The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  Then Moses called the fire department from the kitchen telephone, noticing, as he picked up the receiver, that much flesh had been burned off his right hand by the cellar doorknob. His lips were swollen with adrenaline and he felt peculiarly at ease. Then he ran down to the hall where the guests were still waltzing and told Justina that her house was burning. She was perfectly composed and when Moses stopped the music she asked the guests to go out on the lawn. They could hear the bull horn in the village beginning to sound. There were many doors onto the terrace and as the guests crowded out of the hall, away from the lights of the party, they stepped into the pink glow of fire, for the flames had blown straight up the clock tower and while there were still no signs of fire in the hall the tower was blazing like a torch. Then the fire trucks could be heard coming down the road toward the drive and Justina started down the hall to great them at her front door as she had greeted J. C. Penney, Herbert Hoover and the Prince of Wales, but as she started down the hall a rafter somewhere in the tower burned loose from its shorings, crashed through the ceiling of the rotunda and then all the lights in the house flickered and went out.

  Melissa called to her guardian in the dark and the old woman joined them—now she seemed bent—and walked between them out to the terrace where D’Alba and Mrs. Enderby took her arms. Then Moses ran around to the front of the house to move the cars of the guests. They seemed to be all that was worth saving. “For the last six nights I been trying to discharge my conjugal responsibilities,” one of the firemen said, “and every time I get started that damned bull horn …” Moses bumped a dozen cars down over the grass to safety and then went through the crowd, looking for his wife. She was in the garden with most of the other guests and he sat beside her at the pool and put his burned hand into the water. The fire must have been visible for miles then, for crowds of men, women and children were climbing over the garden walls and pouring in at all the gates. Then the Venetian room took fire and, saturated with the salts of the Adriatic, it bloomed like paper, and the iron works of the old clock, bells and gears had begun to crash down through the remains of the tower. A brisk wind carried the flames deep into the northwest and then slowly the garden and the whole valley began to fill up with a bitter smoke. The place burned until dawn and looked, in the morning light with only its chimneys standing, like the hull of some riverboat.

  Later the next afternoon Justina, Mrs. Enderby and the count flew to Athens and Moses and Melissa went happily into New York.

  But Betsey returned, long before this. Coming home one night Coverly found his house lighted and shining and his Venus with a ribbon in her hair. (She had been staying with a girl friend in Atlanta and had been disappointed.) Much later that night, lying in bed, they heard the sounds of rain and then Coverly put on some underpants and went out the back door and walked through the Frascatis’ yard and the Galens’ to the Harrows’, where Mr. Harrow had planted some rose bushes in a little crescent-shaped plot. It was late and all the houses were dark. In the Harrows’ garden Coverly picked a rose and then walked back through the Galens’ and the Frascatis’ to his own house and laid the rose between Betsey’s legs—where she was forked—for she was his potchke once more, his fleutchke, his notchke, his little, little squirrel.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  In the early summer both Betsey and Melissa had sons and Honora was as good as or better than her word. A trust officer from the Appleton Bank brought the good news to Coverly and Moses and they agreed to continue Honora’s contributions to the Sailor’s Home and the Institute for the Blind. The old lady wanted nothing more to do with the money. Coverly came on from Remsen Park to New York and planned with Moses to visit St. Botolphs for a week end. The first thing they would do with Honora’s money was to buy Leander a boat and Coverly wrote his father that they were coming.

  Leander gave up his job at the table-silver company with the announcement that he was going back to sea. He woke early on Saturday morning and decided to go fishing. Struggling, before dawn, to get into his rubber boots reminded him of how rickety his limbs—or what he called his furniture—had gotten. He twisted a knee and the pain shot and multiplied and traversed his whole frame. He got the trout rod, crossed the fields and started fishing in the pool where Moses had seen Rosalie. He was absorbed in his own dexterity and in the proposition of trying to deceive a fish with a bird’s feather and a bit of hair. The foliage was dense and pungent and in the oaks were whole carping parliaments of crows. Many of the big trees in the woods had fallen or been cut during his lifetime but nothing had changed the loveliness of the water. Standing in a deep pool, the sun falling through the trees to light the stones on the bottom, it seemed to Leander like an Avernus, divided by the thinnest film of light from that creation where the sun warmed his hands, where the crows carped and argued about taxes and where the wind could be heard; and when he saw a trout it seemed like a shade—a spirit of the dead—and he thought of all his dead fishing companions whom he seemed cheerfully to commemorate by wading this stream. Casting, gathering in his line, snagging flies and talking to himself, he was busy and happy and he thought about his sons; about how they had gone out in the world and proved themselves and found wives and would now be rich and modest and concerned with the welfare of the blind and retired seamen and would have many sons to carry on their name.

