The romantic Evelyn had already surprised them again by running off with her Italian violin instructor at the Peabody Institute, Hugo Eroica. He went to fight in the war, too, but, apparently, on the wrong side, leaving Evelyn alone and unwed in Paris, where, before her parents could rescue her, she met and married Blanchard Troyes, a French industrialist. Only after Troyes's death had she finally floated home to Dingley Falls.
There she found that her old friend Tracy (Dixwell Canopy) was also at home alone, because her husband, Vincent, had died, and it made no sense to maintain a townhouse in Manhattan, too. She found that her old friend Beanie (Dingley Abernathy) was home as well, because she'd made Winslow the lawyer for her railroad and her Optical Instruments factory. And there, Evelyn found a new friend, Priscilla (Hancock Ransom), because Ernest Ransom, a native Dingleyan, was president of the Ransom Bank and the most influential man in town. So the Three Graces (with Priss added) were back together. They lived on Elizabeth Circle, they gave each other dinner parties, they played bridge and a little golf and tennis at the Dingley Club, they took one of Beanie's trains into Manhattan every Wednesday to see shows and shops and occasionally doctors. They had numbers of projects and belonged to many organizations. On Mondays, like today, they held meetings of the Thespian Ladies Club.
Now, over daiquiris at the Prim Minster, their efficient club president, Tracy Canopy, was reading aloud: "'The Stabbo-Massacrism Band, which in the last year has frenzied young British audiences with its filthy talk and spittle, found their entire tour canceled Thursday when towns throughout the United Kingdom learned of their having vomited on a member of the Royal Family during a private performance following the marriage of the Earl of Swithorne's daughter to the son of Sheikh Qaru of Grosvenor Square. "Rock and roll is all very well," commented the best man, George St. George-Albans, "but really!" The bride's mother, Lady "Babs"
Howard, wearing a quilted evening gown of embroidered pink and mauve roses, appeared a picture of composure as she was carried to her waiting limousine midst the enthusiastic cheers of loyal onlookers.
Many of the hostile villagers then stayed at the estate gates to boo the first American superstars of thug-rock, who defiantly pantomimed sexual perversities at them until removed by local constables.'
"Now really, indeed." Mrs. Canopy paused indignantly, looking over her glasses, then took up another clipping. "And just yesterday."
She gave them now news closer to home. "In Argyle, listen to this:
'An elderly vagrant, who gave his name as Old Tim Hines, was arrested and held without bail Sunday, charged with molesting five suburban preschoolers, having first gained their trust by tap-dancing for them with beer-bottle caps tacked to his loafers. "Old Tim's nice,"
maintained one of the alleged victims, whose name was not disclosed.'
"Art is being sexually abused," concluded Mrs. Canopy, who, since her widowhood, had given her heart over to Art.
"Art who?" asked the playful Priss Ransom.
"Oh, dear, I hope not," sighed Mrs. Blanchard Troyes, née Evelyn Goff, briefly of the Peabody Institute.
"I don't know what," confessed the president, her jaw as stubborn as Woodrow Wilson's. "But something must be done to save Art for future generations. Here we are in the most idealistic country in the world, but how can we hold up the torch to other nations if the torch is covered, well, if it is covered with spittle?"
The heart of Mrs. Canopy had been before jostled but not dislodged from its place in line before the ticket booth of Art, where she had faithfully stood alone since the main curtain of Life, as the rector put it, had fallen on Vincent seven years ago. After Mr. Canopy had died in the reception line of their twentieth wedding anniversary celebration, Tracy had lent out to homeless painters their townhouse in Manhattan, that city to whose insatiable Art she and her husband had fed so many thousands of unearned dollars.
Nor, to this day, could mistrust of her faith disabuse her: the masterpiece of Habzi Rabies, a Pakistani painter who had hocked her car for hash and then set fire to the summer house on Lake Pissinowno that she had lent him, the masterpiece for which she had provided both the money and the medium, continued to hang over the mantel of her Dingley Falls living room. Fingerpaint on a Widow's Fur was its title. "The primitivism of a child. So unspoiled," said Mrs. Canopy. "Sad the same is no longer true of your Russian sable," joked the sarcastic Priss to Beanie Abernathy with a wink. "What?" asked Beanie, who never got a joke.
