The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [55]
“Well, my name is Coverly Wapshot,” Coverly said, “and I come from St. Botolphs. I guess you must know where that is. All the Wapshots live there. My great-grandfather was Benjamin Wapshot. My grandfather was Aaron. My mother’s family are Coverlys and …”
“Well I’m not as interested in your genealogy,” the doctor said, “as I am in your emotional make-up.” It was an interruption, but it was a very courteous and friendly one. “Do you know what is meant by anxiety? Do you have any feelings of anxiety? Is there anything in your family, in your background that would incline you to anxiety?”
“Yes sir,” Coverly said. “My father’s very anxious about fire. He’s awfully afraid of burning to death.”
“How do you know this?”
“Well, he’s got this rig up in his room,” Coverly said. “He’s got this suit of clothes—underwear and everything—hanging up beside his bed so in case of fire he can get dressed and out of the house in a minute. And he’s got buckets full of sand and water in all the hallways and the number of the fire department is painted on the wall by the telephone and on rainy days when he isn’t working—sometimes he doesn’t work on rainy days—he spends most of the day going around the house sniffing. He thinks he smells smoke and sometimes it seems to me that he spends nearly a whole day going from room to room sniffing.”
“Does your mother share this anxiety?” the doctor asked.
“No sir,” Coverly said. “My mother loves fires. But she’s anxious about something else. She’s afraid of crowds. I mean she’s afraid of being trapped. Sometimes on the Christmas holidays I’d go into the city with her and when she got into a crowd in one of those big stores she’d nearly have a fit. She’d get pale and gasp for breath. She’d pant. It was terrible. Well then she’d grab hold of my hand and drag me out of there and go up some side street where there wasn’t anybody and sometimes it would be five or ten minutes before she got her breath back. In any place where my mother felt she was confined she’d get very uneasy. In the movies, for instance—if anybody in the movies was sent to jail or locked up in some small place why my mother would grab her hat and her purse and run out of that theater before you could say Jack Robinson. I used to have to sprint to keep up with her.”
“Would you say that your parents were happy together?”
“Well, I really never thought of it that way,” Coverly said. “They’re married and they’re my parents and I guess they take the lean with the fat like everybody else but there’s one thing she used to tell me that left an impression on me.”
“What was that?”
“Well, whenever I had a good time with Father—whenever he took me out on the boat or something—she always seemed to be waiting for me when we got home with this story. Well, it was about, it was about how I came to be, I suppose you’d say. My father was working for the table-silver company at the time and they went into the city for some kind of banquet. Well, my mother had some cocktails and it was snowing and they had to spend the night in a hotel and one thing led to another but it seems that after this my father didn’t want me to be born.”
“Did your mother tell you this?”
“Oh, yes. She told me lots of times. She told me I shouldn’t trust him because he wanted to kill me. She said he had this abortionist come out to the house and that if it hadn