A Stillness in Bethlehem(11)

“I don’t think so. I talked to Benjy and he says he’ll file a countermotion for the town, and that ought to hold up any action until after the holidays. It’s not this year that’s the problem.”

“Once we get through this year, we might be able to talk her out of the whole thing,” Stu said. “You know. Using persuasion.”

“We might,” Peter agreed. “The problem is—”

“What?”

“Well, it’s like cancer, isn’t it? We’ve been getting away with this for years, basically because no one wanted to be the first to complain. Now Tish is going to be the first to complain, and if we deflect her there’s sure to be half a dozen other people who won’t mind at all being second. And sooner or later—”

“Ah,” Stu said. “Sooner or later.”

Peter took a long gulp of his coffee, made a face and put the cup down. “I’ve worked it all out,” he said. “After I talked to Benjy and Franklin, I mean. You have any idea how much of the town budget gets paid for by the Celebration?”

“Nope.”

“Almost a third. A third. Can you believe that? And it’s not only the fancy stuff, either. I mean, good years, we go fancy. But bad years, we pay for the roads without raising taxes and we pay the heat on a lot of houses with nobody but widows in them and—well, God knows what. We’ve been doing this since 1934, Stu. I don’t know if we can survive without it.”

“Everybody else does.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, “but they don’t survive very well. Oh, hell, Stuart. I don’t want to see us get to be like one of those places upstate with nobody in them practically and the town hall falling down and everybody sucking up to the flatlanders because they bring in the money. At least here we only have to suck up to the flatlanders once a year.”

“And it’s once a year too much,” Stu said.

Peter shot him a look. “I wish you wouldn’t joke about it. I came up here to make you give me some help. We’ve got an hour. I think this is something we ought to do something about.”

“Like what?” Stu was surprised.

“Like go up there,” Peter said. “Go up there now. Make her see reason.”

“Tish?”

“Make her see reason,” Peter insisted.

Stu was about to shoot him another flippant comment, and then he saw it. Peter’s eyes were straying. Peter’s eyes had left the conversation and come to rest on the gun-room door, riveted, as if he were Superman and his X-ray vision had just caught sight of Lois Lane being held captive on the other side. There were faint beads of sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, and an odd flush under his skin—odd because his skin itself seemed too white. Stu didn’t think he’d ever seen him look so strange.

“Peter?” he said.

Peter Callisher came to with a shudder. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “I think I’m losing my mind.”





5


“What I don’t understand,” Betty Heath was saying, sewing another glass ruby onto the hem of Balthazar’s robe, “is what difference it makes if she does file this injunction. I mean, it’s just her, isn’t it? It’s just Tish? Why should she be able to shut everything down when she’s the only one who’s complaining?”

The glass rubies were in a cardboard box on a long narrow table pushed up against the wall under the window that looked out on Main Street from the basement of the First Congregational Church, and right next to them was another cardboard box full of shiny nylon satin ribbons. Sharon Morrissey pawed through the ribbons and came up with one in green. She turned it over in her hand and put it back again. Out on Main Street, Amanda Ballard was jogging along the sidewalk on her own, her Christmas spirit decorously displayed by a big chunk of red-and-green yarn tied into her hair. Sharon Morrissey hated women who wore big chunks of yarn in their hair. She could never wear anything in her hair herself, because she had a big white streak across the left side of it, and the streak always made her self-conscious. It was worse because she’d had the streak for as long as she could remember. Pictures of her at the age of three showed it clearly, looking out of place and vaguely painful, as if it were the result of a terrible tragedy. Of course, she didn’t like Amanda Ballard much in any case. There was that. She would have looked at something else, but everything else she could think of to look at seemed to be a snake pit. She couldn’t look at Betty Heath, because Betty would suspect just how stupid Sharon thought she was, which was infinitely so. She couldn’t stare at the gold felt Christmas bell she had been painting over with glitter, because the damned thing was insipid and even Betty would realize that. Most of all, she couldn’t stare at Susan Everman, who was sitting at her elbow putting glitter on a green felt Christmas tree. Sharon Morrissey and Susan Everman lived together in a small two-bedroom house on the town end of the Delaford Road. They had bought that house three years ago, while on a vacation trip up from New York City. They had moved into it six months later, giving rise to a kind of town talk that was neither gossip nor speculation, but a half-curious statement of fact. Sharon Morrissey wrote children’s books that Susan Everman illustrated. They used one of their two bedrooms for the guests who arrived with regularity every weekend of the winter. They had a savings account together at the Vermont Savings and Loan. Everybody in town knew perfectly well what was going on. Most of them, in good New England fashion, didn’t care a whit. Unfortunately, one of the few people who did care—or who at least found the whole thing so uncomfortable that she couldn’t stop talking about it once it was brought to her attention—was Betty Heath. As Sharon had told Susan more than once, being around Betty was much worse than being around someone who definitely didn’t like lesbians, because with somebody who definitely didn’t like lesbians, you could just not like her back. Betty was such a mass of confusion, she made Sharon’s head ache. She also had a memory like a sieve. Betty would insist on having something explained—wasn’t it difficult, for instance, to get the bank to allow you to have an account together?—and Sharon would explain it, and ten minutes later Betty would have to have it explained all over again. Talking with Betty, Sharon sometimes felt as if she were teaching a class at the New School, with all the good parts left out. Betty would never ask about sex and never listen to anything she considered pornographic. Sharon never got to say anything that might have caused a serious and fatal shock.