The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  “Melissa?”

  “Justina is so mean to him,” Melissa said, “and she has no right to be. And you don’t like him.”

  “I don’t like him,” Moses said, “that’s true.”

  “Oh, I feel so sorry for him.” She got up from the bench and started for the terrace after Badger. “Melissa,” Moses said, but she was gone in the dark.

  It was about ten o’clock when Moses went upstairs. The door to their room was locked. He called his wife’s name and she didn’t reply and then he was enraged. Then some part of him that was as unsusceptible to compromise as his sexual pride was inflamed and this rage seemed to settle in his gut like stone. He pounded on the door and tried to break the lock with his shoulders and was resting from these exertions when the cold air, coming through the space between the door and the sill, reminded him that Badger was sleeping in the room where he had slept when he first made his trip over the roofs.

  He ran down the back stairs and across the rotunda and took the old elevator to the bedrooms on the other side of the house. Badger’s door was shut but when he knocked no one answered. When he opened the door and stepped in the first thing he heard was the loud noise of rain from the balcony. There was no sign of Badger in the room. Moses went out onto the balcony and swung up onto the roof and sure enough, about a hundred yards away from him and moving very cautiously, bent at the waist and sweeping the air around his feet with his hands like a swimmer (he must have been tripped up by the old radio wire), was Badger. Moses called his name. Badger began to run.

  He seemed to know the way; he steered clear of the airshaft anyhow. He ran toward the pyramidal roof that the chapel made and then turned right and ran along the pitched slate roof of the hall. Moses came around the other side but Badger retreated and got back onto the straightaway and began running toward D’Alba’s lighted dormer. Halfway across the flat roof Moses outstripped him and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  “It isn’t what you think,” Badger said. Then Moses hit him and down Badger went on his bum and he must have sat on a nail because he let out such a hoarse, loud roar of pain that the count stuck his head out of a window.

  “Who’s there, who’s there?”

  “It’s Badger and me,” Moses said.

  “If Justina hears about this she’ll be wild,” the count said. “She doesn’t like people to walk on the roofs. It makes leaks. And what in the world are you doing?”

  “I’m on my way to bed,” Moses said.

  “Oh, I wish you’d give a civil answer to a sensible question once in a while,” the count said. “I’m terribly, terribly tired of your sense of humor and so is Justina. It’s a terrible comedown for her to have people like you in the house after having spent her life in the highest society including royalty, and she told me herself …” The voice got fainter as Moses continued along the ledge to above Melissa’s balcony, his feelings blasted with anger. Then he sat on the roof with his feet in the rain gutter for half an hour, composing an obscene indictment of her intractableness and seeming to release this into the night until the stony rage in his gut diminished. Then, realizing that if he was to find any usable truth in the situation, he would have to find it in himself, he swung down onto the balcony, undressed and got into bed where Melissa was asleep.

  But Moses had wronged Badger. There had not been a lecherous thought in his head when he started over the roofs. He had been very drunk. But there was some magnanimity in the man—a trace of the raw material of human excellence—or at least enough scope in his emotions to set the scene for a conflict, and when he woke early the next morning he reproached himself for his drunkenness and his crazy schemes. He could see the world out of his window then all blue and gold and round as a bull’s eye but all the sapphire-colored lights in heaven merely chilled Badger’s spirit and excited in him a desire to retire into some dark, badly ventilated place. The world, in the partial lights of early morning, appeared to him as hypocritical and offensive as the smile of a door-to-door salesman. Nothing was true, thought Badger; nothing was what it appeared to be, and the enormity of this deception—the subtlety with which the color of the sky deepened as he dressed—angered him. He got down through the rotunda without meeting anyone—not even a rat—and telephoned Giacomo, although it was not six o’clock, and Giacomo drove him to the station.

