The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  Northeaster (Leander wrote). Wind backed from SW. 3rd equinoctial disturbance of season. All in love is not larky and fractious.—In the attic the broken harp-string music of water dropping into pails and pans had begun and, feeling chilled and exposed to the somber view of the river in the rain, he put away his papers and went down the stairs. Sarah was in Travertine. Lulu was away. He went into the back parlor, where he was completely absorbed in building and lighting a fire—in watching how it caught, in sniffing the perfume of clean wood and feeling the heat as it reached his hands and then went through his clothes. When he was warm he went to the window to see the dark day. He was surprised to see a car turn in the gates and come up the drive. It was one of the old sedans from the taxi stand at the station.

  The car stopped at the side door and he saw a woman lean forward and talk to the driver. He did not recognize the passenger—she was plain and gray-haired—and he guessed that she was one of Sarah’s friends. He watched her from the window. She opened the door of the car and walked up, through the thin curtain of rain that fell from the broken gutters, to the door. Leander was glad for any company and he went down the hall and opened the door before she rang.

  He saw a very plain woman, her coat darkened at the shoulders with rain. Her face was long, her hat was trimmed gaily with hard white feathers, like the feathers that are used to balance badminton birds, and her coat was worn. Leander had seen, he thought, hundreds of her kind. They were the imprimatur of New England. Dutiful, pious and hardy, they seemed to have patterned their spirits after the weeds that grow in high pastures. They were the women, Leander thought, after whom the dirty boats of the mackerel fleet were named: Alice, Esther, Agnes, Maybelle and Ruth. That there should be feathers in her hat, that an ugly pin made of seashells should be pinned to her flat breast, that there should be anything feminine, any ornament on such a discouraging figure, seemed to Leander touching.

  “Come in,” Leander said. “I expect you’re looking for Mrs. Wapshot?”

  “I think you’re the gentleman I’m looking for,” she said with a look so troubled and shy that Leander glanced down at his clothes. “I’m Miss Helen Rutherford. Are you Mr. Wapshot?”

  “Yes, I’m Leander Wapshot. Come in, come in out of the rain. Come into the parlor. I have a little fire.” She followed Leander along the hall and he opened the door to the back parlor. “Sit down,” he said. “Sit in the red chair. Sit by the fire. Give your clothes a chance to dry out.”

  “You have quite a big house here, Mr. Wapshot,” she said.

  “It’s too big,” Leander said. “Do you know how many doors there are in this house? There are one hundred and twenty-two doors in this house. Now what was it that you wanted to see me about?”

  She made a sniffling sound as if she had a cold or might even have been crying and began to unbuckle a heavy brief case that she carried.

  “Your name was given to me by an acquaintance. I’m an accredited representative of the Institute for Self-Improvement. We still have a few subscriptions open for eligible men and women. Dr. Bartholomew, the director of the institute, has divided human knowledge into seven branches. Science, the arts—both the cultural arts and the arts of physical well-being—religion …”

  “Who gave you my name?” Leander asked.

  “Dr. Bartholomew thinks it’s more a question of inclination than background,” the stranger said. “Many people who’ve been fortunate enough to have a college education are still ineligible by Dr. Bartholomew’s standards.” She spoke without emphasis or feeling, almost with dread, as if she had come about something else, and she kept her eyes on the floor. “Educators all over the world and some of the crowned heads of Europe have endorsed Dr. Bartholomew’s methods and Dr. Bartholomew’s essay on ‘The Science of Religion’ is in the Royal Library in Holland. I have a picture of Dr. Bartholomew here and …”

  “Who gave you my name?” Leander asked again.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy gave me your name.” She began to wring her hands. “He died last summer. Oh, he was good to me, he was like a real daddy, there wasn’t anything in the world that he wouldn’t do for me. He was my best beau. On Sundays we used to take walks together. He was awfully intelligent but they cheated him. They did him out of everything. He wasn’t afraid, though, he wasn’t afraid of anything. Once we went to a show in Boston. That was on my birthday. He bought these expensive seats. They were supposed to be in the orchestra but when we came to sit in them they put us in the balcony. We paid for orchestra seats—he told me—and we’re going down and sit in that orchestra. So he took my hand and we went downstairs and he told the usher—he was one of those stuck-up fellows—we paid for orchestra seats and we’re going to sit in that orchestra. I miss him so much it’s all I can think about. He never let me go anywhere without him. And then he died last summer.”

