Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Mrs. Canopy already owned (and used) a toilet made by Bébé of Fidel Castro's affable face, with his army cap lifting off as the lid and his cigar a foot flusher. "My God in heaven," Priss had said when she first saw it installed in the bathroom. "I'm going to use the facilities upstairs, if you don't mind. I'm afraid I'm simply incapable of relaxing while squatted over the head of a Communist."

  "That's the point Señor Jesus wanted to make. Political oppression. So witty, I think."

  "Ha!" said her friend.

  Tracy wished she could chat with Priss now. She went to her window. Sammy Smalter's light was still on. And perhaps that was Winslow Abernathy's study light across the landscaped circle. But of course she couldn't call men at midnight.

  She could refill her hummingbird feeder. She could think of a speaker for the next Thespian ladies meeting and a new project for the Historical Society. Mrs. Canopy had already dusted Vincent's snuffbox collection in its oak curio cabinet. She had glazed and fired two clay pots, selected some clothing and antiques to donate to an auction given to raise money for a community theater in Argyle. It was still only 1:15 A.M . She wound her Ridgeway grandfather clock, glanced at Fingerpaint on a Widow's Fur above her mantel (obviously she needed to ask Habzi, before he left for Alaska, whether or not it would hurt to embed a few mothballs in the fabric of her former sable), and briskly climbed the stairs to her room. It was chilly there.

  From her heirloom trunk (where a photograph of Vincent holding his beloved terrier smiled up at her from pressed sheets and forlorn fashions folded away with the past) she took a lovers' knot coverlet.

  Having dressed for sleep, Tracy climbed with a sigh into her pumpkin pine four-poster canopied bed and began to read Naked Lunch where she had left off two nights ago.

  chapter 21

  In his study Winslow Abernathy read again his wife's letter to his son. One flesh they were all supposed to be. Yet Beanie had simply driven away. And Arthur preferred to act as if nothing had happened. And Lance, Lance who had revved his engine to a stop in the driveway a few minutes ago, almost seemed to be blaming Winslow for the loss of his mother. "Couldn't you stop her? I mean, shit, Dad!"

  Lance was now out in the old coach house in the backyard, where at sixteen he had insisted on fashioning out of attic furniture a bachelor hut. Naturally, Beanie had let him do it. Why didn't he get a job? Maybe both his sons were secretly gloating that their father had lost his wife. She had always loved them best, called them her little lovers, spoiled them irrecoverably, and they, the snot-nosed pricks—good God, what was wrong with him, why was he talking like this? Those couldn't be his words, not his emotions. He seemed to be turning into A.A. Hayes, paranoid and intoxicated. Winslow realized that the drink in his hand was his fifth; he remembered that he had failed to eat dinner, or lunch, nor had he slept well in Boston the night before. Obviously he was drunk and debilitated, and so not himself, for he didn't drink. Nor did he stay up until 2:00 A.M. It was after two by the rosewood desk clock, Beanie's gift. "You won't remember to wear your watch but you always want to know what time it is, so I'm putting a clock here and one on the office desk."

  Abernathy looked around his study. Beanie had decorated it; she had the gift of fabrics and forms, of woods and colors. He loved the room, its three windows opening onto seven pine trees and then the meadow of green yard beyond them. He loved the mosaic of his books, the fine faded pattern of the Oriental rug, the Daumier and Hogarth engravings that mocked his profession, so that as he searched for precedents, sardonic attorneys winked down at him and porcine judges snored. He loved most of all the alabaster head, yellow with age, that sat by the window. The head of Marcus Antistius Labeo, a Roman jurist who had declared the decrees of Caesar and Augustus illegal for the purely logical reason that the authority of these two gods had been illegal. Naturally, people had paid no attention to Antistius, but apparently someone thought he deserved at least a bust for his purity and simple logic. Now Abernathy, who had once thought he would be such a jurist, owned the bust, loving it the way Lance loved his Jaguar. (Both had been expensive. Beanie gave expensive gifts and dime-store gifts indiscriminately.)

