The Wapshot Scandal (10 page)

What had not happened or what might possibly have happened and been overlooked by Coverly’s way of thinking began with Caroline’s visit. She arrived on a Thursday. All the windows were lighted when Coverly came home from work and when he stepped into the house he could hear their voices from the living room. Betsey seemed happy for the first time in months and met him with a kiss. Caroline looked up at him and smiled, the color and cast of her eyes concealed by a large pair of spectacles that reflected the room. She was not a heavy woman but she sat like a heavy woman, her legs wide apart and her arms hung gracelessly between them. She was wearing a traveling costume—blue pumps that pinched her feet and a tight blue skirt that was rucked and seamed like a skin. Her smile was sweet and slow and she got to her feet and gave Coverly a wet kiss. “Why, he looks just like Harvey,” she said. “Harvey was this boy in Bambridge and you look just like him. He was a nice-looking boy. His family had a nice house on Spartacus Street.”

“They didn’t live on Spartacus Street,” Betsey said. “They used to live on Thompson Avenue.”

“They lived on Spartacus Street until his father got the Buick agency,” Caroline said. “Then they moved to Thompson Avenue.”

“I thought they always lived on Thompson Avenue,” Betsey said.

“It was that other boy that used to live on Thompson Avenue,” Caroline said. “The one that had curly hair and crooked teeth.”

There was a bottle of bourbon on the coffee table and they each had a drink. When Betsey went into the kitchen to heat up the supper Caroline remained with Coverly. It was at this point that Coverly would decide that what had happened had not happened. Caroline spoke to him in a whisper. “I just been dying to meet the man Betsey married,” Caroline said. “Nobody in Bambridge ever thought Betsey’d get married, she’s so
queer
.”

There was a moment before Coverly decided, as he would, that what had been said had not been said when he was confronted with the venom in this remark. He could only conclude that “queer” in Georgia meant charming, original and fair.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Why, she’s just queer, that’s all,” Caroline whispered. “Everybody in Bambridge knew Betsey was queer. I don’t think it was her fault. I just think it was because Step-pappy was so mean to her. He used to whip her, he used to take off his belt and whip her with no provocation whatsoever. I just think he whipped the common sense right out of her.”

“I didn’t know any of this,” Coverly said; or didn’t say.

“Well, Betsey was never one to tell anybody anything,” Caroline whispered. “That was one of the queer things about her.”

“Dinner’s served,” Betsey said in her sweetest and most trusting manner. This much, in retrospect, would appear to be true.

The talk about Bambridge went on through dinner and it was a conversation that, led by Caroline, seemed strangely morbid. “Bessie Pluckette has another mongoloid idiot,” Caroline exclaimed, not cheerfully but with definite enthusiasm. “Unfortunately it’s just as healthy as it can be and poor Bessie can just expect to spend the rest of her life taking care of it. Poor thing. Of course she could put it into the state institution but she just doesn’t have the heart to have her little son starved to death and that’s what they do in the state institution, they starve them to death. Alma Pierson had a mongoloid too but mercifully that one died. And remember that Brasie girl, Betsey, the one with the shriveled right arm?” She turned to Coverly and explained. “She has this shriveled right arm, no longer than your elbow and right at the end of it there’s this teeny-weeny hand. Well, she learned how to play the piano. Isn’t that wonderful? I mean she could only play chords of course with this teeny-weeny hand but she could play the rest of the music with her left hand. Her left hand was normal. She took piano lessons and everything; that is, she took piano lessons until her father fell down the elevator shaft at the cotton mill and broke both legs.” Was this morbidity, Coverly wondered, or were these the facts of life in Georgia?

Caroline stayed three days and was (if one forgot her remarks before dinner) a tolerable guest excepting that her knowledge of tragic, human experience was inexhaustible and that she left lipstick stains on everything. She had a broad mouth and she painted it heavily and there were purple lipstick stains on the cups and glasses, the towels and napkins; the ashtrays were full of stained cigarette ends and in the toilet there was always a piece of Kleenex stained purple. This seemed to Coverly not carelessness but much more—some atavistic way of impressing herself upon this household in which she would spend so short a time. The purple stains seemed to mark her as a lonely woman. When Coverly went to the site on the day she left Caroline was asleep and she had gone by the time he got home. She had left a smear of purple lipstick on his son’s forehead; there seemed to be purple lipstick everywhere he looked, as if she had marked her departure this way. Betsey was watching television and eating from a box of candy that Caroline had given her as a present. She did not look up when he came in and brushed away the place on her cheek where he kissed her. “Leave me be,” she said, “leave me be. . . .”

