"A machine gun? I guess he thinks the Russians are sailing up the Rampage after his aunt?"
"Could be it's a war souvenir of his dad's."
Sarah filled her eyes round with incredulity and then rolled them. "Mind yourself. That's all. Dwarfs can turn vicious without a minute's warning."
"He's not a dwarf, and if God made him a midget, He has His own reasons, and if Jesus Himself didn't mind eating supper with prostitutes and washing the smelly feet of fishermen, I bet He don't mind me washing Mr. Smalter's sink." With that rebuttal Orchid ended, for today, a six-year argument and changed the subject. "Well, that's too bad what you say about Judith being sick. Right on top of the poor Sister with her heart giving out, passing away alone like that in the night with no chance for the Last Rites."
"Well, it don't mean Judith'll be gone in a week. Like I told her last night on the phone, 'Honey, sometimes people live their whole life long with a bad heart, so don't you let it worry you.' I told Hawk the same. Him and Joe got on the phone about Maynard Henry. Did I tell you that the people in Argyle locked Maynard up with that crazy old man, the one, you remember, that was out shaking his black dingle in the innocent faces of little white children? Joe said Maynard was just about foaming at the mouth, he was so mad being shut up with that old Negro. Put in with a loco, like he was a loco.
When everybody knows that Raoul Treeca has had it coming to him a long time, and just lucky it was only his legs and ribs and his Chevy, and not worse."
"Well, I don't care. The man had no business hitting that poor little Vietnamese wife of his in the face. I don't believe for a minute she knew what she was doing getting in that truck with Raoul Treeca. But Maynard's quick to hurt. He always was."
"Wouldn't surprise me if he shoved Hawk's car off a cliff when he gets out. After this latest." Sarah MacDermott slid a pencil in and out of her yellow topknot. "Well, come and eat with us tonight. I grabbed a real nice London broil right when the truck pulled in. If your society folks let you off in time."
Outside Luke Packer loaded Mrs. O'Neal's groceries into Ramona Dingley's Pontiac Firebird. The elderly shut-in bought a new car every year—each one racier than the last—as if she thought she could outdrag death if she only had the horsepower.
"I sure would love to have this car," Luke sighed. "I'm going to work for Mr. Smalter in the drugstore."
"Well, that's nice." Orchid smiled.
"Listen, did you happen to ask him what he had a machine gun for?"
"Oh, not for the world. I'm scared to death what he'll do when he finds out I was in his room on the wrong day. Oh, no, I didn't ask him. He would have snapped my head off for sure."
The social circle of Dingley Falls was named Elizabeth, and on it lived, clockwise, the Abernathys, Mrs. Troyes, the Ransoms, Dr. Scaper, Ramona Dingley, and Mrs. Canopy, each with a few acres'
privacy. All the houses had their birth dates discreetly displayed near their doors. Unlike the rest of them, Ramona Dingley's home was not an eighteenth-century one. It was Victorian, a festooned wedding cake of a house that had in fact been a wedding gift. It was frosted with gables, gambrels, a mansard roof, and a widow's walk. It was a scrolled and gewgawed hobby-house personally designed by Ramona's grandfather, Charles Bradford Dingley III, when, to the horror of his neighbors, he had wantonly torn down the perfectly good Federalist house of his forebears to replace it with this Taj Mahal for his Irish bride. "Waste not, want not" had been his neighbors' philosophy with regard to so much as a used soup bone, much less a used house. They said it was lucky that Charles III had already sent his mother, Augusta, to her grave by eloping with her parlormaid, because this demolition of the family homestead would have struck her down even more cruelly.
Inside, the house was as dark as the outside was sugar-white. Its rooms were somber and muffled with thick sofas and drapes. All over the enormous parlor perched stuffed wild animals and religious icons:
taxidermy and Catholicism having been the two pastimes of Ramona's long-dead father, Ignatius, second son of the architectural Charles Bradford Dingley III and of Bridget Quin, that wily parlormaid who (according to Charles's mother) had tricked the sensitive youth into a misalliance (marriage) by telling him that the Virgin Mary had visited her in the pantry where she had announced that Bridget and Charles were destined to give birth to another St.
Francis. As things turned out, their son, Ignatius, though obsessively religious, had failed to found an order. He had loved animals, but had preferred them stuffed. Now, like the rest of the house, his collected passions belonged to his only surviving child, Ramona. On the mantel an owl flapped open its sooty wings beside a crimson bleeding heart, and a scrawny otter hid among St. Sebastian's brass arrows.
Two bobcats leaped out from the window ledges at guests already distracted by a life-sized German wood carving of Christ crucified on the wall.
Unlike her home, Ramona was very eighteenth-century. She had left the house furnished just as her father had left it to her, not out of sentiment, but as a raffish decorator might stick a Picasso satyr in the middle of a Dutch Colonial boudoir. So, wryly, Miss Dingley placed herself in her father's mansion.
"Awful, ain't it?" she asked, for even her grammar had an eighteenth-century flavor—once an affectation, now a habit. Miss Dingley was speaking to Father Jonathan Fields, whose bright, plastic-covered eyes stared at the bright glass eyes of a raccoon that clung to a bookshelf.
"Oh, no. They're very well done. Is taxidermy your hobby?"
She guffawed as rudely as Dr. Johnson. "Don't be an idiot. And don't think I'm one. They're my father's. Loved graven images.
Stuffed ones, too. One of those types of Catholics enraptured by anything killed in an unpleasant way. Have some port."
"No, thank you. I'm sorry. I don't drink." The curate sat in his immaculate black clerical suit in a high-backed chair with claws carved into the arms. Across the tea (or port) table Ramona Dingley perched, also in black, on a motorized wheelchair which, to her visitor's disconcertion, she kept starting and stopping in little jumps as she talked. She liked motion. A private elevator brought her plummeting down each morning from her fourth-floor bedroom. Her housekeeper drove her briskly around Lake Pissinowno in the Firebird, but never fast enough. Ramona was a thin person whom age had annoyingly loaded down with weight. Her hawk face jutted strangely out of the fat—hawks are rarely obese—and her plump arms ended strangely in strong, claw-like hands.
"Oh, yes, you said so last night." She poured two hefty goblets of port. "You should drink though." She held the goblet out until he took it. "Do you a world of good. In vino veritas, and that's what we're here for."
"Yes, I brought you the books; Miss Dingley."
"Don't be literal. I meant here on earth. We're put here on earth for a piddling span in order to learn the truth. And do you know what we learn?" She drank up her port. "That we're here on earth for a piddling span. Absurd, ain't it?"
"Life?"
"Death! Life's not absurd. Not unless you try to make sense of it.
Notice, young man, your rector don't. He's a happy man, Sloan Highwick. A shoo-in for heaven should there be one."
"But you don't think there is?" Father Fields, at a loss, tried to lead Miss Dingley toward those problems for help with which he was, he assumed, being asked.
"Don't talk shop right off the bat. I don't get many visitors. And Sammy's forever up in his room at his typewriter. No evidence, but I suspect he's a blackmailer. Got barrels of money. Went away for a weekend once right after my heart attack. Brought me back a case of my favorite wine."
"That was thoughtful."
"It certainly was. Bought it in Paris for me. Knocked me over.
Found it hard to believe."
So did Jonathan Fields.
"Yes, barrels of money. I don't grudge him. Compensatory, don't you know, for being a tad on the short side. One of God's little lapses of concentration. Too proud to ask a woman out. Hard for an Adonis like yourself to
imagine, no doubt, but Sammy thinks he'll be rejected. Probably right."
But then the curate himself, six feet tall and with (according to Father Highwick) the face of a Botticelli angel, was afraid to ask anyone out. That is, afraid to ask Walter Saar.
"So." His hostess grabbed a Chinese ivory walking stick out of the paws of a stuffed bear that reared up beside the couch and, as she spoke, swatted the air with it. "Who can I talk to? I turn to the church. They got to come. May get a recruit. Neighbors won't, any more than they have to be decent. People are scared of the old.
Scared they'll drool down their chins or have fits and die right in front of them. Feel guilty because the old bore them. Embarrass them. And because they're so glad they're not tottering into six feet of wormy dirt any minute now. I know I gloated when I was young.
Whenever that was."
The swinging cane whisked by Jonathan's head. "You were," he said. "I think the rector told me, weren't you a professional tennis player once?"
"Yes, I was. Hard to believe now, ain't it? God could lob me for the moon, round and pasty as I am now."
Jonathan found this image so unnerving that he laughed, then blushed, then mumbled an apology.
"Why? Don't be sorry. Always laugh when folks joke about themselves. Always encourage sanity. It helps. That'd be a better job for the church than trying to figure out whether that idiot God exists or not.
Yes, I played tennis. Too rich to do anything worthwhile. Family wouldn't have stood for it. Would have cut me off without a nickel, then where would I be now? Off with a bedpan in the state home without my elevator, or this. My wheels." She slapped her wheelchair with affection. "Yes, all the old were young and had a life they cared about, and a body someone paid attention to. But the young can't see the first and get sick thinking about the second. Tennis was my passion. Not that the family didn't cringe when I stopped playing a prissy game in the backyard on Sundays and took off to the tournaments.
With a sheer lust for victory. Won a lot of them, too, got the trophies up in my room. Lance, Beanie's boy, you know him? He gets it from me. So did Beanie. A sportsman or woman in every generation of Dingleys. I was better than Lance'll ever be. I had the killer instinct.
And at least a few brains. Now I hear my niece has vamoosed."
(Beanie Abernathy was not Miss Dingley's niece, nor was Sammy Smalter her nephew; they were both, to different degrees, her cousins.
Nevertheless, each of them called her "Aunt," though they never seemed to consider that they were consequently also related. They scarcely knew each other at all.) Ramona poured more port. "Good healthy lust is a fine thing. Sorry I was too wrapped up in the game to get a man. Back then you had to choose. Life or marriage. Too late now, of course. Shock would kill me. Sex at this late date."
The curate was increasingly alarmed. What should he say to any of this? Her words and her wheelchair jumped at him in the same fast jerks.
"That idiot Winslow," she went on after a long drink. "Good, decent man. No killer instinct though. Knew he was bound to lose Beanie if a man in the market ever got within striking distance and gave her a shake to bring her to. But, none of my business. Tell me now." She raced her chair abruptly forward at the startled priest.
"That girl. Skinny girl with the frizzy hair. You know her. Hedgerow.
You know her. The one that flies all over town on the red bicycle, with all the books."
"Polly Hedgerow?"
"Get her for me."
"Get her?"
"Tell her to come see me. Tell her, do a good deed, call on the old dying shut-in, don't you know. Tell her my house is full of unheard-of things. She'll be curious. I would have."
"Of course, all right, I'll be happy to. She comes to see the rector a lot and I'll ask her."
Miss Dingley made a spitting noise. "Comes to see Sloan? What for? Not one of those moony adolescent religious fanatics, is she?"
"Oh, no, I don't think so. I believe she and the rector, well, I gather they just, well, exchange news, sort of, about people in Dingley Falls. From what I've overheard, I mean."
"Gossip! Sloan always did. Oh, don't look shocked. I don't mean malicious. He hasn't got the brains to be malicious. Well, ask her."
"All right."
"Now. You're eager to save my soul as quick as you can and get on with your own affairs. So tell me, Jonathan—absurd for me to call a baby like you 'Father'—what do you think of this?" She poured him more port. "The idea came to me after our enjoyable quarrel last night. Be pleased I fix my mind on theology and ain't just luring you here to fix my eyes on you. Don't be modest. You know you're gorgeous. If you don't, your skull's even emptier than Sloan's. But. Now Christ is taken down from the Cross. Alive. That's my point. After all, it was Passover, wasn't it? So they only left him up there six hours. Without a bone broken, remember. Now I checked, what a pack of monsters those Romans, and it often took two, maybe three days to kill a man by crucifixion. The human race, well. Jesus wept, but I suspect somebody was laughing. So! Here's your Christ, a young man, no bad habits, healthy, in his early thirties. Probably simply lapsed into a coma, I should imagine. Wakes up at Joseph of Arimathea's—rich fellow, had a previous arrangement with the soldiers. Paid them off to take away the body, didn't he?"
"Yes," said Father Fields weakly. Port fumes and Miss Dingley's theory crashed in his head.
"All makes sense. Jesus wakes up, goes back to His carpentry shop in Galilee. No doubt by now He's sensibly concluded He never should have left it in the first place. Those moronic disciples of His find out from the women they left at the tomb, too scared to stick themselves, that Christ is gone! Ascended! Naturally, they don't believe a word of it at first. Would you? Then gradually the notion dawns on them. The Messiah! If He beat death, they've got a miracle worth the world. They head home to spread the good news. Who do they spot on the road but Jesus Himself, nail holes in His hands and fed up with trying to talk idiots into salvation. Of course, they can see that their whole religion is going to be laughed off the map if their risen Christ is seen tapping out cabinets in Nazareth. So!
They kill Him! How about that? Find a flaw."
Passion and port drove the shy curate to his feet "But no, you see, no! You're talking about it from the wrong…I mean, the mystery isn't whether…Christ was the Son of God, Miss Dingley. That's my point.
He was God. God died. God chose to suffer the ugliest, most sordid death the most wretched of us could die. Public execution! Think of the shame. God felt it. To free you! I'm sorry, I don't mean to yell."
"You're not yelling. Don't apologize, even if you were. You believe it, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Well, stick to it. Now how exactly is God's public execution supposed to free me from anything?"
"Well, because it does. It frees you, you see, the moment you fully and, well, freely believe that it does."
"Does what?"
"Free you."
"And that's faith, I suppose. Quite a trick. Too easy, you ask me,"
"Oh, I don't agree. Almost too hard. As hard for us as it is to, I guess, allow ourselves to be happy."
"Pah. Now what's to keep me from believing anything I want to?
Suppose I said, I don't know, Eichmann's execution set me free?"
"The point isn't that God died. It's that God died."
"Well, young man, it's a question of temperament, ain't it?" She frowned, then grinned. "And then He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of His Father, and all the believers are up there too?
Am I a daughter of God?"
"I feel quite sure you are."
"Well, Mr. Fields, I sat at the right hand of my father long enough. In there." She jabbed the walking stick at the door to the cavernous dining room. "And he was a relentless believer. I hope you're not telling me I have that horrible experience to look forward again. Must I be resurrected? Couldn't I simply turn into fertilizer and help out, don't you know, a few nasturtiums behind Town Hall?"
chapter 16
From behind her iron grille, Mrs. Haig saw the pink circle ringed with yellow tufts as Mr. Smalter moved across the foyer over to the wall of post office boxes. Later than usual he had come to check his mail. With a spin of the lock, he removed the letters, turned, and waved the white envelopes in her direction. "Thank you."
Judith raised herself on the stool to lean over. "Hello, Mr. Smalter."
He came closer. "You didn't mention yesterday that you'd be leaving the post office. Otto told me. I'll miss seeing you here. I'm an old creature of habit, and, you see, you're a part of my day."
"Thank you," she said without looking at him. "But it will be easier for Alf, for Mr. Marco, here in the office. He's really getting too old to have to do the deliveries, and someone new will do that."
"And you?"
She said nothing.
"Ah. You have your new house. A great deal to do there."
"Yes."
They fell silent.
He glanced through his letters. "Maybe you noticed, I've been putting a new address on all those packages. After 'a lull in the hot race'?"
"Oh?" Having for seven years seen the thick manila envelopes addressed to James Poe and Sons, the postmistress had of course been unable to avoid seeing a new name typed there instead.
"That relationship, with Jimmy Poe's sons, exhausted itself, Mrs. Haig." Smalter slid his letters into the pocket of his three-piece-suit jacket. It was striped blue seersucker, as it always was in June. "I got a little rancorous and then they got a little rancorous and so it seemed best to call it quits on my birthday. Forty-two!" He opened his hand in apology or resignation at that figure.
"Forty-two? So am I," she heard herself say. This conversation was the longest Judith had ever had with a man whom she had seen several times a day, through her bars, for close to a decade. It must be, she thought, because of our hearts that we can talk now.
"Our prime, they say," said Mr. Smalter after another pause.
"They do?"
"Don't they say life begins at forty? Let's not give up hope. No, James Poe and I have parted company. You know, you've never even asked me why I have some letters sent to this box and others sent to Elizabeth Circle."
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