Michael Malone Read online

  Dingley Falls

  A novel by

  Michael Malone

  For a singer "Dodie"

  John Darwin Penland 1950–1979

  Song's a good prayer.

  So is laughter.

  Copyright © 1980, 2002 by Michael Malone Cover and internal design © 2002 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photo © Getty Images and Digital Vision First published in New York in 1980 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  FAX: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malone, Michael.

  Dingley Falls : a novel / by Michael Malone.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-4022-0007-2 (pbk.)

  1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. Anonymous letters—Fiction. 3.

  Connecticut—Fiction. 4. Hate mail—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A43244 D56 2002

  813'.54—dc21

  2002006928

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  acknowledgments

  I've never understood why those who write fictions should not acknowledge debts as publicly as those who write facts. I'd like to thank Mrs. Arthur E. Case for her generous friendship, and Dr. Barbara Otto and Dr. J.J. Quilligan, Jr., for consenting with such kind cheer to diagnose the peculiar symptoms afflicting Dingleyans.

  During the four years it has taken to finish Dingley Falls, numbers of readers, both in and out of what is for some odd reason called "the industry," have given me good criticism, wise advice, and warm support. My heartfelt appreciation to them all.

  the people (in alphabetical order)

  THE TOWN

  Beanie Dingley Abernathy A Juno-esque heiress to what is left of the Dingley fortune.

  Winslow Abernathy Beanie's husband, a lawyer.

  Arthur Abernathy Their stolid son and Winslow's law partner; Dingley Falls's first selectman.

  Lance Abernathy Arthur's good-looking fraternal twin; an amateur tennis player.

  Limus Barnum Unsavory owner of local antiques, hobbies, and appliances store.

  Sidney Blossom Town librarian and former hippie.

  William Bredforet Roguish octogenarian; Ernest Ransom's great-uncle.

  Mary Bredforet His wife.

  Tracy, Mrs. Vincent Canopy A perky widowed patroness of the arts; Beanie's childhood friend.

  Father Patrick Crisp Elderly Catholic priest at Our Lady of Mercy in Madder.

  Louie Daytona Gorgeous bisexual sculptor and ex-convict befriended by Tracy Canopy.

  Bill Deeds The Bredforets' cranky, eighty-year-old, African-American chauffeur.

  Dr. Ruth Deeds His granddaughter; an eager young internist at the federal Center for Disease Control; a Marxist feminist.

  Ramona Dingley Tennis champion of 1927; town selectman; wry caretaker of the past; invalid seventy-three-year-old distant relative of Beanie.

  Jonathan Fields Exquisite, diffident curate at St. Andrew's, Dingley Falls's Episcopal Church.

  John ("Hawk") Haig Police chief; a big, handsome man in his early forties.

  Judith Sorrow Haig His wife; a beautiful woman with a heart condition; postmistress of Dingley Falls.

  A.A. Hayes The alcoholic editor of the Dingley Day; southern expatriate; sardonic failure.

  "Junebug," Mrs. A.A. Hayes His migraine-prone wife.

  Tara and Suellen Hayes Two of their children.

  Cecil Hedgerow Widower; third selectman;

  unenthusiastic realtor.

  Polly Hedgerow His sixteen-year-old daughter; a bookworm, gossip, and sleuth.

  Maynard Henry Unemployed construction worker;

  Vietnam veteran.

  Chin Lam Henry His nineteen-year-old wife;

  a Vietnamese refugee.

  Father Sloan Highwick Affable sixty-six-year-old Rector of St. Andrew's.

  Mrs. Highwick His mother; a senile painter.

  Prudence Lattice Lonely spinster in her sixties; owner of a tea shop that has fallen on hard times.

  Joe MacDermott Hawk Haig's assistant.

  Sarah O'Reilly MacDermott His wife; gabby, ebullient cashier at the Madder A&P; mother of five boys; self-elected best friend of Judith Haig.

  Alf Marco Dingley Falls's colorless postman.

  Sebastian Marco His younger brother; a moody gardener.

  Carl Marco, Sr.

  Their older brother; a self-made Madderite merchant; tract developer; aspiring philanthropist.

  Carl Marco, Jr.

  His son; a muscular ophthalmologist.

