The Wapshot Scandal (36 page)

And so she does. She goes to the Supra-Marketto Americano on the Via Delle Sagiturius. Here she disengages one wagon with a light ringing of metal from a chain of hundreds and begins to push her way through the walls of American food. Grieving, bewildered by the blows life has dealt her, this is some solace, this is the path she takes. Her face is pale. A stray curl hangs against her cheek. Tears make the light in her eyes a glassy light but the market is crowded and she is not the first nor the last woman in the history of the place to buy her groceries with wet cheeks. She moves indifferently with the alien crowd as if these were the brooks and channels of her day. No willow grows aslant this stream of men and women and yet it is Ophelia that she most resembles, gathering her fantastic garland not of crowflowers, nettles and long purples, but of salt, pepper, Bab-o, Kleenex, frozen codfish balls, lamb patties, hamburger, bread, butter, dressing, an American comic book for her son and for herself a bunch of carnations. She chants, like Ophelia, snatches of old tunes. “Winstons taste
good
like a cigarette should. Mr. Clean, Mr.
Clean
,” and when her coronet or fantastic garland seems completed she pays her bill and carries her trophies away, no less dignified a figure of grief than any other.

CHAPTER XXXII

Betsey and Binxey arrived the day before Christmas and Coverly went down to the station to meet the train. “I’m so tired,” Betsey said, “I’m just so tired I could
die
.” “Was the train trip bad, sugarluve?” Coverly asked. “Bad,” said Betsey, “bad. Just don’t speak to me about it, that’s all. I don’t see why we have to come all the way down here to have Christmas anyhow. We might just as well have gone to Florida. I’ve never been to Florida in my whole life.”

“I promised Honora that we’d have Christmas here.”

“But you told me she was dead, dead and buried.”

“I promised.” For a moment he felt helpless before this incompatibility; felt as if his blood had been transmuted by anger or despair into something syrupy and effervescent, like Coca-Cola. It was unthinkable that he should break his promise to the old woman, it was some part of his dignity, and yet he could see clearly that it was unthinkable to Betsey that he should trouble himself. Coverly walked beside his wife with the slight crouch of a losing sexual combatant, while Betsey stood more erectly, held her head more sternly, seemed to seize on every crumb of self-esteem that he dropped. Coverly had done what he could to get the house in order. He had lighted fires, decorated a tree and put presents under it for his son and his wife. “I have to put Binxey to bed,” Betsey said indignantly. “I don’t guess there’s any hot water for a bath, is there? Come on, Binxey, come on upstairs with Mummy. I’m just so tired I could
die
.”

After supper Coverly waited for the carol singers but they had either given up this ceremony or taken Boat Street off their route. At half-past ten the bells of Christ Church began to ring and he put on a coat and walked out to the green. The ringing of the bells stopped as he approached the door. He was preceded by three women, all of them unknown to him. They seemed not together and they were all three past middle age. The first wore a drum-shaped hat, covered with metal disks from which the street lights flashed with the brilliance of some advertising lure. Buy Ginger-Fluff? Texadrol? Fulpruff Tires? He looked into her face for the text but there was nothing there but the text of marriage, childbirth, some delight and some dismay. The other two wore similar hats. He waited until they had entered before he went in and found that they four were the only worshipers on Christmas Eve.

He went to a pew way forward, genuflected with a loud creaking of his kneebones and said his prayers, immersed in the immemorial and Episcopal smell of ancient rains. Mr. Applegate came in without his cassock and lighted the candles. He returned to the altar a moment later, carrying the Host. “Almighty God,” he intoned, “unto Whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from Whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts with the inspiration of Thy holy spirit. . . .”

