Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  What everyone called the trailer park was really a leveled field between Long Branch Road and Hope Street where the Lattice and Goff Chinaware factory had manufactured crockery from 1849 to 1929, when it went bankrupt, and where the empty building had stood from 1929 to 1959, when it was condemned and demolished.

  What everyone called Madder was really just the working-class section of Dingley Falls, just everything east of where the Rampage crossed under the bridge in the noisy waterfall that had given the town its name and its factories their first power. Just a late Victorian annexation of the brick rowhouses built by the Dingleys to house the men and women who came to work in the Optical Instruments factory during its Gilded Age, and the similar rowhouses built by Lattices and Goffs to house the men and women who came to paint the same patterns on eighty years of crockery, and the frame boxes built by men and women who left behind small farms to become small merchants, so that those who worked in the factories would be fed, clothed, fueled, furnitured, and, eventually, entertained. These men and women came to call their home "Madder" after the man who had ground telescope lenses for the Dingleys from 1862 to 1898, when, to the surprise of his defeated opponent, he had left town to sit with the United States Congress for two-and-a-half terms before his death. Everything southeast of the Rampage had been Lucius Madder's territory because he had fought for it, fought hooligans for the streets, Dingleys for a union, the state for a school, the church for an orphanage, the party for an election. Because it requires more people to work a factory than to own one, Madder had won the right to represent not only the Irish and Polish Catholics who had voted for him, but the Scotch-Irish-English Protestants over on Elizabeth Circle who most emphatically had not.

  "Oh, that damn Luke Madder!" William Bredforet used to chuckle at his great-nephew Ernie. "Why, they say C.B. Dingley would puff up red as a gobbler's neck whenever he heard that man's name so much as mentioned. Luke Madder took the whole Dingley plant out once for fifteen weeks on some damn fool safety regulation.

  Oh, I remember hearing how sometimes Camilla had to get fat old C.B. saddled up quick so he could ride it off before he burst a blood vessel. Only way C.B. could get away from that man was to go try to sell his damn telescopes to Pershing and let the Kaiser's boys blow him to pieces in France. Left the plant to his boy Chuck, and I don't think Chuck ever set foot in it more than once a year for the Christmas party. Why, one time out in the duck marsh my dad and Luke Madder came to blows over President Taft. Well, Ernie, Luke and Chuck and C.B., they're all gone now. L and G Chinaware is shut down for good. Dingley O.I. might as well be. It's all gone now."

  The descendants of most of the men and women who had come to work in the factories, who had christened their home "Madder's town," and then simply "Madder," had now moved to other homes and bigger factories. There were no longer any orphans in the old orphanage. There were only twenty trailers left in the trailer park, though that was enough for several Dingleyans to want the eyesore evacuated. There were not many inhabitants in the trailers, though there were enough to lead Hawk Haig to call the place a cesspool.

  Three years ago there had been more, construction workers who had been canceled with the highway and who, unable to find other work in Dingley Falls, had hitched their aluminum wagons to Mustangs, Pintos, and Mavericks and driven away. With wives, children, and in-laws, with broken-spring sofa beds, console televisions, cheap throw rugs, and nappy throw pillows, with velvet paintings of Christ or matadors or stags beside a mountain lake, with chipped plastic dishes, cracked plastic toys, ripped plastic chairs, torn plastic plants, with the chips, cracks, and tears of their lives patched with whatever mending materials the world and their wills provided them (the consolation of those TV consoles often foremost), they had moved out.

  Some, unable at the scramble of departure to locate dogs or cats—and short of space and food anyway—had left their pets behind with other failures of the past. The dogs, herding into community, had survived and bred, and now ran in the pack that so troubled Judith Haig's heart. The lean, restless dogs remained, long after their restless owners had returned to wherever they came from, or had gone on, westward, to whatever they thought they would find. Other highways to build, other land to connect.

  A few stayed, including the Vietnam veterans Karl and Victor Grabaski, to take jobs building Astor Heights, the new development just south of Dingley Falls where Carl Marco was constructing traditional homes at old-fashioned prices as fast as he could. Building Cape Cods, Colonials, and saltboxes for those families, like the MacDermotts, who could afford to get out of Madder without having to leave town beneath the mattress tied to their car hood.

