by John Cheever
Then the train whistle sounded—the afternoon train that had pushed its cowcatcher through the massive drifts, bringing home the last to come, bringing them back to the old houses on Boat Street, where nothing was changed and nothing was strange and nobody worried and nobody grieved, and where in an hour or two the souls of men would be sifted out, the good getting toboggans and sleds, skates and snowshoes, ponies and gold pieces, and the wicked receiving nothing but a lump of coal.
CHAPTER II
The Wapshot family settled in St. Botolphs in the seventeenth century. I knew them well, I made it my business to examine their affairs, indeed I spent the best years of my life, its very summit, on their chronicle. They were friendly enough. When you met them on the streets of St. Botolphs they behaved as if this chance meeting were something they had anticipated but if you told them anything—told them that the West River had flooded or that Pinkham’s Folly had burned to the ground—they would convey, in a fleeting smile, the fact that you had made a mistake. One did not tell the Wapshots anything. Their resistance to receiving information seemed to be a family trait. They thought well of themselves; they esteemed themselves so healthy that it seemed impossible to them that they would not have known about the flood or the fire, even though they might have been in Europe. I went to school with the boys, raced with Moses at the Travertine Boat Club and played football with them both. They used to cheer one another loudly as if shouting the family name across a playing field would give it some immortality. I spent a lot of pleasant time at their house on River Street and yet what I remember is that it was always in their power to make me feel alone, to make it painfully clear that I was an outsider.
Moses, when I knew him best, had the kind of good looks and presence that sweeps a young man triumphantly through secondary school and disappointingly enough not much farther. He had dark yellow hair and a sallow complexion. Everybody loved Moses, including the village dogs, and he comported himself with the purest, the most impulsive humility. Everybody did not love Coverly. He had a long neck and a disagreeable habit of cracking his knuckles. Sarah Wapshot, their mother, was a fair and slender woman who wore a pince-nez, mispronounced the word “interesting” and claimed to have read Middlemarch sixteen times. She used to leave her books in the garden and their set of George Eliot was foxed and buckled by the rain. Their father, Leander, was one of those Massachusetts Yankees who look forever like a boy although toward the end he looked like a boy who had seen the Gorgon. He had a high color, fine blue eyes and thick white hair. He said “marst” for “mast” and “had” for “hard” and spent the last years of his life running a launch between Travertine and the amusement park in Nangasakit. Leander drowned while swimming. Mrs. Wapshot died two years later and ascended into heaven, where she must have been kept very busy since she was a member of that first generation of American women to enjoy sexual equality. She had exhausted herself in good works. She had founded the Woman’s Club, the Current Events Club, and was a director of the Animal Rescue League and the Lambert Home for Unwed Mothers. As a result of all these activities the house on River Street was always filled with dust, its cut flowers long dead, the clocks stopped. Sarah Wapshot was one of those women whose grasp of vital matters had forced them to consider the simple tasks of a house to be in some way perverted. Coverly married a girl named Betsey Marcus from the Georgia badlands; a counter girl in a Forty-second Street milk bar. At the time of which I’m writing he worked at the Talifer Missile Site. Moses had thrown up his job as a banking apprentice to work for Leopold and Company, a shady brokerage house. He married Melissa Scaddon. Both Moses and Coverly had sons.
Spread them out on some ungiven summer evening on the lawn between their house and the banks of the West River, in the fine hour before dinner. Mrs. Wapshot is giving Lulu, the cook, a lesson in landscape painting. They have set up their easel a little to the right of the group. Mrs. Wapshot is holding a paper frame up to the river view and saying: “Cherchez la motif, Lulu. Cherchez la motif.” Leander is drinking bourbon and admiring the light. For a man who is, in all his ways, plainly provincial, Leander’s life has possessed more latitude than one would have guessed. He once traveled as far west as Cleveland with a Shakespearean company and, a few years later, ascended one hundred and twenty-seven feet in a hot-air balloon at the county fair. He is proud of himself, proud of his sons; pride is some part of the calm and inquisitive gaze he gives to the river banks, thinking that all the rivers of the world are old but that the rivers of his own country seem oldest.
