by John Cheever
Leander took her off for a day on the Topaze. It was lovely seaside weather and she stood on the forward deck while Leander watched her from the wheelhouse. A stranger approached her as they started across the bay and Leander was happy to see that she paid him very little attention and when he persisted she gave him a chilly smile and climbed up to the wheelhouse. “This is absolully the funniest old boat I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Now Leander did not like to have people speak critically of the Topaze. Her light words made him angry. His respect for the old boat might be a weakness but he thought that people who did not appreciate the Topaze were lightheaded. “I’m starving,” Rosalie said. “All this salt air. I could eat an ox and it isn’t ten o’clock.” Leander’s feelings were still smarting from her first words. “At the lake at this camp where I went to,” she said, “there was a kind of boat that took people around, but it wasn’t as much fun as this. I mean I didn’t know the captain.” She sensed the mistake she had made in speaking lightly of the Topaze and now she tried to make amends. “And the other boat wasn’t as seaworthy,” she said. “I suppose she’s awfully seaworthy. I mean I suppose she was built in the days when people knew how to build seaworthy boats.”
“She’s thirty-two years old this spring,” Leander said proudly. “Honora doesn’t spend more than two or three hundred dollars on her a season and she’s brought her passengers through thick and thin without harming a hair on their heads.”
They went ashore together at Nangasakit and Leander watched her eat four hot dogs and wash them down with tonic. She didn’t want to ride on the roller-coaster and he guessed that her ideas of pleasure were more sophisticated. He wondered if she drank cocktails in lounges. In speaking of her home she had spoken both of wealth and meanness and Leander guessed that her life had been made up of both. “Mother gives an enormous garden party, every summer,” she had said, “with an orchestra sort of hidden in the bushes and millions of delicious cakes,” and an hour later she had said, speaking of her own ineptitude as a housekeeper, “Daddy cleans the bathrooms at home. He gets into these old clothes and gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs the floors and tubs and everything.…” The hired orchestra and the housecleaning priest were equally strange to Leander and interested him, mostly in that her background seemed to stand between Rosalie and her enjoyment of Nangasakit. He would have liked to ride on the roller-coaster himself and he was disappointed when she refused. But they walked on the wrecked sea wall above the white sand and the green water and he was happy in her company. He thought—like Sarah—how much he would have liked a daughter, and the images of her career formed swiftly in his mind. She would marry, of course. He even saw himself throwing rice at her as she ran down the steps of Christ Church. But somehow her marriage went wrong. Her husband was killed in the war perhaps or turned out to be a drunk or a crook. In any case she came back to take care of Leander in his old age—to bring him his bourbon and cook his meals and listen to his stories on stormy nights. At three o’clock they went back to the boat.
Everyone liked Rosalie but Moses, who stayed out of her way and was surly with her when they met. Mrs. Wapshot kept urging him to take her sailing and he always refused. It may have been that he associated her with that first night in the pasture and the fire or that—and this was more likely—that she seemed to him to be his mother’s creation, to have stepped out of Sarah’s brow. He spent most of his time at the Pocamasset boat club, where he raced the Tern, and he sometimes went fishing in the brook that flowed from Parson’s Pond down behind the barn into the West River.
He planned to do this one morning and was up before dawn, although his chances of catching any fish that late in the summer were slim. It was dark when he made himself some coffee and pulled on his waders in the kitchen, his head full of pleasant recollections of other, similar, early mornings; the camp at Langely and skiing—the suffocating heat in ski lodges and the bad food and the running. Drinking coffee in the dark kitchen (the windows had begun to show some light) reminded him of all these things. He got some gear out of the hall closet, hitched his boots to his belt and trudged up the fields, planning to walk to Parson’s Pond and then fish the stream down with wet flies, which were the only flies he had been able to find.
He cut into the woods a little below Parson’s Pond. Other fishermen had made a path. It was humid in the woods and the smell of vegetation was heady and his heart seemed to rise when he heard the noise of water—like the garbled voices of prophets—and saw the first pool. His bladder was full, but he would save that for good luck if he needed it. He was so anxious to get a fly into the water that he had to reproach himself for haste. He had to put on leader and tie some respectable knots. While he did this he saw a trout traveling upstream—no more than the flicker of an eyelid—and somehow determined like a dog at evening with a newspaper in its mouth.
