The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  Then he got some supper—this friend of Sir Walter Scott—and in the morning went to work as a stock clerk for Warburton’s Department Store.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Moses’ work in Washington was highly secret—so secret that it can’t be discussed here. He was put to work the day after he arrived—a reflection perhaps of Mr. Boynton’s indebtedness to Honora or a recognition of Moses’ suitability, for with his plain and handsome face and his descendance from a man who had been offered a decoration by General Washington, he fitted into the scene well enough. He was not smooth—the Wapshots never were—and compared to Mr. Boynton he sometimes felt like a man who eats his peas off a knife. His boss was a man who seemed to have been conceived in the atmosphere of career diplomacy. His clothes, his manners, his speech and habits of thought all seemed so prescribed, so intricately connected to one another that they suggested a system of conduct. It was not, Moses guessed, a system evolved at any of the eastern colleges and may have been formed in some foreign-service school. Its rules were never shown to Moses, so he could not abide by them, but he knew that rules must underlie this sartorial and intellectual diffidence.

  Moses was happy at the boardinghouse that he had picked by chance, and found it tenanted mostly by people of his own age: the sons and daughters of mayors and other politicians; the progeny of respectable ward heelers who were in Washington, like himself, as the result of some indebtedness. He did not spend much time at the boardinghouse for he found that much of his social, athletic and spiritual life was ordained by the agency where he worked. This included playing volleyball, taking communion and going to parties at the X Embassy and the Z Legation. He was up to all of this although he was not allowed to drink more than three cocktails at any party and was careful not to make eyes at any woman who was in government service or on the diplomatic list, for security regulations had clapped a lid on the natural concupiscence of a city with a large floating population. On the autumn week ends he sometimes drove with Mr. Boynton to Clark County, where they went riding and sometimes stayed for dinner with Mr. Boynton’s friends. Moses could stay on a horse, but this was not his favorite sport. It was a chance to see the countryside and the disappointing southern autumn with its fireflies and brumes, all of which stirred in him a longing for the brilliance of autumn at West Farm. Mr. Boynton’s friends were hospitable people who lived in splendid houses and who, without exception, had made or inherited their money from some distant source such as mouthwash, airplane engines or beer; but it was not in Moses to sit on some broad terrace and observe that the bills for this charming picture had been footed by some dead brewer; and as for brewing he had never drunk such good bourbon in his life. It was true that, having come from a small place where a man’s knowledge of his neighbors was intimate and thorough, Moses sometimes experienced the blues of uprootedness. His knowledge of his companions was no better than the knowledge travelers have of one another and he knew, by then, enough of the city to know that, waiting for a bus in the morning, the swarthy man with a beard and a turban might be an Indian prince in good standing or he might be a rooming-house eccentric. This theatrical atmosphere of impermanence—this latitude for imposture—impressed him one evening at an embassy concert. He was alone and had gone, at the intermission, out onto the steps of the building to get some air. As he pushed open the doors he noticed three old women on the steps. One was so fat, one so thin and haggard and one had such a foolish countenance that they looked like a representation of human folly. Their evening clothes reminded him of the raggle-taggle elegance of children on Halloween. They had shawls and fans and mantillas and brilliants and their shoes seemed to be killing them. When Moses opened the door they slipped into the embassy—the fat one, the thin one and the fool—so warry, so frightened and in such attitudes of wrongdoing that Moses watched. As soon as they got inside the building they fanned out and each of them seized a concert program that had been left on a chair or fallen to the floor. By this time a guard saw them and as soon as they were discovered they headed for the door and fled, but they were not disappointed, Moses noticed. The purpose of their expedition had been to get a program and they limped happily down the driveway in their finery. You wouldn’t see anything like that in St. Botolphs.

