Boston is both a real stop on Jim Gardener’s New England poetry circuit and a point of contrast with Haven: a place of readings, hotel rooms, bars, and academic parties that first shelters Gardener’s drinking and then recedes as the novel’s communal crisis takes hold. Its significance lies less in a sustained portrait of the city than in the events the narrative sets there and the distance—geographical and mental—between Boston’s ordinary social routines and Haven’s increasingly unnatural forms of connection.

Boston on the Poetry Circuit

When Bobbi Anderson calls the university’s English Department, she learns that Gardener is on the New England Poetry Caravan. His schedule takes him to Fall River on June 24, Boston for two readings over the next three nights, and then on to Providence and New Haven. The itinerary places Boston within a chain of temporary engagements rather than as Gardener’s home or destination: he is moving from one audience to another, and Bobbi can only infer when he might return to Haven.

Gardener’s Boston reading at B.U. on June 25 goes well. The following day is an off-day, but it becomes the starting point of the collapse that the narration names a fall: he wakes wanting to drink, and the episode begins in his hotel room before ending, eight days later, at Arcadia Beach in New Hampshire. Boston therefore marks the first location in an arc whose physical endpoint lies elsewhere. The abruptness of that movement makes the city a threshold between the professional itinerary Gardener is still following and the uncontrolled crisis into which he is about to descend.

Hotel Room, Bar, and Reading

The hotel is where Gardener’s fall starts, but the narrative also records how the relapse is socially enabled. Ron Cummings arrives as Gardener and Peter are getting home from a trip to the veterinarian, and suggests going down to the hotel bar. His blunt invitation to get drunk makes refusal harder; Gardener finds himself raising a Jack Daniel’s and repeating to himself that he can stop whenever he chooses. The bar turns a private vulnerability into a shared outing, without making it any less of a relapse.

The reading on June 27 shows the cost of the drinking in public. Gardener has stage fright as usual, intensified by a headache that has become severe. He feels detached from his own voice and briefly fears he will faint at the lectern. Amid that disorientation, an inner voice tells him to get through it; sometimes it sounds like his father, more often like Bobbi Anderson. The scene places the effort of continuing his reading beside the bodily consequences of his drinking, while the remembered cadence of Bobbi’s encouragement reaches him even in Boston.

After the reading, the caravan’s host, Arberg, holds a party at his house for the poets, the Friends of Poetry, and English Department faculty. It begins stiffly, with guests talking in small groups over drinks and paper plates. Gardener remembers finding academic socializing pointless when he taught, yet now finds something melancholy and pleasing in its familiarity. His expectations of the party’s later transformation—music changing, guarded talk giving way to gossip—belong to his own perspective, as does his attention to the abundant buffet and the touring poets’ opportunistic appetite for free food. Boston’s social world is rendered through this mixture of professional routine, nostalgia, appetite, and private strain.

Distance and the Network

Boston also acquires significance through its distance from Haven. As Gardener’s drinking begins in the city, Bobbi and Peter are returning from the veterinarian; the narration explicitly sets their concurrent journeys against each other, separated by roughly two hundred and ten miles. The parallel links their storylines without suggesting that they share the same immediate experience: Bobbi is drawn toward the buried object and her work, while Gardener wakes wanting alcohol. Their separate compulsions begin to unfold at once, with the distance between them emphasizing how far apart their circumstances have become.

Later, Boston belongs to a different scale of connection. During the search for David Brown, Haven’s residents link minds instinctively and direct their combined attention outward; they know David is not merely lost but not there. The same collective capacity makes the search urgent while failing to make it cooperative: heat, darkness, exhaustion, and fistfights accompany the effort, and Ruth McCausland collapses under the strain of searching and resisting the changes in her own mind. In a subsequent town-wide meeting, the residents remain at their ordinary tasks—Beach Jernigan frying hamburgers at Haven Lunch, Nancy Voss sorting stamps at the post office, and Bobby Tremain working beneath his car—while their silent mental voices bind them together. These episodes do not establish Boston as the source of Haven’s network; rather, Boston’s earlier hotel-bar and poetry-party scenes provide a contrast with a collective life that crosses Haven without requiring its people to gather physically.

A City Beyond the Main Crisis

The novel returns briefly to the Boston itinerary through the memory of Gardener’s readings and party, but the city does not become the center of the later Haven conflict. Instead, it remains a waypoint in the movement of characters and a measure of distance: between Gardener and Bobbi during the start of their separate crises, and between recognizable social contact and Haven’s silent, coercive intimacy. This limited but precise role lets Boston retain the texture of an ordinary working city while the events elsewhere transform ordinary connection into something that can coordinate a search, conceal danger, and overwhelm individual judgment.