15

… these tabernacles of flesh are to be rent in pieces, these houses of clay are to be broken down by the hand of death.…

Reverend Paul Litchfield
first minister of Carlisle, 1781-1827

When in doubt, throw it out. Rosemary Hill was cleaning the attic. She had spent days and days under the roof in the sweltering heat, bowed over on a low stool, sorting through papers and memorabilia, taking small respites downstairs in bed, then coming back up. Ruthlessly she tossed things into the wastebasket. What possible use to Jeffry and Amanda were her life-drawings from art school, thirty years back? Why would they care about these old yellowed copies of the Nashoba Bee? Out with them all, out, out.

But Rosemary couldn’t throw away the cheap school photographs of Jeffry in the third grade, or the notes on parish visiting at the Concord Reformatory. Jeffry would want the pictures and the church might want the notes. Rosemary stacked them beside the attic stairs, then gazed around the attic.

There was still such an awful lot of stuff. How much longer would she have the strength to keep on? How many weeks or months? She looked at her watch. She would have to stop in a little while for the second meeting of the group at Ed Bell’s house at three o’clock. There was time for just one more box. Undoing the string on a carton of old linens, Rosemary pulled out a dresser scarf. Would Amanda like a dresser scarf? Amanda’s own great-grandmother had made it, and nowadays this sort of thing was coming back in style.

At the Bells’ house, on Acton Road, Ed was getting ready for his afternoon meeting, looking critically at the living room. It seemed comfortable enough, a little frowsy from the battering it had taken from five children and any number of dogs. But the chairs were too far apart. For a gathering like this one, people really needed to be closer together. He pushed one of the big upholstered chairs closer to the sofa and dragged the other one across the rug on its two back legs. His wife looked in as he crowded the desk chair against the coffee table.

“Another one of those meetings?” said Lorraine. “Honestly, Ed, dear, it’s the craziest thing I ever heard of.” Lorraine had her pocketbook in her hand. “Illegal, immoral, and I don’t know what else.”

“We just talk, that’s all we do,” said Ed. “You’re going for Ellabelle?”

“Yes, and I’m late.”

But late as she was at the copy center, Lorraine was still too early for Eleanor, who always found it hard to stop working. Eleanor had turned her job into a dance. Now she grinned at her mother, snatched the next customer’s sheet of paper, whirled around, tossed up the cover of the copy machine, slipped in the paper, snicked the cover down again, punched a row of buttons with quick dabs of her fingers, whirled again with tossing hair, to seize the ringing telephone and tuck it between ear and shoulder and josh with the boy in the office upstairs while she gathered up the copies from the bin, smacked them smartly into a pile, twirled to put the phone down, beamed at the customer and dropped his copies in front of him, all complete.

Lorraine stood waiting, lost in admiration. What a girl that Eleanor was! She could do anything she set her mind to. In school she was a responsible student. In her modern-dance class she was nimble and quick: she could turn around in midair, she could stand on one leg and bring the other one up beside her ear. On the basketball court she could sink a ball in the basket every time she tried. She could swim fifty laps in the school swimming pool, she could run like a deer. Therefore it was all the more pitiful to see what was happening to her at home, snarled as she was in the toils of love. Lorraine watched her daughter and waited, gripping her pocketbook.

This afternoon Bo Harris would be coming over again to work on his old car. And the new boy, Paul, would be arriving, moving into Stanton’s room. Eleanor, Bo, and Paul—how would the three of them get along? Darling Ed, he had taken Bo aside and asked him to encourage Paul to help with the replacement of the engine block. Eleanor would be mooning around the edges, abject, eager, trying to help, getting in the way. Poor Eleanor! She had thrown herself so passionately into Bo’s great enterprise. His resolute seriousness was hers as well. She was making a heroic effort to understand the workings of a gasoline engine. She was an authority on pistons, on the fatal delay of the spark. But it was all book-learning. She didn’t have the mechanical know-how Bo Harris seemed to have been born with.

Dropping Eleanor off at home, Lorraine drove off to ransack Gibby’s General Grocery. Thus, when Eleanor came running downstairs in full cosmetic regalia, it was her father who took her: outside and introduced her to Paul Dobbs, and Paul to Bo Harris.