Coverly is burning tent moths out of the apple trees. Moses folds a sail. From the open windows of their house they can hear the Waldstein Sonata being played by their cousin Devereaux, who is practicing for his concert debut in the fall. Devereaux has a harried, dark face and is not quite twelve years old. “Light and shadow, light and shadow,” says old Cousin Honora of the music. She would say the same for Chopin, Stravinsky or Thelonious Monk. She is a redoubtable old woman in her seventies, dressed all in white. (She will switch to black on Labor Day.) Her money has saved the family repeatedly from disgrace or worse and while her own home is on the other side of town she gives this landscape and its cast a proprietary look. The parrot, in his cage by the kitchen door, exclaims: “Julius Caesar, I am thoroughly disgusted.” It is all he ever says.
How orderly, clean and sensible the world seems; above all how light, as if these were the beginnings of a world, a chain of mornings. It is late in the day, late in this history of this part of the world, but this lateness does nothing to eclipse their ardor. Presently there is a cloud of black smoke from the kitchen—the rolls are burning—but it doesn’t really matter. They eat their supper in a cavernous dining room, play a little whist, kiss one another good night and go to sleep to dream.
CHAPTER III
The trouble began one afternoon when Coverly Wapshot swung down off the slow train, the only south-bound train that still stopped at the village of St. Botolphs. It was in the late winter, just before dark. The snow was gone but the grass was dead and the place seemed not to have rallied from the February storms. He shook hands with Mr. Jowett and asked about his family. He waved to the bartender in the Viaduct House, waved to Barry Freeman in the feed store and called hello to Miles Howland, who was coming out of the bank. The late sky was brilliant and turbulent but it shed none of its operatic lights and fires onto the darkness of the green. This awesome performance was contained within the air. Between the buildings he could see the West River with its, for him, enormous cargo of pleasant memory and he took away from this brightness the unlikely impression that the river’s long history had been a purifying force, leaving the water fit to drink. He turned right at Boat Street. Mrs. Williams was sitting in her parlor, reading the paper. The only light at the Brattles’ was in the kitchen. The Dummers’ house was dark. Mrs. Bretaigne, who was saying good-bye to a caller, welcomed him home. Then he turned up the walk to Cousin Honora’s.
Maggie answered the door and he gave her a kiss. “They ain’t nothing but dried beef,” Maggie said. “You’ll have to kill a chicken.” He went down the long hall past the seven views of Rome into the library, where he found his old cousin with an open book on her lap. Here was home-sweet-home, the polished brass, the applewood fire. “Coverly dear,” Honora said in an impulse of love and kissed him on the lips. “Honora,” Coverly said, taking her in his arms. Then they separated and scrutinized one another cannily to see what changes had been made.
Her white hair was still full, her face leonine, but her new false teeth were not well fitted and they made her look like a cannibal. This hinted savagery reminded Coverly of the fact that his cousin had never been photographed. In all the family albums she appeared either with her back to the camera as she ran away or with her face concealed by her hands, her handbag, her hat or a newspaper. Any stranger looking at the albums would have thought she was wanted for murder. Honora thought Coverly looked underfed and she said so. “You’re skinny,” she said.
/> “Yes.”
“I’ll have Maggie bring you some port.”
“I’d rather have a whisky.”
“You don’t drink whisky,” Honora said.
“I didn’t used to,” Coverly said, “but I do now.”
“Will wonders never cease?” Honora asked.
“If you’re going to kill a chicken,” Maggie said from the doorway, “you’d better kill it now or you won’t get supper much before midnight.”
“I’ll kill the chicken now,” Coverly said.
“You’ll have to speak louder,” Honora said. “She can’t hear.”
