Beanie, that nethermost plebe of the intellect, that Brobdingnagian haus and horse frau, Beanie was the modern woman!
Nouveau riche in the riches of passion with Rich Rage. It was Beanie who had flung the apron to the hearth, defied censure for sensuality, put herself before her husband and children, slept with a man, so to speak, on the first date. It was Beanie who, apparently, had no fear of flying at all. Mrs. Ransom's world had flown off its axis. A reign of terror was upon her. The revolution had struck down the aristocracy and put peasants in the vanguard. The first had become last, the last had become first. How should she put it? She, a stylish forerunner of the first four hundred, had been left in the dust by a Clydesdale mare.
That's how she should put it. Who should she put it to? Certainly not Tracy. Tracy had made her choice and chosen Beanie, who had never even heard of Main Street as a girl, much less identified with its heroine (as had Mrs. Ransom and Mrs. Canopy). Why in h., then, was it Beanie who had eloped with a younger man to make her bed among bohemian artists in Greenwich Village? Why in h., then, was it Priscilla Hancock who couldn't even insist on a weekend alone with her g.d. mother in Newport, Rhode Island, where all she would do anyhow would be to play bridge with seventy-year-old widows whose rings hung loosely from their thinning fingers? If someone was God now, which she doubted, it was probably Voltaire. She needed to talk with Walter Saar. Wasn't he, after all, the mate of her mind, the man whose company she most preferred in all Dingley Falls?
Even if he was (and he was—at least she was modern enough to have noticed) a homosexual. Yes, she knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and it had never crossed Tracy's or Ernest's (or, God knows, Beanie's) minds. It would be tempting to tell them, with sophisticated nonchalance, affecting surprise that they too had not simply assumed it. She could not, however, take the risk. Her husband's sexual mores were no more cosmopolitan than those of Calvin Coolidge. If obliged to know of Walter Saar's practices, he would feel obliged to arrange for Walter Saar's dismissal. Then where would she be, especially now that Tracy had proved a traitor? Without Walter, she would go mad laughing alone in Dingley Falls. He was, as well, the man with whom she had successfully bid a grand slam, the man with whom she had commanded the dance floor at the Club on New Year's Eve, the most stylishly dressed, the most (he was, now that she thought of it), the most handsome man in town. And if he hadn't had the gall to be a g.d. queer, drooling over that insipid Barbie-doll of a priest, she (now that she thought of it) might have had a secret affair with Walter Saar and lived in sensuous emancipation.
Priss flung open the doors of the ladies' locker room at the Dingley Club. She hadn't wanted to lie down with a Valium. She wanted to smack golf balls as hard as she could. But the mocking wanton, Liberation, chased poor Priss even into the sanctuary of the toilet, for when she opened the stall, her daughter Katherine looked up, startled, with one foot on the seat and one hand extracting a diaphragm. "Oh!
You scared the shit out of me!" was the greeting her child gave her.
"What are you doing?"
"It was bugging me. I don't think I had it in right."
"Where did you get that thing?"
Kate held it in the hands that had once with wonder held up seashells. "At the health center. At Vassar. I wanted to get off the pill for a while."
These were breakers crashing over Mrs. Ransom. She closed the stall door, went to what had once been called the powder room, a room wallpapered with tiny pink roses, and sat down in front of the vanity table. She didn't feel very vain. Soon Kate reared over her in the mirror.
"Kate, are you sleeping with someone in town?" she asked the reflection.
"Sure. Sid," her daughter replied. "I thought you knew."
"At the Club?"
"Sure. Why? What's wrong with that?" As a defensive strategy, Kate assumed, first, innocence of her mother's disapproval, and, next, sarcasm. "Sex is legal, you know, or hasn't it been on the news yet?"
"Please don't be belligerent. And what do you think your father would say?"
"I don't think Daddy wants to know, or I'd tell him. It's his hangup, though, not mine."
"I won't pretend to follow that. Sidney Blossom?"
"What's wrong with Sid, for crap's sake?"
"Somehow I can't see it, that's all."
"Nobody's asking you to."
Kate sprawled on a lady's lounge chair, her bare legs defiantly wide-flung. The two women glowered at each other.
"Kate. Listen to me. What are you going to do if you become pregnant?"
"I'm not going to get pregnant."
