Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Polly gulped her drink as if she watched a magician.

  "Something's funny up there." The woman fixed her eyes on the girl. "For a while I thought I was seeing UFOs. You know, flying saucers. Nobody would listen to me, of course. Never will listen to old people. Sometimes wonder myself if I am senile. Read too many of those sordid newspapers Orchid buys at the A&P. Still think something's going on. Too embarrassed to follow it up officially until I get a fact. Let's find out there's nothing there, I'll get it off my mind."

  Polly shook her head excitedly. "No, no, there is something there. I got lost up there, if this is the same place, and I saw a sort of government thing. Buildings. I bet it's bombs."

  Miss Dingley set her goblet down sharply. "Are you telling the truth? Up near Bredforet Pond? There is something up there?"

  "Yes. Yes. It's really weird, way far back beyond the marsh. I got lost looking for arrowheads."

  "What makes you think it's the government?"

  "It said so. It said 'Keep Out.' I was out there for hours and hours before I saw it. A big cleared space with an electrified fence. It says, 'U.S. Government. Keep Out.' I saw a dog inside, but I didn't see any people."

  "That land belongs to Ernest Ransom at the bank. Been in his family for eons."

  "I saw it though. Maybe he gave it to them."

  "For what? When? What makes you think it's bombs? See any silo whatchamacallits?"

  "I don't think so. Just buildings."

  "Nobody's said a word about such a thing! Don't know what the idiotic government would be doing up here on private property anyhow. Creeping into everything and taxing us for the trespass. I won't have them here in Dingley Falls without so much as a by-your-leave."

  "I'm not sure I could find it again, but I did see it. I was going to go and look."

  "I never heard a word about Ernie Ransom selling that land."

  "I told a friend of mine, but she wasn't interested."

  "Hard to believe he'd let them set up such a thing on his land.

  Well, Miriam. Let's go look. It's certainly nothing this town has authorized, I know that much."

  "I could show it to you." Polly noticed the wheelchair and then blushed.

  "Yes. Wish I could. Absurd, ain't it, stuck in this thing? But I tell you what. Orchid and I will drive as far as we can. I want you to get somebody to go with you. Have you got a camera, much good at taking pictures?"

  "No. But, well, I guess I know somebody who can. A guy in my class; he takes pictures for the paper. Do you think it's something criminal? I mean, maybe we'll get arrested."

  "I think just about everything to do with the government's criminal. Give men the means for grand larceny and they'll commit it.

  Every other kind of atrocity you can come up with. They'll go at it happy as boys with slingshots in an abandoned glass house." Ramona poured another glass of port. "What you say you saw up there, very disturbing. I don't like it. I'm an old woman. The government's got the power now, and I'm used to the rich having it. When they did, they were all crooks too, of course. Well, we'll see. Take those pistachios home. Yes. I knew we'd get on. First time I saw you on that red bicycle. Used to have one myself. Now, you see, I'm still on wheels."

  chapter 27

  Gone were the ample, untaxing days when Beanie's grandparents, Charles and Camilla Dingley, had ridden to Knickerbocker balls and banquets in a private railway car stuffed with purple plush. A car of couches with its own potted palm tree. A car with a dining table over which hung allegorical oil paintings, heavily framed. A car with a big bronze Atalanta, interrupting her race to stoop for the golden apple and dreamily staring out the window at landscapes running the other way. Gone now were those plush, gilded days when trains went on pilgrimages to shrines of victors in Newport and Saratoga Springs, when so fast and deep the money flowed along the Hudson, the Housatonic, and even the little Rampage that it took a substantial traffic in railway cars to hurry owners to property, and guests to owners. Those days had passed when everyone knew who everyone-who-was-anyone was.

  Those thick damask days when Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and even Dingleys had passed their ample, untaxed time in paying calls on one another, in marrying one another, breeding money with one another, and heavily entombing one another.

  All lost now—houses, horses, and purple plush. "Goddamn fool taxes and the goddamn Roosevelts," old William Bredforet had often told his great-nephew Ernest Ransom, when Ernest asked him, "Where did all that go?"

  "It went down the drain," Bredforet told him. "Ignoramuses pissed it away. That grinning mustached monkey Teddy squatting in the smut with his muckrakers! Big stick, ho! Trust buster, ho! Him and the worse ones after him. Threw it away in the Atlantic Ocean, blew it across the sea with kisses. 'Take it, it's free!' So people did. Let too many goddamn people in the fool country, and every last one of them thought they had a right to the moon."

