Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  All the other solitary people in Dingley Falls were proof of that truism of human nature which the rector chanced to avoid. For all of them thought they would be happier if they did not live alone.

  Indeed, they saw in their solitude the very source of everything that kept them from utter and lasting satisfaction with life. Among those on whom the untimed silence and unchanged space of loneliness weighed so heavily that they felt they must keep in continual motion to escape being numbed, the most frightened were Evelyn Troyes and Walter Saar. An odd pair, the elegant headmaster and the petite widow, though they shared the added coincidence of escaping solitude with music while wishing to escape it in the company of the curate, Jonathan Fields, who spent far more time with Father Highwick than with either of them. Of course, Jonathan was scared, too, and knew that Highwick was safer: he was demanding, but his demands could be met, for the rector wanted time, not love, which costs more. Jonathan earnestly believed that his happiness lay in a life shared daily with a lover, but he deceived himself in this assumption, for his wiser self had actually chosen well for him. As a bachelor priest he could give a little to a lot without giving the whole lot (himself) to anyone, which was what he mistakenly thought he longed to do—if only he were not so insecure and so much in demand.

  But Walter Saar and Evelyn Troyes were ready to make such gifts. They were honestly unsuited to living alone. Evelyn had managed to avoid it for more than forty years, having proceeded directly from her childhood home to a conservatory dormitory to an elopement with Hugo Eroica to a marriage with Blanchard. In fact, she had scarcely so much as slept in a solitary bedroom and had never, until her daughter, Mimi, abandoned her for college, lived in an entire house by herself. She wasn't used to it and she didn't like it.

  Evelyn knew best who she was through a man's response; without the boundaries of a male surrounding her, her identity seemed to her to drift away into vapor. She could not define herself.

  Walter Saar, on the other hand, was quite used to living alone, but he didn't like it either. Yet consciousness of his vast desire for love ("If unrestrained, I would darn some dear man's socks with my teeth") held him in check. Less conscious that he wanted, even more than a chance to be loved, a chance to love, to give away a heart that was too enlarged for comfort, he played the profligate prodigal even to himself, imprisoning with barbs of wit that "disgustingly domestic sensibility" of which he was so ashamed, fearing rightly that if his heart got loose it would embarrass him by espousing, in a loud, tacky voice, such unsophisticated clichés as monogamy, fidelity, hope, and, God forbid, faith.

  The loneliness then of Walter Saar and Evelyn Troyes was singleminded. In that regard, it was unlike the solitude of Dr. Otto Scaper, who missed a wife in the past but was otherwise reasonably content, and of Sidney Blossom, who missed a wife in the future but was otherwise moderately capable of enjoying himself. It was different from the loneliness of Tracy Canopy, who would have been wretched on a desert island with Vincent but without a phone to call her many acquaintances, or a post office from which to receive her many catalogs, or a committee in which to exchange her many ideas. It was different from the loneliness of Prudence Lattice, who had lost hope, or of Sammy Smalter, who had never allowed himself to have much, or of Winslow Abernathy, who had had only one day to assimilate solitude, or of Judith Haig, who found it impossible to assimilate anything else, or of Limus Barnum, whose need was so mammoth that no one person, no number of people, could fill it, and whose anger at not being filled was so naked that everyone looked the other way.

  All these people lived alone in Dingley Falls and were convinced that happiness lived in more crowded houses. They should have seen A.A. Hayes drive, slightly intoxicated, enviously past the bachelor quarters of Sidney Blossom, on his way home to four children he failed to understand and a wife whose proximity was more painful because his love—which in the beginning he had thought as enduring as marble—had not yet entirely been worn away by the oceans of rage that beat against it. They should have heard Sarah MacDermott long for the silence of Judith Haig if only for the two minutes it would take her to remember what her name was. They should have noticed Priss Ransom hurriedly suppress the thought that while Ernest was for the most part agreeably unobtrusive, he would be entirely so should he join Vincent Canopy and leave her, like Tracy, her own woman. They should have listened to the awe with which many of Walter Saar's students spoke of his wit and style and courage to stay free. They should have eavesdropped on Coleman Sniffell.

