Report on the Hadleyburg Renaissance

“But at last, in the drift of time, Hadleyburghad the ill luck to offend a passing stranger.…”

—Mark Twain, “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg”

No one, it seems, can offer a satisfying explanation for the new “phenomena” which are everywhere observable, and a number of these developments, such as the so-called Renaissance at Hadleyburg, have passed without even an adequate recording. Though I make no attempt to account for these anomalies, I date the bulk of them, and certainly my awareness of them, from our celebrated Maladeux case, after the youth who was, to be sure, part anarchist demon, but also, if one cares to be honest about his total legacy in the context of our times, part prophet. Since Maladeux, for instance—and so some take him for the cause—one sees this isolation of our youth, this separation, perhaps unconscious, from what was once the mainstream of our lives. Thus we observe—we live with—the phenomenon of their own music, their own gangs, their own world. And thus we feel the edge of their contempt, or often the duller edge of their profound indifference, manifested from time to time in some spontaneous hostility—all, of course, as Maladeux, in so many words, had prophesied.

True enough, the paper boy still makes his rounds, as far as I can tell unharmed, just after dawn, and the newspapers he delivers are still printed daily, on schedule, as if to belie or somehow dissipate the disquieting effects of their contents—and more on this directly. But well before the paper boy is stirring, when the first prospects of those fine mornings of midsummer entice me up and about, I have heard, coming from around the comer and down the block, the most obscene laughter, aggressive, rude, and, I am sorry to say, youthful, rendering it, for reasons I cannot explain, the more chilling and foreboding.

But to illuminate, hopefully, my references to “the context of our times” and the unsettling contents of our daily papers, I have only to turn to the seemingly endless sources of our anxieties and to focus on one of the more alarming and bewildering of these, which, though for awhile the preoccupation of the entire media, by cautious and tacit agreement now seems happily to have run its course. Yes, I refer to that wave, or rather those drawn out waves in curious succession, of motiveless murders, unpredictable as they were abhorrent, and resulting in a situation which was in a sense paradoxical for our police, who were at once baffled and gratified. Gratified, because after years of trying vainly to convince their critics of the dangers and difficulties of their calling, they were at last witnessing the spectacle of a changing public demeanor, a demeanor formerly arrogant, insouciant or at best merely tolerant, but which soon became something perhaps best described as abject and sycophantic. And with good reason, for as this inscrutable menace extended the reach of its tentacles, it touched the heart, if not the more tangible person, of every law-abiding citizen, so that if one knew not a victim or two personally he at least knew someone who did. I well recall that one appointed official made bold to suggest that this citizenry was reaping its “just deserts,” as he put it, a pronouncement surely calculated, one would have thought, to raise a clamor for his removal, and yet the only consequence I ever detected was a proliferation of sulking suspicions that the crimestoppers, far from doing their duty, were content to see the public ordeal prolonged.

And who could deny that the general dismay was augmented by the fact that the vast majority of these crimes remained unsolved? Indeed, has anyone noticed that to date not a single suspect has been brought to trial? But of course, I should not be speaking of “suspects,” for there were none. It’s true that a few of the cases were dispatched under the heading of “suicide,” and the usual number of dubious confessions were received. Yet surely the case for the authorities, on the whole, rested on...