by John Cheever
At about this time Coverly received a letter from his old cousin.
Someone more persevering might have broken the letter down word by word and diagnosed its content but Coverly was not this gifted or patient. He was able to decipher a few facts. A holly tree that grew behind her house had been attacked by rust. She wanted Coverly to return to St. Botolphs and have it sprayed. This was followed by an indecipherable paragraph on the Appleton Bank and Trust Company in Boston. Honora had set up trusts for Coverly and his brother and he supposed she was writing of these. The income enabled Coverly to live much more comfortably than he would have been able to on his government salary and he hoped nothing was wrong here. This was followed by a clear sentence stating that Dr. Lemuel Cameron, director of the Talifer site, had once received a scholarship endowed by Lorenzo Wapshot. She closed with her customary observations on the rainfall, the prevailing winds and the tides.
Coverly guessed that her reference to the holly tree meant something very different but he didn’t have the emotional leisure to discover what was at the back of the old woman’s mind. If there was trouble with the Appleton Bank and Trust Company—and his quarterly check was late—there was nothing much he could do. The remark about Dr. Cameron might or might not have been true since Honora often exaggerated Lorenzo’s bounty and had, like any other old woman, a struggle to remember names. The letter arrived at a bad time in his affairs and he forwarded it on to his brother.
Betsey had not rallied from the failure of her cocktail party. She hated Talifer and squarely blamed Coverly for making her live there. She avenged herself by sleeping alone and by not speaking to her husband. She complained loudly to herself about the house, the neighborhood, the kitchen, the weather and the news in the papers. She swore at the mashed potatoes, cursed the pot roast, she damned the pots and pans to hell and spoke obscenely to the frozen apple tarts, but she did not speak to Coverly. Every surface of life—tables, dishes and the body of her husband—seemed to be abrasive facets of a stone that lay in her path. Nothing was right. The sofa hurt her back. She could not sleep in her bed. The lamps were too dim to read by, the knives were too dull to cut butter, the television programs bored her although she watched them faithfully. The greatest of Coverly’s hardships was the breakdown in their sexual relationship. It was the crux, the readiest source of vitality in their marriage, and without this her companionship became painful.
Coverly tried to throw a ring of light around her figure and saw or thought he saw that she might be heartlessly overburdened by a past of which he knew nothing. We are all, he thought, ransomed to our beginnings, and the sum in her case might have been exorbitant. This might account for that dark side of her nature that seemed more mysterious to him than the dark face of the moon. Were there instruments of love and patience that could explore this darkness, discover the wellsprings of her misery and by charting it all draw it all into the area of reasonableness; or was this the nature of her kind of woman to stand forever half in a darkness that was unknown to herself? She looked nothing like a moon goddess, sitting in front of the television set, but of all the things in the world her spirit with its irreconcilable faces seemed most like the moon to him.
One Saturday morning when he was shaving he heard Betsey’s voice—strident and raised in anger—and he went downstairs in his pajamas to see what was the matter. Betsey was upbraiding a new cleaning woman. “I just don’t know what the world’s coming to,” Betsey said. “I just don’t know. I suppose you expect me to pay you good money for just sitting around, for just sitting around smoking my cigarettes and watching my television.” Betsey turned to Coverly. “She can hardly speak English,” Betsey said, “and she doesn’t even know how to work a vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t even know how to do that. And you. Look at you. Here it is nine o’clock and you’re still in your pajamas and I suppose you’re going to spend the day just sitting around the house. It just makes me sick and tired. Well, you take her upstairs and you show her how to work the vacuum cleaner. Now you march, both of you. You get upstairs and do something useful for a change.”
The cleaning woman had dark hair and olive skin. Her eyes were wet with tears. Coverly got the vacuum cleaner and carried it up the stairs, admiring the stranger’s ample rump. There was between them the instantaneous rapport of unhappy children. Coverly plugged in the cord and turned on the motor but when he smiled at the stranger things took a different turn. “Now we put it in here,” Betsey heard him say. “That’s right. That’s the way. We have to get it into the corners, way into the corners. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Back and forth, back and forth. Not too fast . . .” Downstairs Betsey thought angrily that Coverly had at last found something useful to do on Saturday mornings and that at least one room would be clean. She went into the bathroom where she had a vision—not so much of the emancipation of her sex as the enslavement of the male.
Routine progress—a feminine President and a distaff Senate—did not appear in Betsey’s reverie. Indeed, in her vision the work of the world was still largely done by men, although this had been enlarged to include housework and shopping. She smiled at the thought of a man bent over an ironing board; a man dusting a table; a man basting a roast. In her vision all the public statuary commemorating great men would be overthrown and dragged off to the dump. Generals on horseback, priests in robes, solons in tailcoats, aviators, explorers, inventors, poets and philosophers would be replaced by attractive representations of the female. Women would be granted complete sexual independence and would make love to strangers as casually as they bought a pocketbook, and coming home in the evening they would brazenly describe to their depressed husbands (sprinkling Adolph’s meat tenderizer on the London broil) the high points of their erotic adventures. She would not go so far as to imagine any legislation that would actually restrict the rights of men; but she saw them as so browbeaten, colorless and depressed that they would have lost the chance to be taken seriously.
