The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [7]
“Lady’s going home,” he called over his shoulder to Mrs. Wapshot. “She wants to get home and I’m going to let her.”
“Couldn’t you let us off?” Mrs. Wapshot asked.
“I ain’t going to stop her now,” Mr. Pincher said. “She’s had a lot more to put up with than the rest of you. She wants to get home now and I ain’t going to stop her.”
Mrs. Wapshot and her friends resigned themselves to the news of their captivity. After all, none of them had been hurt. The water pitcher was broken and the lectern had been upset, but the lectern was whole. Lady’s stable was on Hewitt Street, they knew, which meant going over the hill and through the back country to River Street; but it was a fine day and a good opportunity to enjoy the salt air and the summer scenery, and anyhow they didn’t have any choice.
The old mare had begun the pull up Wapshot Hill and from here, above the trees, they had an excellent view of the village in the valley. To the northeast lay the brick walls of the table-silver factory, the railroad bridge and the morose, Victorian spire of the depot. Toward the center of town was a less sentimental spire—the Unitarian Church, founded in 1780. Its clock struck the half hour as they traveled. The bell had been cast in Antwerp and had a sweet, clear note. A second later the bell at Christ Church (1870) struck the half hour with a gloomy note that sounded like a frying pan. This bell came from Altoona. A little below the crown of the hill the wagon rolled past old Mrs. Drinkwine’s charming white house with her picket fence buried in red roses. The whiteness of the house, the feathery elms, the punctual church bells—even the faint smell of the sea—encouraged in these travelers a tendency to overlook the versatility of life as if it was only common sense to forget that Mrs. Drinkwine had once been a wardrobe mistress for Lee and J. J. Shubert and knew more about the seamy side of life than Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
But it was difficult, from the summit of Wapshot Hill, not to spread over the village the rich, dark varnish of decorum and quaintness—to do this or to lament the decadence of a once boisterous port; to point out that the Great Pissmire was now Alder Vale and that the Mariner’s Jug was now the Grace Louise Tearoom. There was beauty below them, inarguable and unique—many fine things built for the contentment of hardy men—and there was decadence—more ships in bottles than on the water—but why grieve over this? Looking back at the village we might put ourselves into the shoes of a native son (with a wife and family in Cleveland) coming home for some purpose—a legacy or a set of Hawthorne or a football sweater—and swinging through the streets in good weather what would it matter that the blacksmith shop was now an art school? Our friend from Cleveland might observe, passing through the square at dusk, that this decline or change in spirit had not altered his own humanity and that whatever he was—a man come for a legacy or a drunken sailor looking for a whore—it did not matter whether or not his way was lighted by the twinkling candles in tearooms; it did not change what he was.
But our friend from Cleveland was only a visitor—he would go away, and Mr. Pincher and his passengers would not. Now, past Mrs. Drinkwine’s and over the crown of the hill, the west of the village spread out below them—farmland