"Well, sing something with some snap to it, Evelyn. I can't stand that lilimimiheehee shrieking. It would send a dog under the house," bellowed Bredforet, and, "Oh, shut up, William," said his tiny wife.
So Sidney Blossom asked the moody Kate to turn his pages, and her mother stared her into acceptance. Then, with hand posed Peabody Institute-style on the Steinway, Evelyn began "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life," swept up to Schubert, and crashed to a halt with "Un bel di" when June Hayes dropped the glass robin that had belonged to Ernest Ransom's grandmother. It shattered on the polished floor. Mrs. Hayes screamed, her husband winced, Mrs. Troyes slid off her note, and the room came to a full stop.
"Oh, Priss, I feel just awful," gasped Mrs. Hayes breathlessly. "I'm nothing but a clumsy, a terribly clumsy, old fool. I don't suppose you can ever forgive me." She sank to her knees among slivers of glass.
Both Ransoms came hurrying over. Ernest helped his guest to her feet while his wife gathered the broken bird into a silent butler. A.A.
Hayes refurbished his own Scotch.
"For heaven's sake, June, it's nothing," said the fifth generation of Ransom hosts in this house. "Tell you the truth, I detest those silly things, always have."
"I'm surprised they didn't all fall off this rickety table. I've been meaning to have that leg fixed," said the host's wife.
"I'm always breaking things," threw in Tracy Canopy.
"This society is patched with the paste of lies," said A.A. Hayes to Chin Lam Henry, who was refilling the ice bucket. She smiled and nodded. "Don't suppose that's exactly news where you come from," he added. She smiled and nodded again.
Walter Saar handed Mrs. Hayes a glass of sherry. "Much more dramatic way of finishing off poor Madame Butterfly anyhow.
Euthanasia," he murmured. Saar was very sensitive to the humiliations of others. Rubbing alcohol on his empathy only inflamed this exposed nerve, and in his urgency to soothe he often miscalculated.
As now; for June Hayes (mother of one of his students) looked at him with what, had he not thought her incapable of it, he would have called murderous hate. "Let's play a word game," he tried again.
"I love games," said the rector.
William Bredforet yelled from the settee, "Thought they said somebody was going to read his poetry."
"He couldn't come after all," explained Evelyn.
"Good. I don't like poetry."
Mrs. Ransom handed the broken glass to the Vietnamese girl with the black eye, Chan or Chin or whatever her name was.
chapter 9
Arthur Abernathy returned from his parents' house visibly shaken.
Emerald sent Priss and Tracy to him in the library, as Priss preferred to call what everyone else in the family called the den. The other guests were still playing word games.
"Read this," said Beanie's son.
Priss drew her glasses from her dress pocket. "May twentieth. A final reminder. From Vassar Library. To Richard Rage. Our records indicate that the titles listed below were due on January third. If..."
"Other side," said Arthur, sinking into a chair.
"'Dear Arthur. I'm writing this to you because you'll be c-o-mm-i-n-g home after the Ransom party.'" Priss looked at Tracy. "It's from Beanie. She can't spell worth a damn. '…after the Ransom party and please say I'm sorry for missing it and my r-e-g-r-e-t-t-s for not calling. Your father won't be back from Boston 'til Thurs. You'll have to explain this to him, Arthur, and I'm sure you'll do a better job than I would. You t-o-o are awfully alike. But I'm leaving now with Richard here, you haven't met him though I hope you will someday, but only if you want to. His name is Richard Rage. Tracy invited him, and we met each other.'"
"Oh my, oh my, oh my," said Tracy.
"'...met each other. I'll be gone for a while and I guess that means the same as forever. We have fallen in love against our wills. Please believe this.'" Priss read faster and faster, no longer pausing to point out spelling errors. "'I know your father will be hurt and it's the last thing I want to do but I really can't help doing this. I've never felt like this and I have to find out. And after what has happened, it wouldn't be right if I stayed.'"
"Oh my, oh my, oh my."
"Tell him to try to understand (or if not possible, put me out of his mind). I don't know where Richard is going but feel I have to go too. I know you will think this is crazy and I guess it is. I will write him. Or call. Tell him I took the Seville. All the rest is his with all my heart. I have Big Mutt with me. Love, Mom. P.S. I love you. Tell Lance I love him. I'm sorry. P.P.S. Please, I hope your father won't let the plants die. Chicken salad in fridge. Don't worry about me. I love you."
