The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  No fishing in vicinity. Walked with bride in hills. Beautiful scenery. Milky-blue hills in distance. Old lakes. Old mountains. Poignant country, north of mill towns. Then booming. Later ruined. (Unable to meet competition from south and west.) So-called marginal farming. Sam Scat. Stony fields. Most hill towns abandoned even then. Foundation holes, ruined buildings in deep woods. Homesteads, schoolhouses, churches even. Woods in vicinity still wild. Deer, bears, some lynx. Young wife picked nosegay of posies from gardens planted by farmers’ wives. Departed then. English roses. Sweet William. Lemon lilies. Phlox and primrose. Brought some back to bridal chamber. Put in water pitcher. Real love of flowers. Haying weather perfect. Writer worked in fields with farmer, sons. Thunderstorm at end of day. Dark clouds mounting. Cock’s crow. Deep sound of stone hills falling. Get hay into barn before rain. Forked lightning. Heavy wagon reaches safety just as first drops fall. Encircling sound. Long after nightfall, departure of rain, embrace of wife returns to writer all good things. Magic of haying weather. Heat of sun. Chill of storm.

  Vacation ends all too soon. Bid good-by to hills, fields, cow pastures, Elysian fields with real sorrow. Pinckney Street, Whittier, Grimes, etc. Sainted old mother was tender with wife, never so tender with anyone but Hamlet. Never spoke of trouble but seemed to sense babe-in-wood situation. Nothing of convenience in marriage, however. Made in heaven; so it seemed. Sweet child woke with writer in early mornings. Darned socks, made marriage bed sweet, cleaned lamp chimneys, waxed rosewood piano. Thought often of future. Dispose of troll-child and raise own family. Live in rose-covered cottage after demise of sainted old mother. In church writer often thanked God for sweetness of spouse. Prayed with full heart. Never had occasion to thank same for anything else. Wife sang sometimes in evening, accompanied by sainted old mother on Hallet & Davis rosewood piano. Voice modest in range but true pitch and oh so clear. Sweet, good, loving, kindly, spirit.

  Little troll very lively. Abdomen swollen, but no disfigurement. Easily fatigued during dog days. Accouchement expected in October. Sent message to office one afternoon. Left office at three. Found bags packed, both wife’s and writer’s. Took late train to Nahant. Hired livery to Rutherford farm. Reached there nine o’clock or later. Dark house. Smelled salt in wind. Heard harsh, regular noise of waves. Used both bell pull and knocker. Door opened by sallow-faced woman in nightdress, wrapper. Hair in rags. “I don’t know your names,” says she. “I don’t want to know them. The sooner you get out of here the better.” Lighted lamp. Unpacked bags. Went to bed. Wife slept poorly. Often spoke in sleep. Unclear words. Listened all night to troubled speaking; also moiling of sea. Seemed from sound of waves to be flat, stony beach. Distinguished rattling, knocking sound of stones. Milk-pail, cattle sounds before dawn. Woke early. Washed in cold water. “You’ll take your meals in kitchen,” said sallow-faced landlady. “So far as you’re able you’ll do your own work. I’m not going to be picking up after you.”

  Husband of same introduced self at breakfast. 5’6”. 125 pounds. Runty. Poor specimen. Appeared to be henpecked. Former livery-stable proprietor or so claimed. Tales of prosperity. Once possessed biggest wardrobe in Nahant. Sixty-four horses. Seven grooms on payroll. All lost in epidemic. Documents of splendor displayed. Receipted feed bill for one thousand dollars. Also tailor bill, butcher bill, grocery bill, etc. All gone. Walked with Clarissa on beach. Dear wife gathered colored stones, shells in skirt. Day slow to pass. Situation seemed like Gordian knot and to cut same dreamed of future. Painted rosy picture of country cottage, children gathered around knees, pleasant life. Net result of such woolgathering was to make wife weep.