  And so it was. The big cheese of the moon was sliced into smaller and smaller shares, and mice began to nibble on the rats' portions. Soon nearly everyone had private cars and nearly no one had private railway cars. In fact, those trains, in which the granddaughter of Charles (Bradford IV) and Camilla Dingley still owned shares though not coaches, no longer even stopped for passengers in her hometown. The former depot now belonged to Carl Marco and was rented by Sidney Blossom. To catch her train, Beanie Dingley Abernathy was obliged to make her way into Argyle, just as if ten generations of Dingleys had never toiled, scrimped, underbought, and oversold, never wrested land from the Indians and income from the land, never risen by their bootstraps and stamped out the competition, never merged, cornered, and capitalized, never been self-made at all, but in the mythic memory of a great dream. For what remained of so much private enterprise? Only a pass. A piece of paper that entitled Beanie (and her immediate family)

  to ride without charge in a public compartment of those trains, to ride to and from wherever the trains happened to be going anyhow. That was all. She couldn't even treat by any inherited la droit madame her best friends, Tracy, Evelyn, and Priss, to a free seat on her train when they took their regular Wednesday journeys to the market of Art. No, the Thespian Ladies had to pay full fare. Had to pay to ride on tracks that Beanie's great-great-grandfather, Charles Bradford Dingley II, had sledgehammered through Connecticut rock, with, he used to say, his own bloody hands. On a train that he had shoved up hill, down vale, with his own sweaty shoulder to the wheel, Beatrice, his last heiress, had no privilege but a pass.

  "What was it all for then?" William Bredforet wanted to know.

  "That sobbed-over common man! He never had the brains or intestinal fortitude or balls or vision to build the goddamn country. Then the little weasels come along and whine, 'You can't keep all this to yourself, it's not fair!' Well, there were too many of them in the end, Ernie. They ate it all the way crows can eat a stag if he's down. And it's all gone now."

  The coach was gone. So too, it seemed, was the heiress. Gone and left her shares with all her heart to her immediate family. Like her ancestors, she had seized the moon, just a different one. Now she would miss the PATSY-sponsored premiere of the feminist film to which Tracy had invited her fellow club members. Now, when Evelyn screeched her Chrysler to a stop-on-a-dime (a dime's width away from the back bumper of Tracy's Volvo), Beanie had not been there waiting to go to the train station. Now, when Tracy and Priss, waiting by the curb for their tardy driver, scampered up the slope on seeing Evelyn's car tear at them like a huge, gray wounded elephant, Beanie was far away. Without her, then, they went to Argyle, paid their full fares, and entered, for Priss's sake, a smoker.

  "Filthy," snapped Priss.

  "People don't seem to care like they used to," sighed Tracy, as they shuffled through leaves of trash on the aisle floor. "Wait. My shoe's stuck in gum."

  "We ought to drive to the city, I keep saying," said Evelyn again.

  "I've done it in thirty minutes less than the train, you know."

  Yes, they did know, f
or they had been flattened against the backseat, their faces stretched into Mongolian contours by wind and terror the day Evelyn had set that record.

  "No, this is fine," Priss insisted, as she pried used Kleenex from her ashtray with a gloved finger. "You sit over there, Tracy. Put your bag down next to you. Here. Put Evelyn's coat."

  But before they could secure the seat, someone claimed it.

  "Walter! How cunning," chirped Evelyn Troyes. "But I thought you'd be with Jonathan. I'd been hoping he and I might have a quick bite of lunch, but he said he'd promised you to work with the choir. What a nice surprise."

  So, thought Walter Saar, he uses me for his alibi. Fair enough. I use him from time to time, in my thoughts. "Unfortunately," he said aloud, "we had an emergency today. One of the teaching staff suffered a heart attack. Mr. Oglethorpe. In fact, Jonathan had just been to call on him when it happened."

  "Oglethorpe? My God. I've met the man," said Priss. "Well, he must be seventy. Homely and catatonically shy?"

  "Yes, he's been ill a long time. He was in the infirmary with a virus, then suddenly…"

  "Is he all right?" asked Tracy.

  "He's in Argyle Hospital now. I called his sister. They say he's not critical."

