The Wapshot Scandal (6 page)

“My wife tells me you stole our garbage pail,” Coverly said.

“So what?”

“Are you in the habit of helping yourself to other people’s property?” Coverly was more perplexed than angry.

“Listen, chicken,” Murphy said. “Where I grew up you either helped yourself or you ate dirt.”

“But this doesn’t happen to be where you grew up,” said Coverly. It was the wrong tack. He seemed to be footnoting the dispute. Then, confident of his rightness he spoke sternly and in a full voice, marred by some old-fashioned or provincial haughtiness.

“Would you be good enough to return our garbage pail?” he asked.

“Listen,” Murphy said. “You’re trespassing. You’re on my land. Get off my land or you’ll go home a cripple for life. I’ll gouge out your eyes. I’ll break your nose. I’ll tear off your ears.”

Coverly swung a right from the hip, and Murphy, a big man and a coward, it seemed, went down. Coverly stood there, a little bewildered. Then Murphy came forward on his hands and knees and sank his teeth into Coverly’s shin. Coverly roared. Betsey and Mrs. Murphy came running out of their kitchens. Just then a missile left its pad and, in the dusk, shed a light as bright as the light of a midsummer’s day over the valley and the site, throwing the shadows of the combatants, their houses and their ginkgo trees blackly onto the grass, while air waves demarked the earth-shaking roar so that it sounded like the humble click of track joints. The missile ascended, the light faded with it, and the two women took their husbands home.

Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?

The computation and administration center where Coverly worked appeared from a distance to be a large, one-story building but this single story merely contained the elevator terminals and the security offices. The other offices and the hardware were underground. The one visible story was made of glass, tinted darkly to the color of oily water. The darkened glass did not diminish but it did alter the light of day. Beyond these dim glass walls one could see some flat pasture land and the buildings of an abandoned farm. There was a house, a barn, a clump of trees and a split-rail fence, and the abandoned buildings with the gantries beyond them had a nostalgic charm. They were signs of the past, and whatever the truth may have been, they appeared to be signs of a rich and a natural way of life. The abandoned farm evoked a spate of vulgar and bucolic imagery—open fires, pails of fresh milk and pretty girls swinging in apple trees—but it was nonetheless persuasive. One turned away from this then to the dark, oil-colored glass and moved into another world, buried six stories beneath the cow pasture. It was a new world in every way. Its newness was most apparent in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and usefulness that seems lost to most of us today. To observe that the elevators sometimes broke down, that one of the glass walls had cracked, and that the pretty receptionists in the security office had a primitive and an immemorial appeal was like burdening oneself with the observations of some old man, pushed by time past the boundaries of all usefulness. The crowds that went to and from the computation center had a look of contentment and purpose that you won’t find in the New York or Paris subways, where we seem to regard one another with the horror and dismay of a civilization of caricaturists. Leaving his office late one night Coverly had heard Dr. Cameron, the site director, ending a dispute with one of his lieutenants. The doctor was shouting, “You’ll never get a Goddamned man onto the Goddamned moon, and if you do, it won’t do you any Goddamned good.”

Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?

Betsey had hoped to be transferred to Canaveral and was disappointed in Talifer. They had been there two months then but no one had come to call. She had made no friends. In the evening she could hear the sounds of talk and laughter but she and Coverly were never included in these gatherings. From her window Betsey could see Mrs. Armstrong working in her flower garden and she interpreted this interest in flowers as the sign of a kindly nature. One day, when Binxey was taking his nap, Betsey went next door and rang the bell. Mrs. Armstrong answered the door. “I’m Betsey Wapshot,” Betsey said, “and I’m your next-door neighbor. My husband Coverly was trained as a subprogrammer but they’ve got him on public relations right now. I’ve seen you in your garden and I thought I’d pay you a call.” The woman kindly invited her in. She seemed not inhospitable but subdued. “What I wanted to ask you about,” Betsey said, “was my neighbors. We’ve been here two months now but we just seem to have been too busy to make friends. We don’t know anybody and so I thought I’d like to give a little cocktail party and see who’s who. I want to know who to ask.”

“Well, my dear, I’d wait a little while, if I were you,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “For some reason this seems to be quite a conservative community. I think you’d better meet your neighbors before you invite them.”

“Well, I come from a small town,” Betsey said, “where everybody’s neighbors, and I often say to myself that if I can’t trust in the friendliness of strangers, well, then what in the world is there that I can trust in?”

“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Armstrong.

“I’ve lived in all kinds of places,” Betsey said. “High society. Low society. My husband’s family came over on the
Arbella
. That’s the ship that came after the
Mayflower
but it had a higher class of people. It seems to me that people are all the same, under their skins. What I want you to do is to give me a list of twenty-five or thirty of the most interesting people in the neighborhood.”

“But, my dear, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“There isn’t time.”

“Well, it wouldn’t take very long, would it?” Betsey asked. “I’ve got a pencil and paper right here. Now just tell me who lives in the house on the corner.”

“The Seldons.”

“Are they interesting?”

“Yes, they’re quite interesting but they’re not terribly friendly.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Herbert.”

“Who lives in the house next to them?”

“The Trampsons.”

“Are they interesting?”

“Yes, they’re terribly interesting. He and Reginald Tappan discovered the Tappan Constant. He’s been nominated for a Nobel Prize but he’s not terribly friendly.”

“And then on the other side of them?” Betsey asked.

“The Harnecks,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “But I must warn you, my dear, that you’ll be making a mistake if you ask them before you’ve been introduced.”

“And that’s where I think you’re wrong,” Betsey said. “You just wait and see. Who lives on the other side of them?”

In the end she went away with a list of twenty-five names. Mrs. Armstrong explained that she would be unable to come to the party herself because she was going to Denver. With the thought of a party to occupy her Betsey was happy and at peace with the world. She explained her plans to the proprietor of a liquor store in the shopping center. He told her what she would need and gave her the telephone number of a couple—a maid and barman—who would mix the drinks and prepare the food. At the stationery store she bought a box of invitations and happily spent an afternoon and an evening addressing these. On the day of the party the couple arrived at three. Betsey dressed herself and her little son, Coverly came home at five, when the first guests were expected, and the scene was set.

When no one had come by half-past five Coverly opened a beer and the barman made a whisky and ginger ale for Betsey. Cars went to and fro on the street but none of them stopped at the Wapshots’. She could hear the sounds of a tennis game from a court in the next block; laughter and talk. The bartender said kindly that the neighborhood was a strange one. He had worked in Denver and he longed to get back to a place where people were more courteous and predictable. He halved limes, squeezed lemons, arranged a row of cocktail glasses on the table and filled these with ice. At six o’clock the maid took a paper-back novel out of her bag and sat down to read. At a little after six the back doorbell rang and Betsey hastened to answer it. It was the delivery man from the dry-cleaners. Coverly heard Betsey ask him in for a drink. “Oh, I’d love to, Mrs. Wapshot,” the man said, “but I have to go home now and cook my supper. I’m living alone now. I guess I told you. My wife ran off with one of the butchers in the food express. The lawyer told me to put the kids in an orphanage, he said I’d get custody quicker that way, so I’m all alone. I’m so alone that I talk with the flies. There’s a lot of flies where I live but I don’t kill them. I just talk with them. They’re like friends. ‘Hello, flies,’ I say. ‘We’re all alone, you and me. You’re looking good, flies.’ I suppose you might think I was crazy for talking with the flies but that’s the way it is. I don’t have anybody else to talk to.”

Coverly heard the door close. Betsey drew some water in the sink. When she came back into the room her face was pale. “Well, let’s have a party,” Coverly said. “Let’s you and I have a party.” He got her another drink and passed her a tray of sandwiches but she seemed so stiff with pain that she could not turn her head and when she drank her whisky she spilled some on her chin. “The things you read about in these paper books,” the maid said. “I don’t know. I been married three times but right here in this book they’re doing something and I don’t know what it is. I mean I don’t know what they’re doing. . . .” She glanced at the little boy and went on reading. Coverly asked the couple if they wouldn’t like a drink but they both politely refused and said that they didn’t drink on duty. Their presence seemed to amplify a pain of embarrassment that was swiftly turning into shame; their eyes seemed to be the eyes of the world, civil as they were, and Coverly finally asked them to go. They were enormously relieved. They had the good taste not to say that they were sorry; not to say anything but good-bye. “We’ll leave everything out for the latecomers,” Betsey called gallantly after them as they went out the door.

It was her last gallantry. The pain in her breast threatened to overwhelm her. Her spirit seemed about to break under the organized cruelty of the world. She had offered her innocence, her vision of friendly strangers, to the community and she had been wickedly spurned. She had not asked them for money, for help of any kind, she had not asked them for friendship, she had only asked that they come to her house, drink her whisky and fill the empty rooms with the noise of talk for a little time and not one of them had the kindness to come. It was a world that seemed to her as hostile, incomprehensible and threatening as the gantry lines on the horizon, and when Coverly put an arm around her and said, “I’m sorry, sugar,” she pushed him away from her and said harshly, “Leave me be, leave me be, you just leave me be.”

In the end Coverly, by way of consolation, took Betsey to a coffee house in the commercial center. They bought their tickets and sat in canvas chairs with mugs of coffee to drink. A young woman with yellow hair drawn back over her ears was plucking a small harp and singing:

“Oh Mother, dear Mother, oh Mother,
Why is the sky so dark?
Why does the air smell of roach powder?
Why is there no one in the park?”

“It’s nothing, my darling daughter,
This isn’t the way the world ends,
The washing machine is on spinner,
And I’m waiting to entertain friends.”

“But Mother, dear Mother, please tell me,
Why does your Geiger counter tick?
And why are all those nice people
Jumping into the creek?”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, my darling,
It’s really nothing at all,
My Geiger counter simply records
An increase in radioactive fall.”

“But Mother, dear Mother, please tell me,
Before I go up to bed,
Why are my yellow curls falling,
Falling off of my head?
And why is the sky so red?
Why is the sky so red . . .”

There was something in Coverly’s nature—something provincial no doubt—that made this sort of lamentation intolerable and he seized Betsey’s hand and marched out of the coffee house, snorting like someone much older. It wasn’t much of a night.

Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?

CHAPTER V

Moses and Melissa Wapshot lived in Proxmire Manor, a place that was known up and down the suburban railroad line as the place where the lady got arrested. The incident had taken place five or six years before, but it had the endurance of a legend, and the lady had seemed briefly to be the genius of the pretty place. The facts are simple. With the exception of one unsolved robbery, the eight-man police force of Proxmire Manor had never found anything to do. Their only usefulness was to direct traffic at weddings and large cocktail parties. They listened day and night on the interstate police radio to the crimes and alarms in other communities—car thefts, mayhem, drunkenness and murder—but the blotter in Proxmire Manor was clean. The burden of this idleness on their self-esteem was heavy as, armed with pistols and bandoleers of ammunition, they spent their days writing parking tickets for the cars left at the railroad station. It was like a child’s game, ticketing commuters for the most trifling infractions of the rules the police themselves invented, and they played it enthusiastically.