Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Now they were talking about national and not personal failures.

  In the low-ceilinged "Churchill Room" of the inn, by the enormous summer-swept fireplace, they sat across the dark tabletop with its pewter ashtray and its matchbooks printed THE PRIM MINSTER 1726.

  From the Colonial perspective of these surroundings, the two men found fault with more recent American developments. Hayes savored the last swallow of a drink. "Believe me, you're wrong.

  Washington wouldn't blink at an assassination. They're all a bunch of trench-coat lunatics, like the Marx Brothers in a James Bond movie. Down there trying to blow up Castro with a cigar!"

  "I suppose there may be a lunatic fringe."

  "They're all alike, think alike, talk alike. Everybody in the government is working for the Godfather, and the Godfather in this country is organized money. One day we'll find out how those secret services are behind everything, and the everything they're secretly servicing is organized money. Good old oil and steel. Where's that waitress? Have another one with me, Winslow. Why, Texas and sheikhs bestride this narrow world like Colossuses while all us petty men walk under their huge derricks"—Hayes waved his glass at the bartender—"and get pissed all over. Yes, sir, Neiman-Marcus will be selling plaid mink coats in Cairo, and your old alma mater will be shipped, ivy and all, to an Arabian desert, you just wait and see."

  Abernathy thought that Hayes ought to cut back on his drinking; maybe he kept a bottle in the office—surely he couldn't have gotten this drunk in the short time they'd sat here. "You're getting paranoid," he said.

  "That's what they all say. I just see significance, that's all. I see the signs. It all signifies something. You call it paranoia; the old Church Fathers called it the Grand Design."

  "Don't tell me faith in the powers of the CIA is sending you back to the church?" Abernathy smiled as he searched for his pipe.

  "No, sir. Those old theologians thought it was all a good plan. I think the pattern's there, but I think it stinks. That bartender in a coma or what?" Hayes shook his Scotch glass more vehemently.

  "Look here, Winslow, something I've been meaning to ask you."

  Not him, too, thought Abernathy. Must I explain away the loss of a wife even to him? "What?" he asked. His pipe seemed to be in none of his pockets.

  "You know that crazy smut mail folks have been getting, accusations and out-and-out libels? Have you gotten one?"

  In his relief the lawyer laughed. "No. I was passed over. I know Arthur got one inviting him rather brusquely to resign as first selectman. Otto mentioned something about it. Probably some prankster, you know, like teenagers calling strangers on the phone."

  "Well, that's what I told Limus Barnum; he seems to think we should ride out at night like vigilantes and string the guy up.…Ah, sir, your child, I believe."

  Winslow's son Arthur and Arthur's fiancée, Emerald Ransom, came through the bar on their way to the Prime Minister's dining room. Abernathy was embarrassed; he had only a few hours earlier (pleading exhaustion) declined his son's invitation to dinner.

  "Well, hello, Dad, A.A. You decided to join us then? Kate and, I guess, Sidney Blossom are meeting us. Glad to have you."

  Abernathy stood. "No, just on my way home, really. Just had a quick drink. Not really hungry. Pretty tired. Have a pleasant evening.

  How are you, Emerald? You look lovely." Emerald touched a bracelet on her wrist and then fleetingly offered Mr. Abernathy a lovely hand as she passed by into the "Queen's Room," where pewter pitchers of gladiolus were set out on cream linen tablecloths and engravings of Victoria's prime ministers crowded the walls.

  As Emerald wafted away, Hayes stared at her through his empty glass. "Just one thing I want to know," he mumbled. "I just don't see how those two ever managed to get engaged. I swear I don't believe the woman has ever opened her mouth. Now I love quietness; an excellent thing in a woman, as the Bard says. Beanie has it, and I love it in her. But that girl's downright comatose." The editor realized, too late, that he had—as he told himself—slid his fat foot into his drunken mouth once again.