Coverly followed Maggie back through the house to the kitchen. “She’s crazier than ever,” Maggie said. “Now she claims she can’t sleep. She claims she ain’t slept for years. Well, so I come into the parlor one afternoon with her tea and there she is. Sound asleep. Snoring. So I say, ‘Wake up, Miss Wapshot. Here’s your tea.’ She says, ‘What do you mean, wake up? I wasn’t asleep,’ she says. ‘I was just lost in deep meditation.’ And now she’s thinking of buying an automobile. Dear Jesus, it would be like setting a hungry lion loose in the streets. She’ll be running over and killing innocent little children if she don’t kill herself first.”
The relationship between the old women stood foursquare on a brand of larcenous backbiting that appeared to contain so little in the way of truth that it could be passed off as comical. Maggie’s hearing was perfect but for some years Honora had told everyone she was deaf. Honora was eccentric but Maggie told everyone in the village that she was mad. The physical and mental infirmities they invented for one another had a pristine quality that made it nearly impossible to believe there was any grimness in the contest.
Coverly found a hatchet in the back pantry and went down the wooden steps to the garden. Somewhere in the distance he could hear children’s voices, distinctly accented with the catarrhal pronunciations of that part of the world. There was a gaggle of sound from the hen house beyond the hedge. He felt uncommonly happy in this sparsely populated place; felt some marked loosening of his discontents. It was the hour, he knew, when the pinochle players would be drifting across the green to the firehouse and when the yearnings of adolescence, exacerbated by the smallness of the village, would be approaching a climax. He could remember sitting himself on the back steps of the house on River Street, racked with a yearning for love, for friendship and renown, that had made him howl.
He went on through the hedge to the hen house. The laying hens had retired but four or five cockerels were feeding in their yard. He chased them into their house and after an undignified scuffle caught one by its yellow legs. The bird squawked for mercy and Coverly spoke to it soothingly, he hoped, as he lay its neck on the block and chopped off its head. He held the struggling body down and away from him to let the blood drain into the ground. Maggie brought him a bucket of scalding water and an old copy of the St. Botolphs Enterprise and he plucked and eviscerated the bird, losing his taste for chicken, step by step. He brought the carcass back to the kitchen and joined his old cousin in the library, where Maggie had set out whisky and water.
“Can we talk now?” Coverly asked.
“I guess so,” Honora said. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward. “You want to talk about the house on River Street?”
“Yes.”
“Well, nobody’ll rent it and nobody’ll buy it and it would break my heart to see it torn down.”
“What is the matter?”
“The Whitehalls rented it in October. They moved in and moved right out again. Then the Haverstraws took it. They lasted a week. Mrs. Haverstraw told everybody in the stores that the house was haunted. But who,” she asked, raising her face, “would there be to haunt the place? Our family has always been a very happy family. None of us have ever paid any attention to ghosts. But just the same it’s all over town.”
“What did Mrs. Haverstraw say?”
“Mrs. Haverstraw spread it around that it’s the ghost of your father.”
“Leander,” Coverly said.
“But what would Leander want to come back and trouble people for?” Honora asked. “It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in ghosts. He just never had any use for them. I’ve heard him say many times that he thought ghosts kept low company. And you know how kind he was. He used to escort flies and moth millers out the door as if they were guests. What would he come back for except to eat a bowl of crackers and milk? Of course he had his faults.”
“Were you with us,” Coverly asked, “the time he smoked a cigarette in church?”
“You must have made that up,” Honora said, fending for the past.
“No,” Coverly said. “It was Christmas Eve and we went to Holy Communion. I remember that he seemed very devout. He was up and down, crossing himself and roaring out the responses. Then before the Benediction he took a cigarette out of his pocket and lighted it. I saw then that he was terribly drunk. I told him, ‘You can’t smoke in church, Daddy,’ but we were in one of the front pews and a lot of people had seen him. What I wanted then was to be the son of Mr. Pluzinski the farmer. I don’t know why, except that the Pluzinskis were all very serious. It seemed to me that if I could only be the son of Mr. Pluzinski I would be happy.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Honora said. Then she sighed, changed her tone and added uneasily: “There was something else.”
