The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [79]
It was the kind of relationship that was useful and peaceable enough until Moses began to lose interest and then Beatrice got ardent and demanding. She couldn’t reach him at his office but she called his apartment, sometimes nightly, and when he went to see her she would cry and tell him about her artificial and socially ambitious mother and the sternness of Clancy. She moved from her apartment to a hotel and he helped carry her bags. She moved from this hotel to another and he helped her again. One early evening when he had just come in from supper she telephoned to say that she had gotten a singing engagement in Cleveland and would Moses put her on the train? He said that he would. She said she was home and gave him another address and he took a taxi.
The address was a delicatessen. He thought that perhaps her mother, in somewhat reduced circumstances, might have taken an apartment above the store, but there was no apartment entrance and he looked into the delicatessen. There in the back, dressed in a hat and coat and surrounded by suitcases, sat Beatrice. She was crying and her eyes were red. “Oh, thank you for coming, Moses dear,” she said, as daintily as ever. “I’ll be ready to go in just a minute. I want to catch my breath.”
The room where she sat was the kitchen of the delicatessen. There were two other people there. Beatrice didn’t explain or introduce them but Moses recognized one as Beatrice’s mother. The resemblance was marked, although she was a very stout woman with a florid and handsome face. She wore an apron over her dress and her shoes were broken. The other woman was thin and old. This was Clancy. Here were the origins of Beatrice’s splendid and unhappy memories. Her governess was a delicatessen cook.
The two women were making sandwiches. Now and then they spoke to Beatrice, but she didn’t reply. They didn’t seem troubled by her tear-stained face or her silence and the atmosphere in the kitchen was of a spent and ancient misunderstanding. The contrast between the stories Beatrice had told him of her unhappy childhood—her elegant and callous mother—and the clear lights of the delicatessen made her dilemma as keen and touching as the troubles of a child.
It was a fine delicatessen. The acid smell of pickles in brine came from some barrels near the door. Fresh sawdust had been scattered on the floor by Clancy—a little of it still clung to her apron—and from the door to the rear of the place, from the floor to the ceiling, were stacked cans of vegetables and fruit, shrimps, stone crabs, lobster meat, soups and chickens. There were baked turkeys and fowl in the glass cases, hams, turban-shaped rolls in the bread bins, sliced cucumbers in vinegar, creamed cheese, rollmops, smoked salmon, whitefish and sturgeon, and from this abundance of acid and appetizing smells poor Beatrice had invented an unhappy childhood with a hardhearted mother and a stern governess.
A little sob came from Beatrice. She took a paper napkin from a container on the table and blew her nose into it. “If you could get a taxi and take my suitcases out, Moses dear,” she said. “I’m too weak.” He knew what her suitcases contained—that magpie wardrobe—and when he lifted them they felt like stone. He carried the bags out to the curb and got a cab and Clancy followed with a large