  The light went out in Lance's bachelor quarters. His son would now fall effortlessly asleep. When the twins were first born (terrifyingly small, squirming life bound in blankets of less length and weight than the little plush bears Tracy Canopy had given them), Abernathy had kept awake, fearful that if he slept, Arthur and Lance would simultaneously cease to breathe. Nothing so small and unevolved could possibly sustain the complexity of human life. Pressed beside the nursery door, he had chosen squalls over silence, for silence meant death, suffocation, or just a mysterious stop to mysterious life, six pounds of life being in itself obviously too fragile to last.

  But he had eventually slept, and waked to find the twins with him in bed, suckled by Beanie, though he had warned her that to bring them there could be dangerous. He had slept, worked in his office, appeared in court, traveled in defense of (mostly) money; he had studied in his study the laws, ius civile, of imperial Rome. And while he did so, the boys studied too—the turn to the side, the smile, the full turn, a seated position, a wave, a clap, a crawl, a creep. Then they stood in their cribs crying "mamamamamama," afraid to sit down, afraid to fall, into what? For how could they know what might be back there, they who had yet to study gravity? So they clung to their bars, and when he came, they wailed louder, "mamamamamama." Time after time Beanie had gone to them, her robe a flow of color behind her, Juno descending to rescue her chosen little men, who howled and clutched at the rails of their tiny ships. Over and over again she went, for as soon as saved, they stood again—vain ambition of the human race. She never lost patience with them.

  She had apparently now lost patience with him, for she had gone. Gone beyond the compass of his call, should he call. Winslow poured himself another Scotch and gazed with mild dismay at the white water circle he had allowed to stain his desktop. Well, he thought, why not get angry about it all? People were always telling him to get angry: "Say how you feel, Winslow," Beanie had desired.

  Why not then chase after her with a siren atop his car, force her by law, by physical bullying, to return? Why not pitch Lance out into an employment line? Accuse Arthur of moral and intellectual muteness? Yes, the snot-nosed pricks, Beanie had always loved them best. And they, hadn't they turned on him, hadn't they (in their heart of hearts) been trying to murder him from the moment they were ambulatory? Murder him in cold blood and pass their patricide off as a childish accident? Had not ambush stalked him, turned his home into a Theban road of subterranean explosives—an innocuous tricycle suddenly angled at the top of the basement steps, an escaped pet tarantula walking the tightrope of his steering wheel, an electric razor carelessly dropped into a tub he was just preparing to step into.

  Could he not make a case that only by relentless caution and cunning (or sheer chance) he had survived their adolescence? Had not Lance, in that ruthless time, brazenly shoved his superior musculature and sexuality into Abernathy's face at every opportunity: springing out of the bathroom with a towel pushed out from his genitals, tossing the statuesque Beanie in the air while she laughed like a five-year-old? Had the father not survived the challenge of wrestling matches and tennis bouts, the green bruises squeezed into his flesh under the guise of affection? Survived the news that Lance found the golden chambers of higher learning "a total drag" and endured academics only at the insistence of the air force, which he had joined because "flying was his trip"? Had he not survived never knowing which he feared most—the death of his son, or the realization that his son casually agreed to cause the deaths of others: "So don't worry about me, Mom. I'm eighteen thousand feet up in the air. Got a A-One pad here in Guam, good buddies, air-conditioning, the works. We just fly them over, drop them, and head back home.

  Nothing to worry about"? Had Abernathy spent two years being bombed on a carrier in the Pacific to make the world safe for someone who would write letters l
ike that?

  And Arthur. Arthur, from whose studiousness Abernathy had hoped to find a companion lover of learning. Had not Arthur confessed himself a grind for grades, whose indifference to the content of his education was masked by a stolid determination to gather from his prominent university as many calling cards (knowledge the least of them) as time and diligent cultivation allowed him? Arthur, who copied even Ernest Ransom's archaic fashion of wearing a gold pocketwatch on a chain, and who had followed the banker into golf, Scotch with soda, hearty handshaking, football on television, and had finally gotten his dual reward—Ransom's daughter (and Hayes was right about Emerald) plus first selectmanship of Dingley Falls (and Winslow wondered if he didn't almost agree with what that anonymous letter-writer had had to say about that)?

