Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  She believed that in His own time, Christ the Savior would save the poor. He would march into the banks and flip over the money tables. He would flip the world over so that everyday people like Joe and her would come out on top. She saw no reason why death duties must be paid on the inheritance of the meek. Yet while she was certain that in Paradise the men and women of Madder would sit down with the angels and laugh, in the meantime she was determined to buy a house in Astor Heights. "Joe, if you ask me, God helps those who help themselves. And I know He's going to get me that Cape Cod with the patio, because He wouldn't have brought Grandpa all the way over here across the Atlantic Ocean and then just let the whole thing drop. And I believe in my heart that my daddy and mother are right up there, reminding Him, year in, year out, to bring this family one step further along to getting away from Madder."

  chapter 46

  Out on the widow's walk of the tallest house in Dingley Falls, Ramona leaned with her cane against the white scroll railing. She could see over the top of Wild Oat Ridge, but there was nothing to see except haze settling on the forest. The invalid had been up since five, fiddling. Fiddling with boxes of possessions she kept meaning to pack up for the thrift shop, or for Orchid, or for whoever would take them. Fiddling with medications for her stomach, which had resented last night's unfamiliar pizza. Fiddling with her will and with theology.

  Miss Dingley was furious with the Deity this morning. Like a thief last night He had left her future behind to snatch up instead the handsomer booty of a youngster's. If we had to go out at all, we should at least, she grumbled, leave in the order in which we came. But now even children were being pushed ahead of her. God was behaving like the body porter in a Japanese subway she had seen on television. He didn't seem to care whom He shoved through the snapping doors.

  Sammy's news about the girl's drowning had upset her more than she would have expected. What if it had been Polly Hedgerow? What if Luke had returned in the dark to tell her that Polly lay drowned in Bredforet Pond because of an old woman's folly? No sense to say it couldn't happen, no doubt the Strummer girl's parents had thought the same. Hard to believe in something absurd as death happening to your own. But it happened all the time. Roof collapses on a schoolhouse. Camp bus plunges into a ravine. Sudden fevers. Children gone in an instant while she lingered on and on. Unfair. Unfair. What kind of game was God playing? Fouls everywhere.

  "Oh. Sammy. Startled me. Sorry. Made you come all this way up.

  Breakfast ready?"

  In his three-piece seersucker suit, Sammy Smalter came to the railing to see the new day.

  "Looks to be a scorcher, Sammy. Roast in that vest and tie. Don't know why you bother. Nobody cares anymore. Half the people appeared to be traveling in their underwear last time I took a train into New York. Whenever that was."

  They went down in the elevator to Orchid O'Neal's breakfast, served on a vast black mahogany table designed, Ramona said, to seat twenty uncomfortably. "Made up my mind. Now Sammy. If you're sure you don't want any part of it, plan to talk to Winslow today. Some coffee?" Here without preamble Miss Dingley returned to a conversation about her estate begun in 1973, but, after seven years with his relative, Smalter was generally able to decipher her terse code.

  "Have you something in mind?" he asked The old woman rubbed her hawk's nose with the edge of her cup.

  "Cecil Hedgerow's girl."

  Smalter nodded slowly.

  "Liked her grandma Miriam. Suspect I was jealous of her mother;

  Pauline Moffat was a flower. Always made me feel like a hulky Leviathan, beached and flopping on the shore. True, Cecil's a quitter, but he's had a hard time of it. I'm sure he's got nothing set aside.

  Girl like that ought to have the best chance she can. Ought to know what it is that's not worth having."

  "Sounds reasonable."

  "Odious to think of the government frittering my money away on bombs. The Abernathys don't need it. Arthur's got Emerald's money, and Lance ought to get a job." She took three more pancakes and poured syrup over them. "Don't say anything," she warned him.

  "Why should I diet at my age?…And I'm too selfish for anonymity.

  My father, Ignatius, would have left the whole estate to a herd of Catholic lepers in Africa if Willie Bredforet hadn't threatened to have him committed. But few of us are saints."

  Smalter smiled around his yellow pipe and puffed out, with smoke, another of his utterly ignored poetical quotes. "'No doubt there's something strikes a balance …' No, thanks," he refused offers of seconds.