  Sgt. Fred Myers A desk clerk at the Argyle jail; a philosopher.

  Orchid O'Neal Sarah MacDermott's widowed older sister; a house cleaner.

  Jerry Packer Bartender at the Dingley Club.

  Luke Packer His seventeen-year-old son; a bright, restless film buff.

  Susan Packer Luke's older sister; secretary to Abernathy & Abernathy.

  Richard Rage Lascivious avant-garde poet.

  Ernest Ransom The most influential man in Dingley Falls; the meticulous, methodical president of Ransom Bank.

  Priss, Mrs. Ernest Ransom His chic, satiric wife; college friend of Beanie and Tracy.

  Emerald Ransom Their eldest child; a practiced beauty.

  Kate Ransom Emerald's younger sister; a Vassar senior long wooed by Sidney Blossom.

  Ray Ransom Their son; a braggart.

  Walter Saar Headmaster of Alexander Hamilton Academy; a sleek, witty, aesthete homosexual secretly possessed of most of the old-fashioned virtues.

  Otto Scaper Fat, gruff physician in his seventies.

  Sammy Smalter Town pharmacist; a midget.

  Coleman Sniffell Assistant editor of the Dingley Day.

  Ida Sniffell His mercilessly cheerful wife; Dr. Scaper's nurse.

  Jack and Peggy Strummer Nice people.

  Joy Strummer Their beautiful blond teenage daughter; Polly's best friend.

  Wanda Tojek The Ransoms' maid.

  Evelyn, Mrs. Blanchard Troye Wispy, lovely widow of a French industrialist; childhood friend of Beanie and Tracy.

  Irene Wright Ransom's secretary.

  OPERATION ARCHANGEL

  Comdr. Hector Brickhart Former USC tackle; warrior in the Pacific; chief of naval intelligence; now on the board of ALASORE Oil.

  Bob ("Bucky") Eagerly Public relations expert on White House staff.

  Thomas Svatopluk Brainy, arrogant East European biochemist; chief M.D.; Ph.D. of staff of Operation Archangel.

  Daniel Wolton Professionally moral Boston Brahmin; INR spy on OSS.

  Gregory Thom Government official with OSS.

  John Dick Government official with CIA.

  Colonel Harry Government official with DIA.

  "On the Rampage, Pip. Off the Rampage, Pip. Such is Life!"

  part one

  chapter 1

  There was something the matter with Judith Haig's heart. That was why she had to quit her job at the post office where she had sorted the lives of Dingley Falls for eleven years. Mrs. Haig was only forty-two years old. She didn't drink or smoke, and she was slim enough to have worn her
daughter's clothes if she had had a daughter. So it seemed to be simply bad luck that her heart murmured. She was in Dr. Otto Scaper's office now, waiting to be told how careful she needed to be.

  The post office wasn't really the problem. All she did there was raise, then lower the flag, weigh packages and sell stamps, slip into their slots the rare letters and regular government checks that sustained those (very few) too indigent to have homes to which the postman, Alf Marco, could take their mail. The problem was the dogs. Mrs. Haig was afraid of the dogs that lived in the trailer park and gathered in packs to wait for her when she left her home north of the Rampage to cross the bridge into downtown Dingley Falls.

  Waited to tear out onto the bridge and snarl at her ankles. They never quite bit her. But they scared her and troubled her heart.

  Her husband, John "Hawk" Haig, police chief of Dingley Falls (and the neighboring borough of Madder), did not believe his wife.

  The one day he had walked with her to work, there had been no dogs at all on Falls Bridge. They knew that she was afraid of them, and that her husband wasn't, and so they hadn't bothered to come. Mrs. Haig was most afraid of horrible thoughts that she couldn't keep out of her mind. Among them, unavoidable premonitions that these dogs wished and planned to ravage her. This fear, and her belief that the dogs knew she understood what they wanted, she did not tell her husband.

  For years Chief Haig had wanted her to quit her job anyhow.

  Everyone knew there was no reason for her to be working, not with his salary and with no children to support. And they had their house of flat new bricks shoved up against the shoulder of the highway above Dingley Falls and Madder. She might as well stay there and enjoy fixing it up.

