Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  "Jonathan. Ahem. Good." Saar coughed. After having noticed Mrs. Blanchard Troyes parked in her enormous Chrysler across the lane from his house, he had placed his binoculars back on the window seat beside an unopened Birds of New England. The two men had been planning for two months a choral concert to be performed at St. Andrew's Church by the Alexander Hamilton Academy Choir on Whitsunday, when Father Fields would accompany the boys on the magnificent organ that Timothy Dingley had ordered from London just before the Revolutionary War.

  "I've heard you play it only once," said Saar, as he mournfully sipped tomato juice. "The Evensong when your Almighty pulled me inside by the ear like a child and sat me down in a corner pew. Bach!

  Here, I'm subjected to hours of amplified howls bellowing out of every dorm, sounds that make me feel old and fragile and approaching the climax of a nervous breakdown."

  Startled by Saar's use of the word climax (had he been overheard, overseen, in the bathroom?), Fields stuttered, blushing, "Maybe, you know, if you like, I could play for you sometime, though I'm not really very good."

  The truth was that Saar agreed with this modest appraisal. He knew music. The curate played with no self-esteem, and so without conviction. But he couldn't say that, so he said, "Jonathan, you should modify your mea culpas, really. All afternoon I've listened to you lacerate yourself as an unworthy priest, an unworthy counselor to the many, many people who insist on your help, an unworthy son, an unworthy friend. Really, your unworthiness is becoming a megalomania."

  "I'm sorry. I guess I've been monopolizing the conversation."

  "There! Again. Now, how about Thursday here in the chapel?

  You play for me. Lights out at ten, and I'll let old Oglethorpe beat the boys back into their beds alone—though it is my favorite duty of the day, of course." The headmaster smiled. His headache throbbed, and he was deeply suspicious of his motives in not mentioning to Father Fields that Mrs. Troyes was parked outside, apparently awaiting him.

  "I'd like that," Jonathan murmured. "Thursday." His heart leaped against his ribs.

  The headmaster and the curate had been in love for almost a year. Their erotic feelings (unlike those of Evelyn Troyes and Sloan Highwick) were more or less known to themselves, but not to each other—at least not with sufficient certainty to warrant a declaration.

  Each, fearing the other's disapprobation, offered no clues whose meaning could not be denied. That it should not require two months to plan a quarter-hour recital was such a clue, one that forced itself upon the attention, finally, even of the innocent rector, who terrified his curate one evening by observing, "Jonathan, I would bet you anything you like that all this choir business is nothing but a sham. It's you Walter wants. Yes, I can always spot it. He's on his way to God and is afraid to confess it for fear of looking like a fool. So many intellectual fellows are, poor things. But that man is seeking conversion, and you, dear boy, are the tool of our Lord."

  Finding that the Dingley Falls post office was for some reason locked, Beanie Abernathy had no idea what to do with Rich Rage, who sat contentedly in her Seville munching on Mrs. A.A. Hayes's tuna salad on toast and asking Beanie questions about her life.

  Should she proceed with the architectural tour? Should she take him immediately to the country club, where his original hostess, Priss Ransom's daughter Kate, was playing tennis with Evelyn Troyes's daughter Mimi? Rage told her he had no desire to do either, so she drove him to Argyle, seven miles south, where she knew there to be a bigger post office. Unless Monday, May 31, was a national holiday commemorating something neither she nor Mr. Rage could recall, it was sure to be open.

  Dreary, dirty Argyle made Rage want a drink. He took her to a macho bar. "Love 'em," the poet told his guide. "Saw a merchant marine in a place like this in the Battery; downed a pint of hooch on an empty stomach; his capillaries closed up on him and he keeled over dead, right at the feet of the guy that had challenged him to do it. Checked out, whap, on the floor, like that! That's life."

  "And death," said Beanie, who did not know what either hooch or capillaries meant. She shrunk her ample form against the corner of their greasy booth, for Rage was rubbing her leg with his lively tweed knee.

  Three blocks away, Beanie's friend Evelyn sat in the ophthalmologist's waiting room, waiting for the young curate whom she had brought there after collecting him from Walter Saar. In the interim she memorized the danger signs for glaucoma, unable to decide whether she had all or none of them. In the office itself Jonathan Fields, itchy in his still-gummy jockey shorts, spotted the appropriate letters on cue from Carl Marco, Jr., whose chest pressed briefly against the curate's face and evoked, to Fields's dismay, an unconscionable fantasy of being fellatioed against his will after having been shackled to the examining chair by the virile ophthalmologist.