  "Much more disciplined than I am. Impressive, but don't gloat.

  So. What do you think of my plan? Plan to ship Polly abroad. Then put her in a good school. Sometimes wish I'd gone. Couldn't bear to be indoors long enough though. Ignorant now. So. Plan to leave Orchid a fat check. Plus her salary for life. Put the rest in trust, or whatever Winslow can figure out to keep the government off it. Give it to that girl. Why not? You agree?"

  Mr. Smalter, polishing his spectacles on the wide linen napkin, wondered, bemusedly, if he shouldn't leave his money to Polly's friend Luke Packer. Then they could be shipped abroad together and both be sent to good schools. Smalter did not take very seriously Ramona's abrupt decisions about her estate. Past testaments had ranged from bequests to him and Lance, to Prudence Lattice, to a tennis camp, and to the Historical Society for the maintenance of the town green. He suspected she made these announcements to enjoy the pleasures of beneficence prior to death. "What about Cecil? Your taking charge of Polly's life because you've got the money to do a better job than he can might hurt his pride."

  Miss Dingley shot backwards in her wheelchair to swoop the coffee urn off a mahogany sideboard. "Let's hope the man has more sense than to sacrifice his daughter's future on that altar!" She poured two cups. "Pride! Pphht! I'll tell him he's got a choice between my leaving it to Polly, or to that American Nazi magazine that Barnum fellow used to try to get you to subscribe to. How's that?…Supposed to be a joke, Sammy."

  Smalter put his glasses back on, looping the gold frames around his ears, and stared up at the invalid. "Sorry. I don't see the humor in mocking the fact that Cecil's mother was Jewish."

  "Oh, stop moralizing. You think that's mockery? Sammy, you never could let yourself laugh at folks. Should, you know. Laugh at me, and yourself, too. All of us and our antics must be pretty humorous to Somebody. Might as well go along with the joke." Miss Dingley threaded her napkin through its heavy silver ring.

  "Some things don't lend themselves to laughter."

  "You're a tad on the sanctimonious side, Sammy. So was your great-grandma Bridget. That same prissy, pursed-mouth look. For a parlormaid born in the slums of Limerick, Grandma was an odious priss at times."

  Smalter's ears turned a dark blood red. Pushing the heavy chair in, he stood beside it and looked over at the woman he called "Aunt." She stared into her coffee. Finally a sigh rumbled through her lips. "Pay no attention, Sammy. Bad night for us both. I'm old.

  Mean. Angry I'm old. Impatient. Legs don't work. Hands can hardly unbutton my clothes. Be back in diapers soon. Have to hire a nurse to change them. Then you tell me the Strummer girl's gone."

  Ramona hit the arm of her wheelchair. "I'm here. She's gone. And that monstrous Almighty Idiot God…"

  "Well." The little man placed his hand near hers on the table.

  "Ah, well, Ramona, what good does it do us to say there's no justice?

  What good?"

  "What good? It's the truth! Oh, Sammy, Sammy, how can you of all people think otherwise?"

  "Sometimes I imagine that it's gone beyond His capacity, that He's simply lost control."

  "Why don't He admit it then? Let Him resign."

  Smalter laughed. "For a woman who insists that God is merely a tyrannical male myth, you're a tad on the anthropomorphic side, Ramona." He tapped her hand quickly with his. "I'm off to work."

  "Why do you go to that idiotic pharmacy if you're so rich?"

 
"Ask Emerson."

  "Pphht! Who you going to leave your money to, Sammy, do you know?"

  "I'm going to leave it to you. God's in no hurry to listen to what you're planning to tell Him; you'll outlive me by decades. But you're wrong, you know. You think you can subpoena the universe to answer your charges. But God's like the government. He can't be sued."

  When he pulled the cord to turn on the stockroom light, Mr. Smalter found Luke Packer huddled on a footstool. Quickly the boy picked up a cardboard box and, with a muttered greeting, turned his back on the pharmacist. He moved like someone who continued to function after having, unawares, suffered a concussion. Immediately Smalter realized what he cursed himself for not having remembered earlier, that he had once seen Luke and Joy Strummer in conversation, and that the boy would have naturally been given the news.