  Labor pains began at seven. Wet bed. Broke waters or some such term. Writer unfamiliar, even today, with obstetrical lingo. “Our Father who art in heaven,” said Clarissa. Prayed continuously. Pain arduous. First experience with such things. Held wife in arms when seizures commenced. Sallow-faced landlady waited in next room. Sound of rocking chair. “Put blanket over her mouth,” she said. “They’ll hear her up at the Dexter place.” Most violent seizure at eleven. Suddenly saw blood, baby’s head. Landlady rushed in. Drove me away. Called henpecked husband to bring water, rags, etc. Much coming and going. Sallow-faced landlady emerged at 2 A.M. “You have a little daughter,” says she. Magical transformation! Butter wouldn’t melt in mouth. Went in to see baby. Sleeping in soapbox. Clarissa also sleeping. Kissed brow. Sat in chair until morning. Went for walk on beach. Clouds shaped like curved ribbing of scallop shell. Light pouring off sea into same. Form of sky still vivid in memory. Returned to room on tiptoe. Opened door. Clarissa in bed, smiling. Masses of dark hair. Baby at breast, swollen with milk. Writer cried for first time since leaving West River. “Don’t cry,” Clarissa says. “I’m happy.”

  Heavy step of sallow-faced landlady. Transformation still in order. “God bless you, you dear, sweet little girl,” she says to the baby. High, squeaky voice. “Look at her dear little fingers,” says she. “Look at her dear little toes. I’ll take her now.” “Let her suck for a little while,” says Clarissa. “Let her finish her dinner,” says I. “Well, you ain’t going to take the baby with you,” says she, “and since you ain’t going to take the baby with you and since she ain’t going to be your baby there’s no point in your suckling her.” “Let her suck for a little while longer,” says Clarissa. “I’m not one to judge others,” says she, “and I don’t put my nose in their business but if you hadn’t done wrong you wouldn’t be coming out here to have your baby in this Godforsaken place and when a baby drinks milk from a mother who’s done wrong all the wickedness and sinfulness and lustfulness goes right into the baby through its mother’s milk,” says she. “You’ve got a wicked tongue,” I said, “and we’d appreciate it if you’d leave us alone now.” “Let her suck for a little while longer,” Clarissa said. “I’m only doing what I’m paid to do,” she said, “and what’s more she’s God’s little creature and it ain’t fair to have her imbibing all the weaknesses of another the first thing in her life.” “Leave us alone,” I said. “She’s right, Leander,” Clarissa said and she took the child off her pretty breast and gave it to the intruder. Then she turned her face away and cried.

  She cried all the day long; she cried all night. She cried the bed full of tears. In the morning I helped her dress. She was too weak to dress herself, too weak even to lift her dark hair, and I lifted it for her and held it while she put it up with pins. There was a nine-o’clock train to Boston and I sent a message for a livery to pick us up in time to get it. Then I packed the valises and carried them out to the side of the road. Then I heard the landlady screaming: “You, you, where is she?” Oh, she looked then like a harpy. “She’s run away. Go up to the Dexters’, go up the Dexter path. I’ll go down by the shell road. We’ve got to head her off.” Off she goes in her muddy boots. Off goes former livery-stable proprietor with his manure fork. Pursued quarry over horizon. Heard baby crying in garden. Whimper, really. She had flown; but she had not gone far.

  Pear tree in garden pruned to look like fountain, sunshade perhaps. Graceful tent of leaves. Under this she sat. Bodice unbuttoned. Camisole unlaced. Child at breast. Fretful crying. Did not speak; she and me. Eyes only. No explanations, names even. Child sucking, but crying also. A little rain began to fall; but not on us. Pear tree served as adequate shelter. Baby fell asleep. How long we sat there I don’t know. Half hour perhaps. Watched oyster-shell road darken in rain. Still no drops touched us. “I have more tears than milk,” she said. “I have more tears than milk. I’ve cried my breasts dry.” Carried sleeping baby, sheltered by head, shoulders from rain, back to soapbox in kitchen near stove. Took livery to station.

  Have no wish to dwell on sordid matters, sorrows, etc. Bestiality of grief. Times in life when we can count only on brute will to live. Forget. Forget. (By this Leander meant to say that Clarissa was drowned in the Charles River that night.) Took cars to St. Botolphs next morning with old mother and poor Clarissa.

  Overcast day. Not cold. Variabl
e winds. South, southwest. Hearse at station. Few rubbernecks watching. Father Frisbee said the words. Old man then; old friend. Purple face. Skirts blowing in wind. Showed old-fashioned congress boots. Thick stockings. Family lot on hill above river. Water, hills, fields restore first taste of sense. Never marry again. Roof of old house visible in distance. Abode of rats, squirrels, porcupines. Haunted house for children. Wind slacked off in middle of prayer. Distant, electrical smell of rain. Sound amongst leaves; stubble. Hath but a short span, says Father Frisbee. Full of misery is he. Rain more eloquent, heartening and merciful. Oldest sound to reach porches of man’s ear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The fat man who had given Coverly pointers on how to shave had begun to come into Coverly’s room at night after supper and give him advice on how to get ahead in the world. He was a widower who had a house somewhere to the north where he went for week ends and who pinched pennies by living in the rooming house so that he would have a comfortable retirement. He had a job with Civil Service and it was his feeling that Coverly should get on the Civil Service lists. He brought him those newspapers that list Civil Service openings and kept pointing out opportunities for high-school graduates or opportunities for specialists who had been trained by the Civil Service schools in the city. There was a demand that year for Tapers and he pointed this out to Coverly as his best bet. The government would pay half of Coverly’s tuition at the MacIlhenney Institute. It was a four-month course and if he passed his exams he would be taken into government service at seventy-five dollars a week. Advised and encouraged by his friend, Coverly enrolled in some night classes on Taping. This involved the translation of physics experiments into the symbols—or tape—that could be fed into a computation machine.

  Coverly’s schedule went like this. He punched Warburton’s time clock at half-past eight and went down a back staircase into the basement. The air was spectacularly bad: the reek and the closeness of a department store backstage. The other stock boys were of varying ages—one of them was in his sixties—and they were all amused by Coverly’s catarrhal accent and his references to life in St. Botolphs. They unpacked the merchandise as it came in and kept it flowing up the freight elevators to the departments overhead. When there were sales they worked sometimes as late as midnight, unloading racks of fur-trimmed coats or cartons of bed sheets. On three nights a week, when Coverly had finished work at Warburton’s, he signed the monitor’s book at the MacIlhenney Institute. This was in the fourth floor of an office building that seemed to contain a good many other schools—institutes of portrait photography, journalism and music. The only elevator that ran in the evening was a freight elevator, operated by an old man in overalls who could, by pursing his lips, give a fairly good imitation of a French horn. He performed the William Tell Overture while he took his passengers up and down and he liked to be complimented. There were twenty-four students in Coverly’s class and the instructor was a young man who seemed to have put in a hard day himself by the time he got to them. The first lecture was an orientation talk on cybernetics or automation, and if Coverly, with his mildly rueful disposition, had been inclined to find any irony in his future relationship to a thinking machine, he was swiftly disabused. Then they got to work memorizing the code.

  This was like learning a language and a rudimentary one. Everything was done by rote. They were expected to memorize fifty symbols a week. They were quizzed for fifteen minutes at the opening of each class and were given speed tests at the end of the two-hour period. After a month of this the symbols—like the study of any language—had begun to dominate Coverly’s thinking, and walking on the street he had gotten into the habit of regrouping numbers on license plates, prices in store windows and numerals on clocks so that they could be fed into a machine. When the class ended he sometimes drank a cup of coffee with a friend who was going to school five nights a week. His name was Mittler and his second enrollment was at Dale Carnegie’s and Coverly was very much impressed with how likeable Mittler had learned to make himself. Moses came over one Sunday to visit Coverly and they spent the day banging around the streets and drinking beer but when it came time for Moses to go back the separation was so painful for both of them that Moses never returned. Coverly planned to go to St. Botolphs for Christmas but he had a chance to work overtime on Christmas Eve and he took it, for he was in the city, after all, to make his fortune.

