"Winslow will find her," said Tracy.
"Will he look?"
"Of course he will. What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Mrs. Ransom, "my dear, they are so utterly peu compatissant and have been for thirty-odd years. Winslow is, like me…and you," she added expansively, "an observer of the circus.
And Beanie is a…," She first thought "elephant" but set it aside as uncharitable, "…seal. Life is to Winslow, and me, and you, a silly, sweaty melodrama, in response to which only the deodorant of irony seems sensible, or bearable."
"Well, oh, irony? I've never thought I…"
"Yes, yes, yes, it's quite true," interrupted Mrs. Ransom, who did not want her phrasing meddled with. "On the other hand, as Walter Saar said to me on the phone this morning, Beanie will leave a rather large hole in Winslow's life. Rather like overlooking the Grand Tetons not to notice she was missing. Now, I imagine that if someday Ernest misplaced me, like a golf ball, he might briefly scan the grass with his shoe, but he wouldn't want to hold up the game and would soon decide he could simply get another."
"Priss, you always joke!"
Tracy's friend had to agree that when looking Life in the face she had some difficulty keeping her own straight. "Though Ernest doesn't lose things," she added. "I've lived with him thirty years.
He's had the same cigarette case longer than he's had me. A methodical man."
"I don't know why Ernest doesn't go into politics," said Tracy, apropos of nothing, except that all anyone had ever been able to think of to say about Ransom was that he should go into politics.
"Why doesn't he?"
"Connaît? He never says anything to me he wouldn't say at a dinner party. I prefer that," Priss quickly added. "Intimacy doesn't appeal to me. I like Ernest because his surface is so deep."
"I think I know what you mean. Oh, my, it's late. I must go take Vincent some flowers."
Priss's chiseled upper lip twitched at the edge of her coffee cup.
She rather disapproved of Tracy's increasingly frequent visits to the grave site of the late Mr. Canopy. The act smacked of, what? The Pre-Raphaelites. Or worse, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Of their foursome, she and Tracy had always played the roles of the enlightened sophisticates, cynics and critics, whereas Evelyn Troyes had been cast as the moonstruck romantic. And Beanie as (what was her son Ray's term?), as, yes, the jock. Now, not only was Evelyn burning a tank of gas a day in pursuit of that pink-cheeked curate, Jonathan Fields, but Beanie had run sexually amok, and Tracy was off twice a week scattering roses on her husband's tomb. Mrs. Ransom began to wonder if perhaps she were missing something, if something were missing. Annoyingly, a phrase from that anonymous letter bullied its vulgar way into her mind. Did she, after all, have whatever it was up her tushie? Could one be a Lezzie and not notice? She thought it unlikely. Even if the big dong had never much appealed either.
Today was the seventh anniversary of Vincent Canopy's completely unexpected death while discussing golf clubs with Ernest Ransom during the celebration at the Dingley Country Club of Vincent's twenty pleasant years with Tracy Dixwell.
"Excuse me, Ernest, been feeling a little off," he had said, and gone to the men's room. There they had searched for him when time came to toast the couple's long life and happiness.
"I'll never forget it," Father Highwick often remarked. "Vincent there in the booth, the door open, seated on the bowl, a carnation in his lapel, his head lowered nearly to his knees like a man in deep thought, or perhaps looking for a key. 'Something troubling you, Vincent?' I asked. Poor fellow, he toppled right over, dead, though I didn't know it, and gave himself a nasty crack on the head."
Despite being on the spot, there had been nothing Dr. Otto Scaper could do. Others at the festivity also became ill, though none as critically. The rumor raced through town that Carl Marco, Sr., grocer and caterer, had poisoned Dingley Falls's entire upper class.
Dr. Scaper said it looked like old Malta Fever to him, but admitted that brucellosis didn't usually kill people like that. Everyone then decided that Mr. Canopy must have imported a bug from New York City, which was known to be full of germs. A week later, however, Mrs. Cecil Hedgerow (Pauline Moffat Hedgerow—Dr. Scaper's own goddaughter, and Polly's mother) had died, and three days after that Joe MacDermott's mother in Madder had died, both with the same symptoms as Vincent Canopy. Neither woman had shopped at Marco's, neither had traveled to New York, and neither had been in contact with Mr. Canopy, who commuted to "the City" during the week and undoubtedly would have wished he had not made an exception to stay home for his twentieth wedding anniversary. Yet these three people, among others who recovered, had suddenly died of apparently the same disease. Gossip said it was very peculiar. Then Gossip forgot it.
Today Vincent's widow went to visit him. She took with her a memorial bouquet and a sonnet whose final couplet read: "Seven years, seven long and lonely years, since, last we spoke, and oh, so pokey time has passed." Vincent was sleeping with his Dixwell in-laws in a sunny corner of the Old Town Burial Ground that rose above the green behind Town Hall and the Congregational Church.
By climbing an incline of Bredforets, Ransoms, Goffs, and of Dingley Falls judges, babies, generals, and beloved wives, and by turning left at the statue of Charles Bradford Dingley IV—a full figure in Quincy pink granite by Daniel Chester French, the largest sarcophagus in the cemetery, and the only one without a body beneath it (the body, the bones by now, were presumably somewhere near the Argonne)—finally and a little breathless, Tracy Canopy joined her late spouse.
She unfolded a low canvas stool and sat down beside a high sphere of flattened panels made of crushed automobiles, an abstract rendering of Victory over Death which the widow had commissioned from the subsequently unjustly imprisoned sculptor Louie Daytona.
At its base was a bronze plaque:
VINCENT TYLER CANOPY 1908–1969
HERE RESTS A LOVING MAN WHOSE HEART WAS GIVEN FREELY TO HIS FRIENDS, AND ART.
"Oh, Vincent, Vincent, I wish you were here," said his wife to the side door of a maroon Buick. "More and more I wish you hadn't died."
By talking over her concerns with her husband, by reading him her cutouts from the world of the arts and sharing the news of her life, Tracy had become very good friends with Vincent in the years since his death. Actually, even before that they had gotten along nicely. Having met at the Met (as they afterwards joked), the couple had married over the protests of no one. Being both well named, well taught, wealthy, and healthy, they were declared to be well matched.
Personally, Vincent had been slightly more…physical than she, but the passion that had not passed him by while he was away in the City all week making his investments was with time safely in the past, where it could not leap out at Tracy, who frankly confessed finally that she "would rather not." Their basic compatibility had been solidified by Canopy's demise and was now as solidly welded as his tomb.
"Vincent, you'll never guess. Beanie's gone, oh, my, well, I don't know what to call it. Who could have known? She eloped with a poet last night," Mrs. Canopy explained as she always had, for her husband had never kept up with Dingley Falls gossip. "With one of my poets. What can I say to Winslow? He'll wonder why I didn't try to stop her. I think I'll write him first, before I see him, not just that I'm sorry but just to let him know…oh, my, let him know what? I wish you were here to take him off somewhere nice for dinner and be his friend. But Beanie, too, what can she be feeling?"
With a sigh, Tracy arranged her husband's jonquils in the candelabra of polished tailpipes atop the metallic sphere. "I was robbed, too. Priss, you know her cynical mind, Priss thinks Babaha did it, stole everything and put it in her duffel bag while I was at our Thespian Ladies lunch. Where Beanie met him. Mr. Rage. But I can't believe she would do such a thing. Babaha, I mean. Or Beanie.
Really, so many strange things seem to be happening. Mr. Hayes, you never liked him, told me Otto thinks our water's been poisoned. And I met a nice young girl
from Vietnam, beaten up by her husband, and he's in jail. How can things like that be happening in Dingley Falls?
Remember how we never even used to lock the front door, and we used to think how different it was here from Manhattan? Was it so long ago?"
It should not be assumed that Mrs. Canopy addressed her deceased husband in a way that suggested mental disturbance; perhaps it would be fairer to say that while her conversational tone might have suggested to a casual passerby some such problem, she was quite capable of distinguishing reality from fantasy. She needed a vehicle to receive her thoughts, and Vincent's Buick had come to serve that purpose. She did not necessarily assume that he lay listening beneath it. For that matter, he had rarely listened when he had sat across from her at dinner, or before the living room fire. The change was that he no longer got up and went to bed before she finished.
