The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [9]
They saw Mrs. Mortimer Jones chasing up her garden path with a butterfly net. She wore a bulky house dress and a big straw hat.
Beyond the Joneses’ was the Brewsters’ and another sign: HOME-MADE PIE AND CAKES. Mr. Brewster was an invalid and Mrs. Brewster supported her husband and had sent her two sons through college with the money she made as a baker. Her sons had done well but now one of them lived in San Francisco and the other in Detroit and they never came home. They wrote her saying that they planned to come home for Christmas or Easter—that the first trip they made would be the trip to St. Botolphs—but they went to Yosemite National Park, they went to Mexico City, they even went to Paris, but they never, never came home.
At the junction of Hill and River streets the wagon turned right, passing George Humbolt’s, who lived with his mother and who was known as Uncle Peepee Marshmallow. Uncle Peepee came from a line of hardy sailors but he was not as virile as his grandfathers. Could he, through yearning and imagination, weather himself as he would have been weathered by a passage through the Straits of Magellan? Now and then, on summer evenings, poor Uncle Peepee wandered in his bare skin among the river gardens. His neighbors spoke to him with nothing more than impatience. “Go home, Uncle Peepee, and get some clothes on,” they said. He was seldom arrested and would never be sent away for to send him away would reflect on the uniqueness of the place. What could the rest of the world do for him that could not be done in St. Botolphs?
Beyond Uncle Peepee’s the Wapshot house could be seen in the distance and River Street itself, always a romantic picture, seemed more so on this late holiday morning. The air smelled of brine—the east wind was rising—and would presently give to the place a purpose and a luster and a sadness too, for while the ladies admired the houses and the elms they knew that their sons would go away. Why did the young want to go away? Why did the young want to go away?
Mr. Pincher stopped long enough for Mrs. Wapshot to climb down from the wagon. “I shan’t thank you for the ride,” she said, “but I will thank Lady. It was her idea.” This was Mrs. Wapshot’s style, and smiling good-by she stepped gracefully up the walk to her door.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rosalie Young took the road to the shore that morning, unknown to the Wapshots as you are unknown to me, early, early, long before the parade had begun to form in St. Botolphs, way to the south. Her date stopped for her in his old convertible at the rooming house in the city where she lived. Mrs. Shannon, the landlady, watched them drive away through the glass panels of her front door. Youth was a bitter mystery to Mrs. Shannon but today the mystery was deepened by Rosalie’s white coat and the care she had taken in painting her face. If they were going swimming, the landlady thought, she wouldn’t have worn her new white coat, and if they weren’t going swimming why did she carry a towel—one of Mrs. Shannon’s towels? They might have been going to a wedding or an office picnic, a ball game or a visit to relations. It made Mrs. Shannon sad to know that she couldn’t be sure.
But it was always difficult for a stranger to guess Rosalie’s destination, she approached each journey with such great expectations. Sometimes in the autumn her date would tell his parents that he was going hunting and would then take Rosalie—who was under no kind of surveillance once she left the rooming house—out for a night in a tourist cabin on the turnpike, and when he picked her up on those Saturday afternoons she usually wore a chrysanthemum and an oak leaf pinned to her lapel and carried a small suitcase with an Amherst or Harvard label stuck to it as if all the pleasures of a football week end—the game, the tea dance, the faculty reception and the prom—were what she was expecting. She was never disappointed nor was she ever disabused. There was never a point, when she hung up her coat in the tourist cabin while he tried to burn off the damp with a fire, where the difference between this furtive evening and the goal-post snake dance would depress her, nor did she ever seem to reach a point where these differences challenged or altered her expectations. Most of her expectations were collegiate and now, as they found their way out of the city, she began to sing. Popular music passed directly from the radio and the bandstand into some retentive space in her memory, leaving a spoor of cheerful if repetitious and sentimental lyrics.