The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [105]
Melissa didn’t come down until lunch and this meal, although it was not filling, was served with two kinds of wine and dragged on until three. After lunch they walked back and forth on the terrace below the towers like two figures on a dinner plate and looking for some privacy in the gardens they ran into Mrs. Enderby. At half-past five, when it was time for Moses to go and he took Melissa in his arms, a window in one of the towers flew open and Justina called down, “Melissa, Melissa, tell Mr. Wapshot that if he doesn’t hurry he’ll miss his train.”
After work on Monday Moses packed his clothing in two suitcases and a paper box, putting in among his shirts a bottle of bourbon, a box of crackers and a three-pound piece of Stilton cheese. Again he was the only passenger to leave the train at Clear Haven but Giacomo was there to meet him with the old Rolls and drive him up the hill. Melissa met him at the door and that evening followed the pattern of his first night there except that the fuses didn’t blow. Moses wheeled the general to the elevator at ten and started once more over the roofs, this time on such a clear, starlit night that he could see the airshaft that had nearly killed him. Again in the morning at dawn he climbed back to his own quarters and what could be pleasanter than to see that heavily wooded and hilly countryside at dawn from the high roofs of Clear Haven. He went to the city on the train, returned in the evening to Clear Haven, yawned purposefully during dinner and pushed the old general to the elevator at half-past nine.
CHAPTER THIRTY
While Moses was eating these golden apples, Coverly and Betsey had settled in a rocket-launching station called Remsen Park. Coverly had only spent one day at the farm. Leander had urged him to return to his wife—and had gone to work himself at the table-silver factory a few days later. Coverly had joined Betsey in New York and, after a delay of only a few days, was transferred to this new station. This time they traveled together. Remsen Park was a community of four thousand identical houses, bounded on the west by an old army camp. The place could not be criticized as a town or city. Expedience, convenience and haste had produced it when the rocket program was accelerated; but the houses were dry in the rain and warm in the winter; they had well-equipped kitchens and fireplaces for domestic bliss and the healthy need for national self-preservation could more than excuse the fact that they were all alike. At the heart of the community there was a large shopping center with anything you might want—all of it housed in glass-walled buildings. This was Betsey’s joy. She and Coverly rented a house, furnished even to the pictures on the walls, and set up housekeeping with the blue china and the painted chairs that Sarah sent them from St. Botolphs.
They had been in Remsen Park for only a little while when Betsey decided that she was pregnant. She felt sick in the morning and stayed in bed late. When she got up, Coverly had gone to work. He had left coffee for her in the kitchen and had washed his own dishes. She ate a late breakfast, sitting at the kitchen window so that she could see the houses of Remsen Park stretching away to the horizon like the pattern on a cloth. The woman in the house next door came out to empty her garbage. She was an Italian, the wife of an Italian scientist. Betsey called good morning to her and asked her to come in and have a cup of coffee but the Italian woman only gave her a sullen smile and returned to her own kitchen. Remsen Park was not a very friendly place.
Betsey hoped that