  The man who had the room next to Moses in the boardinghouse was the son of a politician from somewhere in the West. He was competent and personable and an ideal of thrift and continence. He did not smoke or drink and saved every penny of his salary toward the purchase of half a saddle horse that was stabled in Virginia. He had been in Washington for two years and he invited Moses into his room one night and showed him a chart or graph on which he had recorded his social progress. He had been to dinner in Georgetown eighteen times. His hosts were all listed and graded according to their importance in the government. He had been to the Pan-American Union four times: to the X Embassy three times: to the B Embassy one time (a garden party) and to the White House one time (a press reception). You wouldn’t find anything like that in St. Botolphs.

  The intense and general concern with loyalty at the time when Moses arrived in Washington had made it possible for men and women to be discharged and disgraced on the evidence of a breath of scandal. Old-timers like to talk about the past when even the girls in the Library of Congress—even the archivists—could be booked for a clandestine week end at Virginia Beach, but these days were gone or at least in suspense for government servants. Public drunkenness was unforgivable and promiscuity was death. Private industry went its own way and a friend of Moses’ who was in the meat-packing industry once made him this proposition: “I’ve got four dirty girls coming up from the shirt factory in Baltimore Saturday and I’m going to take them out to my cabin in Maryland. How about it? Just you and me and the four of them. They’re pigs but they’re not bad looking.” Moses said no thanks—he would have said so anyhow—but he envied the meat packer his liberty. This new morality was often on his mind and by thinking about it long enough he was able to make some dim but legitimate connection between lechery and espionage, but this understanding did nothing to lessen this particular loneliness. He even wrote to Rosalie, asking her to visit him for a week end, but she never answered. The government was full of comely women but they all avoided the dark.

  Feeling lonely one night and having nothing better to do he went out for a walk. He headed for the center of town and went into the lobby of the Mayflower to buy a package of cigarettes and to look around at a place that, for all its intended elegance, only reminded him of the vastness of his native land. Moses loved the lobby of the Mayflower. A convention was meeting and red-necked and self-respecting men from country towns were gathering in the lobby. Listening to them talk made him feel closer to St. Botolphs. Then he left the Mayflower and walked deeper into the city, and hearing music and being on a fool’s errand he stepped into a place called the Marine Room and looked around. There were a band and dance floor and a girl singing. Sitting alone at a table was a blonde woman who seemed pretty at that distance and who looked as if she didn’t work for the government. Moses took the table beside her and ordered a whisky. She did not see him at first because she was looking at herself in a mirror on the wall. She was turning her head, first one way and then another, raising her chin and taking the tips of her fingers and pushing her face into the firm lines that it must have had five or six years ago. When she had finished examining herself Moses asked if he could join her and buy her a drink. She was friendly—a little flurried—but pleased. “Well, it would be very nice to have your company,” she said, “but the only reason I’m here is because Chucky Ewing, the band leader, is my husband and when I don’t have anything better to do I just come down here and kill time.” Moses joined her and bought her a drink and after a few farewell looks at herself in the minor she began to talk about her past. “I used to vocalize with the band myself,” she said, “but most of my training is operatic. I’ve sung in night clubs all over the world. Paris. London. New York …” She spo
ke, not with a lisp, but with an articulation that seemed childish. Her hair was pretty and her skin was white but this was mostly powder. Moses guessed that it would have been five or six years since she could be called beautiful but since she seemed determined to cling to what she had been he was ready to string along. “Of course, I’m really not a professional entertainer,” she went on. “I went to finishing school and my family nearly died when I started entertaining. They’re very stuffy. Old family and all that sort of thing. Cliff dwellers.” Then the band broke and her husband joined them and was introduced to Moses and sat down.

  “What’s the score, honey?” he asked his wife.

  “There’s a table in the corner drinking champagne,” she said, “and the six gentlemen by the bandstand are drinking rye and water. They’ve each had four. There’re two tables of Scotch and five tables of bourbon and some beer drinkers over on the other side of the bandstand.” She counted the tables off on her fingers, still speaking in a very dainty voice. “Don’t worry,” she told her husband. “You’ll gross three hundred.”

  “Where’s the convention?” he said. “There’s a convention.”

  “I know,” she said. “Sheets and pillowcases. Don’t worry.”

  “You got any hot garbage?” he asked a waiter who had come over to their table.

