The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [80]
Moses carried her bags through the station and put them on the Cleveland train and then Beatrice kissed him good-by daintily and began to cry in earnest. “Oh dear Moses, I’ve done something awful, and I have to tell you. You know how they always investigate people, I mean they ask everybody you know about you, and a man came to see me one afternoon and I told him this long story about how you took advantage of me and promised to marry me and took all my money but I had to tell them something because they would have thought I was immoral if I didn’t and I’m sorry and I hope nothing bad happens to you.” Then the conductor shouted all aboard and the train pulled out for Cleveland.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
And now we come to the wreck of the Topaze.
This happened on May 30—her first voyage of the year. For two weeks Leander and the hired hand—Bentley—had been getting her into shape. The lilac was in bloom and in St. Botolphs there were hedges of lilac—there were whole groves and forests of it blooming the length of River Street and growing wild around the cellar holes on the other side of the hill. Going to the wharf in the early mornings Leander saw that the children walking to school all carried branches of lilac. He wondered if they gave it to their teachers, who must have lilac trees themselves, or used it to decorate the classrooms. All that week he saw children carrying lilac branches to school. Early on the morning of the thirtieth he cut some lilac himself and took it to the cemetery and then he went down to the Topaze.
Bentley had worked as a hired hand for Leander before. He was a young man who had been to sea and who had a bad name. He was known by everyone to be the illegitimate son of Theophilus Gates by a woman who called herself Mrs. Bentley and who lived in a two-family house near the table-silver factory. He was one of those neat, taciturn and competent seamen who tear the world to pieces about once a month. Landladies in many cities had admired him for his cleanliness, sobriety and industry until he would come home some rainy night with three bottles of whisky in a paper bag and drink them, one after the other. Then he would break the windows, piss on the floor and erupt in such a volcano of bitterness and obscenity that the police were usually called and he would start all over again in some other city or furnished room.
Another passenger or crew member that day was Lester Spinet, a blind man who had learned to play the accordion at the Hutchens Institute. It was Honora’s idea that he should work on the Topaze, and she planned to pay him a salary herself. Leander was naturally pleased to have music on his boat and displeased at himself that he disliked the sound of the blind man’s cane and the way he looked. Spinet was a heavy man with a massive head and face canted upward, as if some traces of light still reached his eyes. Spinet and Bentley were waiting for Leander that morning when he got to the wharf and they took on some passengers including an old lady with some lilac branches wrapped in a newspaper. The sky and the river were blue and it was everything, or almost everything, that a holiday should be, although it was a little close or humid and mixed with the smell of lilacs that came down from the river banks was a sour smell like the smell of wet paper. It might storm.
At Travertine he took on more passengers. Dick Hammersmith and his brother were on the wharf in bathing trunks, diving for coins, but there wasn’t much business. As he headed for the channel he saw that the beach in front of the Mansion House was crowded and heard the shrieks of a child who was being ducked by her father. “Daddy isn’t going to hurt you, Daddy only wants you to see how nice the water feels,” the man said while the child’s cries grew higher and more desperate. He passed through the channel