The Wapshot Scandal

by John Cheever

  The sky was dark and low but even if it rained, he thought, it would be better for his purposes than a bright moon. He walked out of his neighborhood into Parthenia and thought guiltily of how few eggs would be hidden here. Supermarkets and other changes had left the stores there mostly deserted. Filth was written on the walls and in one of the store windows, beyond the FOR RENT sign, was a display of funeral wreaths made of dry moss and false boxwood. One of these was shaped like a valentine heart and had a banner that said “Mother and Father” draped across its ventricles. This was Water Street, the demesne of the hoods. He saw three hoods standing in a doorway ahead of him and thought they looked familiar.

  A week earlier Mr. Freeley had gone to the Easter Assembly at the high school to hear his daughter sing. He had come in late and stood at the back of the auditorium near the door, waiting like any other parent for the appearance of his child. His daughter, although she had no special gifts that he knew of, had been chosen to sing a solo. It was unfortunate that he had come in too late to find a seat. Standing near him at the door was a group of local hoods, whose whispering and shuffling made it difficult for him to give all his attention to the children’s singing. The hoods seemed uncommitted to the performance. They kept slipping in and out the door and he thought how uncommitted they were to anything. They did not play games, they did not study, they did not skate on the ice pond or dance in the gymnasium but they menacingly circled all these activities, always in some doorway or on some threshold, in and out of the light as they were this evening.

  Then the pianist began to hammer out the music for his daughter’s solo and he saw the girl step shyly from the ranks of the chorus to the front of the stage. At the same time one of the hoods left his shadowy position at the door and joined a girl who was standing in front of Mr. Freeley. They blocked the view of his daughter. He moved to the left and then to the right, but the hood and his girl were always in the way and he only had a glimpse of his child. He had a good view of the hood and his maneuvers with the girl. He saw him put an arm around her shoulders. He heard him whispering into her ear. Then to the music of “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” he saw him slip his hand into the front of her dress. Mr. Freeley seized the boy and the girl roughly by the shoulders and thrust them apart, saying so loudly that his daughter looked out at the disturbance: “Cut it out or take it out. This is no place for that kind of thing.” He was shaking with rage and to keep himself from hitting the youth in the face he walked out of the auditorium and onto the school-house steps.

  He lit a cigarette with difficulty. He was so deeply disturbed that he wondered if what was really bothering him was not fear for his daughter. He was sure that he had been enraged as a father and a citizen at the unsuitability of what he had just been a witness to during an Easter hymn in a building that belonged, at least in spirit, to the innocent. When his cigarette had burned down he went back into the auditorium. The hoods stood aside to let him pass and he thought he had never experienced such an emanation of naked hatred as came from them toward him.

  The hoods in the doorway on Water Street had the same suspenseful attitudes, showed the same choice of half-lights, and he felt a revolting strangeness toward them as if they had not come from another class or neighborhood but had come hurtling down from an evil planet. As he approached them he saw they were passing around a whisky bottle. He could not reproach them for lawlessness and depravity. Lawlessness and depravity were their aspirations. He smelled whisky as he passed the doorway and then he was struck on the back of the head and instantly lost consciousness.

  Emile’s alarm woke him at half-past one. While he was shaving a gust of wind slammed the door of his room and woke his mother. Waked so suddenly she sounded heavy and her voice like the voice of a much older woman. “Emile. You sick?”

  “No, Mum,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  “You sick? You in trouble, dear? Those frozen crab cakes—did they make you sick?”

  “No, Mum,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  “You sick?” she asked, still heavily, and then she cleared her voice and seemed at the same moment to clear her mind. “Emile!” she exclaimed. “It’s the eggs.”

  “I have to go now, Mum,” he said. “It’s nothing serious. I’ll be back before breakfast.”

  “Oh, it’s the eggs, isn’t it?”

  He could hear the bed creak as she sat up and put her feet on the floor, but he got by the door of her room before she reached it and went down the stairs. “I’ll be back before breakfast,” he called. “I’ll tell you about it then.” He felt for the chart in his pocket and let himself out the front door.

