Synopsis
Book by Tracy Kidder
Extrait
Chapter 1: Townie
He grew up here. He was the youngest of Jane and Bill O'Connor's seven children. His oldest sister called him Todder when he was an infant. His high school friends shortened up his surname and rechristened him Oakie. To teachers and other adults he was usually Tommy. His wife would call him Tom. All his nicknames and the diminutive accompanied him to adulthood. If you do all your growing up in the same small place, you don't shed identities. You accumulate them.
One day when he was ten years old, Tommy O'Connor's Little League baseball coach made him the starting pitcher. A signal honor, but then Tommy couldn't get anyone out. He walked the first batter, and from their lawn chairs on the sidelines the parents called, "Make him be a hitter, Tommy." So he threw an easy one right over the plate, and the batter nailed it. His teammates in the field behind him did as they'd been taught: they talked it up, they chattered, squeaky voices calling, "Hum chuck, Tommy. No batter, no batter. Hum it in there, Tommy baby." He threw harder and walked the next two batters. He eased up and the next kid hit it over everything. Many games of Little League reach this kind of impasse. Five runs in, the bases loaded once again, and still nobody out, the fielders grumbling, the parents looking on in silence, all except for one, someone else's father, who cares more about a good ball game than his neighbor's son, and shouts, "Get him outa there, for Christ's sake!" Tommy stood on the mound, staring at his shoes.
The coach called time and went out to talk to him. If sports build character, they can also test it prematurely. What if the kid can't take it? What if he begins to cry? "You all right?" the coach asked.
Tommy lifted his eyes toward the sky. It was a fine summer afternoon at Arcanum Field. Not a cloud in sight. Tommy looked back over his shoulder, as if just making sure. Then he looked at the coach, and he smiled. "Think it might rain?" he asked.
The coach told the story to Tommy's father, Bill, the treasurer of Hampshire County and the region's preeminent master of ceremonies and after-dinner speaker. Bill put that story about Tommy in the vast repertoire he employed at the Elks, the Legion, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the John Boyle O'Reilly Club, the family's kitchen table. There it grew as smooth as the bits of glass that Tommy found on the beach during the family's summer camping trips to Cape Cod. Tommy's mother kept scrapbooks about him, even when he was an adult. He was her last child, the youngest of the six who survived. He had brown curly hair, and a little cockeyed grin that made girls and women smile back.
Tommy spent his childhood and adolescence on Forbes Avenue, just off Elm Street and a few blocks from Smith College, in a quiet neighborhood of both grand and ordinary homes. He was raised in a wood-framed house that a family of modest means could afford back then. The house was full to bursting with exuberant youth, and the neighborhood was so full of children that Tommy never felt a need to go beyond it, except for the sake of adventure. Early on summer mornings he would stand on the sidewalk in front of his family's house and hear a cry or lift it first himself -- "E-awkee!" -- and then the same call, from voices that hadn't changed yet, would sound up and down the streets, and soon barefoot children would appear from all directions, apparitions out of the gray dawn. Tommy's friend Rick emerged from just three doors up Forbes Avenue, and from their homes came Ethan and Lisa and Bobby and half a dozen more. They'd converge on the sidewalk and make plans, naming destinations -- "Meet ya at the Hill," "Meet ya at White Rock," "Meet ya at the dirt mounds."
The fastest, easiest route to Hawley Junior High -- named for a local Revolutionary War patriot -- would have been by sidewalk, but Tommy and his friends rarely went that way. From September until June they traveled with their bookbags through the backyards of the Elm Street neighborhood, sliding through hedges, ducking under fences, wading through snow. They paused to gather chestnuts at Slawson's chestnut tree, for the after-school chestnut wars with the Washington Street kids. They crossed the Smith College campus, past stately buildings and views of Paradise Pond, though years would pass before Tommy noticed the postcard beauties of the place. It was just their playground then. They stopped outside the college art museum and climbed on the Rodin, a statue called The Walking Man. They detoured through the backstairs spots that made perfect hiding places during games of Kill. They hunted frogs in the pond beside the college greenhouse, until someone came out and chased them away -- class consciousness began to bloom in Tommy at that pond, the day he saw a group of kids and a teacher from the private Smith day school catching frogs without interference. The campus was so rich in diversions -- the Foucault pendulum inside the science building, which they set swinging wildly; the elderly college security guards, Creepy Kreps and Mooney, whom they could usually get to chase them -- that by the time they'd passed under the Romanesque shadows of the town's public library, they were nearly always late for school.