There were rags of mist over the water that early in the morning and what was that smell, he wondered, as strong as tanbark and much finer? He let himself into the brook, making sure of his footing, and made a fair cast. At least he was pleased himself and if he had been a trout he would have struck, his gastric juices flowing freely until he felt the hook in his jaw. He gathered in his line and made another cast, wading so deep in the pool that his crotch got wet, a blessing, he thought, hoping that the cold water would discourage his mind from ever leaving such simple pleasures, for with his maturity Moses had found in himself a taste for the grain and hair of life. He snagged a fly and then tying another waded on through some swift, shallow water into another pool, the prettiest of them all, but one where he had never caught a fish. The granite around the pool was square, like quarry stone, the water was black and slow-moving, overhung here and there with fir and wild apple, and although Moses knew that it was a pool where he wasted his time he could not convince himself that it was not inhabited by trout—whole families of shrewd two-pounders with undershot jaws. From this dark pool he waded through white water again to a place with meadowy banks where Turk’s-cap lilies and wild roses grew and where it was easy to cast. While he was fishing this pool the sun came up and out—a flood of golden light that spread all through the woods and sank into the water so that every blue stone and white pebble showed—flooded the water with light until it was as golden as bourbon whisky—and the instant this happened he got a strike. His footing was bad. He nearly fell down, swearing loudly, but his rod was bent and then the trout surfaced with a crash and made for the logs at the mouth of the pool, but Moses kept him away from these, the fish zooming this way and that and the thrill of its life shooting up into Moses’ arms and shoulders. Then, as the fish tired and he got out his landing net, he thought: What a life; what a grand life! He admired the rosy spots on the fish, broke its back and wrapped it in fern, ready now for a big day, a day in which he would catch his limit or over. But he fished that pool for an hour without getting another strike and then waded on to the next and the next, about as reflective as a race-track tout, but not insensitive to the stillness of the woods around him, the loud, prophetic noise of water and then, by looking down to the pool below him, to the fact that he was not alone. Rosalie was there.
She had come to bathe; she was really washing herself, rubbing soap between her toes and sitting naked in the warm sun on a stone. He snapped his reel so that she would not hear him take in the line and waded carefully, not to make any noise, to the banks of the pool where she could not see him but where he could see her through the leaves. He watched his gleaming Susanna, shamefaced, his dream of simple pleasure replaced by some sadness, some heaviness that seemed to make his mouth taste of blood and his teeth ache. She did not go in for washing much more than her feet. The water was too cold or the sun was too warm. She stood, picked a leaf off her buttocks and went into the green woods; vanished. Her clothes would be there. His head was confused and the smell of the dead trout in his pocket seemed like something from his past. He unwrapped the fish and washed it in the running water, but i
t looked like a toy. After a decent interval he went back to the farm, where his mother was waiting to ask him to bring water from the well, and after lunch he asked Rosalie to go sailing. “I’d adore to,” she said.
They went down to Travertine in the old car and she knew more about sailing than he had expected. While he pumped the boat dry she put the battens into his sail and kept out of the way. There was a fresh southwest wind blowing and he took the racecourse, running for the first buoy with the wind at his stern, his center-board up. And then the wind backed around to the east and the day darkened as swiftly as breath obscures a piece of glass. He took a wide tack for the second buoy but the water was rough and suddenly everything was sullen, angry and dangerous, and he could feel the pull of the old sea—the ebb tide—on his hull. Waves began to break over the bow and every one of them soaked Rosalie.
She hoped that he would head back for the boat club and she knew that he wouldn’t. She had begun to shake with the cold and she wished she had never come. She had wanted his attention, his friendship, but as the hull rose clumsily and made an ominous thump and another sea broke over her shoulders she had some discouraging thoughts about her past and her hopes. Without a loving family, without many friends, dependent mostly upon men for her knowledge and guidance, she had found them all set on some mysterious pilgrimage that often put her life into danger. She had known a man who liked to climb mountains and as the Tern heeled over and shipped another sea she remembered her mountain-climbing lover; the crusts of fatigue in her mouth, the soreness of her feet, the dry sandwiches and the misty blue view from the summits that only raised in her mind the question of what she was doing there. She had tramped after bird watchers and waited home for fishermen and hunters and here she was on the Tern, half frozen and half drowned.
They rounded the second buoy and started back for the boat club and as they approached the mooring Rosalie went up to the bow. What happened was not her fault although Moses might have blamed her if he hadn’t seen it. As she pulled the skiff toward her the light painter broke. The skiff rested thoughtfully, it seemed, in the chop for a second or two and then eased its bow around to the open sea and headed in that direction, nodding and dancing in the rough. Moses kicked off his sneakers and dived in, striking out for the skiff, and swam after it for some distance until he realized that the skiff was traveling more rapidly on the ebb tide and the wind than he could swim. Then he turned his head and saw the full scope of his mistake. When the painter broke the mooring had been lost and now, with her sails down and Rosalie calling to him, the Tern was heading out to the open sea.
It was foggy then. He could barely see the beach and the lights of the Pocamasset club and he struck out for these, but not hurriedly, for the ebb tide was strong and there were limits to his strength. He saw someone come out onto the porch of the boat club and he waved and shouted but he couldn’t be heard or seen and after floating for a minute to rest he began the long haul to shore. When he felt sand under his feet it was a sweet sensation. The old committee boat was tied up to the wharf and he threw off the lines and headed her out into the fog, trying to guess the course the Tern would take. Then he let the motor idle and began to shout: “Rosalie, Rosalie, Rosalie, Rosalie…”
She answered him in a little while and he saw the outlines of the Tern and told her what line to throw him, and lifted her, in his arms, off the bow. She was laughing and he had been so anxious that her cheerfulness seemed to him like a kind of goodness that he had not suspected her to have. Then they picked up the skiff and headed for shore and when the Tern was moored they went into the old clubhouse that looked as if it had been put together by old ladies and mice and had, in fact, been floated down the river from St. Botolphs. Moses built a fire and they dried themselves here and would have remained if old Mr. Sturgis hadn’t come into the billiard room to practice shots.