  "'Scuse me, Father, let me just get in here a sec and lower this gizmo," said Dr. Marco, who had sexual problems of his own, as he took this confessional proximity to explain, for he was going to have to marry his receptionist before the end of her first trimester. "My father's just about to bust a gut, Father. You know? Maybe I shouldn't have told him, just gotten it over with. Tie the old knot. What do you think?"

  What was he supposed to think? "I think it's always best to be as open as you can. Do you, well, love her?"

  "Oh, sure, yeah, sure, I guess so. She's okay. But the thing is, she's not Catholic, so, well, you know. My father is. Real gung-ho. So he's in a bind, you know. I mean abortion is no-go. Well, hell." The young doctor's grin looped above his white tunic. "I got out of Vietnam, I guess you can't get out of everything. You know? Don't blink."

  "Jonathan! How terribly nice," cried Mrs. Troyes when the trim, curly-haired cleric burst upon her like a night in Reno with his tinted contact lenses. Yes, he had time to share a quick cocktail with her at Dingley Falls's Old Towne Inn. So Evelyn's heart was full as she floored the Chrysler and left behind Argyle and Beanie Abernathy, unseen at the intersection, in the blur of her rearview mirror.

  chapter 4

  Dingley Falls's own Dr. Scaper, big as a bear and deaf as a post, telephoned Judith Haig. She wasn't at home. "Wonder, by God, if something isn't poisoning folks in this town. Those tests on that woman don't make sense," he boomed at his nurse, Ida Sniffell, who ignored him. She was reading a book on how to pay more attention to yourself than to others. "Call Sam Smalter," he boomed again. "Tell him to get this prescription made up for Mrs. Haig. Okay? Hell's bells, you listening to me at all, Ida?"

  He got a nod, which was all the book allowed her to give.

  Judith Haig wasn't at home because she was standing in the checkout line of the Madder A&P. West of Goff Street (which, as precisely as Marxism, scissored Dingley Falls into class sectors known as Dingley and Madder) everyone had his groceries delivered by Carl Marco, Sr. Those who lived east of Goff in Madder had to shop for themselves. Mrs. Haig's clerk at the A&P was Sarah MacDermott, who would have also been her best friend had Judith allowed herself one. For though Mrs. MacDermott had plenty of other people to absorb the volubility that bounced about inside her like popcorn against a pan lid, she had chosen Judith in the eighth grade and would not give her up. And, since Sarah's husband, Joel, was Chief John "Hawk" Haig's assistant, the two women shared the law as in-laws. That such was the full extent of their commonality was an abyss over which Sarah MacDermott could leap fearlessly because she had never noticed the gap.

  "Men and women, Jesus bless us." The gum-chewing Mrs. MacDermott now began, with her typical preamble, to put Judith in touch with the day's gossip. "Chinkie Henry was just in here with a black eye, proud as the Pope she was of it too, if you ask me. A black eye on a Orientaler, if you can picture that! She told me, I had to ask her, that Maynard did it. Her own husband. And, what's more, he rammed Raoul Treeca right over Wild Oat Ridge, broke both his legs and totally destroyed his Chevy pickup."

  Judith Haig glanced up from her canned goods to the cash register as Sarah, without once looking at either, flawl
essly rang up her carefully chosen purchases. The man in line behind her ostentatiously juggled three boxes of frozen fish and glared irritably at Sarah for talking with a customer.

  "Who?" Judith finally asked.

  "Who what?" clacked Sarah as she shoveled an armful of cans toward the bag boy. "Watch the rice, Luke, hole in it. Maynard Henry. He caught Raoul Treeca trying to run off with his wife, with Chinkie. Chin. The Saigon girl that the Grabaski cousins, you know, brought back from Vietnam last year and set up in that trailer where they took turns with her or all went in together for all I know. We'll never get the nitty-gritty on that one, and of course you can't understand a word Chinkie's saying anyhow, even if she would tell you."