  The early train was a local and all the passengers were night-shift workmen, returning home. Looking into their tired and dirty faces Badger felt a longing for what he thought to be their humble ways. If he had been brought up simply his life would have had more meaning and value, the better parts of his disposition would have been given a chance to develop and he would not have wasted his gifts. Shaken with drink and self-reproach, he felt it was plain that morning that he had wasted them beyond any chance of their renewal, and images of his earlier life—a high-spirited and handsome boy, bringing in the terrace furniture before a thunderstorm—rose up to reinforce his self-condemnation. Then at the nadir of his depression light seemed to strike into Badger’s mind, for it was the force of his imagination rebelling against utter despair, to raise white things in his head—cities or archways at least of marble—signs of prosperity, triumph and splendor.

  Then whole palladia seemed to mushroom beneath Badger’s patent-leather hair, the cities and villas of a younger world, and he made the trip into the city in a hopeful mood. But sitting over his first cup of coffee in the hole-in-the-wall where he lived Badger saw that his marble white civilizations were helpless before invaders. These snowy, high-arched constructions of principle, morality and faith—these palaces and memorials—were overrun with hordes of war-whooping, half-naked men, dressed in the stinking skins of beasts. In they rode at the north gate and as Badger sat huddled over his cup, he saw one by one his temples and palaces go. Out the south gate rode the barbarians, leaving poor Badger without even the consolation of a ruin; leaving him with a nothingness and with his essence, which was never much better than the perfume of a wood violet gone.

  “Mamma e Papa Confettiere arrivan’ domani sera,” Giacomo said. He was screwing light bulbs once more into the long string of fixtures that were hung in the trees of the driveway. Melissa met Moses sweetly at the door as she had done on his first night there and told him that some old friends of Justina’s were arriving on the next night. Mrs. Enderby was in the office, telephoning invitations, and D’Alba was running around the hall in an apron, giving orders to a dozen maids that Moses had never seen before. The place was upside down. Doors were thrown open onto bat-smelling parlors and Giacomo took the bed pillows out of the broken windows in the winter garden where palm trees and rose bushes were being unloaded from trucks. There was no place to sit down and they had sandwiches and drinks in the hall where the Scaddonville Symphony Orchestra (eight ladies) undressed the harp of its cracked mackintosh and tuned their instruments. Then the glee of the old upside-down palace on the eve of a party reminded Moses of West Farm, as if this house, like the other, lay deep in their consciousness—even in the dreams of the fly-by-night maids, who exhumed and burnished the old rooms as if they were improving their wisdom. Bats were found in the big basement kitchens and two of the maids came screaming up the stairs with dish towels over their heads but this small incident discouraged no one and only seemed to heighten the antic atmosphere, for who, these days, was rich enough to have bats in their kitchen? The big chests in the cellar were filled with beef and wine and flowers and all the fountains played in the gardens and water poured out of the green-mouthed lions in the plunge and a thousand lights or more burned in the house and the driveway was beaded with lights like a country fair and lights burned here and there in the garden, forlorn and unshaded like the lights in rooming-house hallways and with all the doors and windows open at ten or eleven and the night air suddenly cold and a thin moon in the sky over the broadest lawns Moses was reminded of some wartime place, some poignance of furlough and leave-takings, headlines and good-by dances in beery ports like Norfolk and Sa
n Francisco where the dark ships waited in the roads for the lovers in their beds and none of it might ever happen again.

  And who were Mamma and Papa Confettiere? They were the Belamontes, Luigi and Paula, the last of the haut monde of the prezzo unico botteghe. She was the daughter of a Calabrian farmer and Luigi was spawned in the back of a Roman barbershop that smelled of violets and old hair, but at the age of eighteen he had saved enough money to stock a prezzo unico store. He was the Woolworth, he was the Kress, he was the J. P. Scaddon of Italy and had made himself into a millionaire with villas in the south and castles in the north by the time that he was thirty. He had retired in his fifties and for the last twenty years had motored around Italy with his wife in a Daimler, throwing hard candies out of the windows of their car to the children in the street.