  When he returned to the front of the store, he continued to curse—

  the fact that the girl had to die, the fact that Luke had to know and to come to terms with her death, the fact that anyone had to come to terms with death, whose terms were so unconditional and outrageous, the fact that everyone's body (whether beautiful like Joy Strummer's, or deformed like his own) was a rotting jail imprisoning, then killing, its captive. He cursed the fact that he was placed in a position of initiating a conversation in which he must comfort Luke.

  Such conversations struck him as inevitably awkward and embarrassing to both sides—"I'm deeply sorry"; "Thank you for your sympathy"—for they fell necessarily into rote memorizations like other polite forms of address. Smalter believed strongly in standard formalities, handcuffs on the flailing assaults of the savage heart. But good manners, he acknowledged, could not mix with the bluntness of death. He had nothing polite to say about such a barbarian. Still, he could not pretend to read a newspaper while he could hear, twenty feet away, the methodical stacking of supplies, the never interrupted movement with which he knew Luke was striving to hold off that old ugly fact that is so rightly antithetic and incomprehensible to the young. On the other hand, nor could he, railing against loss, rush back there, crush Luke in his arms, and soothe him with the salve of tears. Father Highwick could have, but Mr. Smalter could no more howl through the facade of his social self than he could have danced naked on Dingley Green. He found it difficult to go back into the supply room at all, but impossible, finally, not to.

  Luke, he knew, had too few words to understand, himself, much less to say, what he felt. Smalter had too many, and none would do.

  "Excuse me. Luke? What say we let things go for the day and close up?"

  Luke stacked one carton of mouthwash on top of another.

  "Okay. If you want to." He squared the edges precisely. "All right, just let me finish."

  "Luke? I heard the news of your friend.…I'm deeply sorry, deeply sorry. I don't know what I can say." He placed his hand on the box on the opposite edge from where Luke tore at some loose tape.

  "Thank you, Mr. Smalter." He had the defenseless smile of someone trying not to cry. "Kind of crazy, isn't it?" His eyes filled with the question, then wetness brightened their color, and he turned away to pick up another box. Smalter stared at it. Inside were twelve kits that promised to remove all signs of age from the buyers' hair. "Yes. It's kind of crazy."

  "If you wouldn't mind though, you know, I think I'd like to keep working back here. If you close up. Would that be okay? I want to keep busy, I guess."

  "Yes, that's always best."

  The Tea Shoppe to which Smalter retreated was not open. Its early hours, like his pharmacy's, depended on the proprietor's spirits or the weather. He walked on to the Dingley Day, where he interrupted A.A. Hayes in the compilation of a comparative list. "Do you know," said the editor, looking up at the door from his scratch paper, "that if I were Keats I would have been dead for twenty-three years?

  Alexander, fifteen. Christ, fifteen. If I were Martin Luther King, Jr., I would have been shot nine years ago."

  "Pru's not open yet. How are you, Alvis?"

  "Rotten. Now if I were Marx or Einstein, I'd have a whole lot of time left, not that it'd make a damn bit of difference. Some people make a dent. Not likely I'll be included in that number. What a pissass thing, Sammy. What a hell of a thing."

  Smalter noticed Hayes's paper cup and bottle. "You mean Joy Strummer."

  "She and my girl were in school together. All of us known her since we've been up here. I swear I'd get half a mind to take Otto seriously about this town being attacked by something if the news from the rest of the world wasn't equally insane."

  "Otto says she didn't drown. Is that what you mean?"

  "Somebody killed her, I suppose."

  "No. He says she had a heart attack."

  "Oh, sure! I'm beginning to wonder if Otto ought not to be put out to pasture."

  "It does happen."

  "Doubt it makes a hell of a lot of difference to Jack and Peggy Strummer one way or another. 'Scuse me, how 'bout a drink?"

  "It's a little early for me."

  "After nine, isn't it?"

