The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [90]
Beyond the baseball pitcher there was a booth selling flowers that had been picked in the village gardens and there were wheels and a bingo game and the wooden stand where the musicians continued without a break their selection of dance music. Moses was surprised to find them so old. The pianist was old, the saxophone player was bent and gray and the drummer must have weighed three hundred pounds, and they seemed attached to their instruments by the rites, conveniences and habits of a long marriage.
When they had finished their last set a man announced some local talent and Moses saw a child, at the edge of the platform, waiting to go on. She seemed to be a child but when the band played her fanfare she lifted up her hands, shuffled into the light and began a laborious tap dance, counting time painfully and throwing out to the audience, now and then, a leering smile. The taps on her silver shoes made a metallic clang and shook the lumber of the platform and she seemed to have left her youth in the shadows. Powdered, rouged, absorbed in the mechanics of her dance and the enjoinder to seem flirtatious, her freshness was gone and all the bitterness and disappointments of a lascivious middle age seemed to sit on her thin shoulders. At the end she bowed to the little applause, smiled her tart smile once more and ran into the shadows where her mother was waiting with a coat to put over her shoulders and a few words of encouragement and when she stepped back into the shadows Moses saw that she was no more than twelve or thirteen.
He threw his paper cup into a can, and finishing his circuit of the carnival saw, walking through the deep grass smell and the summer gloom, a group, a family perhaps, in which there was a woman wearing a yellow skirt. The color of the skirt set up in him a yearning, a pang that put his teeth on edge, and he remembered that he had once loved a girl who had a skirt of the same color although he could not remember her name.
“I want a specialist, a brain specialist,” Moses heard his friend shouting when he returned to the hospital. “Charter a plane if it’s necessary. Money is no consideration. If he wants a consultant, tell him to bring a consultant. Yes. Yes.” He was using a telephone in an office across the hall from the waiting room that had been given by the Watkins family and where it had grown dark without anyone’s bothering to turn on a lamp. Only a few lights seemed to burn in the hospital at all. The bereaved and elderly lover sat among covered typewriters and adding machines and when he had finished his conversation he looked up to Moses and either because the light caught his spectacles or because his mood had changed, he seemed very officious. “I want you to consider yourself on my payroll as of this morning,” he said to Moses. “If you have other engagements to fulfill you can cancel them, confident that I will more than make this worth your while. The hospital has given me a room for the night and I want you to go back to the inn and get my toilet articles. I’ve made out a list.” he said, passing such a list to Moses. “Estimate your mileage and keep track of the time and I will see that you are amply reimbursed.” Then he picked up the telephone and asked for long distance and Moses stepped out into the dark hall.
He had nothing better to do and he was glad to drive back to the inn, not so much from a commendable sense of charity and helpfulness as from his desire to draw into a sensible perspective the events of the last few hours. Back at the inn he gave the manager—like a true Wapshot—the most meager account of what had happened. “She was in an accident,” he said. He went upstairs to the room that had been occupied by poor Mr. Cutter and his paramour. All the things on the list were easy to find—everything but a bottle of rye but after looking in the medicine cabinet and behind the books in the shelves he looked under the bed and found a well-stocked bar. He had a drink of Scotch himself in a tooth-brush glass. Back at the hospital