What had happened was that Peggy Strummer's daughter had drowned last night in the Ransoms' pool. Mrs. Hayes said she'd recalled that Peggy had said how grateful she was to Father Fields for his efforts about Bobby, and so she thought, if he wouldn't mind, could he follow her down to Glover's Lane as soon as possible? Peggy was quite beside herself and they were worried she might do something dangerous. This hostilely explained, Mrs. Hayes hurried back to her car.
In a back pew of the shadowy church the curate crumpled to his knees. How could that news be true, and this building have any meaning? Joy? Why had he left her at the Ransoms? Why had he gone to Saar's? How could he have done what he did there while she was dying? If he had stayed, she might be alive. If he'd only come home, he'd have been here if her parents had needed him. Choosing himself, he had failed them all. How many had arrived to find the doors, the doors of the church, locked against them? Minutes passed and Jonathan fought to say, "Take her to Your peace, give her parents peace. Don't ask me to justify You. Just help me."
Miss Dingley told Orchid to get the car ready. The curate had called from the Strummers', where Dr. Scaper had given Mrs. Strummer a shot to make her sleep. Would she go see Polly Hedgerow? Because a woman might be better able to comfort the girl about her friend's death. Polly had refused to come out of her room, and her father had simply sat all morning in the kitchen drinking one cup of coffee after another, as if the pain of having to tell his daughter about Joy had dried his flesh away and left him dust. Miss Dingley said she would go at once.
As she waited in her wheelchair by the white frame fence at the foot of her lawn, she listened to an irascible cardinal. In the middle of her yard there was a Victorian birdhouse atop a pole; it was a replica of the ornate mansion behind it and was the size of a large dollhouse. The red-tufted cardinal chirped crankily out of a third-story window. "What do you want?" Ramona asked him. "A television set?" Ignoring his landlady, he flew off to attach himself like a cluster of dusty berries to the high shrubs that bordered Mrs. Canopy's white carriage house.
Next door to Miss Dingley's was Otto Scaper's house. Sebastian Marco sat there by the white wooden fence that ringed the doctor's huge old mulberry tree. The gardener sharpened his shears. "Mourning his brother, God bless him," sighed Mrs. O'Neal as they drove past.
Next door, the Argyle Standard (left by the housekeeper's MacDermott nephew in the brass letter slot beneath the brass eagle knocker on the Ransoms' orange front door) fell out when Ernest Ransom opened the door. He had an American flag under the arm of his jogging suit. The eight orange-shuttered front windows gave the house an almost Caribbean air, like a Colonial hotel in the West Indies. How Ernie's wife talked him into allowing her to have those shutters painted orange, when they'd been black for two hundred years, was one of the mysteries of married life unfathomable, Miss Dingley concluded, to the unwed. Standing on the white wooden milk box, Ransom ran up a Bennington flag beside his door. A crescent of stars above the number 76 unfurled in pure bright color. Ransom set off jogging down his walk.
I'm sure he thought about it, Ramona said to herself. And I guess he doesn't see any impropriety in going for a run the morning after a guest dies in his home. Well, but he's right. Life goes on.
Next door a newspaper was stuck in the brass ring in Evelyn Troyes's white front door that was set between two flat Doric columns to which two brass lanterns were attached. The lanterns matched the lamp on the post at the end of her lawn, up which now another of Mrs. O'Neal's nephews carried a cardboard box filled with Marco's groceries. "Your family appears to have staked out Elizabeth Circle as its territory. Isn't that another one of your nephews with the groceries?" Ramona pointed at the jaunty teenager, who had left the radio on in his truck. The street music clashed with gleaming white brick and manicured lawns.
"They're good boys," vouched Orchid.
Out on Cromwell Hill Road, Ramona spotted two small women who walked a block ahead of the approaching car; between the two loped a huge black dog on a red leash. "Who's that with Pru? Stop.
Blow the horn, Orchid. Pru! Pru! Want a ride? Take you to town.
Who's this? Hush, dog! Nothing to get so fired about. Get down!"
Miss Lattice motioned Chin Lam to pull Night away from the Firebird's roaring noise and walk him ahead while she stepped to the window to speak with her old acquaintance. "Ro, dear. Good morning, Orchid. Thank you, but we'll walk on. So short a way to bother.