  Arthur and Lance. The words themselves began to sound nonsensical to him. Who were these two men, these props of his age, branches of his root, flesh of his flesh? God knows. And Beanie, his Eve, his rib. There was the rub, his rib had broken off, had snapped like a wishbone—and gotten her wish. "I'm drunk. I'm really drunk," said Abernathy aloud. He stood, wiped the water from his desk with his jacket sleeve, and having turned out his desk lamp, felt his way through the kitchen. He thought he had better drink some coffee.

  But where was it, where was the grinder, and how exactly did this new automatic dripolator of Beanie's work? It was too much to cope with. There was nothing to do with intoxication except put it to sleep. He'd just take some aspirin, if there were any, and if he could find them.

  Someone screamed. A ululant animal sound that kept on and on and made no sense in Elizabeth Circle. A human moan that whined out from the house on his right, Prudence Lattice's house. Abernathy realized that he was running efficiently out the door, through thickets of pine, to his elderly neighbor's smaller yard, running successfully among all her boxes and buckets of summer flowers. Near her back door, by a garbage can, Prudence Lattice stood, spectral in the shadows. She clasped the lid of the can to her chest. Her wail, lulled now, had sharply sobered him.

  "Prudence, are you all right? What's wrong?"

  He had frightened her. Her thin arms in an old flowered bathrobe tightened around the lid; she held it against her like a shield. One slippered foot pressed quickly on the other, then switched, as if she ran in panic but were too panicked to move.

  "It's just me. It's Winslow. I thought I heard a scream. Is something wrong?"

  The small woman stared at him blankly. "Scheherazade," she whispered.

  "Your cat?" Then, with sickening suddenness, Abernathy saw what lay at the top of the garbage pail. His old neighbor's cat, her Siamese. A stiffened reality of what had once been life, now hard fur and legs locked in a stretch. The crossed blue eyes gazed moronically ahead, indifferent to the night.

  "My God, Pru." Abernathy pried her hands from the lid and covered the can. He had to ask her twice what had happened.

  "She got out tonight, oh, Winslow, somehow, and then she didn't come home. I called her, called and called. I never let her go out at night, and she always comes when I call."

  "Yes."

  "I went to bed but then I woke up and came outside to look, I worried that...but I couldn't find her, and then there was a broken pot just there, flower pot."

  "Yes."

  "I just, not thinking, went to put it in the trash, but when I took off the lid…"

  "I'm sorry, Pru. I'm so sorry."

  "Someone"—she breathed the fact with a long shudder—"killed her and put her there."

  "Let's go back inside, let's go now." Abernathy led Miss Lattice into her old oversized kitchen which spare furnishings made appear even larger, and their owner even smaller and less substantial.

  "Perhaps," the lawyer said, "someone thought to be…of assistance; I mean, perhaps a car struck her, and someone couldn't think where else—"

  "No." She shook her head. "Don't tell me it was kindness."

  No, Abernathy thought, probably not. Probably an unthinking act, a prankster, a stranger who did not know that Pru Lattice had nothing to love or be loved by except a Siamese cat romantically named for one thousand and one unattainable dreams. No, not kindness.

  Her hands folded in her lap, her feet twisted under, Miss Lattice sat silently in her kitchen chair. Her neighbor sat down across from her. "Shall I send someone over to stay with you?" If only Beanie were home. "Shall I call Otto over to give you something?" A woman or a doctor would know how to help.

  "Thank you, but you go back home, I'm all right, you shouldn't have troubled."

  "Well, try to sleep. I'm very sorry this had to happen."

  "It didn't have to happen. But then, it did, didn't it?" She smiled too brightly. "But, if it wouldn't be too much trouble for you, I'm sorry, but I don't want her…left there, and I'm afraid I can't make myself…"

  "Of course, of course."

  "Thank you, Winslow." She let him out and locked the door of the house that was all her father had left her when, fallen on harder times, he had had nothing more to leave and no one else to leave it to.

  Abernathy could not touch the cat. He found a shovel with which to lift it out of the garbage can. Even so, death's cold seemed to chill the shaft and ice his hands. The cat was heavy. Its skull, he now noticed, was crushed, and clots of viscous gelatin clung to broken pieces of bone. So much for the mystery of intelligence, thought the lawyer. At the end of the yard, by an oak tree, he dug a hole. It was not as easy as he had assumed. There were rocks he had to pry loose with his fingers in the dark. Still, he dug deeper than he needed to, for fear of dogs. Then he shoveled the cat down into the hole.