"Artists are different from you and me," Mrs. Canopy always explained. She herself indulged in a little pot throwing and even wrote poems, which she placed in the finished pots and left on the Dingley Falls doorsteps of her many acquaintances. But she made no claims to Art and was not given to those excesses she allowed the Gifted. Nor did her concern today about this "sexual abuse" of Art derive from a squeamishness that might seem compatible with her age and heritage. Mrs. Canopy went staunchly off to be raped by Art once a week. She was not afraid of Virginia Woolf, and while Oh! Calcutta! had cost her an involuntary struggle, she'd never let out a scream. Neither was violence any less supportable. Ushers had carried away far younger than she when Porko Fulawhiski attempted to disembowel himself with a palette knife in Dead on Red: Final Appearance of a One-Man Show in SoHo.
What was it then that so disturbed her now about these clippings of Old Tim Hines and a relative of the Queen, the latter of whom she planned to lunch with this summer at the Waldorf across a crowded room of some seven hundred other Bicentennialists? "Mr. Hines may or may not be; but that band just simply isn't sincere. Or maybe I'm just getting old," she suggested with a brisk sigh. The cutouts describing the cutups of Hines and the Stabbo-Massacrism Band introduced today's topic, "Sexuality and the Arts." Their guest speaker was Mr. Rich Rage, an obscene poet hailed by the Village Voice as "The Baudelaire of the Bathroom Wall" who was also a visiting instructor of creative writing at Vassar College, where he had been obligingly seducing his class in, roughly, alphabetical order. By the term's end he had progressed as far as the Rs, which is how young Kate Ransom had persuaded him to come overnight to Dingley Falls—both of them mildly anticipating her capitulation. Mrs. Canopy did not know of this private inducement; neither, for that matter, did Priss Ransom, who had lost track of her daughter Kate's maturation some years back.
Rage swallowed a roll whole, rose to his feet, and spoke from his heart. "Ladies, look, you gotta spread your legs, raise your knees, and open your cunts to art. Fuck the brain. Until art comes inside you so hard the come shoots out your nose and ears, you haven't had art, and art hasn't had you. Now that's what Wordsworth and Coleridge said, and that's all that needs to be said, you follow me?"
"I think so, Mr. Rage," said the valiant Mrs. Canopy, whose memory searched in vain through a college course for anything resembling such startling remarks by the Lake Poets. Beanie Abernathy bit through the toothpick in her chicken club.
When Rage finished his brief but vibrant "Stare Up the Asshole of Art," he tossed all the half-eaten sandwiches and fruit cups forgotten by the ladies in their attentiveness into his green canvas bag and flung it over his broad tweed shoulder. "Nobody ever finishes their food! The freedom to waste, that is definitely one of the glories of America!"
"Are you a Socialist then?" asked Mrs. Canopy, her eyes behind the round glasses as bright as flags. She was ready to bear it if he were.
"Oh, hell, no. I'm a monarchist. Love the House of Hanover and especially the hemophiliacs."
"No, please," said Beanie Abernathy, slipping her long feet back into her low-heeled shoes. She had just been told by Tracy Canopy to escort Mr. Rage on a tour of the town until it was time for him to meet Kate Ransom at the Dingley Club. Tracy herself had to take to the Argyle bus station, seven miles away, a visiting Lebanese music student who had seen America for ninety-nine days and was now going home. Tracy asked Beanie to drive Rage first to the post office, where he needed to mail some student grades, and then guide him through as much of historic Di
ngley Falls as he cared to see.
"Tracy, Prissie, Evelyn, don't leave me alone with him," Beanie bent to whisper at her friends. She stared at the poet in his warm brown turtleneck that was the color of his eyes. From across the room, where he was selling copies of his book, he grinned at her. His hair and beard looked like curly wheat.
"Oh, Beanie, don't be silly." Priss laughed. "Winslow won't mind. And you're bigger than Mr. Rage is anyhow." Indeed, Beanie was Juno-esque of face and figure. Her form had been a drawback at twenty, except for her serving as goalie on the Mount Holyoke lacrosse team, but thirty-two years later, age had finally caught up with her features, and now Mrs. Abernathy was quite something to see, though she'd never seen it. She still hunched over at cocktail parties to shorten herself, just as she had shrunk into a corner at birthday parties in the sixth grade.
"You take Mr. Rage then, Evelyn," Mrs. Canopy instructed the wispy Mrs. Troyes, as the group followed her into the Prim Minister's parking lot.
