The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  He knew there was a hospital in the next village and he made good time until he got stuck, on the narrow road, behind a slow-moving truck loaded with live chickens. Moses blew his horn but this only made the truck driver more predatory and how could Moses communicate to him that the thread of a woman’s life might depend on his consideration? He passed the truck at the crown of a hill but this only excited the driver’s malevolence and, roaring downhill, his chicken crates swaying wildly from side to side, he tried, unsuccessfully, to repass Moses. They had come down at last into the leafy streets of the village and the road to the hospital. Many people were walking at the side of the road and then Moses saw signs nailed to the trees advertising a hospital lawn party. They were out of luck. The hospital was surrounded by the booths, lights and music of a country fair.

  A policeman stopped them when they tried to approach the hospital and waved them toward a parking lot. “We want to get to the hospital,” Moses shouted. The policeman leaned toward them. He was deaf. “We have a woman here who is dying,” the stranger cried loudly. “This is a matter of life and death.” Moses got past the policeman and through the fair, approaching a brick building, darkened by many shade trees. The place was shaped like a Victorian mansion and may have been one, modified now by fire escapes and a brick smokestack. Moses got out of the car and ran through an emergency entrance into a room that was empty. He went from there into a hall where he met a gray-haired nurse carrying a tray. “I have an emergency in my car,” he said. There was no kindliness in her face. She gave him that appalling look of bitterness that we exchange when we are too tired, or too exacerbated by our own ill luck, to care whether our neighbors live or die. “What is the nature of the emergency?” she asked airily. Another nurse appeared. She was no younger but she was not so tired. “She was thrown by a horse, she’s unconscious,” Moses said. “Horses!” the old nurse exclaimed. “Dr. Howard has just come in,” the second nurse said. “I’ll get him now.”

  A few minutes later a doctor came down the hall with a second nurse and they wheeled a table out of the emergency room down a ramp to the car and Moses and the doctor lifted the unconscious woman onto this. They accomplished this in a summer twilight, surrounded by the voices of hawkers and the sounds of music that came from the fair beyond the trees. “Oh, can’t somebody stop this?” the stranger asked, meaning the music. “I’m Charles Cutter. I’ll pay any amount of money. Send them home. Send them home. I’ll pay for it. Tell them to stop the music at least. She needs quiet.”

  “We couldn’t do that,” the doctor said quietly, and with a marked upcountry accent. “That’s how we raise the money to keep the hospital running.” In the hospital they began to cut off the woman’s clothes and Moses went into the hallway, followed by her husband. “You’ll stay, you’ll stay a little while with me, won’t you?” he asked Moses. “She’s all I have and if she dies, if she dies I don’t know what I’ll do.” Moses said that he would stay and wandered down the hall to an empty waiting room. A large, bronze plaque on the door said that the waiting room was the gift of Sarah P. Watkins and her sons and daughters, but it was difficult to see what the Watkins family had given. There were three pieces of imitation-leather furniture, a table and a collection of old magazines. Moses waited here until Mr. Cutter returned. “She’s alive,” he sobbed, “she’s alive. Thank God. Her leg and her arm are broken and she has a concussion. I’ve called my secretary and asked them to send a specialist on from New York. They don’t know whether she’ll live or not. They won’t know for twenty-four hours. Oh, she’s such a lovely person. She’s so kind and lovely.”

  “Your wife will be all right,” Moses said.

  “She isn’t my wife,” Mr. Cutter sobbed. “She’s so kind and lovely. My wife isn’t anything like that. We’ve had such hard times, both of us. We’ve never asked for very much. We haven’t even been together very much. It couldn’t be retribution, could it? It couldn’t be retribution. We’ve never harmed anyone. We’ve taken these little trips each year. It’s the only time we ever have together. It couldn’t be retribution.” He dried his tears and cleaned his spectacles and went back down the hall.

  A young nurse came to the door, looking out at the carnival and the summer evening, and a doctor joined her.

  “B2 thinks he’s dying,” the nurse said. “He wants a priest.”

  “I called Father Bevier,” the doctor said. “He’s out.” He put a hand on the nurse’s slender back and let it fall along her buttocks.

  “Oh, I could use a little of that,” the nurse said cheerfully.

