2

… I have been anxious to improve the nick of time
… to stand on the meeting of two eternities …
to toe that line.

Walden, “Economy”

Charlotte’s letter was a critical point like a change of state, like the instant when a kettle of water starts to boil, or a swelling balloon bursts with a loud report, or an accumulating pile of gravel steepens until the stones rattle thunderously downhill.

In human affairs there are similar critical points, hours when small things mount to a crisis, moments when anger erupts or tears flow, days when marriages fail. Even the instant when understanding floods the mind can be a crucial turning point.

Long before the morning when Charlotte wrote her letter the simmering had begun in the kettle, the balloon had begun to expand, the steepening slope of the pile of gravel was becoming more acute.

If there was a single moment of beginning, it was the day Jack Markey rode up in the elevator to the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building on Huntington Avenue in Boston to receive a new assignment from Jefferson Grandison.

Jack was already immersed in one commercial project for his chief. He was working hard, throwing into it all his enthusiasm, all his skill in matching buildings to a particular site. Flying up in the elevator, he didn’t know how he’d find time for a second undertaking.

The elevator was attached to the outside of the building, and it was made of glass. It occurred to Jack as he rushed up from the dark canyon of Huntington Avenue into the light-filled upper air that Grandison’s office was not on the seventieth floor at all—it was somewhere in the upper reaches of the sky. Understanding Mr. Grandison’s exalted loftiness was like grasping the concept of infinity. No matter how far away you envisioned the end of space, there was infinite expanse beyond, and no matter how high you imagined Grandison’s dwelling place, he was higher still. Empires rose when Jefferson Grandison nodded his head. He shook it and they fell.

This morning Mr. Grandison had completed the details of an important contract by telephone. The other party was unctuously grateful. “That is thoroughly satisfactory, Mr. Grandison, sir. I’ll send a messenger directly with the papers and the check, transferring to you the possession of Lot Seventeen. I trust you’ll take it off our hands in the very near future?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grandison, sir, I don’t want to trouble you, but I wonder if you might be just a little more specific, as far as the timetable?”

“Not at this time.”

“I see. Well, now, sir—”

“I bid you good morning.”

When Jack walked into the office, still a little dizzy from his upward flight, Grandison beckoned him to the map table. It was a very large table, but it was dwarfed by the space around it, a room that was made even larger by the immense views surrounding it on three sides. Oversize maps could be spread out on the table, then swept off to be replaced by others. There were small-scale maps of the entire North Shore, the Berkshires, the Cape, there were mid-scale maps of towns and cities and large-scale maps of single streets and individual parcels of real estate. Jefferson Grandison could focus the zoom lens of his interest swiftly, rushing down from far away to stare at single souls laid bare. In the company of Jack Markey, he often looked down on the creation in this way, gazing at the land of Judah, the river Jordan, the waters of Nimron, the wilderness of Moab.

Today their attention was directed at Concord, Massachusetts, and the intersection of Route 2 with the Walden Pond road, Route 126. Jack’s current project was nearby, Walden Green, a mixed-use complex on a parcel belonging to the local high school on the northwest side of the intersection.

Grandison touched with his pencil the forty-acre site of the Concord landfill on the other side of the highway. “It’s being phased out, you say, the landfill?”

“Right. They don’t have much room left for that old-fashioned kind of refuse-disposal. Oh, they’re doing what they can. They’re recycling. But pretty soon their only choice will be a transfer station in the same place. Well, you know what that’s like. Big expense. Everything sorted and trucked away.”

“The landfill belongs to the town of Concord?”

“That’s right. To the town.”

“Which is, I believe, in a state of fiscal crisis?” Grandison’s pencil drifted slowly down Route 126 and stopped. “And this, what’s this next door?”

“Pond View. It’s a trailer park.”

“Surprising, a landfill and a trailer park so near to Walden Pond.”

“Yes, but the trailer park is being phased out, too. Those people only have a life tenancy. When they die, nobody else can come in.”

“According to this map, the trailer park belongs to the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is also in a perilous financial condition. How old are the tenants, roughly speaking?”

“I don’t know.” Jack made a joke. “Somebody might set a few of those mobile homes on fire.”

Grandison twiddled his pencil and said nothing. The pencil made meaningless scrawls across the parcel known as Pond View.

When the interview was over, Jack entered the glass elevator, pushed the button, and fell out of the sky, plunging earthward, emerging on Huntington Avenue breathless after his headlong descent.

On the sidewalk he had to step around the scattered possessions of a bag lady who was sitting just outside the glassy entrance of the office tower. Jack tossed a quarter in her direction and walked quickly away.

Sarah Peel reached for the quarter and zipped it into her coin purse, but she was not grateful. Sarah knew that no kindly Lord kept watch over this sparrow’s fall. Only the cold March wind, blustering down the narrow shaft of one Boston street or another, affected the course of her days. Sometimes it blew dust into her face, sometimes sleet and snow, and sometimes money. It was a random process, entirely without intention to help or to harm.