Honora finished her hooked rug that afternoon—a field of red roses—and this and the gloomy sea-turn decided her to go to West Farm at last and be introduced to the stranger. She cut across the fields in the rain from Boat Street to River Street and let herself in the side door calling, “Hello. Hello. Is anyone home?” There was no answer. The house was empty. She was not nosy, but she climbed the stairs to the spare room to see if the girl might be there. The hastily made bed, the clothes scattered on chairs, and the full ash tray made her feel unfriendly and suspicious and she opened the closet door. She was in the closet when she heard Moses and Rosalie coming up the stairs, Moses saying, “What harm can there be in something that would make us both feel so good?” Honora closed the closet door as they came into the room.
What else Honora heard—and she heard plenty—does not concern us here. This is not a clinical account. We will only consider the dilemma of an old lady—born in Polynesia, educated at Miss Wilbur’s, a philanthropist and Samaritan—led by no more than her search for the truth into a narrow closet on a rainy afternoon.
CHAPTER TEN
No one saw Honora leave the house that day and if they had they wouldn’t have been able to tell whether or not she was crying with the rain streaming over her face as she stamped across Waylands’ pasture to Boat Street. The violence of her emotion may have stemmed from her memories of Mr. de Sastago, whose titles and castles turned out to be air. Her life had been virtuous, her dedication to innocence had been unswerving and she had been rewarded with a vision of life that seemed as unsubstantial as a paper match in a fairly windy place. She did not understand. She did not, as you might expect, take out her bewilderment on Maggie. She changed into dry clothes, drank her port and after supper she read the Bible.
At ten o’clock Honora said her prayers, turned out the light and got into bed. As soon as she turned out the light she felt wakeful and alert. It was the dark that made her wakeful. She was afraid of it. She looked boldly into the dark to assure herself that there was nothing to be afraid of but there seemed, in the dark, to be a stir, an increase of movement as if figures or spirits were arriving and gathering. She cleared her throat. She tried shutting her eyes, but this only heightened the illusion that the dark was populated. She opened her eyes again, determined to look squarely at the fantasy since she could not escape it.
The figures, although she couldn’t see them clearly, were not numerous. There seemed to be twelve or fourteen—enough to circle her bed. They seemed to dance. Their movements were ugly and obscene and by looking narrowly into the dark she was able to recognize their forms. There were pumpkin heads cut with a dog-tooth smile; there were the buckram masks of cats and pirates that are sold to children at Halloween; there were skeletons, masked executioners, the top-heavy headdresses of witch doctors that she had seen photographed in the National Geographic magazine; there was everything that had ever seemed to her strange and unnatural. I am Honora Wapshot! she said aloud. I am a Wapshot. We have always been a hardy family.
She got out of bed, turned on a light and lighted the fire in her hearth, holding out her arms to the warmth. The light and the fire seemed to scatter the grotesques. I am a Wapshot, she said again. I am Honora Wapshot. She sat by the fire until midnight and then she went to bed and fell asleep.
Early in the morning she dressed and after breakfast hurried through her garden to catch the bus to Travertine. The rain was over but the day was sullen; the tail of the storm. There were only a few other passengers. One of these, a woman, left her seat in the rear when they had been traveling for a few minutes and sat down beside Honora. “I’m Mrs. Kissel,” she said. “You don’t remember me, but I recognized you. You’re Honora Wapshot. I have a very embarrassing thing to tell you but I noticed when you got on the bus—” Mrs. Kissel lowered her voice to a whisper—“that your dress is undone all down the front. It’s very embarrassing but I always think it’s best to tell people.”
“Thank you,” Honora said. She clutched her coat over her dress.
“I always think it’s best to tell people,” Mrs. Kissel went on. “Whenever people tell me I’m always grate
ful. I don’t care who they are. It reminds me of something that happened to me. Some years ago Mr. Kissel and I went up to Maine for his vacation. Mr. Kissel comes from Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College. We went up in the sleeping cars. The train arrived at the station early in the morning and I had the most awful time getting my clothes on in that berth. I’d never been in a sleeping car before. Well, when we got off the train there were quite a few people there on the platform. The stationmaster was there, waiting for the mail, I guess, or something like that. Well, he came right over to me. I’d never seen him before in my life and I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. Well, he came right over to me and he said ‘Madam,’ he said in a low voice, ‘Madam, your corset is undone.’” Mrs. Kissel lifted her head and laughed for an instant like a young, young woman. “Oh, I’d never seen him before,” she said, “and I never saw him again, but he came right over to me and told me that and I didn’t resent it. Oh, I didn’t resent it at all. I thanked him and went into the ladies’ room and fixed it and then we took a carriage to the hotel. Those were the days when they had carriages.”