Mrs. Canopy stretched out her legs and recrossed her ankles with a sigh. How ridiculous not to be able to sit on a low stool without cramps, creaks, and mottled skin that had lost its circulation. How annoyingly unavoidable aging was. She had been right never to become too involved with her body. It only betrayed you in the end, deserted the highest Olympic jumper as well as she, who had only trotted, swatted, swum, and touched her toes for the four years she'd been obliged to do so by a college gym instructor. And the worst of it was that when the body finally did collapse of its own puniness, it dragged you right along with it. You had no choice but to follow it down into the grave. It was really maddening, after all.
"Now, stop it!" Mrs. Canopy told herself sharply. "Sometimes you have to just not think." And so she sat for a while and watched two thoughtless bobolinks. But mind, despite ten lessons, would not be controlled. "You know that letter I found? Priss got one, too, terribly ugly. I didn't tell her about mine. Being called a fool is worse, I think. Perhaps I am one, after all. I feel so…expendable. I've never worked in all my silly life, well, except for those two years for the USO, I suppose I could count them. But my charities and my poor artists. Remember we used to call our artists our children? Maybe we were wrong not to have any children, except I did know, I thought, I wouldn't be very good at it. But what a waste I am. Poor Beanie.
You know, nothing has ever been really the matter with me and nothing really horrible has ever happened, except, you know, of course, when I lost you. But they advertise late at night the most pitiful souls, deformed or starved and dying day after day. And I can't even claim to understand it. How could I say I did?" She straightened a flower. "But I'm watching, and the funny thing is I keep falling asleep and I wake up, well, in tears without warning.
Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't see somebody about it. Suddenly I wake up in tears, and quite a bit of time has simply vanished. Isn't that funny?"
Mrs. Canopy wasn't at all certain she thought it was funny, but she had always tried to look at life, if not with Priss's derisive snort of laughter, at least with the smile she now gave her husband's tomb.
chapter 15
No man can escape the detection of his housekeeper, whether a paid one or his wife. Sammy Smalter was not married, but his rooms on the third floor of Ramona Dingley's house were cleaned every Wednesday by Mrs. Orchid O'Neal, who therefore knew more about the druggist than anyone else in Dingley Falls. Fortunately, she was not a gossip, or at least she did not grasp the significance of those clues which he preferred to keep secret, or at least she had no one to tell them to but her sister, Sarah MacDermott. Mrs. O'Neal, had, however, made a discovery today, by cleaning on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, that she thought she should share. To her amazement, Mr. Smalter kept a machine gun under his bed and could have been dreaming of destroying them all.
There was another gun the town already knew about. This was Limus Barnum's .357 Magnum, with which he had shot himself through the heel of his bedroom slipper, while chasing a, he said, black burglar across his front lawn and through June Hayes's herb garden. The burglar had allegedly escaped with a tape cassette and a vicuna jacket, and Limus had subsequently appeared in a photograph in the Dingley Day, pointing at the pistol with which he had protected his home.
The right to bear arms was one thing, but what did a pharmacist need with a machine gun? If it was not for the drug addicts he supplied in his drugstore, it was, decided Orchid's sister, Sarah MacDermott, for mass murder. She was not unique in considering Mr. Smalter an eccentric anyhow—his most evident eccentricity being the fact that he was only four-and-a-half feet tall. "The dwarf 's an oddball," Lime had told A.A. Hayes. "Gives me the willies."
"Poor Sammy, but I do think wearing a yellow bow tie in the winter is going too far," Father Highwick had told Jonathan Fields. "He could be dreaming of murdering us all in our beds," Sarah MacDermott told her sister, Orchid. But Sammy Smalter was not a dwarf and hated to be called one. He was a midget, or he was somewhere, depending on the textbook consulted, between midgethood and low man on the totem pole of height. No one in town knew exactly why he should have been so afflicted; he had simply stopped growing. Gladys Goff suspected it was because his maternal great-grandfather, Charles Bradford Dingley III, had married a servant girl. That servant girl, Bridget Quin Dingley, was sure the boy was a midget because her daughter had married a coronet player, out of a Chautauqua tent, who, losing his lip, had taken her money to open the Smalter Pharmacy right on the Dingley Green. Whatever the cause, Samuel Ignatius Dingley Smalter, was extremely short, though certainly not a dwarf.
"As perfect proportioned as you or me," Orchid O'Neal told her sister. "And Sarah, you should see his little sink and toilet Miss Dingley ordered in just his size when he first came there to live, and cute as a dollhouse. And socks and boxer shorts no bigger than your Francis's, stacked up in his drawers neat as a pin with all his pills. He orders his T-shirts, I've seen the packages come in, from Saks Fifth Avenue in the children's department. Quite a savings, he says too, in his joking way, buying in boys' sizes, menswear being so overpriced.
Well, you know that's a fact better than most."
Sarah MacDermott did indeed know it, for she had five weedy sons and an overweight husband. "Joe, Jr.," she grimaced in agreement. "You remember the blue herringbone I almost got him at Penney's last April? Well, the exact same one is on sale now for twenty-three ninety-nine more than it was original-priced a year ago."
"Mr. Smalter's suits have his name hand-stitched right into them."
"Yes, it can't go on. You work all your life and year after year you can afford less and less. People won't stand for it one of these days, Orchid."
"We're better off than any other country, though, that's certain."
"People just ought to refuse to put up with it."
Orchid O'Neal and Sarah MacDermott, the former O'Reilly sisters and granddaughters of the Madder patriarch Francis O'Reilly, whose freckled progeny filled a dozen pews at Our Lady of Mercy, were arguing economic revolution at the A&P. Meanwhile, Sarah was ringing up the groceries Orchid had purchased for Ramona Dingley and Sammy Smalter, whose housekeeper she was until two o'clock, when she became Evelyn Troyes's housekeeper until six o'clock, when she became her own. Orchid lived next to her sister in a two-family rowhouse across the Rampage from the Dingley Optical Instruments factory, where Orchid's husband had worked until his death. After the widow's own children had fled Madder for a better life in California, her squabbling young MacDermott nephews kept her empty apartment filled with the sounds of the past. They gave her somebody to love, just as the people on Elizabeth Circle gave her "somebody to do for." To clean for someone had been her life's work, and she was quite proud that she did it so well.
Sarah, however, took offense at her sister's profession. The time had been, a century ago, when everybody kept an Irish girl indentured in the kitchen, offering her in exchange for her service a drafty attic room and time off to rush to early Mass. Sarah maintained that the Irish had served America long enough and, having risen even to the presidency, deserved servants themselves hired from among the less tenured mi
norities. "Well, I guess Francis O'Reilly clambered and climbed out of a peat bog to sail to New England and open his own liquor store so his granddaughter—" Sarah grabbed a jar of mustard. "Seventy-nine cents! Can you believe that? Sixty-nine just yesterday! Orchid, remember how I told you, don't buy the name brands. They put the exact same junk in A&P cans—climbed out of a bog so you could pass your mornings washing out a dwarf 's socks."
She rang up the mustard and backhanded it to Luke Packer. "And why that Mrs. Troyes couldn't make do with a nice colored girl instead of sitting on her fanny while another white woman vacuumed her floor is something she'll have to try explaining to her Maker. These tomatoes are green on the bottom, don't buy anything you can't see all the way around. I guess Granddad's up in heaven pulling out his hair by the roots to see you a servant still, while Grandma and the angels watch in pity. Baby clams?!"
"If it's salary you're talking about, Sarah, I'll have you know I make more than you do."
Mrs. MacDermott laughed. "Jesus bless us, the holy blind nuns with their begging cups make more than I do." She ate three of Sammy Smalter's grapes, then dropped them into a plastic bag.
"Just tell me why shoving about other people's food is more high and mighty than tidying a decent home, I wouldn't mind knowing?" asked Orchid.
"Scrubbing the ring on his 'cute little' sink!"
"I like Mr. Smalter. He's a good man for all his affliction, and very considerate to me. 'Rest your feet, Mrs. O'Neal. Have you had a bite of lunch yet?' He always has a decent word."
"A bite of lunch? Watch he doesn't have a bite of your legs one of these days while you're bending over his cute little tub! Didn't you just now tell me how he's got a machine gun under his bed?"
"I don't mind saying it gave me a shock seeing that ugly thing poked out from under the dust ruffle. But he is the sole protection of his aunt."
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