  Beanie's name lay heavily in the air. Hayes could think of no words in which to ask his friend how he felt. And so the lawyer and the editor called for the bill.

  chapter 19

  Of the people in Dingley Falls who now sat awake alone in their houses, Judith Haig was neither reading, like Tracy Canopy, nor watching television, like Evelyn Troyes, nor listening to records, like Walter Saar, nor writing a letter, like Limus Barnum, nor preparing a sermon, like Jonathan Fields. Judith, having long ago cleaned the little part of her house that needed cleaning, was sitting in her robe by the window and trying not to think about what Sammy Smalter's life had probably been like. Had he gone to special schools, had he cried in his bed and begged not to be sent, not to be seen, not to be? Did he waken from dreams to feel himself once again shrunken beneath his sheets?

  Judith stood. She had to close the curtains more tightly. Then she went to a closet. On its floor was a paper sack of yarns and needles.

  Years ago she had knitted things; the quiet discipline was one the Sisters of Mercy had taught her. For some reason she had packed this crumpled A&P bag in with the rest of her belongings (or Haig's belongings, rather, for she did not collect things) and had let the movers move them here from Madder, here to the outpost of Hawk Haig's yet unlinked chain of businesses, here on the highway shoulder.

  Judith now decided to knit something. A scarf. She would knit Sammy Smalter out of her mind and into a scarf of her scraps of yarn.

  Until almost midnight she unraveled the knots of balled threads and began slowly to knit again. Into that beaded click without warning the screech of a telephone shrieked out at her. From Hartford, where he had gone that evening to meet a man who was "looking into something" for him, her husband was calling her. "Just checking," he said. Now that Dr. Scaper had warned him, Hawk Haig worried about his wife.

  Her husband had been on her mind too. Just before he'd left, he had sat over his slab of steak in their new dinette in a kind of smug expectation. The cheerful mood startled her, after so many, many months of his bitter chagrin about the highway and the rotten luck of losing his one chance to make a killing, to make something of himself (and her), to "make it" (for her, for him). He said he was pleased because he had arrested the man at the trailer park. Except for an occasional drunk driver or exuberant adolescent, arrests in Dingley Falls were rare. As he ate, Haig had recounted jubilantly his incarceration of Maynard Henry: "A mean s.o.b. Just mean. Crazy, you know, Jude? Imagine a great guy like Arn having a kid brother like that. I've been waiting for a chance to put him away for good, he's a menace. Came at me with a knife once, over at Dixwell High, in the parking lot. I heard how over in Vietnam Maynard was always in trouble, got in a bar fight in Saigon and bit this guy's earlobe off.

  Now I'm talking about another American's! Can you believe that?

  Bit his ear off! So instead of locking him up, they give him a medal and he comes back here and marries a gook. You know? Joe and I already had two run-ins with him at Fred's Fries. Way out of line.

  Now he thinks he can get away with shoving some dumb spic's car off a cliff and busting his legs. And you wouldn't believe what it took to get that dumb Treeca even to press charges! That whole trailer park's a cesspool, Honey, any more coffee?"

  Now, on the phone, Haig told her he'd had a chance to talk to a guy in Hartford, and maybe he was onto something about the canceled highway. He had some real leads now, and if she wouldn't mind, he was going to stay and check them out. He was convinced that somebody had stopped the highway on purpose and that the somebody was Ernest Ransom, and that Ransom knew something about the land that made it too valuable to sell. For a few days Joe MacDermott could manage the station. Judith didn't mind. He told her that later that summer maybe they'd take a trip together, a real vacation, maybe even fly to Florida. It would do her good. They deserved a rest, they'd worked hard all their lives unlike that crew over on Eli
zabeth Circle.

  Judith did not think it would do her good to see Florida, but she said, "All right," since what desire did she have to set against his desire?

  After he hung up, she finished a skein of blue yarn and started a red.

  She stopped. Something was outside, coming in the dark toward the house. A deadened crunch of someone stepping in the gravel.

  Then she heard the dog. Staccato barks like pellets. And then a knock.

  Judith waited. The knock came again. It was not angry, not even insistent, a patient knocking. Pressed inside the door, she asked, "Who's there, please?"

  "Mrs. Haig?" The voice was a woman's, high and unsure. "Chief Haig?" The pronunciation was careful and unsure.