Mrs. Ransom looked with shock at her son-in-law-to-be. She removed her elegant glasses and passed the piece of crumpled paper to Tracy. "This must be a joke." She frowned.
"My mother never told a joke in her life," groaned Arthur, his head in his hands.
"Well. Beanie has...surprised me," said Mrs. Ernest Ransom.
By 11:40 the last guests were leaving the Ransoms' dinner party. An hour earlier the ancient Bredforets had been reclaimed by a sharp rap at the door from their equally ancient and irascible chauffeur:
"Already haf-pass they bedtime this minute, Mistuh Ransom," the tiny old man had shouted down the hall, ignoring Wanda, who attempted to block his path.
"Stop embarrassing me, talking like that," yelled his employer.
"Everybody already knows you're black."
"Thank you for a lovely evening. Pay no attention to either of them." Mrs. Bredforet had smiled sweetly.
Now the others were gently ushered out by their host. Ransom was particularly helpful to the lethargic A.A. Hayes, who had slipped into a trance halfway into his raincoat.
"Ernest, I'm sorry but could you help me with Alvis, please?"
Hayes heard his wife sweetly ask for this assistance, and in retaliation he leaned back against the doorjamb and offered to write campaign speeches for his host. He knew he was annoying Ransom and didn't care. "You should run, you know. You could be governor. You're a perfect candidate. I think it's your cufflinks. Or maybe your rhetorical flair. 'These are not the worst of times either.' I liked that."
"I'll keep it in mind." The banker smiled. "Now, I believe that June is waiting, A.A. It is raining…"
On the walk, Hayes's wife stood in the rain, her eyes patiently downcast.
"Ah, yes, the missis." Hayes grinned. "Burning pits in your bricks with her acid eyes. Coming, Junebug honey." He tilted down the steps.
"Hayes is incorrigible," said Ransom to his wife after they had closed the door. "I feel sorry for June. I only asked him because Winslow gets along with him so well, and then Winslow takes off for Boston. While Beanie…! Well, I'm sure there's been some misunderstanding about that note."
News of Mrs. Abernathy's letter had traveled like a final party game through the living room, since Arthur and Priss, clinging to the hope that there was an alternative explanation, had more or less played "Beanie, Beanie, who's got our Beanie?" with several of the guests. But no one had seen her since Tracy (now crushed with guilt) had left her with that unpardonable poet in the Prim Minister's parking lot. Had Tracy not introduced him with the topic query "Is art being sexually abused?" Recalling the incident, she said to Priss sadly, "It seems such a dramatic irony, doesn't it?"
"Ha, ha," said Priss.
Evelyn Troyes had taken Walter Saar home. It was important to her to understand those with access to Jonathan Fields. Saar was not a walker; but having lost his driver's license, and feeling what he suspected was an excessive fear of the police, he had asked Sidney Blossom for a ride to the party—and when Sidney went home early, he had accepted Evelyn's offer for the return trip.
"I know this road," she promised, gunning the motor as she went into the wet blind curve at the bottom of High Street.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," blurted the headmaster, who was almost as frightened as he'd been the night the two Puerto Ricans had taken him back into the kitchen
of His Fancy Club, where they had demanded his watch, sports coat, and cash. He had to stop drinking.
After Ernest Ransom thanked and paid and placed in the town's only taxi Mrs. Maynard "Chinkie" Henry, after he complimented Wanda on her dinner and his wife on her dinner party, he swung open his French windows onto a starry night. Across his landscaped lawn the full, wet trees gleamed like coal. On the other side of Elizabeth Circle, lights were on in the third floor of Ramona Dingley's monstrous Victorian house. Sammy Smalter, who lived there with her, stayed up until all hours. Ransom considered this habit unorthodox, and therefore suspicious.
He decided on a walk. Something troubled him. It had nothing to do with Beanie Abernathy's love flight, behavior so aberrant that the banker simply rejected the reality of the news. Something else was on his mind. An image was still stuck there that had for no reason pushed its way into a conversation he'd had earlier that evening with Dr. Otto Scaper at the golf course.