  But they didn't. And besides, knowledge is no cure for envy. The incontestable proof of history that wealth and fame and youth are no sources of happiness in no real way lessened Hawk Haig's desire for wealth or A.A. Hayes's desire for fame or Ramona Dingley's desire for youth, and for the same trite and true reasons, no evidence of their neighbors' misery could stop Dingleyans from envying one another.

  "Such is Life," Sloan Highwick would say, and return to his roses.

  CONCERNING LETTERS

  The power of the post office is awful. There stands Judith Haig, sorting lives, collecting decisions, distributing possibilities. In the hands of a satanic humorist, or even a careless carrier (Mrs. Haig is neither), futures could be randomly redistributed, happiness returned to its sender, undelivered. Mail that is government-inspected (and microfilmed, too) has always seemed scary to A.A. Hayes. But now he has also begun to worry about Dingley Falls's anonymous letters.

  As he told himself, when slightly intoxicated: "Some sadistic bastard is hand-stamping on the scribbles of the human heart. And we can no more escape what's being said about us than we can escape that bully the telephone, or that s.o.b. the IRS."

  None of the townspeople have reported these written slanders officially to Chief Haig in order that the culprit might be legally pursued, though gossip about the letters has been rampant. Few people prefer to have even a maniac's analysis of their psyches read into a public court record. Particularly when the analysis is so compellingly negative, and at least possibly true. A.A. Hayes, for example, could easily have written his to himself: "You chicken-snot snob. You loser.

  Why don't you kill your wife? She's killing you. You like that? Hard to kill a dead man, right, pal? No-ball liberal." Hayes could go even further: "As Lime says (nobody's all bad), someone ought to get on the stick. Am I so morally lackadaisical, so stripped of ambition, that a scoop can be flung in my face like a chocolate pie and not arouse in me even the curiosity to comment, 'Ah, chocolate'? Apparently so. Some paranoid! I have let drop the dropping of the highway, the breaking of my window, the smashup of my life, without so much as a who, what, when, where, or how. Not to mention why. Some journalist! Some spy! Don't I care? Apparently not. My whole life could go by while I sat on the pot reading Journal of the Plague Year with the door locked to keep the world away."

  The editor knew of a half-dozen other Dingleyans who had received the letters. But there were still others he had not heard of:

  Priss Ransom, who had said "Ha!" to it all, had said so only to Tracy Canopy. Tracy had not shared with a living soul the anonymous accusation that she was a fool. Evelyn Troyes was still waiting for an opportunity to ask Priss or Tracy exactly what she should make of the following: "Your Juicy Fruit Father Field's a faggot. You bore him stiff.

  He'd like to get sucked stiff. Not by you."

  Sammy Smalter had laughed at his—he'd heard worse. And Beanie Abernathy had thrown hers away without brooding on its evidently prophetic advice, which was: "You itch, Mrs. A. Lawyur can't reach it, can he? I'd like to suck those big tits. You got a itch.

  You got to scratch it."

  While Hayes was starting to worry about these letters, there were, of course, other letters threatening Dingley Falls, just as anonymous and far more dangerous than those smutty misspelled ones that dispensed both with the post office and with the postmistress, who had never received one. There were literal letters far more harmful than words. Words, a child knows, can break no bones.

/>   The secret service behind the secret base is abbreviated. (No country ever spells its secrets out.) Here in the U.S.A. we have long had whole anonymous alphabets to save us from the likes of the KGB of the USSR, and from one another. Operation Archangel is thought to be run by the DDT—the Department of Dirty Tricks division of the CIA division of the OSS. DIA says NIC threw them some money. NIE has them on record. The INR and the AEC have the OSS under surveillance, and the FBI has the INR and the AEC on file. But, despite this sticky web of connections, the continued operation of Operation Archangel has escaped the notice of all those responsible for it.

  The most outspoken enthusiast of new experiments in deterrent virology (or biological warfare) had been from the beginning the big former tackle of Rose Bowl renown, Commander Hector Brickhart of NIC. He shot from the hip and said everybody else should, too. With regard to the Virilization of Defense, as he misheard the phrase, he saw a great future in it. "This stuff is a damn sight bigger than all the nukes in the sea. This thing gets out of hand, and, let's face it square in the face, we can kiss the whole shithouse adios amigos." By "the whole shithouse" the commander meant the world as we know it. By "this thing" he meant, of course, Operation Archangel.