  There were also two empty trailers in the park; one was the old rusted teardrop model, where an elderly night watchman at Dingley Optical Instruments recently had been found dead in a cot whose gray sheets were gritty to the touch. The other, beside a brightly colored patch of garden, was the sparkling twenty-five-foot model that Maynard Henry had bought with most of the taxpayers' money he'd saved from three thrifty overseas tours. The rest of the money he'd blown on a week in a Taiwan whorehouse and on black market bargains—on a digital watch, a tape deck, a kilo of grass, a carved ivory ball, and a suede jacket. What cash was left he'd shoved, with a grimace of disgust, into the hands of an old scarecrow woman who was squatting in a road near Dak To, brushing flies off a scrawny dead baby. He had subsequently regretted that such an impulse had seized him, since now he was a married man and could have used the money, which in any case had probably been stolen from the woman either before or after she too died. The money would have come in handy, for until his arrest made him a dishwasher for the state, Henry had been for the most part unemployed, a state highway cancellation. Unlike the Grabaskis, he had not found work in Astor Heights because Carl Marco, himself a veteran of an earlier war, would not hire anyone with a less than honorable discharge.

  A third trailer, a double-wide Silver Dream, was missing one of its residents. There were only five Treecas in it now, because Raoul was in the Argyle Hospital orthopedic ward with both his legs up on pulleys. He'd been laid off anyhow, so being laid up hadn't cost him a job. Raoul hadn't found work at Astor Heights either, because Carl Marco was an American and did not care for Puerto Ricans.

  Carl Marco was a self-made man. He had made his father's tiny butcher shop into a supermarket that kept alive the best families in Dingley Falls. He had made his aunt's pastries into a catering service on call for Dingley Falls's best celebrations. He had made his mother's pasta into Mama Marco's Restaurant, where nearly everyone in town ate at least once a month (and Sidney Blossom ate twice a week). He had made Hedgerow Realty solvent by buying it, then hiring Cecil Hedgerow to sell real estate that no one knew Carl Marco owned. He had made his son, Carl Jr., an ophthalmologist by whipping him through school, year by year. It hurt him that his brothers, the postman Alf and the gardener Sebastian, had not allowed him to make anything of them. It had been painful to see his own blood carrying the mail and carrying compost when the head of the family was perfectly capable of carrying his own blood. Had he not carried the family out of Madder on his shoulders? As soon as Carl Jr., married his receptionist, Marco would build them a house in Astor Heights, too.

  And houses for his girls. As he made money, Marco made plans.

  He planned first regional, then national distribution for his mother's spaghetti sauce. He planned to build bungalows on the north arc of Lake Pissinowno on land that Cecil Hedgerow had finally finished buying for him, lot by lot. He planned to turn Lake Pissinowno into the Lake Tahoe of Connecticut, to turn Birch Forest and the marshland into a little subdivision. He believed that sooner or later Dingley Falls must become one more bedroom suburb of the great megalopolitan work force, as the panic to evacuate plague-ridden urban centers grew with the years. Like Pompeiians racing away from the tumbling lava, all those who could afford to flee would crowd the roads leading to nostalgic small towns, where to be mugged, robbed, raped, or taxed to
death was only a future nightmare. As each town filled, emigrants would be forced to go farther and farther for refuge.

  When they reached Dingley Falls, Marco planned to be ready, with sliding doors to decks and Colonial porticos. In Astor Heights he awaited the evacuees, his gas lampposts already flickering their old-fashioned welcome across yet unseeded lawns.

  But he was sixty. Realistically it was unlikely he would live long enough to self-make all his plans. Look at what had happened to AIf, his younger brother. So Marco wanted to find someone who had wasted no time making himself, to finish things in his stead. But the only male of his four children had proved unsatisfactory; his brothers would give him no nephews. He'd even briefly considered making Cecil Hedgerow his partner. But unless his own blood gathered his harvest, why had he labored? Why had he scrounged to grab his share if there was no one of his own to share it with? Besides, Hedgerow had been a Madder boy himself, his mother had sewn other women's clothes. Marco wanted someone above such memories. And so his thoughts pictured Lance Abernathy soaring high over the northern arc of Lake Pissinowno in a white Piper Cub. Marco remembered the boy as a five-year-old kinetic blur through the shining kitchen on Elizabeth Circle, where, just starting out in the business, he had himself delivered groceries to Mrs. Abernathy. Lance was a Dingleyan, indeed a Dingley, a veteran, a sportsman, a social socialite whom everyone seemed to like.