We were up at St. Andrew's earlier, but the doors were locked! Do you know why? Now, I'm afraid were running very late."
"Who's this we? Who's that girl? What happened to her eye?"
"Her name's Chin Lam." Miss Lattice leaned into the window and whispered. "Oh, it's just a tragic situation, Ro. Her husband's in prison and Winslow's trying to get him out, though if he can't, really it might be for the best. He hit her."
"What?"
"Yes. Isn't it? I believe Mr. Henry tried to murder somebody.
Chin, she's Vietnamese, but the nicest young girl you'd ever want to meet anywhere. There's no excuse to brood, but I had been very, very low about somebody's killing Scheherazade."
"What? Somebody killed your cat?"
"Winslow wasn't sure but I am. And I'd been so depressed about it is what I mean that having Chin with me has really been a help.
But, of course, it's just for a few days."
Ramona was annoyed to find herself so thoroughly uninformed about her town. Obviously, she snorted to herself, she'd been out of touch the last ten years or so. And now! Folks trying to murder cats and each other, war refugees with bruised faces, children drowning, Beanie and Winslow quitting after thirty years, government compounds, Otto's theory that something, who knew what, was wrong with the very air or water or whatever. She was losing control of Dingley Falls. Perhaps while she sat crippled in her father's mansion, her birthplace, her namesake, her town had gone as mad as the rest of the world. "Hideous to think of," she said aloud.
"Yes, isn't it? I feel so sorry for her."
"What's she doing here, Pru?"
"She came here after the war," said Miss Lattice, as though that were an explanation. "Now we simply don't have any idea what's going to happen. Mrs. Haig (you know, at the post office), really a very nice woman, I'd never actually known her except to say hello.
Not at all what you'd think, given, well, years ago I did hear, I suppose it was Gladys Goff, that she was, well, a love child. No shame to her, of course. She's been kind about Chin. And so has Winslow."
Miss Dingley peered into the sun at the young Asian woman who waited down the road with the German shepherd. "Handsome-looking. Work in your shop then?"
"Oh, she's doing wonderfully well."
"What about her own home? Got one, hasn't she?"
"Yes, but, well, Ro, she was out in that awful trailer park where my papa's plant used to be. All alone. Frightened to death. Anything might have happened to her. Of course, I don't have much to offer, but she's welcome to stay as long as she wants to. Really, I just couldn't bear the thought of her going back there by herself. Not to Madder."
The two women walked away from the Firebird and into Dingley Falls with the large black dog. At the end of the green they saw Judith Haig in front of the post office, where she was attempting with some difficulty to attach the government flag to its pole. A breeze flapped the cloth around her legs. Breaking free of Miss Lattice's leash, Night raced at the moving colors. Judith froze, trapped in the cloth. "Night, come back here this minute! You, Night! You!" To her surprise, and possibly his, Prudence Lattice's frail peremptory voice stopped the dog; he wheeled around. "I go help," called Chin Lam.
She ran to the post office in short, easy strides and caught up the fluttering corner that Judith had dropped. Together they raised the Bicentennial American flag over Dingley Falls.
chapter 47
Everybody had always told Lance Abernathy that he was brave, and he had believed them. As a child he had never cried at shots, scrapes, or splinters, not
at the dark, or a bully, or new classrooms, not even when he broke his collarbone trying to water ski off a pier in Matebesec Cove. While Arthur had vomited into the bushes after their father ordered them inside for a spanking (they had thrown Miss Lattice's Persian cat, Xerxes, into the clothes washer and watched him go mad with terror), Lance had laughed at the punishment. To be thrashed didn't frighten him, to be knocked to the ground and pounded in the kidneys on the football field didn't frighten him. Neither did marching to the headmaster's, taking a girl on a dare up to the parking lot beside the Falls; neither did dangling from a rope on the sheer side of a cliff, or swooping among thickets down a ski slope, or passing a bus on a hill in his Jaguar, or facing the cynical dean of his college, or flying through enemy flak high above the hazy, humid mountains of Vietnam. He'd met every challenge that centuries of his peers had devised to test him. He wasn't afraid to fight, drink, dive, speed, steal, flunk, screw, or, finally, and from eighteen thousand feet, kill.