  “So could I,” the doctor said.

  He continued to stroke her buttocks and desire seemed to make the nurse plaintive and in a human way much finer and the doctor, who had looked very tired, seemed refreshed. Then, from the dark interior of the place, there was a wordless roar, a spitting grunt, extorted either by extreme physical misery or the collapse of reasonable hope. The doctor and the nurse separated and disappeared in the dark at the end of the hall. The grunt rose to a scream, a shriek, and to escape it Moses walked out of the building and crossed the grass to the edge of the lawn. He was on high land and his view took in the mountains, blackened then by an afterglow—a brilliant yellow that is seen in lower country only on the coldest nights of February.

  In the trees on his left the fair or carnival had hit its gentle, countrified stride. An orchestra on a platform was playing “Smiles” and on the second chorus one of the players put down his instrument and sang a verse through a megaphone. Strings of lights—white and faded reds and yellows—were hung from booth to booth to light, with the faint candle power of these arrangements, the dark of the maples. The noise of voices was not loud and the men talking up hamburgers and fortune’s wheel called with no real insistence. He walked over to a booth and bought a paper cup of coffee from a pretty country girl. When she had given him his change she moved the sugar bowl an inch this way and that, looked at the doughnut jar with a deep sigh and pulled at her apron. “You’re a stranger!” she asked. He said that he was. The girl moved down the counter to wait on some other people who were complaining about the chilly mountain dusk.

  In the next booth a young man was pitching baseballs at a pyramid of wooden milk bottles. His aim and his speed were superb. He stared at the milk bottles, drawing back a little and narrowing his eyes like a rifleman, and then winged a ball at them with the energy of sheer malevolence. Down they came, again and again, and a small crowd of girls and bucks gathered to watch the performance but when it was ended and the pitcher turned toward them they said so long, so long, Charlie, so long, and drifted away, arm in arm. He seemed to be friendless.

  Beyond the baseball pitcher there was a booth selling flowers that had been picked in the village gardens and there were wheels and a bingo game and the wooden stand where the musicians continued without a break their selection of dance music. Moses was surprised to find them so old. The pianist was old, the saxophone player was bent and gray and the drummer must have weighed three hundred pounds, and they seemed attached to their instruments by the rites, conveniences and habits of a long marriage.

  When they had finished their last set a man announced some local talent and Moses saw a child, at the edge of the platform, waiting to go on. She seemed to be a child but when the band played her fanfare she lifted up her hands, shuffled into the light and began a laborious tap dance, counting time painfully and throwing out to the audience, now and then, a leering smile. The taps on her silver shoes made a metallic clang and shook the lumber of the platform and she seemed to have left her youth in the shadows. Powdered, rouged, absorbed in the mechanics of her dance and the enjoinder to seem flirtatious, her freshness was gone and all the bitterness and disappointments of a lascivious middle age seemed to sit on her thin shoulders. At the end she bowed to the little applause, smiled her tart smile once more and ran into the shadows where her mother was waiting with a coat to put over her shoulders and a few words of encouragement and when she step
ped back into the shadows Moses saw that she was no more than twelve or thirteen.

  He threw his paper cup into a can, and finishing his circuit of the carnival saw, walking through the deep grass smell and the summer gloom, a group, a family perhaps, in which there was a woman wearing a yellow skirt. The color of the skirt set up in him a yearning, a pang that put his teeth on edge, and he remembered that he had once loved a girl who had a skirt of the same color although he could not remember her name.

  “I want a specialist, a brain specialist,” Moses heard his friend shouting when he returned to the hospital. “Charter a plane if it’s necessary. Money is no consideration. If he wants a consultant, tell him to bring a consultant. Yes. Yes.” He was using a telephone in an office across the hall from the waiting room that had been given by the Watkins family and where it had grown dark without anyone’s bothering to turn on a lamp. Only a few lights seemed to burn in the hospital at all. The bereaved and elderly lover sat among covered typewriters and adding machines and when he had finished his conversation he looked up to Moses and either because the light caught his spectacles or because his mood had changed, he seemed very officious. “I want you to consider yourself on my payroll as of this morning,” he said to Moses. “If you have other engagements to fulfill you can cancel them, confident that I will more than make this worth your while. The hospital has given me a room for the night and I want you to go back to the inn and get my toilet articles. I’ve made out a list.” he said, passing such a list to Moses. “Estimate your mileage and keep track of the time and I will see that you are amply reimbursed.” Then he picked up the telephone and asked for long distance and Moses stepped out into the dark hall.

