“A long time. I find the obituaries moving.”
“Jesus, you’re serious.”
“Perfectly. And to answer your question, I’m staying at the new hotel on the river up there. If you’re not staying with Susan, get your own room. I’m not sharing space with an insomniac.”
Bob gazed out at the terrace of a building nearby where trees grew, their leaves still golden, but some branches bare. “We should bring Zach down here,” Bob said. “I wonder if he’s ever seen trees growing on tops of buildings.”
“Do whatever you want with the kid. I wasn’t aware you’d even managed to have a conversation with him.”
“Wait till you see him,” Bob said. “He’s just, like, I don’t know—missing in action or something.”
“I look forward to it,” Jim said. “And that’s sarcasm.”
Bob nodded, folded his hands patiently on his lap.
Jim leaned back in his chair and said, “The biggest Somali community in this country is in Minneapolis. Apparently at the community college there’s a mess in the bathrooms from Muslims washing their feet before prayer. So they’re putting in new foot-washing sinks. Some of the blond folks are fit to be tied, of course, but on the whole, really, Minnesotans are kind of great. Which is why, I imagine, so many Somalis are there. I find it pretty interesting.”
“It is interesting,” Bob agreed. “I’ve talked to Margaret Estaver on the phone a few times. She’s into it.”
“You’ve talked to her?” Jim seemed surprised.
“I like her. She’s comforting, somehow. Anyways, it sounds—”
“Would you stop saying ‘anyways’? You get”—Jim sat forward and waved his hand—“I don’t know, diminished by it. It makes you sound like a hick.”
Bob felt his cheeks grow warm. He waited a long time before he spoke. “Anyway,” he said quietly, looking at his hands, “it sounds like the biggest problem up there is that most of the Somalis in town really don’t speak English. The few that do end up having to be the liaison between the city and their own population, and they aren’t necessarily the elders, who are the guys in their culture who make decisions. Also, there’s a big difference between the ethnic Somalis—who are big-time into which clan you come from—and the Bantus, who’ve just started showing up in Shirley Falls, and they used to be looked down on back in Somalia by the others. So it’s not like they’re all cozy friends up there.”
“Listen to you,” Jim said.
“And I agree,” Bob continued, “Maine does need them. But these immigrants—secondary migrants, by the way, in this case, they’ve come from their first place of arrival, so they’ve lost their initial federal support—they don’t want jobs that include food because they have to steer clear of alcohol and pork and anything with gelatin in it. Probably tobacco too. The woman who sold me cigarettes and a bottle of wine near Susan’s house was Somali, I figured out later—no headscarf, though—and she pushed forward the bag for me to pack them myself, like she’d been asked to touch turds. They can’t get most jobs until they learn some English. A lot of them are illiterate—hey, get this: They never even had a written language of their own until 1972, can you believe it? And if they spent years in the refugee camps, which they have, it was hard, if not impossible, to get any schooling there.”
“Will you stop?” Jim said. “You’re killing me. Sitting there delivering fragmented facts. And it’s not like there were jobs in Shirley Falls to begin with. Usually a migrant population moves because of jobs.”
“I think they moved there to be safe. I’m just telling you this for your speech. Terrible, terrible stuff they’ve been through, whether it kills you or not, you should know it, if you’re going to speak. Terrible stuff in Somalia, and then waiting around in the camps. So, you know, just keep that in mind.”
“What else?”
“You just asked me to stop.”
“Well, now I’m asking you not to stop.” Jim stared at the ceiling for a moment, as though needing to control some vast irritation. “But I hope your sources are accurate. I don’t give speeches anymore, and I don’t relish the idea of falling on my face. Maybe you don’t know that about me, but I’m not a fall-on-your-face kind of guy.”
Bob nodded. “Then you should know a lot of Shirley Falls citizens think the Somalis are given car vouchers—not true. That they’re just sucking up welfare—partly true. And for Somalis it’s rude to look someone right in the eye, so people—and our sister’s a perfect example—think they’re arrogant, or shifty. They barter, and people don’t like that. The locals want them to appear grateful, and they don’t especially appear grateful. There’ve been incidents in the schools, of course. Gym classes have been a problem. The girls don’t want to undress and aren’t supposed to wear gym shorts anyway. They’re working it out, you know. Committees on this and that.”