  All at once there shot through Dingley Falls an extraordinarily loud noise. It sounded like a gun, which made absolutely no sense in such surroundings. Across the green half a dozen people in static arrest stared from the steps of the bank, from the library, and from the post office. The two men hurried out of Hayes's office and trotted down the sidewalk. The sound cracked around them again. They ran to Barnum's Antiques, Hobbies, and Appliances, where a shaded door said CLOSED. "Limus? Limus, are you in there?" Smalter rapped with his fist, then shook the door. Hayes ran around the side of the store, but the back was locked.

  "Can you see up in that transom window?" Smalter asked.

  Hayes jumped. "No. It's filthy. You think that ass has killed himself?"

  "I'd be less surprised to hear he'd killed somebody else, all that neo-Nazi slime he reads."

  "I didn't know there were any Jews in Dingley Falls to kill,"

  Hayes said.

  "Maybe you ought to kick the door in. It looks pretty flimsy."

  "Well, I don't know, I hate to butt in. Hell. Here goes." But as the embarrassed editor swung his foot back, the door rattled, and in its crack Barnum's face glared at them.

  "Hey! What do you think you're doing? Get the hell away! Were you trying to kick in my door?"

  "What's the problem, Limus?" asked the pharmacist.

  "You'll be the one with problems if you don't learn how to leave me alone. Trying to bust in here on private property. How come you got so much time to spend harassing me, Smalter? Why don't you go join a circus?"

  "We heard a gun," Hayes said. "Somebody in there?"

  "Me. I'm in here. I was cleaning my gun, okay? Any crime against that? It went off." Sun rushed in the crack so that Barnum's pale eyes kept blinking at them.

  "Went off twice?" Smalter snapped.

  "So what? I was checking it out. I got a license. Maybe I felt like doing a little target practice. It's my store, isn't it? If I felt like it, I could blow holes in every crummy piece of junk in here. How do you like that, huh?"

  "Not if it disturbs other people," said Smalter.

  "So do something about it, if you think you can."

  Hayes leaned over Smalter's head. "You didn't shoot yourself through the shoe again, did you?" He grinned broadly.

  "Fuck you." Barnum slammed the door in his face and locked it.

  The editor waved at the people across the green. "Everything's all right, y'all. Nobody hurt." Motion restarted.

  Frowning, Smalter straightened his bow tie. "I dislike that man.

  I can't tell you how offensive I find him."

  "Oh, hell, he's his own worst enemy, Sammy, don't let it bother you. I think he's nuts. His commercial was on TV last night, you know the one where he reaches out his hands into the camera like he was going to haul us right through it into his pocket? His eyes look like he's nuts with greediness! Then half the time he's got the damn store shut up. Mighty funny way for a man who say
s he's all business to run a business," Hayes added, as the two men returned to their own.

  Orchid O'Neal found Miss Dingley at her desk in the parlor, beside her an elephant's foot wastepaper basket into which she dropped the paper waste of forgotten memorabilia. "Telephone, ma'am, it's the young priest, in a pitiable state."

  Father Fields was in a pitiable state. Sin lay on him like slabs of stone. Before dawn he had awakened to find himself lying beside the naked body of Walter Saar. There rushed upon him the remembrance of pleasure. Pleasure he had dreamed of for years. Feelings too true to condemn. Doesn't God want us to be happy? he had kept asking himself as he drove the church Lincoln up Cromwell Hill Road and hoped no one saw him go past at 5:00 A.M. Next he woke up horrified in his narrow bed when he heard the long, nagging honk of a car horn. It was 8:30! He'd missed morning service! For the first time.

  Dear God, what would the parishioners (though, thankfully, there were only three at the most) think? What would the rector, what would God think? Heart pounding, Jonathan rushed into his clothes, ran across the garden to the vestry, pulled a surplice over his head, and raced down the aisle to draw back the iron bolt on the doors.

  There stood Mrs. A.A. Hayes in a pink sundress, looking at his unshaved face and uncombed hair precisely as if she had seen him last night through the window of the headmaster's bedroom. Her son Charlie was a student there. Was it conceivable that she, an early riser… The curate forced himself to be rational.

  "It's just me." June Hayes frowned. "I was here a little while ago, but I guess I must have just misunderstood your little notice up here about daily Mass, and then I telephoned, maybe y'all should have the phone company check yours, see if something or other might be the matter with it. I feel awful dragging you out of bed, but something's happened."