Over the years of his developing manhood, Lance had collected the tokens of successful rites of passage. Black eyes, sprained ankles, broken arms and legs, suspended licenses, a pyramid of beer cans, lettered sweaters, stolen traffic signs, and, as he said, add it all up, more cherries than crabs. Here in his bachelor quarters, the second floor of the family carriage house, he lay among his relics. Chair lift tickets hung from his sky-blue parka like scalps. Bright strips of ribbon were pinned to his air force jacket. Citations for speeding decorated his walls. This morning he lay on the bed in his chieftain hut surrounded by testaments to all the exams he had passed: his old gold and tin and plastic trophies, his old medals and badges, and pictures of old girlfriends hanging like diplomas over his desk.
He lay and stared at his hand in its creamy plaster cast, and he confessed to himself that he was afraid to look at the faces of an unassuming middle-aged couple who were too frightened to ride in a plane, much less fly one. He was scared of a man who was in awe of Mr. Ransom, when Lance didn't hesitate to call the banker "Ernest" although (because) he knew it offended him. Scared of two people who could not bear to watch the war on television, much less fight or have their son fight in it. He was afraid of Mr. and Mrs. Strummer, whom he had scarcely met.
What could he say to them? What could they answer? When someone in the squad lost a friend, you said, "Tough luck, man," or, "Hey, listen, that's real bad shit," or, "Let's go zap some of those little bastards for so-and-so," or, best, you just left the guy alone. But he couldn't walk into the Strummers' living room and say, "Tough luck, man," to Joy's father. There wasn't anything he could say. He'd just leave them alone.
Lance spun himself off the bed, his left arm raised. He pulled on Levi's and a T-shirt, slid his feet into loafers. He dumped drawers of socks, shorts, and shirts (put there by his mother) into a leather satchel. He scooped jackets and slacks from a closet, racquets and balls, rods and tackle from the floor. All of it he flung into the Jaguar.
Its seats were already warm from the sun. Then he strode across the damp lawn and eased open the back door of the big house, relieved to find his father still upstairs. A glassed-in summer room was green with flowering plants. Lance took to its round white table a quart of milk and six dinner rolls. Finally, in his father's study, he found paper and a pen and, while he ate, wrote for the first time in five years, "Dear Dad."
Thanks for getting me fixed up last night. Hand doing okay. What happened got me down pretty bad. No way probally I can help here. Don't know what to do, accept get away for awhile and try to get my head together again. Would you do me a favor, and maybe send some flowers to her folks. Here's some cash. I'm going up to see Phil Lovell in Hyannis (from U. Mass. You met him.) I'll write. Thanks, Dad. I'm sorry about you and Mom.
Hope it works out okay for you both. Take it easy okay. Lance.
He folded the paper, then, after pointing the pen a long time at a second sheet, wrote to his mother for the first time in two years.
Dear Mom. Sorry about last night. I was out of line barging into Mrs. C's. Tell her I apologize, okay? I found out something pretty horrible happened at the party while I was gone. A girl drowned in the pool. She was my date. It's the worst thing I guess that's ever happened to me so I just honestly don't know how to cope with it, you know what I mean? I feel like I'm dead. I'm shoving off up to Phil's families' place and try to get my head together again. Maybe we'll go down to Gautamaula (sp.) Phil knows this co. that needs some guys who can fly supplies in and out for them.
Maybe I'll try it. This girl's parents are the Strumers, over on Glover Lane, I don't know if you know them but maybe you could tell them how sorry I am. I wish it hadn't happened, that's all. I'd give anything if I just hadn't taken her over there. Or I should have stayed, instead of acting like a jerk over at Mrs. C's and driving you up a wall. Mom, you know what I mean? I'm going to shove off now. I hope it works out so you and Dad can get back together. If that's what you want. You have to go with what makes you happy. But anyhow I love you. Take care of yourself. Lance. P.S. If you do decide to go off, write me, okay, c/o Phil. P.S. I'm sure Dad does love you. You know, he's just so quiet. P.S. I love you more than anybody.
All he found in his wallet was a $20 bill. He left it on the table beside his father's note. The letter to his mother he pushed into Tracy Canopy's large black mailbox. It sat on a pole beside the white fence that bordered the clipped hedge that bordered the white house. Nothing stirred in all the white and green of Elizabeth Circle, for Lance had left before the hour of newsboys and grocery boys.