The resonance of the Mass moved into that gloomy place on Christmas Eve with the magnificence of an Elizabethan procession. Perorative clauses spread out after the main supplication or confession in breadth and glory and the muttered responses seemed embroidered in crimson and gold. On it would move, Coverly thought, through the Lamb of God, the Gloria and the Benediction until the last Amen shut like a door on this verbal pomp. But then he sensed something strange and wrong. Mr. Applegate’s speech was theatrical but what was more noticeable was a pose of suavity, a bored and haughty approach to the holy words for which Cranmer had burned. As he turned to the altar to pray Coverly saw him sway and grab at the lace for support. Was he sick? Was he feeble? The woman with the lights in her hat turned to Coverly and hissed: “He’s drunk again.” He was. He spoke the Mass with scorn and contumely, as if his besottedness were a form of wisdom. He lurched around the altar, got the general confession mixed up with the order for morning prayer and kept saying: “Christ have mercy upon us. Let us pray,” until it seemed that he was stuck. There is no point in the formalities of Holy Communion where, in the case of such a disaster, the communicants can intervene and there was nothing to do but watch him flounder through to the end. Suddenly he threw his arms wide, fell to his knees and exclaimed: “Let us pray for all those killed or cruelly wounded on thruways, expressways, freeways and turnpikes. Let us pray for all those burned to death in faulty plane-landings, mid-air collisions and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all those wounded by rotary lawn mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers and other power tools. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the days that the Lord hath made in ounces, pints and fifths.” Here he sobbed loudly. “Let us pray for the lecherous and the impure. . . .” Led by the woman with the flashing hat, the other worshipers left before this prayer was finished and Coverly was left alone to support Mr. Applegate with his Amen. He got through the rest of it, divested himself, extinguished his candles and hurried back to his gin bottle, hidden among the vestments, and Coverly walked back to Boat Street. The telephone was ringing.

“Coverly, Coverly, this is Hank Moore over at the Viaduct House. I know it’s none of my business but I thought maybe you were wondering where your brother was and he’s over here. He’s got the widow Wilston with him. I don’t want to put my nose in nobody else’s business but I just thought you might like to know where he was.”

It was Christmas Eve at the Viaduct House but the scene upstairs was flagrantly pagan. This was no sacred grove and the only sound of running water came from a leaking tap but Moses the satyr leered through the smoky air at his bacchante. Mrs. Wilston’s curls were disheveled, her face was red, her smile was the rapt and wanton smile of forgetfulness and she held a lovely glass of lovely bourbon in her right hand. Her jowls—the first note of pendulousness to be massively reiterated by her breasts—were very meaty. “Now you listen to me, Moses Wapshot,” she said, “you just listen to me. You Wapshots always thought you were bettern everybody else but I wanna tell you, I wanna tell you, I can’t remember what I wanna tell you.” She laughed. She had lost the power of consecutive thought and with it all the stings and pains of living. She waked and yet she dreamed. Moses, naked as any satyr, smacked his lips and left his chair. His walk was lumbering, bellicose and a little haunted. It was on the one hand pugnacious and had on the other the lightness, the fleetness, the hint of stealth of a man who is stepping out of a liquor store after having paid for a quart of gin with an unsubstantiated check. He made his way to her, smacked her wetly in several places and gathered her up in his arms. She sighed and lolled in his embrace. He started for the bed with his jolly burden. He weaved to the right, recouped his balance and weaved to the right again. Then he was going; he was going; he was gone. Thump. The whole Viaduct House reverberated to the crash and then there was an awful stillness. He lay athwart her, his cheek against the carpet, which had a pleasant, dusty smell like the woods in autumn. Oh, where was his dog, his gun, his simple joy in life! She, still lying in a heap, was the first to speak. She spoke without anger or impatience. She smiled. “Let’s have another drink,” she said. Then Coverly opened the door. “Come home, Moses,” he said. “Come home, brother. It’s Christmas Eve.”

Christmas Day in the morning, when Coverly woke and romanced Betsey, was dazzling. The frost on the windowglass, shaped like shrapnel, distilled and amplified the light. Maggie came early and opened the furnace drafts and presently hot air and coal gas began to pour out of the registers. Binxey emptied his stocking and unwrapped the presents that Coverly had bought for him and they all had breakfast in the warm kitchen off a wooden table that was as slick and porous as hand soap. The kitchen was not a dark room but the power of light on the new snow outside made it seem cavernous.