  "Thank God it was you on the train, Walter," said Priss. "You never know what odiferous sort will try to sit next to you and tell you how awful their lives are these days."

  Had Walter Saar not been dazed with shock from the sight of Oglethorpe's eyes, pinpoints of panic in an old chalk face, he might not have found himself being driven into Manhattan. But there was nothing he could do for the man, the school carried on, the gap was filled. He needed his half-holiday. He needed to get out. And had Saar been watching where he was going, he probably would not have chosen to sit beside the Thespian Ladies to wherever (and he preferred not to predict his ultimate destination) he was traveling. Not that he disliked them: Mrs. Ransom was a witty bridge partner, and her husband controlled the trustees of Alexander Hamilton Academy. Mrs. Canopy was, when you came down to it, a kind soul whose heart was in the right place—didn't he love Art himself? And Mrs. Troyes was simply very lonely. Well, God knows, so was he. No, he did like them, but he preferred, when transformed into Mr. Hyde, to ride alone. Certainly he would rather not be squeezed among the social acquaintances of the good Dr. Jekyll, headmaster and dinner guest. Mr. Hyde? Saar winced. In his attaché case at this moment lay cradled a cool can of Michelob, which he very much wanted to drink. But of course he couldn't pop open a beer can on a train in front of these ladies.

  "What are you up to, Walter?" Priss blew her words across the aisle in a coil of smoke that tickled Evelyn's nose and made her miss Blanchard, who had also smoked Gauloises.

  "Why, I'm…nothing definite. Into the city. Though I might, the new…"

  "Oh, I know. The new rock ballet of Riders to the Sea? " guessed Tracy.

  "Good God!" snorted Priss.

  "I'm sorry, I don't think so," Saar said, his throat hoarse with wishing for that beer. He lit a cigarette, then realized he already had one in the ashtray.

  "Oh, of course! You're the opera buff." Tracy wagged her finger as if he had deliberately thrown her off. "The new Houston opera.

  That's for you."

  "Why, ah, yes," said Saar with a dry smile. At any rate, it would serve.

  "Oh, is it peut-être Puccini?" sighed Evelyn. "I'd love some Puccini more than this movie."

  "No, no, no," Mrs. Canopy explained. "Joe Tom Steeler. Big D to High C. It sounds very original. Perhaps we could all go next week. I believe I read that all the singers are cows, I mean costumed as cows.

  Mr. Steeler shows that life is simply one big dirty cattle drive, from Dallas up to Chicago, and in his last act he has everyone scrunched up in the stockyards, and while they sing (you knew it was atonal, Walter, didn't you?), apparently these giant mechanical axes representing oil derricks smash them over the heads until they're pounded beneath the stage floor. Oh, but perhaps I shouldn't have told you the end. (You knew the reviews have been almost vicious?)"

  "Well, Tracy, they laughed at Wagner, too. Not everyone can be as generous and open-minded as you," said Saar politely, ignoring Priss's secret smirk.

  "Yes! Yes! Give him a chance, exactly!" Mrs. Canopy's enthusiasm was not infectious, but it persevered. "Mr. Steeler has worked so hard and long, this is his twenty-seventh opera, and not one that you could really call a popular success. But I find reviewers almost enjoy being cruel, which is such a small, jealous talent, I think. I suppose it's easier to laugh at people, isn't it?"

  "I'm afraid so." Saar felt heat run down his arms to his hands.

  God knows he had laughed at Tracy Canopy enough, had amused Priss Ransom at the Club, between bridge hands, with witticisms about their menopausal Maecenas and her eight-cylindered monument to dear, dead Vincent. Surely Tracy didn't deserve to be laughed at like that. Well, she did deserve it, but surely we ought to give each other more than we deserve. Was bitchiness the only fashionable gay style available? Was Oscar Wilde the only triumphant role model? Why not take Walt Whitman instead? Saar felt a sudden rage against Priss Ransom, and so also against himself, as she sat across the aisle telling Evelyn Troyes, "Stop feeling sorry for June Hayes! I have. How many g.d. migraine headaches are we supposed to ooh and aah over? How many years are we going to scrape her off the ceiling every time the phone rings, before we get an itsy bit impatient? Evelyn, really! Surely June knows what a g.d. phone sounds like after forty years."

  "She's very sensitive."

  "Indeed she is. So is a Chihuahua. For the same reason, too. It's cultivated."

