by John Cheever
Beyond Pluzinskis’ the road turned to the right and they could see the handsome Greek portico of Theophilus Gates’ house. Theophilus was president of the Pocamasset Bank and Trust Company and as an advocate of probity and thrift he could be seen splitting wood in front of his house each morning before he went to work. His house was not shabby, but it needed paint, and this, like his wood splitting, was meant to put honest shabbiness above improvident show. There was a FOR SALE sign on his lawn. Theophilus had inherited from his father the public utilities of Travertine and St. Botolphs and had sold them at a great profit. On the day these negotiations were completed he came home and put the FOR SALE sign on his grass. The house, of course, was not for sale. The sign was only meant to set in motion a rumor that he had sold the utilities at a loss and to help preserve his reputation as a poor, gloomy, God-fearing and overworked man. One more thing. When Theophilus invited guests for the evening they would be expected, after supper, to go into the garden and play hide-and-go-seek.
As they passed Gates’ the ladies could see in the distance the slate roof of Honora Wapshot’s house on Boat Street. Honora would not appear to them. Honora had once been introduced to the President of the United States and wringing his hand she had said: “I come from St. Botolphs. I guess you must know where that is. They say that St. Botolphs is like a pumpkin pie. No upper crust.…”
They saw Mrs. Mortimer Jones chasing up her garden path with a butterfly net. She wore a bulky house dress and a big straw hat.
Beyond the Joneses’ was the Brewsters’ and another sign: HOME-MADE PIE AND CAKES. Mr. Brewster was an invalid and Mrs. Brewster supported her husband and had sent her two sons through college with the money she made as a baker. Her sons had done well but now one of them lived in San Francisco and the other in Detroit and they never came home. They wrote her saying that they planned to come home for Christmas or Easter—that the first trip they made would be the trip to St. Botolphs—but they went to Yosemite National Park, they went to Mexico City, they even went to Paris, but they never, never came home.
At the junction of Hill and River streets the wagon turned right, passing George Humbolt’s, who lived with his mother and who was known as Uncle Peepee Marshmallow. Uncle Peepee came from a line of hardy sailors but he was not as virile as his grandfathers. Could he, through yearning and imagination, weather himself as he would have been weathered by a passage through the Straits of Magellan? Now and then, on summer evenings, poor Uncle Peepee wandered in his bare skin among the river gardens. His neighbors spoke to him with nothing more than impatience. “Go home, Uncle Peepee, and get some clothes on,” they said. He was seldom arrested and would never be sent away for to send him away would reflect on the uniqueness of the place. What could the rest of the world do for him that could not be done in St. Botolphs?
Beyond Uncle Peepee’s the Wapshot house could be seen in the distance and River Street itself, always a romantic picture, seemed more so on this late holiday morning. The air smelled of brine—the east wind was rising—and would presently give to the place a purpose and a luster and a sadness too, for while the ladies admired the houses and the elms they knew that their sons would go away. Why did the young want to go away? Why did the young want to go away?
Mr. Pincher stopped long enough for Mrs. Wapshot to climb down from the wagon. “I shan’t thank you for the ride,” she said, “but I will thank Lady. It was her idea.” This was Mrs. Wapshot’s style, and smiling good-by she stepped gracefully up the walk to her door.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rosalie Young took the road to the shore that morning, unknown to the Wapshots as you are unknown to me, early, early, long before the parade had begun to form in St. Botolphs, way to the south. Her date stopped for her in his old convertible at the rooming house in the city where she lived. Mrs. Shannon, the landlady, watched them drive away through the glass panels of her front door. Youth was a bitter mystery to Mrs. Shannon but today the mystery was deepened by Rosalie’s white coat and the care she had taken in painting her face. If they were going swimming, the landlady thought, she wouldn’t have worn her new white coat, and if they weren’t going swimming why did she carry a towel—one of Mrs. Shannon’s towels? They might have been going to a wedding or an office picnic, a ball game or a visit to relations. It made Mrs. Shannon sad to know that she couldn’t be sure.