  "That's all," said Judith palely, pushing a slab of meat toward Luke, then opening her purse. It was, in fact, too much. She remembered pictures. A highway of black-hatted bodies running in slow motion, like Fantasia mushrooms afloat in a flooded river. Televised races to escape torched homes, bodies running from one enemy to another, carts heaped high with grandparents and bicycles, some too old, too young, too unlucky, crumpled dead into ditches, the spaces they left in the crowd gone in an instant. The black-and-white picture pushed its way across Judith Haig's eyes as she tried to listen to what Sarah was saying. Such pictures (images seen on television, stories told her) often assaulted her mind without warning and were, she suspected, among the causes of her heart condition. She dreaded their coming, as epileptics dread the look of light that foreshadows seizure.

  Still talking, Sarah jabbed out a final sequence of buttons, and the drawer binged open. "Look at that! Forty-eight forty. People should refuse, just refuse to pay these prices. It's criminal. They're strangling us."

  "Yes."

  "Well, what can we do, we have to eat."

  "Yes."

  "Anyhow, let me finish. Maynard found out about it, he'd been overseas, too—haven't I told you this before?"

  "No, I don't think so."

  "Joined the Marines in Argyle. Anyhow, they say he beat up both those Polacks, took Chinkie off, and made her Mrs. Maynard Henry that very month. A year later, this happens. Well, I could have warned him. Stick to your own." Sarah counted out change. "Sorry, honey, but that's it, not enough silver to hold down the eyes on a dead man. My boy, Jimmy, he saw Raoul hitching Maynard's trailer to his pickup, ran over to Fred's Fries, and told Maynard he'd better come see. Maynard caught up to them slowing down for the ridge—just outdrove them—run them into the shoulder, jerked Chinkie out, unhitched the trailer, and then just shoved Raoul, still sitting like a fool in his pickup, wetting his tight pants." Sarah took a breath with gusto. "And, like I say, right over the top. Both legs and three ribs snapped like wishbones on a chicken. Right near your house."

  "I don't know him," said Mrs. Haig. She watched the boy organize her groceries into their bags; he chose among possibilities like an artist with collage materials. Sarah helped him squeeze the bags into the pushcart.

  "Oh, Judith, you went to school with Maynard's big brother, Arn. Arn Henry? Scored twice for Dixwell in the playoffs our senior year?" Exasperated, Mrs. MacDermott blew a puff of air up to her yellow bangs. "We were standing right there in the bleachers when Hawk threw him the pass!"

  "I'm sorry, Sarah, I don't remember."

  "On the Blessed Virgin, Judith, it amazes me you can remember who you are sometimes."

  Sometimes it amazed Mrs. Haig, too. And sometimes she couldn't.

  "Why, Hawk and Joe arrested Maynard for assault this morning.

  What's come over you? Wait a minute, where are you going?"

  "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm not feeling well. Dr. Scaper seems to think there may be something the matter with my heart." Having offered this information in order to placate her friend, Mrs. Haig then disappeared while Sarah MacDermott, who had turned to the fuming customer, called over her shoulder, "What? Jesus bless us.

  Judith! Judith! Wait a minute, what did you say? Your heart? Listen, honey, I'll call you! And Coleman Sniffell, you just keep your pants on!"

  Judith Haig walked quietly home to fix up her house for her husband, Hawk, who apparently had been out arresting someone she should have known. She had no trouble on the way. The dogs did not know that the post office was always closed on Memorial Day and were not expecting her to cross Falls Bridge until after five.

  chapter 5

  "What's your real name? No mother names her beauty 'Beanie.'" Rich Rage was trying to get to know his bewildered guide, Mrs. Abernathy, who, pointing out points of interest as they drove back through Dingley Falls, referred to each simply as, "That's an old house over there to your left," or, "There's an old house on your right."

  Mesmerized by the bumpy-road rhythm of Beanie's ample bosom, Rage looked at none of this history. Both he and she had left behind the stiffness of sobriety in the macho bar where, on top of the Thespian Ladies' daiquiris consumed earlier, they had drunk three Scotches each while discovering that Beanie liked shelling peanuts, driving cars, playing most sports, baking bread; liked children, animals, colors, cloth, and walking in the woods. She had never said so before; the questions had never been asked. She liked wood shavings, dancing, the mountains, the ocean, fire, and clouds; she had loved to feed, rock, diaper, and play with her twin sons when they were babies; she had waited for them to come home from school when they were older so that they could do things together. She liked to hammer, cut with scissors, polish silver, and fix broken things. She liked to sink in leaves or snow or goosedown. She liked, he summarized, physical sensations.

  And, she thought to herself with surprise, she liked Rich Rage.

