by John Cheever
CHAPTER VI
Incredible as it may seem, Honora Wapshot had never paid an income tax. Judge Beasely, who was nominally in charge of her affairs, assumed that she was cognizant of the tax laws and had never questioned her on the subject. Her oversight, her criminal negligence, might have been explained by her age. She may have felt herself too old to begin something new such as paying taxes or she may have felt that she would die before she was apprehended. Now and then the thought of her dereliction would waveringly cross her mind and she would suffer a fleeting pang of guilt, but, as she saw it, one of the privileges of age was a high degree of irresponsibility. In any case, she had never paid a tax and thus, one evening, a man named Norman Johnson got off the same train that had brought Coverly to St. Botolphs the night he saw his father’s ghost.
Mr. Jowett guessed from his clothing that he was a salesman and directed him to the Viaduct House. Mabel Moulton, who had been running the hotel since her father’s stroke, led him up the stairs to a room on the second floor back. “It isn’t much,” she explained, “but it’s all we have.” She left him alone to amplify her observation. The single window looked out across the river to the table-silver factory. In the corner there was a pitcher and a basin for washing. He saw a chamber pot under the bed. These primitive arrangements disturbed him. Imagine using a chamber pot at a time when men freely explored space! But did astronauts use chamber pots? Motormen’s helpers? What did they use? He dropped this subject to sniff the air of the room but the Viaduct House was a very old hotel and forgiveness was all you could bring to its odors. He hung both the suit he wore and the one in his bag in the closet. The collection of tin coat-racks there chimed the half-hour when he touched them. This ghostly music startled him and then the stillness of the place rushed in. There were footsteps in the room overhead. A man’s? A woman’s? The heels were hard but the step was heavy and he guessed they belonged to a man. But what was he doing? First the stranger walked from the window to the closet. Then he walked from the closet to the bed. Then he walked from the bed to the washstand and then from the washstand back to the window. His step was brisk, quick and urgent, but his comings and goings were senseless. Was he packing, was he dressing, was he shaving or was he, as Johnson knew from his own experience, simply moving aimlessly around an empty place, wondering what it was that he had forgotten?
Johnson, wearing a shirt and underpants, sat on the edge of the bed. (His underpants were printed with poker hands and dice.) He opened a bottle of sherry and drank a glass. In the heterogeneous and resurgent stream of faces that surrounds us there are those that seem to be the coins of a particular realm, that seem to have a sameness of feature and value. One would have seen Johnson before; one would see him again. He had the kind of long face to which the word “maturity” could not in any sense be applied. Time had been a series of unsuspected losses and rude blows, but in half-lights and cross-lights this emotional scar tissue was unseen and the face seemed earnest, simple and inscrutable. Some of us go around the world three times, divorce, remarry, divorce again, part with our children, make and waste a fortune, and coming back to our beginnings we find the same faces at the same windows, buy our cigarettes and newspapers from the same old man, say good morning to the same elevator operator, good night to the same desk clerk, to all those who seem, as Johnson did, driven into life by misfortune like the nails into a floor.
He was a traveler, familiar with the miseries of loneliness, with the violence of its sexuality, with its half-conscious imagery of highways and thruways like the projections of a bewildered spirit; with that forlorn and venereal limbo that must have flowed over the world before the invention of Venus, unknown to good and evil, ruled by pain. His father had died when he was a boy and he had been raised by his mother and her sister, a schoolteacher and a seamstress. He had been a good boy, industrious and hard-working, and while the rest of the kids were running up and down the street after a football he had sold arch supporters, magazine subscriptions, hot-water heaters, Christmas cards and newspapers. He stored his dimes and nickels in empty prune-juice jars and deposited them in his savings account once a week. He paid his own tuition for two years at the university and then he was drafted into the infantry. He could have gotten a deferred job at the ore-loading docks in Superior and made a fortune during the war but he didn’t learn this until it was too late.
He landed in Normandy on the fourth day of the invasion. His burly first sergeant shot himself in the foot as soon as they landed and his bloodthirsty company commander cracked up after three hours of combat. The modest and decent men like himself were the truly brave. He was wounded on his third day in combat and flown back to a hospital in England. When he returned to his company he was transferred to headquarters and he stayed there until his discharge. That was four years out of his life, four years cut out of the career of a young man. When he got back to Superior his aunt was dead and his mother was dying. When he buried her he was left with three thousand dollars in medical bills, a fourteen-hundred-dollar bill from the undertaker and a seven-thousand-dollar mortgage on a house nobody wanted to buy. He was twenty-seven years old. He poured himself another glass of sherry. “I never had an electric train,” he said aloud. “I never had a dog.”
He got a job in the Veterans Administration in Duluth and learned another lesson. Most men were born in debt, lived in debt and died in debt. Conscientiousness and industry were no match for the burdens of indebtedness. What he needed was an inspiration, a gamble, and standing on a little hill outside Superior one night he had an inspiration. In the distance he could see the lights of Duluth. Below him were the flat roofs of a cannery. The evening wind from Duluth blew in his direction and on this wind he heard the barking of dogs. His thinking took these lines. Two thousand people lived on the hill. Everyone on the hill had a dog. Every dog ate at least a can of food a day. People loved their dogs and were ready to pay good money to feed them but who knew what went into a can of dog food? What did dogs like? Table scraps, garbage and horse buns. Stray dogs always had the finest coats and enjoyed the best health. All he needed was a selling point. Ye Olde English Dog Food! England meant roast beef to most people. Put a label like that on a can and dog owners would pay as high as twenty-five cents. The noise from the cannery fitted in with all of this and he went happily to bed.
He experimented with dogs in the neighborhood and settled on a formula that was ninety per cent floor sweepings from the breakfast-food factory, ten per cent horse buns from the riding stable and enough water to make the mixture moist. He had a label designed and printed with a heraldic shield and “Ye Olde English Dog Food” in a florid script. The cannery agreed to process a lot of a thousand and he rented a truck and took a load to the cannery in ashcans. When the cans were labeled and crated and stored in his garage he felt that he possessed something valuable and beautiful. He bought a new suit and began going around to the markets of Duluth with a sample can of Olde English.
The story was the same everywhere. The grocers bought from the jobbers and when he approached the jobbers they explained that they couldn’t handle his food. The dog food they sold was pushed by the Chicago meat-packers on a price tie-in basis with the rest of their products and he couldn’t compete with Chicago. He tried peddling his dog food on the hill but you can’t sell dog food door to door and he learned a bitter lesson. The independent doesn’t have a chance. Duluth was full of hungry dogs and he had a thousand cans of feed stored in his garage but as an independent he was helpless to bring them profitably together. Remembering this, he had another glass of sherry.
It was dark by then. The light had gone from the window and he dressed to go down for supper. He was the only customer in the dining room, where Mabel Moulton brought him a bowl of greasy soup in which a burnt match was swimming. The burnt match, like the chamber pot, made his hatred of St. Botolphs implacable. “Oh, I’m awful sorry,” Mabel said, when he showed her the match. “I’m awful sorry. You see, my father had a stroke last month
and we’re awful short-handed. Things aren’t the way we’d like to have them. The pilot light on the gas range isn’t working and the cook has to keep lighting the range with matches and I expect that’s how a match got into your soup. Well, I’ll take away your soup and bring you the pot roast and I’ll make sure there’s no matches in that. Notice that I’m taking off your plate with my left hand. I sprained my left hand last winter and it’s never been right since but I keep doing things with it to see if I can’t get it back into condition that way. The doctor tells me that if I keep using it, it’ll get better. Of course it’s easier for me to use my right hand all the time but every now and then . . .” She saw that he was unfriendly and moved on. She had waited on a thousand lonely men and most of them liked to hear about her aches, pains and sprains while she admired the pictures of their wives, children, houses and dogs. It was a light bridge of communication but it was better than nothing and it passed the time.
Johnson ate his pot roast and his pie and went into the bar. It was crudely lighted by illuminated beer signs and smelled like a soil excavation. The only customers were two farmers. He went to the end of the bar farthest from them and drank another glass of sherry. Then he bowled a game on the miniature bowling machine and went out the side door onto the street. The town was dark; turned back on itself, totally unfamiliar with the needs of travelers, wanderers, the great flowing world. Every store was shut. He glanced at the Unitarian church across the green. It was a white frame building with columns, a bell tower and a spire that vanished into the starlight. It seemed incredible to him that his people, his inventive kind, the first to exploit glass store fronts, bright lights and continuous music, should ever have been so backward as to construct a kind of temple that belonged to the ancient world. He went around the edges of the green and turned up Boat Street as far as Honora’s. Lights burned here and there in the old house but he saw no one. He went back to the bar and watched a fight on television.
The favorite was an aging club fighter named Mercer. The challenger was a man named Santiago who could have been Italian or Puerto Rican. He was fleshy, muscular and stupid. Mercer had it all his way for the first two rounds. He was a fair, slight man, his face lined, so Johnson thought, with common domestic worries. He would have kissed his wife good-bye in some kitchen an hour ago and he was fighting to keep up the payments on the washing machine. Agile, intelligent and tough, he seemed unbeatable until early in the third round when Santiago opened a cut over his right eye. Blood streamed down Mercer’s face and chest and he slipped on the bloody canvas. Santiago reopened the cut in the fifth and Mercer was blinded again and staggered helplessly around the ring. The fight was stopped in the sixth. Mercer’s spirit would be crushed, his wife and children would be heartbroken and his washing machine would be taken away. Johnson went upstairs, got into a suit of pajamas printed with scenes of a steeplechase and read a paper-back novel.
His novel was about a young woman with millions of dollars and houses in Rome, Paris, New York and Honolulu. In the first chapter she made it with her husband in a ski hut. In the second chapter she made it with a butler in the pantry. In the third chapter her husband and the butler made it in the swimming pool. The heroine then made it with a chambermaid. Her husband discovered them and joined the fun. The cook then made it with the postman and the cook’s twelve-year-old daughter made it with the groom. On it would go for six hundred pages. It would end, he knew, in religious institutions. The heroine, having practiced every known indecency, would end up in a cloistered order with a shaven head and a lead ring. The last you saw of her depraved husband would be his feet in the rude sandals of a monk as he pressed through a snowstorm carrying a vial of antibiotics to a sick whore in the mountains. It seemed like a poor fare for a lonely man and he felt from the hard mattress where he lay an accrual of loneliness from the thousands like himself who had lain there, hankering not to be alone. He turned off the light, slept and dreamed of swans, a lost suitcase, a snow-covered mountain. He saw his mother lifting the ornaments off the Christmas tree with trembling hands. He woke in the morning feeling natural, boisterous and even loving, but the stranger with a hidden face is always waiting by the lake, there is always a viper in the garden, a dark cloud in the west. The eggs that Mabel brought him for breakfast were swimming in grease. As soon as he stepped out of the Viaduct House a dog began to bark at him. The dog followed him across the green, snapping at his ankles. He ran up Boat Street and some children on their way to school laughed uproariously at his panic. When he got to Honora’s his high spirits were spent.
Maggie answered the doorbell and led him into the library, where Honora was sitting by the window, picking over a large assortment of fireworks heaped in a washbasket. At the sound of a man’s footsteps she took off her spectacles. She hoped to look younger. She could not see much without her glasses and when Johnson entered the library the indistinctness with which she saw his face made her think that he was a young man with keen appetites, enthusiasms, an open heart. She felt for his very blurred image an impulse of friendship or pity. “Good morning,” she said. “Please sit down. I was just looking over my fireworks. I bought these last year, you know, and I thought I’d have a little party, you know, but it was very dry last July, it didn’t rain for six weeks and the fire chief asked me not to shoot them off. I put them in the coat closet and I completely forgot about them until this morning. I love fireworks,” she said. “I love to read the labels on the packages and imagine what they’ll look like. I love the smell of gunpowder.”
“I’d like to know something about your Uncle Lorenzo,” Johnson said.
“Oh, yes,” Honora said. “Is this about the commemorative plaque?”
“No,” Johnson said. He opened his briefcase.
“Well, a man came last year,” Honora said, “and urged me to have a commemorative plaque made for Lorenzo. At first I thought he represented some committee but then I discovered that he was just a salesman. You’re not a salesman?”
“No,” Johnson said. “I’m from the government.”
“Well, Lorenzo served in the state legislature, you know,” Honora said. “He introduced the child-labor laws. You see, my parents were missionaries. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, would you, but I was born in Polynesia. My parents sent me back here to school but they died before I could return. Lorenzo raised me. He was never an awfully friendly man.” She seemed deeply reflective. “But you might have described him as both my father and mother,” she said with a sigh of obvious discontent.
“This was his house?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Your uncle left you his estate?”
“Yes, he had no other family.”
“I have some correspondence here from the Appleton Bank and Trust Company. They estimate the value of your uncle’s estate at the time of his death to have been about a million dollars. They claim to have paid you an annual income ranging from seventy thousand to a hundred thousand dollars.”
“I don’t know,” Honora said. “I give most of my money away.”
“Have you any proof of this?”
“I don’t keep records,” Honora said.
“Have you ever paid an income tax, Miss Wapshot?”
“Oh, no,” Honora said. “Lorenzo made me promise that I wouldn’t give any of his money to the government.”
“You are in grave trouble, Miss Wapshot.” Then he felt tall and strong, felt the supreme importance of those who bring black tidings. “This will lead to a criminal indictment.”
“Oh, dear,” Honora said.
She had been caught and she knew it; caught like any clumsy thief waving a water pistol at a bank teller. If her knowledge of the tax laws was not much more than a dream, she knew them to be the laws of her country and her time. What she did then was to go to the fireplace and light the pile of shavings, paper and wood that the gardener had laid on the irons. The reason she did this was that fire was for her a sovereign pain-killer. When she was discontented wit
h herself, troubled, bewildered or bored, to light a fire seemed to incinerate her discontents and transform her burdens into smoke. She approached the light and heat of a fire like an aboriginal. The shavings and paper exploded into flame, filling the library with a dry, gaseous heat. Honora stoked the blaze with dry apple wood; felt that once the fire was hot enough she would have burned away her fears of the poor farm and the jail. A log exploded and an ember landed in the basket of fireworks. A Roman candle was the first to go. “Mercy,” Honora said. Purblind without her spectacles, she reached for a vase of flowers to extinguish the Roman candle but her aim was off and she got Johnson square in the face with a pint or so of bitter flower water and a dozen hyacinths. By this time the Roman candle had begun to ejaculate its lumps of colored fire and these ignited something called The Golden Vesuvius. A rocket took off in the direction of the piano and then the lot went up.
CHAPTER VII
The two stories about Honora Wapshot that were most frequently told in the family concerned her alarm clock and her penmanship. These were not told so much as they were performed, each member of the family taking a part, singing an aria so to speak, while everyone joined in on the Grand Finale like some primitive anticipation of the conventions of nineteenth-century Italian opera. The alarm clock incident belonged to the remote past when Lorenzo had been alive. Lorenzo was determined to appear pious and liked to arrive at Christ Church for morning worship at precisely quarter to eleven. Honora, who may have been genuinely pious but who detested appearances, could never find her gloves or her hat and was always tardy. One Sunday morning Lorenzo, in a rage, led his niece by the hand into the drugstore and bought her an alarm clock. So they went to church. Mr. Briam, Mr. Applegate’s predecessor, had started on an interminable sermon about the chains of St. Paul when the alarm clock went off. Since most of the congregation was asleep they were startled and confused. Honora shook the clock and then proceeded to unwrap it but by the time she got through to the box in which it sat the ringing had stopped. Mr. Briam then picked up the chains of St. Paul and the alarm clock, on repeat, began to ring again. This time Honora pretended that it wasn’t her clock. Sweating freely, she sat beside this impious engine while Mr. Briam went on about the significance of chains until the mechanism had unwound. It was an historic Sunday. The tales about her penmanship centered on a morning when she had written to the local coal dealer protesting his prices and then had written to Mr. Potter to share with him his sorrow over the sudden loss of his sainted wife. She got the letters in the wrong envelopes but since Mr. Potter could read nothing of her letter but the signature he was touched by her thoughtfulness and since Mr. Sumner, the coal dealer, was unable to read the letter of condolence he received he mailed it back to Honora. She had been taught Spencerian penmanship but something redoubtable or coarse in her nature was left unexpressed by this style and the conflict between her passions and the tools given to her left her penmanship illegible.
