The Wapshot Scandal (14 page)

She went first to the state employment office where eighteen or twenty men were sitting around looking for work but none of them was willing to dig a ditch and she saw as one of the facts of her life, her time, that standards of self-esteem had advanced to a point where no one was able to dig a hole. She went to the liquor store to get some whisky and told the clerk her problems. He said he thought he could get someone to help. He made a telephone call. “I’ve got you somebody,” he said. “He’s not as bad as he sounds. Give him two dollars an hour and all the whisky he can drink. His father-in-law fired him out of the house a couple of weeks ago and he’s on the bum, but he’s a nice guy.” She went home and had another drink. Sometime later the doorbell rang. She had expected an old man with the shakes but what she saw was a man in his thirties. He wore tight jeans and a dark pullover and stood on her steps with his hands thrust into his back pockets, his chest pushed forward in a curious way as if this were a gesture of pride, friendship or courtship. His skin was dark, rucked deeply around the mouth like the seams on a boot, and his eyes were brown. His smile was bare amorousness. It was his only smile, but she didn’t know this. He would smile amorously at his shovel, amorously into his whisky glass, amorously into the hole he had dug, and when it was time to go home he would smile amorously at the ignition switch on his car. She offered him some whisky but he said he would wait. She showed him where the tools were and he began to dig.

He worked for two hours and uncovered and cleared the frozen drain. She was able to clear out the bathtubs and sinks. When he returned the tools she asked him in for his whisky. She was quite drunk herself by then. He poured himself a water glass of whisky and drank it off. “What I really need,” he said, “is a shower. I’m living in a furnished room. You have to take turns at the bathtub.” She said he could take a shower, knowing full well what was afoot. He drank off another glass of whisky and she led him upstairs and opened the bathroom door. “I’ll just get out of these things,” he said, pulling off his sweater and dropping his jeans.

They were still in bed when the children came home. She opened the door and called sweetly down the stairs: “Mummy’s resting. There are cookies on top of the icebox. Be sure and take your vitamin pills before you go out to play.” When the children went out she gave him ten dollars, kissed him good-bye and slipped him out the back door. She never saw him again.

The old plumber fixed the drain and on the weekend Pete filled in the trench. The weather remained bitter. One morning, a week or ten days later, she was wakened by her husband’s huffing and puffing. “There isn’t time, darling,” she said. She slipped on a wrapper, went downstairs and tried to open a package of bacon. The package promised to seal in the bacon’s smoky flavor but she couldn’t get the package open. She broke a fingernail. The transparent wrapper that imprisoned the bacon seemed like some immutable transparency in her life, some invisible barrier of frustrations that stood between herself and what she deserved. Pete joined her while she was struggling with the bacon and continued his attack. He was very nearly successful—he had her backed up against the gas range—when they heard the thunder of their children’s footsteps in the hall. Pete went off to the train with mixed and turbulent feelings. She got the children some breakfast and watched them eat it with the extraordinary density of a family gathered at a kitchen table on a dark winter morning. When the children had gone off to get the school bus she turned up the thermostat. There was a dull explosion from the furnace room. A cloud of rank smoke came out the cellar door. She poured herself a glass of whisky to steady her nerves and opened the door. The room was full of smoke but there was no fire. Then she telephoned the oil-burner repairman they employed. “Oh, Charlie isn’t here,” his wife said brightly. “He’s up in Utica with his bowling team. They’re in the semi-finals. He won’t be back for ten days.” She called every oil-burner man in the telephone directory but none of them was free. “But someone must come and help me,” she exclaimed to one of the women who answered the phone. “It’s zero outside and there’s no heat at all. Everything will freeze.” “Well, I’m sorry but I won’t have a man free until Thursday,” the stranger said. “But why don’t you buy yourself an electric heater? You can keep the temperature up with those things.” She had some more whisky, put on some lipstick and drove to the hardware store in Parthenia where she bought a large electric heater. She plugged it into an outlet in the kitchen and pulled the switch. All the lights in the house went out and she poured herself some more whisky and began to cry.