  He had nothing better to do and he was glad to drive back to the inn, not so much from a commendable sense of charity and helpfulness as from his desire to draw into a sensible perspective the events of the last few hours. Back at the inn he gave the manager—like a true Wapshot—the most meager account of what had happened. “She was in an accident,” he said. He went upstairs to the room that had been occupied by poor Mr. Cutter and his paramour. All the things on the list were easy to find—everything but a bottle of rye but after looking in the medicine cabinet and behind the books in the shelves he looked under the bed and found a well-stocked bar. He had a drink of Scotch himself in a tooth-brush glass. Back at the hospital Mr. Cutter was still on the telephone. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Now you get some sleep, my boy,” he said mingling paternalism with officiousness. “If you don’t have a place, go back to the inn and ask them to give you a room. Report back here at nine o’clock. Remember that money is no consideration. You’re on my payroll.” Moses went back to the bridle path to get his fishing tackle, which he found unharmed except for a fall of dew, and spent the night in his rented shack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The next day at dusk, Mr. Cutter’s paramour regained consciousness, and in the morning Moses arranged to have his car driven to New York and flew to the city with Mr. Cutter and the patient in a chartered ambulance plane. He was not quite sure where he stood on Mr. Cutter’s payroll, but he had nothing better to do. He went to Coverly’s address as soon as he got to New York, not knowing that his brother was on Island 93. Betsey was there and he took her out to dinner. She was not the girl he would have married, but he found her likable enough. A day or so later he had an interview with Mr. Cutter and a few days later he was enrolled in the Fiduciary Trust Company Bond School at a better salary than he had received in Washington and with a more brilliant future. The letter Leander wrote to him in Washington lay on the hall floor of his apartment and it went like this:

  “Slight mishap to Topaze on 30th. All hands removed with dry feet. Sank in channel and was removed as navigational hazard by Coast Guard on Tues. Beached and patched at Mansion House. She’s at your mooring now (Tern’s) and has been at same since mishap. Afloat but not seaworthy. Beecher estimates cost of repairs at $400. Till empty here and Honora very unco-operative. Can you help? Please try my son and see what you can do. These are d——d difficult days for your old father.

  “Topaze gone, how will I fare? Geezer as old as me begins to cherish his time on this earth but with Topaze gone days pass without purpose, meaning, color, form, appetite, glory, squalor, regret, desire, pleasure or pain. Dusk. Dawn. All the same. Feel hopeful sometimes in early morning but soon discouraged. Sole excitment is to listen to horse races on radio. If I had a stake could quickly recoup price to repair Topaze. Lack even small sum for respectable bet.

  “Was generous giver myself. On several occasions gave large sums to needy strangers. One-hundred-dollar bill to cab starter at Parker House. Fifty dollars to old lady selling lavender at Park Street Church. Eighty dollars to stranger in restaurant who claimed son needed operation. Other donations forgotten. Cast bread upon waters, so to speak. No refund as of today. Tasteless to remind you but never spared the horses with family. Extra suit of sail for Tern. Three hundred dollars for dahlia bulbs. English shoes, mushrooms, hothouse posies, boat club dues and groaning board consumed much of windward anchor.

  “Try to help old father if within means. If not, feel out acquaintances. There is one easy spender in every group of men. Sometimes gambler. Topaze good investment. Has shown substantial profit for every season, but one. Grand business expected in Nangasakit this year. Good chance of returning loan by August. Regret hand-kerchief tone of letter. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.”

