Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Outside, trailed by stars, the moon floated by. Mother moon and all her bright pretty children, the nuns had said. And Judith had prayed to the moon for her own mother to return and claim her as her own. Now she looked at her watch, then pulled herself on her side and reached for the telephone. Winslow Abernathy's number was one she was easily able to remember, though she had never dialed it but once, for Dingley Falls had but one exchange, and the last four numbers were the year of her birth.

  He said that he could sleep now. Judith knew that she, too, could sleep. She wondered at the strange peace she felt. It was not that her bruises and lacerations and her strained heart no longer hurt, but that she had taken in the pain like cold air into the lungs so that pain itself was restful. It was not that, but how oddly untroubled her heart was, how unafraid. There was the difference. She was no longer afraid. Nor was this lack of fear simply knowledge that she had now suffered as much terror, as much loathing and loss, as bullying life had to threaten. Not simply that, tortured, she had been willing to leap off the precipice into madness and had fallen, still unbroken, into the sea, where she floated sane and whole. Not simply that she had begged Death to carry her down, drowning knowledge; or that Death had, for an instant, held her in the dark water, then pushed her painfully back to air; though all were undoubtedly true. And doubtless she would be told that this peacefulness was the anesthesia of shock; that she was still too stunned for wild grief. And yes, she knew there was much yet to feel about John, about the sad, chance waste of his death, much yet to forgive herself and him about the fearful waste of their marriage. She knew, too, that what she had felt during the assault and the killings lived still unordered inside her and could never be wholly excised; that from time to time memory would spring open the unlockable gate, and shame or pain or rage or grief would leap up in her thoughts like the dogs of her imagination.

  Yet, Judith knew that she was not stunned by shock. This peace that made no sense was not stupefying, but was clear and clean and light. She had let go of all she had lost, and so let go of cowardice as well. The world was oddly upside down. The violation of her self, the defilement of her body, were unrelieved horrors to her. Dr. Deeds had not needed to warn her. Judith did not lacerate herself, or think she deserved what had happened to her. And still, out of the violation, her heart had been freed, as if immersion in dreadful polluted water could clean. She had fallen into the filth beside those other drowners she had always pitied. But the world was upside down, and in falling through its glass dome, she had fallen, stained clean, down into life.

  Her hands resting on the scarf—her colors, worn on the arm of the stranger who had gone into battle her liege man—Judith Haig closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  chapter 66

  Judith and Maynard and Chin Lam slept. But it was not yet midnight on Saturday night, and most people, to whom what had happened to Judith Haig was just a story, were still awake.

  At night when the gusty flotsam of life had settled, and the ghosts of the day sprang up grinning in the windows unseen, the readers of Dingley Falls read on. They read not merely to keep their eyes lowered so that they wouldn't see the goblins, not even if they thought of themselves as refugees from their own lives, or thought of their books as evacuation routes. As did A.A. Hayes, who had fallen asleep in his armchair finally, with one of Ben Rough's little escapist mysteries beside him, with melted ice from his glass spilling into the rug as his hand relaxed, and around him on the walls the signed names of famous men. Or old Prudence Lattice and young Susan Packer, who were turning over (with that quick, unsatisfying unconsciousness with which the overweight eat) pages of the same sugary romance. No, Dingleyans were reading because, unlike God and unlike the periscopes made by Dingley Optical Instruments, they could not see around corners; because from any one perspective life is so much less full than fiction and so much more painful. Safe in fiction, they were testing their hearts.

  Some Dingleyans read not for delight but for instruction, as Evelyn Troyes now read sheet music for voice and violin lent her by Cecil Hedgerow. As Ida Sniffell now sat in bed underlining inspiration in Like Your Life! while in the kitchen her husband, Coleman, read, with gloomy satisfaction, the artificial ingredients on a can of just-spread sandwich spread. For instruction, Dr. Deeds (escaping the endless gin game between her grandfather and William Bredforet) read what little the Argyle Hospital library had to offer on the collapse of the heart. Ruth had disappointed Dr. Scaper when she'd told him it would be impossible for her to extend her vacation beyond Tuesday. She promised to keep in touch, to pass on, when he sent them, his patients' files and the results of the dog's autopsy. She advised him, however, to request an official investigation by epidemiologists from state or federal agencies. Meanwhile, she'd talk with her colleagues. Of course, she reminded him, the experts might find a perfectly obvious explanation. There might be no new disease at all. And even if there were, to isolate a rare factor like a variant Q Fever might take months, might take years; would take money, might never happen; an antibiotic might never be found. So much depended upon the haphazard coincidence of skill and luck. But she could not promise to stay, or to come back. In all honesty, she didn't think she'd want to come live in Dingley Falls to inherit his general practice. In all honesty, she preferred the frontier campfire to the bedside lamp. He told her, "Keep us in mind, quarter of a century or so from now. Come back, see if you don't feel different."

  At midnight, high in the hawk's nest from which for so many years she had sat brooding over her town, Ramona Dingley lay encased in the clear plastic oxygen tent in the middle of her massive mahogany four-poster that her father, Ignatius, had inherited from his mother, Bridget. Ramona's eyes were closed, her breath a soft sigh. Around her sat Orchid O'Neal, and a hired nurse that Sammy Smalter had insisted upon, and the druggist himself, and Father Jonathan Fields. Orchid was telling her beads, the nurse was working a crossword puzzle, Jonathan was repeatedly reading to himself the Visitation of the Sick.

  From time to time he looked over at the old woman. At one point her eyes flicked open, caught his, and then (or at least so it seemed to the curate) she winked at him. Of course, it might have been an involuntary twitch, but in memory, Jonathan always preferred his interpretation. He had winked back and broadly grinned.

  On the other side of the room, near the bureau crowded with her trophies, Ramona's closest friend, her kinsman Sammy, sat holding his book of Browning persistently before his eyes until he could compel himself to see the words. Daily for most of his life Smalter had relentlessly trained his will to let go, without a futile and so unseemly struggle, of unfulfillable desires. He had let go of the love of Judith Haig without ever thinking it could be his. He had lost her again to Winslow Abernathy. He knew this with all certainty, whether the two yet knew it or not; for love, though its eyes are steeled, swoops down like a falcon, unerringly on the heart. Yet, Judith's assault by the unforgivable Barnum, and her near death, in some ways as painful to him as anything in his life could be, Smalter had borne without a sign. Or so he thought; though both Judith and Winslow, and even Polly Hedgerow, had seen that he loved her.

  This afternoon Smalter had gone briefly to the hospital with flowers, had expressed briefly his sympathy to Mrs. Haig, had tapped briefly her hands as he left, and when she placed her hand briefly on top of his had allowed himself to think no more about it than he could bear; just as, when he lost Ramona, the closest person to his heart, he would risk missing her no more than he could bear to. Now the pharmacist forced his eyes to reread the first line of poetry on a page he had stared at for hours, to reread it again and again until the words came into focus.

  In bed, Winslow Abernathy did not see the words on his page either. That carried on such fragile wings, Judith Haig had passed over death was also the subject of his thoughts. That and planning how to tell her tomorrow that she didn't need to share with him the literal facts of what had really happened at John Haig's house beside the highway. Winslow would say
to her that the gift lay in her desire to tell him. He would say that he with fear and happiness accepted that gift. But he would explain that he had taken vows to the principle of the law, and that if the words were spoken to say that Maynard Henry had violated the law, then Winslow would have to act on those words. If the words were not spoken, he could not, of course, hear them. Winslow smiled at this legalistic threading of his moral maze; the technique was one learned from reading Thomas More. Hand resting on the book that moved gently on his thin chest, Winslow, falling down into sleep, smiled too at the fact that he knew just what he felt. The technique, he acknowledged, was one he had learned from listening to Beatrice Dingley.

  Far from Dingley Falls, surrounded by dozens of library books on American history, Richard Rage stared at a scratched-out scribbled page. On it were written the first lines of the long poem about Beanie's family line, the poem with which he would hand their child an inheritance:

  Harried out of their land by Laud's command,

  By gaudy strictures on the heart of faith;

  Borne westward on a wave of protestations,

  They set up their arks in a somber sea And started to sell us America.

  Sleepily, he kept looking at the words while he ate his eraser. It was hard work being a poet with traditions. Rich yawned, scratched his tawny gold beard, and wriggled his toes against Big Mutt at the foot of the bed. Then filled with thanksgiving, he hugged his muse.

  She had fallen asleep already and happily he joined her.

  Beanie was dreaming of Rich jouncing down the sidewalk with their little daughter high above the blurred crowd, laughing in the crook of his shoulder at the silly jingle of his song. And then in her dream the sidewalks raised up and floated off like ghosts, and grass long buried stirred again out of the earth. And then she was the little daughter high in that safe crook of frail bone and flesh. And the red-gold sweet swirling hair was her father's, and the rumbling sound of song was his voice, at her command rolling his eyes as he sang, "The choo-choo train that takes you / Away from me, you'll never know how sad it makes me. / Toot-toot-tootsie good-bye / Toottoot-tootsie don't cry." And they jounced across Dingley Green until they fell laughing beneath the mammoth copper beech that was, he told her, their "family tree," planted long ago by the man whose statue sat in the stone chair nearby. A family tree that flamed in the fall with the generous color of the Dingleys' hair, a tree whose roots reached for three hundred years down toward the earth primeval.

  Beanie always remembered of her father, first his tawny hair, and next the sound of his voice singing through her childhood. "I Want to Be Happy." And "Barney Google." And when he drove her, shy and teary, to boarding school, he sang "When You Wish upon a Star,"

  while in the backseat her mother kept repacking all of Beanie's new bags and telling her to do a hundred things that had she been a southern belle, and half a foot shorter, she might have been able to do. And Beanie had always thought, that sad December in 1941 after her father had been killed at Pearl Harbor, how much her dad would have liked the new song, "White Christmas," which all the people of Dingley Falls gathered to sing together around the town tree that stood without lights that year, and in the next few dark years of the war. Stood with only a gold star at its top, like the gold stars in the windows of more and more houses in Dingley Falls and Madder. A tall native spruce that grew not far from where Elijah Dingley had planted his copper beech and blessed it with a long laugh and a short prayer: God keep us in health and heart. God keep us in bread and ale. God keep us at home and out of the hands of the godly.

  Whenever Rich sang, Beanie would think of her father and of those singers standing together on the Dingley Green in the cold night of that Christmas, 1941, when America with its snug and warm, silly heart joined a world at war for what it promised was the last time.

  In celebration of the town's rescue from fire, song and laughter kept local bartenders busy everywhere except at the Dingley Club, where only a few people played bridge. But at the Prim Minster, a piano and a banjo came free with drinks. At reopened Mama Marco's, pizzas spun in the air and beer whizzed into jugs, while on the record player Mel Torme sang as loudly as he could. Noisiest of all was Fred's Fries, where the Grabaski cousins fought each other, and a local rock band, with Tony Treeca on drums and Jimmy MacDermott on lead guitar, fought hard against conversation. Most of the attempted talk was about the fire, and about Cecil Hedgerow's valor. Some Madderites went so far as to say they'd like to see Hedgerow running the town, making something useful of it, bringing it jobs, getting its highway connected to the world outside it, stirring things up like in the stories of the old days when Congressman Luke Madder had been alive.

  At home Sarah MacDermott was also thinking, parenthetically, of Cecil Hedgerow, but in tears. Sarah, in her robe of black zigzags on cheap white nylon, sat on a child's plastic chair beside the lower bunk of her little Francis, who kept having nightmares no matter how much she loved him. Mrs. MacDermott was crying because it looked as if finally, after three generations, an O'Reilly would own land in America. She, Sarah O'Reilly MacDermott, could bring her family out of Madder and set them down on garden furniture on the patio of that little Cape Cod through which Cecil Hedgerow had often walked her. Right there on Pilgrim Boulevard in Astor Heights.

  But what horror entangled this gift of a lifetime! Joe, now acting police chief, would beyond doubt be officially appointed to that post at the town meeting called for next week. And his salary would rise so that the bank could not refuse them the mortgage. And so the dream of her heart's preeminent desire was to come true, but at, God bless him, poor Hawk's expense. Poor Hawk's big salary was going to make their dreams come true, not his. While he lay all alone in the cold ground, with his beautiful house that he never should have built out in the wilderness burned to a crisp over his corpse. And worst of all his beautiful wife, that if Sarah could trust her intuitions, hadn't even loved Hawk in the first place for some reason, his poor dear wife lying in her hospital bed, snatched right out of the grim jaws of death not a moment too soon after being dragged through hell on earth, and what's more, no home or husband to go home to, and the post office itself shutting down even if Judith had the strength to get her old job back, which she didn't. And even though Judith had told her this morning that Maynard hadn't done it, and had even held her hands and said, "Sarah, stop saying this was your fault. It wasn't."

  Still, Mrs. MacDermott would never get over this in a thousand years, and that's what she'd said to Chinkie in the A&P today, and at least Chinkie'd had the human feelings, even if she was an Orientaler, to say she was grateful for what Judith had tried to do to get Maynard out of jail. No, she'd never get over it in a million years.

  But what can we do but grin and bear it? First thing to do was get Judith well, and then move her in with them. Orchid could make room until they got the new house, which would really be part Judith's anyhow, if you looked at it that way. And then, time would just have to heal all wounds And God's good mercy. And Sarah, weeping, took from her pocket a bunched strip of toilet paper, blew her nose as noiselessly as possible, and kissed her sleeping son. Well, Jesus bless us; Hawk voted most likely to succeed, and, Judith, best-looking. Well. Sarah vowed to go first thing in the morning to early Mass to ask the Blessed Virgin to whisper in God's ear a special word of kindness for her best friend, Judith Haig, and at the same time, if it didn't sound too awful, special thanks for getting her that little Cape Cod with the patio, for bringing her out of Madder and into the promised land of property she could call her own.

  Mrs. MacDermott's spiritual adviser, Father Patrick Crisp, was also thinking tonight of Judith. He had visited her this evening at the hospital, where he had chastised a reporter who had sneaked into her room with a tape recorder to ask what it felt like to be raped and lose her husband. Father Crisp had known Judith since the year of her birth. That is, the year she was found by the then young priest beneath a Station of the Cross at the Church of Our Lady of Mercy.
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  It had been beneath the Station depicting Simon the Cyrenean's carrying Christ's Cross for him that the mother (perhaps consciously, more likely by the divinity of coincidence) had put down her burden in its cardboard box. This girl, Judith's mother, left Dingley Falls the next day, Holy Saturday, and went to Ontario, where she married an older man for whom she had cared as a practical nurse, and after he died, had married again, and had had other children. No one in town knew the parentage of Judith Haig, whom the nuns took in. The old town librarian Gladys Goff, neatly stitching together her genealogical quilts of the best families, knew nothing of wholly private connections and would not have sewn in such names if she had. For Judith's mother had herself been illegitimate, the only child of a Madder factory girl whom one of the sons of one of daughters of Charles Bradford Dingley III had seduced at the Optical Instruments factory where the young man was then the young girl's supervisor.

  And so by birth, though not by title, Judith's mother's maternal grandmother had been that housekeeper, that Irish parlormaid named Bridget Quin, for whose bridal gift the asthmatic and uxorious Charles Dingley III had built, to his mother's fury, that huge, white Victorian wedding cake of a house where Sammy Smalter now sat beside his kinswoman, Ramona Dingley, last to live by that family name the whole town shared. As a child, Judith had imagined being plucked from the orphanage by a noble inheritance, like the heroines of romance. It had never happened. She would never inherit a family name or a family past. Still, she had inherited her mother's height and figure. She had inherited her father's arresting good looks, particularly the remarkable gas-flame blue of his eyes. For Judith's father was William Bredforet.