The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  “I want some emergency transportation,” Coverly said. “I want to go home. My father’s dying.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, my boy,” Lindstrom said. “I’m very sorry. I can’t get you emergency transportation. I don’t know why they send people to me. I don’t know why they do this. You can go and see the major. A man got some emergency transportation last month. At least that’s what I heard. You go to the major and I’ll pray for you.”

  The major was playing poker and drinking whisky at the officers’ club and he left the card table gruffly, but he was an amiable or sentimental drinker, and when Coverly said that his father was dying he put an arm around his shoulder, walked him over to the transportation office and got a clerk out of the movies to cut his orders.

  He left before dawn in an old DC-4, covered with oil and with a picture of a bathing beauty painted on its fuselage. He slept on the floor. They got to Oahu in the disorder of a hot summer dusk with more lightning playing in the mountains. He left for San Francisco in a transport at eleven the next night. There was a crap game and the un-insulated plane was very cold and Coverly sat in a bucket seat, wrapped in a blanket. The drone of the motors reminded him of the Topaze and he fell asleep. When he woke the sky was a rosy color and the flight clerk was passing out oranges and saying that he could smell the land wind. A solid cloud ceiling broke as they neared the coast and they could see the burned summer hills of San Francisco. A few hours after clearing military customs Coverly hitched a ride on a bomber to Washington and went from there to St. Botolphs on the train. He took a taxi from the station out to the farm in the middle of the morning and saw, for the first time, the signs on the main road on the elm tree, VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND. He got out of the cab and looking around he saw his father, searching for four-leaf clovers in the meadow by the river, and he ran to him, “Oh, I knew you’d come, Coverly,” Leander called. “I knew that you or Moses would come,” and he embraced his son and laid his head on his shoulder.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  At the turn of the century there were more castles in the United States than there were in all of Merrie England when Gude King Arthur ruled that land. The search for a wife took Moses to one of the last of these establishments to be maintained—the bulk of them had been turned into museums, bought by religious orders or demolished. This was a place called Clear Haven, the demesne of Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scaddon, an ancient cousin from St. Botolphs who had married a five-and-ten-cent-store millionaire. Moses had met her at a cotillion or dance that he had gone to with a classmate from Bond School and through her had met her ward, Melissa. Melissa seemed to Moses, the instant he saw her, to be, by his lights, a most desirable and beautiful woman. He courted her and when they became lovers he asked her to marry him. So far as he knew, this sudden decision had nothing to do with the conditions of Honora’s will. Melissa agreed to marry him if he would live at Clear Haven. He had no objections. The place—whatever it was—would shelter them for the summer and he felt sure that he could prevail on her to move into the city in the fall. So one rainy afternoon he took a train to Clear Haven, planning to love Melissa Scaddon and to marry her.

  The conservative sumptuary tastes that Moses had formed in St. Botolphs had turned out to coincide with the sumptuary tastes of New York banking, and under his dun-colored raincoat Moses wore the odd, drab clothes of that old port. It was nearly dark when he set out, and the journey through the northern slums, and the rainfall catching and returning like a net the smoke and filth of the city, made him somber and restive. The train that he took ran up the banks of the river and, sitting on the land side of the car, he watched a landscape that in the multitude of its anomalies would have prepared him for Clear Haven if he had needed any preparation, for nothing was any more what it had aimed to be or what it would be in the end and the house that had meant to express familial pride was now a funeral parlor, the house that had meant to express worldly pride was a rooming house, Ursuline nuns lived in the castle that was meant to express the pride of avarice, but through this erosion of purpose Moses thought he saw everywhere the impress of human sweetness and ingenuity. The train was a local and the old rolling stock creaked from station to station, although at some distance from the city the stops were infrequent and he saw now and then from the window those huddled families who wait on the platform for a train or a passenger and who are made by the pallid lights, the rain and their attitudes to seem to be drawn together by some sad and urgent business. Only two passengers remained in the car when they reached Clear Haven and he was the only one to leave the train.

  The rain was dense then, the night was dark and he went into a waiting room that held his attention for a minute for there was a large photograph on the wall, framed in oak, of his destination. Flags flew from the many towers of Clear Haven, the buttresses were thick with ivy and considering what he went there for it seemed far from ridiculous. Justina seemed to have had a hand in the waiting room for there was a rug on the floor. The matchboard walls were stained the color of mahogany and the pipes that must heat the place in winter rose gracefully, two by two, to disappear like serpents into holes in the ceiling. The benches around the walls were divided at regular intervals with graceful loops of bent wood that would serve the travelers as arm rests and keep the warm hams of strangers from touching one another. Stepping out of the waiting room he found a single cab at the curb. “I’ll take you up to the gates,” the driver said. “I can’t take you up to the house but I’ll leave you at the gates.”

  The gates, Moses saw when he got out of the taxi, were made of iron and were secured with a chain and padlock. There was a smaller gate on the left and he went in there and walked through the heavy rain to the lights of what he guessed was a gatehouse or cottage. A middle-aged man came to the door—he was eating—and seemed delighted when Moses gave his name. “I’ma Giacomo,” he said. “I’ma Giacomo. You comea with me.” Moses followed him into an old garage, rank with the particular damp of cold concrete that goes so swiftly to the bone. There, in the glare, stood an old Rolls-Royce with a crescent-windowed tonneau like the privy at West Farm. Moses got into the front while Giacomo began to work the fuel pump and it took him some time to get the car started. “She’sa nearly dead,” Giacomo said. “She’sa no good for night driving.” Then they backed like a warship out into the rain. There were no windshield wipers or Giacomo did not use them and they traveled without headlights up a winding drive. Then suddenly Moses saw the lights of Clear Haven. There seemed to be hundreds of them—they were so numerous that they lighted the road and lifted his spirits. Moses thanked Giacomo and carried his suitcase through the rain to the shelter of a big porch that was carved and ribbed like the porch of a cathedral. The only bell he saw to ring was a contraption of wrought-iron leaves and roses, so fanciful and old that he was afraid it might come down on his head if he used it, and he pounded on the door with his fist. A maid let him in and he stepped into a kind of rotunda and at the same time Melissa appeared in another door. He put down his bag, let the rain run out of the brim of his hat and gathered his beloved up in his arms.

  His clothes were wet and a little rancid as well. “I suppose you could change,” Melissa said, “but there isn’t much time.…” He recognized in her look of mingled anxiety and pleasure the suspense of someone who introduces one part of life into another, feeling insecurely that they may clash and involve a choice or a parting. He felt her suspense as she took his arm and led him across a floor where their footsteps rang on the black-and-white marble. It was unlike Moses, but to tell the truth he looked neither to the left where he heard the sounds of a fountain nor to the right where he smelled the sweet earth of a conservatory, feeling, like Cousin Honora, that to pretend to have been born and bred in whatever environment one found oneself was a mark of character.

  He was in a sense right in resisting his curiosity, for Clear Haven had been put together for the purpose of impre
ssing strangers. No one had ever counted the rooms—no one, that is, but a vulgar and ambitious cousin who had spent one rainy afternoon this way, feeling that splendor could be conveyed in numbers. She had come up with the sum of ninety-two but no one knew whether or not she had counted the maid’s rooms, the bathrooms and the odd, unused rooms, some of them without windows, that had been created by the numerous additions to the place, for the house had grown, reflecting the stubborn and eccentric turns of Justina’s mind. When she had bought the great hall from the Villa Peschere in Milan she had cabled the architect, telling him to attach it to the small library. She would not have bought the hall if she had known that she would be offered the drawing room from the Château de la Muette a week later, and she wrote the architect asking him to attach this to the little dining room and advising him that she had bought four marble fountains representing the four seasons. Then the architect wrote saying that the fountains had arrived and that since there was no room for them in the house would she approve his plans for a winter garden to be attached to the hall from Milan? She cabled back her approval and bought that afternoon a small chapel that could be attached to the painted room that Mr. Scaddon had given her on her birthday. People often said that she bought more rooms than she knew how to use; but she used them all. She was not one of those collectors who let their prizes rot in warehouses. On the same trip she had picked up a marble floor and some columns in Vincenzo but the most impressive addition to Clear Haven that she was able to find on that or any of her later trips were the stones and timbers of the great Windsor Hall. It was to this expatriated hall now that Melissa took Moses.

