Shortest Day by Jane Langton

people at Bright Day were after her. They found her right away at Harvard Towers. “Gretchen,” her counselor said, “you’re almost due. It’s not good for your baby for you to be out in the cold like this. What if you couldn’t get to us in time? What if you delivered your baby on the street? And, Gretchen, you’re missing your group discussions, you’re not doing your chores.”
    But Gretchen was loyal to Palmer Nifto. “We need you, Gretchen,” Palmer kept saying. “You’re the most important person at Harvard Towers.”
    She knew her big belly helped the cause. Already she had been photographed by the Cambridge Chronicle and the Cambridge Tab and the Harvard Crimson and even by the Harvard Gazette . She had stuck her stomach out proudly, and now she was going to be on TV, because yesterday a crew from Channel 4 had come to Harvard Towers and Palmer had pushed her right out in front.
    Bob Chumley was an old regular from the chancy world of Cambridge homelessness. He was smart and capable and could lend his hand to anything, but an addiction to cocaine kept him from holding down a job. Bob was unacceptable in the shelters of Cambridge, because he had a couple of dogs, big handsome golden retrievers, and you couldn’t have dogs in a shelter.
    Guthrie Jones was a homeless man whose beat was Harvard Square. There was a fey charm about Guthrie, but you had to be on the lookout or he would talk your ear off, wanting to tell you something, something that could never be quite articulated, something terribly important if only he could utter it, some anguished fury against the world.
    Linda Bunting should never have been homeless at all, because she was the mother of two small children. Somehow she had dropped through the cracks of the welfare system. She had a nice tent full of stuffed toys and sleeping bags, and a space heater blasting out its orange comfort twenty-four hours a day. And the children were perfectly warm. Their tiny noses barely showed between knitted hats and woolly scarves.
    Some of the other citizens of Harvard Towers were less beguiling. Oh, Vergil Taylor was all right. He made good copy, because he almost never took off his Rollerblades. Vergil skimmed around the edges of the tent city and rattled over the uneven surfaces of the brick walks and whizzed along the asphalt paths of Harvard Yard, swooping in graceful arcs, leaning left, leaning right, in a perpetual dance. He made a good courier whenever Palmer had an urgent message to deliver.
    The only other Afro-American at Harvard Towers was old Albert Maggody. No one knew his history. No one had ever heard him speak. Maggody took no part in tent-city activities and he made no response to questions. He just sat there, wrapped in layers of blankets, his face nearly hidden. Only his hand appeared when someone passed a tray of sandwiches or proffered a cup of coffee. He never said, Bless you , like some of them. Maggody was life at its lowest terms.
    To Mary Kelly, who was beginning to take an interest in the occupants of Harvard Towers, his was the most pitiful case.
    One of the homeless women was a problem for Palmer Nifto. Of course he welcomed one and all, because he was anxious to increase the population of Harvard Towers, but Emily Pollock gave him a pain. Emily had been a flower child in the seventies, but now she was a fat bossy woman in giant earrings and full skirts and big woolly caftans. She was always offering screwy advice, and making decisions without consulting Palmer first, then screeching them to the world on the open mike. “We’re going to organize a council,” bawled Emily, “and run this place democratically from now on.”
    Palmer had no intention of handing over his authority to a democratic council. And when a delegation from United Harvard Ministries came to him, representing the pastors of a number of local churches, he was distinctly cool.
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