Now the love song of Coverly Wapshot was slapstick and vainglorious and at the time of which I’m writing he had developed an unfortunate habit of talking like a Chinese fortune cookie. “Time cures all things,” he would say or, “The poor man goes before the thief.” In addition to his habit of cracking his knuckles he had acquired an even more irritating habit of nervously clearing his throat. At regular intervals he would emit from his larynx a reflective, apologetic, complaining and irresolute noise. “Grrgrum,” he would say to himself as he washed the dishes. “Arhum, arrhum, grrumph,” he would say as if these noises subtly expressed his discontents. He was the sort of man who at the PR conventions he sometimes attended always dropped his name tag (Hello! I’m Coverly Wapshot!) into the wastebasket along with the white carnation that was usually given to delegates. He seemed to feel that he lived in a small town where everyone would know who he was. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Betsey was one of those women who, like the heroines in old legends, could turn herself from a hag into a beauty and back into a hag again so swiftly that Coverly was kept jumping.
Coverly, like some despot, was given to the capricious rearrangement of the facts in his history. He would decide cheerfully and hopefully that what had happened had not happened although he never went so far as to claim that what had not happened had happened. That what had happened had not happened was a refrain in his love song as common as those lyrical stanzas celebrating erotic bliss. Now Betsey was a complaining woman or, as Coverly would put it, Betsey was not a complaining woman. She had been unhappy at Remsen and had wanted to be transferred to Canaveral, where she saw herself sitting on a white beach, counting the wild waves and making eyes at a lifeguard. If Betsey had been painted she would have been painted against the landscapes of northern Georgia where she had spent her mysterious childhood. There would be razorback hogs, a dying chinaberry tree, a frame house that needed paint and as far as the eye could see acres of swept red dirt that would turn slick and wash off in the lightest rains. There was not enough topsoil in that pa
rt of the state to fill a bait can. Coverly had seen this landscape fleetingly from the train window and of her past he only knew that she had a sister named Caroline. “I was so disappointed in that girl Caroline,” Betsey said. “She was my only, only sister and I just wanted to enjoy a real sisterhood with her but I was disappointed. When I was working in the five-and-dime I gave her all my salary for her trousseau but when she got married she just went away from Bambridge and she never once wrote me or told me her whereabouts in any way, shape or form.” Then Caroline began to write Betsey and there was a bouleversement in Betsey’s feeling for her sister. Coverly was pleased with this since, with the exception of the television set, Betsey’s loneliness in Talifer was unrelieved and it did not seem to be in his power to make the place more sociable. In the end Caroline, who was divorced, was invited to visit.
What had not happened or what might possibly have happened and been overlooked by Coverly’s way of thinking began with Caroline’s visit. She arrived on a Thursday. All the windows were lighted when Coverly came home from work and when he stepped into the house he could hear their voices from the living room. Betsey seemed happy for the first time in months and met him with a kiss. Caroline looked up at him and smiled, the color and cast of her eyes concealed by a large pair of spectacles that reflected the room. She was not a heavy woman but she sat like a heavy woman, her legs wide apart and her arms hung gracelessly between them. She was wearing a traveling costume—blue pumps that pinched her feet and a tight blue skirt that was rucked and seamed like a skin. Her smile was sweet and slow and she got to her feet and gave Coverly a wet kiss. “Why, he looks just like Harvey,” she said. “Harvey was this boy in Bambridge and you look just like him. He was a nice-looking boy. His family had a nice house on Spartacus Street.”
“They didn’t live on Spartacus Street,” Betsey said. “They used to live on Thompson Avenue.”
“They lived on Spartacus Street until his father got the Buick agency,” Caroline said. “Then they moved to Thompson Avenue.”
“I thought they always lived on Thompson Avenue,” Betsey said.
“It was that other boy that used to live on Thompson Avenue,” Caroline said. “The one that had curly hair and crooked teeth.”
There was a bottle of bourbon on the coffee table and they each had a drink. When Betsey went into the kitchen to heat up the supper Caroline remained with Coverly. It was at this point that Coverly would decide that what had happened had not happened. Caroline spoke to him in a whisper. “I just been dying to meet the man Betsey married,” Caroline said. “Nobody in Bambridge ever thought Betsey’d get married, she’s so queer.”
