So entangled are we in our own designs that the concurrent and often conflicting plots of our families, friends, and enemies may come to us as surprises suddenly unraveled or traps suddenly sprung. Our show of surprise is our way of protesting the injuries done us, or denying that we have offered bribes for the gifts bestowed. If no one can see into another's heart, Beanie tells Winslow, it is probably because no one comes close enough, or stays long enough, or "listens loud enough over the thump of their own," to see and hear.
Spiders fast in the centers of our own webs, we are busy creating the world in which we live. But as we spin out of ourselves our private universes, in the end the webs tangle, and we become flies to one another, caught for good or evil. Caught by surprise.
The certainty—that there are larger plots, Byzantine and diabolical webs in which a few are spiders and the rest witless flies—is a popular faith among paranoid atheists like A.A. Hayes, who is very fond of the spider metaphor. Once they had condemned God for what He did to humanity, people like Hayes fled immediately to the sanctuary of conspiracy. The editor of the Day admits they only changed the words, but would argue that language is everything.
Hayes clings to meaning, and words have definitions. Better, he says, to believe in conspiracy than in nothing; better to believe that the big spiders of the world secrete from their corrupt entrails a complex web whose interconnections can be traced and plotted, than to accept that all of us, flies and spiders both, dangle in a webless void.
A.A. Hayes thinks a great deal about evil, for which—as humanists do—he blames God. His faith in evil is ecumenical; he sees its causes everywhere: our homes, our hearts, our heads, our hormones; in short, our Fall. We are all guilty of merciless possibilities. But Hayes worries less about the evil of the individual heart, which is, after all, so garishly dressed and loudly spoken that it is not very hard to spot it in the crowd, and is almost comforting, it's so old-fashioned: like evil in a melodrama, a villain with a waxy moustache. Like Hitler, against whom personally and with such a clear sense of rightness Ernest Ransom had fought World War II. What, thought Hayes, would people like Ernest Ransom do without Hitler? Faith in Hitler's insanity kept the modern world sane, as faith that the plague was God's visitation helped to keep the Middle Ages from going completely mad. Hitler's was the easy face of horror both to bankers like Ransom, who saw peril in Communist hippies like Sidney Blossom, and to populists like Blossom, who saw peril in Fascist capitalists like Ernest Ransom.
Yet Hayes, too, clutched at a faith in evil still human. For the editor's enemy was organized crime, of which the Mafia was the least dangerous. Hayes meant crime organized so blandly and on such a big scale by bureaucracies like ITT and U.S.A. that none of the victims ever realized crimes were being committed. So, while he believed in an impersonal conspiracy, he believed it to be under the conscious control of evil persons. A boardroom of waxy mustaches.
But Hayes's imagined conspirators, those military and industrial men, can no more weave beyond their own private webs than he can, though their threads may be stretched farther than his. Yet, there is some conspiracy. It has spun us all together. It has fixed each of us in our strand of the radiating web, our places chosen for us, or chosen by us, or unchosen. The question, Ramona Dingley's question for Jonathan Fields, is, of course, which? If the conspiracy is not God's, if He has not woven the web and does not sit in its center, is there nothing there to hold the pattern in place?
Is the labyrinth itself the center? Programmed so long ago it can program itself now, wholly self-sustaining, does it sit in the center insentient, paradoxically omniscient because it perfectly knows nothing at all? Does it weave the world, paradoxically omnipotent because it is perfectly random? Are we chosen by the chance computations of the Minotaur's machine? At whose mercy, by whose grace, do we plot?
We who rarely understand our own petty plots, and more rarely look into the mystery of our neighbors, who have no way of knowing (and spend little time wondering) whether our lives are governed by divine design or a complex of technology and bureaucracy or by nothing at all, should not fault Dingleyans for seeing no more than we do. The same heart beats in every human breast and is as little listened to. Even less should Dingleyans be expected to have explored the plot north of the marshlands, when life has given them so short a time and so slight a skill to explore themselves.
But the plot is there. North of the marshlands is a secret base, which began Operation Archangel in 1969 and which, in the preoccupations of an unlucky administration's fall, was never told to stop.
So it never did.
The secret base happens to be, in 1976, that Bicentennial year, the unseen antagonist of Dingley Falls, Connecticut, but the townspeople, though some have heard rumors and some have seen lights, know nothing about it. Suppose they did know what was up there, outside their limits? How could they, any more than we would, think that a government base (a collection of orders, buildings, formulae, men, and test tubes) was a chief plotter against them? And was only one of unknown numbers of plots? In melodramas there are heroes to unveil the villain; in Dingley Falls there are only people like the rest of us.
The secret base is plotting to bring peace in our time and make the world safe for democracy. It is plotting to put a stop to the aesthetic absurdity of military armaments, the technological naiveté of crude and mostly nuclear missiles. The secret base has known for a long time how to end wars before they start, before they waste national resources like time, energy, money, and the human race.
The secret base is not susceptible to jingoism, is indifferent to the paranoiac political gobbledygook about the Communist menace that so worries Ernest Ransom and the paranoiac political gobbledygook about the Fascist threat that so worries Sidney Blossom. The base has always known that it is silly to spend a great deal of money training and equipping people like Maynard Henry to travel ten thousand miles to kill people like Chin Lam. The secret base has gone beyond neolithic man, who has heaped up mounds of yellow metal in vaults beneath the earth and called it power, who has hauled huge, bullying ships across water and over clouds and called it defense of honor.
Ernest Ransom's little silver star on a rag of ribbon is an absurdity to the secret base.
North of Dingley Falls near the marshlands beyond Bredforet Pond, there is a compound of disinterested, dispassionate equipment, including personnel, that believes that knowledge is the only gold worth shoring up, worth hiding, and worth setting a guard around to keep off the descendants of the mindless mob that plagued Galileo, burned Brahe, and, ever the foe of science, feared and fought the future. Knowledge and peace and quiet, a good lab and the men to work it, are all the secret base wants. The men don't know from how high up the orders came down telling their director, Dr. Thomas Svatopluk, to proceed with Operation Archangel. Some say the orders came from the very top, some say not. They don't really care.
It matters little to these scientists who sits in the presidential chair, who snatches the seal for a few silly years in an oval office. They are dedicated to the operation, and the plots of their own careers, and are tangled in the webs of their own lives.
Scientists who are pure care little for implementation. But in this Baconian world, theory must lie down—for money—with technology. Science must test things out. Testing things out is the way Ford, Wright, and Edison gave so much to so many, the way Bell discovered the telephone and Columbus discovered America. It is the way the secret base discovered that in the tip of an eye dropper, in the tip of a speck on a microscopic dot, lay power to conquer the will and the heart of the world. Not that they made their discoveries for the federal agency that had given them the code name Archangel, nor for the Pentagon's intelligence divisions, who were 100 percent behind the potential in the operation. Not that they were doing it for whoever first told them they could do it, for they don't even know who that was. They were not doing it because they were members of a conspiratorial web. They were doing it to find out if it could be
done.
The secret base was plotting—theoretically—conquests beyond Alexander's dreams.
It was testing them out on Dingley Falls.
part two
chapter 12
The librarian Sidney Blossom loved what lay upon the leaves of books. Those stories of loss and gain, of pride and prejudice and great expectations, were as alive to him up on their shelves as were their living counterparts in Dingley Falls. His predecessor, and the town's last official historian, had honored, however, only trees. Gladys Goff had dated within a decade the foot-wide oak boards on the floor of the Prim Minster Inn and had charted all the best local families out to the most distant twig on a branch. Nothing created after the Revolutionary War was of any interest to Miss Goff, genealogically or architecturally. She was not a reader. If told that salaciousness or socialism lay between the covers of one of those books she kept so carefully covered, she removed that book from Dixwell Library. She did not take it home and read it first. If told that individuals in the town had disgraced their genealogy, she removed them from her mental chart and had in her time lopped away whole limbs. But she did not tell tales. Although a prude and a snob, she had never been a gossip.
