Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

"Damnation! Will you stop talking like a pickaninny in a minstrel show? That Amos 'n' Andy act of yours burns the fire out of me.

  Why don't you just drive, if you can make out the road, blind as a bat."

  "Why doan you—"

  The glass behind them slid open. "William! Bill! Shut up, please." The glass slid shut. The Bredforets and Bill Deeds, in their eighties, had returned to the egalitarian effrontery of eight-year-olds.

  They lived together in a huge house across the road from the Prim Minster. Strangers often confused the two buildings, and once Bredforet had left a party of six waiting in his front hall for half an hour before he returned to tell them the cook had murdered the dishwasher and there would be no further service that night. William's practical jokes were equally annoying to his wife and his chauffeur, who had been in a conspiracy together for years to keep him reasonably decorous, reasonably faithful, and reasonably sober.

  Deeds, whose son was a CPA and whose granddaughter was a doctor at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, refused to allow his family to retire him and move him to Chicago. His passion was cars, and he knew that if he lived with his son, he wouldn't be permitted, at his age and with his eyesight, to get a driver's license. His other passion was gin rummy, and after a sixty-year tournament, William Bredforet now owed him at least on paper almost $9 million.

  Mary Bredforet told people that the two men had enjoyed bickering together too long for anything but death to shut them up.

  On Elizabeth Circle, Deeds slammed to a stop behind Ramona Dingley's red Firebird. Its tinsel modernity offended him. "Shantytown morning glory," he sneered at the car.

  "You want to sit out here or come inside with us?"

  "Whut I want to sit in there for?"

  "Well, stay out here then. Just keep your nose out from under Ramona's hood."

  "You s'pose' to take your nap at one o'clock. I bet I haf to come git you like always."

  "I bet you better not," said William in a tone that sounded like childish fingers waggled in ears and a tongue stuck out.

  Because Ramona Dingley had been a boisterous girl of ten when the Bredforets had married (in the social event of 1914), the old couple continued to think of her as she had appeared in a corner of their wedding portrait—hanging in her lace dress from the porch fence, one black buttoned shoe kicked out at air—to think of her as someone far too young and agile to be as ill as she now claimed to be:

  "Still fooling around in that wheelchair, Ro? Here, let me take a ride in it."

  "William! Let her have her own motor, for heaven's sake."

  "Thank you, Mary. Be back in a minute. Don't let him set the house on fire." Miss Dingley spun her wheelchair in a tight circle, then putted across the hall to the dining room.

  Wandering through her parlor, Bredforet poked a trim, manicured finger into one of the holes in the life-sized wood carving of Christ that hung on the wall. "Mary, the fact is that Ignatius Dingley was mad as a hatter. The Dingleys have always been dumb, but his screws were loose. Remember, I always said they should have locked him away the first time he saw John the Baptist on the steps of Ransom Bank."

  "Lunch!" Ramona shot into the parlor, then backed out in reverse.

  They gathered at one end of the dark, long table, where William instructed his wife to "tell Ro her niece has run off with a young stallion, bolted off in the night."

  "Know it already," said Ramona. "Heard he was a professor, though. That's what surprised me. Used to think Beanie would marry a sportsman. Sometimes wish I had myself."

  "Don't," old Mrs. Bredforet advised her junior, who was seventythree. "Keep your independence, Ro. I always intended to see the world as a nurse and that was sixty-odd years ago."

  "Who's stopping you?" asked her husband.

  "Yes, I wanted to amount to something but I didn't have the courage. I just admired Florence Nightingale with a passion. I wanted to sit by the bed of men wounded in foreign places."

  "Wounded in foreign places, aha! That's a good one, Mary!"

  Bredforet's trim gray moustache leaped up to his cheeks in a grin.

  "Worst place in the world to be wounded though. Ha, ha."

  His wife pinched the freckled skin on his hand. "I am going to slap your head off one of these days," she told him.

  "Too late for all of us now, ain't it?" sighed Ramona as she briskly poured the claret. "Our beds will be the ones for nurses to sit at now, sit there bored by our dying, reading romantic trash and dribbling chocolate candy on our sheets. Then with nothing much accomplished, down into the dirt we go. With that idiot Sloan Highwick to sing out a list of insipid virtues they've decided to pretend we had.