  They left Rome after Easter (the date was announced in the newspapers and the radio) so that a crowd would have gathered outside the gates of their house for the first free candy of the season. They drove north toward Civitavecchia, scattering candy to the left and the right—a hundred pounds here, three hundred pounds there—circumventing Civitavecchia and all the larger cities on their route for they had once nearly been torn limb from limb by a crowd of twenty thousand children in Milan and had also caused serious riots in Turin and Leghorn. Piedmont and Lombardy saw them and southward they traveled through Portomaggiore, Lugo, Imola, Cervia, Cesena, Rimini and Pesaro, tossing out handfuls of lemon drops, peppermints, licorice sticks, anise and horehound drops, sugar plums and cherry suckers along streets that, as they climbed Monte Sant’Angelo and came down into Manfredonia, had begun to be covered with fallen leaves. Ostia was shut when they passed there and shut were the hotels of Lido di Roma, where they scattered the last of their store to the children of fishermen and caretakers, turning northward and home again under the fine skies of a Roman winter.

  Moses took a suitcase to work in the morning and rented a suit of tails at lunch. He walked up from the station to the hall in a late summer dusk when the air already smelled of autumn. Then he could see Clear Haven in the early dark with every one of its windows lighted for Mamma and Papa Confettiere. It was a cheerful sight and, letting himself in at the terrace doors, he was cheered to see how the place had been restored, how shining and quiet it was. A maid who came down the hall with some silver on a tray walked stealthily and, other than the sound of the fountain in the winter garden and the hum of water rising in some pipes within the walls, the house was still.

  Melissa had dressed and they drank a glass of wine. Moses was standing in the shower when all the lights went out. Then every voice in what had been a hushed place was raised in alarm and dismay and someone who was stuck in the old elevator cage began to pound on the walls. Melissa brought a lighted candle into the bathroom and Moses was pulling on some trousers when the lights went on again. Giacomo was around. They drank another glass of wine on the balcony, watching the cars arrive. Jacopo was directing them to park on the lawns. God knows where Mrs. Enderby had found the guests, but she had found enough for once and the noise of talk, even from the third floor, sounded like the October sea at Travertine.

  There must have been a hundred people in the hall when Moses and Melissa went down. D’Alba was at one end and Mrs. Enderby at the other, steering servants toward people with empty glasses, and Justina stood by the fireplace beside an elderly Italian couple, swarthy, egg-shaped, merry and knowing, Moses discovered when he shook hands with them, not a word of English. The dinner was splendid, with three wines and cigars and brandy on the terrace afterward, and then the Scaddonville Symphony Orchestra began to play “A Kiss in the Dark,” and they all went in to dance.

  Badger was there, although he had not been invited. He walked up from the station after dinner and hung around the edges of the dance floor, a little drunk. He could not have said why he had come. Then Justina saw him and the corrosive glance she gave him and the fact that she was not wearing any jewelry reminded Badger of his purpose. That evening had for him the savor of a man who finds his destiny and adores it. This was his finest hour. He went upstairs and started once more over those roofs (he could hear the music in the distance) that he had crossed often enough for love himself, but that he crossed now with a much deeper sense of purpose. He headed for Justina’s balcony at the north end of the house and entered that big chamber with its vaulted ceiling and massive bed. (Justina never slept in this; she slept on a little cot behind a screen.) The decision against her jewelry must have been made suddenly for it was all heaped on the cracked and peeling surface of her dressing table. He found a paper bag in her closet—she collected paper and string—and filled this with her valuables. Then, trusting in Divine Providence, he left boldly by the door, went down the stairs, crossed the lawns with the music growing fainter and fainter and caught the 11:17 into the city.

