The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [60]
It was dark then and he was tired, lost and despairing—no one in the city knew his name—and where was his home—the shawls from India and the crows winging their way up the river valley like businessmen with brief cases, off to catch a bus? This was on the Mall, the lights of the city burning through the trees and dimly lighting the air with the colors of reflected fire, and he saw the statues ranged along the broad walk like the tombs of kings—Columbus, Sir Walter Scott, Burns, Halleck and Morse—and he took from these dark shapes a faint comfort and hope. It was not their minds or their works he adored but the kindliness and warmth they must have possessed when they lived and so lonely and so bitter was he then that he would take those brasses and stones for company. Sir Walter Scott would be his friend, his Moses and Leander.
Then he got some supper—this friend of Sir Walter Scott—and in the morning went to work as a stock clerk for Warburton’s Department Store.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Moses’ work in Washington was highly secret—so secret that it can’t be discussed here. He was put to work the day after he arrived—a reflection perhaps of Mr. Boynton’s indebtedness to Honora or a recognition of Moses’ suitability, for with his plain and handsome face and his descendance from a man who had been offered a decoration by General Washington, he fitted into the scene well enough. He was not smooth—the Wapshots never were—and compared to Mr. Boynton he sometimes felt like a man who eats his peas off a knife. His boss was a man who seemed to have been conceived in the atmosphere of career diplomacy. His clothes, his manners, his speech and habits of thought all seemed so prescribed, so intricately connected to one another that they suggested a system of conduct. It was not, Moses guessed, a system evolved at any of the eastern colleges and may have been formed in some foreign-service school. Its rules were never shown to Moses, so he could not abide by them, but he knew that rules must underlie this sartorial and intellectual diffidence.
Moses was happy at the boardinghouse that he had picked by chance, and found it tenanted mostly by people of his own age: the sons and daughters of mayors and other politicians; the progeny of respectable ward heelers who were in Washington, like himself, as the result of some indebtedness. He did not spend much time at the boardinghouse for he found that much of his social, athletic and spiritual life was ordained by the agency where he worked. This included playing volleyball, taking communion and going to parties at the X Embassy and the Z Legation. He was up to all of this although he was not allowed to drink more than three cocktails at any party and was careful not to make eyes at any woman who was in government service or on the diplomatic list, for security regulations had clapped a lid on the natural concupiscence of a city with a large floating population. On the autumn week ends he sometimes drove with Mr. Boynton to Clark County, where they went riding and sometimes stayed for dinner with Mr. Boynton’s friends. Moses could stay on a horse, but this was not his favorite sport. It was a chance to see the countryside and the disappointing southern autumn with its fireflies and brumes, all of which stirred in him a longing for the brilliance of autumn at West Farm. Mr. Boynton’s friends were hospitable people who lived in splendid houses and who, without exception, had made or inherited their money from some distant source such as mouthwash, airplane engines or beer; but it was not in Moses to sit on some broad terrace and observe that the bills for this charming