The Wapshot Scandal (5 page)

It was his and his brother’s house, by contract, inheritance and memory. Its leaks and other infirmities were his responsibility. It was he who had broken the vase on the mantelpiece and burned a hole in the sofa. He did not believe in ghosts, shades, spirits or any other forms of unquietness on the part of the dead. He was a man of twenty-eight, happily married, the father of a son. He weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds, enjoyed perfect health and had eaten some chicken for dinner. These were the facts. He took a copy of
Tristram Shandy
down from the shelf and began to read. There was a loud noise in the kitchen that so startled him the sweat stood out on his hands. He raised his head long enough to embrace this noise in the realm of hard fact. It could be a shutter, a loose piece of firewood, an animal or one of those legendary tramps who were a part of local demonology and who were supposed to inhabit the empty farms, leaving traces of fire, empty snuff cans, a dry cow and a frightened spinster. But he was strong and young and even if he should encounter a tramp in the dark hallway he could take care of himself. Why should he feel so intensely uncomfortable? He went to the telephone intending to ask the operator the time of night but the telephone was dead.

He went on reading. There was noise from the dining room. He said something loud and vigorous to express his impatience with his apprehensions but the effect of this was to convince him overwhelmingly that he had been heard. Someone was listening. There was a cure for this foolishness. He went directly to the empty room and turned on the light. There was nothing there and yet the beating of his heart was accelerated and painful and sweat ran off his palms. Then the dining room door slowly closed of itself. This was only natural since the old house sagged badly and while half the doors closed themselves the other half wouldn’t close at all. He went through the swinging door on into the pantry and the kitchen. Here again he saw nothing but felt again that there had been someone in the room when he turned on the light. There were two sets of facts—the empty room and the alarmed condition of his skin. He was determined to scotch this and he went out of the kitchen into the hallway and climbed the stairs.

All the bedroom doors stood open, and here, in the dark, he seemed to yield to the denseness of the lives that had been lived here for nearly two centuries. The burden of the past was palpable; the utterances and groans of conception, childbirth and death, the singing at the family reunion in 1893, the dust raised by a Fourth of July parade, the shock of lovers meeting by chance in the hallway, the roar of flames in the fire that gutted the west wing in 1900, the politeness at christenings, the joy of a young husband bringing his wife back after their marriage, the hardships of a cruel winter all took on some palpableness in the dark air. But why was the atmosphere in this darkness distinctly one of trouble and failure? Ebenezer had made a fortune. Lorenzo had introduced child-welfare legislation into the state laws. Alice had converted hundreds of Polynesians to Christianity. Why should none of these ghosts and shades seem contented with their work? Was it because they had been mortal, was it because for every last one of them the pain of death had been bitter?

He returned to the fire. Here was the physical world, fire-lit, stubborn and beloved, and yet his physical response was not to the parlor but to the darkness in the rooms around him. Why, sitting so close to the fire, did he feel a chill slide down his left shoulder and a moment later coarsen with cold the skin of his chest, as if a hand had been placed there? If there were ghosts, he believed with his father that they kept low company. They consorted with the poorhearted and the faint. He knew that we sometimes leave after us, in a room, a stir of love or rancor when we are gone. He believed that whatever we pay for our loves in money, venereal disease, scandal or ecstasy, we leave behind us, in the hotels, motels, guest rooms, meadows and fields where we discharge this much of ourselves, either the scent of goodness or the odor of evil, to influence those who come after us. Thus it was possible that this passionate and eccentric cast had left behind them some ambiance that made his presence seem like an intrusion. It was time to go to bed and he got some blankets out of a closet and made up a bed in the spare room, nearest the stairs.

He woke at three. There was enough radiance from the moon or the night sky itself to light the room. What had waked him, he knew immediately, was not a dream, a reverie or an apprehension; it was something that moved, something that he could see, something strange and unnatural. The terror began with his optic nerves and reverberated through his whole person but it was in the beam of his eye that the terror had begun. He was able to trace the disturbance back through his nervous system to his pupil. The eye counted on reality and what he had seen or thought he had seen was the ghost of his father. The chaos set into motion by this hallucination was horrendous and he shook with psychic and physical cold, he shook with terror, and sitting up in bed he roared: “Oh, Father, Father, Father, why have you come back?”

The loudness of his voice was some consolation. The ghost seemed to leave the room. He thought he could hear stair lifts give. Had he come back to look for a bowl of crackers and milk, to read some Shakespeare, come back because he felt like all the others that the pain of death was bitter? Had he come back to relive that moment when he had relinquished the supreme privileges of youth—when he had waked feeling less peckery than usual and realized that the doctor had no cure for autumn, no medicine for the north wind? The smell of his green years would still be in his nose—the reek of clover, the fragrance of women’s breasts, so like the land-wind, smelling of grass and trees—but it was time for him to leave the field for someone younger. Spavined, gray, he had wanted no less than any youth to chase the nymphs. Over hill and dale. Now you see them; now you don’t. The world a paradise, a paradise! Father, Father, why have you come back?

There was the noise of something falling in the next room. The knowledge that this was a squirrel, as it was, would not have brought Coverly to his senses. He was too far gone. He grabbed his clothing, flew down the stairs and left the front door standing open. He stopped on the sidewalk long enough to draw on his underpants. Then he ran to the corner. Here he put on his trousers and shirt but he ran the rest of the way to Honora’s barefoot. He scribbled a farewell note, left it on her hall table and caught the milk train north, a little after dawn, past the Markhams’, past the Wilton Trace, past the Lowells’, who had changed the sign on their barn from
BE KIND TO ANIMALS
to
GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS
, past the house where old Mr. Sturgis used to live and repair watches.

