The Wapshot Scandal (9 page)

“I’d like to know something about your Uncle Lorenzo,” Johnson said.

“Oh, yes,” Honora said. “Is this about the commemorative plaque?”

“No,” Johnson said. He opened his briefcase.

“Well, a man came last year,” Honora said, “and urged me to have a commemorative plaque made for Lorenzo. At first I thought he represented some committee but then I discovered that he was just a salesman. You’re not a salesman?”

“No,” Johnson said. “I’m from the government.”

“Well, Lorenzo served in the state legislature, you know,” Honora said. “He introduced the child-labor laws. You see, my parents were missionaries. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, would you, but I was born in Polynesia. My parents sent me back here to school but they died before I could return. Lorenzo raised me. He was never an awfully friendly man.” She seemed deeply reflective. “But you might have described him as both my father and mother,” she said with a sigh of obvious discontent.

“This was his house?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Your uncle left you his estate?”

“Yes, he had no other family.”

“I have some correspondence here from the Appleton Bank and Trust Company. They estimate the value of your uncle’s estate at the time of his death to have been about a million dollars. They claim to have paid you an annual income ranging from seventy thousand to a hundred thousand dollars.”

“I don’t know,” Honora said. “I give most of my money away.”

“Have you any proof of this?”

“I don’t keep records,” Honora said.

“Have you ever paid an income tax, Miss Wapshot?”

“Oh, no,” Honora said. “Lorenzo made me promise that I wouldn’t give any of his money to the government.”

“You are in grave trouble, Miss Wapshot.” Then he felt tall and strong, felt the supreme importance of those who bring black tidings. “This will lead to a criminal indictment.”

“Oh, dear,” Honora said.

She had been caught and she knew it; caught like any clumsy thief waving a water pistol at a bank teller. If her knowledge of the tax laws was not much more than a dream, she knew them to be the laws of her country and her time. What she did then was to go to the fireplace and light the pile of shavings, paper and wood that the gardener had laid on the irons. The reason she did this was that fire was for her a sovereign pain-killer. When she was discontented with herself, troubled, bewildered or bored, to light a fire seemed to incinerate her discontents and transform her burdens into smoke. She approached the light and heat of a fire like an aboriginal. The shavings and paper exploded into flame, filling the library with a dry, gaseous heat. Honora stoked the blaze with dry apple wood; felt that once the fire was hot enough she would have burned away her fears of the poor farm and the jail. A log exploded and an ember landed in the basket of fireworks. A Roman candle was the first to go. “Mercy,” Honora said. Purblind without her spectacles, she reached for a vase of flowers to extinguish the Roman candle but her aim was off and she got Johnson square in the face with a pint or so of bitter flower water and a dozen hyacinths. By this time the Roman candle had begun to ejaculate its lumps of colored fire and these ignited something called The Golden Vesuvius. A rocket took off in the direction of the piano and then the lot went up.

CHAPTER VII

The two stories about Honora Wapshot that were most frequently told in the family concerned her alarm clock and her penmanship. These were not told so much as they were performed, each member of the family taking a part, singing an aria so to speak, while everyone joined in on the Grand Finale like some primitive anticipation of the conventions of nineteenth-century Italian opera. The alarm clock incident belonged to the remote past when Lorenzo had been alive. Lorenzo was determined to appear pious and liked to arrive at Christ Church for morning worship at precisely quarter to eleven. Honora, who may have been genuinely pious but who detested appearances, could never find her gloves or her hat and was always tardy. One Sunday morning Lorenzo, in a rage, led his niece by the hand into the drugstore and bought her an alarm clock. So they went to church. Mr. Briam, Mr. Applegate’s predecessor, had started on an interminable sermon about the chains of St. Paul when the alarm clock went off. Since most of the congregation was asleep they were startled and confused. Honora shook the clock and then proceeded to unwrap it but by the time she got through to the box in which it sat the ringing had stopped. Mr. Briam then picked up the chains of St. Paul and the alarm clock, on repeat, began to ring again. This time Honora pretended that it wasn’t her clock. Sweating freely, she sat beside this impious engine while Mr. Briam went on about the significance of chains until the mechanism had unwound. It was an historic Sunday. The tales about her penmanship centered on a morning when she had written to the local coal dealer protesting his prices and then had written to Mr. Potter to share with him his sorrow over the sudden loss of his sainted wife. She got the letters in the wrong envelopes but since Mr. Potter could read nothing of her letter but the signature he was touched by her thoughtfulness and since Mr. Sumner, the coal dealer, was unable to read the letter of condolence he received he mailed it back to Honora. She had been taught Spencerian penmanship but something redoubtable or coarse in her nature was left unexpressed by this style and the conflict between her passions and the tools given to her left her penmanship illegible.

At about this time Coverly received a letter from his old cousin.

Someone more persevering might have broken the letter down word by word and diagnosed its content but Coverly was not this gifted or patient. He was able to decipher a few facts. A holly tree that grew behind her house had been attacked by rust. She wanted Coverly to return to St. Botolphs and have it sprayed. This was followed by an indecipherable paragraph on the Appleton Bank and Trust Company in Boston. Honora had set up trusts for Coverly and his brother and he supposed she was writing of these. The income enabled Coverly to live much more comfortably than he would have been able to on his government salary and he hoped nothing was wrong here. This was followed by a clear sentence stating that Dr. Lemuel Cameron, director of the Talifer site, had once received a scholarship endowed by Lorenzo Wapshot. She closed with her customary observations on the rainfall, the prevailing winds and the tides.

Coverly guessed that her reference to the holly tree meant something very different but he didn’t have the emotional leisure to discover what was at the back of the old woman’s mind. If there was trouble with the Appleton Bank and Trust Company—and his quarterly check was late—there was nothing much he could do. The remark about Dr. Cameron might or might not have been true since Honora often exaggerated Lorenzo’s bounty and had, like any other old woman, a struggle to remember names. The letter arrived at a bad time in his affairs and he forwarded it on to his brother.

Betsey had not rallied from the failure of her cocktail party. She hated Talifer and squarely blamed Coverly for making her live there. She avenged herself by sleeping alone and by not speaking to her husband. She complained loudly to herself about the house, the neighborhood, the kitchen, the weather and the news in the papers. She swore at the mashed potatoes, cursed the pot roast, she damned the pots and pans to hell and spoke obscenely to the frozen apple tarts, but she did not speak to Coverly. Every surface of life—tables, dishes and the body of her husband—seemed to be abrasive facets of a stone that lay in her path. Nothing was right. The sofa hurt her back. She could not sleep in her bed. The lamps were too dim to read by, the knives were too dull to cut butter, the television programs bored her although she watched them faithfully. The greatest of Coverly’s hardships was the breakdown in their sexual relationship. It was the crux, the readiest source of vitality in their marriage, and without this her companionship became painful.

Coverly tried to throw a ring of light around her figure and saw or thought he saw that she might be heartlessly overburdened by a past of which he knew nothing. We are all, he thought, ransomed to our beginnings, and the sum in her case might have been exorbitant. This might account for that dark side of her nature that seemed more mysterious to him than the dark face of the moon. Were there instruments of love and patience that could explore this darkness, discover the wellsprings of her misery and by charting it all draw it all into the area of reasonableness; or was this the nature of her kind of woman to stand forever half in a darkness that was unknown to herself? She looked nothing like a moon goddess, sitting in front of the television set, but of all the things in the world her spirit with its irreconcilable faces seemed most like the moon to him.

One Saturday morning when he was shaving he heard Betsey’s voice—strident and raised in anger—and he went downstairs in his pajamas to see what was the matter. Betsey was upbraiding a new cleaning woman. “I just don’t know what the world’s coming to,” Betsey said. “I just don’t
know
. I suppose you expect me to pay you good money for just sitting around, for just sitting around smoking my cigarettes and watching my television.” Betsey turned to Coverly. “She can hardly speak English,” Betsey said, “and she doesn’t even know how to work a vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t even know how to do that. And you. Look at you. Here it is nine o’clock and you’re still in your pajamas and I suppose you’re going to spend the day just sitting around the house. It just makes me sick
and
tired. Well, you take her upstairs and you show her how to work the vacuum cleaner. Now you march, both of you. You get upstairs and do something useful for a change.”