"Really? I can't share your confidence when you make remarks like 'I don't think I had it in right.'"
"Besides, so what? It wouldn't be the end of the world."
"For your father to find out you'd had an abortion?"
"I don't know whether I'd have an abortion or not. Maybe I wouldn't. It would depend."
"I don't believe that, even today, Vassar would let you back in the dorm next fall with a baby. Nor can I see you spending your life washing the windows of an abandoned train depot, living with Sidney Blossom in a backwater of civilization."
Kate was upset. She felt attacked in vulnerable positions, where she did not yet know herself how she felt. Her confusion made her even more combative. "Who's talking about my life?" she yelled, springing forward in the chair. "Besides, why shouldn't I? He's a great guy, for your information, if you'd take the trouble to notice."
"The world is at least sprinkled with great guys, some of whom must be a bit more interesting, not to mention solvent, than Sidney Blossom."
Kate jerked out of the chair. "Fuck. You live here. If it's such a craphole, why've you been here for the last forty or fifty years? I know it's not because you can't tear yourself away from Daddy either, because sometimes I think you don't give a crummy shit about him! Just because you married for money, or whatever it was, doesn't mean I have to!"
Mrs. Ransom looked up at the gilt-framed mirror. The girl, the woman, her daughter, glared at her, the blue eyes (like her husband's) bluer behind the narrowed black lashes; the brows tightened with anger. There was her own mouth, thin with anger, her own jaw thrust against her. Mrs. Ransom lowered her head to her hands. But how could she be crying when she didn't cry? Evelyn cried all the time, Beanie cried, even Tracy admitted to tears, but Priscilla Hancock, when looking life in the face, had always, always laughed.
As terrified as if she had been again a child who feared she had the power to kill, Kate stared at the turban bent toward the table.
Then she rushed around the chair, fell to her knees, and hugged her mother's back. "Oh, God, I'm sorry! That was rotten of me. I didn't mean it. Mommy. I didn't even know what I was saying." She rocked her mother back and forth. "Mommy. Please. Please. I'm sorry."
Mrs. Ransom pulled back. Her nose was running. It was a sight so painful to Kate that she stepped away as her mother took from her jacket pocket a handkerchief monogrammed PHR and squeezed it to her nose. "You see," Priss said, "sometimes…" She blotted her eyes.
"Sometimes anachronisms prove convenient." She waved the handkerchief. Kate smiled. Mrs. Ransom stood up and adjusted her turban in the mirror. "Even Gloria Steinem must have to blow her g.d. nose.
Of course, perhaps she uses her hair."
"Oh, Mother! You always joke."
"Darling, if I didn't, I'd slit my throat. And then where would you be? You'd have to watch the inexcusably wide Wide World of Sports with your father."
"The thrill of victory." Kate grinned, relieved. "The agony of defeat."
"Frankly," sighed Mrs. Ransom as she freshened her lipstick, "I never know which is which."
Coleman Sniffell was at his desk, trying with a pair of pliers to remove the twist-off top from a bottle of soda. His thumb was bleeding. He knew the sugar and artificial coloring inside were going to kill him if he ever managed to drink any of the garbage. He tore the clippings off his paper spike and jabbed it through the bottle top, then
sucked. Then he took his sandwich out of its soggy bag. It was time for his habitual luncheon reverie. Sniffell used those blank moments when the brain is forced to fill itself ex nihilo, those confrontations with emptiness that come to everyone seated on the toilet without a book, or waiting for a bus or sleep or a watched pot to boil, to contemplate the murder of his wife, Ida. Entirely theoretically, of course, merely as a mental exercise, as some people work chess problems over a solitary meal. During the past twenty years he had poisoned her with untraceable salves applied by South American hunters to the tips of javelins, he had bumped her out of the head of the Statue of Liberty, he had shot, bludgeoned, run over, electrocuted, choked, mashed, and minced the unsuspecting Ida Sniffell, who stood, convicted of optimism. As he now finished eating his sandwich and draining the brake fluid from the car just before his wife drove off in it over a cliff, Sniffell was interrupted by his boss, who brought layouts of the next Dingley Day; the lead page was black-bordered and a three-column box made this announcement:
We of the Dingley Day Wish to Express OUR DEEPEST SYMPATHY To the Families and Friends of ALFREDO CESARINI MARCO ARCHIBALD THEODORE OGLETHORPE JAMES PRICE JOY HELEN STRUMMER SISTER MARY JOSEPH ZOLARINSKI Their stories followed under such headings as TEACHER AT ALEXANDER HAMILTON ACADEMY SINCE 1929 EXPIRES IN ARGYLE.