  “Yes sir, yes sir,” the waiter said. “I’ve got some delicious hot garbage. I can give you coffee grounds with a little sausage grease or how about some nice lemon rinds and sawdust?”

  “That sounds good,” the band leader said. “Make it lemon rinds and sawdust.” He had seemed anxious and unhappy when he came to the table but this leg-pulling with the waiter cheered him up. “You got any dishwater?” he asked.

  “We got all kinds of dishwater,” the waiter said. “We got greasy dishwater and we got dishwater with stuff floating around in it and we got moth balls and wet newspaper.”

  “Well, give me a little wet newspaper with my sawdust,” the band leader said, “and a glass of greasy dishwater.” Then he turned to his wife. “You going home?”

  “I believe that I will,” she said daintily.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “If the convention shows I’ll be late. Nice to have met you.” He nodded to Moses and went back to the bandstand, where the other players had begun to stray in from the alley.

  “Can I take you home?” Moses asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “We just have a little apartment in the neighborhood and I usually walk but I don’t think there’d be any harm in you walking me home.”

  “Go?”

  She got a coat from the hat-check girl and talked with the hat-check girl about a four-year-old child who was lost in the woods of Wisconsin. The child’s name was Pamela and she had been gone four days. Extensive search parties had been organized and the two women speculated with deep anxiety on whether or not little Pamla had died of exposure and starvation. When this conversation ended, Beatrice—which was her name—started down the hall, but the hat-check girl called her back and gave her a paper bag. “It’s two lipsticks and some bobby pins,” she said. Beatrice explained that the hat-check girl kept an eye on the ladies’ room and gave Beatrice whatever was left there. She seemed ashamed of the arrangement, but she recuperated in a second and took Moses’ arm.

  Their place was near the Marine Room—a second-story bedroom dominated by a large cardboard wardrobe that seemed on the verge or in the process of collapse. She struggled to open one of its warped doors and exposed a magpie wardrobe—maybe a hundred dresses of all kinds. She went into the bathroom and returned, wearing a kind of mandarin coat with a dragon embroidered up the back out of threads that felt thorny to Moses’ hands. She yielded easily but when it was over she sobbed a little in the dark and asked, “Oh dear, what have we done?” Her voice was as dainty as ever. “Nobody ever likes me except in this way,” she said, “but I think it’s because I was brought up so strictly. I was brought up by this governess. Her name was Clancy. Oh, she was so strict. I was never allowed to play with other children.…” Moses dressed, kissed her good night and got out of the building without being seen.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Back at the farm Leander had banked the foundations of the old house with seaweed and had hired Mr. Pluzinski to clear the garden. His sons wrote him once or twice a month and he wrote them both weekly. He longed to see them and often thought, when he was drinking bourbon, of traveling to New York and Washington, but in the light of morning he couldn’t find it in himself to ever leave St. Botolphs again. After all, he had seen the world. He was alone a lot of the time, for Lulu was spending three days a week with her daughter in the village and Mrs. Wapshot was working three days a week as a clerk in the Anna Marie Louise Gift Shoppe in Travertine. It was made clear to everyone, by Sarah’s mien, that she was not doing this because the Wapshots needed money. She was doing it because she loved to, and this was the truth. All the energies that she possessed—and that she had used so well in improving the village—seemed to have centered at last in an interest in gift shops. She wanted to open a gift shop in the front parlor of the farmhouse. She even dreamed of this project, but it was something Leander wouldn’t discuss.