  The mooring that Leander mentioned was a mushroom anchor and chain in the river at the foot of the garden, and the old launch could be seen from there. Mrs. Wapshot stared at the Topaze one afternoon when she was picking sage. She felt a stirring in her mind and her body that might mean that she was going to have a vision. Now in fact so many of Mrs. Wapshot’s imaginings had come true that she was entitled to call them visions. Years and years ago, when she was walking by Christ Church, some force of otherness seemed to stop her by the vacant lot that adjoined the church and she had a vision of a parish house—red brick with small-paned casement windows and a neat lawn. She had begun her agitation for a parish house that afternoon and a year and a half later her vision—brick for brick—was a reality. She had dreamed up horse troughs, good works and pleasant journeys to have them materialize oftener than not. Now, coming back from the garden with a bouquet of sage, she looked down the path to the river where the Topaze lay at her mooring.

  It was a gray afternoon along the coast, but not an unexciting one—there might be a storm, and the prospect seemed to please her, as if she held on her tongue, like a peppercorn, the flavor of the old port and the stormy dusk. The air was salty and she could hear the sea breaking at Travertine. The Topaze was dark, of course, dark and she seemed unsalvageable in that light—one of those hulks that we see moored by coal yards in city rivers, kept afloat through some misguided tenderness or hope, wearing sometimes a For Sale sign and sometimes the last habitation of some crazy old hermit whose lair is pasted up with pearly-skinned and spread-legged beauties and whose teeth are pulled. The first thing that crossed her mind when she saw the dark and empty ship was that she would not sail again. She would not cross the bay again. Then Mrs. Wapshot had her vision. She saw the ship berthed at the garden wharf, her hull shining with fresh paint and her cabin full of light. She saw, by turning her head, a dozen or more cars parked in the cornfield. She even saw that some of them had out-of-state license plates. She saw a sign nailed to the elm by the path: VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND. In her mind she took the path down the garden and crossed the wharf to board the ship. Her cabin was all new paint (the life preservers were gone), and lamps burned on many small tables, illuminating a cargo of ash trays, cigarette lighters, playing-card cases, wire arrangements for holding flowers, vases, embroidery, hand-painted drinking glasses and cigarette boxes that played “Tales from Vienna Woods” when you opened them. Her vision was in detail and splendidly lighted and warm
as well, for she saw a Franklin stove at one end of the cabin with a fire in the grate and the perfume of wood smoke mingled with the smell of sachets, Japanese linen and here and there the smell of tallow from a lighted candle. The S.S. Topaze, she thought again, The Only Floating Gift Shoppe in New England, and then she let the stormy dusk reclaim the dark ship and went very happily into the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Leander did not understand why Theophilus Gates would not lend him enough money to have the bow of the Topaze repaired while he would loan Sarah all the money she wanted to turn the old launch into a floating gift shop. That is what happened. The day after her vision Sarah went to the bank and the day after that the carpenters came and began to repair the wharf. The salesmen began to arrive—three and four a day—and Sarah began to stock the Topaze, spending money, as she said herself, like an inebriated sailor. Her happiness or rapture was genuine although it was hard to see why she should find such joy in a gross of china dogs with flowers painted on their backs, their paws shaped in such a way that they could hold cigarettes. There may have been some vengefulness in her enthusiasm—some deep means of expressing her feelings about the independence and the sainthood of her sex. She had never been so happy. She had signs painted: VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND, and posted at all the roads leading into the village. She planned to open the Topaze with a gala tea and a sale of Italian pottery. Hundreds of invitations were printed and mailed.

  Leander made a nuisance of himself. He broke wind in the parlor and urinated against an apple tree in full view of the boats on the river and the salesmen of Italian pottery. He claimed to be aging swiftly and pointed out how loudly his bones creaked when he stooped to pick a thread off a carpet. Tears streamed capriciously from his eyes whenever he heard a horse race on the radio. He still shaved and bathed each morning, but he smelled more like Neptune than ever and clumps of hair grew out of his ears and nostrils before he could remember to clip them. His neckties were stained with food and cigarette ash, and yet, when the night winds woke him and he lay in bed and traced their course around the dark compass, he still remembered what it was to feel young and strong. Deluded by this thread of cold air he would rise in his bed thinking passionately of boats, trains and deep-breasted women, or of some image—a wet pavement plastered with yellow elm leaves—that seemed to represent requital and strength. I will climb the mountain, he thought. I will kill the tiger! I will crush the serpent with my heel! But the fresh winds died with the morning dusk. There was a pain in his kidney. He could not get back to sleep and he would limp and cough through another day. His sons did not write him.