The cleaning woman had dark hair and olive skin. Her eyes were wet with tears. Coverly got the vacuum cleaner and carried it up the stairs, admiring the stranger’s ample rump. There was between them the instantaneous rapport of unhappy children. Coverly plugged in the cord and turned on the motor but when he smiled at the stranger things took a different turn. “Now we put it in here,” Betsey heard him say. “That’s right. That’s the way. We have to get it into the corners, way into the corners. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Back and forth, back and forth. Not too fast . . .” Downstairs Betsey thought angrily that Coverly had at last found something useful to do on Saturday mornings and that at least one room would be clean. She went into the bathroom where she had a vision—not so much of the emancipation of her sex as the enslavement of the male.

Routine progress—a feminine President and a distaff Senate—did not appear in Betsey’s reverie. Indeed, in her vision the work of the world was still largely done by men, although this had been enlarged to include housework and shopping. She smiled at the thought of a man bent over an ironing board; a man dusting a table; a man basting a roast. In her vision all the public statuary commemorating great men would be overthrown and dragged off to the dump. Generals on horseback, priests in robes, solons in tailcoats, aviators, explorers, inventors, poets and philosophers would be replaced by attractive representations of the female. Women would be granted complete sexual independence and would make love to strangers as casually as they bought a pocketbook, and coming home in the evening they would brazenly describe to their depressed husbands (sprinkling Adolph’s meat tenderizer on the London broil) the high points of their erotic adventures. She would not go so far as to imagine any legislation that would actually restrict the rights of men; but she saw them as so browbeaten, colorless and depressed that they would have lost the chance to be taken seriously.

Now the love song of Coverly Wapshot was slapstick and vainglorious and at the time of which I’m writing he had developed an unfortunate habit of talking like a Chinese fortune cookie. “Time cures all things,” he would say or, “The poor man goes before the thief.” In addition to his habit of cracking his knuckles he had acquired an even more irritating habit of nervously clearing his throat. At regular intervals he would emit from his larynx a reflective, apologetic, complaining and irresolute noise. “Grrgrum,” he would say to himself as he washed the dishes. “Arhum, arrhum, grrumph,” he would say as if these noises subtly expressed his discontents. He was the sort of man who at the PR conventions he sometimes attended always dropped his name tag (Hello! I’m Coverly Wapshot!) into the wastebasket along with the white carnation that was usually given to delegates. He seemed to feel that he lived in a small town where everyone would know who he was. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Betsey was one of those women who, like the heroines in old legends, could turn herself from a hag into a beauty and back into a hag again so swiftly that Coverly was kept jumping.

Coverly, like some despot, was given to the capricious rearrangement of the facts in his history. He would decide cheerfully and hopefully that what had happened had not happened although he never went so far as to claim that what had not happened had happened. That what had happened had not happened was a refrain in his love song as common as those lyrical stanzas celebrating erotic bliss. Now Betsey was a complaining woman or, as Coverly would put it, Betsey was not a complaining woman. She had been unhappy at Remsen and had wanted to be transferred to Canaveral, where she saw herself sitting on a white beach, counting the wild waves and making eyes at a lifeguard. If Betsey had been painted she would have been painted against the landscapes of northern Georgia where she had spent her mysterious childhood. There would be razorback hogs, a dying chinaberry tree, a frame house that needed paint and as far as the eye could see acres of swept red dirt that would turn slick and wash off in the lightest rains. There was not enough topsoil in that part of the state to fill a bait can. Coverly had seen this landscape fleetingly from the train window and of her past he only knew that she had a sister named Caroline. “I was so disappointed in that girl Caroline,” Betsey said. “She was my only, only sister and I just wanted to enjoy a real sisterhood with her but I was disappointed. When I was working in the five-and-dime I gave her all my salary for her trousseau but when she got married she just went away from Bambridge and she never once wrote me or told me her whereabouts in any way, shape or form.” Then Caroline began to write Betsey and there was a
bouleversement
in Betsey’s feeling for her sister. Coverly was pleased with this since, with the exception of the television set, Betsey’s loneliness in Talifer was unrelieved and it did not seem to be in his power to make the place more sociable. In the end Caroline, who was divorced, was invited to visit.