There was a moment before Coverly decided, as he would, that what had been said had not been said when he was confronted with the venom in this remark. He could only conclude that “queer” in Georgia meant charming, original and fair.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Why, she’s just queer, that’s all,” Caroline whispered. “Everybody in Bambridge knew Betsey was queer. I don’t think it was her fault. I just think it was because Step-pappy was so mean to her. He used to whip her, he used to take off his belt and whip her with no provocation whatsoever. I just think he whipped the common sense right out of her.”
“I didn’t know any of this,” Coverly said; or didn’t say.
“Well, Betsey was never one to tell anybody anything,” Caroline whispered. “That was one of the queer things about her.”
“Dinner’s served,” Betsey said in her sweetest and most trusting manner. This much, in retrospect, would appear to be true.
The talk about Bambridge went on through dinner and it was a conversation that, led by Caroline, seemed strangely morbid. “Bessie Pluckette has another mongoloid idiot,” Caroline exclaimed, not cheerfully but with definite enthusiasm. “Unfortunately it’s just as healthy as it can be and poor Bessie can just expect to spend the rest of her life taking care of it. Poor thing. Of course she could put it into the state institution but she just doesn’t have the heart to have her little son starved to death and that’s what they do in the state institution, they starve them to death. Alma Pierson had a mongoloid too but mercifully that one died. And remember that Brasie girl, Betsey, the one with the shriveled right arm?” She turned to Coverly and explained. “She has this shriveled right arm, no longer than your elbow and right at the end of it there’s this teeny-weeny hand. Well, she learned how to play the piano. Isn’t that wonderful? I mean she could only play chords of course with this teeny-weeny hand but she could play the rest of the music with her left hand. Her left hand was normal. She took piano lessons and everything; that is, she took piano lessons until her father fell down the elevator shaft at the cotton mill and broke both legs.” Was this morbidity, Coverly wondered, or were these the facts of life in Georgia?
Caroline stayed three days and was (if one forgot her remarks before dinner) a tolerable guest excepting that her knowledge of tragic, human experience was inexhaustible and that she left lipstick stains on everything. She had a broad mouth and she painted it heavily and there were purple lipstick stains on the cups and glasses, the towels and napkins; the ashtrays were full of stained cigarette ends and in the toilet there was always a piece of Kleenex stained purple. This seemed to Coverly not carelessness but much more—some atavistic way of impressing herself upon this household in which she would spend so short a time. The purple stains seemed to mark her as a lonely woman. When Coverly went to the site on the day she left Caroline was asleep and she had gone by the time he got home. She had left a smear of purple lipstick on his son’s forehead; there seemed to be purple lipstick everywhere he looked, as if she had marked her departure this way. Betsey was watching television and eating from a box of candy that Caroline had given her as a present. She did not look up when he came in and brushed away the place on her cheek where he kissed her. “Leave me be,” she said, “leave me be. . . .”
After Caroline’s departure Betsey’s discontents only seemed to increase. Then there was a night that, according to Coverly’s habit of eliminating facts, especially did not happen. He was kept late at the site and didn’t get home until half-past seven. Betsey sat in the kitchen, weeping. “What’s the matter, sugarluve,” he asked, or didn’t ask.
“Well, I made myself a nice cup of tea,” Betsey sobbed, “and a piece of hot Danish and I was just sitting down to enjoy myself when the telephone rang and there was this woman selling magazine subscriptions and she talked and by the time she was done talking my tea and my Danish were all cold.”
“That’s all right, sugar,” Coverly said. “You can heat it up again.”
“It isn’t all right,” Betsey said. “It just isn’t all right. Nothing’s all right. I hate Talifer. I hate it here. I hate you. I hate wet toilet seats. The only reason I live here is because there’s no place else in the world for me to go. I’m too lazy to get a job and I’m too plain to find another man.”
“Would you like to take a trip, sugar, would you like a change?”
“I been all over this country, it’s the same everywheres.”
“Oh, come back, sugar, come back,” he said, speaking in great love and tiredness. “I feel as if I were walking up a street calling after you, asking you to come back and you never turn your head. I know what the street looks like, I’ve seen it so often. It’s nighttime. There’s a place on the corner where you can buy cigarettes and papers. Stationery. I can see you walking up this street and I’m behind you, calling you to come back, to come back, but you never turn your head.” Betsey went on sobbing, and thinking that his words had moved her Coverly put an arm around her shoulders but she wrenched herself convulsively out of his embrace and screamed: “Leave me be.” The scream, like the piercing and hideous noise of brakes, seemed to be apart from the fitness of things.
“But, sugar.”
“You beat me,” she screamed. “You took off your belt and you beat me and you beat me and you beat me.”
“I never beat you, sugar. I never hit anybody but Mr. Murphy the night he stole our garbage pail.”
“You beat me and beat me and beat me,” she screamed.
“When was this, sugar, when did I do this?”