Jim held up both hands. “Do me a favor and put this in writing. Email me bullets. I’ll think of something ‘healing’ to say. Now go away. I have work to do.”
“What kind of work?” Bob looked around before finally standing up. “You said you were getting sick of this job. When did you say that? Last year? I can’t remember.” He hoisted his knapsack onto his shoulder. “But you said you haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom in four years. All these big cases get settled. I can’t think that’s good for you, Jimmy.”
Jim looked carefully at the sheet of paper he’d been holding. “What in the world makes you think you know squat about anything?”
Bob was walking toward the door, and he turned back. “I’m just saying what you told me at some point. I think you have courtroom talent. I think you should be using it. But what do I know—”
“Nothing.” Jim dropped his pen onto his desk. “You know nothing about living in a house for grown-ups, instead of a graduate dorm. You know nothing about tuition for private schools, starting at kindergarten and going through college at least. Nothing about housekeepers or gardeners, nothing about keeping a wife in— Just nothing, you cretinized bozo. Look, I’m working. Now go.”
Bob hesitated, then held up a hand. “Going,” he said. “Watch me go.”
8
In Shirley Falls the days were short now, the sun never climbing very high in the sky, and when a blanket of clouds sat over the small city it seemed as though twilight began as soon as people finished their lunch, and when darkness came it was a full darkness. Most of the people who lived there had lived there all their lives, and they were used to the darkness this time of year, but that did not mean they liked it. It was spoken of when neighbors met in grocery stores, or on the steps of the post office, often with an added phrase of what was felt about the holiday season to come; some liked the holidays, many did not. Fuel prices were high, and holidays cost money.
About the Somalis, a few townspeople did not speak at all: They were to be borne as one bore bad winters or the price of gasoline or a child who turned out badly. Others were not so silent. One woman wrote a letter that the newspaper published. “I finally figured out what it is I don’t like about the Somalis being here. Their language is different and I don’t like the sound of it. I love the Maine accent. People think of us as saying ‘You cahn’t get they-ah from he-yah.’ That will disappear. It scares me to think how this changes our state.” (Jim forwarded this in an email to Bob with the subject line Racist White Bitch Clings to Native Language.) Others said to each other how nice it was to see the colorful robes of the Somali women in a town as drab and depressed as Shirley Falls had become; there was a little girl in the library the other day, wearing a burkha, cute as the dickens. Honestly.
But among the leaders of the city was a feeling much grander, and it was the feeling of panic. For the last few years there had been the constant struggle to cope—Somali women showing up almost daily at City Hall, unable to speak English, unable to fill out forms for housing, public assistance, or even to tell the birth dates of their children (“born in the season of the sun,” a hard-to-find tran
slator would say, and so one after another of these children had birthdays registered as January 1, the year guessed at). Adult English classes were arranged and at first poorly attended, the women sitting listlessly while their children played in the next room; social workers had struggled to learn the words of Somali (subax wanaagsan: “Good morning”; iska waran: “How are you?”). There was the scramble to learn who these people were and what they needed, and now, after all that, came the sense of a huge wave spilling over the riverbanks as news reports of the pig’s head incident spread across the state, the country, parts of the world. Suddenly Shirley Falls was being portrayed as a place of intolerance, fear, meanspirited. And that was not true.
The clergy, who had been only partly helpful—and this included Margaret Estaver and Rabbi Goldman, three Catholic priests and a Congregational minister—realized a crisis had now really arrived. They rose to it. They tried. City council members, the city manager, the mayor, and of course the police chief, Gerry O’Hare, all of whom had been working in their various ways, understood also that a serious situation was suddenly at hand. Meetings took place at all hours as the Together for Tolerance rally was planned. There was tension—lots of it. The mayor promised that in two weeks, on a Saturday at the start of November, peace-loving people would fill Roosevelt Park.