  Down they drop us, thunk. Thunk!" She slammed the crystal top into the decanter.

  "Rubbish. You're too cooped up, isn't she, Mary? You know, Ro, there's nothing the matter with you. I bet you had that heart attack so you could get that machine. Your father was mad as a hatter, and living in this old curiosity shop with a passel of stuffed vermin and porcupine martyrs everywhere you look has turned you morbid.

  That's all. You're healthy as a filly, and so is Mary, and so am I.

  Where'd you get this idea about dying?"

  "From life," said Miss Dingley. "Unfortunate but true, Willie.

  Hardly a soul seems to have managed to avoid it."

  "Wait your turn then. Don't push."

  "I don't mind death so much," said his wife quietly. "I don't think I mind death. It's probably very peaceful. But I just don't want William to go first."

  "Neither do I," he assured her.

  "I'm so used to him, it might be even more unsettling than dying, not to see him, and not to know where he was."

  "You and Bill Deeds are probably counting the days until you can get your hands on my money and plow it all into that fool garden of yours. Don't let them put me in a hospital either, Ro. I wouldn't trust a nurse within ten feet of me unless I could keep an eye on both her hands and feet. All of them itching to pull my switch or trip over my cord and let me grind to a halt to make room for the next poor bastard. I hate doctors. Run in blindfolded with a butcher knife and hope they accidentally whack out the problem before they kill you slicing off everything else. No, thanks. Last time I wanted to die I was nineteen. I'm way too old for it now. Now hand me that pea soup," called William with gusto as out came Orchid O'Neal with the cat-faced china tureen that no one had ever liked, but that had perversely refused to be dropped and broken, and that had outlasted three generations of Dingley owners. Fragile as china is, it is less fragile than life.

  For Winslow Abernathy, lunch was the last of the chicken salad on Beanie's pumpernickel bread. All he had to do was combine the two and place the sandwich in a bag. He put in a piece of fruit as she had done in the mornings for him and the boys. Three lunches taking shape while breakfast bacon cooked. Always surprises inside: black and green olives, celery, carrot sticks, flowered radishes, mushrooms filled with cheese, all in little glass jars. Sometimes quiche, wild blackberry muffins, marbled cake. When had she prepared them? At night when her family slept? In the morning while the coffee brewed? Where had he been while his daily life was being taken care of by someone who now proved herself a stranger? He had the chicken salad. When that ran out, he was on his own. Abernathy had never prepared more than one meal a year; he made oyster stew on New Year's Eve. Well, I can learn, he said. But, oh, she'll be back.

  He pulled the pieces of bread apart and stared at what was spread on them. The thought of that food, all that thirty years of food ladled into him by Beanie, suddenly became nauseating. As a child he had always kept carefully separated with his fork each item on his plate.

  He had eaten each separately, too, believing that by completely finishing peas before he began potatoes, peas and potatoes would escape uncontaminated to solitary compartments of his stomach. This habit persisted, and, in fact, the sight of Beanie's casseroles and stews had often made him queasy. Now Abernathy imagined the sum total of cartons and can
s, quarters of cows and lambs and pigs, mounds of vegetables, everything stacked in heaps up the walls of his office.

  Then he imagined all of it, all ten thousand eggs and the rest, mingled in a slimy pulp inside his body. Then all the food he had ever eaten in his life pressed against his bones and organs. Bloody meat shoved in front of him by a grinning navy cook. He wrapped up his uneaten sandwich. He put it in the wastebasket.

  The lawyer was awaiting Judith Haig's arrival. Had he not spoken to Mrs. Haig on Monday at Dr. Scaper's (when they had shared, by proximity, the vulnerability of an examining room with all it implied of helpless flesh probed for any unfortunate secrets), then he might have told his secretary to postpone her until next week. But he had not done so, and now the door was opened and Mrs. Haig was ushered in. Could it be a divorce? he wondered. He knew John Haig had his own lawyer, a blustery Argyle youth who clearly hoped to slide into the district attorney's job on the trombone of his own self-esteem. Why should she want a lawyer of her own?