Tommy's world widened bit by bit, to take in other neighborhoods and villages within the town such as Bay State, Leeds, and Florence, and every widening seemed dramatic to him, a journey into a vast territory, called Northampton. But the old neighborhood remained its center, and the friends from it his most enduring. The oldest friend of all was Rick Janacek. Tommy knew him before he knew Northampton. Rick was left to play at the O'Connor house when Tommy still slept in a crib. He was two years older, and became something like a leader for Tommy and many of his gang. "Let's go see what Rick's doing," he'd often say, on the mornings when Rick didn't join them on the sidewalk outside Tommy's house.
The O'Connor family had lost a child some years before, but the Janaceks' misfortunes were astonishing. Two children had died in infancy from blood disorders. One had cerebral palsy. In the most lurid of the family's catastrophes, the second son accidentally shot and killed the eldest. Not long afterward, that second son lost half his arm in the meat cutter at the family store. And a year after that, the family store burned down. The city took up a collection. Tommy's father had organized the fund-raiser.
All of this had happened before Rick and Tommy were born, but Tommy heard the stories, of course -- "the old Irish," as his father called them, whispering that the one Janacek boy was maimed in fateful retribution for killing the other. Between Rick and Tommy, those troubles remained for years a thing known and not discussed. Rick didn't bring up the subject, and Tommy didn't want to meddle. Family was a sacred subject even then for him.
The hallway outside Rick's bedroom always seemed to be half filled with boxes. You got past by walking sideways. Rick's house always seemed dark, heavy-curtained, a bit eerie, but that didn't bother Tommy much, partly because of Rick's mother, who was forever feeding Tommy snacks and loading him up with boxes of damaged crackers to take home. Sometimes when he came looking for Rick and Rick wasn't there, she invited him to sit with her on her porch, and talked about relatives and people she knew who were doing good works, while feeding him another snack. She brightened the house considerably for him.
In the background of a group of old snapshots, a corner of Rick's bedroom appears -- a crowded bureau, a clutter of coats and shirts hanging on a wall, and a desk completely covered with model paints, the pieces of a model in progress sitting on some newspaper. A heavy curtain blocks the window. Tommy, who is just eleven, stands in the foreground, pink-cheeked and chubby with a Dutch-boy haircut, striking various poses: joyfully giving Rick the finger, spraying deodorant at Rick, and, wearing a maniacal grin, holding the deodorant can as if to spray an armpit with it. Rick took the pictures from his sickbed. He was laid up for six months with a badly broken leg, and for six months Tommy visited him after school, almost every single day. They spent the countless hours of Rick's convalescence playing an early electronic game called Talking Football and building models. Rick's creations had a craftsman's perfection; Tommy's had gobs of glue hanging from their joints.
A friend two years older is a prized possession when accomplishment is still marked by years acquired and inches grown. Tommy pestered Rick for information about the adult world. Rick had Playboy magazines. He could answer some of Tommy's insistent queries and clear up his wild misconceptions about the facts of life. Tommy got drunk for the first time with Rick: he threw up on the couch in Rick's living room; Rick walked him home, put him to bed, and cleaned up the mess. One day when Tommy was fifteen, Rick said, "I got a joint." Rick held up a bedraggled-looking thing vaguely like a cigarette.
"What are you gonna do with it?"
"Want to try it? Nobody'll know."
So it was that for the first and last time in his life Tommy tried to taste an illegal drug. In his memory, it only made him cough. He still thought they'd tried to smoke oregano.
Tommy was a tender child, utterly dependent on his parents' affection for each other -- bawling, he vividly recalled, when they got into mock arguments. He shared a room for years, and the same bed for several, with his older brother Jack, who was big, handsome, and wild. He adored Jack, and was, like many little brothers, oppressed by him. Tommy came to adulthood with a proclivity to worry, which seemed allied with the anger that he felt when someone tried to "get over" on him, and maybe that was part of the residue of growing up with Jack. But they were great friends now, and Tommy had decided to feel grateful to Jack when he returned to his memories of childhood. In that fine, assembled place, Jack had toughened him up -- cured Tommy of his fear of the dark, for instance: when their parents went out, Jack used to lock Tommy in the basement and turn off the lights.