  It was hard to say why the subject of gift shops should excite, on one hand, Sarah’s will to live, and on the other, Leander’s bitterest scorn. As Mrs. Wapshot stood by a table loaded with colored-glass vases and gave a churchly smile to her friends and neighbors when they came in to spend a little money and pass the time, her equilibrium seemed wonderfully secure. This love of gift shops—this taste for ornamentation—may have been developed by the colorless surface of that shinbone coast or it may have been a most natural longing for sensual trivia. When she exclaimed—about a hand-carved salad fork or a hand-painted glass—“Isn’t it lovely?” she was perfectly sincere. The gossip and the company of the customers let her be as gregarious as she had ever been in the Woman’s Club; and people had always sought her out. The pleasure of selling things and putting silver and bills into the old tin box that was used for this purpose pleased her immensely, for she had sold nothing before in her life but the furniture in the barn to Cousin Mildred. She liked talking with the salesmen and Anna Marie Louise asked her advice about buying glass swans, ash trays and cigarette boxes. With some money of her own she bought two dozen bud vases that Anna Marie Louise had not wanted to buy. When the bud vases came she unpacked the barrel herself, tearing her dress on a nail and getting excelsior all over the place. Then she washed the vases and, arranging a paper rose in one, put it into the window. (She had had a lifelong aversion to paper flowers, but what could you do after the frosts?) Ten minutes after the vase had been put in the window it was sold and in three days they were all gone. She was very excited, but she could not talk it over with Leander and could only tell Lulu in the kitchen.

  To have his wife work at all raised for Leander the fine point of sexual prerogatives and having made one great mistake in going into debt to Honora he didn’t want to make another. When Sarah announced that she wanted to work for Anna Marie Louise he thought the matter over carefully and decided against it. “I don’t want you to work, Sarah,” he said. “You don’t have anything to say about it,” Sarah said. That was that. The question went beyond sexual prerogatives into tradition, for much of what Sarah sold was ornamented with ships at sea and was meant to stir romantic memories of the great days of St. Botolphs as a port. Now in his lifetime Leander had seen, raised on the ruins of that coast and port, a second coast and port of gift and antique shops, restaurants, tearooms and bars where people drank their gin by candlelight, surrounded sometimes by plows, fish nets, binnacle lights and other relics of an arduous and orderly way of life of which they knew nothing. Leander thought that an old dory planted with petunias was a pretty sight but when he stepped into a newly opened saloon in Travertine and found that the bar itself was made of a bifurcated dory he felt as if he had seen a ghost.

  He spent much time in his pleasant r
oom on the southwest corner of the house, with its view of the river and the roofs of the village, writing his journal. He meant to be honest and it seemed, in recording his past, that he was able to strike a level of candor that he had only known in his most lucky friendships. Young and old, he had always been quick to get out of his clothes, and now he was reminded of the mixed pleasures of nakedness.

  Writer went to work day after confab about poor father (he wrote). Rose before dawn as usual. Got morning papers for delivery and looked at help-wanted ads. Vacancy at J. B. Whittier. Big shoe manufacturer. Finished newspaper route. Washed face. Put water on hair. Inked hole in sock. Ran all the way to Whittier’s office. They were on the second story of frame building. Center of town. First person there. Only little light in sky. Spring dawn. Two other boys joined me, looking for same job. Birds singing in trees of Common. Glorious hour. Clerk—Grimes—opened door at eight o’clock. Let in applicants. Took me to Whittier’s office. Half-past eight. Beard the lion. Heavy man, seated at desk with his back to door. He did not turn. Spoke over shoulder. “Can you write a letter? Go home and write a letter. Bring it in tomorrow morning. Same time.” End of interview. Waited in outer office and watched two applicants go in and out with same results. Watched other applicants go home. Asked clerk—slender-faced—for sheet of paper and use of pen. Obliged. Headed paper J. B. Whittier. Wrote imaginary creditor. Asked to see boss again. Clerk helpful. Bearded lion for second time. “I’ve written my letter, sir.” Reached for letter but did not turn. Read letter. Passed brown envelope over shoulder. Addressed to broker. Brewster, Bassett & Co. “Deliver this and wait for the receipted bill.” Ran all the way to broker’s. Caught breath while waiting for receipted bill. Ran all the way back. Gave bill to Whittier. “Sit down there in the corner,” he says. Sat there for two hours without being noticed. More despotism in business in those days. Merchants often erratic. Tyrannical. No unions. Finally spoke at end of two hours. “I want you in there.” Points to outer office. “Clean out the spittoons and then ask Grimes what to do. He’ll keep you busy.”