And then—what was feared, happened. A white supremacy group called the World Church of the People requested a permit to gather on the same day. Susan was told this by Charlie Tibbetts, and she whispered into the phone, “Dear God, they’ll murder him.” No one was going to murder Zachary, Charlie said (sounding tired), and certainly not the World Church of the People, who thought Zach was a hero. “That’s worse,” Susan cried. Then, “Why does the city have to give them a permit, why can’t they say no?”
Because this was America. People had the right to convene, and it was better for Shirley Falls to give them a permit, more control could be exerted that way. The permit gave them permission to gather in the Civic Center, which was on the outskirts of town and not near the park. Charlie told Susan this no longer had much to do with Zach. Zach had been charged with a misdemeanor, period, the rest of it would quiet down.
It didn’t quiet down. Day after day the newspapers printed editorials from the outraged liberals of Maine, and from conservatives too, who wrote measured suggestions that the Somalis were expected, like every other person lucky enough to live here, to get jobs and training and pay their taxes. And then a letter would be published saying that all working Somalis were paying their taxes, and our country was based on the freedom to practice whatever religion was chosen, and so on and so forth. But the sense of purpose was heightened by the knowledge that the rally would be competing with the white supremacy group; a full-court press was on.
A team of civil rights units was sent into the schools. The purpose of the rally was explained. The Constitution of the United States was explained. Attempts were made to explain the history of the Somali troubles. Congregations in all the local churches were asked to help out. The two fundamentalist churches did not respond, but the rest did; there was a growing sense of umbrage: No one told Maine people how to live or what to think; the idea that Shirley Falls was somehow a place to recruit bigots was reprehensible. Colleges and universities got involved, civic organizations, senior citizen groups, all sorts of people seemed to be saying the Somalis could damn well live there just like other groups had before them, the French from Canada, the Irish before that.
What was being written on the Internet was another matter altogether, and Gerry O’Hare perspired as he faced his computer screen, scrolling through various websites. He had never in his life met anyone who said the Holocaust was a beautiful time in history, that ovens should be installed in Shirley Falls and the Somalis escorted in. It made him feel that he knew nothing about the world after all. He had been too young to go to Vietnam, though of course he knew men who had gone and he saw the results; some were right now living down there near the Somalis by the river, unable to keep a job, they were so nerved up. But it’s not as though Gerry O’Hare hadn’t seen things: children who had spent nights locked inside a doghouse, or had scars from parents who’d held their little hands to a stove, women whose hair had been ripped out by furious spouses, a gay homeless man lit on fire and thrown into the river a few years ago. These things had been hard to see. But it was new, what he saw on the Internet, the cool statements of superiority so deeply believed in, that anyone not white should, as one person had written, “be exterminated as easily as we do rats.” Gerry didn’t share with his wife the things he read. “Cowards,” he did say. “You can be anonymous, that’s what’s the trouble with the Internet.” Each night now Gerry took a sleeping pill. He understood: It was his watch this was happening on. He owed his citizens safety and this meant foreseeing the unforeseeable. The state police were brought in, other police departments in the state were tapped for their services, the plastic shields and sticks came out of storage, training in crowd control went on.
And Zachary Olson came through the back door of his home one morning and began to sob. “Mommy,” he cried to Susan, who was getting ready to leave for work. “They fired me! I walked in and they said they fired me, I don’t have a job.” And he bent and hugged his mother as though he had been given the sentence of death.
“They don’t have to tell him why,” Jim said when Susan called. “No employer if they know what they’re doing ever tells the person why. Bob and I will be there soon.”
9
With November came the wind, blowing in spurts of fury, and the air in New York turned chilly but not cold. Helen worked in her back garden, planting her tulip and crocus bulbs. Her irritation with the world had dampened into a cushion of soft melancholy that went with her everywhere. Afternoons, she would sweep the front stoop of its leaves, talking to the neighbors who passed by. There was the gay man, precise and pleasant, the tall and stately Asian doctor, the beastly woman who worked for the city and whose hair was too blond, the couple a few doors down expecting their first baby, and of course Deborah-Who-Does and Debra-Who-Doesn’t. Helen took time to speak to all of these people. It steadied her, because this had been the time of day her children would amble home from school, the sound of Larry’s key in the grated gate.
