Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  As she spoke, Mrs. MacDermott continued to unpack groceries, set the table, boil hot dogs, broil frozen french fries, and arbitrate between sons who sporadically burst out of the TV room with legal briefs against their siblings. Between interruptions she pursued her conversation out of death and into sex; as a gossip, she necessarily discoursed on the great themes of life. Sarah was willing to confess to a lascivious nature. She attributed it to a polymorphous gluttony at the root of her personality, which made it impossible for her to get enough of anything (beer, TV, babies, parties, food, money, news), and sex was no different. No doubt she was a sinner, but she still loved the way it relaxed her after a long day. Yet despite her carnality, she had been completely faithful to Joe throughout their marriage except for one single "slipup," as she called it, for which she hoped Judith could forgive her, as Father Crisp had, though expecting Joe to was probably too much to ask, and so she'd kept it to herself, which she hoped Judith would as well. Promising to keep her friend's lapse secret (she had been subjected to this confession before), Judith ventured to suggest that Sarah might want to do the same; she didn't feel comfortable hearing such things.

  "Honey, if I tried to bottle up everything the way you do, they'd carry me away in a straitjacket. But everybody's got to just live and let live. Because we're all the same, Lord bless us, when you get down to it. Not a one of us can poop with our legs crossed so tight it can't get out."

  Mrs. Haig was spared any obligation to reply to this definition of humanity because the phone rang, and it was her husband, John, asking Sarah if she had his wife over there. He was home and wondered why Judith wasn't. He said he would come for her at once. "I started," said Mrs. MacDermott after Judith hung up, "to ask you both to stay for supper, but the pure and simple truth is I haven't got enough meat in this house to coax a starving tiger out of a burning building. Anyhow, you two haven't seen each other in a while, and I figure Hawk'd rather have you to himself tonight." Sarah rolled her eyes and waggled her eyebrows. Judith's blush flushed even the skin over her collarbone. "I'm sorry, Sarah, but could I use your phone for a minute?"

  "Don't be sorry, be my guest." Sarah was spooning beans and french fries onto plates.

  "Is this the only one you have?"

  "Honey, how many do you need?"

  "Just for a minute, I'm sorry, but could I ask if I could use it in private?"

  Sarah stared at Mrs. Haig, then flipped off her stove burners.

  "Say no more." She grinned and backed out into the TV room with a tray of hot dogs.

  Hot with embarrassment, Judith found Winslow Abernathy's home phone number. She noticed as she dialed that its four digits after the local exchange were the year of her birth. When Abernathy answered, she told him that perhaps it would be helpful to remind Miss Lattice that Chin Lam would need to make arrangements about meeting her husband. She told him again that she was grateful for his efforts on the girl's behalf, but that she herself would be unable to pursue the matter further because her husband had just returned home from an out-of-town trip. If he wouldn't mind she would call him at his office about the final outcome of the Henrys' difficulties and would prefer that he not call her at home. She hoped he would understand.

  "Hawk's outside honking." Sarah popped her head around the door and saw that Judith had replaced the receiver. "Just like he did in high school, remember? I remember once I was standing right next to you when you asked him to never do it again. I really thought you were going to lose your temper that time, 'course you didn't, but still.

  Well, what can women do but grin and bear it? Okay, well, tell him now he's back I'd like to get Joe home at a decent hour. Honey, good-bye and did I tell you, we're going to the lake tomorrow if you feel like coming? You and little Francis could sit off by yourselves somewhere and read. You know, that little bookworm came right up and told me he wished he had you for a mother, can you believe that?"

  Sarah, back at work in her kitchen, wondered about the telephone call. It struck her that she had never known Judith to call anyone, much less demand privacy to do so. Was she involved with someone? Oh, it wasn't possible! Anyhow, how could she be having an affair with a man and have to look up his number in the phone book, which was still out on the counter? A man whose name began with an A or a B. Over the gunfire of the television and the clatter of her sons it had been difficult to hear any part of Judith's conversation, not that Sarah had listened, but she had caught the name Chin Lam. What was it between Judith and Chinkie? You'd think Chinkie was some long lost relation the way Judith was behaving! Well, Judith could act awful frosty sometimes, so there was no sense in asking, even after all the years of love Sarah had poured down on her.

  And sometimes it just didn't seem worth it, so much all give and no get. But it takes all kinds, that was Mrs. MacDermott's motto, and what's more, who knew what God was up to when He made some hearts warm and some hearts cold? She had a very clear sense that God approved of her persistent befriending of Judith Haig. It was one of those kinds of accomplishments, like missionary work or chastity, of which God was said to be particularly fond.

  The last purple had darkened Wild Oat Ridge to indistinction and Dingley Falls lost its outline. Night was only slightly cooler than dusk had been, outside was only slightly cooler than indoors.

  For years, however, the houses of Elizabeth Circle had been equipped to condition air to circumvent the vagaries of nature, and inside the brightly lit rooms there, residents moved at their ease.

  But the Abernathys' home had no air conditioners. The thought of having to keep her windows closed and having to smell machine-forced air for even such a summer night as this had been intolerable to Beanie. She could always, thought Winslow, endure a higher degree of reality than he could; for he had been forced to come outside to walk tonight, unable to function under the heavy weight of heated air that hung over his study. He wondered how he could have forgotten for so many years that he was a person who habitually took walks.

  Winslow Abernathy, while entirely sober, was feeling lightheaded. Wryly he considered the possibility that he had poisoned himself inadvertently in his novice but seemingly innocuous broiling of a steak and tossing of a salad. In this mood he decided that he, like a postman with special delivery news, would call on each of his neighbors in turn and preempt their speculations on his private life by declaring in their front halls that Mr. and Mrs. Winslow Abernathy wished to announce the separation of Beatrice Rose Dingley from Winslow Edward Abernathy on June 4. Private ceremony. No flowers. He was unaccustomed to behaving with public facetiousness, however, dignified, and he attributed the desire now to joke with Elizabeth Circle to this odd light-headedness of his. His neighbors, he knew, would attribute it to the peculiar effects of grief on the unsuspecting.

  But what was so peculiar was that the collapse of his marriage, while presumably unsuspected, had not, honestly (once he had been forced to take time to assess honestly his state of mind), seemed sudden at all. And more remarkably, had not seemed cause for grief. And most remarkably (unless his roughest digging had not been strong enough to pry loose hidden ore of suffering), his predominant emotion about the entire matter was that he was very proud and a little bit envious of Beanie for so clearly grasping the truth and acting upon it. This response to the abrupt adultery of his wife and her termination of their marriage after thirty quiescent years was, he thought, marvelously bizarre, but so absurd, even to himself, that he felt shy about sharing it, even with the wryest of his acquaintances, A.A. Hayes (who was too committed to the intolerableness of his own marriage to find amusing the buoyancy with which Abernathy watched his be torpedoed and sunk). Yes, he thought, the Hayeses kept themselves sensitive to life, and each other, by continually ripping the bandages off each other's wounds; they were unhappily married, far more so than the Abernathys. In fact, Winslow would not admit that he and Beanie had been unhappily married at all. He had been too civilized, and Beanie too good-hearted, for daily misery.

  Because, a
s Beanie had explained, unlike the Hayeses (who were fiercely monogamous in the intensity of their hate), she and Winslow had never been married at all. Yesterday she had sat with him in his study and had tried to explain to him why he felt less pain about what was happening than he thought he ought to feel.

  It is not easy, she had said, but it is usually easier, to do the right thing, though it may seem, even for as long as thirty years, that it is easier not to. The Abernathys could have "easily" lived in pleasant accord until their deaths, except for the inevitable chance of Richard Rage, who had in a single day, and without intending to, made clear that the Abernathys were not living together at all, by reminding them that they were not touching, not seeing the other, that they had never been able to move into the other's world, though in the beginning both had been mesmerized by the very width of the chasm between them. So they had thought they lived easily together, only to find, when the chasm did split apart, how quickly everything could fall right. Like a painting, Beanie said, finally moved after hanging for years slightly too high on the wall, and suddenly you see that it's wrong and you change it. Like not consciously knowing you had been for a long while off balance in a plane until the wing tipped back and you were upright again and it felt right.

  These were not the metaphors he would have chosen; still, he, with his more fugitive and cloistered virtues, stood in awe of Beanie's victory over language; less in awe of her courage in battling her way to Truth as her wrestling Truth down until it yielded her, like the angel yielding to Jacob, the words to explain its meaning. She who had actually once said she "hated" language. Yes, thought Winslow as he began to a second circuit of Elizabeth Circle, the situation was absurd. Never had he loved Beanie more than today, when she had forced him out of his easy cell and into freedom, when she had released him from any obligation to love her at all. And so shocked had he been by the intensity of his affection, once he focused his attention—as he had not done for years—on who she was; so excited had he become about the reality of his regard, that he had nearly caught Beanie up in his arms and begged her to reconsider. But he hadn't done it, and in that fact, of course, the truth lay.

  Then briefly he had washed himself in warm tubs of pity that the actual process of their discovering themselves should cost him this new (this newly noticed) Beanie. But now he felt only light-headed, as if above the aching tiredness he had fought for weeks his mind floated, buoyant and marvelously detached from what must look to his neighbors like the stormy shipwreck of his life. Winslow Abernathy chuckled aloud, though very quietly. He would not, after all, indulge in playing town crier for Elizabeth Circle. No one would believe him anyhow if he cried, "All's well." And the truth was he had no desire to make up something properly bereft to say to them.