On one day out of many like it at the O'Connor house, Jack slapped Tommy and Tommy started crying and Rick said, "You're disgusting." Jack said, "Yeah. Mama's boy." Afterward Rick started saying to Tommy, "Why don't you stand up to him?" And one day he did. Tommy actually wrestled Jack to the ground, and looked up at Rick with startled eyes, as if to say, "Wow, it actually worked." Then Jack recovered and pummeled Tommy once again. But this was the beginning of Tommy's years of fighting back, a period that ended in a donnybrook conducted all over the O'Connor house. It concluded in the cellar in a draw, when he and Jack realized that one of them was going to kill the other.
By then Rick no longer guided Tommy. In many ways their positions had changed. By the time they got out of high school, Rick would say to mutual friends, "I taught O'Connor all about life. And he came back and told me what it was like."
Tommy was the kind of student about whom teachers say, "If only he'd apply himself." He was also the kind that teachers remember with special fondness and amusement out of the legions they've taught. One of his report cards read, "He's doing better. But he's still talking." Through every stage of school, he was surrounded by the warmth of popularity. Though he was hardly the best student or athlete, his high school classmates chose him to deliver their commencement address. "No jokes," the faculty adviser said, and Tommy obeyed. His classmates tittered anyway.
Rick grew taller and handsomer, but Tommy had the charm, and the first girlfriend. For a while Rick and another pal, Mark, tagged along when Tommy went out on dates. Then came their Smith College days. Some doctors and professors lived in their neighborhood but Tommy and Rick belonged to the quotidian part of Northampton, the part that ran the stores and local government and policed and plowed the streets and went to public school and attended high school football games on Friday nights and listened to the local AM radio station. To date a Smithie was, as Rick would put it, "every townie's dream." Tommy accomplished that first. His parents couldn't afford to send him away to a private college. Tommy lived at home and worked his way through two state schools in the region. The initials on his sweatshirt, "HCC," stood for Holyoke Community College. Now and then he told a Smithie they stood for "Harvard College Crew." He brought Rick along to parties at Hopkins dormitory, where they became something like mascots, interim boyfriends for the young women whose real ones weren't around. For Tommy too, these were mere flirtations with another life. He always felt a slight relief in June, like the feeling of returning home, when the Smithies left and he went back to older, native friends.
A lot of friends eventually moved away. Tommy stayed in town, and he became a local cop. In his neighborhood this wasn't an unusual thing for a boy to do when he grew up. Several had become cops -- Tommy's brother Jack in Richmond, Virginia; Tommy's friend Mark on Martha's Vineyard; and also Rick, who joined the Northampton force a couple of years after Tommy. But Tommy's case was special. For as long as anyone could remember, he'd dreamed of becoming a policeman. At five years old he stood in the middle of Forbes Avenue dressed in a round postman's hat and pretended to direct the scanty traffic. In fourth grade he founded the O'Connor Detective Agency. He borrowed his father's old sewer commissioner's badge. His family's garage was the station house. Most of his friends were deputized. They made up flyers and distributed them around the neighborhood: "If you have any mysteries or anything missing call the O'Connor Detective Agency." Soon bikes expanded their territory, and took them into the old downtown.
Back then, in the early seventies, Northampton's Main Street looked like a lot of others in New England towns -- the upper stories of many commercial buildings abandoned, some of their windows covered in plywood; moneylending and furniture stores occupying what once had been prime commercial space. Pleasant Street off Main was essentially a skid row, lined with buildings sheathed in tar paper and with what the local cops called fighting bars, where brawling men rolled around on sawdust-covered floors. The lovely old train station was crumbling, its roof half caved in. Downtown had its attractions, though: Charlie's, where Tommy and his pals bought penny candy, and old drugstores with creaking wooden floors and soda fountains that produced ice cream sodas, cherry Cokes. On their bikes he and his deputies followed suspicious-looking cars down Pleasant Street. In Tommy's memory, he got so good at mimicking a siren that now and then a driver actually pulled over, and he rode by looking innocent.
In junior high, he joined the Police Explorer Scouts and stayed with them through high school, and in due course he went from being a ward of the town to one of its wardens, dressed in blue polyester. In all his dreams, Tommy spent the rest of his life in Northampton. He made a plan. He would remain a cop and rise to sergeant -- and no higher for a long time, because higher office meant mostly desks and paperwork. He would marry and have a bunch of kids who would reenact his own Northampton childhood -- why not, when his had been so nearly perfect? And then after he retired, he would run for mayor.
By the end of high school he'd already met the woman he wanted to marry, Jean Kellogg, a Yankee girl from a s...
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