  Justina sat by the fire, drinking sherry. She was, by Leander’s reckoning, about seventy-five then, but her hair and her eyebrows were ink black and her face, framed in spit curls, was heavily rouged. Her eyes were glassy and shrewd. Her hair was raised off her forehead in a high construction, plainly old-fashioned and reminding Moses of the false front on the Cartwright Block in St. Botolphs. It was the same period. But she reminded him mostly of what she had been—a foxy old dancing mistress.

  She greeted Moses with marked disinterest but this was not surprising in a woman whose distrust of men was even more outspoken than Cousin Honora’s. Her dress was rich and simple and her imperious and hoarse voice ranged over a complete octave of requited social ambitions. “The Count D’Alba, General Burgoyne and Mrs. Enderby,” she said, introducing Moses to the others in the room. The count was a tall, dark-skinned man with cavernous and hairy nostrils. The general was an old man in a wheel chair. Mrs. Enderby wore a pince-nez, the lozenge-shaped lenses of which hung so limply from the bridge of her nose that they gave her a very dropsical look. Her fingers were stained with ink. Melissa and Moses went to some chairs by the fire but these were so outrageously proportioned that Moses had to boost himself up and found, when he was seated, that his legs did not reach the floor. A maid passed him a glass of sherry and a dish in which there were a few old peanuts. The sherry was not fit to drink and when he tasted it Melissa smiled at him and he remembered her accounts of Justina’s parsimony and wished he had brought some whisky in his suitcase. Then a maid stood in a distant doorway and rang some chimes and they went down a hall into a room that was lighted with candles.

  The dinner was a cup of soup, a boiled potato, a scrap of fish and some kind of custard, and the conversation, that was meant to move at Justina’s dictates, suffered from the fact that she seemed either tired, absent-minded or annoyed by Moses’ arrival. When the general spoke to her about the illness of a friend she expressed her fixed idea about the perfidiousness of men. It was her opinion that the husband of her friend was responsible for the illness. Unmarried women—she said—were much healthier than wives. When the meal was finished they returned to the hall. Moses was still hungry and he hoped that there was some breakdown in the kitchen arrangements and that if he did live at Clear Haven he would not be expected to get along on such meager fare. Justina played backgammon with the general and the count sat down at the piano and started a medley of that lachrymose music that is played for cocktails and that is so limpid in its amorousness, so supine and wistful in its statement of passion that it will offend the ears of a man in love. Suddenly all the lights went out.

  “The main fuse is gone again,” Justina said, rolling her dice in the firelight.

  “Can I fix it?” Moses asked, anxious to make a good impression.

  “I don’t know,” Justina said. “There are plenty of fuses.”

  Melissa lighted a candle and Moses followed her down a hall. They could hear a babble of voices from the kitchen where the servants were striking matches and looking for candles. She opened a door into a further corridor and started down a steep flight of worn, wooden stairs into a cellar that smelled of earth. They found the fuse box and Moses changed the old fuse for a new one, although he noticed that the wiring was in some cases bare or carelessly patched with friction tape. Melissa blew out her candle and they returned to the hall, where the count had resumed his forlorn music and where the general hitched his wheel chair up to Moses and led him to a glass case near the fireplace where there were some moldy academic robes that the late Mr. Scaddon had worn when he was given an honorary degree from Princeton.