  “Where is your home?” Leander asked.

  “Nahant.”

  “Nahant?”

  “Yes. Daddy told me everything.”

  “What do you mean?” Leander said.

  “Daddy told me everything. He told me how you came there after dark, like thieves, he said, and about how Mr. Whittier paid for everything and how Mother kept me from drinking her wicked milk.”

  “Who are you?” Leander said.

  “I’m your daughter.”

  “Oh no,” Leander said. “You’re lying. You’re a crazy woman. Get out of here.”

  “I’m your daughter.”

  “Oh no,” Leander said. “You’ve thought this all up, you and those people in Nahant. You’ve made it all up. Now get out of my house. Leave me alone.”

  “You walked on the beach,” she said. “Daddy remembered everything so’s you’d believe me and give me money. He even remembered the suit you had. He said you had a plaid suit. He said you walked on the beach and picked up stones.”

  “Get out of my house,” Leander said.

  “I won’t go away from here until you give me money. You never once asked was I living or dead. You never gave me a thought. Now I want some money. After Daddy died I sold the house and I had a little money and then I had to take this work. It’s hard for me. It’s too hard for me. I’m not strong. I’m out in all weathers. I want some money.”

  “I don’t have anything to give you.”

  “That’s what Daddy said. He said you’d try to get out of helping me. Daddy told me that’s what you’d say, but he made me promise to come and see you.” Then she stood and picked up her brief case. “God will be your judge,” she said at the door, “but I know my rights and I can bring you into court and blacken your name.” Then she went down the hall and when she got to the door Leander called after her, “Wait, wait, wait, please,” and went down the hall. “I can give you something,” he said. “I have a few things left. I have a jade watch fob and a golden chain and I can show you your mother’s grave. It’s in the village.”

  “I would spit on it,” she said. “I would spit on it.” Then she went out of the house to where the taxi was waiting and drove away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A week or ten days after his dinner with Betsey, Coverly moved into her apartment. This took a lot of persuasion on Coverly’s part but her resistance pleased him and seemed to express the seriousness with which she took herself. His case was based—indirectly—on the fact that she needed someone to look out for her, on the fact that she did not have, as she had said herself, the thickness of skin the city demanded. Coverly’s feelings about her helplessness were poetic and absorbing and when he thought of her in her absence it was with a mixture of pity and bellicoseness. She was alone and he would defend her. There was this and there was the fact that their relationship unfolded with great validity and this informal marriage or union, played out in a strange and great city, made Coverly very happy. She was the beloved; he was the lover—there was never any question about this and this suited Coverly’s disposition and gave to his courtship and their life together the liveline
ss of a pursuit. Her search for friends had been arduous and disappointing and it was these disappointments and exasperations that Coverly was able to redress. There was no pretentiousness in her—no memories of either hunt balls or razorback hogs—and she was ready and willing to cook his supper and warm his bones at night. She had been raised by her grandmother, who had wanted her to be a schoolteacher, and she had disliked the South so much that she had taken any job to get out of it. He recognized her defenselessness, but he recognized, at a much deeper level, her human excellence, the touching qualities of a wanderer, for she was that and said so and while she would play all the parts of love she would not tell him that she was in love. On the week ends they took walks, subway and ferryboat rides, and talked over their plans and their tastes, and late in the winter Coverly asked her to marry him. Betsey’s reaction was scattered, tearful and sweet, and Coverly wrote his plans in a letter to St. Botolphs. He wanted to marry as soon as he had passed his civil-service examinations and had been assigned to one of the rocket-launching stations where Tapers were employed. He enclosed a photograph of Betsey, but he would not bring his bride to St. Botolphs until he was given a vacation. He took these precautions because it had occurred to him that Betsey’s southern accent and sometimes fractious manner might not go down with Honora and that the sensible thing to do would be to marry and produce a son before Honora saw his wife. Leander may have sensed this—his letters to Coverly were all congratulatory and affectionate—and it may have been at the back of his mind that with Coverly married they might soon all be on Easy Street. It would be way at the back of his mind. Sarah was heartbroken to know that Coverly would not be married at Christ Church.

  Coverly passed his exams with flying colors in April and was surprised when the MacIlhenney Institute had a graduation ceremony. This was held in the fifth floor of the building in an academy of piano teaching where two classrooms had been thrown together to make an auditorium. All of Coverley’s classmates appeared with their families or their wives, and Betsey wore a new hat. A lady, a stranger to them all, played “Pomp and Circumstance” on the piano and as their names were called they went up to the front of the room and got their diplomas from Mr. MacIlhenney. Then they went down to the fourth floor where they found Mrs. MacIlhenney standing by a rented tea urn and a plate of Danish pastry. Coverly and Betsey were married the next morning at the Church of the Transfiguration. Mittler was the only witness and they spent a three-day honeymoon on an island cottage that Mittler owned and loaned them. Sarah wrote Coverly a long letter about what she would send him from the farm when he was settled—the Canton china and the painted chairs—and Leander wrote a letter in which he said, among other things, that to make a son was as easy as blowing a feather off your knee. Honora sent them a check for two hundred dollars, but no message.

  Coverly passed his Civil Service examinations and was qualified as a Taper. He knew, by then, the location of most of the rocket-launching bases in the country and as soon as he was settled he would send for Betsey and they would begin their marriage. Although Coverly’s status was civilian his assignment was cut at an army base and he was given transportation by the air force. His orders were cut in code. A week after his marriage he boarded an old C-54 with bucket seats and found himself, next day, in an airfield outside San Francisco. His feeling then was that he would be sent to Oregon or flown back to one of the desert stations. He telephoned Betsey and she cried when she heard his voice but he assured her that in a week or ten days they would be together again in a house of their own. He was very uxorious and lay down each night in his army bunk with Betsey’s specter, slept with her shade in his arms and woke each morning with powerful longings for his sandwich-shop Venus and wife. There was some delay about the second stage of his journey and he was kept at the air-force base in San Francisco for nearly a week.

  We all, man and boy, know what a transient barracks looks like and there would be no point in enumerating this barrenness. The fact that Coverly was a civilian did not give him any freedom and whether he went to the officers’ club or the movies he had to report his whereabouts to the orderly room. He could see the hills of San Francisco across the bay and, thinking that this city—or some firing grounds in the vicinity—would be his destination, he wrote hopefully to Betsey about her coming West. “It was cold in the barracks last night and I sure wish you’d been in bed with me to warm it up.” And so forth and so on. He lived among a dozen or so men who seemed to have been withdrawn from permanent installations in the Pacific because they were unfit. The most articulate of these was a Mexican who had not been able to stomach army food because there were no peppers in it. He told his story to anyone who would listen. As soon as he started eating army food he lost weight. He knew what the trouble was. He needed peppers. He had eaten peppers all his life. Even his mother’s milk had been peppery. He pleaded with army cooks and doctors to get him some peppers but they wouldn’t take his pleas seriously. He wrote to his Momma and she sent him some pepper seeds in an envelope and he planted them around an anti-aircraft gun emplacement where the soil was rich and where there was plenty of sun. He watered them and tended them and they had just begun to sprout when the commanding officer ordered them to be plowed under. It was unmilitary to raise vegetables on a gun emplacement. This order broke the Mexican’s spirit. He lost weight; he became so emaciated that he had to be sent to the infirmary; and now he was being discharged from the army as a mental incompetent. He would have been happy to serve his flag, he said, if he could have peppers in his food. His plaint seemed reasonable enough but it got tiresome night after night and Coverly usually stayed out of the barracks until the lights were off.