CHAPTER IV

Going back to Talifer where he lived with Betsey, Coverly had the choice of concluding that he was demented or that he had seen his father’s ghost. He chose the latter, of course, and yet he could not say so to his wife; he could not explain to his brother Moses why the house on River Street was empty. The specter of his father seemed to sit beside him in the plane that took him west. Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back! What, he wondered, would Leander have made of Talifer?

The site for Missile Research and Development had a population of twenty thousand, divided, like any society, whatever its aspirations, into first class, second class, third class and steerage. The large aristocracy was composed of physicists and engineers. Tradesmen made up the middle class, and there was a vast proletariat of mechanics, ground crewmen and gantry hands. Most of the aristocracy had been given underground shelters and while this fact had never been publicized it was well known that in the case of a cataclysm the proletariat would be left to scald. This made for some hard feeling. The vitals of the place were the twenty-nine gantries at the edge of the desert, the mosque-shaped atomic reactor, the underground laboratories and hangars and the two-square-mile computation and administration center. The concerns of the site were entirely extraterrestrial, and while common sense would scotch any sentimental and transparent ironies about the vastness of scientific research undertaken at Talifer and the capacity for irrational forlornness, loneliness and ecstasy among the scientists, it was a way of life that presented some strenuous intellectual contrasts.

Security was always a problem. Talifer was never mentioned in the newspapers. It had no public existence. This concern with security seemed to inhibit life at every level. One Saturday afternoon Betsey was watching television. Coverly had taken Binxey for a trip to the shopping center. Out of her window she saw that Mr. Hansen, who lived across the street, was taking down his storm windows and putting up his screens. He had a stepladder, which he planted carefully in his flowerbeds, then he raised and unhooked his windows and carried them into the garage. His wife and children seemed to be off. There were no other signs of life around the place. When he had removed the windows from the first floor he started on the upstairs bedrooms. His ladder didn’t reach these and he had to work by leaning out of the open windows, unhooking the frames and drawing them on their rectilinear bias into the house. The hardware for one of the windows seemed warped or rusted. It would not come loose. He straddled the windowsill and yanked at the frame. He fell out of the window and landed with a thud onto a little terrace that he had paved with cement block a few weeks earlier. Betsey looked out of the window long enough to see that his body was inert. Then she returned to her television set. Twenty minutes later she heard a siren and an ambulance came down the street and took the still inert form away on a stretcher. She learned that evening that he had been instantly killed. Some children had given the alarm. But why hadn’t she? How could she account for her unnatural behavior? The general concern for security seemed to be at the bottom of her negligence. She had not wanted to do anything that would call attention to herself, that would involve giving testimony or answering questions. Presumably her concern for security had led her to overlook the death of a neighbor.

Coverly would have had some difficulty explaining to Leander that while he had been trained as a taper and sub-programmer, he had been switched to public relations when he was transferred from the Remsen to the Talifer Site. This was a mistake, made by one of the computations machines in personnel, but there was no appeal. They lived in a mixed neighborhood. Betsey wanted a shelter and Coverly had applied for a transfer to another neighborhood but the government-operated real-estate office was swamped with such applications and anyhow Coverly was not unhappy where he was. Ginkgo trees had been planted along the sidewalks where children roller-skated, and song birds had nested in the trees. Sitting in his back yard before dinner he could watch the sere and moving mountain twilight—that sour and powerful glow—beyond the distant gantries. They had a little garden and a grill for cooking meat. The house on their right was owned by a man named Armstrong, who was in the World Relations Department. Armstrong had developed a dry, manly and monosyllabic prose style for ghosting the chronicles of astronauts. The house on their left was owned by a gantry-crew man named Murphy, who got drunk and beat up his wife on Saturday nights. The Wapshots did not get along with the Murphys. One morning when Coverly was at work the signal board indicated that there was a telephone call for him. He left the security area to take the call. It was Betsey. “She stole my garbage pail,” Betsey said.

“I don’t understand, sugar,” Coverly said.

“Mrs. Murphy,” Betsey said. “The garbage man came this morning, he always comes on Tuesdays, and when he took away the garbage she took that nice, new, tin, galvanized garbage pail of mine and carried it right up to the back of her house, leaving me with that cracked, plastic old thing they brought from Canaveral.”

“Well, I can’t do anything about it now,” Coverly said. “I’ll be home at half-past five.”

Betsey was still excited when he returned. “You go right over there now and get it back,” she said. “They’ll fill it up with garbage and claim that it’s theirs. You should have painted our name on it. You go right over there now and get it away from them. There he is, he’s cutting the grass.”

Coverly left the house and walked to the boundary of his lot. Pete Murphy had just started up his lawn mower. The distant mountains were blue. The time of day, the sameness of the houses, the popping noise of the one-cylinder engine and the two men in their white shirt sleeves gave to the scene some unwonted otherness, as if Coverly were not about to accuse his neighbor, or his neighbor’s wife, of theft, but was about to remark that merchandising indices showed in their uptrend the inarguable power of direct-mail advertising. In short, their reality and their passions seemed challenged. The distant mountains had been formed by fire and water but the houses in the valley looked so insubstantial that they seemed, in the dusk, to smell of shirt cardboards. Coverly cracked his knuckles nervously and signaled to Pete with a jerk of his head. Pete pushed the lawn mower directly past him and muffled Coverly’s words with noise of the motor. Coverly waited. Pete made a second circle of the lawn and then throttled down the motor and stopped in front of Coverly.