The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [53]
The butler passed Coverly a cocktail on a tray. He had never drunk a martini cocktail before and to conceal his inexperience he raised the glass to his lips and drained it. He didn’t cough and sputter but his eyes swam with tears, the gin felt like fire and some oscillation or defense mechanism in his larynx began to palpitate in such a way that he found himself unable to speak. He settled down to a paroxysm of swallowing. “Of course, this isn’t my idea of a decent room at all,” Cousin Mildred went on. “It’s all Harry’s idea. I’d much rather have called in a decorator and gotten something comfortable but Harry’s mad for New England. He’s an adorable man and a wizard in the carpet business, but he doesn’t come from anyplace really. I mean he doesn’t have anything nice to remember and so he borrows other people’s memories. He’s really more of a Wapshot than you or I.”
“Does he know about Benjamin’s ear?” Coverly asked hoarsely. It was still hard for him to speak.
“My dear, he knows the family history backwards and forwards,” Cousin Mildred said. “He went to England and had the name traced back to Vaincre-Chaud and he got the crest. I’m sure he knows more about Lorenzo than Honora ever did. He bought all these things from your mother and I must say he paid for them generously and I’m not absolutely sure that your mother—I don’t mean to say that your mother was untruthful—but you know that old traveling desk that always used to be full of mice? Well, your mother wrote and said that it belonged to Benjamin Franklin and I don’t ever remember having heard that before.”
This hint or slur at his mother’s veracity made Coverly feel sad and homesick and annoyed with his cousin’s rattling conversational style and the pretentions of simplicity and homeliness in her parlor and he might have said something about this, but the butler refilled his glass again and when he took another gulp of gin the oscillations in his larynx began all over again and he couldn’t speak. Then Mr. Brewer came in—he was much shorter than his wife—a jolly pink-faced man with a quietness that might have been developed to complement the noise she made. “So you’re a Wapshot,” he said to Coverly when they shook hands. “Well, as Mildred may have told you, I’m very much interested in the family. Most of these things come from the homestead in St. Botolphs. That cradle rocked four generations of the Wapshot family. It was made by the village undertaker. That tulip-wood table was made from a tree that stood on the lawn at West Farm. Lafayette rode under this tree in 1815. The portrait over the mantelpiece is of Benjamin Wapshot. This chair belonged to Lorenzo Wapshot. He used it during his two terms in the state legislature.” With this Mr. Brewer sat down in Lorenzo’s chair and at the feel of this relic beneath him a smile of such sensual gratification spread over his face that he might have been squeezed between two pretty women on a sofa. “Coverly has the nose,” Cousin Mildred said. “I’ve told him that I could have picked him out in a crowd. I mean I would have known that he was a Wapshot. It will be so nice having him work for you. I mean it will be so nice having a Wapshot in the firm.”
It was quite some time before Mr. Brewer replied to this but he smiled broadly at Coverly all during the pause and so it was not an anxious silence and during it Coverly decided that he liked Mr. Brewer tremendously. “Of course, you’ll have to start at the bottom,” Mr. Brewer said.
“Oh, yes sir,” Coverly exclaimed; his father’s son. “I’ll do anything sir. I’m willing to do anything.”
“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to do anything,” Mr. Brewer said, tempering Coverly’s earnestness, “but I think we might work out some kind of apprenticeship, so to speak—some arrangement whereby you could decide if you liked the carpet business and the carpet business could decide if it liked you. I think we can work out something. You’ll have to go through personnel research. We do this with everyone. Grafley and Harmer do this for us and I