  All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and shells and alchemists’ gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore water green, and purple further out and the joy of distances and the roar of falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn’t come out of the sea for all of us. She came for Coverly through the swinging door of a sandwich shop in the Forties where he had gone to get something to eat after classes at the MacIlhenney Institute. She was a thin, dark-haired girl named Betsey MacCaffery—raised in the badlands of northern Georgia—an orphan, her eyes red that night from crying. Coverly was the only customer in the shop. She brought him a glass of milk and a sandwich in an envelope and then went to the far end of the counter and began to wash glasses. Now and then she took a deep, tremulous breath—a sound that made her seem to Coverly, as she bent over the sink, tender and naked. When he had eaten half his sandwich he spoke to her:

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Oh Jesus,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be here crying in front of strangers, but the boss just came in and found me smoking a cigarette and he gave me hell. There wasn’t anybody in the store. It’s always slow this late on rainy nights, but he can’t blame me for that, can he? I don’t have anything to do with the rain and I just can’t stand out there in the rain asking people to come in. Well, it was slow and there hadn’t been anybody in for nearly twenty—twenty-five or thirty minutes—and so I went out back and lighted a cigarette and then he came right in, sniffing like a pig, and gave me hell. He said these awful things about me.”

  “You shouldn’t pay any attention to what he says.”

  “You English?”

  “No,” Coverly said. “I come from a place called St. Botolphs. It’s a small town, north of here.”

  “The reason I asked was you don’t talk like the others. I come from a small town myself. I’m just a small-town girl. I guess maybe that’s the trouble with me. I don’t have this thick skin you need to get along with in the city. I had so much trouble this week. I just took this apartment with my girl friend. I have or perhaps I should say I had this girl friend, Helen Bent. I thought she was my true-blue friend; true-blue. She certainly led me to believe she was my best friend. Well, since we were such good friends it seemed sensible for us to take an apartment together. We were inseparable. That’s what people used to say about us. You can’t ask Betsey unless you ask Helen, they used to say. Those two are inseparable. Well, we took this apartment together, my girl friend and I. That was about a month ago; a month or six weeks. Well, just as soon as we got moved in and settled and about to enjoy ourselves I discover that the whole thing is just a scheme. The only reason she wants to share this apartment with me is so she can meet men there. Formerly she was living with her family out in Queens. Well, I don’t have any objections to having a boy friend now and then but it was only a one-room apartment and she was having them in every night and naturally it was very embarrassing for me. There were men going in and out of there so much that it didn’t seem like home to me. Why, sometimes when it was time for me to go home to my own apartment where I was paying rent and had all my own furniture I’d just feel so heavyhearted about busting in on her with one of her friends that I’d go and sit in a late movie. Well, I finally spoke to her. Helen, I said, this place doesn’t seem like home to me. There’s no sense in my paying rent, I said, if I have to take up residence in a movie house. Well, she certainly showed her true colors. Oh, the spiteful things she said. When I come home the next day she’s gone, television set and all. I was glad to see the last of her, of course, but I’m stuck with this apartment with nobody to share
the rent and in a job like this I don’t have any occasion to make girl friends.”

  She asked Coverly if he wanted anything more. It was nearly time to close and Coverly asked if he could walk her home.

  “You sure come from a small town, all right,” she said. “Anybody could tell you come from a small town, asking if you can walk me home, but it so happens I just live five blocks from here and I do walk home and I don’t guess it would do me any harm, providing you don’t get fresh. I’ve had too much of freshness. You’ve got to promise that you won’t be fresh.”

  “I promise,” Coverly said.

  She talked on and on while she made the preparations for closing the store and when these were finished she put on a hat and coat and stepped with Coverly out into the rain. He was delighted with her company. What a citizen of New York, he thought—walking a counter girl home in the rain. As they approached her house she reminded him of his promise not to be fresh and he didn’t ask to come up, but he asked her to have dinner with him some night. “Well, I’d adore to,” she said. “Sunday’s my only night off but if Sunday’s all right with you I’d adore to have dinner with you on Sunday night. There’s this nice Italian restaurant right around the corner we can go to—I’ve never been there, but this former girl friend of mine told me it was very good—excellent cooking, and if you could pick me up at around seven …” Coverly watched her walk through the lighted hall to the inner door, a thin girl and not a very graceful one, feeling, as surely as the swan recognizes its mate, that he was in love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE