The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [63]
“Can I take you home?” Moses asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “We just have a little apartment in the neighborhood and I usually walk but I don’t think there’d be any harm in you walking me home.”
“Go?”
She got a coat from the hat-check girl and talked with the hat-check girl about a four-year-old child who was lost in the woods of Wisconsin. The child’s name was Pamela and she had been gone four days. Extensive search parties had been organized and the two women speculated with deep anxiety on whether or not little Pamla had died of exposure and starvation. When this conversation ended, Beatrice—which was her name—started down the hall, but the hat-check girl called her back and gave her a paper bag. “It’s two lipsticks and some bobby pins,” she said. Beatrice explained that the hat-check girl kept an eye on the ladies’ room and gave Beatrice whatever was left there. She seemed ashamed of the arrangement, but she recuperated in a second and took Moses’ arm.
Their place was near the Marine Room—a second-story bedroom dominated by a large cardboard wardrobe that seemed on the verge or in the process of collapse. She struggled to open one of its warped doors and exposed a magpie wardrobe—maybe a hundred dresses of all kinds. She went into the bathroom and returned, wearing a kind of mandarin coat with a dragon embroidered up the back out of threads that felt thorny to Moses’ hands. She yielded easily but when it was over she sobbed a little in the dark and asked, “Oh dear, what have we done?” Her voice was as dainty as ever. “Nobody ever likes me except in this way,” she said, “but I think it’s because I was brought up so strictly. I was brought up by this governess. Her name was Clancy. Oh, she was so strict. I was never allowed to play with other children.…” Moses dressed, kissed her good night and got out of the building without being seen.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back at the farm Leander had banked the foundations of the old house with seaweed and had hired Mr. Pluzinski to clear the garden. His sons wrote him once or twice a month and he wrote them both weekly. He longed to see them and often thought, when he was drinking bourbon, of traveling to New York and Washington, but in the light of morning he couldn’t find it in himself to ever leave St. Botolphs again. After all, he had seen the world. He was alone a lot of the time, for Lulu was spending three days a week with her daughter in the village and Mrs. Wapshot was working three days a week as a clerk in the Anna Marie Louise Gift Shoppe in Travertine. It was made clear to everyone, by Sarah’s mien, that she was not doing this because the Wapshots needed money. She was doing it because she loved to, and this was the truth. All the energies that she possessed—and that she had used so well in improving the village—seemed to have centered at last in an interest in gift shops. She wanted to open a gift shop in the front parlor of the farmhouse. She even dreamed of this project, but it was something Leander wouldn’t discuss.
It was hard to say why the subject of gift shops should excite, on one hand, Sarah’s will to live, and on the other, Leander’s bitterest scorn. As Mrs. Wapshot stood by a table loaded with colored-glass vases and gave a churchly smile to her friends and neighbors when they came in to spend a little money and pass the time, her equilibrium seemed wonderfully secure. This love of gift shops—this taste for ornamentation—may have been developed by the colorless surface of that shinbone coast or it may have been a most natural longing for sensual trivia. When she exclaimed—about a hand-carved salad fork or a hand-painted glass—“Isn’t it lovely?” she was perfectly sincere. The gossip and the company of the customers let her be as gregarious as she had ever been in the Woman’s Club; and people had always sought her out. The pleasure of selling things and putting silver and bills into the old tin box that was used for this purpose pleased her immensely, for she had sold nothing before in