The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [31]
Leander took her off for a day on the Topaze. It was lovely seaside weather and she stood on the forward deck while Leander watched her from the wheelhouse. A stranger approached her as they started across the bay and Leander was happy to see that she paid him very little attention and when he persisted she gave him a chilly smile and climbed up to the wheelhouse. “This is absolully the funniest old boat I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Now Leander did not like to have people speak critically of the Topaze. Her light words made him angry. His respect for the old boat might be a weakness but he thought that people who did not appreciate the Topaze were lightheaded. “I’m starving,” Rosalie said. “All this salt air. I could eat an ox and it isn’t ten o’clock.” Leander’s feelings were still smarting from her first words. “At the lake at this camp where I went to,” she said, “there was a kind of boat that took people around, but it wasn’t as much fun as this. I mean I didn’t know the captain.” She sensed the mistake she had made in speaking lightly of the Topaze and now she tried to make amends. “And the other boat wasn’t as seaworthy,” she said. “I suppose she’s awfully seaworthy. I mean I suppose she was built in the days when people knew how to build seaworthy boats.”
“She’s thirty-two years old this spring,” Leander said proudly. “Honora doesn’t spend more than two or three hundred dollars on her a season and she’s brought her passengers through thick and thin without harming a hair on their heads.”
They went ashore together at Nangasakit and Leander watched her eat four hot dogs and wash them down with tonic. She didn’t want to ride on the roller-coaster and he guessed that her ideas of pleasure were more sophisticated. He wondered if she drank cocktails in lounges. In speaking of her home she had spoken both of wealth and meanness and Leander guessed that her life had been made up of both. “Mother gives an enormous garden party, every summer,” she had said, “with an orchestra sort of hidden in the bushes and millions of delicious cakes,” and an hour later she had said, speaking of her own ineptitude as a housekeeper, “Daddy cleans the bathrooms at home. He gets into these old clothes and gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs the floors and tubs and everything.…” The hired orchestra and the housecleaning priest were equally strange to Leander and interested him, mostly in that her background seemed to stand between Rosalie and her enjoyment of Nangasakit. He would have liked to ride on the roller-coaster himself and he was disappointed when she refused. But they walked on the wrecked sea wall above the white sand and the green water and he was happy in her company. He thought—like Sarah—how much he would have liked a daughter, and the images of her career formed swiftly in his mind. She would marry, of course. He even saw himself throwing rice at her as she ran down the steps of Christ Church. But somehow her marriage went wrong. Her husband was killed in the war perhaps or turned out to be a drunk or a crook. In any case she came back to take care of Leander in his old age—to bring him his bourbon and cook his meals and listen to his stories on stormy nights. At three o’clock they went back to the boat.
Everyone liked Rosalie but Moses, who stayed out of her way and was surly with her when they met. Mrs. Wapshot kept urging him to take her sailing and he always refused. It may have been that he associated her with that first night in the pasture and the fire or that