"How many piss-ass synonyms for dies are there?" asked A.A.
Hayes as he spread out the page for Sniffell's perusal. "Look here, let's take Evelyn's story off one and put her on two, POLICE SEEK PATIO VANDAL, how's that? And what's this ad for Mugger-Buggers? What is that, is that real?"
"Absolutely. Limus Barnum ordered one; he showed it to me."
"A high-voltage hat pin?" He read, "'Afraid to go out, afraid to stay home? Protect yourself and whatever you own.' What is this?
Electrocute trespassers?"
"More like a cattle prod. Some teenager in Argyle cleared over twenty-five thousand dollars last year on it. Invented it and sold it door to door. Now he's got mail orders."
Hayes sighed. "Now why can't my children show some of that kind of Yankee ingenuity?"
Sniffell pointed at the page. "Alvis, come on. What's this TEN BLOODIEST BATTLES IN AMERICAN WARS? Listen, don't put in another one of those lists. Nobody reads them." Hayes left with a shrug. Sniffell always grumbled about the lists, but secretly he liked them, believing that history should be showed up for the roll call of casualties that it had always been. On the other hand, this desperate, pitiful impulse of A.A. Hayes to rank chaos, to find an order of one through ten in the utterly random debris of civilization, was yet a further indication of how far from grasping cosmic absurdity the southerner was. Both men were collectors, but Hayes framed his signatures of the great in a symmetrical row around the walls of his den, and Sniffell pinned clippings of the unfortunate helter-skelter on a bulletin board. Sniffell made no evaluations of his findings, never attempted to choose the ten best or worst tricks played by the crazed and barbaric fates.
But Hayes had always been a list-maker. Since childhood he had recorded errands, theories, heroes, habits to break, books to read, lives to live. He transferred to each new list the unaccomplished items on its predecessor. Over the years the gap between aims and execution had shortened as his desires dwindled. Later Hayes would find the yellow scraps of his forgotten "Things to Do, Be" in books or trouser pockets. He had long since concluded that he would never do or be anything but the out-of-shape editor of the Dingley Day, who smoked and went to the beach or the mountains for two weeks in the summer. He would never be any of those possible futures, a brain surgeon, trial lawyer, congressman, screenwriter, hitchhiker, prophet, millionaire, or enemy of the people, not a great editor, not a great lover, not a great sportsman, not, he concluded, a great anything. As he had told Sammy Smalter, he would leave no scratch on the tablets of history. He made lists of facts now. He and June could not get along. He would die. He would die from (1) a heart attack (smoking, drinking, no exercise, tension in the home), (2) cancer (smoking, southern diet, family history, tension in the home), (3) a car accident (poor driving habits, poor upkeep of a poor car, bad luck, tension in the car). At this point Hayes's personal lists were limited to modest aspirations: pick up carton of cigarettes, call printers, June's birthday.
But as the private lists contracted, the public ones grew. Into the lists that appeared boxed in the Dingley Day went all the ambition and idealism, the breadth and reach, displaced from his life. He made ruthless, sweeping decisions: the ten best books, movies, products, Americans, human beings. And the ten worst. He strode over history, awarded laurels, condemned to death. He posed questions in lists: Who really killed JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe, Lindbergh's son, Howard Hunt's wife? He asked his readers if Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. Was Anastasia shot?
Who was Jack the Ripper? Did Jefferson have a black mistress? Was Hitler alive? Were the little princes really smothered in the Tower?
Was Truman wrong to drop the bomb? Should Nixon have been brought to trial? Exactly when (for it must come) would all those "Looking Glass" planes, flying in circles over the Midwest since 1961, launch their nuclear missiles? Against whom? How long would that give us to compile our final lists with whatever summations seemed fit? Was there a Holy Grail?
Nobody seemed to care. At least no syndications had ever picked up A.A. Hayes's lists. And no Dingleyan, except for the desperate Limus Barnum and the informative Tracy Canopy, had ever bothered to write an answer to his questions. In his list of military carnage, Hayes now scratched out Buena Vista and wrote in Hill 861 near Hue.