She cried for her discomforts but she cried more bitterly for their ephemeralness, for the mysterious harm a transparent bacon wrapper and an oil burner could do to the finest part of her spirit; cried for a world that seemed to be without laws and prophets. She went on crying and drinking. Some repairmen came and patched things up but when the children came home from school she was lying unconscious on the sofa. They took their vitamin pills and went out to play. The next week the washing machine broke down and flooded the kitchen. The first repairman she called had gone to Miami for his vacation. The second would not be able to come for a week. The third had gone to a funeral. She mopped up the kitchen floor but it was two weeks before a repairman came. In the meantime the gas range went and she had to do all the cooking on an electric plate. She could not educate herself in the maintenance and repair of household machinery and felt in herself that tragic obsolescence she had sensed in the unemployed of Parthenia who needed work and money but who could not dig a hole. It was this feeling of obsolescence that pushed her into drunkenness and promiscuity and she was both.

One afternoon when she was very drunk she threw her arms around the milkman. He pushed her away roughly. “Jesus, lady,” he said, “what kind of a man do you think I am?” In a blackmailing humor he stuffed the icebox with eggs, milk, orange juice, cottage cheese, vegetable salad and eggnog. She took a bottle of whisky up to her bedroom. At four o’clock the oil burner went out of order. She was back on the telephone again. No one could come for three or four days. It was very cold outside and she watched the winter night approach the house with the horror of an aboriginal. She could feel the cold overtake the rooms. When it got dark she went into the garage and took her life.

They held a little funeral for her in the undertaking parlor in Parthenia. The room where her monumental coffin stood was softly lighted and furnished like a cocktail lounge and the music from the electric organ was virtually what you would have heard in a hotel bar in someplace like Cleveland. She had, it turned out, no friends in Proxmire Manor. The only company her husband was able to muster was a handful of near strangers they had met on various cruise ships. They had taken a two-week Caribbean cruise each winter and the ceremony was attended by the Robinsons from the S.S.
Homeric
, the Howards from S.S.
United States
, the Gravelys from the
Gripsholm
and the Leonards from the
Bergensfjord
. A clergyman said a few trenchant words. (The oil-burner repairmen, electricians, mechanics and plumbers who were guilty of her death did not attend.) During the clergyman’s remarks Mrs. Robinson (S.S.
Homeric
) began to cry with a violence and an anguish that had nothing to do with that time or place. She groaned loudly, she rocked in her chair, she sobbed convulsively. Mrs. Howard and Mrs. Leonard and then the men began to sob and wail. They did not cry over the loss of her person; they scarcely knew her. They cried at the realization of how bitterly disappointing her life had been. Melissa knew none of this, of course, traveling that morning on the same train that carried Mrs. Lockhart’s remains on the first leg of their trip back to Indiana.

Gertrude Bender, with whom Melissa sat, had silver-gilt hair skinned back in a chignon with such preciseness and skill that Melissa wondered how it had been accomplished. She had matching silver-gilt furs, and rattled six gold bracelets. She was a pretty, shallow woman who wielded the inarguable powers of great wealth and whose voice was shrill. She talked about her daughter Betty. “She’s worried about her schoolwork but I tell her, ‘Betty,’ I tell her, ‘don’t you worry about your schoolwork. Do you think what I learned in school got me where I am today? Develop a good figure and learn the forks. That’s all that matters.’”

In the seat in front of Melissa there was an old lady whose head was bowed under the weight of a hat covered with cloth roses. A family occupied the facing seats across the aisle—a mother and three children. They were poor. Their clothing was cheap and threadbare, and the woman’s face was worn. One of her children was sick and lay across her lap, sucking his thumb. He was two or three years old, but it was hard to guess his age, he was so pale and thin. There were sores on his forehead and sores on his thin legs. The lines around his mouth were as deep as those on the face of a man. He seemed sick and miserable, but stubborn and obdurate at the same time, as if he held in his fist a promise to something bewildering and festive that he would not relinquish in spite of his sickness and the strangeness of the train. He sucked his thumb noisily and would not move from his position in the midst of life. His mother bent over him as she must have done when she nursed him, and sang him a lullaby as they passed Parthenia, Gatesbridge, Tuxon Valley and Tokinsville.

