A Stillness in Bethlehem

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LIKE DOZENS OF OTHER small towns scattered across the White Mountains and the Green Mountains and the Berkshires, Bethlehem often got its first dusting of snow just after Halloween and found itself hip-deep in white by the first of December. This first of December had not been that bad. It had been a mild season from the beginning, causing squeals of panic and indignation to rise from the flatlanders who had bought up the ski resorts to the north. The squeals and panic were noted with a certain amount of satisfaction by the natives, who didn’t much like the flatlanders in spite of the money they spent. Then, in the middle of everything, there had been a quick-mud thaw. The temperature had dropped far enough to freeze that over only on the first of December itself. It was now December second, the official opening day of the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration, and everything looked a little skewed. Peter Callisher thought that what it really looked like was haphazard. The people of Bethlehem, Vermont, had been putting on their Nativity Celebration since 1934. The Celebration had grown from a small collection of rough sheds propped up with two-by-fours around the gazebo in the town park to a kind of psychic delusion that possessed the whole town three weeks out of every year. Each cycle of the Nativity play now took a full week, starting on Monday and ending on Saturday, bringing new and bewildered bevies of tourists into the inns around Main Street every Sunday afternoon. The Holy Family had taken up residence in the gazebo itself, and the cow and the donkey and the sheep that surrounded them were all real enough to cause difficulties in managing their manure. It all looked eerily authentic, in spite of the fact that Palestine rarely got this much snow—or any snow at all. For Peter Callisher, standing at the window of the living room in the apartment he kept over the offices of the Bethlehem News and Mail, it all looked depressing, as if they were trying to hold on to something they should have let go of long ago. Peter wasn’t a flatlander, but he looked like one. He was tall and angular and bookish, complete with wire-rimmed glasses and a parka from L. L. Bean, and there was something about the way he moved his hands that spoke very strongly of Away. It should have. Peter Callisher was forty-four years old. He had been born and raised in Bethlehem, in the small brick house on Dencher Street his father had built around the time he took over the News and Mail. Peter had sold that house exactly six years ago, when his father died and he had taken over the News and Mail himself. In the time between, he had been about as Away as anyone could get. At first, there had been the usual things. He had gone south to Yale for college and then to New York to take a master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism. After that, he had gone to work for The New York Times. It was what happened after that that got to people, because they found it inexplicable. Running away to Boston or New York or the Ivy League: That was all right. That was about sex. Running away to Pakistan, even if The New York Times was paying you to do it and calling you a foreign correspondent: That was something else again. As for coming back to town with a bullet in your hip when you hadn’t even been in a war, and trailing rumors about Afghanistan and the mujahadeen—that was enough to put an end to conversations all over town, even down in the basement of the Congregational Church, where the old ladies made holiday baskets for the poor in Burlington and talked about the children of friends of theirs who’d died.

From where he was standing, Peter Callisher could see most of the town park and the south end of Main Street. As usual on the first day, before the serious tourists had begun their serious tramping about, people were milling around, trying themselves out, wondering how they’d gotten themselves into this fix. The three wise men had new robes this year, brightly colored and sewn over with paste gemstones. They even had camels sent up from a theatrical-animal supply service in Boston. The child Jesus had swaddling clothes shot through with gold thread. The angel of the Annunciation had wings wired to glow with incandescent bulbs. According to The Boston Globe, Bethlehem was likely to realize over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars from this Celebration, spread out across viewing tickets, room rents, restaurant checks, parking fees and souvenirs—of which there would be plenty, on sale twenty-four hours a day from the old horse barn in back of the Town Hall. According to New York magazine, Bethlehem’s take was going to be closer to half a million, due at least in part to the fact that New York had been hyping the Celebration vigorously for every one of the past five seasons. Whatever the final count, the money would more than come in handy. Like too many of the towns on the edges of the rural backwaters of northern New England, Bethlehem didn’t seem to have any money of its own.