18

Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

Walden, “The Ponds”

“Mr. Grandison, sir? I’m calling again about Lot Seventeen. I wonder, sir, if perhaps it’s slipped your mind?”

Jefferson Grandison looked at the telephone with disgust. He had given specific instructions to his receptionist that this particular caller was not to be put through. “Of course,” he said after a moment’s delay, “we will attend to the matter at once.”

“I knew you would, Mr. Grandison. I knew it was merely an oversight on your part. I wonder if you could speak in terms of an exact time?”

“Excuse me, but my other phone is ringing.” Grandison put down the phone and walked out to the anteroom to speak sharply to Martha Jones.

Later on, when Jack Markey stepped out of the elevator and said good morning, Martha cautioned him, “Watch out. He’s in one of his funny moods.”

“Right,” said Jack, but he felt confident that he knew how to handle his chief in all his funny moods. He smiled conspiratorially at the receptionist. In her white dress she was an astonishingly beautiful girl, but he had given up trying to charm her. There was something, perhaps, about living in the clouds that had unsexed her. Perhaps it was the altitude. Perhaps medical people should look into the effect on the sex drive of height above sea level. Jack wondered if he should stay the hell away from the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building before his own healthy urges slipped away from him.

The woman was right about Grandison. He was indeed in one of his detached stratospheric moods. His vague gaze dodged away from Jack and lost itself in the mist outside the enormous windows. But Jack had long since discovered in that unfocused eye a remote and smoldering point of light. It was like peering into the smoky entrance to a cave, seeing far away within the cavern a bed of burning coals. Grandison was in there all right.

Jack recounted his progress in preparing the Concord groundwork for the development to be called Walden Green. Then they got down to brass tacks, the massive business arrangements that would be necessary whenever the town gave them a binding agreement—the permanent commitment from the Paul Revere Insurance Company, the construction loan, the mortgage, the hard and soft costs, the timing. “There’ll be a saving on the design,” said Jack, smiling.

“Of course. In-house. Your department.”

“Right.”

Not until then did they get down to the other Concord matter. “You’ve found an intermediary, I understand?” murmured Grandison.

“Yes. Two, as a matter of fact. One of them’s free of charge.” Jack grinned.

“I leave it in your hands entirely.” Grandison stared at his right hand, which was doodling in a notebook, leaving only the faintest trace on the white paper.

“Oh, Mr. Grandison,” said Martha Jones, putting her head in the door, “Mrs. Grandison is on the phone.”

The meeting was over. Jack excused himself and plunged earthward once again in the glass elevator.

It was always a shock to find himself on the ground again, surrounded by the reality of Huntington Avenue with its drab street people. The same sorry-looking bag lady was occupying the glass portico of the Grandison Building.

Once again Jack stumbled over her disordered belongings. Why didn’t the damned woman move out of the way? “Excuse me,” he said irritably.

Sarah Peel glanced at him with her ancient reptilian eyes. She saw Jack speak to the guard before turning on his heel and striding away down the street. Slowly she got up.

The guard walked toward her. He was a softhearted man, but he knew he had been too lenient already. “Look here, ma’am,” he said, not unkindly, “you’ve got to move on.”

Without a word Sarah collected her possessions, stuffed them into her stroller, and trudged off in the direction of Copley Square.

She had been asleep when Jack Markey tripped over her, or at least she had been lost in the half stupor with which she abolished time. It was the same daydream that had made her childhood bearable, in that sad house in East Boston next to the New England Ring and Flange Company, where the whole neighborhood echoed with the scream of the high-powered saws and the thundering noise of sheet metal racing between rolling drums. Young Sarah had dreamed of a green countryside with farms and trees, she had longed for cows with large soft eyes and ponies with flying manes and tails.

Once a traveling fair had come to the empty lot beyond the Ring and Flange Company, and every day for a week Sarah took a ride on the merry-go-round. Every day she chose the same horse, the white one that looked back at her with a fiery eye. Down the horse plunged, and up, and then it rushed forward with a lovely surging bound, while the calliope wheezed the “Skater’s Waltz” and the drums banged magically by themselves, and the cymbals clashed. The horse belonged to her. She gave it a name, Pearl.

The other kids didn’t know how to ride, they just sat there, but Sarah knew how. She felt it in her bones.