  Marco believed he had the capital to make Lance Abernathy his.

  His eldest daughter, now abroad celebrating her graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design, was as bright and gifted as she was pretty, and as accustomed to the best as if she had never even known where Madder was. Marco planned to ask Lance to give Ilaina flying lessons when she returned from Florence. She would become young Abernathy's partner for life, and consequently so would Carl Marco.

  It was time, decided the grocer, to put his house in order. God had given him a warning, he reminded himself as he straightened the CLOSED sign on Mama Marco's Restaurant and wired the new blackribboned wreath to the outside of the door.

  It was only 6:30 in the morning when he finished. By seven he would be checking inventory in his office at the supermarket.

  Dingley Falls would not stop eating while he mourned his brother.

  Now, as he drove up Three Branch, past his boyhood apartment, on his way to Our Lady of Mercy to light the candle as his mother had asked, Marco looked over at the spilled garbage littering the trailer park. Something could be made of that lot. Perhaps a plant to process an entire line of Mama's products. He could even, he decided, as he pushed a $10 bill into the church collection box beside the red-bottled candles, he could even put a picture of Mama's face on the red bottles of spaghetti sauce. There she would be, smiling in row after row, millions of smiles in thousands of stores, his blood from coast to coast. At seven Marco stopped in front of the grimed brick rowhouse where the MacDermotts lived without enough room, Sarah said, to wear out a crippled ant. Her son, Joe MacDermott Jr., was Carl Marco's delivery boy. He'd decided to give the boy a ride to the edge of town.

  The MacDermotts were a working family. This morning Tommy (thirteen) was already on the streets—tubes of news, the Argyle Standard, stacked like organ pipes in his bicycle basket. He had inherited his position from Luke Packer. Eddie (fifteen) was an usher at the Hope Street Cinema, which would be closed for the next week, though Eddie had not yet been told so. He had inherited his position from Bobby Strummer, the owner's son. Jimmy (Joe Jr., sixteen) was already out making deliveries for Marco's supermarket. Joe Sr., in Haig's patrol car, had already left for the police station. Sarah, in a '68 station wagon that burned as much gas, she said, as the Ku Klux Klan raiding a minstrel show, was leaving her house at 8:30.

  First she had to take Francis (seven) and Billy (three) to her neighbor—who said she might as well watch two more while she was at it, but who nevertheless accepted a token subsidy to help make ends meet. Even so, they rarely did. Neither did the MacDermotts', or anyone else's in Madder. If, said Sarah, her own sister had not seen fit in her sunset years to go off and work her fingers to the bone for a dwarf in the mornings and a Frenchman's widow in the afternoons, then she could have left the kids with Orchid, which would have been a heck of a lot easier on everybody. But, of course, Orchid needed to make her own ends meet.

  So today, as usual, Mrs. MacDermott was getting ready to drop off her sons at her neighbor's, her sister at Ramona Dingley's, and herself at the Madder A&P. The two women squeezed the two children into the front seat of the patched and spattered car, for its rear was stuffed with a set of secondhand garden furniture Sarah had bought at the Argyle Goodwill. She planned to put it out in her backyard as soon as she and Joe bought a backyard to put it in. She longed to see how it would look on the little patio of the little Cape Cod in Astor Heights that Cecil Hedgerow would give them a special deal on, if Ernest Ransom would give them a mortgage.

  As Sarah drove off, Luke Packer bounded down the steps from the far end of the triplex where he lived with his parents and older sister.