Gladys Goff had scarcely admitted that Madder lay on the eastern side of Dingley Falls. Architecturally, Madder was a hodgepodge, and its family trees were weeds. Certainly she had never so much as acknowledged the existence of Judith Haig, who had not only grown up in Madder but had been raised in a small Catholic orphanage there, and who had no idea who even her parents were, much less her great-great-grandparents. For there had been no clue, no note pinned with a gold brooch, no monogrammed lace handkerchief left with her in the cardboard box that Father Patrick Crisp had found beneath a station of the cross one Good Friday night forty-two years earlier. This morning the pastor had heard, from Sarah MacDermott, that there was something the matter with Judith's heart. It did not appear that God had made her lucky. Her story, sighed Father Crisp, continued to be a sad one.
Before Mrs. Haig retired to fix up her house, she had to make final arrangements at the post office. Tuesday morning at 8:50 her husband, Hawk, left the police station, where he had sat since 7:00 A.M. to protect Dingley Falls. He drove across the rickety bridge and returned with his wife. The dogs returned to the trailer park, but they watched her go by.
At 9:05 Sammy Smalter came to her post office window, where he handed up one of his usual packages addressed to New York.
At 9:20 Prudence Lattice, who had nothing else to do, opened her Tea Shoppe.
At 9:21 Limus Barnum went in there for a cup of coffee. He brought his own doughnuts in their cellophane wrappers and a magazine for men.
At 9:30, after the jog around Elizabeth Circle and the light but fibrous breakfast whereby he maintained a form trim enough to don, if need be, the World War II captain's uniform boxed up in his attic, Ernest Ransom arrived at his bank, where he learned he had sold three hundred shares of United Chemicals at a considerable profit.
At 10:30 Polly Hedgerow, having already scored at least 98 percent on her history final and having decided that 98 was good enough, was pedaling full speed along Cromwell Hill Road. She had raced out of Dixwell High without bothering to turn down the hall to see if her friend Joy Strummer was at her locker yet. A team of ball-dribbling boys would have surrounded Joy anyhow. Swinging dangerously onto the gravel path, Polly entered the courtyard behind St. Andrew's. Father Sloan Highwick was out there, clipping the roses all wrong and humming the Nicene Creed, "He suffered and was bur-i-ed."
"Guess what?" she called.
"Yes, terrible. I already know."
"How?" Polly dismounted.
"I had dinner last night at the Ransoms. Everyone was there. Very pleasant. Except, of course, for poor Mrs. Abernathy. And poor Mr. Abernathy. And that poor misguided fellow, Rage, who has apparently, I say apparently, um, gone away with her." The rector sighed.
"Such is Life, Polly dear. Not all roses." He returned to clipping his.
Polly was chagrined. Elation over her now worthless scoop deflated like a bike tire. She kicked her kickstand. Her age was such a rotten handicap—while she was forced into an early bed, the rector ran about getting invited to parties and slurping up information right and left.
Sloan Highwick, however, never understood the gossip; he simply collected it, just as Petrarch collected the Greek manuscripts of Plato long before he found a tutor to teach him how to translate them. Polly Hedgerow was, in a way, the rector's tutor. But being so young, her translations were sketchy at best, even when news did come her way. For it was the "why," not the "what," that intrigued her. Gossip to her was simply a book (some of whose words sent her to the dictionary) for whose hidden meaning she read between the lines. This intellectual superiority to Highwick consoled her now, for Polly was, in that regard, a bit of a snob. And so she decided again not to share with Highwick the biggest fact in all Dingley Falls, a fact that she assumed no one but she had discovered (and she by accident while digging for Indian arrowheads east of Birch Forest). The fact that beyond the marshlands somebody had built some kind of a U.S.
government compound—she wasn't sure why, but imagined it might be to store atom bombs in—an installation surrounded by high electric fences and guarded by soldiers with dogs. She had never heard anyone in town mention such a place. She wasn't sure such a place should be in Dingley Falls, Connecticut.
The telephone call from his son and partner reached the attorney Winslow Abernathy as he drank coffee and stared down from the window of his staid hotel to the pond in Boston Public Garden where the docked swan boats floated empty together.