  "My husband's not here. Can I help you?"

  "My name is Chin Lam. My husband, Henry. Maynard Henry.

  Your husband has imprisoned."

  "Yes? I'm sorry, Chief Haig isn't here."

  "Not?"

  "No, I'm sorry."

  "It is late now, I know. I was lost walking to look for you."

  Judith had to open the door. "Just a minute, please." Turning on the hall light, she unlatched a chain. And with a guttural roar, a black German shepherd lunged up at the opening. A burning rip of terror (not surprise, but fulfilled nightmare) tore up Mrs. Haig's chest to her throat.

  "No! No, no, no. Night! No!" A young, thin Asian woman grabbed the dog by his collar and pulled him off the door; she stroked his head until, begrudgingly, he stopped growling. "Okay? It okay?

  My husband's dog. I was fear, frighten to come, just me. I leave dog outside. It okay?"

  "Yes, I'm sorry. It's just that your dog startled me. Yes, come in."

  The dog sat down on the front steps to wait. Chin Henry, with a large, frayed man's parka kept on over a summer dress, sat down on the edge of a plastic-covered chair in Judith Haig's family room.

  Urged, she accepted a cup of tea—a package Mrs. Haig found behind the spices in her new kitchen cabinets.

  Her English, Chin apologized, was very poor. (And, of course, neither Mrs. Haig, nor anyone else in town, spoke much Vietnamese, though it had not occurred to them to ask Mrs. Henry's forgiveness.) Her arrival, Chin apologized, was very much an intrusion, but she hadn't found a phone, nor had she known the Haigs' home was so far from her own home (trailer, rather) or she would not have walked this late at night. Having gone so far beyond the bridge, she had become very confused. "Sorry I coming too late. Very dark.

  No more houses here."

  "No, there aren't. I'm sorry."

  They tried to talk. They had to make do with very few words.

  Mrs. Maynard Henry spoke in intense frustration, robbed of her language, left in such poverty when her need was most imperative.

  Mrs. Haig strained to translate the message across their differences. That message seemed to be that the young woman had no one to turn to. Her husband had been arrested by the husband of her hostess. The police chief had even threatened to have Chin Lam deported as an illegal alien. She didn't know whether she was an illegal alien or not. Today, after work at the Tea Shoppe, she had ridden the bus to Argyle City Jail, where they had let her speak to Maynard behind a grille. She had found her husband furious that he was locked in jail, in a cell with an insane person.

  Judith imagined (had not Sarah MacDermott said so?) that Maynard Henry felt that he was being kept in jail for keeping what was his: his wife. And that Chin was his, that she had been swept in panic with shouting people into a Saigon building, swept with yells into a helicopter, swept into a ship across a sea to a plane, to a bus, to a row of wood barracks in America; that she had had to submit to Victor Grabaski and been driven by him north to Dingley Falls, Connecticut, that her husband had spoken some words of her language, had saved her from Victor Grabaski, from law, from loss, had done so by marrying her—all this Judith imagined from Sarah's remarks to be Chin Lam's story. That Maynard had struck Chin because she had allowed herself to be swept away by Raoul Treeca, who had told her something she could not understand, but that she must go back somewhere, that the other refugees were somewhere else, and he would take her to them, all this Judith assumed had bewildered the girl. Forced to imagine the planes and buildings and people shouting, Judith Haig had felt, unavoidably, what those months must have been to Chin. She could not help but feel. She was too sensitive. "I'm sorry," she kept saying, "but what can I do?"

  "You ask your husband? He could let Maynard go? Maynard is so…angry. Angry all the time. He lose, lost job making roads." Chin danced with her arms her spouse's labor. "Sorry. So stupid. What is word? Construction."

  "Yes, the highway." Both their husbands, then, had lost the highway.

  "Yes. Now in jail. I have nobody. Chief Haig, he does, I am sorry, he does not like Maynard and tells him, 'You not coming out ever.