Within a year the stately Asian doctor would be dead from a heart attack, the gay man would lose a parent, the expectant couple would have their baby and move to a more affordable neighborhood, but all this hadn’t happened yet. The changes that were coming in Helen’s own life hadn’t happened yet (although she thought they had, Larry leaving her to go to college, thrusting her into the biggest change since her children had been born), and so she swept her front stoop and chatted and went inside and spoke to Ana about going home early, and then the house was hers until Jim came home. She would remember those late afternoons the same way she remembered how, when her children were small, she would linger in the living room for a few moments alone on Christmas Eve, watching the tree with its lights and its presents, feeling so excited and peaceful that tears filled her eyes, and then those Christmases were gone: the children no longer small, Emily perhaps not even coming home this year, going to her boyfriend’s family instead—no, it was astonishing to think those Christmases were gone.
But here was her home, with Jim. She walked through it after Ana left, the family room with the original old light fixtures, the mahogany trim gleaming when the afternoon sun slid through the upstairs parlor, the bedroom with the deck through the French doors. The bittersweet that grew along the railing now had orange nutlike berries showing through the curled and cracked encasings, and the vines were brown and lovely where the leaves had fallen off. Later, she would remember how Jim came through the door some evenings that autumn and showed an extra layer of largeheartedness toward her, sometimes throwing his arms around her right out of the blue and saying, “Hellie, you are so good. I love you.” It made the ache from her silent home more bearable. It made her feel graceful ag
ain. And yet—at times—there seemed a neediness to Jim she felt she’d not noticed before. “Hellie, you’ll never leave me, right?” Or: “You’ll love me no matter what, right?”
“You silly thing,” she’d answer. But there was a visceral recoiling in her when he was like that, and she was privately appalled at herself. A loving wife was loving; that’s who she’d always been. He spoke frequently of the Wally Packer trial, repeating to her—as though she hadn’t been there—his greatest moments. “Single-handedly I crushed that DA. Folded him up. He never saw it coming.” It wasn’t the fun kind of reminiscing they had done in the past. But how could she be sure? The emptiness of her big house, as the days grew shorter, disoriented her.
“I need a job,” she said at breakfast one morning.
“That’s a good idea.” Jim did not seem startled by the remark, and this mildly offended Helen.
“Well, it’s not that easy,” she said.
“How so?”
“Because a hundred years ago when I was—briefly, it’s true—a successful accountant, everything wasn’t computerized. I’d be lost in that world now.”
“You could go back to school,” Jim said.
Helen drank her coffee, put it down. She looked around the kitchen. “Let’s go walk in the park before you leave for work. We never do that.”
Walking, Helen’s heart lightened; she took Jim’s hand. With her other hand she waved to people from the neighborhood who’d come out early to run their dogs. They all waved back, some calling out a greeting. You have a friendly way, Jim had told her over the years, people are always glad to see you. And this made Helen think of her women friends who used to gather weekly in the kitchen of Victoria Cummings for a glass of wine on Wednesday afternoons: Oh, Helen, you’ve come! Calling out to her, some clapping their hands at the sight of her. Hey, girls, Helen’s here! The Kitchen Cabinet, they called it, two hours of gossip and laughing, and now that poor Victoria was having such a mess in her marriage she’d stopped hosting it, and Helen decided that when she got back to the house she’d telephone each of the women and say that the Kitchen Cabinet would meet at her house instead. Helen was surprised she hadn’t thought of this sooner; the world was righted now, women friends cast their own color of sunshine. That funny old lady from exercise class could come too. You lie on the mat, she had said to Helen the first day, and then you pray to God you get up. Over the hill was the wide swath of brown grass and the deep brown of the tree trunks, the glassy surface of the pond they passed. The building tops seen along the edge of the park appeared different from this angle, stately and old. Helen said, “It’s like we’re in Europe, that’s what it looks like. Let’s go to Europe this spring. Alone.”