  Now Mrs. Haig watched huge Dr. Scaper come out of his office with the lawyer Winslow Abernathy and pat the patient on his long, thin back. "Well, you never can tell about the heart," roared the seventy-four-year-old physician. "How long you plan to be up in Boston then?"

  "Just three days. Meanwhile, I'd rather not let Beanie know about this, I think. I'll give you a call, Otto. Thank you." Abernathy nodded his vague, frowning smile at Mrs. Haig, whom he knew from the post office but failed really to see. The door closed quietly behind him.

  "Be with you in one minute," Dr. Scaper yelled at Mrs. Haig.

  "Got to use the facilities." He shuffled over to whisper, "Call of nature, go in there to smoke. Ida here's against it."

  Through the sun-splintering window next to her desk, the doctor's nurse saw Polly Hedgerow pedal past in a rush of red on her bicycle. "Fifteen years old," sighed Ida Sniffell, "and I don't believe she's thought to buy herself a bra." Judith Haig tried to reply with a smile but returned to the magazine she wasn't really reading, so she didn't learn that in this Bicentennial year Betty Ford, and other rich and famous women in America, had their problems, too.

  Without hands, in a private bravura performance, sixteen-year-old Polly Hedgerow cruised the freshly tarred rotary that circled the little town green. In its center, a granite Elijah Dingley sat stiffly in his marble chair, and in the stone arms of the statue snuggled Joy Strummer, languidly reading a movie magazine in the shade of a giant copper beech.

  Elijah Dingley had founded the town on which he imposed his name three hundred years ago, when he banished himself from Providence, Rhode Island, in disgust at the emotional displays of Roger Williams and on his way to New York, got lost. Dingley Falls was in Connecticut, east of the Hudson and west of Hartford, in low mountains and beautifully situated on the Rampage River, a branch of the Housatonic. Joy Strummer was Polly's best friend.

  "Joy!" she yelled as she flew past. Joy's little spaniel jumped up and barked at her.

  The pretty town of Dingley Falls was well-off and white-framed with shutters. Dingleyans had watched the riotous sixties on television and were happy to have missed them. They were proud that in 1976, as all around Great Societies puffed themselves up and blew themselves away, here in Dingley Falls the true America had been safely preserved, like an artifact in a time capsule. They had lost nothing but their elms. Here there were no disaffections, no drugs or delinquency, no pollutants or impoverishments to trouble repose.

  The town's polities were Republican, its income private, and its houses Federalist. Some of these homes had black shutters, some had gray, and Mrs. Ernest Ransom had painted hers bright orange. Priss Ransom was Mrs. Vincent Canopy's best friend. "Priss has always insisted on defining herself," explained Tracy Canopy.

  This morning Polly Hedgerow happened to be on her way to visit the man who, twenty-seven years ago, had married Tracy to Vincent Canopy. He was Father Sloan Highwick, Rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church and Polly's sidekick. Together they spied, like an unfallen Lear and Cordelia, on who was in, who was out, in their little town. First she circled the green three times, not only to avoid annoying powerful forces, but also to check things out for the Rector.

  As she pedaled, she panned the white brick and gray slate buildings, the civic and mercantile Stonehenge of Dingley Falls. As far as she could tell, nothing much was going on. The lawyer, Mr. Abernathy, stood on the sidewalk as if he couldn't remember where he was supposed to go next. Across the green, old Miss Lattice scurried to Ransom Bank, probably to get change for her Tea Shoppe. In the doorway of Barnum's Antiques, Hobbies, and Appliances, that creepy Mr. Barnum was ogling Joy Strummer, smacking his lips. The Dingley Day office still had a broken window; Mr. Hayes, the editor, didn't seem to care. And at the far end of the green the bespectacled Mrs. Vincent Canopy was driving the right front wheel of her Volvo up onto the curb, where she left it. Mrs. Ernest Ransom got out of the passenger door and laughed.

  Leaning into a left turn, Polly sped away from the town center and gathered speed to climb Cromwell Hill. At its top, in his Irish country hat, Father Highwick was pestering his gardener, Sebastian Marco, who was trying to transfer Red Sunrise dahlias in the solitude an artist deserves. The rector had nothing to do, and for sixty-six years he had never been able to bear being alone. So while Sebastian grimaced when the girl suddenly rattled into his garden, her wheels scattering his combed gravel, he forgave the barbarity, because as long as she kept Highwick company the gardener could work without having to rebut an erroneous homily on the gardenia or listen to an off-key "Cantate Domine."