Then, leaving Sniffell absorbed in an imagined effort to inject a syringe of herbicide precisely in the puncture hole where Ida Sniffell had just donated a pint of blood, Hayes walked over to the post office to buy some stamps so that he could cross at least that off his list.
At the post office this Friday morning Judith Haig had herself received a news item in the form of a letter from the headquarters of the postmaster general. It advised her that in the interest of saving the American taxpayers money (Hayes would have interjected that they were already paying the military well over $100,000,000,000 a year to defend their country, so it was quite true they could use a break), cutbacks in postal service would be necessary. As soon as the investigatory committee determined which branches were to be lopped off (and obtaining that information would cost the taxpayers at least a million), the ax would fall on the unproductive. The postmaster wished the postmistress of Dingley Falls, Connecticut, to know that her office had been running at a loss for fifty years, that last year it had shown an income of only $7,719.30 ($844.65 of it came from Sammy Smalter) and an outgo of quite a bit more. This was no way to run a business. This was not what Benjamin Franklin had had in mind. In light of these facts, the situation would be examined.
Unless the town could show just cause why their P.O. ought not to be closed, the P.G. would be obliged to erase Dingley Falls from his map and cancel its zip code. A rural route carrier from Argyle could deliver the town mail, and Dingleyans could buy stamps at the main office there, or wherever they happened to see any for sale.
This news bulletin Mrs. Haig had passed along to Arthur Abernathy's clerk at Town Hall, but she did not share it with the newsman. According to Hayes, nobody in Dingley Falls ever told him anything. Who, for example, was this fat female stranger behind the P.O. counter informing him, "No space program stamps here.
Got to go to Argyle, you want commemoratives."
"Really? Y'all used to have them. Where's Mrs. Haig?"
"She can't help you. No commemoratives here."
Hayes heard low, murmuring voices. Emerging from the back office were Judith Haig and (to the editor's surprise) Winslow Abernathy. They appeared to be talking (to his greater surprise) about bail having been arranged for Maynard Henry. Hayes waved.
They nodded.
As a stamp collector, the editor had been for years a regular customer of Mrs. Haig's, though they
were not friendly. He suspected that she was the genuine omniphobic he suspected his wife, June, only pretended to be. Hayes recalled the night Limus Barnum had roused Glover's Lane by firing his Magnum pistol at his bedroom slipper while pursuing (he said) a burglar. At the shot, June had spun, shrieking, out of bed and locked herself in a closet. What (wondered Hayes, watching the postmistress shudder as Abernathy stooped to retrieve his dropped briefcase) would Mrs. Haig have done, shocked awake by a pistol shot? Gone temporarily insane? Why did women keep the pitch of life so high?
On the sidewalk in front of Abernathy & Abernathy, Hayes tossed four cough drops into his mouth. "You representing the post office now, Winslow?"
"Pardon me? Oh, no, just relaying a message."
"Stop me if I'm butting in, but I thought I heard you talking about Maynard Henry. You know, I talked to the guy. He's nuts.
Reminded me of a mistreated horse. Don't tell me you're representing him? I guess you knew he almost killed some poor Puerto Rican fellow. He didn't get out, did he?"
"Alvis, excuse me. I'm not representing him. But he didn't strike me as 'nuts.' How do you mean that? Violent?"
"For a start. He more or less told me he planned on killing the guy that put him in there. I sort of believed him."
"Well, he feels that he's been railroaded."
"How do you know all this?"
"He told me. I went to speak with him."
Hayes crunched up the cough drops and lit a cigarette. "Mind telling me why?"
"Someone asked me if I would."
Hayes knew that that was the end of the information. Abernathy (who was the person closest in the town to what the southerner thought of as a friend) was not a person to share other people's news.
But Abernathy was no more reticent than most Dingleyans, who gossiped only within family fences or those made of historic social links. As an atheist, Hayes had no access to the one font of egalitarian gossip ever flowing from the lips of Father Sloan Highwick. For reasons of personal taste he could not join Limus Barnum, social voyeur and community spy, at his sweaty peephole. No, sighed the editor of the Dingley Day, as he looked in the broken window of his office and wondered how it might have happened, nobody ever tells me anything.
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