The Wapshot Scandal (37 page)
Read The Wapshot Scandal Online
Authors: John Cheever
There were eight in all. The men wore stocking caps that seemed to have been pulled down over their ears with impatience and severity by the hands of some attendant who was anxious to get off and enjoy his own Christmas dinner. When Coverly and Betsey had got them all seated in the parlor Coverly looked around for the wisdom of Honora’s choice and thought that these eight blind guests would know most about the raw material of human kindness. Waiting for unseen strangers to help them through the traffic, judging the gentle from the self-righteous by a touch, suffering the indifference of those who so fear conspicuousness that they would not help the helpless, counting on kindness at every turn, they seemed to bring with them a landscape whose darkness exceeded in intensity the brilliance of that day. A blow had been leveled at their sight but this seemed not to be an infirmity but a heightened insight, as if aboriginal man had been blind and this was some part of an ancient, human condition; and they brought with them into the parlor the mysteries of the night. They seemed to be advocates for those in pain; for the taste of misery as fulsome as rapture, for the losers, the goners, the flops, for those who dream in terms of missed things—planes, trains, boats and opportunities—who see on waking the empty tamarc, the empty waiting room, the water in the empty slip, rank as Love’s Tunnel when the ship is sailed; for all those who fear death. They sat there quietly, patiently, shyly, until Maggie came to the door and said: “Dinner is served and if you don’t come and get it now everything will be cold.” One by one they led the blind down the brightness of the hall into the dining room.
So that is all and now it is time to go. It is autumn here in St. Botolphs where I have been living and how swiftly the season comes on! At dawn I hear the sound of geese, this thrilling cranky noise, hoarse as the whistling of the old B & M freights. I put the dinghy into the shed and take up the tennis court tapes. The light has lost its summery components and is penetrating and clear; the sky seems to have receded without any loss of brilliance. Traffic at the airports is heavy and my nomadic people have got into their slacks and hair-curlers and are on the move once more. The sense of life as a migration seems to have reached even into this provincial backwater. Mrs. Bretaigne has hung a blue-plastic swimming pool out on her clothesline to dry. A lady in Travertine has found a corpse in her mint bed. In the burial ground where Honora and Leander lie, there is a carpet of green, drawn like a smile over the tumultuous conversion to dust. I pack my bags and go for a last swim in the river. I love this water and its shores; love it absurdly as if I could marry the view and take it home to bed with me. The whistle on the table-silver factory blows at four and the herring gulls in the blue sky sound like demented laying hens.
This late in the year the Williamses still drive down to Travertine for a swim in that dark and nutritious sea and after supper Mrs. Williams goes to the telephone and says to the operator: “Good evening, Althea. Will you please ring Mr. Wagner’s ice-cream store.” Mr. Wagner recommends his coffee and delivers a quart a few minutes later on a bicycle that rings and rattles so in the autumn dusk that it seems to be strung with bells. They play a little whist, kiss one another good night and go to sleep to dream. Mr. Williams, racked by the earth-shaking, back-breaking, binding, grinding need for love, dreams that he holds in his arms the Chinese waitress who works in the Pergola Restaurant in Travertine. Mrs. Williams, sleepless, sends up to heaven a string of winsome prayers like little clouds of colored smoke. Mrs. Bretaigne dreams that she is in a strange village at three in the morning ringing the doorbell of a frame house. She is looking, it seems, for her laundry, but the stranger who opens the door cries suddenly: “Oh, I thought it was Francis, I thought Francis had come home!” Mr. Bretaigne dreams that he is fishing for trout in a stream whose stones are arranged as coherently as those in any ruin and have as profound a sense of the past as the streets and basilicas of some ancient place. Mrs. Dummer dreams that she sails down one of the explicit waterways of sleep, while Mr. Dummer, at her side, climbs the Matterhorn. Jack Brattle dreams of a lawn without quack grass, a driveway without weeds, a garden without aphids, cutworm or black Spot and an orchard without tent caterpillars. His mother, in the next room, dreams that she is being crowned by the governor of Massachusetts and the state traffic commissioner for the unprecedented scrupulousness with which she has observed the speed limits, traffic lights and stop signs. She wears long white robes and thousands applaud her virtue. The crown is surprisingly heavy.
Some time after midnight there is a thunderstorm and the last I see of the village is in the light of these explosions, knowing how harshly time will bear down on this ingenuous place. Lightning plays around the steeple of Christ Church, that symbol of our engulfing struggle with good and evil, and I repeat those words that were found in Leander’s wallet after he drowned: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.” A cavernous structure of sound, a sort of abyss in the stillness of the provincial night, opens along the whole length of heaven and the wooden roof under which I stand amplifies the noise of rain. I will never come back, and if I do there will be nothing left, there will be nothing left but the headstones to record what has happened; there will really be nothing at all.
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