  Tracy he had already telephoned to thank for her goodness to Beanie, and for the rest, he had no comment. The lawyer chuckled, realizing he had completed the circle of widely spaced houses twice already, without noticing what he was doing. For years, no doubt, he had not actually looked at the houses surrounding his own. As Beanie, oddly, put it, he kept his eyes on his brain. Evelyn Troyes, for example, appeared to have a gas-flame lamppost at the end of her lawn; had she always had it? He could hear Evelyn's television, or record player, playing. What did Evelyn do with herself, alone in that large, wasted house? Why didn't she and Tracy both, and him too for that matter, move in with Ramona and Sam Smalter, plenty of room there, and give their houses to the descendants of the Madder workers whose labors had constructed and supported them? Or, for that matter, give it all back to the Indians, if any could be found. How Arthur would bellow for his pilfered patrimony if Winslow should simply sign over Dingley Optical Instruments to the Algonquin tribe from which Elijah Dingley had bought the land three hundred years ago in exchange for glass beads, an axhead, and Agatha Dingley's Dutch lace petticoat.

  Abernathy waved at Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Ransom, as with a honked greeting they pulled their Mercedes out of their driveway and passed the pedestrian. Ever since he'd known them, thought Winslow, the Ransoms had dined out half the week and invited guests to dine in the other half. Ergo, they hate being together in private, or ergo, they love being together in public, or undoubtedly endless other ergos that if he were interested in the Ransoms he would be interested in. He noticed that Otto Scaper's lights were already out, and then walked on around the curving sidewalk until up on the hill from which Ramona's white Victorian mansion looked down on its simpler Federalist neighbors, the midget Sammy Smalter stood on the lawn so stilly that Winslow was reminded of the plaster statues of Negro boys once used as ornamental hitching posts by Beanie's Baltimore mother, May Rose. It was another of those bizarre images attributable to his light-headedness.

  "Outdoors too?" called Smalter in greeting. Abernathy could see the quick series of flaring red as Smalter puffed on his pipe. He began searching his pockets for his own.

  "Yes. Rather muggy."

  "Horrible. The whole sky feels like a steamy towel in a barber shop being lowered over your face."

  "Yes, I suppose it does." Did it? How could it? What unsettling images Smalter evoked as a matter of course, as if his habitual frame of mind was as conceptually inebriated as Abernathy felt his own to be tonight. What a different way of seeing the world, to look at something through a simile rather than translating it into a simile after the fact. Very different from his perennial "it is as if" tactic in efforts to persuade Beanie to agree that he was right. And now, after all the verbal debates he was accustomed to winning both in his court and in his castle, he had been persuaded by Beanie that she was right, perhaps even right when she, absurdly, remarked, "I don't know if you'll want to, I mean take the time. It takes time to learn how you'd feel feeling in love, and you don't have to, Winslow, it doesn't mean you're wrong if you don't. But you could. But it would have to be a woman who looks like this statue to you." And she had put her hand on the head of Marcus Antistius Labeo, the Roman jurist.

  What awed him about this remark was that he knew what she meant, even as he said he didn't. What struck him as remarkable was that while part of his mind was thinking what a ridiculous simile (for the chipped alabaster face was that of a sad, introspective, middle-aged man with pure, blind eyes and a too sensitive mouth; the nose was broken and the forehead balding), at the same time another part of his mind immediately, illogically, thought of Judith Haig.

  What was more remarkable still was that Beanie had then added, "Like the woman who runs the post office. She looks like that."

  chapter 51

  The house of Mr. and Mrs. John "Hawk" Haig crouched beside the highway, an outpost on the watch for all those traders who were to invade Dingley Falls and make Hawk's fortune. Inside the house the Haigs sat like an illustration in their family room—he with the newspaper in his vinyl recliner, she with her knitting in her green plaid armchair, each with a coffee mug inscribed with their first names (gifts Haig liked to use because his sister had given them), both cooled by the air-conditioning and lulled by the tick of the imitation antique clock. The evening so far had passed with less disjunction than Judith had expected. John was unusually talkative. He was disgusted by the possibility that Dingley Falls might lose its post office, and he was thrilled by his discoveries about the abandoned highway.

  Earlier in the evening he had been eager to lead her step by step through the maze where he had wound his way in Hartford, until, finally, when he was tangled in red tapes of confusion, a tip completely by chance had led him straight to the cache of hidden facts.

  Somebody had been paid off to stop that highway connector.

  Somebody had been paid off to falsify that surveyor's report.

  Somebody had been paid off to negotiate the resale of that land. And Ernest Ransom, president of Ransom Bank, holder of the Haig mortgage, was up to his neck in the muddy waters of all these payoffs.

  "And, Jude, I'm going to stir that water up until the mud sticks on the faces where it belongs. I'm not going to even bo
ther with those jerk selectmen. I'm going straight to the state attorney's office and press charges for conspiracy to defraud the people of Connecticut. A shake-up like this is all I need to get my name out there. So I can get a committee together and they can start getting organized and soliciting contributions. So I can get a campaign going. I know, but that's the thing about it these days. It takes a lot of money just to buy yourself a chance to do something in this world. All I want is my chance to show I can make just a little bit of difference. Just a chance to make it. To matter, that's the God's truth, hon, you know what I mean? Hey, that smells great."