  The stars were shining. It was much too early in the year for there to be anything blooming but a few clumps of snowdrops and the only wild flowers were the speckled skunk cabbages in the hollow but there was in the air a soft fragrance of earth as fine as roses and he stopped to fill his lungs and his head with it. The world seemed fine in the street light and the starlight and young, too, even in its shabbiness, as if the fate of the place had only just begun to be told. The earth, covered lightly with leaves, moss, garlic grass and early clover, was waiting for his treasure.

  When there was no sign of Mr. Freeley at quarter after two he began to worry. It was so still that he could have heard a car in the far distance and he heard nothing. He wanted help on his mission, he did not want to do it alone, but at twenty minutes past two he decided that he would have to. He unlocked the garage doors, which, poorly hung, scraped loudly in the gravel. He looked in the back seat. His hoard was safe. When he backed the old car out onto the road the only light burning in the neighborhood was in his mother’s parlor. He was too excited to imagine the mischief she might be up to and she was up to plenty. She had her new friend in Remsen Park on the telephone. “Emile’s just gone out to hide the eggs,” she said. “He just left. I don’t know but I’ve got a feeling he’s going to hide them in the Delos Circle neighborhood. I mean wouldn’t it be just like Mr. Freeley to give everything to those rich snobs and forget his friends in Remsen Park? Wouldn’t it be just like him?”

  In another two hours, Emile thought, as he shifted from reverse into low, his mission would be accomplished and, this close to success, he saw how heavily the responsibility had weighed on his mind. A light was burning in a house at the corner but it was a small, narrow window, closely curtained, and he guessed that it was a bathroom. As he watched the light went out. From the top of Turner Street near the golf links he could see all over the village—see how perfect and reassuring the darkness was and how deeply the place slept, and the thought of so many men, women, children and dogs wandering through their labyrinthine dreams made him smile. He stood at the headlights of his car, reading the instructions. Eight eggs at the corner of Delwood Avenue and Alberta Street, three eggs on Alberta Street, ten eggs at the junction of Delos Circle and Chestnut Lane.

  The Hazzards lived at the corner of Delwood Avenue and Alberta Street. Mrs. Hazzard was awake. She had waked from a bad dream at about two and was sitting at the open window, smoking. She was thinking about the eggs—about those that contained warrants for travel—and wondering if any would be hidden on Alberta Street. She wanted to see Europe. There was more envy than longing in her feeling. It was not so much that she wanted to see the world as that she wanted to see what other people had seen. When she read in the paper that Venice was sinking into the sea and that the leaning tower of Pisa was due to collapse, what she felt was not sadness at the disappearance of these wonders but a sharp bitterness at the image of Venice vanishing beneath the waves before she, Laura Hazzard, had seen it. She also felt that she was singularly well equipped to appreciate the pleasures of travel. It was her kind of thing. When friends and relations returned from Europe with their photographs and souvenirs she listened to their accounts of travel with the feeling that her impressions would have been more vivid, her souvenirs and photographs would have been more beautiful and that she would have fitted more gracefully int
o a gondola. But there were some tender sentiments mixed with her envy. Travel was linked in her mind to the magnificence and pathos of love; it would be like a revelation of the affections. She had sensed, in love, a sky much deeper than the blue sky of the Northern Hemisphere; more spacious rooms and stairways, arches, domes, all the paraphernalia of the enormous past. She was thinking of this when she saw a car come around the corner and stop. She recognized Emile and watched him begin to hide his eggs in the grass. This whole sequence of events—the bad dream that waked her, her thoughts as she sat at the open window and the sudden arrival of the young man in the starlight—seemed to her marvelous and in her excitement she called down to him from the window.

  Despair swept over Emile when he heard her voice. How, short of wringing her neck, could he undo the fact that she had seen him at his secret task? “Shhh,” he said, looking up at the window, but she had gone and in a minute she opened the door and ran out barefoot and in her nightgown. “Oh, Emile, you know I think I was meant to find one,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep and I was just sitting at the window when you came along. I have to have one of the gold ones, Emile! Give me one of the gold ones.”