“What.”
“You remember how he used to give away nickels on the Fourth of July.”
“Oh, yes.” Coverly then saw the front of their house in many colors. A large flag hung from the second floor, its crimson stripes faded to the color of old blood. His father stood on the porch, after the parade and before the ball game, passing out new nickels to a line of children that reached up River Street. The trees were all leafed out and in his reverie the light was quite green.
“Well, as you may remember he kept the nickels in a cigar box. He had painted it black. When I was going through the house I found the box. There were still some nickels in it. Many of them were not real. I believe he made them himself.”
“You mean . . .”
“Shhhh,” said Honora.
“Supper’s ready,” said Maggie.
Honora seemed tired after supper so he kissed her good night in the hallway and walked to his own home on the other side of town. The place had been empty since fall. There was a key on the windowsill and the door swung open onto a strong smell of must. This was the place where he had been conceived and born, where he had awakened to the excellence of life, and there was some keen chagrin at finding the scene of so many dazzling memories smelling of decay; but this, he knew, was the instinctual foolishness that leads us to love permanence when there is none. He turned on the lights in the hall and the parlor and got some logs from the shed. He was absorbed in laying and lighting a fire but when the fire was set he began to feel, surrounded by so many uninhabited rooms, an unreasonable burden of apprehension, as if his presence there were an intrusion.
It was his and his brother’s house, by contract, inheritance and memory. Its leaks and other infirmities were his responsibility. It was he who had broken the vase on the mantelpiece and burned a hole in the sofa. He did not believe in ghosts, shades, spirits or any other forms of unquietness on the part of the dead. He was a man of twenty-eight, happily married, the father of a son. He weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds, enjoyed perfect health and had eaten some chicken for dinner. These were the facts. He took a copy of Tristram Shandy down from the shelf and began to read. There was a loud noise in the kitchen that so startled him the sweat stood out on his hands. He raised his head long enough to embrace this noise in the realm of hard fact. It could be a shutter, a loose piece of firewood, an animal or one of those legendary tramps who were a part of local demonology and who were supposed to inhabit the empty farms, leaving traces of fire, empty snuff cans, a dry cow and a frightened spinster. But he was strong and young and even if he should encounter a tramp in
the dark hallway he could take care of himself. Why should he feel so intensely uncomfortable? He went to the telephone intending to ask the operator the time of night but the telephone was dead.
He went on reading. There was noise from the dining room. He said something loud and vigorous to express his impatience with his apprehensions but the effect of this was to convince him overwhelmingly that he had been heard. Someone was listening. There was a cure for this foolishness. He went directly to the empty room and turned on the light. There was nothing there and yet the beating of his heart was accelerated and painful and sweat ran off his palms. Then the dining room door slowly closed of itself. This was only natural since the old house sagged badly and while half the doors closed themselves the other half wouldn’t close at all. He went through the swinging door on into the pantry and the kitchen. Here again he saw nothing but felt again that there had been someone in the room when he turned on the light. There were two sets of facts—the empty room and the alarmed condition of his skin. He was determined to scotch this and he went out of the kitchen into the hallway and climbed the stairs.
All the bedroom doors stood open, and here, in the dark, he seemed to yield to the denseness of the lives that had been lived here for nearly two centuries. The burden of the past was palpable; the utterances and groans of conception, childbirth and death, the singing at the family reunion in 1893, the dust raised by a Fourth of July parade, the shock of lovers meeting by chance in the hallway, the roar of flames in the fire that gutted the west wing in 1900, the politeness at christenings, the joy of a young husband bringing his wife back after their marriage, the hardships of a cruel winter all took on some palpableness in the dark air. But why was the atmosphere in this darkness distinctly one of trouble and failure? Ebenezer had made a fortune. Lorenzo had introduced child-welfare legislation into the state laws. Alice had converted hundreds of Polynesians to Christianity. Why should none of these ghosts and shades seem contented with their work? Was it because they had been mortal, was it because for every last one of them the pain of death had been bitter?