  When Badger boarded the train he had no idea of how he would dispose of the jewelry. He may have thought of prying some of the stones out of their settings and selling them. The train was a local—the last—taking back to the city people who had been visiting friends and relations. They all seemed tired; some of them were drunk; and, sweating and sleeping fitfully in the overheated coach, they seemed, to Badger, to share a great commonality of intimacy and weariness. Most of the men had taken off their hats but their hair was matted with the pressure of hat brims. The women wore their finery but they wore it awry and their curls had begun to come undone. Many of them slept with their heads on the shoulders of their men, and the smells—and the looseness of most of the faces he saw—made Badger feel as if the coach was some enormous bed or cradle in which they all lay together in a state of unusual innocence. They shared the discomforts of the coach, they shared a destination and for all their shabbiness and fatigue they seemed to Badger to share some beauty of mind and purpose, and looking at the dyed red head of the woman in front of him he attributed to her the ability to find, a shade below the level of consciousness, an imagery of beauty and grandeur like those great, ruined palladia that rose in Badgers head.

  He loved them all—Badger loved them all—and what he had done he had done for them, for they failed only in their inability to help one another and by stealing Justina’s jewelry he had done something to diminish this failure. The red-headed woman in the seat in front moved him with love, with amorousness and with pity, and she touched her curls so often and with such simple vanity that he guessed her hair had just been dyed and this in turn touched him as Badger would have been touched to see a sweet child picking the petals off a daisy. Suddenly the red-headed woman straightened up and asked in a thick voice, “Wassa time, wassa time?” The people in front of her to whom the question was addressed did not stir and Badger leaned forward and said that it was a little before midnight. “Thank you, thank you,” she said with great warmth. “You’re a genemun after my own heart.” She gestured toward the others. “Won’t even tell me what time is because they think I’m drunk. Had a liddle accident.” She pointed to some broken glass and a puddle on the floor where she seemed to have dropped a pint bottle. “Jess because I had a liddle accident and spilled my good whisky none of these sonofbitches will tell me time. You’re a genemun, you’re a genemun and if I didn’t have a little accident and spill my whisky give you a drink.” Then the motion of Badger’s cradle overtook her and she fell asleep.

  Mrs. Enderby had given the alarm twenty minutes after the theft and two plain-clothes men and an agent from the insurance company were waiting for Badger when he got off the train in Grand Central. Wearing tails, and carrying a paper bag that seemed to be full of hardware, he was not hard to spot. They followed him, thinking that he might lead them to a ring. He walked jubilantly up Park Avenue to Saint Bartholomew’s and tried the doors, which were locked. Then he crossed Park Avenue, crossed Madison and walked up Fifth to Saint Patrick’s, where the doors were still open and where many charwomen were mopping the floors. He went way forward to the central altar, knelt and said his Lamb of God. Then—the r
ail was down and he was too enthralled to think of being conspicuous—he walked across the deep chancel and emptied his paper bag on the altar. The plain-clothes men picked him up as he left the cathedral.

  It was not one o’clock when the police department called Clear Haven to tell Justina that they had her jewelry. She checked the police list against a typewritten list that had been pasted to the top of her jewel box. “One diamond bracelet, two diamond and onyx bracelets, one diamond and emerald bracelet,” etc. She tried the policeman’s patience when she asked him to count the pearls in her necklace, but he did. Then Papa Confettiere called for music and wine. “Dancinga, singinga,” he shouted, and gave the ladies’ orchestra a hundred-dollar bill. They struck up a waltz and then the fuses blew for the second time that night.

  Moses knew that Giacomo was around—he had seen him in the halls—but he went to the cellar door anyhow. A peculiar smell surrounded him but he didn’t reflect on it and he didn’t notice the fact that as he went down the back hallway sweat began to pour off his body. He opened the cellar door onto a pit of fire and a blast of hot air that burned all the hair off his face and nearly overcame him. Then he staggered down the hall to the kitchens where the maids were cleaning up the last of the dishes and asked the major-domo if anyone was upstairs. He counted off the help and said that no one was and then Moses told them to get out; that the house was on fire. (How Mrs. Wapshot would have been disappointed with this direct statement of fact; how cleverly she would have led the guests and servants out onto the lawn to see the new moon.)