  “It’s supposed to be a secret, Mrs. Hazzard,” Emile whispered. “Nobody’s supposed to know. You’re not supposed to look for them until morning. You have to go back into your house now. You go on back to bed.”

  “What do you think I am, Emile?” she asked. “You think I’m a little girl or something? You give me a golden egg and I’ll go back to bed but I won’t move until you do.”

  “You’ll spoil everything, Mrs. Hazzard. I won’t hide any more eggs until you go back into your house.”

  “You give me a golden egg, you give me one of those golden eggs or I’ll help myself.”

  Mrs. Hazzard’s voice waked old Mrs. Kramer who lived next door. Instantly alert, she installed her teeth, stepped into her slippers and went to the window. She understood the meaning of the scene at once. She went to the telephone and called her daughter, Helen Pincher, who lived three blocks away on Millwood Street. Helen woke from a deep sleep and mistook the telephone for the alarm clock. She tried to stop the ringing, shook the clock and finally turned on the light before she realized that it was the telephone. “Helen, it’s Mother,” the old woman said. “They’re hiding the Easter eggs. Right in front of my house. I can see them out of my window. Get over here!”

  The ringing of the bell had not waked Mr. Pincher but the light and the last of the conversation did. He saw his wife put down the phone and run out of the room. For the last month or so Mr. Pincher had been alarmed by his wife’s conduct. She had overdrawn the checking account three times, she had run out of gasoline three times in the same week, she had forgotten to wear stockings to the Gripsers’ wedding, she had lost her snake bracelet and she had ruined his good leather hunting jacket by putting it into the washing machine. Each time she had said: “I must be going out of my mind.” When he heard footsteps outside and looked out of the window and saw that she was running down the front walk in her nightgown he was convinced that she really had become irrational. He got into his bathrobe but he couldn’t find any slippers and so he ran barefoot out of the house after her. She had a lead of a block or more and he called loudly: “Helen, Helen, come back, dear. Come home, dear.” He woke the Barnstables, the Melchers, the Fitzroys and the DeHovens.

  Emile got back into his car. Mrs. Hazzard tried to open the other door and get in but it was locked. He tried to start the car but he was nervous and the motor flooded. Then into the beam of his headlights came Helen Pincher, running. Her nightgown was transparent and the curlers in her hair looked like a crown. Her mother was hanging out of the window, urging her on. “That’s them, Helen, there they are!” Behind her, her husband shouted: “Come back, darling, come back, sweetheart.”

  Emile got the car started just as Helen reached it and she put her head in at the window. “I want the one for Paris, Emile,” she said.

  Emile put the car into gear and as he began slowly to let out the clutch Mr. Pincher joined them shouting: “Stop that car, you damned fool. She’s sick.” Now in the beam of his headlights Emile saw the approach of a dozen or more women in nightgowns. They all appeared to be wearing crowns. He continued to move the car slowly forward but some of the women stood directly in his way and he had to stop twice to avoid harming them. During one of these stops Mrs. DeHoven let the air out of one of his rear tires.

  Emile felt the car settle. He knew what had happened but he went on moving slowly. The deflated tire slumped against the shoe and he could not get up much speed but he thought he might outstrip his pursuers. Alberta Street at that point went steeply downhill for perhaps half a mile. On the left was a large tract of empty land. The owner (old Mrs. Kramer) was asking ten thousand an acre and the property hadn’t moved. It had gone to deep grass and scrub wood and on every wild cherry and sumac tree there was nailed the name and telephone number of some real-estate agent. Emile thought that if he got to Delos Circle he might be in the clear. He speeded up going downhill, but just as his headlights reached Delos Circle he saw the housewives of Remsen Park, thirty or forty of them, most of them wearing long robes and what appeared to be massive crowns. He swung the car sharply to the left, bumped over the curb and the sidewalk into the unsold house lots and drove straight to the far boundary of the property. He was trapped but he still had some time at his disposal. He cut the motor and the lights, ran around to the back and opened the luggage compartment and began to pitch the eggs off into the deep grass. He had a good wing and by heaving the eggs far away from him he was able to divert the advancing crowd. His arm got lame before long and then he began to take the egg crates and dump their contents into the grass. He disposed of all but one before the women reached him and straightened up to see them, so like angels in their nightclothes, and hear their soft cries of longing and excitement. Then with a single egg in his pocket—a golden one—he cut back through the woods.