  It pleased Moses to think that the palace and the hall stood four square on the five-and-ten-cent stores of his youth with their appetizing and depraved odors. His most vivid memories were of the girls—the girl with acne at the cosmetic counter, the fullbusted girl selling hardware, the indolent girl in the candy department, the demure beauty selling oilcloth and the straw-haired town whore on probation among the wind-up toys—and if there was no visible connection between these memories and the hall at Clear Haven the practical connection was inarguable. Moses noticed that when the general spoke of J. P. Scaddon he avoided the phrase “five-and-ten-cent store” and spoke only of merchandising. “He was a great merchant,” the general said, “an exceptional man, a distinguished man—even his enemies would admit that. For the forty years that he was president of the firm his days were scheduled from eight in the morning until sometimes after midnight. When I say that he was distinguished I mean that he was distinguished by his energies, his powers of judgment, his courage and imagination. He possessed all these things to an unusual degree. He was never involved in any shady deals and the merchandising world as we see it today owes something to his imagination, his intelligence and his fine sense of honor. He had, of course, a payroll that employed over a million people. When he opened stores in Venezuela and Belgium and India his intention was not to make himself or his stockholders any richer, but to raise the standard of living generally.…”

  Moses listened to what the general said but the thought that he would lay Melissa had given to that day such stubborn light and joy that it was an effort to keep his ardor from turning to impatience while he listened to this praise of the late millionaire. She was beautiful and it was that degree of beauty that fills even the grocery boy and the garage mechanic with solemn thoughts. The strong, dark-golden color of her hair, her shoulder bones and gorge and the eyes that appeared black at that distance had over Moses such a power that, as he watched her, desire seemed to darken and gild her figure like the cumulative coats of varnish on an old painting, and he would have been gratified if some slight hurt had befallen her, for that deep sense of involvement we experience when we see a lovely woman—or even a woman with nothing left to her but the loveliness of intent—trip on the iron steps of a train carriage or on a curbing of the street—or when, on a rainy day, we see the paper bag in which she is carrying her groceries home split and rain down around her feet and into the puddles on the sidewalk oranges, bunches of celery, loaves of bread, cold cuts wrapped in cellophane—that deep sense of involvement that can be explained by injury and loss was present with Moses with no explanation. He had half risen from his chair when the old lady snapped:

  “Bedtime!”

  He had underestimated the power of desire to dra
w his features and he was caught. From under her dyed eyebrows Justina looked at him hatefully. “I’m going to ask you to take the general to his room,” she said. “Your room is just down the hall so there won’t be any inconvenience. Melissa’s room is on the other side of the house”—she said this triumphantly and made a gesture to emphasize the distance—”and it’s not convenient for her to take the general up. …”

  The stamp of desire on his face had betrayed him once and he did not want to be betrayed by disappointment or anger and he smiled broadly—he positively beamed—but he wondered how, in the labyrinth of rooms, he would ever find his way to her bed. He could not go around knocking on all the doors nor could he open them on screaming maids or the figure of Mrs. Enderby taking off her beads. He might stir up a hornet’s nest of servants”even the Count D’Alba—and precipitate a scandal that would end with his expulsion from Clear Haven. Melissa was smiling so sweetly that he thought she must have a plan and she kissed him decorously and whispered, “Over the roof.” Then she spoke for the benefit of the others. “I’ll see you in the morning, Moses. Pleasant dreams.”

  He pushed the general’s chair into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. The elevator rose slowly and the cables gave off a very mournful sound, but filled again with stubborn joy Moses was insensitive to the premonitory power of such lifts and elevators—the elevators in loft buildings, castles, hospitals and warehouses—that, infirm and dolorous to hear, seem to touch on our concepts of damnation. “Thank you, Mr. Wapshot,” the old man said when Moses had wheeled his chair to the door. “I’ll be all right now. We’re very glad to have you with us. Melissa has been very unhappy, very unhappy and unsettled. Good night.” Back in his own room Moses shucked his clothes, brushed his teeth and stepped out onto the balcony of his room, where the rain still fell, making in the grass and the leaves a mealy sound. He smiled broadly with a great love of the world and everything in it and then, in his skin, started the climb over the roofs.