  "Your name stand for Sabrina?" he asked the buttons on her cashmere blazer.

  "Beatrice," admitted Beanie.

  "Hell, that's even better. Dante tears the balls off Milton any day.

  Mine's really Richard Rage. I mean, it's not a personal statement.

  They called me 'Dickie.' So Beatrice, meet snivelly, scared little Dickie Rage from St. Louis. Acne left not a trace on my face, for the scars went deeper."

  "Richard," said Beanie.

  "I like the way you say it."

  "Richard," said Beatrice again.

  Having filled over fifty bags for Sarah MacDermott and then signed out at the A&P, Luke Packer was following Joy Strummer home. He kept his distance by staring intently at the sky whenever the girl, her movie magazine rolled in her hand, dawdled to coo at her stupid cocker spaniel or to strip a hedge branch of its leaves in one swift upward pull. Half a block behind, he was uncommitted but ready to rush forward if danger should assail her, which Luke despaired of its ever doing in this stupid dump of a town.

  Down Glover's Lane they strolled on opposite sides of the street where Joy lived with her family next door to Polly Hedgerow. And it was now not her own but Polly's house (like hers, newer and so less affluent than the houses on Elizabeth Circle) that Joy Strummer entered. Across the lane from the Hedgerows', Luke sat down on the Hayeses' front porch, patiently spinning on one finger the basketball that his friend Tac Hayes kept ready beside the door. Basketball bored Luke. "You got the height. You got the hands," the Dixwell coach had blurted in front of the entire gym class one day. "But you don't got it up here." Tap to the head. "Or in here." Thud to the heart. "That's where it counts, Packer, up here and in here!"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Get your tail in gear, Packer." But he knew he wouldn't, though Joy had gone out at least six times with Tac, who had nothing to offer but the letter on his sweater. Sports would not be Luke's ticket out of town and into the world.

  Sooner than he had hoped, the two girls came down the Hedgerows' broken porch steps. Round, creamy, blond Joy, and that sarcastic bloodhound, that freckled wire, Polly Hedgerow. They dawdled back up Glover's Lane toward Dingley Green. Behind them padded Joy's doting spaniel. Behind him, with a preoccupied look, strolled Luke.

  "Luke Packer's following you," Polly whispered, placing her copy of Anna Karenina on her head. "He's been doing it
for days."

  "I know," replied Joy dreamily.

  "He's a jerk."

  "Maybe."

  Circling the green clockwise, as they had always done on oddnumbered days, Polly and Joy tried to hurry past Barnum's Antiques, Hobbies, and Appliances store before slick-haired Mr. Barnum, who was holding the door open to let old Miss Lattice out, could get up close and breathe his mouthwash on them.

  But, "Hi there, girls," he gurgled, so they had to stop. "Guess they gave you a break from school today, huh, Joy? I saw you taking it easy up there on the statue."

  "There's never any school on Founder's Day, Mr. Barnum," Polly answered for her friend. "And besides, all that's left is exams tomorrow. A dog just got into your store."

  As Barnum charged back inside, Polly sneered, "Wouldn't you hate it if he tried to cop a feel? I bet he'd love to get next to a girl and cop a feel. That's what guys call it. Ray Ransom is always trying."

  "On you?" Joy smiled with tolerant disbelief.

  "Don't be sick, no. Suellen Hayes told me."

  "Oh, her." Joy watched herself, reflected in the glass windows of the Tea Shoppe; as she floated by, her silvery blue, starry T-shirt shimmied with light. "Listen, I don't want to stay too long, okay? I feel rotten."

  "You don't look like you feel bad."

  "I look awful," sighed Joy, who knew otherwise.

  Joy had changed, Polly thought, puzzled and a little sad. She no longer said, "Oh, vomit!" when the boys from Alexander Hamilton Academy invaded Miss Lattice's restaurant like a Wall Street panic of underaged stockbrokers in their striped ties and gray blazers. She no longer wanted to ride her bike or explore Birch Forest. No, now she lingered at her locker, happily penned there by a lanky circle of long arms and legs. She stayed in her room listening to records endlessly repeated. Now, she sighed and daydreamed, her phone was always busy, her grades were even worse than before. Polly was losing her best friend to a genetic mechanism that had pulled the switch on the dam and let loose a lake of hormones in which Joy now floated placidly but inexorably to a destiny that in Polly still elicited a defiant "Oh, vomit!"