The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [101]
After work on Monday Moses packed his clothing in two suitcases and a paper box, putting in among his shirts a bottle of bourbon, a box of crackers and a three-pound piece of Stilton cheese. Again he was the only passenger to leave the train at Clear Haven but Giacomo was there to meet him with the old Rolls and drive him up the hill. Melissa met him at the door and that evening followed the pattern of his first night there except that the fuses didn’t blow. Moses wheeled the general to the elevator at ten and started once more over the roofs, this time on such a clear, starlit night that he could see the airshaft that had nearly killed him. Again in the morning at dawn he climbed back to his own quarters and what could be pleasanter than to see that heavily wooded and hilly countryside at dawn from the high roofs of Clear Haven. He went to the city on the train, returned in the evening to Clear Haven, yawned purposefully during dinner and pushed the old general to the elevator at half-past nine.
CHAPTER THIRTY
While Moses was eating these golden apples, Coverly and Betsey had settled in a rocket-launching station called Remsen Park. Coverly had only spent one day at the farm. Leander had urged him to return to his wife—and had gone to work himself at the table-silver factory a few days later. Coverly had joined Betsey in New York and, after a delay of only a few days, was transferred to this new station. This time they traveled together. Remsen Park was a community of four thousand identical houses, bounded on the west by an old army camp. The place could not be criticized as a town or city. Expedience, convenience and haste had produced it when the rocket program was accelerated; but the houses were dry in the rain and warm in the winter; they had well-equipped kitchens and fireplaces for domestic bliss and the healthy need for national self-preservation could more than excuse the fact that they were all alike. At the heart of the community there was a large shopping center with anything you might want—all of it housed in glass-walled buildings. This was Betsey’s joy. She and Coverly rented a house, furnished even to the pictures on the walls, and set up housekeeping with the blue china and the painted chairs that Sarah sent them from St. Botolphs.
They had been in Remsen Park for only a little while when Betsey decided that she was pregnant. She felt sick in the morning and stayed in bed late. When she got up, Coverly had gone to work. He had left coffee for her in the kitchen and had washed his own dishes. She ate a late breakfast, sitting at the kitchen window so that she could see the houses of Remsen Park stretching away to the horizon like the pattern on a cloth. The woman in the house next door came out to empty her garbage. She was an Italian, the wife of an Italian scientist. Betsey called good morning to her and asked her to come in and have a cup of coffee but the Italian woman only gave her a sullen smile and returned to her own kitchen. Remsen Park was not a very friendly place.
Betsey hoped that she would not be disappointed in her pregnancy. Her mind seemed to strike an attitude of prayer, as involuntary as the impulse with which she swore when she slammed her finger in a window. Dear God, she thought briefly, make me a mother. She wanted children. She wanted five or six. She smiled suddenly, as if her wish had filled the kitchen with the love, disorder and vitality of a family. She was braiding the hair of her daughter, Sandra, a beautiful girl. The other four or five were in the room. They were happy and dirty and one of them, a little boy with Coverly’s long neck, was holding in his hands the halves of a broken dish, but Betsey had not scolded him, Betsey had not even frowned when he broke the dish, for the secret of his clear, resilient personality was that his growth had never been impeded by niggardly considerations. Betsy felt that she had a latent talent for raising children. She would put the development of personality above everything. The phantom children that played around her knees had never received from their parents anything but love and trust.