11/22/63

Mrs. Starrett didn’t return the smile. She was helpful, even charming, but she had the same watchful reserve as everyone else I’d met in this queer place — Fred Toomey being the exception that proved the rule. “Don’t be silly, Mr. Amberson. There’s nothing private about the United States Census. You march right over there and tell the city clerk that Regina Starrett sent you. Her name is Marcia Guay. She’ll help you out. Although they probably stored them in the basement, which is not where they ought to be. It’s damp, and I shouldn’t be surprised if there are mice. If you have any trouble — any trouble at all — you come back and see me.”

So I went to City Hall, where a poster in the foyer said PARENTS, REMIND YOUR CHILDREN NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS AND TO ALWAYS PLAY WITH FRIENDS. Several people were lined up at the various windows. (Most of them smoking. Of course.) Marcia Guay greeted me with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Starrett had called ahead on my behalf, and had been suitably horrified when Miss Guay told her what she now told me: the 1950 census records were gone, along with almost all of the other documents that had been stored in the City Hall basement.

“We had terrible rains last year,” she said. “They went on for a whole week. The canal overflowed, and everything down in the Low Town — that’s what the oldtimers call the city center, Mr. Amberson — everything in the Low Town flooded. Our basement looked like the Grand Canal in Venice for almost a month. Mrs. Starrett was right, those records never should have been moved, and no one seems to know why they were or who authorized it. I’m awfully sorry.”

It was impossible not to feel what Al had felt while trying to save Carolyn Poulin: that I was inside a kind of prison with flexible walls. Was I supposed to hang around the local schools, hoping to spot a boy who looked like the sixty-years-plus janitor who had just retired? Look for a seven-year-old girl who kept her classmates in stitches? Wait to hear some kid yell, Hey Tugga, wait up?

Right. A newcomer hanging around the schools in a town where the first thing you saw at City Hall was a poster warning parents about stranger-danger. If there was such a thing as flying directly into the radar, that would be it.

One thing was for sure — I had to get out of the Derry Town House. At 1958 prices I could well afford to stay there for weeks, but that might cause talk. I decided to look through the classified ads and find myself a room I could rent by the month. I turned back toward the Low Town, then stopped.

Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum…

That was Glenn Miller. It was “In the Mood,” a tune I had reason to know well. Curious, I walked toward the sound of the music.

7

There was a little picnic area at the end of the rickety fence between the Kansas Street sidewalk and the drop into the Barrens. It contained a stone barbecue and two picnic tables with a rusty trash barrel standing between them. A portable phonograph was parked on one of the picnic tables. A big black 78-rpm record spun on the turntable.

On the grass, a gangly boy in tape-mended glasses and an absolutely gorgeous redheaded girl were dancing. At LHS we called the incoming freshmen “tweenagers,” and that’s what these kids were, if that. But they were dancing with grown-up grace. Not jitterbugging, either; they were swing-dancing. I was charmed, but I was also… what? Scared? A little bit, maybe. I was scared for almost all the time I spent in Derry. But it was something else, too, something bigger. A kind of awe, as if I had gripped the rim of some vast understanding. Or peered (through a glass darkly, you understand) into the actual clockwork of the universe.

Because, you see, I had met Christy at a swing-dancing class in Lewiston, and this was one of the tunes we had learned to. Later — in our best year, six months before the marriage and six months after — we had danced in competitions, once taking fourth prize (also known as “first also-ran,” according to Christy) in the New England Swing-Dancing Competition. Our tune was a slightly slowed-down dance-mix version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”

This isn’t a coincidence, I thought, watching them. The boy was wearing blue jeans and a crew-neck shirt; she had on a white blouse with the tails hanging down over faded red clamdiggers. That amazing hair was pulled back in the same impudently cute ponytail Christy had always worn when we danced competitively. Along with her bobby sox and vintage poodle skirt, of course.

This cannot be a coincidence.