Scaper had come shambling toward Ransom's golf cart from the small practice green where on sporadic afternoons the bearish old physician took what he claimed to be all the exercise his body would put up with. Ransom had stood politely by, his very good leather golf bag shouldered over his perfectly fitting knit shirt, while Scaper lumbered interminably closer in baggy suit pants, wearing a soiled white shirt with its sleeves rolled tightly up his huge arms and an unfashionable tie flapping loosely around his enormous neck.
"Ern, a second, hey," he had puffed out around his cigar. "Got a minute?"
Of course Ransom had.
"Something's pestering me," the old doctor growled. "I want to come see you at the bank, tomorrow maybe, see what you think. I know there's no sense bringing it up officially unless I do. Arthur and the rest of them just do whatever you tell them anyhow."
Ransom smiled to shake away this presumed power over Dingley Falls's selectmen, while Scaper pawed at the ground with his putter and mumbled, "Something, well, doesn't make sense. Now I know I never was much of a diagnostic man, no eye for fancy guesswork, just fiddle and fix, and I'm not denying I haven't kept up; who could, working the way I do?"
Ransom nodded. "Of course. Just what is—"
"But I've poked around in a lot of insides and sent out a lot of tests. I'm not going to get you balled up in a lot of lingo, Ern, but the situation is I'm getting all this endocarditis, and it's not responding the way it ought to. And awhile back that goddamn fluky brucellosis costing me Pauline Hedgerow before I could turn around! You know?
No reason— what? What? You say something?" Scaper turned his right ear to the banker. A hearing aid was looped there.
Ransom looked bland and blank, but not at all impatient. "No, but tell you the truth, Otto, I don't see—"
"Look here." Gripping his putter hard, Scaper stared out across the lush fairway of the country club. "I swear I'm starting to think some…pollutant's gotten loused up, maybe in our water, or produce; or we got ourselves some kind of industrial poisoning, or some such goddamn thing is going on. Now I went ahead and sent out a water sample."
"Let's not get any rumors started now that are going to get people upset, Otto. I mean, people do die."
"I know that. Die as sure as the sun shines. I know that. But you just get a feeling after all these years. This is different, it's unnatural, it's wrong. Ever seen a bird that died from oil slick? Another bird that dies a regular way is just as dead, but it's different."
It was then that the image still troubling Ransom even after his party had suddenly surfaced in his mind. He had suddenly remembered a gash of burned-out earth covering a lot the size of a football field. He had come upon it four years earlier, when he had hiked out near the marshland to look at some land of his he intended to sell.
He remembered how he had been so surprised, so surprisingly sickened, to see it blasted and seared into his former property. The image had jammed in his head as the doctor spoke, so that instead of hearing Scaper's words, Ransom heard the crackle of leaves on an autumn Sunday back in 1972 when he had worked his way through the marshes alone, setting out from an unfinished strip of highway.
Instead of seeing the safe, rich green of the Dingley Country Club's golf course, he saw that black, scorched, pitted earth onto which he had stumbled out of thick foliage. That image was stuck in his head today, like, he thought, a slide caught in a projector, the same slide appearing click after click on the screen. Through tonight's dinner party, and now after it, as he walked along the rain-polished flagstones between the rain-shiny flower beds, that image kept flashing, of land as wasted as the moon and black as an oil slick.
The banker stooped to pull up a grass clump shoving through a cracked flagstone. A threshing noise of snapped branches lashed into the night. Then loud grunts and labored breath. Ransom felt his heart jerk. He ran around a curve of clipped shrubbery and saw across the smooth, dark lawn a female shadow who swung something over her head. The sight startled him again, then she turned and he realized the female was Kate, his second daughter (first in his heart). She was pummeling an azalea bush with a tennis racket. Ransom walked over and caught her arm. "Hold on, now." He smiled. "What would Sebastian Marco say if he saw you beating on his flowers like this?" His tone was smooth, calm, and habitual. All the Ransoms, but Kate, lived formally and had no forms for fury. Only her manner, like her looks, was so unruly. Her parents had been appalled by her temper tantrums since she had been a baby. Grown, she was a handsome, disheveled copy of both their good looks, but her face still, at twenty-one, could twist into lines of tantrums no one had ever seen on Ransom's face, or his wife's.
