Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  The sailor helped his girl into the trembling swan. And up in a window of the stone hotel, Winslow Abernathy noticed that the coffee he drank was now cold. It was past time to take his pill.

  The First Congregational Church, which looks down on Dingley Green and is physically the largest church in town, should be, by New England tradition, also the church to gather into its fold the largest number of Dingley Falls's big sheep. Three hundred years ago, however, Elijah Dingley, revolting against his father's Puritanism and his mother's Evangelicalism, had gone so far—from Providence—as to found Dingley Falls on the Rampage and to build there a High Anglican Church, of which St. Andrew's was the third stone replacement; and to confirm in it his firstborn, Thomas Laud Dingley, whom he had named after that very Archbishop of Canterbury who had driven Elijah's father out of England in the first place. Where the founding family worshiped, most of their immediate court inevitably followed, and so, down the centuries, a rivalry for the souls of the social circle (generations of Dingleys, Goffs, Dixwells, Ransoms, and Bredforets) continued to be waged from the pulpits of First Congregational and St. Andrew's Episcopal. The more indifferent (or ecumenical) townspeople went to whichever church was closer or boasted more of their friends. For these, the later service, shorter sermons, richer gossip, and more alcoholic coffee hours of St. Andrew's may have played a part in its greater popularity. No Dingleyan proper, as opposed to Madderite, had been a Catholic since 1925, when Ramona Dingley's father had died in that faith. A few (like Ramona, A.A. Hayes, Sidney Blossom, and Polly Hedgerow) attended neither the Low Church on the green nor the High Church on the hill, nor any other church anywhere else. And the more indecisive (or passionate) felt called first by one bell, then another: Evelyn Troyes had become an Anglican three times and a Congregationalist four. Even after she concluded that Sloan Highwick never was going to marry her, Prudence Lattice had faithfully appeared at every Evensong, though she worried that her ancestors would have writhed in their graves had they known a Lattice was receiving Communion out of a gold chalice in front of a gilded choir screen.

  "Miss Lattice likes to make things for you," said Polly. "She wants somebody to need her."

  Father Highwick had given his young friend two of the dainty pate sandwiches that Prudence Lattice had brought him in a calico napkin from the Tea Shoppe.

  "She's a good soul," said the rector with an easy smile.

  "Nobody would marry her, I guess."

  "Quince Ivoryton wanted to. I think it was Quince. But God calls us all to different altars, and Quince fell in France, poor fellow.

  Or Italy."

  "Don't you want to know how I found out about Mrs. Abernathy so fast?"

  "Poor lady."

  "Suellen Hayes told me this morning. She heard her parents talking about it when they got home. Her dad was stinko." Polly checked to be sure the rector had heard that tidbit. "And Mr. Hayes was laughing out loud. 'I never would have believed it of ol' WeanieBeanie.' (He called Mrs. Abernathy that.) 'Who in hell would have thought…' (I'm just telling you what Suellen told me in homeroom), 'who in hell would have thought that ol' WeanieBeanie had the imagination to commit adultery?'"

  "Hum."

  "He said that news ought to really shake up the old town, except he was sorry because he liked Mr. Abernathy and he liked ol'

  WeanieBeanie, too. He said he wished they'd find out Mr. Ransom was a dope peddler and Mrs. Ransom was a fiend or something."

  Sloan Highwick frowned. He had, after all, his pastoral duties.

  "That was not very nice of Mr. Hayes, perhaps. Hum. Do you know what adultery means?"

  "Of course I do. It means a sexual affair." Polly pursed her lips primly.

  "Hum. It means being too intimate, hum, with someone to whom you're not married, if, hum, you are married."

  "I know," said Polly. "Like Anna Karenina."

  "It's a sin."

  "Not anymore, is it?"

  "Heavens, a sin's a sin. It's not like narrow lapels, you know, or wide ones, which really I think have gone too far. There, then." He laughed his benevolent laugh, and pedagogic duty discharged to Highwick's satisfaction, they walked back through the garden.

  Polly looked at the erratically clipped rosebush. "Sebastian Marco's going to kill you when he sees that!"

  "That Sebastian! He thinks himself a genius, which he may indeed be." The rector glanced at his gardener's perfect striped tulips.

  "However, it's all very well to be a genius, but when you start to act like one, it's a different matter entirely. When you can't even bother to answer a few civil questions!"

  "He quit again?"

  Highwick forlornly nodded.

  "Oh, he'll be back. He's scared you'll ruin his garden."

  Something flashed at Polly as the door to Jonathan Fields's cottage opened. "Gosh! What happened to him? His eyes are all different."

  "Those are his new contact lenses. Poor fellow, so young," sighed Highwick, who had perfect sight and never troubled it with much reading or writing. The lithe Jonathan came toward them now with two huge sapphires twinkling in his face. He carried a stack of library books, for he was on his way to visit Ramona Dingley again, after he made all the church calls at the hospital near Argyle, where Evelyn Troyes was driving him since it happened to be on her way to wherever she told him she was going that happened to be along that way.

  "Mrs. Troyes is a little lonely, I don't like to say no," he told the rector. "I have to eat dinner with the rector, he gets a little lonely if he has to eat by himself," he told Mrs. Troyes.

  "I have to go to Miss Dingley's," he now said to his superior. "I don't think I'm much help though. She asked for some books on the historicity of Christ. 'Tough ones,' she said. She said the gospels were nothing but gossip. Maybe, Rector, I'm not really sure how, maybe if you could…"

  "No, no, no, you're doing a marvelous job. I shouldn't interfere.

  But dear, dear Ramona. First flying saucers in the marshes. Now this, this greedy curiosity. The elderly sometimes get that way.

  Suspicious. Poor old thing. Discourage her, discourage her gently. It never helps to poke and prod into the Mystery, to spoil the bloom on the bud," counseled the rector, who was, in that sense, completely unspoiled.

  The curate hurried away, laden with books that Gladys Goff had selected for the townspeople's edification, though whatever missionary impulses Father Fields may have had were dampened when he noticed that most of the tomes had last been checked out in 1935.

  Doomed to failure, Miss Goff had devoted her life to attempts to improve the minds and preserve the lineages of Dingley Falls families. It's just as well she died when she did and was replaced by that more charitable reader, Sidney Blossom, while the house of Dingley itself, whose fireplaces and forebears she had so carefully catalogued, was still standing. For now there was gossip about the last direct lineal descendant of Elijah the founder, stories going around about Beatrice Dingley Abernathy that—even if untrue—Gladys Goff would have never allowed on her shelves.

  chapter 13

  Ernest Ransom was driving out of town to visit that former property of his. He was a man of many holdings—most of them handed him, as each ancestor finished his life's run and passed the stick forward, handed him in a lineal descent of bonds and a bank, of glass birds and dishes, land, houses, and attitudes. One such holding was fifty swampy acres just north of Dingley Falls, property no one had ever thought usable, but simply something in the family, bequeathed along with keepsakes like Charity Bredforet's embroideries of national landmarks, which no one wanted either.

  Ransom, however, had found a buyer; rather a buyer had found him. In early 1969 someone representing someone who represented something governmental had presented himself at the bank with a letter of introduction from one of the congenial Washington acquaintances whom Ransom had met as a result of his reliable, if unenthusiastic, support for the Republican ticket the previous fall:

  reliable because Bredforets and Ransoms ha
d always been dutiful citizens whose substantial contributions to the GOP they considered as morally obligatory as their donations to the Episcopal Church—both those institutions being, in the family's inherited judgment, as fundamental to the social order as gravity is to the well-running of the universe. Nevertheless, Ernest Ransom had not been enthusiastic, because in 1968 he could not bring himself to believe that either of his party's candidates, Nixon or Agnew, were what he could really call "gentlemen." Eight years earlier, in fact, he had taken the unprecedented, and unrepeated, step of secretly voting for a Democratic president, who, if reprehensible in all other ways, undeniably had been schooled to dress, play for Harvard, sail, and get himself injured for his country—as a gentleman. But that brief infidelity with JFK, like an affair with a dangerously seductive foreigner in wartime, clearly could mean little in the pattern of one's life, and Ransom had never committed adultery again.

  In 1968, therefore, he had contributed time and money to Republicans. And in return he had been invited to meet Republicans of time and money, those who made decisions, or who had heard decisions in the making, knowledge that proved useful to have in the banking business when mixed casually with a drink and handed to Ernest Ransom at gentlemen's luncheons. And so, approached by his government about the leasing of mostly marshy land that no one had ever thought of using anyhow, he was happy to oblige. Profit was not at all his motive, though profit was, naturally, all to the good. He understood the representative to say something about possible ornithological research into migratory cycles. Possibly in the future there might be something on the order of a national wildlife refuge.

  Possibly it might bear the Ransom family name. All to the good.

  Since William Bredforet was now too old to stand holding a gun for hours in sodden rubber boots down among sedge and gnat-thick rushes, and since Ernest preferred golf, there was no family objection he could see in the preservation of any mallard or woodcock that might be left in the area. So the land was leased, and the banker kept the fact, as he had been asked, under his hat. That had been more than seven years ago.

  Today, his sunglasses filtering out the bright summer glare, Ransom drove his sedan a little too fast around Ransom Circle, up Goff Street, and out onto Route 3, out to that suddenly sliced-off carpet of superhighway rolled out, it had seemed to Police Chief Hawk Haig, to herald the future, a future that had declined, after all, to make an appearance. At the road's abrupt end, Ransom squatted in his tailored suit to pull out a few clumps of sprawling weeds that leeched forward on all sides to reclaim the land. He felt ill at ease there. Accustomed since a very pleasant childhood to everyone's regard, Ernest intensely disliked being disliked. And the problem of the discontinued connector had caused him the unpleasantness of alienating a number of people. Not that he had done so deliberately, but things had, as he generally phrased it, gotten rather complicated.

  Three years after his dealings with the nation, the state (still in what all Ransoms considered the disturbingly itchy hands of Democrats) had proposed to connect Route 3 to the interstate that ran twenty miles to the north. As a result (the result upon which Hawk Haig had bought his land and built his future), vacationers would have driven right by Dingley Falls to Lake Pissinowno or farther west into other lovely scenery, rather than entirely bypassing the town to the northwest (as members of Dingley Falls's Historical Society hoped they would continue to do). And after the confetti of red tape had settled over the State House, an engineering report appeared. It proposed a route through the southeast corner of Ernest Ransom's land, which, since the site in question did not directly overlap the land he had leased earlier to the federal government, he was happy enough to sell. Construction began. Construction workers praised the union and the union praised the Democrats and Ransom invested the money and Hawk Haig purchased his acres and, except that the Historical Society had neon nightmares about Tastee-Freez and motels with names like Bide-a-Wee, everyone was content.

  But things had gotten complicated. Soon after his negotiations with the state, Ransom received a disturbing visit from a disturbed representative of a federal agency. It seemed to this Mr. Palter that Mr. Ransom hadn't caught the signal right when he'd leased the federal government that land. It seemed there were too many players on the field, and the coach thought the team ought to huddle and come up with a better game plan. In the end, it seemed that the nation thought it counterproductive for the state to be plowing up earth even within a fifty-acre radius of (leased) federal property. Mr. Palter explained that once the offensive line had knocked out Congress, that possible Ransom National Wildlife Preserve was on the theoretical assembly line. And though the ball of a bill had not yet been passed over those hard-line congressional committee fuckers, excuse the term, still indications were in the affirmative. Meanwhile, let's get a few strings pulled on this end and get the state the hell off the field. So Ransom understood this Mr. Palter to say, though he was not completely certain they were speaking the same language.

  Soon after Mr. Palter's visit, a speedy investigation by another federal agency demonstrated to its own satisfaction that the state had indeed left dangling a few dirty strings. Such as, the state's construction contractor and the state assemblyman who had first proposed the connector were related by marriage. Such as, the contractor and the engineer who had drawn up the first report were both alumni, twenty years back, of a secret teenage social club called the Hartford Hellions. Such suspicious connections behind the connector clearly indicated, at least to the federal investigators, that there was dirt to be dug up before the state dug up any more of Ernest Ransom's dirt. Ransom was persuaded that he agreed. He advised Dingley Falls's first selectman to push for a second surveyor's report.

  The federal agency even volunteered army engineers, who, with the same impressive speed, discovered, at least to their satisfaction, that the route already under construction was far from sound. In fact, so dismal were geological and soil conditions found to be, by this second report, that it expressed frank astonishment that the first report should ever have proposed pouring the state's concrete, unloading the state's gravel, into a substructure so highly acidic and upon soil of such poor drainage that, as a Republican friend of Mr. Palter's exclaimed on the floor of the State House, in his quotable way, a mere ten years would suffice to sink that connector into a bog of treachery where misguided motorists might, for all the Democrats cared, drive in their swimsuits with snorkels clenched between their teeth, since that would be the only way of getting across the damn thing. And what kind of a "social club" had that been, anyhow?

  Privately, Ransom was surprised. Business dealings in the state over a number of profitable years had occasionally brought him in contact with the president of the original engineering firm, and nothing in the man's past seemed to prefigure so gross a miscalculation, and nothing in his character seemed to make likely the deliberate malfeasance that the federal findings called the only explanation possible. But Ransom had been schooled never to doubt federal findings. So, though privately surprised and somehow ill at ease, publicly he condemned that original engineering firm.

  The vehement protests of the backers of the state report over such "unfounded insinuations" by the backers of the federal report were overruled by the long, loose strings of litigation, after which, in a quiet act of good citizenship kept under his hat, Ransom agreed to act as agent for the purchase of that land from the state by the nation. With the help of the cooperative banker, the federal government came into possession of the entire fifty acres. Ransom took no fee for his service, but had the pleasure within the year of an appointment to a board of twenty advisers to a trade committee, and of an invitation to a dinner given by state leaders in order to raise money for their party's national leader, who came personally to thank them, and from whom Ernest Ransom sat only a flattering seven seats away. All to the good.

  Except some people weren't happy. Not that Ransom had the slightest personal regard for Hawk Haig, or for Maynard Henry and the r
est of the out-of-work construction workers, or for the union, or for Hartford Democrats. Still, he disliked being disliked. He disliked too certain unfounded insinuations about the abandoned highway.

  He disliked these rumors even more after it became all too apparent that both those national officeholders, to whose election in 1968 and 1972 he had given so much time and money, had not behaved as gentlemen during their abbreviated tenure in office. Ransom heard unsavory phrases (whose inapplicability to his own motives did not entirely mitigate the uneasiness he felt at having such words in verbal proximity to the words Ernest Ransom). These phrases (payoff, kickback, hush money) were the more galling when his own party's folly, taped and televised like some interminable soap opera, had made the words so delectable to mouth-watering liberals like A.A. Hayes. Had the Dingley Day (whose cryptic editorials on "The Highway Scandal" had momentarily increased its circulation) still been owned by the Highwick family—who, however, had sold it fifty years ago to a chain of western New England papers that now belonged to a television network that belonged to an oil company—

  Ransom would have insisted that the Highwicks oblige him by firing A.A. Hayes immediately.

  But the highway business was over now; even Hayes had dropped it. Everyone had grown accustomed to that disconnected asphalt strip. It was part of the landscape now, no more noticed than the banks of the Rampage. Still, the place made Ransom uncomfortable, and it had been four years since he last saw it. He would not have come now except for that image, wedged in his mind by the conversation yesterday with Dr. Scaper, which last night had almost kept him awake past his bedtime. Of course, what he had seen four years ago would be gone by now; once he proved that, the uneasy image ought to go as well. That he should get rid of it as soon as possible, even if it meant wasting his morning, was important to the banker, for he disliked (and was unaccustomed to) having anything uncomfortable in his life, or mind.