Miranda's War (3 page)

“The eel was killed for food, and the blood is a byproduct. Why not use it?”

“Well then, I suppose it's not gratuitous killing. But still, you wouldn't think of using human blood in art, would you?”

Miranda pondered.

“Well if it was the byproduct of an injury of a vanquished foe?”

Miranda led her upstairs.

“My son Asa is developing his inner ear in conjunction with art. He can walk into a home and tell within seconds what the relationships of the family members are like.”

“Really?”

“If there's a strained marriage, or the home lacks a male power figure, he'll know. When we drive through Waltham, he'll say to me, ‘This place has no art. People are working all the time. I don't like it here.' Come on in here and look at his room.”

Miranda guided her down the hall into the last bedroom. The walls were a floor-to-ceiling fresco of mountains and hiking trails. The tree line and the ridges drew Julia closer. She put her face right up to the wall.

“Amazing detail. Like living inside the Sistine Chapel, what a joy.”

“I commissioned an artist to paint it from a digital photo I took in the Berkshires.”

“This is a very large bedroom. Or does the sweep of the scene create an optical illusion?”

“Ah, very discerning of you. The house had six bedrooms and servants' quarters. We combined a bedroom with the servants' quarters to create this room. But the sweep of the scene gives the illusion of greater height and depth.”

“Where does he go to school?”

“BB&N.”

“My fifteen-year-old daughter is at Deerfield, and she's doing fine. But my younger son …” and she stopped suddenly.

Miranda walked Julia into Cody's room, which was similarly adorned with a coastal scene, sailboats, a rocky coast and buoys under a summer sun.

“Again, magnificent. Your sons are fortunate.”

They slowly made their way down the back staircase and into the mudroom, between the back door and the kitchen.

Seated together over herbal tea, Miranda held to her revised plan and did not bring up official Commission business at all. Julia tried to, subtly wondering in the abstract if it was “fair” to “punish” someone for a minor legal transgression.

“I read a review of a new book about justice in
The New Yorker
a few weeks ago,” Miranda said, trying not to sound condescending. “I think the author's name is Curtin. He argues that justice is an elusive concept formed by the mores of any given society. I think Lincoln has a distinct society where our social group dominates and we look at the outside world askance.”

Julia seemed fascinated.

“And this is where society wants us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Basically sprawl has ruined all the places we used to call home. Now we're here with our two acres and a conservation trust.”

“I've never thought of it that way.”

“Archer and I moved here from Cambridge soon after he got tenure and became chairman of the department. We weren't going to raise our sons in a place that disapproves of us.”

“Where in Cambridge did you live?”

“In a coach house just off Brattle Street until Cody was born. Then we could have bought a Victorian there, but it's not the same. We wanted the countrified small-town life. And Cambridge is a city,” she said very cautiously, not wanting to make a political statement or reveal that she had not wanted to move to Lincoln. Miranda had wanted to live in Weston, the next town over, which looked quite similar but had almost no academics and no subsidized housing. Academics, with their phony rejection of materialism, their phony moral openness, their ostentatiously dented Volvos, had been grating at her for years. But she was married to one, and they compromised on Lincoln.

“Cambridge is urban and, what else can I say, it's not Lincoln. If it were, half of us would live there and be able to walk to work.”

Julia nodded.

“My husband and I grew up here. His parents had sixteen acres of apple orchards by the Concord border.”

“I know. And the Lincoln Land Conservation Trust now owns part of it.”

Miranda knew the Nickersons had made inquiries with the Conservation Commission about selling the Lincoln portion of the land to a developer. The Commission told them the plan would never be approved. Then they sold a four-acre parcel to the Conservation Trust for $1.1 million, a fifth of what the developer had offered. They had kept five acres in town, still undeveloped and worth a small fortune.

“The part on the Concord side is now split-level ranches,” said Julia, with the ambivalence everyone in Lincoln felt about sprawl. Here Miranda and the academics agreed. She liked Julia's aesthetic ambivalence about development. She sensed a fellow pragmatist, not wedded to profit and open to her reasoning.

“It's not happening here on our watch,” said Miranda.

“I hope not.”

The phone rang.

“I've taken up enough of your time. I'm glad we had this chance to talk,” said Julia.

They had a friendly parting, Miranda walking Julia to her bicycle and watching her disappear down the gravel driveway. Then Miranda went to her computer and searched for something on the Internet about justice that would bear some semblance to what she had said she had read in
The New Yorker
. Archer subscribed, so she had to use his password to log on to the site and do a search. She knew all of his passwords. She'd hacked into his server years ago and he had them all listed in a note item right on his homepage entitled “PASSWORDS.”

Two days later she called Julia and asked if they could get together again to talk about next week's vote. She accepted with a suddenness that showed a real interest in advancing the relationship, inviting Miranda over later that afternoon. The Nickersons' house was also set far back from the road. All a passerby could see was a rural road mailbox with their name. Like most of the houses in Lincoln, it had no street number. Miranda drove past a gate that appeared to be permanently in the open position, and found her car surrounded by sheep. She waited, hoping someone would come down and shepherd them away, but she was alone. So she blasted her horn and inched forward. There was a neglected barn, a tennis court and ahead, up a small incline, a quite stately red brick Federalist house, covered with ivy and being tended to by Latino landscapers. Miranda was more than impressed. A housekeeper greeted her by name at the door and brought her to the back porch, where Julia was working on her laptop and sipping green tea.

“How nice to see you again, Miranda. Please join me.”

Miranda proceeded to explain the “broken window theory” of law enforcement. She had read a paper and a Wikipedia entry on it. Basically, it held that law enforcement at the community level was dependent upon order over the little infractions. A broken window sent a message that lawlessness would be tolerated. This encouraged more serious crime. Analogizing this to Lincoln, Miranda explained that allowing a prominent structure to remain out of code would tell developers the town wasn't serious about enforcement.