  "No, try to understand, Priss. People who have, who feel, who have artistic dreams for themselves, and then, you know, Priss dear, they don't come true, well, then, do you see what I mean? It's a terrible loss."

  "Ha! Evelyn, I'm sorry, if she's that sensitive, let her, oh, how in h. should I know, let her retire to a padded cell or move to Alaska where there's nothing valuable to break. I just can't sympathize.

  And I don't believe in unsung Miltons either. If you had been meant to sing, you would have sung. If June had been meant to do whatever she thinks she was meant to do, she would have done it.

  Now I was smart. I never had to have anything at all, and so now I have everything I want. Walter! Our little Scarlett O'Hara has been assaulted once more by migraine. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose."

  "La," corrected Evelyn without thinking. "La chose." Fortunately she was looking out the window at the time and so was not frozen by the Gorgonian stare Mrs. Ransom gave her.

  "Excuse me, is the rest room back there? Ah, yes, excuse me, Tracy." Saar bumped his way hurriedly to the back of the car.

  "Why did he take his briefcase with him to the toilet?" asked Evelyn dreamily. Receiving no reply from Priss, she began to take the quiz on an advertisement in front of her to find out if she was one of the millions who didn't know they were suffering from alcoholism.

  The toilet was engaged. Saar waited until finally, after much rattling, the bolt slid back to VACANT. And after further jiggling of the knob, the door opened. Out squeezed Father Sloan Highwick's affable face, rosy above the tight black collar and the stunningly white clerical suit he wore in the summer months. "Walter." He beamed.

  "Where are you off to? I'm going to see my mother. Wish I could join you, but I mustn't. The smoke, you understand. An old man's eyes."

  "Here, let me," offered Saar. He slid back the compartment door that the rector was tugging on.

  "Oh," Highwick turned to add in his pleasant, whispery voice, "there's quite a mess in the bowl."

  "Ah."

  "It doesn't flush. What's happened to the railroads? Things used to flush." The rector jerked his white shoe loose from the sliding door it was stuck in and was gone. He had someone newer to talk to: Carl Marco's son, Carl, Jr.—the very good-looking Argyle eye doctor.

  "Praise God." Highwick continued his conversation where he'd left off. "I have
the eyes of a hawk. My mother's eyes. She's ninety-two and she paints the entire Nativity on coffee mugs for the missionary Christmas box. She's an artist, always was."

  "Gee, that's nice."

  "But poor Jonathan. I liked those eyes you gave him, Carl, I told him so. Still, it's a shame. Nothing wrong with my eyes. Lately I have been wondering if I'm not getting a sore throat though. Scratchy.

  Take a look here, would you? AAAAaaaahhhhh. Down 'ere…'ee any'ing?"

  "Gosh, Father, not really. Maybe you ought to see an ENT man if you're worried."

  "Do you know one? We can't be too careful about our health. A gift of God, thank God."

  That mess in the bowl did make rather "close" (as Saar heard his mother saying) the little cubicle in which he now stood, jostled with the train's movement, to drink his Michelob. He preferred not to think about what his mother (home alone in Concord) would have thought could she see her only son—her bright, shining Wally—hiding in a train john, guzzling a can of lukewarm beer, on his way to go stare at (if not worse) whichever male whores the city happened to throw out upon its dirty streets. Her sole creation, her valedictorian, her concert companion, driven into the streets of Manhattan by the Furies of what a college psychiatrist had called his deep-seated masochism and deeper-seated hatred of his mother. Poor Mrs. Saar—

  had she known what sins a series of counselors had ascribed to her while her son protested in vain, had she heard her psyche bandied about through rings of pipe smoke, had she learned she was frigid, castrating, passive-aggressive, and schizophrenogenic! She didn't even know that Walter was a homosexual, much less that it was her fault. She didn't even know that Walter had seen psychiatrists, much less that her second husband had chosen and paid for them. She was aware that Walter's stepfather had once given him a generous subsidy to his salary, but she thought this gift was merely natural. She, after all, would have given her son the moon, and in fact used to pretend when he was a toddler to take it down out of the sky and place it in his hands. But she was not a party to the gentlemen's agreement in which Walter, prior to his majority, agreed to be a circumspect and infrequent visitor to Concord, to try to overcome his "disease," and to accept this disability pay as a spur to recovery.