The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [71]
She asked Coverly if he wanted anything more. It was nearly time to close and Coverly asked if he could walk her home.
“You sure come from a small town, all right,” she said. “Anybody could tell you come from a small town, asking if you can walk me home, but it so happens I just live five blocks from here and I do walk home and I don’t guess it would do me any harm, providing you don’t get fresh. I’ve had too much of freshness. You’ve got to promise that you won’t be fresh.”
“I promise,” Coverly said.
She talked on and on while she made the preparations for closing the store and when these were finished she put on a hat and coat and stepped with Coverly out into the rain. He was delighted with her company. What a citizen of New York, he thought—walking a counter girl home in the rain. As they approached her house she reminded him of his promise not to be fresh and he didn’t ask to come up, but he asked her to have dinner with him some night. “Well, I’d adore to,” she said. “Sunday’s my only night off but if Sunday’s all right with you I’d adore to have dinner with you on Sunday night. There’s this nice Italian restaurant right around the corner we can go to—I’ve never been there, but this former girl friend of mine told me it was very good—excellent cooking, and if you could pick me up at around seven …” Coverly watched her walk through the lighted hall to the inner door, a thin girl and not a very graceful one, feeling, as surely as the swan recognizes its mate, that he was in love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Northeaster (Leander wrote). Wind backed from SW. 3rd equinoctial disturbance of season. All in love is not larky and fractious.—In the attic the broken harp-string music of water dropping into pails and pans had begun and, feeling chilled and exposed to the somber view of the river in the rain, he put away his papers and went down the stairs. Sarah was in Travertine. Lulu was away. He went into the back parlor, where he was completely absorbed in building and lighting a fire—in watching how it caught, in sniffing the perfume of clean wood and feeling the heat as it reached his hands and then went through his clothes. When he was warm he went to the window to see the dark day. He was surprised to see a car turn in the gates and come up the drive. It was one of the old sedans from the taxi stand at the station.
The car stopped at the side door and he saw a woman lean forward and talk to the driver. He did not recognize the passenger—she was plain and gray-haired—and he guessed that she was one of Sarah’s friends. He watched her from the window. She opened the door of the car and walked up, through the thin curtain of rain that fell from the broken gutters, to the door. Leander was glad for any company and he went down the hall and opened the door before she rang.
He saw a very plain woman, her coat darkened at the shoulders with rain. Her face was long, her hat was trimmed gaily with hard white feathers, like the feathers that are used to balance badminton birds, and her coat was worn. Leander had seen, he thought, hundreds of her kind. They were the imprimatur of New England. Dutiful, pious and hardy, they seemed to have patterned their spirits after the weeds that grow in high pastures. They were the women, Leander thought, after whom the dirty boats of the mackerel fleet were named: Alice, Esther, Agnes, Maybelle and Ruth. That there should be feathers in her hat, that an ugly pin made of seashells should be pinned to her flat breast, that there should be anything feminine, any ornament on such a discouraging figure, seemed to Leander touching.