  At least the animal had been dead when he found it, and not dying. Not like the cat-mauled blue jay that had once flown crazed around and around their living room until it killed itself, slamming against the window's illusion, before Beanie could catch it in her sweater to set it free. "I'll do it, if you'll just hold the door open!"

  Beanie had yelled, for Abernathy had backed away, nauseated by the bird's terrible frenzy. Into the new world, padded with papers, muffled by machinery, Life's old facts rarely come to stun us. That a wounded jay should chance to fly in through an open screen was a freak of nature, an unwanted intrusion by the old world on the new. "It's not going to hurt you. It's frightened to death," Beanie had yelled. "I know that, I know," he had hissed at her.

  Cats killed birds. Cats were killed. With the flat of his shovel, Abernathy smoothed the dirt over the small mound packed above Miss Lattice's pet. He tried to replace the clods of grass carefully. A blister had already raised on his thumb, and sucking on it, he tore off a piece of skin. It tasted of dirt and grass.

  When he returned the shovel to the garage, he noticed a folded piece of paper taped to the side of the door. Without thinking, he went over and read it. There was one typed sentence: "Since you won't shut that damn thing up, somebody has to. Serves you right."

  Abernathy ripped the sheet from Miss Lattice's door, balled it up, and jammed it into his pocket. Then he walked home. In the northern sky he saw a star fall. Another Lucifer, he thought; for pride and treachery hurled down to damn the earth. Another one. And the first archangel has done so well.

  chapter 22

  The great truths are all truisms, having bred for a great time in a great many that contempt with which familiarity is fertile. Among the trite and true notions about human nature, none is more so than the fact that the majority of people care more for what they do not have than for what they do have. This legacy of our original parents is the foundation of progress. It supports all such improvements in living as the discovery of the spear, America, and the garbage compactor. It subsidizes credit cards and divorce lawyers.

  There are a happy few who, through either consummate humility, stoicism, luck, or self-satisfaction, want for themselves no more than what the gods have decided to give them. Probably only one of that graced minority lived in all of Dingley Falls: Father Sloan Highwick. At divinity school, a poetical classmate whose
procrastinating habit it was during study periods to sketch portraits in verse wrote perceptively of the future rector:

  Our Sloan's a man of bonhomie.

  So blithesome, so blessed in jollity, He thinks that the Reaper's grim scythe is a grin Inviting souls over for Heavenly gin.

  That death should be to Highwick an invitation to a grand cocktail party in the sky did not at all mean that with any de contemptu mundi distaste for his earthly lot he was eager to fling himself into the reception line where his eternal Host waited to welcome him. Quite the contrary. As he was always among the first to arrive and the last to leave any Dingley Falls gathering to which he was asked, so the good white-haired Father was in no hurry to rush from this party to the next. For Highwick was happy wherever he was. He was, for example, happy living alone in the rectory of St. Andrew's. That life would have been fuller had he taken a wife was, to Prudence Lattice's grief, no troublesome realization of his twilight years. That life would have been truer had he taken a male lover was (despite Walter Saar's disbelief) not an insight that had ever once crossed the rector's mind.

  He delighted in the company of young men because he persisted in his own delighted young manhood.

  Sloan Highwick's sanguinity derived from his lifelong incapacity for self-reflection. It is, as the gloomy John Stuart Mill noted, our brains that make us miserable. Of course, lacking inner resources, Highwick's mood depended upon continual stimulation from others.

  But that, given his calling and his character and his luck, he had never had difficulty obtaining. As a child he had once been read a story about a handsome rabbit who was the favorite of all the animals in the forest until one day a new, even more dazzling rabbit arrived, causing the first to be promptly dropped by his admirers. To this lesson on the slippery wheel of fortune, little Sloan's response had been to ask, "Why didn't the first rabbit just get a bunch of new friends?"

  With such easy adaptability, Highwick had moved through life, alone only when he slept.