“Look, these developers need to know we don't want them here.”

“They're always looking, but we don't give them the permits.”

“If we're lax about enforcement when it comes to the color code, or anything else …” She let the sentence finish itself. “All these retailers are looking at the Route 2 land—Starbucks, Bed Bath & Beyond, Petco. That's not Lincoln. We're above that.”

“It means a lot of tax revenue, which we can use to spruce up the Pierce House.”

“I don't think we even need to own the Pierce House anymore. It's a ten-acre estate, worth $14 million. Why not sell it to the right buyer, not a developer, someone who will preserve it? Have you thought of that? Then we can upzone the Route 2 land.”

“That's a total change in direction.”

“And frankly, citing the owner of the peace sign barn is like a test explosion of a new weapon.”

Julia was taken aback by the language.

“Everyone is buzzing about it,” she said. “That's what you wanted, right?”

“Every true leader has to make an example of someone, like Lincoln did to General McClellan.”

“I'm going to think now,” Miranda said. “I need to be alone.”

Chapter Four

Miranda parked her Range Rover in a tight, difficult-to-find, quasi-legal parking space two blocks away from Archer's mother's townhouse in the Back Bay. The neighborhood, straight lines of old row houses with impeccable brick exteriors, had become divided in recent years between the old-timers, like Rebecca Dalton and her friends who had lived there for forty years, and the new gentry with their millions earned in private equity or high tech. The old-time residents' homes were slightly shabby, in need of tuckpointing or new windows. The new people kept their brownstones in impeccable condition. Most of them seemed like Mark and Ellen Kelleher, who owned the townhouse next to Rebecca's. He was from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and had met his French wife while in school in Boston. During the housing bubble, they purchased their $2.7 million home with 10% down and rented the second and third floors to students, who as far as Rebecca was concerned, had no business living in the Back Bay. She hated their garb, their iPods, their beater cars, their utter lack of style and wit, unless you considered militant informality a style, which she did not.

When Rebecca and Chester Dalton had bought the townhouse on Clarendon Street in 1968 for $43,000, the neighborhood had few students even though colleges of varying levels of prestige surrounded it. The Boston University students, just a half mile west, lived in Stalinesque dorms on Commonwealth Avenue or in cold-water flats in blue-collar Allston. The girls at Simmons College lived in the Fenway, a half mile to the south, and the Harvard and M.I.T. students stayed across the Charles River in Cambridge. Every family had domestic help, and the stability of the real estate market meant there were no speculators.

Then everything changed. Society died out, people no longer could afford servants, they rented their third floors and coach houses to students and singles, moving vans and contractors subdividing the three-story units became fixtures of life here. Then the real estate prices and taxes soared to ridiculous levels. Some of her friends fled to Lincoln, but Rebecca held on as long as she could, while her property taxes rose from $3,200 to $57,000 a year. The expense of maintaining the place pushed her over the edge, to dipping into trust principal, and eventually to dividing her home into three units. Giant dumpsters had stood outside her door for a month as contractors installed new walls and kitchens. She had to endure the indignity of tenants in her midst—an overprivileged graduate student and a middle-aged gay couple, neither of whom she cared for. It was either that or sell. Either way, her freedom had been taken from her, her neighborhood altered forever, and her life placed on a downward trajectory from which it never recovered. Miranda had asked her over and over again why she had “let it happen.” Rebecca never gave a satisfactory answer.

Miranda walked up the aging steps to Rebecca's front door with its three buzzers and rang. Rebecca opened the door while cupping a tiny bird in her right hand. She was nearly six feet tall, had shoulder-length straight gray-white hair, wore watches on both wrists and looked older than her seventy-three years but had an earth-mother aura that drew most people in. Her voice was mannish and full of charm.

“Come on in,” she said, “and for God's sake, don't start rearranging things around here. There's a method to my madness, I can assure you.”

And madness it was. Two other birds were flying around the apartment, a .32-caliber revolver lay on an end table, old newspapers were piled in the living room, and her three cats scampered about as Mahler's Seventh Symphony emanated from an old record player. There were crooked paintings, silk scarves draped over the backs of chairs and bags of groceries blocking Miranda's path on the floor.

“Of course there's a method to it, it's just that nobody else understands, which is my problem too. I think I'm operating on a different plane from everyone else. There are different things going through my mind. My new colleagues on the Conservation Commission are timid souls. But their job is to be brutal.”

“We're all brought up that way now.” Rebecca said. “Men don't go into the military. We don't win wars. We lose them. We lost in Iraq. I don't care what anyone says. And we all have to be sensitive to everyone's feelings.”

“I've been accused of narcissism because I lack empathy for my colleagues. You know what happened to me on the Wang Board.”

“And by God you are. And so am I, although one must always be graceful. You sometimes come on very strong, like a locomotive.”

“Well, I don't want to do that now. It's tough showing up a seventy-four-year-old law professor without looking like you disrespect him.”

“There's a right way to do everything, my dear, even taking on Judge Anderson. I don't know him, but I remember some of his decisions. We all do. Does he still wear the narrow bow ties?”

“At every meeting.”

“Endearing, but maybe people are ready to join the twenty-first century. You can give them that. That's what Archer really loves most about you. So ask him how to proceed. Then adjust it accordingly, and you proceed.”

“He's appalled.”

“Of course he is. But his heart is in the right place. You can bring him around.”

“If you can tell me why he supports subsidized housing in Lincoln, I'll understand him a lot better.”

“He never went to war. He had too much comfort, although he worked very hard in school.”

“The guilt level is so high in Lincoln. We all have so much and have produced so little.”

“Yes, he never made any real money. He's just depleted the trust. His father wanted him to own something.”