Gertrude said, “I don’t understand people who lose their looks when they don’t have to. I mean what’s the point of going through life looking like an old laundry bag? Now take Molly Singleton. She goes up to the Club on Saturday nights wearing those thick eyeglasses and an ugly dress and wonders why she doesn’t have a good time. There’s no point in going to parties if you’re going to depress everyone. I’m no girl and I know it, but I still have all the partners I want and I like to give the boys a thrill. I like to see them perk up. It’s amazing what you can do. Why, one of the grocery boys wrote me a love letter. I wouldn’t tell Charlie—I wouldn’t tell anyone, because the poor kid might lose his job—but what’s the sense of living if you don’t generate a little excitement once in a while?”

Melissa was jealous. That the rush of feeling she suffered was plainly ridiculous didn’t diminish its power. She seemed, unknowingly, to have convinced herself of the fact that Emile worshiped her, and the possibility that he worshiped them all, that she might be at the bottom of his list of attractions, was a shock. It was all absurd, and it was all true. She seemed to have rearranged all of her values around his image; to have come unthinkingly to depend upon his admiration. The fact that she cared at all about his philandering was painfully humiliating, but it remained painful.

She left New York in the middle of the afternoon and called Narobi’s when she got back. She ordered a loaf of bread, garlic salt, endives—nothing she needed. He was there fifteen or twenty minutes later.

“Emile?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you ever write a letter to Mrs. Bender?”

“Mrs. who?”

“Mrs. Bender.”

“I haven’t written a letter since last Christmas. My uncle sent me ten dollars and I wrote a letter and thanked him.”

“Emile, you must know who Mrs. Bender is.”

“No, I don’t. She probably buys her groceries somewhere else.”

“Are you telling the truth, Emile?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, I’m making such a damn fool of myself,” she said, and began to cry.

“Don’t be sad,” he said. “Please don’t! I like you very much, I think you’re fascinating, but I wouldn’t want to make you sad.”

“Emile, I’m going to Nantucket on Saturday, to close up the house there. Would you like to come with me?”

“Oh, gee, Mrs. Wapshot,” he said. “I couldn’t do that. I mean I don’t know.” He knocked over a chair on his way out.

Melissa had never seen Mrs. Cranmer. She could not imagine what the woman looked like. She then got into the car and drove to the florist shop on Green Street. There was a bell attached to the door and, inside, the smell of flowers. Mrs. Cranmer came out of the back, taking a pencil from her bleached hair and smiling like a child.

Emile’s mother was one of those widows who keep themselves in a continuous state of readiness for some call, some invitation, some meeting that will never take place because the lover is dead. You find them answering the telephone in the back-street cab stands of little towns, their hair freshly bleached, their nails painted, their high-arched shoes ready for dancing with someone who cannot come. They sell nightgowns, flowers, stationery and candy, and the lowest in their ranks sell movie tickets. They are always in a state of readiness, they have all known the love of a good man, and it is in his memory that they struggle through the snow and the mud in high heels. Mrs. Cranmer’s face was painted brightly, her dress was silk, and there were bows on her high-heeled pumps. She was a small, plump woman, with her waist cinctured in sternly, like a cushion with a noose around it. She looked like a figure that had stepped from a comic book, although there was nothing comic about her.

Melissa ordered some roses, and Mrs. Cranmer passed the order on to someone in the back and said, “They’ll be ready in a minute.” The doorbell rang and another customer came in—a thick-featured man with a white plastic button in his right ear that was connected by an electrical cord to his vest. He spoke heavily. “I want something for a deceased,” he said. Mrs. Cranmer was diplomatic, and through a series of delicate indirections tried to discover his relationship to the corpse. Would he like a blanket of flowers, at perhaps forty dollars, or something a little less expensive? He gave his information readily, but only in reply to direct questions. The corpse was his sister. Her children were scattered. “I guess I’m the closest she has left,” he said confusedly, and Melissa, waiting for her roses, felt a premonition of death. She must die—she must be the subject of some such discussion in a flower shop, and close her eyes forever on a world that distracted her with its beauty. The image, hackneyed and poignant, that came to her was of life as a diversion, a festival from which she was summoned by the secret police of extinction, when the dancing and the music were at their best. I do not want to leave, she thought. I do not ever want to leave. Mrs. Cranmer gave her the roses, and she went home.