The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [33]
“She’s thirty-two years old this spring,” Leander said proudly. “Honora doesn’t spend more than two or three hundred dollars on her a season and she’s brought her passengers through thick and thin without harming a hair on their heads.”
They went ashore together at Nangasakit and Leander watched her eat four hot dogs and wash them down with tonic. She didn’t want to ride on the roller-coaster and he guessed that her ideas of pleasure were more sophisticated. He wondered if she drank cocktails in lounges. In speaking of her home she had spoken both of wealth and meanness and Leander guessed that her life had been made up of both. “Mother gives an enormous garden party, every summer,” she had said, “with an orchestra sort of hidden in the bushes and millions of delicious cakes,” and an hour later she had said, speaking of her own ineptitude as a housekeeper, “Daddy cleans the bathrooms at home. He gets into these old clothes and gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs the floors and tubs and everything.…” The hired orchestra and the housecleaning priest were equally strange to Leander and interested him, mostly in that her background seemed to stand between Rosalie and her enjoyment of Nangasakit. He would have liked to ride on the roller-coaster himself and he was disappointed when she refused. But they walked on the wrecked sea wall above the white sand and the green water and he was happy in her company. He thought—like Sarah—how much he would have liked a daughter, and the images of her career formed swiftly in his mind. She would marry, of course. He even saw himself throwing rice at her as she ran down the steps of Christ Church. But somehow her marriage went wrong. Her husband was killed in the war perhaps or turned out to be a drunk or a crook. In any case she came back to take care of Leander in his old age—to bring him his bourbon and cook his meals and listen to his stories on stormy nights. At three o’clock they went back to the boat.
Everyone liked Rosalie but Moses, who stayed out of her way and was surly with her when they met. Mrs. Wapshot kept urging him to take her sailing and he always refused. It may have been that he associated her with that first night in the pasture and the fire or that—and this was more likely—that she seemed to him to be his mother’s creation, to have stepped out of Sarah’s brow. He spent most of his time at the Pocamasset boat club, where he raced the Tern, and he sometimes went fishing in the brook that flowed from Parson’s Pond down behind the barn into the West River.
He planned to do this one morning and was up before dawn, although his chances of catching any fish that late in the summer were slim. It was dark when he made himself some coffee and pulled on his waders in the kitchen, his head full of pleasant recollections of other, similar, early mornings; the camp at Langely and skiing—the suffocating heat in ski lodges and the bad food and the running. Drinking coffee in the dark kitchen (the windows had begun to show some light) reminded him of all these things. He got some gear out of the hall closet, hitched his boots to his belt and trudged up the fields, planning to walk to Parson’s Pond and then fish the stream down with wet flies, which were the only flies he had been able to find.
He cut into the woods a little below Parson’s Pond. Other fishermen had made a path. It was humid in the woods and the smell of vegetation was heady and his heart seemed to rise when he heard the noise of water—like the garbled voices of prophets—and saw the first pool. His bladder was full, but he would save that for good luck if he needed it. He was so anxious to get a fly into the