  In its first year the secret base was able to report a few practical tests. The facts, as Commander Brickhart asked for them on a personal visit to the base, and as the chief of staff, Dr. Svatopluk, gave them to him, were these: bacterial and viral pathogens of intensified virulence can be produced, preserved, and safely transported to their destination. Some pathogens, for example, are airborne, so that a man on a subway with a nasal decongestant atomizer could (theoretically) easily release into the crowded air, for example, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or Neisseria meningitidis, or Streptococcus pyo genes, or Diplococcus pneumoniae. All of which Viralization of Defense came down to what Commander Brickhart thought he might as well call "pretty damn mean medicine." All of which, Dr. Svatopluk told him, were "crude," "obvious," and "uninteresting," very much like (he told his staff) the military mind. "My word above," snapped Dr. Svatopluk, "those missile-happy jock brains have got bomb releases for their sphincter muscles! TNT or toxins, it's all the same to them. Fly low and drop a load!"

  Commander Brickhart had been very impatient with the head of the operation. He wanted something that worked, and he wanted it now! Svatopluk tried facetiousness: "Don't you think it might be a teensy bit suspicious, Commander, if all of Moscow woke up one morning with meningitis, and every Commie in Indochina simultaneously dropped dead of TB?" Facetiousness had no more effect on Hector Brickhart than had an Ohio State offensive guard. He got a little hot under the collar, he tried bribery, he tried insults of a crude and obvious sort. Nothing would induce Dr. Svatopluk to mass-market his germs until they were ready.

  Frankly the scientific team found the notion of viral and bacterial saturation a primitive one. They had tried a little salmonellosis and a little brucellosis, and they knew they worked. It is easy, but uninspired, to food-poison a given population, or fever a control group.

  On the other hand, what if a virus could be developed by modifying the very DNA by which we live, and what if that virus could imperceptibly alter the human heart? And what if no diagnostic test could detect it? And no antitoxin could arrest it? And no one need ever know it was being done?

  Now that, thought Dr. Svatopluk's team, would be interesting; that would be worthy of the chief of Operation Archangel.

  part three

  chapter 23

  Gloria.

  The birds began it. Lift up your heart! Lift up your voice! Rejoice!

  Again, I say, rejoice! Over the marshlands and over the ridge and over Madder the sun came to Dingley Falls. First to watch it rise above the horizon, like a whaling ship come home again, was Ramona on her widow's walk. In her wheelchair she had waited to see the sun coming. "Fill me, radiancy divine. Scatter all my disbelief " was the hymn Ramona Dingley unexpectedly heard.

  Second to greet the sun was the town postman, Alf Marco, who set sail on Lake Pissinowno for the first time in twenty years. Like Nijinsky, a fish leaped to the light.

  The sun twinkled the eyes in the statue of Elijah Dingley, whose lopsided smile had warmed passing centuries, though no one knew whether the sculptor had envisioned the town patriarch as so affable an individual, or whether the mallet had slipped. It no longer mattered, he had grinned for so long.

  Into Judith Haig's bedroom where she slept, and into the trailer park where Chin Lam slept, the sun shone. The sun shone on Sarah MacDermott and William Bredforet alike. The sun shone on wild dogs and watchdogs, on the old grave of Vincent Canopy and the new grave of Scheherazade the cat. The sun shone on the Prim Minster and Fred's Fries. On Elizabeth Circle and on Madder and on Astor Heights, the sun shone on all alike.

  Gloria in excelsis. Gloria tibi, the birds sang.

  Along the garden walk to Morning Song came the sun, and with it Father Highwick, who sang St. Stephen's hymn with a smile. "The King shall come when morning dawns, And light triumphant breaks." The rector's shoe slipped off, and he stooped to tie it. Then away he hummed. "When beauty gilds the eastern hills, And life to Joy awakes.'"

  And on Glover's Lane, Joy to life awakened, for Lance Abernathy was coming to take her for a swim at the Club. On Monday Joy had never ridden in a sports car; on Tuesday she had never been to the Dingley Club; and now on Wednesday, Lance and life and maybe love waited for her outside her room. Anything, everything could happen. Maybe now she would stop feeling so tired and sick all the time, and maybe her mother would stop treating her like a baby, and maybe she would tell Lance she was only almost seventeen instead of the nineteen years she had claimed for herself when he asked.

  Next door to Joy, Polly Hedgerow bounced with an arch of her back out of bed. Today was vacation's first day, that first vacant day undefined by the bells of Dixwell High School. The beginning of time when anything, everything could happen. She pulled on the jeans and T-shirt that she had thrown last night over her wicker chair. Perhaps she would ride her bike alone up to the marshlands.

  Perhaps she would walk along the Rampage, though not up as far as Sidney Blossom's little house on the old train depot. The thought of Mr. Blossom was still embarrassing. Perhaps Miss Dingley, who had asked to see her today, would be like Miss Haversham in Great Expectations and tell her a horrible tale of blighted love.

  Polly was slicing bananas onto a bacon and mayonnaise sandwich when her father stumbled downstairs into the kitchen. Clumsy and snappish with sleep, Cecil Hedgerow squeezed his tie tighter around his neck as if he were trying to hang himself. He looked healthier than he felt. Because his weekdays were spent selling houses in the sun, and his weekends spent chasing the smallmouth bass, Hedgerow's face, neck, hands, and arms to the edge of his short-sleeved shirt were a leathery brown; the rest of his body was gray-white.

  "That's not a breakfast," he said, as he fumbled to remove the twisted wire that sealed the bread.

  "Sure it is. Did you know there're tribes in the Pacific that don't eat anything but yams?"

  "That's not a yam. And you're an American. Eat an egg."

  "Did you know Americans are having heart attacks from eating too many eggs?"

  "Did you know that until I drink this cup of coffee, anything you know is knowing too much?"

  "Coffee's a drug."

  "You think I'd go to the trouble to make it if it weren't? Haven't you been wearing those clothes for a week?"

  "Go ahead, why don't you tell me I didn't comb my hair, and my fingernails are dirty, and my room's dirty, and you can't manage all alone with no cooperation from me, and maybe I should have gone to live with my aunt. Boy, what a grouch!"

  "Well, it's all true." Hedgerow sighed and broke three eggs into a pan. "Maybe I should have gone to live with your aunt. You're the grouch."

  "You started it." His daughter opened the back door, and light raced through the room like a two-year-old. "Look! Cheer up, it's a great day outside."
>
  "Be in the high eighties by noon, and muggy."

  "You ought to think positive, Cecil. You're what they call a melancholy personality."

  "Hmmm," mumbled her father. "Don't call me 'Cecil,' call me 'Daddy.'"

  "Oh, vomit, I'm too old."

  "Well, how 'bout Pop, or Dad, or Sir, or Mr. Hedgerow?"

  "I'll call you Papa, like Natasha calls Count Rostov."

  "Fine." Hedgerow sat down at the brunch counter with his breakfast and bent open his National Geographic to a photograph of anglers in the River Tweed. He wished he were with them.

  "I'm going."

  "Well, don't slam the door, babe."

  "Father Fields said Miss Dingley wanted to see me today."

  "What for?"

  "I dunno. Mysterious."

  "Aren't you going to school?"

  "Oh, Daddy! School's over."

  "Fine."

  The widower watched his only child pedal past the kitchen window, her sandwich clamped in her teeth. She needed a mother.

  Someone who understood female things, like Peggy Strummer, or Evelyn Troyes. She was getting too old for him. Her clothes just didn't look right, her hair wasn't right. Obviously Mrs. Strummer next door explained things to Joy, about appearance and other things. Of course, Polly would never look like Joy, no matter what advice she got, but she had a good head on her shoulders. It was just her bad luck that she'd taken after him and not her mother. He ought to talk to Polly, but he kept putting it off. They just made do day by day, postponing serious cleaning, serious shopping, serious conversation. So the dishes got done, but the sink was grimy; the floor got swept, but cobwebs floated in the corners of the ceilings; their clothes got washed, but not ironed; the lawn mowed, but not seeded; his wife's flowers grew, if they would, without gardening.

  Father or daughter usually had to make an extra trip to Marco's supermarket halfway through fixing a meal.