"Oh, I am so sorry, Tracy, but really I can't because I've already arranged to drive Father Fields to Argyle for his new contact lenses.
Beanie, please, forgive me, I'm sure it will be fun, but I'm already late." And without waiting, Evelyn rushed to her Chrysler New Yorker. They saw her lovely prematurely blue-gray head peering through the steering wheel as she shot out of the parking space and sped to an assignation with Reverend Highwick's beautiful young curate, Jonathan Fields.
"Fuck, that broad can drive!" whistled Rich Rage, who appreciated talent wherever he found it.
"Mrs. Troyes lived in Paris for twenty years," Tracy explained.
The lot emptied, except for Mr. Rage and Mrs. Abernathy and a stray dog, whose head Beanie scratched as she stalled for time. The dog, one of the pack that frightened Judith Haig, pushed his head up under Beanie's hand.
"Looks like they stuck you with me, huh?" Rage smiled. "Sorry," he shrugged. "Looks like we'll have to make the best of it."
"Yes, I guess. If you'll follow me…," mumbled Mrs. Abernathy, the unwilling guide, as she led him to her car.
"Love it!" grinned the agreeable poet.
chapter 3
The rector of St. Andrew's and Evelyn Troyes were fighting over young Father Fields, though none of the three knew it, least of all the nearsighted object of passions no less tumultuous for being unconscious. Tracy and Priss had long since analyzed this cerebrally erotic ménage à trois in their mind-control group and elsewhere. Now, after their Thespian Ladies' meeting, they synopsized.
"Evelyn has always confused the spiritual with the sensual," said Mrs. Canopy, as she lurched her Volvo into Elizabeth Circle. "That's why she ran off with a violinist."
"Bien sûr. And was so inexplicably unabused by life with Hugo Eroica that after he abandoned her for Mussolini, she married Blanchard, another foreigner! Of course, Jonathan Fields is pretty.
God knows that's the only reason Sloan hired him."
"Priss!"
"I said God knew it, I didn't say Sloan did." Tracy, who admired her friend's wit and sometimes jotted down her remarks to remember them, smiled appreciatively. "I'll just drop you off here, Priss. I must get Babaha to the station by four-thirty. Extraordinary amount of luggage for a student to accumulate in so short a stay in this country.
Souvenirs for her family, she said. She tells me the Lebanese have very few conveniences. Toilet paper has been such a delight for her.
Oh, I hope Beanie's all right; perhaps I shouldn't have asked her to go with Mr. Rage, she's so shy."
"Don't be silly. When in h. is she going to grow up and stop gawking around like a huge teenage horse? Before you rush off; I got one, my dear, one of the letters." Mrs. Ransom snorted. "Remember, like the one Beanie got, but she threw hers away and said she couldn't recall what was in it?"
"Oh, read it!" begged her friend. "If you don't mind."
Priss already had the sheet of cheap typing paper unfolded in her gloved hand. "It's most vilely intriguing." She laughed. "Mrs. Ransom is spelled s-u-m. 'Think you're sharp as tacks? You don't know the half.'"
"Slant rhyme," said Tracy automatically.
"'There's baby doo-doo up your tushie.'"
"My!"
"'You need a big dong to clean it out, you Lezzie.'"
"Lizzie?"
"No. Lezzie. L-e-z-z-i-e."
"Ah. Lesbian," explained Mrs. Canopy, who knew these expressions from off-Broadway productions.
"Well, my dear, that's all. 'Half ' is spelled h-a-f. Fascinating, n'est-ce pas? What do you make of it?"
"I believe he, or whoever wrote it, feels you may be a homosexual. Latently, of course."
"Ha! And who in h. is 'he'?" demanded the skeptical Priss. "If Wanda hadn't found it wadded among the milk bottles a week before he arrived, I would think it more than likely that your poetical Mr. Rage had sent it. There's a certain similarity of tone."
"Who could it be?"
No one knew. But somebody in Dingley Falls was writing hate letters, accusing people of harboring uncommitted crimes in their hearts, vividly detailed crimes that they would never have the "balls" to carry out. Limus Barnum of Barnum's Antiques, Hobbies, and Appliances had written to the paper to call for action against what the editor, Mr. Hayes, facetiously called "this mailiac out somewhere at night, defiling our boxes and slits with his misspelled smut." The letters were not stamped, were not entrusted to Mrs. Haig or Alf Marco at the post office, but were hand-delivered; were on two occasions, in fact, left next to the poems inside Mrs. Canopy's gift pots.
Not even Polly Hedgerow knew who the anonymous author was, and neither did Father Highwick, unless he was holding out on her.
Oh, boy, thought Polly as she coasted down Cromwell Hill, after trading the rector word of Mrs. Haig's heart for news of an assault by an unemployed construction worker named Maynard Henry on one Raoul Treeca up on Wild Oat Ridge—not that a Madder hardhat was worth the Dingley Falls postmistress. Oh, boy, thought Polly, here comes Mrs. Troyes after Father Fields again! The gray Chrysler roared past her, sucking the bike into its wind tunnel so that Polly was forced to grab the handlebars to keep her balance. Then down the hill she flew into a fantasy, on her way to speed the precious serum through enemy lines just in time to save the stricken village. Mortar whistled around her fearless head.
At St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Evelyn Troyes tapped girlishly on the window of the young curate's stone cottage behind the parish house of Sloan Highwick. The snowy-haired rector was watching her through his open door. "Jonathan's not home yet," he called with satisfaction across the garden. "The headmaster asked him to pay a visit at Hamilton Academy."
Startled, Mrs. Troyes spun around with a dainty leap. "Oh, it's only you, Sloan." She floated to his side, oblivious of either his or her own raging jealousy. "Poor Jonathan, I expect he forgot his eye appointment. Always thinking of himself last. People make so many demands on him, and he takes their problems so to heart, he's simply too good to say no and there are those who will take advantage of his thoughtfulness."
"Exactly," Highwick hurled out at her with what he intended as a smile. "I'm just making tea now. Will you?"
"No, no." She fluttered away. "I'll see you tonight at the Ransoms', won't I? But now I think I ought to trot down to High Street and wait there in the car for Jonathan." Her voice sang out.
"I'm driving him to Argyle. His tinted lenses came in, you know."
"I know. I took the call," fired back the rector while waving a blessing at Mrs. Troyes. His heart was heaped with coals of fire, but he had, as it were, no smoke detector.
In his delightful study at Alexander Hamilton Academy for Young Men, the handsome headmaster, Walter Saar, swept with his binoculars the playing fields, where his boys sported in white shorts.
Ray Ransom was humping Charlie Hayes again, grabbing between his tan thighs for the football. The headmaster had a hard-on. He also had a hangover and was worried about himself. He lit his fifteenth cigarette of the morning. Sunday he ha
d waked up nude and alone in a very unattractive hotel room with rope burns around his wrists and his wallet missing. He had stayed in the filthy shower for as long as he could bear to, and then had left New York vowing never to come there again, at least not to the Village, at least not to bars in the Village where merciless young men with sullen eyes waited. Now he had wasted his entire morning making phone calls to cancel his credit cards. And he would need a new driver's license. He couldn't afford to drink anymore. He was thirty-eight years old. One hint of this incident and Ernest Ransom would tell him that the board of trustees would be pleased to accept his resignation. Worse, perhaps, one of these days he might be killed. The headmaster, an excellent teacher, had been asked once before, years earlier, to resign voluntarily from a school; in exchange for his doing so he had received excellent recommendations to this excellent academy. Such an incident could not be allowed to recur. He vowed again to get on top of life and ride it.
Meanwhile, in Saar's tasteful bathroom, his guest, Father Jonathan Fields (who had indeed forgotten about his eye appointment), was masturbating as quickly as he possibly could, so as not to keep his host waiting. Without seeing his own face (a face like a Raphael, the rector had told him) reflected in its amber glass, Jonathan gazed at the beautiful carved oak mirror. Whatever had possessed him? What had forced this urgent visit to the toilet before he simply came all over his clerical pants while sitting in the headmaster's Chippendale chair with his Royal Doulton teacup jingling in its saucer on his lap? Either Walter Saar, or Saar's exquisite furnishings (each piece of which he longed to own himself—awful, awful envy), had unignorably raised the curate to a turgid height of desire. Visualizing the Holbein over the Queen Anne lowboy in the study, Father Fields ejaculated into the toilet bowl, returned his still twitching member to his shorts, and, having washed his hands, pulled the chain on his passion.
Michael Malone Page 2
