It didn’t matter; this was not a neighborhood that could afford to frown on oddities. Brighton Avenue, where he now stood, was a shabby main street. Congdon Street, where he lived, was home to an assortment of students, foreigners, and old people. A young couple with matching briefcases had recently bought one of the peeling houses in the hope that the street would turn chic; they spent all their free time gamely stripping paint from the interiors. On weekday mornings white-haired women in bathrobes stared from apartment windows while their middle-aged daughters straggled off to work, and then kept on staring. The immobility of the stay-at-home mothers suggested that their daughters had locked them in, but often at noontime Peter would see one of them moving toward the corner. Her steps would lighten as she neared Brighton Avenue. Here was life! Fresh fish, fish-and-chips, Fishberg the optician … Also on Congdon Street was a three-storied frame building with huge pillars and sagging porches — a vaguely Southern edifice. Inside lived an entire village of Cambodians.
Peter had moved to this seedy section of Boston three years earlier, upon his retirement from the private boys’ academy where he’d taught English. His plain apartment here pleased him far more than his aunt’s town house in Back Bay. He had dragged out several decades in that town house, first as his aunt’s pampered guest and then as her legatee. He had sold it for a good price to the young self-made millionaire next door, Geronimus Barron. No one had hurried Peter out after the sale, though he was eager enough to leave; but within a month of his departure, Barron had knocked down the wall between the houses, gutted entire floors, and installed solar panels and skylights. The magnificent place that resulted was featured in Architectural Digest and the New York Times. The lovely tiled fireplace in his own bedroom, Peter noted with pride, remained untouched.
The bus came. The few passengers aboard already looked fatigued. Peter, his own heart light under his silly coat, began the weekly journey.
“HOW’S THE RESEARCH?” Meg Wren was asking him a few hours later.
Jack and the three children were playing with a soccer ball in the field in back of the house. The field sloped gently toward the woods. A mile away was the Sudbury River. Peter couldn’t see the river now, from the kitchen, but he could glimpse it from the third-floor guest room where he stayed whenever he spent the night.
“I’m having trouble placing Mrs. Jellyby,” Peter said.
“Mrs. Jellyby?” Meg repeated, wrinkling her long brow.
Peter waited. Her blue gaze was intelligent, but he was not sure exactly how well read she was. She had been born and raised in Wisconsin and had come east after college, almost fifteen years ago, and had quickly married one of his former students. They’d met at church. “Bleak House?” Meg said.
“Bleak House,” Peter commended. “Mrs. Jellyby is the crackpot who spends all her time collecting money for the natives of Borrioboola-Gha. Her own ragged children keep tumbling down the stairs. Their house is filthy and falling apart. ‘Never have a mission,’ her poor husband warns the heroine. These days we would applaud Mrs. Jellyby’s selflessness. We’d be glad to know that she cares about Africa — funny how some things never change.”
“ ‘Ye have the poor always with you’?”
“Yes, and they’re always the same poor. Mrs. Jellyby carries her ardor to excess and neglects the need nearest her. Not a very Christian form of charity.”
Peter paused. He had been lecturing to Meg, taking advantage of her daughterly attention. In years spent among self-important high school teachers and garrulous old ladies, he had accustomed himself to the listener’s role. Now he had found someone who listened as attentively as he did. It was as if she had inherited the talent from him — or, since that was impossible, had caught it. And this house of hers — so old, and so fresh — it too seemed to want to hear what he had to say. “Mrs. Jellyby’s philanthropy isn’t very Jewish, either,” he went on. “You could make a case that her charity is in Maimonides’ seventh degree — she doesn’t know the names of the people she’s relieving and they’ve certainly never heard of her. But Dickens meant her to be a figure of fun, and he keeps arguing with me. He says that Maimonides was talking about charity closer to home, and that Mrs. Jellyby doesn’t qualify at all … I do get a bit carried away, don’t I?”
Meg was silent. Of all the silences he had ever experienced, Meg’s was his favorite. It was not disappointed, like his mother’s; not bored, like those of the women he had courted; not embarrassed, like that of the search committee that had failed to award him the headmastership; not sleepy, like students in late-afternoon remedial classes; and not terrifying, like his mute aunt after her stroke.
“I think you’re enjoying this task,” she said after a while.
“Carrot scraping?” he said, smiling. He had been scraping carrots for her while they — he — talked.
“Thinking about Dickens and Maimonides,” she said. “Finding Maimonides’ eight levels of charity in the novels of Dickens,” she carefully amended. “It does sound … nice. I knew you were interested in Dickens. But I didn’t know you were interested in Judaism.”
“I’m not interested in Judaism. Only in Jews. They’re so complicated …”
“Mmm,” she responded, noncommittally.
“Always have been.” At Harvard just after the war he had noticed that his brightest classmates were the Jewish boys. They were at home with Swift’s grotesques and Jane Austen’s ingenues. Mastering Middle English was a snap after Hebrew. Shakespeare’s tales were just another set of Midrashim. Every exchange with one of those students had left Peter admiring and envious. He wondered what encounters Meg had thus far endured — dinner-party debate? Lordly attempts at seduction? … And here was her husband, open-faced, steady as the junior high school principal he was. He walked in grinning, his arm outstretched.
The three children bounded in behind Jack: two boys and a little girl. The younger boy’s hair matched the pumpkin on the window-sill. Meg said that his coloring came from her side of the family, though her own smooth hair was brown. The children greeted Peter lightly, as if a week had not gone by since they last saw him; as if he hadn’t spent more than an hour on bus, trolley, and little train; as if he lived there always. Someday he must really live there, Meg had said more than once. The third-floor room was just the place to retire from his retirement.
AFTER LUNCH the three adults drank hot cider under an apple tree and talked about the children.
“They’re lazy,” Jack said. “I tried to teach Ned chess the other day. Too difficult, he said. Checkers is good enough for him.”
Meg said, “It’s good enough for a lot of people.”
“Oh, Meg. We send them to private schools. We shore up this old house for them.” He wasn’t complaining, Peter noticed; he was proud.
“You spend two hours a day commuting,” Meg added.
“I do. So they’ve got to,” Jack said.
“Got to what?” she said, laughing.
“Play chess.” And he laughed, too. “What do you think, Peter?”
“What do I think about what?” Peter hedged.
“About our three hooligans. About the worth of private education. About the country life.” Jack breathed deeply. Generations of farmers and ministers expressed themselves in that pleased inhalation. The house had always been in his family; some ancestor had built it. A century ago he would have farmed the land with his sons and a few hired hands. They would have made a genteel go of it. The boys would have gone to Harvard as a matter of course. Now he had to weary himself every day as a schoolmaster, and his children would have to compete for college places against the grandchildren of longshoremen and Pullman porters. To strengthen them for the fight, Meg drove them to their Cambridge school every morning and home again in the late afternoon. In the interval she worked as a programmer, also in Cambridge.