By herself, across the aisle from the Marcos, Judith Haig knelt in black. She was watching the sun inflame the robe and face and outstretched hands of the Madonna painted on the stained-glass window behind the altar. Streams of crimson light seemed to reach out at her.
She thought of having sat as a child near the plaster statue of Madonna and Child that still stood, chipped and yellowed, by the side chapel; she had pretended that the woman was her unknown mother and had imagined crawling up into her lap, displacing, pushing to the floor, the baby already there. Pushing aside Christ. She had never confessed this sin, not because punishment was unbearable, but because she could not then bear to repent the daydream of hugging herself to that warmth, of wrapping the arms of the Madonna around herself alone. But guilt was stronger than desire finally, and the wish had died by her tenth year. Mrs. Haig no longer wished to be held.
After the prayers, Father Crisp stopped Judith on the steps of the church. He brought with him faintly the incense-mingled summer smells of Sebastian's and Prudence Lattice's flowers whose colors mocked the mourning they had been sent to grace. The old priest took Judith's arm to remind her that she had not been coming to Mass. Indeed, she had rarely been in the church in the past five years, but the fact that he spoke of her lapse as if he referred instead to an absence of no more than a few weeks struck neither of them as peculiar. Judith Sorrow had been raised to share in the expanse of Father Crisp's temporal perspective, where five years were no more than five weeks because both were nothing. The whole world with its sad, sorry history was nothing at all. To lose it, nothing at all.
Evelyn Troyes, however, who had just lost Today on television, felt hopelessly adrift without it. Today not only began, it explained her morning. Yet there on the round white table in her breakfast nook, nothing but meaningless static buzzed out of the gray blur of her television screen. The automatic adjuster adjusted nothing.
Evelyn was upset, for if significance is to be measured by time, television watching was the most significant event in her present life. Her passion for it had developed gradually, had begun only after Mimi had left her for Vassar, but it had grown. Solitude disturbed (more precisely, dissolved) Mrs. Troyes, who had said of her first affair, "I never knew where Hugo left off and I began," and had said of her marriage, "Oh, Blanchard could read me like a book, he always told me I was his favorite book." Bereft of anyone to read and so make sense of her, she could now while at home keep in touch with herself only by listening to operas and watching television. She watched it, she believed, far too much and was ashamed of herself for doing so. For years she had made resolutions to quit entirely, to cut back, to watch only after dinner, to watch only documentaries, only PBS. But the truth was, and she had never confessed this even to Tracy Canopy, she watched more and more. She watched during the day. She watched soap operas daily. They provided her with a wide circle of people in whose operatic dramas she immersed herself, to whose tenacious wrestle with life she attached her own quiet existence. She liked to worry about these women on television. Their problems seemed much more deserving than her own boring concerns, just as Jonathan Fields's health (which was excellent) appeared to her to require far more solicitous watchfulness than her own.
As if nature teased her through the wide, bright-curtained windows, sunlight sparkled all over the useless, silent mechanical box, that Pandora's box of a vicarious human race. Evelyn stared at the screen. It was rather like looking directly into a mirror and seeing nothing reflected there. When she hurried out her dutch doors to see if the rain last night had disconnected her cable, what she saw not so much horrified or angered her as bewildered her. Her beautiful summer garden had been vandalized. Someone had flung her plants everywhere, their roots dangling limply out of dirt clods. Someone had slashed the backs of her bamboo chairs. And along the wall her television cable had been neatly cut. A section of it lay like a severed snake on the patio bricks.
Dazed, Evelyn walked back inside her house, where, her fingers to her lips, softly breathing, "Oh, oh, oh," she floated from one pastel room to another. Mimi had left at dawn for Cape Cod. What should she do? As she reached to phone Tracy Canopy to ask her advice, through her front window she glimpsed Ernest Ransom. In a blue sweat suit he jogged methodically along Elizabeth Circle toward her house. Rushing down the steps, Mrs. Troyes beckoned him inside to take care of her.
