The Wapshot Scandal (30 page)

Three days later the liquor store called to say that Moses’ check had bounced. Coverly stopped there and covered it with a check of his own. On Thursday a motel near the airport called. “I saw your name in the phone book,” the stranger said, “and it’s such a funny name I thought you might be related. There’s a man out here named Moses Wapshot. He’s been here since Saturday and just by counting the empties I would guess he’s drinking about two quarts a day. He hasn’t made a nuisance of himself or nothing but unless he’s pouring the stuff down the sink he’s heading for trouble. I thought you ought to know if he was a member of your family.” Coverly said he would be right out and he drove to the motel but when he got there Moses had gone.

CHAPTER XXVII

It is doubtful that Emile had ever loved Melissa, had ever experienced a genuine impulse of love for anyone but himself and the ghost of his father. He thought now and then of Melissa, always concluding that he was blameless; that whatever suffering she endured was no responsibility of his. He killed some time after he was fired from Narobi’s and presently went to work at the new supermarket on the hill—the one with a steeple. He was employed nominally as a stock boy but when Mr. Freeley, the manager, took him on, he explained that he would have another mission. The market had then been open two months but business was poor and the housewives of the village, like indulged children, were capricious and sometimes ill-tempered from the lack in their lives of the tonic forces of longing and need. Mr. Freeley had seen them storm his doors on opening day and take away the fresh orchid corsage that was given to each customer, but when the flowers were all gone he had seen them return with something like heartlessness to their old friends, the Grand Union and the A & P. They swarmed like locusts, exhausting his below-cost specials and buying the rest of their groceries somewhere else. His market, he thought, was a thing of splendor. The broad glass doors opened at a beam of light onto a museum of victuals—galleries and galleries of canned goods, heaps of frozen poultry and, over by the fish department, a little lighthouse above a tank of sea water in which lobsters swam. The air was full of music and soft lights. There were diversions for the children and delicacies for the gourmet but nobody—almost nobody—ever came his way.

The store was one of a chain and the capriciousness of the spoiled housewives had been calculated by the statisticians in the central office. The ladies were incapable of fidelity and could be counted upon, sooner or later, to find their idle way into Mr. Freeley’s museum. One only had to wait and keep the place resplendent. But the ladies delayed longer than the statisticians had expected and Mr. Freeley was finally given an exploitation package. On Easter Eve a thousand plastic eggs were to be hidden in the grass of the village. All of them contained certificates redeemable at the store for a dozen country-fresh eggs. Twenty of them contained certificates redeemable for a two-ounce bottle of costly French perfume. Ten of them contained certificates redeemable for an outboard motor and five of them—golden ones—were good for a three-week, all-expense vacation for two at a luxury hotel in Madrid, Paris, London, Venice or Rome. The response was terrific and the store filled up with customers. They reasoned that the eggs would be hidden by someone who worked at the store and they intended to find out which clerk it was. “It has been our experience,” Mr. Freeley read in the explanatory literature, “that there is among the housewives in any community a large number who will stop at nothing to ascertain the identity of the egg-hiders and the probable position of the eggs. This has led in some instances to an astonishing display of immorality.” It was Emile that Mr. Freeley hired to hide the eggs. Had he checked with Narobi’s he wouldn’t have hired Emile at all but he thought the boy’s face clear and even virtuous. He told Emile the details in his office. He had been given a chart explaining where the eggs were to be hidden. They were to be hidden between two and three on the morning of Easter. Emile would be paid above his salary a stipend of twenty-five dollars and in order to insure secrecy Mr. Freeley would not speak to him again until Easter Eve. In the meantime Emile would stamp cans.

The store closed at six on Easter Eve. The last potted lily had been sold, but some housewives still lingered in the museum galleries, trying to tempt from the stock boys the secret of the eggs. At quarter after six the doors were locked. At half-past six the lights were turned off and Mr. Freeley was alone in the office with the eggs. He took the chart out of the safe and studied it. A few minutes later Emile came up the stairs. Everyone else had gone home. Mr. Freeley showed him the treasure and gave him the chart. His plan was to store the eggs in the back of Emile’s car. He would be waiting on the sidewalk in front of Emile’s house at two in the morning and they would begin their mission from there. Before they took the crates of eggs down from Mr. Freeley’s office they made a careful examination of the waste bins and empty cartons at the back of the store to make sure that no housewife had concealed herself there. The eggs filled the luggage compartment and back seat of Emile’s car. It was dusk when they began their work and dark when they had finished. They shook hands in a pleasant atmosphere of conspiracy and parted. Emile drove home cautiously as if the eggs at his back were fragile as well as valuable. The power of felicity and excitement they contained seemed palpable. There was an old garage behind the house and he put the car in here and padlocked the door. He was excited and a little oppressed by the fear that something might go wrong. The secret was not out but neither was it perfectly concealed. He knew that there were at least ten people at the store who, through a process of elimination, had come to suspect that he might be in charge of the treasure and he had had to deal with their questioning.

Mrs. Cranmer, having decided that Melissa had preyed on her son’s innocence, had resumed her peaceable life with Emile. In spite of her age and the sorrows she had borne Mrs. Cranmer was still able to engage herself in friendship as passionately as a schoolgirl. She was easily slighted and easily elated by the neglect or attention of her neighbors. She had recently made a new friend in Remsen Park—the low-cost development—and talked with her on the telephone much of the time. She was talking on the telephone when Emile came in. Emile read the paper while he waited for his mother to finish her conversation. Mr. Freeley’s exploitation specialists had taken the back page of the paper and the copy was inflammatory. There were pictures of the five European cities and an assurance that all you had to do was to look in your grass in the morning and you would be on your way.

They ate supper in the kitchen. When the dishes were washed Mrs. Cranmer got back on the telephone. Now she was talking about the eggs and Emile guessed that many conversations in the village that night would be on this subject. It had not occurred to Mrs. Cranmer that her son might be chosen and he was grateful for this. After supper he watched television. At about nine o’clock he heard a dog barking. He went across the hall to his room and looked out of the window but there was no one by the garage. At half-past ten he went to bed.

Mr. Freeley felt very happy that evening. The store had begun to prosper and he felt that the trips to Madrid, Paris, London, Rome and Venice that would soon be hidden in the dewy grass were the result of his own generosity, his own abundant good nature. Kissing his wife in the kitchen he thought that she was as desirable as she had been when he married her many years ago; or if she was not that, she had at least kept abreast of the changes time and age had worked in him. He desired her ardently and happily and looked at the clock to see how long he must wait before they would be alone. There was a roast in the oven and she moved out of his embrace to baste it and then again to set the table, draw the baby’s bath and pick up the toys, and as he watched her go about these necessary tasks he saw the wanness of fatigue come into her face and realized that by the time she had washed the dishes, ironed the pajamas, sung the lullabies and heard the prayers she might not have the strength to respond to his passionate caresses. This conflict in generative energies left him uncomfortable and after supper he took a walk.

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.