  That night Leander dreamed that he was in strange country. He saw no fire and smelled no brimstone but he thought that he was walking alone through hell. The landscape was like the piles of broken and eroded stone near the sea but in all the miles he walked he saw no trace of water. The wind was dry and warm and the sky lacked that brilliance that you see above water, even at a great distance. He never heard the noise of surf or saw a lighthouse although the coasts of that country might not have been lighted. The thousands or millions of people that he passed were, with the exception of an old man who wore some shoes, barefoot and naked. Flint cut their feet and made them bleed. The wind and the rain and the cold and all the other torments they had been exposed to had not lessened the susceptibility of their flesh. They were either ashamed or lewd. Along the path he saw a young woman but when he smiled at her she covered herself with her hands, her face dark with misery. At the next turn in the path he saw an old woman stretched out on the shale. Her hair was dyed and her body was obese and a man as old as she was sucking her breasts. He saw people astride one another in full view of the world but the young, in their beauty and virility, seemed more continent than their elders and he saw the young, in many places, gently side by side as if carnality was, in this strange country, a passion of old age. At another turn in the path a man as old as Leander, in the extremities of eroticism, approached him, his body covered with brindle hair. “This is the beginning of all wisdom,” he said to Leander, exposing his inflamed parts. “This is the beginning of everything.” He disappeared along the shale path with the index finger up his bum and Leander woke to the sweet sounds of a southerly wind and a gentle summer morning. Separated from his dream, he was sickened at its ugliness and grateful for the lights and sounds of day.

  Sarah said that morning that she was too tired to go to church. Leander surprised everyone by preparing to go himself. It was a sight, he said, that would make the angels up in heaven start flapping their wings. He went to early communion, happily, not convinced of the worth of his prayers, but pleased with the fact that on his knees in Christ Church he was, more than in any other place in the world, face to face with the bare facts of his humanity. “We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee,” he said loudly, wondering all the time who was that baritone across the aisle and who was that pretty woman on his right who smelled of apple blossoms. His bowels stirred and his cod itched and when the door at his back creaked open he wondered who was coming in late. Theophilus Gates? Perley Sturgis? Even as the service rose to the climax of bread and wine he noticed that the acolytes’ plush cushion was nailed to the floor of the chancel and th
at the altar cloth was embroidered with tulips but he also noticed, kneeling at the rail, that on the ecclesiastical and malodorous carpet were a few pine or fir needles that must have lain there all the months since Advent, and these cheered him as if this handful of sere needles had been shaken from the Tree of Life and reminded him of its fragrance and vitality.

  On Monday morning at about eleven the wind came out of the east and Leander hurriedly got together his binoculars and bathing trunks and made himself a sandwich and took the Travertine bus to the beach. He undressed behind a dune and was disappointed to find Mrs. Sturgis and Mrs. Gates preparing to have a picnic on the stretch of beach where he wanted to swim and sun himself. He was also disappointed that he should have such black looks for the old ladies who were discussing canned goods and the ingratitude of daughters-in-law while the surf spoke in loud voices of wrecks and voyages and the likeness of things; for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog’s mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho. He waded out to his knees and wetted his wrists and forehead to prepare his circulation for the shock of cold water and thus avoid a heart attack. At a distance he seemed to be crossing himself. Then he began to swim—a sidestroke with his face half in the water, throwing his right arm up like the spar of a windmill—and he was never seen again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  So, coming back to give him a boat, his sons heard the words said for those who are drowned at sea. Moses and Coverly drove down from New York without their wives and arrived in the village late on the day of the service. Sarah did not cry until she saw her sons, and held out her arms to be kissed, but the manners and the language of the village helped to sustain her. “It was a very long association,” she said. They sat in the parlor and drank some whisky where Honora joined them, kissed the boys and had a drink herself. “I think you make a great mistake to have the service at the church,” she told Sarah. “All his friends are dead. There will be no one there but us. It would be better to have it here. And another thing. He wanted Prospero’s speech said over his grave. I think you boys had getter go to the church and speak with the rector. Ask him if we can’t have the service in the little chapel and tell him about the speech.”

  The boys drove over to Christ Church and were let into an office where the rector was trying to work an adding machine. He seemed impatient at the little help Divine Providence gave him in practical matters. He refused Honora’s requests gently and firmly. The chapel was being painted and could not be used and he could not approve introducing Shakespeare into a holy service. Honora was disappointed to hear about the chapel. This anxiety about the empty church was the form her grief seemed to take.

  She looked old and bewildered that day, her face haggard and leonine. She got some shears and went into the fields to cut flowers for Leander—loosestrife, cornflowers, buttercups and daises. She worried about the empty church all through lunch. Going up the church steps she took Coverly’s arm—she clutched it as if she was tired or frail—and when the doors were opened and she saw a crowd she stopped short on the threshold and asked in a loud voice, “What are all these people doing here? Who are all these people?”

  They were the butcher, the baker, the boy who sold him newspapers and the driver of the Travertine bus. Bentley and Spinet were there, the librarian, the fire chief, the fish warden, the waitress from Grimes’ bakery, the ticket seller from the movie theater in Travertine, the man who ran the merry-go-round in Nangasakit, the postmaster, the milkman, the stationmaster and the old man who filed saws and the one who repaired clocks. All the pews were taken and people were standing at the back. Christ Church had not seen such a crowd since Easter.