After Caroline’s departure Betsey’s discontents only seemed to increase. Then there was a night that, according to Coverly’s habit of eliminating facts, especially did not happen. He was kept late at the site and didn’t get home until half-past seven. Betsey sat in the kitchen, weeping. “What’s the matter, sugarluve,” he asked, or didn’t ask.

“Well, I made myself a nice cup of tea,” Betsey sobbed, “and a piece of hot Danish and I was just sitting down to enjoy myself when the telephone rang and there was this woman selling magazine subscriptions and she talked and by the time she was done talking my tea and my Danish were all cold.”

“That’s all right, sugar,” Coverly said. “You can heat it up again.”

“It isn’t all right,” Betsey said. “It just isn’t all right. Nothing’s all right. I hate Talifer. I hate it here. I hate you. I hate wet toilet seats. The only reason I live here is because there’s no place else in the world for me to go. I’m too lazy to get a job and I’m too plain to find another man.”

“Would you like to take a trip, sugar, would you like a change?”

“I been all over this country, it’s the same everywheres.”

“Oh, come back, sugar, come back,” he said, speaking in great love and tiredness. “I feel as if I were walking up a street calling after you, asking you to come back and you never turn your head. I know what the street looks like, I’ve seen it so often. It’s nighttime. There’s a place on the corner where you can buy cigarettes and papers. Stationery. I can see you walking up this street and I’m behind you, calling you to come back, to come back, but you never turn your head.” Betsey went on sobbing, and thinking that his words had moved her Coverly put an arm around her shoulders but she wrenched herself convulsively out of his embrace and screamed: “Leave me be.” The scream, like the piercing and hideous noise of brakes, seemed to be apart from the fitness of things.

“But, sugar.”

“You beat me,” she screamed. “You took off your belt and you beat me and you beat me and you beat me.”

“I never beat you, sugar. I never hit anybody but Mr. Murphy the night he stole our garbage pail.”

“You beat me and beat me and beat me,” she screamed.

“When was this, sugar, when did I do this?”

“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I can’t remember every time.” She fled to her room and shut the door. He was stunned (or would have been stunned if any of this had happened) and it was a minute or two before he realized (or would have realized) that Binxey was crying in terror. He seized the little boy as an object of reason, love, animal warmth. He crushed him in his arms and took him into the kitchen. This was no time, it seemed, for reflection or decision. He cooked some hamburgers and after supper told the boy an asinine story of space travel as he did each night. These stories were no worse than the stories of talking rabbits he had been told as a boy but the talking rabbits had the charm of innocence. He turned off the light, kissed the boy good night and stopped at the bedroom door to ask Betsey if she wanted some dinner. “Let me alone,” she said. He drank a beer, read an old copy of
Life
, went to the window and looked at the lights on the street.

Here was (or would have been had he admitted the facts) the forlornness, the pain of an unexampled dilemma. The thief and the murderer all have their brotherhood and their prophets but he had none. Psychiatry, psychiatry, the word came to his mind as we put one foot in front of the other, but if he went to a doctor he would jeopardize his security clearance and his job. Any association with mental instability made a man unemployable in Talifer. The only way he could cling to his conviction that the devastating blows of life fell in some usable sequence was to claim that these especial blows had not fallen; and so making this claim he made a bed on the sofa and went to sleep.

