.”

  “Oh, Lord, have I got to?”

  “Yes, Homer, you’ve got to.”

  Of course it turned out to be a highly sentimental occasion. Everybody from Harvard Towers was there, sitting in the white pews in the Unitarian church in Harvard Square. Also present were the counselors and pregnant girls from Bright Day in Somerville, and the loyal kids from Phillips Brooks House and the staff people from the shelter at First Church Congregational and all the First Church women who had done such a lot of cooking on a large scale. Palmer Nifto was there too, making his last public appearance.

  Gretchen had chosen a name from the British royal family. She beamed as the minister baptized her baby with water from the baptismal bowl.

  “That bowl is famous,” whispered Mary to Homer. “It’s really old. They have to bring it over from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts whenever there’s a christening.”

  “No kidding.” Homer winced as little Andrew Windsor Milligan threw back his head and howled.

  Afterward everyone milled around and said hello to everybody else. Palmer Nifto kissed Gretchen and congratulated her, without uttering a word about her betrayal. He took his revenge on the world in another way.

  “Okay,” said the deliveryman from the Boston Museum, “you’re through with the christening bowl, right? I’ll take it back. Where is it?”

  “Well, it was right here on this table a moment ago,” said the dumbfounded clergyman.

  “I saw it there myself,” said Mary Kelly. “Where can it be?”

  “Listen, they’ll skin me alive at the museum. That’s a very valuable piece of seventeenth-century silver. What the hell did you do with it?”

  They turned the church upside down, but the 250-year-old Dummer Christening Bowl was nowhere to be found.

  Palmer Nifto too disappeared from the face of the earth. He was not seen again at Harvard Towers. And without his direction, sporadic and zigzagging though it had been, the tent city came apart.

  On the first day of the new year there was another severe snowstorm, turning to sleet and rain. Next morning the tents began coming down. Mary and Homer Kelly slipped and splashed from tent to tent, helping to roll up sleeping bags and dismantle the command tent and dispose of miscellaneous baggage and say goodbye.

  The homeless people of Harvard Towers were still homeless.

  Why had the protest failed? Mary suspected a lack of the right kind of leadership. Oh, Palmer Nifto had been clever all right. He had checkmated every move of the police and the university, time after time. His fault had been a failure of sympathy with the very people he was trying to help.

  The truth was, there was no heart in Palmer Nifto. The terrible problems of the people who had entrusted themselves to his care—old Guthrie with his senility, Gretchen with her teeming fertility, Maggody with his helplessness, Bob Chumley with his cocaine addiction, and bossy Emily Pollock—to Palmer they were merely cards in a hand of poker. The people he called the establishment had won because they sensed this fact about him.

  If Palmer had been a different kind of leader, an idealist, no matter how foolish and wrongheaded, he might have been unconquerable. The lords of the earth could not have ignored a worthy cause in combination with honest saintliness. But a crusade led by a scheming tactician was an easy target.

  They simply finessed Palmer Nifto.

  Ellery Beaver and the Dean of Faculty peered through the tracery of the wrought-iron gate that was the gift of the class of 1879 and watched the tent city come down. “It’s sad,” said the Dean of Faculty. “You have to admit, it’s a little sad.”

  They stared at Emily Pollock as she struggled with her grocery cart, trying to push it through the slush on its little wheels. The snow was filthy, covered with black specks. The edges of the grubby heaps mounded beside the brick walkway had been trampled into dark plates like sheet metal.

  “Of course
it’s sad,” said Ellery Beaver. “God knows, it’s sad. But you have to agree, this isn’t the way to fix the situation. Protests and demands, you can’t cure the homeless problem that way. It’s all wrong. It’s got to be solved rationally by people of intelligence and goodwill and every sort of expertise. They’ve got to sit down together and penetrate into the very heart of things.” Ellery waved his hands right and left, as though the bright cold air around him were peopled by men and women of godlike wisdom and compassion. He had a vision of noble figures in Grecian robes sitting on the steps of Memorial Church, counseling together.

  “Intelligence and goodwill, that’s right,” repeated the Dean of Faculty. “Expertise, exactly, that’s all it would take.” He glanced sideways at Ellery Beaver. “Speaking of intelligence, what’s the latest scoop on your boss? He’s better, I hope?”

  “Alas, no.” Ellery turned away with the Dean and they started back across the Yard. “He still hasn’t shown up in the office. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. The man needs psychiatric evaluation, that’s for sure. Sticky wicket.”

  But as they parted company in Harvard Yard, Ernest Henshaw was at last ready to leave his house on Berkeley Street.

  “Ernest, you’re driving me crazy,” said his wife, “standing around mooning like that. Why don’t you go for a walk? Get out of the house into the fresh air? It would do you a world of good.”

  “Yes,” said Henshaw, brightening, as an idea occurred to him. He put on his coat and scarf and gloves and pulled on his galoshes, and walked straight out of the house. Helen Henshaw sighed with relief.

  Walking in a dream, Henshaw headed for Harvard Square, looking neither left nor right.

  The square was crowded, as usual, with a flood of people on their way somewhere, crossing the intersection to the kiosk in the middle of the street, standing on the curb and crossing again to the other side, emerging from the subway and flowing along the sidewalk past the Harvard Coop and the bank, heading for JFK Street.