The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [81]
Leander blew the warning whistle for his last voyage. From the wheelhouse he could see the rain falling onto the roller-coaster. He saw Charlie Matterson and his twin brother throw a tarpaulin over the last section of cars to come down. The merry-go-round was still turning. He saw the passengers in one of the boats of the Red Mill look up in surprise, as they were debouched from the mouth of a plaster-of-Paris ogre, to find it raining. He saw a young man gaily cover his girl’s head with a newspaper. He saw people in the cottages up on the bluff lighting their kerosene lamps. He thought how sad it was that on this, their first trip away from home in so many years, it should rain. There were no stoves or fireplaces in the cottages. There was no escape from the damp and the doleful sounds of the rain for the matchboard walls of the cottages, salt soaked and tight, would resound when you touched them like the skin of a drum and you would hardly have settled down to a two-handed game of whist before the roof began to leak. There would be a leak in the kitchen and another over the card table and another over the bed. The vacationers could wait for the mailman, but who would write to them?—and they couldn’t write letters themselves for all their envelopes would be stuck together. Only the lovers, their bedposts jingling loudly and merrily, would be spared this gloom. On the beach Leander saw the last parties surrender, calling to one another to remember the blanket, remember the bottle opener, remember the thermos and the picnic basket, until there was no one left but an old man who liked to swim in the rain and a young man who liked to walk in the rain and whose head was full of Swinburne and whose nickname was Bananas. Leander saw the Japanese, who sold fans and back scratchers, take in his silk and paper lanterns. He saw people standing in restaurant doorways and waitresses at windows. A waiter took in the naked tables of the Pergola Cantonese Restaurant and he saw a hand part some window curtains in the Nangasakit House, but he couldn’t see the face that looked out. He saw how the waves, that had been riding in briskly, subsided in the rain so that they barely lapped the shore. The sea was still. Then the old man, who was standing waist deep in the water, suddenly turned and struggled up the beach, feeling the inward pull of the storm sea. He saw the gladness with which Bananas was watching these signs of danger. Then the sea, with a roar of stone, drew out beyond the line of sand to the stony beginnings of the harbor bottom, forming a wave that, when it broke (the first of a barrage that would sound all night), shook the beach and scooted up after the heels of the old man. He took off the lines and blew the whistle. Spinet started to play “Jingle Bells” as the Topaze went out to sea.
There was a channel at Nangasakit—a granite breakwater bearded with sea grass and a bell buoy rocking in the southwest sea, white foam spilling over the float as it tipped. The bell, Leander knew, could on this wind be heard inland. It could be heard by the card players rearranging pots and pans under their leaky roof, by the old ladies in the Nangasakit House and even by the lovers above the merry jingling of their bedposts. It was the only bell Leander had ever heard in his dreams. He loved all bells: dinner bells, table bells, doorbells, the bell from Antwerp and the bell from Altoona had all heartened and consoled him but this was the only bell that chimed on the dark side of his mind. Now the charming music fell astern, fainter and fainter, lost in the creaking of the old hull and the noise of seas breaking against her bow. Out in the bay it was rough.
She took the waves head on, like an old rocking horse. Waves broke over the glass of the wheelhouse so that Leander had to keep one hand on the windshield wiper to see. The water pouring down the decks began to come in at the cabin. It was dirty weather. Leander thought of the passengers