  Honora raised her voice once during the service when the rector began to read from St. John. “Oh no,” she said loudly. “We’ve always had Corinthians.” The rector changed his place and there seemed to be no discourtesy in this interruption for it was her way and in a sense the way of the family and this was the funeral of a Wapshot. The cemetery adjoined Christ Church and they walked behind Leander, two by two, up the hill to the family lot in that stupefaction of grief with which we follow our dead to their graves. When the prayers were finished and the rector had shut his book Honora gave Coverly a push. “Say the words, Coverly. Say what he wanted.” Then Coverly went to the edge of his father’s grave and although he was crying he spoke clearly. “Our revels now are ended,” he said. “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

  After the service the boys kissed their mother good-by and promised to return soon. It would be the first trip they made and Coverly did return, on the Fourth of July, with Betsey and his son, William, to see the parade. Sarah closed her floating gift shop long enough to appear on the Woman’s Club float once more. Her hair was white and only two of the founding members remained, but her gestures, the sadness of her smile and the air of finding that the glass of water on her lectern tasted of rue were all the same. Many people would remember the Independence Day when some hoodlum had set off a firecracker under Mr. Pincher’s mare.

  Honora was not there and after the parade when Coverly telephoned to see if he could bring Betsey and the baby to Boat Street Honora put him off. He was disappointed, but he was not surprised. “Some other time, Coverly dear,” she said. “I’m late now.” A novice at observing her might have guessed that she was late for her piano lessons but as soon as she had mastered “The Jolly Miller” she had shut the lid on her piano and become a baseball fan. What she was late for was the starting pitch at Fenway Park. She had arranged with a cab driver in the village to drive her to and from the games once or twice a week when the Red Sox were in Boston.

  She wears her three-cornered hat and her black clothes to the game and climbs up the ramp to her seat in the balcony with the ardor of a pilgrim. The climb is long and she stops at a turn to catch her breath. She clasps one hand, her fingers outspread, to her breast, where the noise of respiration is harsh. “Can I help you?” a stranger asks, thinking that she is sick. “Can I help you, lady?” but this gallant and absurd old woman does not seem to hear him. She takes her seat, arranges her program and her score card and taps a Catholic priest who is sitting near her on the shoulder with her stick. “Forgive me, Father,” she says, “if I seem remiss in my use of language, but I do get carried away. . . .” She sits in the clear light of harmlessness and as the game proceeds she cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, “Sacrifice, you booby, sacrifice!” She is the image of an old pilgrim walking by her lights all over the world as she was meant to do and who sees in her mind a noble and puissant nation, rising like a strong man after sleep.

  Betsey loved the floating gift shop and spent most of the afternoon there with Sarah, admiring the fish-net floats, mounted to hold ivy, the hand-painted flatirons and coal scuttles, the luncheon sets from the Philippines and the salt and pepper shakers shaped like dogs and cats. Coverly walked alone through the empty rooms of the farm. There would be a thunderstorm. The light was getting dim and the telephone in the hall had begun to ring erratically, sensitive to every random charge of electricity. He saw the thread-bare rugs, the bricks, neatly encased in scraps of carpeting, that would keep the doors from slamming now that the wind had begun to rise, and on a comer table an old pewter pitcher, filled with bayberry and bittersweet, all covered with dust. In the storm light the fine, square rooms stood for a way of life that seemed to be unusually desirable, although it could have been the expectancy of the storm that accounted for the intensity of Coverly’s feeling. Memories of his childhood could be involved and he could remember those thunderstorms—Lulu and the dog hidden in the coat closet—that plunged the sky, the valley and the rooms of the house into darkness and how tenderly they felt for one another, carrying buckets and pitchers and ligh
ted candles from room to room. Outside he could hear the tossing noise of the trees, and the teakwood table in the hall—that famous barometer—made a creaking sound. Then, before the rain began, the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter and something like the terms by which he lived.

  But Leander got the last word. Opening Aaron’s copy of Shakespeare, after it had begun to rain, Coverly found the place marked with a note in his father’s hand. “Advice to my sons,” it read. “Never put whisky into hot water bottle crossing borders of dry states or countries. Rubber will spoil taste. Never make love with pants on. Beer on whisky, very risky. Whisky on beer, never fear. Never eat apples, peaches, pears, etc. while drinking whisky except long French-style dinners, terminating with fruit. Other viands have mollifying effect. Never sleep in moonlight. Known by scientists to induce madness. Should bed stand beside window on clear night draw shades before retiring. Never hold cigar at right-angles to fingers. Hayseed. Hold cigar at diagonal. Remove band or not as you prefer. Never wear red necktie. Provide light snorts for ladies if entertaining. Effects of harder stuff on frail sex sometimes disastrous. Bathe in cold water every morning. Painful but exhilarating. Also reduces horniness. Have haircut once a week. Wear dark clothes after 6 P.M. Eat fresh fish for breakfast when available. Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely gray hair. Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord.