The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  “Sometimes it was a hardship for me,” she said. “It kept me from ever broadening my mind. There’s lots of important things he kept me from seeing, like after the war when the parade went right by our windows with Marshal Foch and all. I looked forward to that parade but I never got to see it. He was on top of me when Lindbergh flewed the Atlantic and when that English king, whatever his name was, put down his crown for love and made a speech about it over the radio I never heard a word of it. But when I remember him now that’s the way I remember him—that sad look on his face that meant he was loving. He never seemed to be able to get enough of it and now, God bless the poor man, he’s lying in a cold, cold grave.”

  It was not until Saturday that Melissa came down, and, asking her to walk with him after dinner, Moses noticed how she hesitated at the door to the terrace as if she apprehended that the summer night might end her imposture. Then she joined him but she kept a meaningful distance between them. He suggested that they go down through the garden, hoping that the smell of roses and the sound of fountains would prevail, but she continued to keep a protective distance between them although when they left the garden she took a path through some pine woods that he had not seen before and that ended in a plot that turned out to be the animal cemetery. Here were a dozen headstones, overgrown with weeds, and Moses followed Melissa, reading the inscriptions:

  Here lie the bones and feathers of an amiable bird,

  A cold December twilight saw his fall.

  His voice, raised in sweet song, was never heard,

  Because the bird was very small.

  Here lie the bones of Sylvia Rabbit.

  She was sat on by Melissa Scaddon on June 17th

  And died of contusions.

  Here lie the bones of Theseus the Whippet.

  Here lie the bones of Prince the Collie,

  He will be missed by One and All.

  Here lie the bones of Hannibal.

  Here lie the bones of Napoleon

  Here lie the bones of Lorna, the kitchen cat.

  The lot exhaled the power of a family, Moses thought, and the glee they took in their own nonsense, and looking from the headstones to Melissa’s face he saw hopefully that her expression seemed to be softened by the foolish graveyard, but he decided to take his time and followed her out of the lot down a path to the barns and greenhouses when they both stopped to hear the loud, musical singing of some night bird. It sounded in the distance, on the early dark, with the brilliance of a knife, and Melissa was captivated. “You know J. P. wanted to have nightingales,” she said. “He imported hundreds and hundreds of nightingales from England. He had a special nightingale keeper and a nightingale house. When we came back from England the first thing we did on the boat after breakfast was to go down into the hold and feed mealy worms to the nightingales. They all died. . . .”

  Then looking past her, to the roof of the barn where the night bird seemed to be perched, Moses saw that it was not a bird at all; it was the plaintive song of a rusty ventilator as it turned on the night wind; and feeling that this discovery might change the sentimental mood that the twilight, the graveyard and the song promised he led her hurriedly into the old greenhouse and made a bed of his clothing on the floor. Much later that night, when they had returned to the house, and Moses, his bones feeling light and clean with love, was waiting for sleep he had every reason to wonder if she had not transformed herself into something else.

  This suspicion was renewed the next night when he stepped into their room and found her on the bed wearing a single stocking and reading a love story she had borrowed from one of the maids and when he kissed her and joined her where she lay her breath smelled, not unpleasantly, of candy. But on the next night, walking across the lawns from the station, Moses was reminded of those noisome details in her past that Justina liked to dwell on. She was on the terrace with Jacopo, one of the young gardeners. She was cutting Jacopo’s hair. Even at a distance the sight made Moses uneasy and sad, for the insatiableness that he adored left the possibilities of inconstancy open and he conceived for Jacopo a hatred that was murderous. Lewd and comely and laughing while she snipped and combed his hair, he seemed to Moses to be one of those figures who stand outside the brightly lighted centers of our consciousness and defeat our love of candor and our confidence in the sweetness of life, but Melissa sent Jacopo away when Moses joined them and displayed her affection for Moses brilliantly in greeting him and he did not worry about the gardener or anything else until, a few nights later, walking down the hall, he heard laughter from their bedroom and found Melissa and a stranger drinking whisky on the balcony. This was Ray Badger.

  Now the dubiousness of visiting a former wife did not, Moses supposed, concern him. His rival, if Badger was still a rival, had a hard-finish suit, a cast in one eye and patent-leather hair. He meant to be charming, when Moses joined them, but the memories he shared with Melissa—he had fed the nightingales—were confined to the past at Clear Haven and Moses was kept out of the conversation. Melissa had seldom mentioned Badger and if she had been unhappy with him it did not show that evening. She was delighted with his company and his recollections—delighted and sad, for when he had left them she spoke sentimentally to Moses about her former husband. “He’s just like an eighteen-year-old boy,” she said. “He’s always done what other people wanted him to do and now, at thirty-five, he’s just realized that he never expressed himself. I feel so sorry for him. . . . ” Moses reserved judgment on Badger and found at dinner that Justina was his advocate. She did not speak to her guest and seemed to be in a deeply emotional state. She announced that she was selling all her paintings to the Metropolitan Museum. A curator was coming for lunch the next day to appraise them. “There is no one I can trust to keep my things together,” she said. “I can’t trust any of you.”

  Badger gave Moses a cigar after dinner and they went together out onto the terrace. “I suppose you wonder why I’ve come back,” Badger said, “and I may as well explain myself. I’m in the toy business. I don’t know whether you knew that or not, and I’ve just had an unusually lucky piece of business. I’ve got the patent on a penny bank—it’s a plastic reproduction of an old iron bank—and Woolworth’s given me an order for sixty thousand. I have a confirmation for the order in New York. I’ve invested twenty-five thousand of my own in the thing, but right now I’ve got a chance to pick up a patent on a toy gun and I’ll sell my interest in the bank for fifteen thousand. I was wondering who to sell it to and I thought of you and Melissa—I read about your marriage in the paper—and I thought I’d come out here and give you the first chance. On the Woolworth order alone you’ll double your investment and you can count on another sixty thousand from the stationery stores. If you could get over to the Waldorf late tomorrow afternoon for a drink I’ll show you the patent and the design and the correspondence from Woolworth.”

  “I wouldn’t be interested,” Moses said.

  “You mean you don’t want to make any money? Oh, Melissa will be very disappointed.”

  “You haven’t talked this over with Melissa.”

  “Well, not really, but I know that she’ll be very disappointed.”

  “I haven’t fifteen thousand dollars,” Moses said.

  “You mean to tell me that you don’t have fifteen thousand dollars?”

  “That’s right,” Moses said.

  “Oh,” Badger said. “What about the general? Do you know if he’s worth anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Moses said. He followed Badger back into the hall and saw him give the old man a cigar and push his wheel chair out onto the terrace. When Moses repeated the conversation to Melissa it did not change her sentimental feelings for Badger. “Of course he’s not in the toy business,” she said. “He’s never really been in any business at all. He just tries to get along and I feel so sorry for him.”

  The fact that Justina was parting with her art treasures because she knew no one trustworthy made the next day both elegiac and exciting.<
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  Mr. Dewitt, the curator, was due at one and it happened to be Moses who let him into the rotunda. He was a slight man who wore a brown felt hat that was so many sizes too small for him that he looked like Boob McNutt. Moses wondered if he hadn’t picked out the wrong hat at a cocktail party. His face was slender and deeply lined—he tipped his head a little as if his baggy eyes were nearsighted—and the length and triangularity of his nose were extraordinary. This thin and angular organ seemed elegant and lewd—a vice, a penance, a gift of the devil’s—and reinforced a general impression of elegance and lewdness. He must have been fifty—the bags under his eyes couldn’t have been formed in a shorter time—but he carried himself gracefully and spoke with a little impediment as if a hair had gotten onto his tongue. “Not pork, not pork!” he exclaimed, sniffing the stale air of the rotunda. “I’m simply pasted together.” When Moses assured him that they would have chicken he put on some horn-rimmed glasses and, looking around the rotunda, noticed the big panel at the left of the stairs. “What a charming forgery,” he cried. “Of course I think the Mexicans make the most charming forgeries, but this is delightful. It was made in Zurich. There was a factory there in the early nineteen hundreds that turned them out by the carload. The interesting thing is their lavish use of carmine. None of the originals are nearly as brilliant.” Then some smell in the rotunda turned his mind back to the thought of lunch. “You’re sure it isn’t pork?” he asked again. “My tummy is a wreck.” Moses reassured him and they went down the long hall to where Justina was waiting for them. She was triumphantly gracious and sounded all those rich notes of requited social ambition that made her voice seem to carry up into the hills and down to the shadow of the valleys.

  Mr. Dewitt clasped his hands when he saw all the pictures in the hall but Moses wondered why his smile should be so fleeting. He carried his cocktail over to the big Titian.

  “Astonishing, astonishing, perfectly astonishing,” Mr. Dewitt said.

  “We found that Titian in a ruined palace in Venice,” Justina said. “A gentleman at the hotel—an Englishman, I recall—knew about it and showed us the way. It was like a detective story. The painting belonged to a very old countess and had been in her family for generations. I don’t clearly recall what we paid her but if you will get the catalogue, Niki?”

  D’Alba got the catalogue and leafed through it. “Sixty-five thousand,” he said.

  “We found the Gozzoli in another hovel. It was Mr. Scaddon’s favorite painting. We found it through the assistance of another stranger. I believe we met him on a train. The painting was so dirty and so covered with cobwebs when we first saw it and hung in such a dark room that Mr. Scaddon decided against it but we later realized that we could not be too particular and in the morning we changed our minds.”

  The curator sat down and let D’Alba fill his glass and when he turned to Justina she was reminiscing about the dirty palace where she had found the Sano di Pietro.

  “These are all copies and forgeries, Mrs. Scaddon.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “They’re copies and forgeries.”

  “The only reason you’re saying this is because you want me to give my pictures to your museum,” Justina said. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want to have my pictures for nothing.”

  “They’re worthless.”

  “We met a curator at the Baroness Grachi’s,” Justina said. “He saw our paintings in Naples where they were being crated for the steamer. He offered to vouch for their authenticity.”

