Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page A

three small children, that’s a big responsibility, and I don’t like to have to worry about...” Mrs. Petkuss paused delicately. “About who’s around.”
    The hearing lasted from two until 7:15 p. m. , five hours and fifteen minutes of participatory democracy during which it was suggested, on the one hand, that the Monterey County Board of Supervisors was turning our country into Nazi Germany, and, on the other, that the presence of Miss Baez and her fifteen students in the Carmel Valley would lead to “Berkeley-type” demonstrations, demoralize trainees at Fort Ord, paralyze Army convoys using the Carmel Valley road, and send property values plummeting throughout the county. “Frankly, I can’t conceive of anyone buying property near such an operation,” declared Mrs. Petkuss s husband, who is a veterinarian. Both Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss, the latter near tears, said that they were particularly offended by Miss Baez’s presence on her property during weekends. It seemed that she did not always stay inside. She sat out under trees, and walked around the property.
    “We don’t start until one,” someone from the school objected. “Even if we did make noise, which we don’t, the Petkusses could sleep until one, I don’t see what the problem is.”
    The Petkusses’ lawyer jumped up. “The problem is that the Petkusses happen to have a very beautiful swimming pool, they’d like to have guests out on weekends, like to use the pool.”
    “They’d have to stand up on a table to see the school.”
    “They will, too,” shouted a young woman who had already indicated her approval of Miss Baez by reading aloud to the supervisors a passage from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty . “They’ll be out with spyglasses.”
    “That is not true,” Mrs. Petkuss keened. “We see the school out of three bedroom windows, out of one living-room window, it’s the only direction we can look ”
    Miss Baez sat very still in the front row. She was wearing a long-sleeved navy-blue dress with an Irish lace collar and cuffs, and she kept her hands folded in her lap. She is extraordinary looking, far more so than her photographs suggest, since the camera seems to emphasize an Indian cast to her features and fails to record either the startling fineness and clarity of her bones and eyes or, her most striking characteristic, her absolute directness, her absence of guile. She has a great natural style, and she is what used to be called a lady. “Scum,” hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as “a veteran of two wars” and who is a regular at such meetings.” Spaniel ” He seemed to be referring to the length of Miss Baez’s hair, and was trying to get her attention by tapping with his walking stick, but her eyes did not flicker from the rostrum. After a while she got up, and stood until the room was completely quiet. Her opponents sat tensed, ready to spring up and counter whatever defense she was planning to make of her politics, of her school, of beards, of “Berkeley-type” demonstrations and disorder in general.
    “Everybody’s talking about their forty- and fifty-thousand-dollar houses and their property values going down,” she drawled finally, keeping her clear voice low and gazing levelly at the supervisors. “I’d just like to say one thing. I have more than one hundred thousand dollars invested in the Carmel Valley, and I’m interested in protecting my property too.” The property owner smiled disingenuously at Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss then, and took her seat amid complete silence.
    She is an interesting girl, a girl who might have interested Henry James, at about the time he did Verena Tarrant, in The Bostonians . Joan Baez grew up in the more evangelistic thickets of the middle class, the daughter of a Quaker physics teacher, the granddaughter of two Protestant ministers, an English-Scottish Episcopalian on her mother’s side, a Mexican Methodist on her father’s. She was born on