Paul was a cheerful-looking sinewy boy with a bruised face. “Well, hey, there,” he said, grinning at Eleanor, whistling in admiration. Eleanor had washed her hair and blown it dry so that it streamed forward around her face and then back at the tips as if the wind had changed direction in a hurricane.

Eleanor said hi, then turned to glance at Bo, but he was looking at his car, which stood among them like a monument. Above it like a canopy rose the tree-trunk tripod and the new block and tackle. Eleanor’s father had paid for the block and tackle. He had always, he said, wanted a block and tackle.

Then Bo turned to Paul and looked at him soberly. “You want to help me install the clutch? It’s a two-man job. It’s really tricky to line up the spline with the clutch plate.”

Paul looked vaguely at the tripod and the block and tackle and the car. “You should see my brother’s Jag.” Leaning against the porch railing, Paul bragged about the Jag and about a couple of Suzukis and BMW bikes he had ridden in the past. Then he talked freely about his four brothers. Two were rich. The other two were locked up in houses of correction.

Bo made another try. “Here, you want to grab the back end of the transmission?”

But Paul had other things to do. He turned away importantly. “I got to go to Winthrop. My brother, he’s going to pick me up. He’s got this place right on the water.”

So Bo had to fall back on Eleanor. “This shaft goes into that hole, see? You got it?”

“Got it,” said Eleanor, and she took a firm hold. But she wasn’t strong enough. They couldn’t get the shaft lined up. Bo cursed and fumed. At last, in desperation, he poked around in the house until he found a broom in the kitchen. Then, bumping down the cellar stairs, he looked fora workbench with tools.

There were two large obstructions in the cellar, a monstrous object with iron doors into which coal had once been shoveled and a modern oil-fired furnace. Mr. Bell’s workbench occupied an enclosed space behind the new furnace—the old coal bin, guessed Bo. He took Mr. Bell’s saw off the wall above the workbench and carried it outdoors with the broom. Resting the broom on the top step of the back porch, he braced it with his knee and sawed off a length of handle.

It worked fine. It lined things up just right. Satisfied, Bo ate half a dozen of Eleanor’s fudge brownies, mounted his bicycle, and rode away.

Eleanor stood in the driveway, gazing after his bare back as he coasted onto Acton Road. Then she had to move out of the way because Mr. Tarkington’s car was turning in to the driveway. It was rusty and dented. It looked almost as bad as Bo’s. And another car was slowing down. Eleanor recognized Mrs. Baxter at the wheel.

What were all these people doing here? Eleanor held the screen door open for Mr. Boland, who came hurrying up from across the street. Then she looked for her father, to tell him he had company.

She found him clattering glasses onto a tray in the kitchen. “What are all these people here for?” said Eleanor.

“Oh, it’s just a meeting,” said her father, smiling at her.

“What kind of a meeting?”

Ed took a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator. “Just a friendly support group, Ellabelle.”

“A support group? For what?”

“For each other.” Ed Bell winked at his daughter, put the pitcher on the tray with the glasses, pushed open the swinging door, and carried the tray into the hall to greet his guests.

The last arrival was Rosemary Hill. Eleanor saw Mrs. Hill climb the porch steps, holding her purse against her side in a queer sort of way. In a moment Mrs. Hill was in the living room with the others. Eleanor stood in the hall, staring at them, wanting to know what was going on, until her father winked at her and pulled at the heavy sliding doors. The doors rumbled together across the floor and shut off Eleanor’s view of the meeting. Shrugging her shoulders, she went upstairs to her room.

When Lorraine Bell came back from her shopping expedition, the meeting was over. There were no other cars in the driveway, except of course Bo’s old wreck under the tripod.

Ed helped his wife carry the groceries indoors. “Oh,” said Lorraine, stopping with a bag in her arms, gazing at the mutilated broom on the grass beside the back steps. “Look at that. What happened?”

Ed’s new hacksaw lay on the driveway beside Bo’s Chevy. Ed picked it up. “Oh, careless youth,” he said, wiping the blade on his sleeve.