  “They’re worthless.”

  A maid came to the door and rang the chimes for lunch, and Justina stood, her self-possession suddenly refreshed. “We will be five for lunch, Lena,” she told the maid. “Mr. Dewitt won’t be staying. And will you telephone the garage and tell Giacomo that Mr. Dewitt will walk to the train?” She took D’Alba’s arm and went down the hall.

  “Mrs. Scaddon,” the curator called after her, “Mrs. Scaddon.”

  “There isn’t much you can do,” Moses said.

  “How far is it to the station?”

  “A little over a mile.”

  “You don’t have a car?”

  “No.”

  “And there aren’t any taxis?”

  “Not on Sunday.”

  The curator looked out the window at the rain. “Oh this is outrageous, this is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever experienced. I only came as a favor. I have an ulcer and I have to eat regularly and it will be four o’clock before I get back into the city. You couldn’t get me a glass of milk?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Moses said.

  “What a mess, what a mess, and how in heaven’s name could she have supposed that those paintings were authentic? How could she have fooled herself?” He gave up with a gesture and started down the hall to the rotunda, where he put on the little hat that made him look like Boob McNutt. “This may kill me,” he said. “I’m supposed to eat regularly and avoid excitement and physical exertion. . . .” Off he went in the rain.

  When Moses joined the others at lunch there was no talk at all and the silence was so oppressive that his hearty appetite showed some signs of flagging. Suddenly D’Alba dropped his spoon and said tearfully, “My lady, oh my lady!”

  “Document,” Justina snapped. Then she swung her head around to Badger and said fiercely, “Please try and eat with your mouth shut!”

  “I’m sorry, Justina,” Badger said. Maids cleared off the soup plates and brought in some chicken but at the sight of the dish Justina waved it away. “I can’t eat a thing,” she said. “Take the food back to the kitchen and put it into the icebox.” Everyone bowed his head, sorry for Justina and bereft of a meal, for on Sunday afternoons the iceboxes were padlocked. She put her hands on the edge of the table, glaring heavily at Badger, and rose. “I suppose you want to get into town, Badger, and tell everyone about this.”

  “No. Justina.”

  “If I hear a word out of you about this, Badger,” she said, “I’ll tell everyone I know that you’ve been in prison.”

  “Justina.”

  She started for the door, not bent but straighter than ever, with D’Alba in tow, and when she reached the door she threw out her arms and cried, “My pictures, my pictures, my lovely, lovely pictures.” Then D’Alba could be heard opening and closing the elevator doors and there was the mournful singing of the cables in the shaft as she went up.

  It was a gloomy afternoon and Moses spent it studying syndicalism in the little library. When it began to get dark he shut his books and wandered through the house. The kitchen was empty and clean but the iceboxes were still padlocked. He heard music from the hall and thought that D’Alba must be playing, for it was cocktail music; the languid music of specious sorrow and mock yearning, of barroom twilights and unfresh peanuts; of heartburn and gastritis and those paper napkins that cling like wet leaves to the foot of your cocktail glass—but when he stepped into the room he saw that it was Badger. Melissa sat beside him on the piano bench and Badger was singing dolefully:

  I’ve got those guest-room blues,

  I’m feeling blue all the time,

  I’ve got those guest-room blues,

  Surrounded by things that aren’t mine.

  The bed is lumpy and has sprained my back,

  And I hear the choo-choo whistling that will taka me back,

  I’ve got those guest-room blues …

  When Moses approached the piano they both looked up. Melissa sighed deeply and Moses felt as if he had violated the atmosphere of a tryst. Badger gave Moses a jaded look and closed the piano. He seemed to be in an emotional turbulence that Moses was at some pains not to misunderstand. He got up from the piano bench and walked out onto the terrace, a figure of grief and unease, and Melissa turned her head and followed him with her eyes and all her attention.

  Now Moses knew that if we grant men vestigial sexual rites—that if the ease of his stance when a hockey stick was first put into his hands, if the pleasure he took
in the athletic equipment in the closet at West Farm or the sense, during a football scrimmage on a rainy day, of looking, during the last minutes of light and play, deep into the past of his kind, had any validity—there must be duplicate rites and ceremonies for the opposite sex. By this Moses did not mean the ability to metamorphose swiftly, but something else, linked perhaps to the power beautiful women have of evoking landscapes—a sense of rueful distance—as if their eyes had come to rest on a horizon that had never been seen by any man. There was some physical evidence for this—their voices softened and the pupils of their eyes dilated, and they seemed to be recollecting some distaff voyage over distaff waters to a walled island where they were committed by the nature of their minds and their organs to some secret rites that would refresh their charming and creative stores of sadness. Moses did not expect ever to know what was going on in Melissa’s mind but as he saw her pupils dilate now and a deeply thoughtful cast fall over her beautiful face he knew that it would be hopeless to inquire. She was recalling the voyage or she had seen the horizon and the effect of this was to stir up in her vague and stormy longings, but that Badger seemed to fit somehow into her memories of the voyage was what made him anxious.