  "I'm afraid I'm upsetting your lunchtime. I could wait outside."

  "No, not at all. How can I help you, Mrs. Haig? Please, have a seat."

  Pulled back into the old leather chair, her eyes on her white, still hands, Judith took a hesitant breath and began so softly that the lawyer had to lean across his desk to hear what she said. "My husband is out of town. Last night a young woman, Chin Henry, who works for Miss Lattice, came to see me. Perhaps you know of her, she's a refugee, a Vietnamese?" Abernathy shook his head. "Oh, well, you see, she married a construction worker here, but there may be a question of the legality, I don't know. But there has been some misunderstanding between them, and well, I believe her husband assaulted someone on her behalf. He's been put in jail. By my husband."

  "Yes?"

  "The girl is very frightened, and alone here, of course. She came to me. Is there, would it be possible for you to find out whether bail could be arranged for him? I suppose that's the first thing. He's not employed and I gather there is little money."

  "What are the charges?"

  "I don't know exactly."

  "Yes. The court, Mrs. Haig, provides counsel for those unable to make private arrangements. And there are bondsmen."

  "I understand. The circumstances aren't clear to me. But I thought, if you wouldn't mind placing a call for her.…You see, she came to me, and I feel I should try to help if I can. I'll be happy to pay for your time, of course." Across the orderly artifacts on his desk, Abernathy sat looking at the woman who sat there, motionless but clearly nervous, pale and tall, dressed in a white suit, unadorned except for the thin gold ring and the tips of gold pins that held her hair. He thought of Roman chastity, a Vestal Virgin, of a nun, of a camellia. Suddenly she looked up, and he could see the pupils of her light blue eyes widen with fear, then quickly close down as she turned away from his eyes. He understood her embarrassment. It always shocked him too when his glance elided with someone else's.

  It had often struck him as well how infrequent the occurrence was; how nearly all the business of life can be conducted without our looking closely into other people's eyes.

  At Abernathy's request, Judith described what she knew about Chin Henry, and as was his habit, he surrounded her statements with hypotheses. What was her motive? Marital hostility? She seemed to want help in obtaining a release for a man her husband had arrested.

  She seemed a very unlikely wife for a man like John "Hawk" Haig.

  Was it maternal impulse?

  "Have you a daughter?" he asked.

  "A daughter? No." His question had alarmed her.

  "I only meant, perhaps you feel, very natural in you, a motherly wish to befriend this young woman. I assume she must be an orphan?"

  "Yes. That is, I think she's not certain."

  "Evacuations are not very tidy. Pardon me for prying, but have you a large family yourself? I mean, were you considering offering her someplace to stay?"

  "I had not, no. But I have no family."

  "I see."

  "I was raised by the Sisters of Mercy in Madder."

  "Ah. Ah, yes." That explained it—the formal diction, the reserve and quietness of her manner. Yet there was something in her quietness as intense as vociferous emotion would be in someone else.

  Something that confused Abernathy and led him into questions.

  Everything, every ordinary social inquiry, seemed to take on eerie tension with this woman. He felt flushed, as if he and she confronted each other, not about a phone call on behalf of a stranger, but at some much deeper level. Perhaps his acute, almost painful sensitivity (as if, he thought, he were under the influence of some consciousnessraising drug), his awareness of the weave of fabric in her white jacket, the slight muscle strain at the sides of her mouth, the movement of one of her hands against the other—perhaps all this resulted from his exhaustion after last night, from the shock of Beanie's departure.

  Whatever the cause, his response was perplexingly disproportionate to the context of their brief acquaintance and legal conversation. As Mrs. Haig continued to speak of the Vietnamese girl, the insight came to Abernathy with certainty that she always experienced this radical a relationship to life, that she was without defenses, without the padding of protective indifference that muffles out the world for others. And he felt, strangely, that to know it, to penetrate that secret, was to share an intimacy with her that imposed responsibilities. He felt, more strangely, that to respond to her attractiveness when she apparently had no knowledge of it was to put her at an additional disadvantage, in a way to imperil her, and so that too exacted his solicitude, his wardship. These reflections passed through Winslow Abernathy's mind as Judith Haig apologized for asking his help.

  Now the lawyer stood. "No bother at all," he said. "I'd be very happy to help if I can. Her immigration and marital status will be simple to verify. Then we'll see what's best to do next. Tell her to try not to worry." He held out his hand, and Judith took it.

  The chain on Polly Hedgerow's new bike had snapped. She was walking back through the Madder section of town, where the stores and working people noisily knocked up against one another. (As A.A. Hayes had once written in the Dingley Day, "Leisurely trees and grassy quietness have become costly; only the urban rich and the rural poor can afford time and space anymore." Reading which, William Bredforet had remarked to his wife, "Joke to think that your grandfather's paper is in the hands of a Johnny Reb Socialist drunk now." And it would have been a shock to Daniel Highwick, capitalist, abolitionist, and teetotaler.)

  Here on Three Branch Road, near what had once been shacks and was now the trailer park, Polly's father, Cecil, had grown up in one of the crowded brick row houses. Since he'd first pointed his old home out to her, she had come to look at it a number of times. The narrow, cracked stone steps and grimy bricks held a sad magic for her—a sweet, sharp rush of pity to think of her father, skinny, unfashionably dressed, coming down those steps with his violin case on a cold morning to walk to school, where the other boys had once ganged up on him; they were Catholic and Cecil Hedgerow's mother was Jewish. His father had not been Jewish, nor had he raised his son in that (or any) religion. The Hedgerows' had been a love match—it had also cost them their respective families' love. Widowed, Miriam Hedgerow had remained alone in Madder, where she opened a seamstress shop in her living room and for twenty years took in and out the clothes of Dingley Falls ladies as fashion or flesh required.

  She had also played the piano and worn small silver earrings in pierced ears.

  It was a special regret of Polly's that she had not known her grandmother, who, after a long illness, had died of cancer when her only grandchild was two. Grandma Miriam was nevertheless very real to the girl. She was a source of exotic beauty, folk wisdom, inherited courage and artistry and liberal ideology, of fascinating foreign ancestry on which Polly could draw to define her own uniqueness.

  Grandma Miriam stood for all those things that separated Polly from the others and would lead her to
a Special Future.

  Now, on the steps of that house, a fat child sat with a sucker. His white belly drooped over his shorts. Full of pity for her father's boyhood, Polly waved at the child, but he was lost in a sugar daze and only stared. She hurried along, turning left toward Dingley Falls at the Catholic Church, and realized that she was near where Luke Packer lived, though she wasn't certain which door led to his home.

  How strange to think of him outside the corridors of Dixwell High, outside her territory of downtown Dingley Falls and here in his own, where she felt like a trespasser. Funny, she had seen Luke nearly every day of the three years since he'd come to town, but had never thought of him as living anywhere in particular, or with anyone.

  How strange, too, to think of him as poor. Not just "not rich," like her and her father, but poor. "Wasn't it awful not to have any money?" she had once asked her father, and he had answered, "For me it wasn't too bad because I didn't have the responsibility. For your grandmother? It was a war that never let up. You couldn't win it, you could just keep day by day trying not to lose it. Holding on wears you down. For her it was awful, but I didn't know it then."

  Polly wondered if Luke knew it, recalling now that, like her dad when he had been at school, Luke was always at work somewhere—bagging groceries, delivering papers, shoveling snow. Funny, she'd often envied him those male prerogatives, those victorious proofs of independence and self-sufficiency. Funny, she had never thought that he worked because he had to, that he was trying not to lose a war. Their history teacher, Ms. Rideout, who had lost heart and quit, had told them, stuttering, that America believed in a race up a ladder and warned you that if you weren't fit enough to grasp the top rung, you had no one but yourself to blame. She said this was a cruel myth, that some people had no time even to reach for the bottom foothold up; they were too busy scrambling in the ground for food.

  Polly remembered how Luke had argued with the teacher and reminded her of many heroes of the American Dream who had awakened like Carnegie, richer than fabled kings. And the teacher had reminded Luke that they had been, that Luke himself was, halfway up the ladder at the race's start. He was bright, he was white, he was hale and male. Poverty alone, she said, was a simple affliction.