Now nothing there but birds worked for a living. Nothing moved but light glinting on all the old brass, and a cardinal that hurried through the debris in Dr. Scaper's roof gutter like a shopper at a bargain basement sale, frantic with greed.
Crowded with sports clothes and the instruments of sports, the crimson Jaguar fled as silently as possible past the testing grounds of all Lance Abernathy's earlier triumphs, past the playing fields of Alexander Hamilton, past the courts of the Dingley Club, past Lake Pissinowno. If he could have brought back Joy by parachuting into an enemy fortress, or jumping his car over a chasm, or taking on, single-handed, a dozen assailants large as Goliath, he would have done so smiling. But Death would not fight with him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had never been initiated into the kind of battle that Jack and Peggy Strummer now waged. Free of the town, the Jaguar leaped into speed as the sun rose bold and orange like an explorer's balloon above Wild Oat Ridge.
"Beanie, dear, I don't think you slept a wink. Go back to bed."
"No, I'm fine. Do you have a sponge mop? Tracy, I'm sorry.
Where's your mop? I could run over this floor a little."
"For heaven's sake, you make me feel slovenly, like I belonged in an Irish shantytown. Please, Beanie, go lie down."
"Am I bothering you?"
"Beanie, Beanie, of course not. Well, yes. I'm worried about you, that's all. Oh, all right, it's in the closet by the dishwasher." Tracy turned back to her secretary, where she was writing a letter to Babaha Tarook, who should be back in Lebanon by now. But she couldn't concentrate. What should she do with Beanie?
Last night from her own room Tracy had heard Lance say things to his mother that sounded like lines by one of the angry new lowerclass playwrights. Horrible things that had finally driven Tracy, trembling, into her robe, then down to the living room, where she told Lance flatly that he had both shocked and disappointed her. Then he had begun to say those things to her, his godmother, and the ultimate outcome was that she had been forced to show him the door, as the old melodramas used to say.
Afterwards, Tracy could not help but hear stifled sobs from her guest room until 3:00 A.M., when, at last, she'd fallen asleep, Play It As It Lays on her lap. At nine she'd waked to the sound of her vacuum cleaner; she'd dressed to the clatter of breakfast dishes downstairs. "Where in the world did you find all this stuff?" she asked Beanie as she surveyed her table neatly cleared of her pottery works and laden with wh
at looked like the repast before a British fox hunt.
"Oh, in the refrigerator. And around. Hope you don't mind. I didn't want to wake you."
Over zucchini omelets and ground lamb patties, the two discussed an idea of Tracy's that she had begged Beanie to sleep on. It was that Beanie and she should leave for England within the week.
Having placed the ocean between herself and both Winslow and Mr. Rage, Beanie could better judge from this more remote perspective just what her decision should be. "I think we'd have a wonderful time, and you'd have a chance to see how you really feel."
Beanie frowned. "I know how I really feel. I don't see why people always think that if they get on a train or a plane and travel far off someplace they've never been, then all of a sudden they'll know what they feel. I already know exactly what I feel. I love Richard.
What I don't know is what would be the fairest thing to do about it.
I'm sorry."
Hastily Tracy corrected herself. "Yes, of course you know, but I meant, time lets things settle down. While you're gone, Winslow and the boys can adjust to the idea, before you and Mr. Rage—"
"Richard."
"You and Richard…" Mrs. Canopy realized she had no term for whatever Beanie and "Richard" planned to do. She didn't think they knew themselves. Marry? Become engaged? Live together? She decided on "Before you two locate yourselves."
Beanie stood by the bay window. She wore a pair of Winslow's old denim pants and one of Lance's cast-off shirts. Yarn held up her auburn hair. "Look." She pointed. "A cardinal. See? There on your carriage house. On the weather vane." She was thinking that to go with Tracy would be the easiest thing and maybe the best. Everyone, Winslow, Arthur, her friends, would say it was sensible, at least more sensible than moving in with Richard immediately. It would save Winslow shame, and herself shame. People would say the Abernathys had decided to separate for a while, and she had gone to Europe to see how she felt. And, honestly, she was frightened by what she had done, scared of what could happen to her if Richard should leave her in another week, scared of what could happen if he stayed forever.
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