  He ate his meals at the officers’ club, lost or won a dollar at the gambling machines, drank a glass of ginger ale at the bar and went to the movies. He saw Westerns, gangster careers, tales of happy and unhappy love both in brilliant colors and in black and white. He was sitting in the movies one evening when the public-address system called: “Attention, attention everybody. Will the following men report to Building Thirty-two with their gear. Private Joseph Di Gacinto. Private Henry Wollaston. Lieutenant Marvin Smythe. Mister Coverly Wapshot …” The audience hooted and whistled and called, “You’ll be sorreee,” as they went out into the dark. Coverly got his valise and went over to Building Thirty-two and was driven with the rest of the men to the airfield. They all had some theory about their destination. They were going to Oregon, Alaska or Japan. It had never occurred to Coverly that he might be leaving the country and he was worried. He pinned his hopes on Oregon but decided that if his destination was Alaska Betsey could follow him there. As soon as they boarded the plane the doors were shut and they taxied down the runway and took off. It was an old transport with a conservative speed, Coverly guessed, and if their destination was Oregon they would reach there before dawn. The plane was hot and stuffy and he fell asleep, and waking at dawn and looking from the port he saw that they were high over the Pacific. They flew westward all day, shooting crap and reading the Bible, which was all they had to read, and at dusk they picked up the lights of Diamond Head and landed on Oahu.

  Coverly was assigned a bunk in another transient barracks and told to report to the airfield in the morning. No one would tell him if his travels were over, but he guessed, from the looks of the orderly-room clerks, that he had some way to go. He got rid of his valise and hitched a ride on a weapons carrier into Honolulu. It was a hot, stale-smelling night with thunder in the mountains. Memories of Thaddeus and Alice, of Honora and old Benjamin came to him and he walked in the footsteps of many Wapshots, but this was not much of a consolation. Half a world lay between him and Betsey, and all his plans of happiness, children, and the honor of the family name seemed cruelly suspended or destroyed. He saw a sign on a wall that said: AIRMAIL AN ORCHID LEI TO YOUR SWEETHEART FOR AS LITTLE AS THREE DOLLARS. This would be a way of expressing his tender feelings for Betsey and he asked an MP near the old palace where he could get a lei. He followed th
e MP’s directions and rang the bell of a house where a fat woman in evening clothes let him in. “I want a lei,” Coverly said sadly.

  “Well, you come to the right place, honey,” she said. “You come right in. You come right in and have a drink and I’ll fix you up in a few minutes.” She took his arm and led him into a little parlor where some other men were drinking beer.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Coverly said suddenly. “There’s some mistake. You see, I’m married.”

  “Well, that don’t make no difference,” the fat lady said. “More’n half the girls I got working for me’s married and I been happily married for nineteen years myself.”

  “There’s been a mistake,” Coverly said.

  “Well, make up your mind,” the fat woman said. “You come in here telling me you want to get laid and I’m doing the best I can for you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Coverly said, and he was gone.

  In the morning he boarded another plane and flew all day. A little before dark they circled for a landing and out of the ports Coverly could see, in the stormy light, a long, scimitar-shaped atoll with surf breaking on one coast, a huddle of buildings and a rocket-launching platform. The airstrip was small and the pilot took three passes before he made a landing. Coverly swung down from the door and crossed the strip to an office where a clerk translated his orders. He was on Island 93—an installation that was half military and half civilian. His tour of duty would be nine months with a two-week vacation at a rest camp in either Manila or Brisbane; take your pick.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Moses was promoted and he bought a car and rented an apartment. He worked hard at his office and still had a lot of nightwork assigned to him by Mr. Boynton. He saw Beatrice about once a week. This was a pleasant and irresponsible arrangement for he discovered very soon that Beatrice’s marriage had gone on the rocks long before he had stepped into the Marine Room. Chucky was going around with the girl who sang in the band and Beatrice liked to talk about his perfidy and ingratitude. She had given him the money to organize the band. She had supported him. She had even bought his clothes. Beatrice meant to speak bitterly, but it wasn’t in her. The dainty way in which she shaped her words seemed to exclude from them any of the deeper notes of human trouble. She had trouble—plenty of it—but she couldn’t get it into her voice. She was thinking of traveling and spoke of beginning a new life in Mexico, Italy or France. She said she had plenty of money although if this was so Moses wondered why she put up with a broken-down cardboard wardrobe and wore such dilapidated furs. Going unexpectedly to her apartment one night, Moses was not let in until he had cooled his heels in the hallway for some time. From the noises inside he figured that she was entertaining another caller and when he was finally let in he wondered if his rival was hidden in the bathroom or stuffed into the wardrobe. But he was not in any way concerned with the life she led and he stayed long enough to smoke a cigarette and then went out to a movie.