"Typical," snapped Coleman Sniffell when his car radio announced that his car had been recalled because it was leaking carbon monoxide. "I wish I were dead and had done with it."
"Oh, you do not," said his wife, Ida, cheerfully.
"It's always me. Termites, rats, dog bites, clogged toilets, mail lost, get in the line that doesn't move; buy something, one tiny screw's missing. Life is a lemon and I want my money back."
"I'll tell you what it is about you, Coleman. There's a Mr. Healthy Self in us all, but you are what we call stifling yours with the Whining Child. Just using your negativity as a pacifier. You're listening to a sick script. Listen to your healthy self!" she advised, as she held up in front of the steering wheel a rainbow-covered paperback. Listen to Your Healthy Self! it said.
The car swerved. A high, nasty horn bleated. Limus Barnum's motorcycle cut in front of the Sniffells as they entered Dingley Circle. It popped to a stop in the middle of the parking space in front of the Tea Shoppe, so that Coleman had to squeeze his car between the cycle and Hayes's dirty coupé, which was also poorly parked.
"Typical! Has it ever occurred to you that Limus Barnum might be psychotic?" Sniffell asked his wife. "He has that sweaty, grinning look of somebody that might have an ax behind his back."
"Oh, Coleman, you just don't like people." Ida sighed as she stooped her white, starchy form to straighten her hose. "I don't see Doc's car. Poor old man, he was up all last night over in Argyle about Mr. Oglethorpe. Doc's just in a tirade lately over all these people getting sick and dying on him."
"He'll drop dead himself, at his age. Why doesn't he retire to Florida—eat himself to death instead, in peace and quiet?"
"Oh, Doc'll never retire, not with his psychosystem. Besides, who'd take his place? No, Doc thrives on what you call engagement. That means life and death just come naturally to him. Now when I—"
"Good-bye, Ida."
"Oh. Good-bye, honey." She held up the corners of his mouth with two fingers. "Now, smile, and the world smiles, et cetera."
"Sure."
Coleman Sniffell had never considered the world a great grinner. If he tried to imagine Earth a face, he saw a miserable sneer stretching from Africa to India. In his view, the irritating optimism of people like his wife could be sustained only by ignorance of a planet that Sniffell in fact did know more about day to day than anyone else in Dingley Falls, since his job for many years had been to summarize the public news for the Dingley Day. And the fatalism with which he tolerated his private annoyances was rarely alleviated by anything he read in the reports of the world that lay in neat stacks on his desk. Sniffell didn't know it, but he liked his job.
Everyone finds satisfaction in constant confirmation of deeply felt beliefs. What the apple was to Newton, famine in Bangladesh and obstruction of justice in Washington were to Coleman Sniffell. Every day, news of new disasters, corruption, brutality, greed, folly, and rotten luck added proof to his hypothesis that what God did to Job was par for the course. Not without a sense of humor himself, Coleman tacked on a bulletin board examples of what he took to be instances of God's not dissimilar wit: the family whose house was demolished by a crashing airplane while they were away in their car being run over by a truck. The CIA's training dolphins to be spies and assassinate enemy frogmen.
Sometimes A.A. Hayes came into the back room and chuckled over these clippings with Sniffell. The latter didn't know it, but he liked Hayes, too. Nevertheless, he felt superior to his editor because he sensed that while A.A. shared his assessment of the human condition, he was unreconciled to so pure a philosophy. Indeed, Hayes's obsession wit
h conspiracies simply indicated a naive refusal to let go of meaningfulness. In Sniffell's opinion, the southerner lacked the courage to trek resolutely into the white wilderness of absurdity or, at least, was unable to set forth sober. Sniffell himself called on no St.
Bernards to save him with brandy. He had no bad habits, including that habit of happiness espoused by his spouse.
Entering the Dingley Day at 8:30 sharp, Mr. Sniffell slipped on the wet floor and got a sliver of glass in his finger from the broken window through which last night's rain had poured. Typically, Hayes still hadn't fixed it. Nor was Hayes here, though they had agreed to meet early so that they could write the obituaries of the teacher Oglethorpe, Sister Mary Joseph, the watchman Jim Price, and now of the town postman, Alf Marco, in time for Friday's edition. He washed his finger under the bathroom faucet with no hope of avoiding infection. He opened the New York Times. In the Bronx an elderly couple, immigrants in terror of being mugged by minority youngsters, had hanged themselves by tying the rope to the closet doorknob and then lying down on the floor. Coleman Sniffell reached for his scissors.
From the gazebo where he drank a mixture of coffee and sugar with the consistency of molasses, the octogenarian William Bredforet watched his wife and chauffeur argue about whether it was too late or too early to thin out a section of their garden. "Neither one of you knows what you're doing; haven't managed to grow so much as a pokeweed in the past fifty years."
"No one's tried to grow pokeweed," warbled his wife across the emerald lawn. "Don't be such a dog in the manger."
"I got to go now." Bill Deeds eased himself to his feet. "You go ahead and ruin it if you got to."
"Go where?" yelled Bredforet. "I may need you to drive me to the Club."
"I can't help that," Deeds replied. "You doan wants to go to no club nohow; just curious. Scared you miss sumpthin'." He took a huge handkerchief from his pants pocket to wipe his hands. "Got to go pick up my granddaughter. She's showed up on the train on vacation from her hospital to come see me."
Recklessly Mary clipped an armful of late jonquils by the clump.
"Ruth? But that's wonderful! Why didn't you warn me? All the way from Atlanta! Oh, I'll love seeing Ruth again. Now you give her these.
I always wished someone would hand me flowers when I stepped out of a railway car. But I married William instead. I remember seeing a gentleman hand a whole bunch of roses to Ro Dingley at the old Dingley Falls station when she came back from France in 1924, but that wasn't for love, just tennis. Oh, I wish I had a granddaughter. Isn't that something, William, that Bill's granddaughter is already a grown woman, and a doctor, and I remember when Ruth was only eleven and outscored you and Ernie Ransom both at shuffleboard that Fourth of July?"
"Rubbish. She did not."
"She did so, I remember it too." Deeds nodded. He knew very well that Bredforet wanted to accompany him to the train station, but was too stubborn to invite him. Deeds chuckled as he waved from the car window at his bored employer, who had early on given his life over to hobbies, like lechery, that were fun for the short run but that could not go the distance, that lacked the stamina to jog along with time. As opposed to hobbies like gardening. Or raising a family who would give you grandchildren.
In his garden, Ernest Ransom rested after a two-mile circuit of Elizabeth Circle that had been interrupted by Evelyn Troyes.
Ransom had sent for Joe MacDermott and had mentioned to him the likelihood of the patio assault's being the mischief of juvenile marauders from Madder, only to be told by MacDermott (who lived in Madder with five sons) that it "could be rich kids raising hell for the hell of it, Mr. Ransom."
"Entirely possible," the banker had agreed. He considered his own boy, Ray, as the hypothetical culprit, but found the notion ridiculous, since he could not believe that anyone as lazy as Ray would walk all the way into town from the academy in order to pull out poor Evelyn's daffodils. Evelyn, Evelyn, what should be done for her? Widowhood was a hardship for women, though of course another marriage at her age was preposterous. Well, he'd send Sebastian Marco over to replant things for her.
Where was Sebastian? It was after nine o'clock. Behind Ransom, in a house that announced its birth on a placard (1789), his wife and daughters still slept. He wished someone would wake up. Strange, because being alone had never bothered him in the past. In fact, his children had been so often reminded not to intrude on his work that now, he knew, none of the three had a habit of relationship with him, or the desire for one. I must be getting old, Ransom thought, grimacing as he pushed himself up from a white iron chair. His calf and thigh muscles were strained from his jog, and "the war souvenir," as he called the steel pin in his leg, was hurting. But Ransom approved of purposeful, respectful pain and enjoyed feeling the earned ache as he walked down the flagstone path to the in-ground pool set at the far end of his lawn in a circle of azaleas and rhododendrons.
He'd brought a drink out here last night, while Priss was away in New York; he'd sat in the dark and tried to think about his drive that morning up to the aborted highway. But soon, listening to the bubble of the mechanical filter, his thoughts had moved away from that troublesome image to more pleasant recollections. He remembered how he'd felt hearing all the living foreign and familiar night sounds the lake had made when as a boy he'd taken Pauline Moffat out rowing after dark. Pauline Moffat. He hadn't thought of her in years, and yet when she'd told him that she was going to marry Cecil Hedgerow he'd felt physically ill. He wasn't sure he could remember what she looked like, and yet seven years ago when Otto Scaper had sat up all night drinking because he hadn't been able to keep Pauline Moffat Hedgerow alive, Ransom had gone next door to sit up all night with him. He'd gone to mourn the loss of a person he'd already lost years, years earlier, and to mourn the person he himself might have become in a life with her, though he had no sense at all of what that theoretical Ernest Ransom might have been like.
There were leaves floating in the pool water now; he scooped them into the net. This afternoon he ought to drop by Smalter's to buy some film for Kate's party. It had been a while since he'd gotten any pictures of his three girls—as he called his wife and daughters when he showed people their portraits in his office or screened the home movies in which Priss, Emerald, and Kate, with the baby, Ray, skied or sailed or stood impatiently in front of natural wonders and historic relics. On film they silently mouthed, "Oh, Daddy, that's enough," and, "For God's sake, Ernest, please!" as the camera zoomed from them to the Acropolis, St. Peter's, Mount Kilimanjaro. Ransom was a compulsive photographer, not because he particularly enjoyed the hobby, but because he was afraid that if he did not capture the moment, it would not exist. He felt compelled to collect his past and bank it, to preserve a record of experiences whose meanings he believed would someday come clear if they were only framed. The movie titled The Ransoms was therefore carefully shelved; short reels spliced together into long reels, slides labeled in carousels of baptisms, first steps, birthdays, presents, performances, trips, graduations, heights, weights, freckles, skills, fashions, moods, friends, and Kate's broken leg and Emerald's sunburn and little Ray's return from the hospital. All had been photographed. Ransom had lost nothing.
Dingleyans cultivate their gardens. Even Cecil Hedgerow shoved the lawn mower up and down a third of his backyard before giving up when foot-high weeds twisted hopelessly around the rusty blades.
Lying in the sun, Joy Strummer's little spaniel did not move when the mower passed.
"Whatcha doing?" called Polly from the kitchen door.
"Nothing." He quit and walked to his car. "See ya, okay? The money for that bike's stuck behind the phone. Brand-new bike!"
She pushed her glasses up on her nose. "I told you. The guy at the filling station said somebody did it on purpose. It wasn't my fault."
"Fine. Nobody's blaming you." He pushed his glasses up on his nose. "But do me a favor, change your clothes before you go over to Ramona Dingley's. And tell her I said hello." As Hedgerow bac
ked his car out, he watched his daughter slide her bare feet (unfortunately resembling his) back and forth in the freshly cut grass. He wondered how many days she'd been in those same jeans and shirt.
"I forgot," he called. "There's a mash note for you on the table. I found it stuck in the screen door. And listen, we have to work on this yard when I get home, okay?"
"A what note?"
"A love letter. Have a good day. Eat an egg."
Not a love letter. A note from Luke Packer, thought Polly, saying whether or not he could go look for the base with her and Miss Dingley. She hurried back to the door, stooped, and ran her fingers through the soft grass stubble. It smelled wonderful. "Summer summer summer summer summer," she whispered like a charm.
"And look over here. Here's where he just took a knife or something and gouged the backs out of my wing chairs that Blanchard bought me in Guadeloupe. Oh, mon dieu, it just hurts my feelings terribly to think someone must hate me so."
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