  With the lovely smile of one who has never troubled himself over life's perplexities, the rector put an avuncular arm around his young friend; poor only child of a widowed agnostic, he sighed to himself, and with glasses and that unfortunate hair. His own hair, luxuriant and nicely brushed, looked as white and soft as angel's hair on a Christmas tree, and his eyes looked as bright as blue china cups.

  "Yes, Polly, dear?" he asked.

  "There's something the matter with Mrs. Haig's heart," she told him. "That's why she has to quit her job at the post office."

  chapter 2

  If anyone had asked Dr. Scaper's nurse who were the best-housed, best-bred, best-off women in Dingley Falls, Ida Sniffell would have given the same answer as Father Sloan Highwick, or anyone else familiar with the town's social register. They were "Mrs. Winslow Abernathy. Mrs. Ernest Ransom. Mrs. Vincent Canopy. And oh, yes, Mrs. Blanchard Troyes." Unlike Judith Haig, these ladies did not go to Dr. Scaper with their problems, although Dr. Scaper had, as a very young man, seen three of them into the world. Instead they went to expensive doctors in New York. They went shopping in New York, and they were all best friends.

  Mrs. Winslow Abernathy had once been Beanie Dingley. She was still big-boned and buxom with generous features, thick, curly hair, and a rich roan coloring. Mrs. Vincent Canopy had once been Tracy Dixwell. She was still short, trim, and square-faced, with green-apple eyes and owlish glasses. Beanie and Tracy had grown up very pleasantly with petite, pretty Mrs. Blanchard Troyes when she had been, decades ago, petite, pretty Evelyn Goff. "The Three Graces of Dingley Falls," the Dingley Day had called them when they had been photographed embracing one another in their white dresses and huge horsehai
r hats the day the paper announced their coming out. The Three Graces had since moved through their lives together:

  Beanie at a healthy stride, Tracy at an efficient clip, and Evelyn in a dreamy float.

  Beanie was a Dingley, but the ancestry of Tracy and Evelyn was more broadly distinguished. Beanie's forebear Elijah had, after all, simply founded a little town on the Rampage, while their thrice-great-grandfathers Goff and Dixwell had been regicides, and there were still streets in New Haven honoring them for having had the audacity to lop off the head of Charles I and the perspicacity not to be in England when Charles II returned home. Dingley, Dixwell, and Goff were among the best names to grow up with in Dingley Falls, where the girls happened to grow up, so they were invited everywhere, and they went everywhere together. That is, until college. For then, to Tracy and Beanie's sorrow, Evelyn Goff had not come to Mount Holyoke with them. Instead, overcoming familial objections with the deadly tenacity of the fragile, she had floated off to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where she dreamed of singing Mimi at the Met. "Evelyn has always confused life with an opera," explained Tracy at the time. "But oh, gosh, Tracy, we'll miss her," said Beanie.

  At Mount Holyoke, an elegant Bostonian had been drawn into the gap of the Graces. Her name was Priss (Priscilla) Hancock.

  Soon, with her tall glamour (all chic and sharp angles) and her ironic festiveness, Priss replaced the absent moony Evelyn as Tracy's confidante. And though the lacrosse-playing Beanie was not exactly Priss's type, one could not be Tracy's friend without taking along her childhood companion, rather like—as Priss said to someone else—dragging out in public a shy St. Bernard. So for four years Tracy, Beanie, and Priss majored in French together and danced the foxtrot and did their hair like Ann Sheridan. They all got married to men who had been officers in the Second World War. First Beanie eloped with Winslow Abernathy, to her mother's disappointment (she'd hoped for a big wedding) and relief (she'd feared Beanie was too big to catch a man). Then Priss, in a moment of spite against a professor with whom she was infatuated, accepted the third and probably final proposal of Ernest Ransom, who had been Winslow Abernathy's roommate at Yale. Finally Tracy married Vincent Canopy of Manhattan, with Beanie and Priss as matrons of honor.