"Hold on, now," he said.
"I hate him. He's a pig!"
"Who?"
"Rich."
"Rich?"
"Rich! Rich Rage!"
"Mr. Rage?" Ransom assumed that Priss had told Kate, then, of Beanie's extraordinary good-bye letter. "Well, yes, I'm sure there's been some mistake, but of course it is embarrassing. And dreadful.
But Beanie, Mrs. Abernathy, will come to her senses, and I don't think you need to—"
Kate wasn't listening to him. "He came here to be with me. I'm the one that brought him here!"
"Yes, I understand that you must feel a little—"
His daughter flung his hands away. "Oh, Daddy, you don't know anything about it! For crap's sake."
"Now, no need. No, I suppose I don't. It doesn't matter.
Shouldn't let things upset you like this. Hold on now."
"Thank God that's over," sighed Priss Ransom, dramatically dropping into an armchair. On the settee with Arthur, Emerald was studying her smart beige pumps. "Arthur, perhaps you ought to call Mr. Haig about your mother. Don't you think, darling? Emerald?"
Emerald shrugged her Indian shawl off her shoulders.
"Well, this isn't like Beanie. That sounds silly, considering, doesn't it?" Priss frowned. "And there's the rain. A car accident?" But she was really not very hopeful. "Or phone Vassar about this moronic Rage? Where is Lance?"
"Where else? He's in Forest Hills playing tennis. There's nothing he can do to help." In fact, Arthur Abernathy thought there was nothing his twin brother, Lance, could do to help any situation.
"Really, someone should call Winslow. At least. Are we just going to sit here and do nothing?"
"Frankly, I'm reluctant to tell Dad," confessed the son as he sadly wound his pocket watch. "No cause to upset him needlessly. I mean, I'm sure Mother will have some—explanation. The problem is, I guess it's all right if I tell you, Dr. Scaper told me this afternoon to try to keep sort of an eye on Dad to see that he takes it easy for a while. He's afraid there might be something the matter with Dad's heart."
chapter 10
Chief John "Hawk" Haig had built his house upon mud, having bulldozed his way through everything that lay on top of it. Now a light red brick ranch house squatted like a solitary hog in the newly landscaped clearing at the edge of town, on Route 3 south of the marshlands and not too far east of Wild Oat Ridge.
What the hell was he doing there? his former Madder neighbors wanted to know. If he was going to build, why not be sociable and build in Astor Heights along with everybody else who could afford to get out of Madder? The truth was that Haig did feel like a fool out there in the wilderness.
Listening to rumors, he had outsmarted himself; rather, he had outdistanced the rumors.
There was to be a highway, a big one with excellent connections.
That dead stretch along Route 3 which Haig now owned (or, more technically, for which he now made monthly payments to Ransom Bank) would bloom like yuccas in the desert then, and when it did, the police chief, of course, would have the last yuck on them all.
And as Rumor promised, the state did begin construction of a big connector heading north off Route 3, east of the marshlands, on land Ernest Ransom had sold it—and, no doubt, Haig was certain, had made a killing on. Workers collected in Madder, crowded a trailer park with the tawdry household goods of their transient households; among the workers Maynard Henry and the two Grabaski cousins, heroes home from the evacuation of South Vietnam.
But then, as Rumor neglected to mention, at least she said no words in Haig's ear, construction abruptly stopped half a mile after it started. Ernest Ransom bought back the land and, no doubt, came out ahead. It was always the little guy, Haig was certain, that got screwed. Now the highway connector connected with nothing but weeds and broken trees, a short black tongue stuck out at Nature, who ignored it. Yucca Boulevard never blossomed, and the last yuck was on John "Hawk" Haig, who owned a house and thirteen acres of pine needles on a thirty-year mortgage.
So he became a sportsman, a hunter of small game on his useless preserve, wiping away with shotgun blasts the smug satisfaction of his victorious tenants, the squirrels. People decided Haig had always been the outdoors type and had bought the land to shoot at. He let them think so.
Meanwhile, his modern house sat as unembarrassed by its incongruity as a Burger King on the moon, serene in the certainty that the future was on its side, and eventually so would be Texaco and Kmart.
Michael Malone Page 6