But it was always difficult for a stranger to guess Rosalie’s destination, she approached each journey with such great expectations. Sometimes in the autumn her date would tell his parents that he was going hunting and would then take Rosalie—who was under no kind of surveillance once she left the rooming house—out for a night in a tourist cabin on the turnpike, and when he picked her up on those Saturday afternoons she usually wore a chrysanthemum and an oak leaf pinned to her lapel and carried a small suitcase with an Amherst or Harvard label stuck to it as if all the pleasures of a football week end—the game, the tea dance, the faculty reception and the prom—were what she was expecting. She was never disappointed nor was she ever disabused. There was never a point, when she hung up her coat in the tourist cabin while he tried to burn off the damp with a fire, where the difference between this furtive evening and the goal-post snake dance would depress her, nor did she ever seem to reach a point where these differences challenged or altered her expectations. Most of her expectations were collegiate and now, as they found their way out of the city, she began to sing. Popular music passed directly from the radio and the bandstand into some retentive space in her memory, leaving a spoor of cheerful if repetitious and sentimental lyrics.
Going out of the city they passed those congested beaches that lie within its limits and that spread, with a few industrial interruptions, for miles to the south. Now, in the middle of the morning, the life of the beaches was in full swing and the peculiar smell of cooking grease and popcorn butter was stronger than any emanations of the Atlantic Ocean that seems there, held in the islands of a sinking coast, to be a virile and a sad presence. Thousands of half-naked bathers obscured the beach or hesitated knee deep in the ocean as if this water, like the Ganges, were purifying and holy so that these displaced and naked crowds, strung for miles along the coast, gave to this holiday and carnival surface the undercurrents of a pilgrimage in which, as much as any of the thousands they passed, Rosalie and her date were involved.
“You hungry?” he said. “You want something to eat now? Ma gave us enough for three meals. I’ve got some whisky in the glove case.”
The thought of the picnic hamper reminded her of his plain, white-haired mother, who would have sent along something of herself in the basket—watchful, never disapproving, but saddened by the pleasures of her only son. He had his way. His neat, bleak and ugly bedroom was the axis of their house and the rapport between this man and his parents was so intense and tacit that it seemed secretive to Rosalie. Every room was dominated by souvenirs of his growth; guns, golf clubs, trophies from schools and camps and on the piano some music he had practiced ten years ago. The cool house and his contrite parents were strange to Rosalie and she thought that his white shirt that morning smelled of the yellow varnished floors where he took up his secretive life with Ma and Pa. Her date had always had a dog. He had, in his lifetime, run through four dogs, and Rosalie knew their names, their habits, their markings and their tragic ends. On the one time that she had met his parents the conversation had turned to his dogs and she had come to feel that they thought of his relationship to her—not maliciously or harmfully, but because these were the only terms they could find—as something like the exchange between him and a dog. I feel absolully like a dog, she said.
They drove through a few holiday village squares where newspapers were stacked outside the one open drugstore and where parades were forming. Now they were in the country, a few miles inland, but there was not much change in feeling, for the road was fenced with stores, restaurants, gift shops, greenhouses and tourist cabins. The beach to which he was taking her was unpopular because
the road was rough and the beach was stony, but he was disappointed that day when he found two other cars in the clearing where they parked, and they unloaded the hamper and followed a crooked path to the sea—the open sea here. Pink scrub roses grew along the path and she felt the salt air form on her lips and tasted it with her tongue. There was a narrow, gravelly beach at a break in the cliffs and then below them they saw a couple like themselves and a family with children and then beyond them the green sea. Turning away self-consciously from the privacy he so sorely wanted then and that the cliffs all around them made available he carried the picnic hamper, the whisky bottle and the tennis ball down onto the beach and settled himself in full view of the other bathers as if this momentary gesture toward simple, public pleasure was made for the sake of whatever his mother had been able to wrap up of herself in the sandwiches. Rosalie went behind a stone and changed from her clothes into a bathing suit. He was waiting for her at the edge of the water and when she had made sure that all her hair was under her bathing cap she took his hand and they walked in.
The water was cruelly cold there, it always was, and when it got up to her knees she dropped his hand and dived. She had been taught to swim a crawl but she had never unlearned a choppy, hurried stroke and with her face half buried in the green she headed out to sea for ten feet, turned, surface-dived, shouted with pain at the cold and then raced toward the beach. The beach was sunny and the cold water and the heat of the sun set her up. She dried herself roughly with a towel, snatched off her cap and then stood in the sun, waiting for its heat to reach her bones. She dried her hands and lighted a cigarette and he came out of the sea then, dried only his hands and dropped down beside her.
Her hair was yellow and she was fair—long limbed and full breasted with a skittish look that even in the robes of a choir girl, which she had worn, made her look high-tailed and undressed. He took her hand and raised it and brushed her arm, covered with the light hair of an early down, with his lips. “I’d adore to pick blueberries,” she said loudly and for the benefit of the others on the beach. “I’d adore to pick blueberries but let’s take your hat and we’ll put the blueberries in that.”
They climbed the stones above the beach, hand in hand, but the search for a privacy that would satisfy her was lengthy and they went from place to place until finally he stopped her and she agreed, timidly, that there was probably nothing better. He took her bathing suit off her shoulders and when she was naked she lay down cheerfully, gladly in the sunny dirt to take the only marriage of her body to its memories that she knew. Tenderness and good nature lingered between them after they were done and she leaned on his shoulder while she stepped back into her bathing suit and they returned hand in hand to the beach. They went swimming again and unwrapped the sandwiches that his worried mother had made them the night before.
There were deviled eggs and chicken joints, sandwiches, cakes, cookies, and when they had eaten what they could they put the rest away in the hamper and he jogged down the beach and pitched the tennis ball to her from there. The light ball wavered in the wind but she caught it and threw it back to him with a wing that, like her swimming stroke, was short of what was needed, and he caught the ball with a flourish and threw it back to her. Now the catching and the throwing, the catching and the throwing took on a pleasant monotony and through it she felt the afternoon passing. The tide was going out, leaving on the beach seriations of coarser gravel and strands of kelp whose flower shapes burst with a shot when she crushed them between her fingers. The family group had begun to gather their possessions and call to their children. The other couple lay side by side, talking and laughing. She lay down again and he sat beside her and lighted a cigarette, asking, now, now, but she said no and he walked off toward the water. She looked up and saw him swimming in the waves. Then he was drying himself beside her and offering her a cup of whisky but she said no, no, not yet, and he drank it himself and looked out to sea.
Now the pleasure steamers, fat, white, crowded and unseaworthy, that had set out that morning were returning. (Among these was the Topaze.) The swell of the sea had quieted a little. Her date drank off his whisky and wrung the paper cup in his hand. The couple on their left were getting up to go and when they had gone he asked again now, now, and she said no, led on by some vague vision of continence that had appeared to her. She was weary of trying to separate the power of loneliness from the power of love and she was lonely. She was lonely and the sun drawing off the beach and the coming night made her feel tender and afraid. She looked at him now, holding in at least one chamber of her mind this vision of continence. He was staring out to sea. Lechery sat like worry on his thin face. He saw the leonine reefs in the sea like clavicles and women’s knees. Even the clouds in heaven wouldn’t dissuade him. The pleasure boats looked to him like voyaging whorehouses and he thought that the ocean had a riggish smell. He would marry some woman with big breasts, she thought—the daughter of a paper hanger—and go on the road selling disinfecants. Yes, yes, she said, yes now.
Then they drank some more whisky and ate again and now the homing pleasure boats had disappeared and the beach and all but the highest cliffs lay in the dark. He went up to the car and got a blanket, but now the search for privacy was brief; now it was dark. The stars came out and when they were done she washed in the sea and put her white coat on and together, barefoot, they went up and down the beach, carefully gathering the sandwich papers, bottles and egg shells that they and the others had left, for these were neat, good children of the middle class.
He hung the wet bathing suits on the door of the car to dry, patted her gently on the knee—the tenderest gesture of them all—and started the car. Once they had got onto the main road the traffic was heavy and many of the cars they passed had, like his, bathing suits hung from the door handles. He drove fast, and she thought cleverly, although the car was old. Its lights were weak and with the lights of an approaching car filling the pupils of his eyes he held to the road precariously, like a blind man running. But he was proud of the car—he had put in a new cylinder head and supercharger—proud of his prowess in negotiating the dilapidated and purblind vehicle over the curving roads of Travertine and St. Botolphs, and when they had gotten free of the traffic and were on a back road that was not, to his knowledge, patrolled, he took it as fast as it would go. The speed made Rosalie feel relaxed until she heard him swear and felt the car careen and bump into a field.
CHAPTER FIVE
The heart of the Wapshot house had been built before the War of Independence, but many additions had been made since then, giving the house the height and breadth of that recurrent dream in which you open a closet door and find that in your absence a corridor and a staircase have bloomed there. The staircase rises and turns into a hall in which there are many doors among the book shelves, any one of which will lead you from one commodious room to another so that you can wander uninterruptedly and searching for nothing through a place that, even while you dream, seems not to be a house at all but a random construction put forward to answer some need of the sleeping mind. The house had been neglected in Leander’s youth, but he had restored it during his prosperous years at the table-silver company. It was old enough and large enough and had seen enough dark acts to support a ghost but the only room that was haunted was the old water closet at the back of the upstairs hall. Here a primitive engine, made of vitreous china and mahogany, stood by itself. Now and then—sometimes as often as once a day—this contraption would perform its functions independently. There would be the clatter of machinery and the piercing whinny of old valves. Then the roar of waters arriving and the suck of waters departing could be heard in every room of the house. So much for ghosts.
The house is easy enough to describe but how to write a summer’s day in an old garden? Smell the grass, we say. Smell the trees! A flag is draped from the attic windows over the front of the house, leaving the hall in darkness. It is dusk and the family has gathered. Sarah has told them about her journey with Mr. Pin
cher. Leander has brought the Topaze in to port. Moses has raced his sailboat at the Pocamasset club and is spreading his mainsail on the grass to dry. Coverly has watched the table-silver-company ball game from the barn cupola. Leander is drinking bourbon and the parrot hangs in a cage by the kitchen door. A cloud passes over the low sun, darkening the valley, and they feel a deep and momentary uneasiness as if they apprehended how darkness can fall over the continents of the mind. The wind freshens and then they are all cheered as if this reminded them of their recuperative powers. Malcolm Peavey is bringing his catboat up the river and it is so still that they can hear the sound she makes as she comes about. A carp is cooking in the kitchen, and, as everyone knows, a carp has to be boiled in claret with pickled oysters, anchovies, thyme, marjoram, basil and white onions. All of this can be smelled. But as we see the Wapshots, spread out in their rose garden above the river, listening to the parrot and feeling the balm of those evening winds that, in New England, smell so of maidenly things—of orris root and toilet soap and rented rooms, wet by an open window in a thunder shower; of chamber pots and sorrel soup and roses and gingham and lawn; of choir robes and copies of the New Testament bound in limp morocco and pastures that are for sale, blooming now with rue and fern—as we see the flowers, staked by Leander with broken hockey sticks and mop and broom handles, as we see that the scarecrow in the cornfield wears the red coat of the defunct St. Botolphs Horse Guards and that the blue water of the river below them seems mingled with our history, it would be wrong to say as an architectural photographer once did, after photographing the side door, “It’s just like a scene from J. P. Marquand.” They are not like this—these are country people, and in the center of the gathering sits Aunt Adelaide Forbes, the widow of a schoolteacher. Hear what Aunt Adelaide has to say.