Abernathy was surprised by Arthur's revelation about Beanie's departure. Had any local gossip reached him of his wife's involvement with another man, he would have dismissed it without thought. So he was surprised, but his composure was not shattered. It was his habit, or nature, to take hurt inside and smother it there. He asked Arthur if they were sure it was Beanie's handwriting, if there had been further news, if Lance (Arthur's twin) had heard from her in Forest Hills, if the hospital had been called, if the highway patrol had been called, if she had provided herself with clothes and money.
He asked who had seen her last and what was her presumed state of mind. He and his son were lawyers.
Abernathy could think of no friends or relatives to whom his wife might have gone. Apart from old Ramona, Beanie was the last of the Dingleys. Her friends, her life, were all there at home. But, indisputably, she was gone, and it was not in her nature to joke or to lie. The senior partner said he would leave immediately and should be back by 3:00 that afternoon. His business in Boston had been to protect Beanie's interests—her factory that made periscopes and telescopes and microscopes, yet seemed to make less money each year.
In the letter Arthur had read, Beanie had given her husband that factory. With all her heart, she'd said. He knew she didn't think he would want it as a recompense for losing her. He knew she hadn't thought at all, if, in fact, she had left him.
What Winslow thought as he continued to drink his coffee and noticed that his window was gullied with the aimless path of last night's rain, what he felt, at first, was not so much a sense of loss as a sense of wonder at Beanie's revealed intensity. What must so precipitous an emotion be like to blot out domestic and social habits, to cut through the easeful inertia of that many years? It must be frightening to be caught in such a passion. Beanie must be frightened. No, that wasn't true. Physical things had never scared her. Letters and numbers scared her, in their (to her) arbitrary manifestations—like cocktail party invitations or bank figures. He and she were quite opposite in that, in most ways. Abernathy had no fear of anything that could be written down. He was, on the other hand, made queasy by the darting approach of a cat, or Big Mutt, the dog Beanie had so named because he was simply that, a large mongrel. She was not given to metaphor.
The lawyer worried about how his wife must feel about how he must feel. How must he feel
? Betrayed? He could not visualize this absurdly named man (this poet?) with regard to whom his wife had written that she had never felt this way before. He could not feel betrayed, because he could not believe it. Arthur was right: Beanie would be home before he got back. That was the only thing that made sense. And perhaps Otto was right, perhaps he should tell her about his checkup, that he might be slightly hypertensive, might be putting a strain on his heart. Maybe he should share the worrisome things with Beanie. Perhaps she was right, that he should not hold himself in so much. Yes, Beanie would be home when he got there, and he would tell her he was afraid to die. But if she had left him, if she wanted to be released from their marriage? Then he would not tell her; for out of charity she would stay, even against her desires.
While, for three decades, Winslow Abernathy had not probed to discover just what his wife's desires might be, he would never—should they be made explicit—bribe her to deny them.
A line was forming beside the first swan down in the public garden; a sailor and his girl were in front, waiting, in no hurry. On leave in his officer's uniform, over thirty years ago, Winslow had sat in such a boat, perhaps in that same boat, and had rewritten Beanie's French composition so that she could eventually graduate from Mount Holyoke, so that he could finish the war and finish law school and marry her. She had held out her hands to the ducks. "They'll bite you," he warned her. "Not unless I hurt them," she said. Then she had snatched up his hands in hers and said, "Oh, throw that book in the water. We could just get married now, couldn't we, before you go back?"
"Yes," he'd told her. "All right."
He had wanted to marry her for a long time, perhaps since the afternoon they were introduced by Ernest Ransom at a game in the Yale Bowl. A cautious, careful young man, never before had Winslow made a decision with so little regard for the evidence, so brief a review of the relevant facts, before entering his plea. But Beanie had seemed to him at once to be an absolute fact, like the war, to be so tangible that, connected to her reality, he could stretch out a tentative hand toward a world he otherwise ignored and sometimes found frightening and often misunderstood. Within a year of their wedding they had the twin boys. Two more tangible facts, like Beanie. And for a long time she tried to have other children. When she didn't, she drove to the pound in Argyle and brought back the first of many dogs. Now, Arthur had said, she had taken the blind old Big Mutt away with her last night. Had she loved the dog too much to leave behind, or feared he loved the dog too little?
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