  They were all working people. His sister, Susan, worked for Abernathy & Abernathy. His mother worked for Dingley Optical Instruments, what there was left of it. His father worked at the Dingley Club, where he prepared Bloody Marys for William Bredforet. Luke worked for the Dingley Day and the Smalter Pharmacy. He was on his way by bike to the drugstore now, a little early. He wanted to get ahead in the world. "Getting ahead" meant, to people who lived there, getting out of Madder. Getting as far ahead as you could meant going to California, as Sarah and Orchid's brother, and Orchid's children one by one, had all done; gone to where even if, as Sarah said, they couldn't find steady work, at least they could get nice tans. At least they'd gotten out, like Lucius Timothy Madder, who'd had the place named after him, because the men and women who worked in Madder's town had seen him leave it.

  When she missed the light at Ransom Circle, Sarah MacDermott decided suddenly to be late for work in order to give her friend Judith a ride. She'd just go catch her at home before she left for the post office. Sarah didn't like the idea of Judith's walking into town when she might, for all anyone knew, have her stroke on the way and fall into the Rampage and get swept down the Falls before a soul could save her. So instead of turning onto Hope Street, she clattered over the old bridge up Goff, east on Route 3, where, between the marshlands on the north and the river on the south, the Haigs' new house thrust itself at the highway.

  Jesus bless us, smack dab in the middle of pure nothing, out here with about one car an hour, if that, to look at out that big front window, and a dozen mangy squirrels, if that, to look at you through the back. And poor Judith lonely as Ruth in the wheat fields. What in the name of Mary and Joseph was the sense of getting out of Madder if all you did was build a brand-new good-looking house out where nobody but woodpeckers would ever look at it, and what's more, Joe said they could have had that garrison Colonial in Astor Heights for the exact same price? Anyhow, Hawk must have been out of his head. Which was funny since everybody'd voted him more likely to succeed than even Arn Henry; everybody'd always thought Hawk Haig would set the world on fire; every girl in the class had been green when he gave his ring on a chain to Judith Sorrow. Now it was enough to make the angels weep the Red Sea full of tears with pity to see Judith out here with heart trouble, and having to quit her job, and probably what destroyed her health in the first place was having to walk all that way to work and back, because she'd never had the nerves for driver's ed.

  And no babies, and a husband with a bad knee that wouldn't even come home after his own wife had to stand there and watch poor Alf Marco drop dead right in front of her eyes, if you can picture that. And now Joe said Hawk had started dropping hints about how he was going to resign from his job, because he had a scheme that was going to make him rich. What was he planning on doing—him and Judith collecting bags of nuts back there in the woods and selling them on the side of the highway? 'Course, if Joe got Hawk's job it sure woul
d help make ends meet. It was criminal the way they couldn't seem to find two dimes to rub together at the end of the month. Not that it didn't make her sick to think that someday something awful might happen to Joe if he stayed in the police business. Her heart was in her throat the whole time she was watching those police shows on TV, the way they kept getting run down by bank robbers and machine-gunned by dope rings. Not that Ransom Bank had ever been robbed, or anybody in town ever run a dope ring (unless Mr. Smalter), but still. Look at that riffraff that lived in that trailer park, whiskey bottles poking out of their trash cans! Her boys were good boys, she thanked God, but if she didn't get them away…Riffraff like those Grabaskis and Raoul Treeca, and even Arn Henry's own little brother, Maynard, fighting over that Chinkie "like she was Bathsheba naked in the tub, Lord love us."

  As Sarah MacDermott had already dropped off her passengers, she was obliged to address this last remark to an empty car, unless she was talking to St. Christopher, whom she refused to take down from his chain on the mirror, no matter what the Pope said, it was better to be on the safe side. She turned into the Haigs' driveway. She would show Judith her garden furniture, that first purchase, even if secondhand, toward a new life. A life of lawns to sit in, and space to breathe in. A life quiet enough to hear herself think in. Sarah's grandfather had come to Connecticut from Donegal, where there had been space and quiet enough, but where half the roof of their stone cottage lay sinking into the wet earth of the yard, where they couldn't grow enough to eat and couldn't eat enough to grow. He had come to America, where he had at least had a whole roof over his head, even if fortune was less easy to find than song had promised. Sarah's father had been born and had died in Madder. His tiny liquor store had been swallowed by the Great Depression, like Jonah by the whale. Sarah's sister, Orchid, went to Dingley Falls every morning to clean other people's houses. Sarah was determined to go there for good and clean her own. She was determined to sit in a chair on earth that she owned.