This curious process of claiming that what had happened had not happened and what was happening was not happening went on in the morning when Coverly went to get a shirt and found that Betsey had cut the buttons off all of his shirts. This was inadmissible. He fastened a shirt with his tie, tucked it into his trousers and went to work but in the middle of the morning he went to the men’s room and wrote Betsey a note:

“Darling Betsey,” he wrote, “I am going away. I am desperate and I am not interested in desperation, especially quiet desperation. I have no address but I don’t suppose that makes much difference because in all the years we’ve been together you’ve never sent me a postcard and I don’t suppose you’re going to start writing me piles of letters now. I have thought of taking Binxey with me but of course this would be against the law. I love him more than I have ever loved anyone in the world and please be kind to him. You might want to know why I am going away and why I am desperate although I somehow cannot imagine you asking yourself any questions about my disappearance. I don’t know any of your family excepting Caroline and I sometimes wish I knew them better because I sometimes think you’ve got me mixed up with someone who caused you pain long ago. I know that I have a very difficult personality my family always said that Coverly was very odd and perhaps I am much more to be blamed than I will ever know. I do not like to cherish resentments, I do not like to be bitter or resentful and yet I often am. In the mornings of our life together when the alarm wakes me the first thing I want to do is to take you in my arms but if I do I know you will fling yourself away from me and so that is the way the days begin and usually the way they end. I won’t bother about saying anything else. As I said in the beginning I am not interested in desperation, particularly quiet desperation and so I am going away.”

Coverly mailed the letter, bought some shirts, cleared some annual leave and left for Denver that night, where he checked into a fourth-string hotel. There were cigarette butts on the bathroom floor and a pier glass arranged at the foot of the bed for questionable reasons. He had some drinks and went to a movie. When he came in at about midnight the elevator man asked if he wanted a girl, a boy, some dirty pictures or filthy comics. He said no thanks and went to bed. He went to a museum in the morning, to another movie and was having a drink at dusk in a bar when he felt his spirit genuflect, bend, stoop and kneel before what appeared to be the image of those worn Indian moccasins, ornamented with beads, that Betsey wore around the house. He had another drink and went to another movie. When he came in the elevator operator asked again if he wanted, a girl, a boy, a dirty massage, filthy pictures or obscene comics. He wanted Betsey.

The secrets of a marriage are most scrupulously guarded. Coverly might speak freely of his infidelities; it was his passion for fidelity that he would hide. It didn’t matter that she had accused him wrongly and cut the buttons off his shirt. It wouldn’t matter if she burned holes in his underpants and served him arsenate of lead. If she locked the door against him he would climb in at the window. If she locked the bedroom door he would break the lock. If she met him with a tirade, a shower of bitter tears, an ax or a meat cleaver it didn’t matter. She was his millstone, his ball and chain, his angel, his fate, and she held in her hands the raw material of his most illustrious dreams. He called her then and said he was coming home. “That’s all right,” Betsey said. “That’s all right.”

He had some trouble making connections for the return trip and it was not until ten that he got back the next night. Betsey was in bed, filing her nails. “Hi, sugar,” he said and sat on the bed, making a groaning sound. “Well, all right,” Betsey said, but she flung her nail file onto the table, preserving this much of her sovereignty. She went into the bathroom, closing the door, and Coverly heard the various sounds of running water, diverse and cheerful as the fountains in Tivoli. But she did not return. What had happened? Had she hurt herself? Had she climbed out the window? He threw open the bathroom door and found her sitting naked on the edge of the tub, reading an old copy of
Newsweek
. “What’s the matter, sugar?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Betsey said. “I was just reading.”

“But that’s an old copy,” Coverly said. “That’s about a year old.”

“Well, it’s very interesting,” Betsey said. “I find it very interesting.”

“But you’re not interested in current events,” Coverly said. “I mean you don’t even know the name of the vice president, do you?”

“That’s none of your business,” said Betsey.

“But do you know the name of the vice president?”

“That’s just none of your business,” Betsey said.

“Oh, sugar,” groaned Coverly, his feeling swamped with love, and he raised her up in his arms. Then the verdure of venery, that thickest of foliage, filled the room. Sounds of running water. Flights of wild canaries. Lightly, lightly, assisting one another at every turn they began their effortless ascent up the rockwall, the chimney, the flume, the long traverse, up and up and up until over the last ridge one had a view of the whole, wide world and Coverly was the happiest man in it. But according to him none of this had happened. How could it have?