  The pain of the blow that had stunned Mr. Freeley drew him back into consciousness. His head felt broken. He found himself lashed by wire to a post in a cellar. He shook with cold and saw that he had nothing on but his underpants. At first he thought he had lost his mind but the centralizing force of pain in his head gave a terrible vividness and reality to his circumstances. He was a big man, his body carpeted with the brindle hair of middle age. The wires that bound him cut deeply into his fleshy arms and his hands were numb. Suddenly he roared for help but there was no reply. He had been robbed and beaten and now he was trapped and helpless in some place that seemed to be underground. The outrageousness of the situation—and panic—made him feel that his brain was cracking open and when he trembled the wire cut his skin. Then he heard footsteps and voices upstairs, the voices of the hoods. They came, one by one, into the cellar. It was the same three. There was the leader, then there was one with a fat face and then a thin, pale one with long hair.

  “Chicken,” the leader said, looking at him.

  “What do you want from me?” Mr. Freeley said. “You have my money. Was it because of that girl at the high school?”

  “I don’t know nothing about no girl at no high school,” the leader said. “I just don’t like your looks, chicken, that’s all. What’s the matter, chicken? Why you shaking so? You afraid we’re going to torture you with matches and all?” He struck a match and held it close to Mr. Freeley’s skin but he didn’t burn him. “Look at chicken. Chicken’s afraid of dying. That’s why I don’t like your looks, chicken. Jesus, listen to chicken roar.”

  Mr. Freeley roared. The floor tipped first to the left, then to the right and he lost consciousness again. Then he felt that he was being touched. He was being cut down. He could feel the loosening of the wires and the rush of blood back into his arms. He would have fallen but someone caught him and supported him. It was the pale one with the long, oily hair. He led Mr. Freeley over to the corner where there was an old automobile seat and he fell onto it.

/>   “Where are the others?” he asked.

  “They gone,” the boy said. “They got scared when you blacked out.”

  “You?”

  “I’m scared all the time.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing now. It’s just like he said. He don’t like your looks. You want some water?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy got some water and held the glass to his lips.

  “When can I go?”

  “Go,” the boy said. “Your suit’s upstairs. It didn’t fit nobody. Harry took your watch. I didn’t take nothing. Goodbye, now.”

  He swung out of the door and Mr. Freeley heard him run lightly up some stairs. He felt his head wound and then he felt his arms and legs. Everything seemed to be sound and he went feebly up the stairs. His suit was by the door and when he got outside he saw that he was in an abandoned roadhouse at the edge of town.

  Mr. Freeley walked home. So did Emile but they took different routes. Emile cut through some back yards to Turner Street and started up the hill. The scene was apocalyptic. Forsaken children could be heard crying in empty houses and most of the doors stood open in the dawn as if Gabriel’s long trumpet had sounded. At the top of Turner Street he cut over onto the golf links, climbed to the highest fairway and sat down, waiting for the day. He felt tired, happy, humorous and relieved of his responsibility and of a much heavier burden. Something had happened. Something had changed. Like everyone else who reads the newspapers he had come to hold in his mind a fear that some drunken corporal might incinerate the planet and to hold in another part of his mind the most passionate longings for a peaceful life among his generations. In spite of his youth he had breathed in this concept of general infirmity. He seemed at times to listen to the planet’s heartbeat as if the earth were a melancholy hypochondriac, possessed of great strength and beauty and with them an incurable presentiment of sudden and meaningless death. Now the moment of danger seemed past, and he felt joyfully that the illustrious and peaceful works of man would go on forever. He could not describe his feelings, he could not describe the dawn, he could not even describe the hooting of a train that he heard in the distance or the shape of the tree under which he sat. He could only watch and admire the vast barrel of night fill up to its last shelf and crevice with the fair light of day and all the birds singing in the trees like a band of angels whistling to their hounds.