  Your wife must go back. Not a real wife.' What best for me to do now? Miss Lattice is so kind, I am working now. But at night, by myself? In trailer park, old man has died today. I am too afraid." Chin held her hands tightly to her chest, then let them fall like leaves. She had a round, childlike face. Life had not yet printed there the meaning of anything it had forced her to witness. Mrs. Haig poured the girl's tea as she tried to decide what was being asked of her. There was another bedroom. No one had ever slept in it, but, as she was a careful housekeeper, it was ready. "Has your husband," she asked, "a lawyer? Someone to put up the bail?"

  "Bail? Bail?" Chin shook her head apologetically.

  "Money. So he can get out. All right. I'll speak to my husband, but he's out of town just now, but in the meantime. Well, all right.

  You look tired. Tired. Yes. You should sleep. There's a guest room, the bed's already made." Only as she spoke did she decide to make this offer.

  "No, no. I walk home now."

  "I don't drive, you see, and it's so late. Tomorrow you'll feel better."

  "No, no. All Maynard's things in the trailer. I watch them."

  They looked at each other. "All right then," said Mrs. Haig. "Let me call Mr. MacDermott at the station, a very nice man, he'll come give you a ride home. Will that be all right?"

  "You are sure it okay?"

  "Yes. And tomorrow we'll talk again."

  "You are kind. Thank you for my help." Chin stood up and held out her teacup to Judith.

  "No, please, sit there. Let me call him. Try not to worry."

  Mrs. Haig took the cup.

  chapter 20

  Seated in her favorite armchair, Tracy Canopy was organizing the Bicentennial Festival, which the Historical Society was sponsoring and in which the Thespian Ladies were to play leading roles. As president of both these clubs, Mrs. Canopy had a million and one things to do. The Society had great hopes of buying from Carl Marco the town's early Victorian train depot, evicting Sidney Blossom, and then restoring it with the thousands of dollars that an endless stream of tourists would be happy to pay for such souvenirs as bicentennial T-shirts, caps, pennants, balloons, and turtles—all printed with the Betsy Ross flag and with slogans like DINGLEY FALLS 1676–1976 and I WAS IN DINGLEY FALLS AND I LOVED IT and SHOP DINGLEY FALLS.

  Limus Barnum had gotten the ladies a great deal on the merchandise, and the ladies' markup was justified only by their worthy cause. The grand finale of all these festivities was to be ten tableaux vivants, each representing one Dingleyan event for every thirty years of the town's history, each starring a member of the Thespian Ladies. Even Beanie had been pressured into portraying her grandmother Lady Camilla Dingley as she charged on horseback into the Great Madder Strike and Riot of 1898. Everything had been planned for months.

  Everything ought to go well. Beanie would surely be back.

  With a nod of approval, Tracy set her clipboard aside and turned to the stack of glossy catalogs on her cherry butler's tray table.

  Tonight Mrs. Canopy had also finished organizing Christmas, as she always did six months in advance, beginning on the day of her wedding anniversary, now also the com
memoration of her husband's death. She felt the need on such a day to list all those who lived in her life, who kept her connected. Mrs. Canopy filled her life by giving to such decisions as much time as they could be made to consume. She was an indefatigable consumer and was much taken advantage of by those elitist catalogs that rob the innocently wealthy by overcharging them. Now she glanced over her list with satisfaction. For Beanie, that Audubon print. And a Dunhill lighter for Winslow; Beanie said he'd lost his. French perfume for Priss and her daughters. For Evelyn Troyes, something chinoiserie. For Prudence Lattice, Sloan Highwick, and other acquaintances, crates of Royal Riviera Pears, Alphonse LaValle Grapes, and Giant Kiwi Berries delivered monthly. Among her artists, Habzi Rabies would have the most practical gift, as he now had a commission to paint a mural on a section of the Alaskan pipeline and needed a warm coat. And for herself, as a treat, she would buy another piece of statuary by the young Cuban refugee Bébé Jesus. Perhaps the J. Edgar Hoover wastepaper basket done in tin, the one he had shown her last spring when she went to pay his landlord so that he could get back into his studio in Sullivan Square.