Moses woke in a crushing paroxysm of anxiety, the keenest melancholy. The brilliance of light, the birth of Christ, all seemed to him like some fatuous shell game invented to dupe a fool like his brother while he saw straight through into the nothingness of things. The damage he had done to his nerves and his memory was less painful than a sense he suffered of approaching disaster, some pitiless fatality that would break him without making itself known. His hands had begun to shake and in another fifteen minutes he would begin to sweat. This was the agony of death, with the difference that he knew the way to life everlasting. It was in the bottles of bourbon Honora had left in the jelly closet. He thought of bourbon while he shaved and dressed but when he went down to the kitchen and found them sitting at the table there he saw them not as the members of his family but as cruel obstacles, standing between himself and the alpine landscapes in a bottle of sour mash. The coffee and orange juice that Maggie gave him seemed innocuous and nauseating. How could he get them out of the room? If he had only thought to buy some presents and left them under the tree, he might have been alone for a minute. “Jelly,” he exclaimed. “I want some jelly for my toast.” He went into the closet and shut the door.

Going through the dining room after breakfast Coverly saw that Maggie had set the table for twelve guests and he wondered who they would be. Honora had always had a large table at Christmas. After Thanksgiving she would begin—in public places—trains, buses and waiting rooms—to look around for those faces that bore the inexpungeable mark of loneliness and invite them to her house for Christmas dinner. Intuition and practice had made her discerning and she could single out her prey unerringly and yet, knowing as she did how the passion of loneliness runs through the lives of all men, she was oftener rebuffed than accepted by strangers who, she saw, as they turned away from her, would sooner spend their holiday in a bare room than admit to her or even to themselves that they lacked a host of friends and relations and a groaning board. Wayward pride had been her adversary, and a formidable one, but the wish to fill up her table seemed, like her love of fires and her disinterest in money, aboriginal, and she had once gone up to the railroad station waiting room on Christmas morning and corraled the strays who were warming themselves there at the coal stove.

Coverly cleared the walks after breakfast. The loud ringing of his shovel on the paving had a singular and a foolish charm, as if this rude music, this simple task, evoked the spirit of Leander in a happier role than he had seemed damned to play out in the wreckage of the old house on River Street. The blinding light on the snow seemed to ring again and again around the boundaries of the village like the vibrations of a rubbed water glass, but even that early in the day the brilliance of the light could be seen to shift, to be the lights of one of the shortest days of the year.

The Bretaignes and the Dummers came in at eleven. Maggie gave them sherry and raspberry shrub. There was such a hard and mischievous light in Moses’ eye by this time that they did not stay for long. Some time after noon Coverly was standing at a window when he saw the yellow bus he had seen on the night he returned. There was the same driver, the same passengers and the legend
HUTCHINS INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND.
The bus stopped in front of the house and Coverly ran down the stairs, leaving the hall door open. “Wapshot?” the driver asked. “Yes,” said Coverly. “Well, here’s the company for your Christmas dinner,” said the driver. “They told me to pick them up at three.” “Won’t you come in?” asked Coverly. “Oh, no, thanks, no,” the driver said. “I got stomach trouble and all I want is a bowl of soup. I’ll get something in the village. Turkey and all that. It makes me sick. You’ll have to show them up the steps though. I’ll give you a hand.”

Coverly opened the door and said to the Negress he had seen on the green: “Merry Christmas. I’m Coverly Wapshot. We’re very happy to have you here.” “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,” she said while from a portable radio she carried a chorus of hundreds sang “Adeste Fideles.” “There are seven steps,” Coverly said, “and then one more into the house.” The woman took his arm with the trust of custom and helplessness and lifted her face to the brilliance of the sky. “I can see a little light,” she said. “Just a little. It must be bright out there.” “Yes, it is,” said Coverly. “Five, six, seven.” “
Joyeux Noël
,” said Moses, bowing from the waist. “May I take your wraps?” “No, thank you, no, thank you,” the woman said. “I took a chill in the auto and I’ll keep them on until I warm up.” Moses led her into the parlor while the driver brought up the angular prophet, who was saying: “Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; grant us Thy peace.” “Hushup, hushup, Henry Saunders,” said the Negress. “You spoil everybody’s party.” Her radio sang “Silent Night.”