CHAPTER II

The Wapshot family settled in St. Botolphs in the seventeenth century. I knew them well, I made it my business to examine their affairs, indeed I spent the best years of my life, its very summit, on their chronicle. They were friendly enough. When you met them on the streets of St. Botolphs they behaved as if this chance meeting were something they had anticipated but if you told them anything—told them that the West River had flooded or that Pinkham’s Folly had burned to the ground—they would convey, in a fleeting smile, the fact that you had made a mistake. One did not tell the Wapshots anything. Their resistance to receiving information seemed to be a family trait. They thought well of themselves; they esteemed themselves so healthy that it seemed impossible to them that they would not have known about the flood or the fire, even though they might have been in Europe. I went to school with the boys, raced with Moses at the Travertine Boat Club and played football with them both. They used to cheer one another loudly as if shouting the family name across a playing field would give it some immortality. I spent a lot of pleasant time at their house on River Street and yet what I remember is that it was always in their power to make me feel alone, to make it painfully clear that I was an outsider.

Moses, when I knew him best, had the kind of good looks and presence that sweeps a young man triumphantly through secondary school and disappointingly enough not much farther. He had dark yellow hair and a sallow complexion. Everybody loved Moses, including the village dogs, and he comported himself with the purest, the most impulsive humility. Everybody did not love Coverly. He had a long neck and a disagreeable habit of cracking his knuckles. Sarah Wapshot, their mother, was a fair and slender woman who wore a pince-nez, mispronounced the word “interesting” and claimed to have read Middlemarch sixteen times. She used to leave her books in the garden and their set of George Eliot was foxed and buckled by the rain. Their father, Leander, was one of those Massachusetts Yankees who look forever like a boy although toward the end he looked like a boy who had seen the Gorgon. He had a high color, fine blue eyes and thick white hair. He said “marst” for “mast” and “had” for “hard” and spent the last years of his life running a launch between Travertine and the amusement park in Nangasakit. Leander drowned while swimming. Mrs. Wapshot died two years later and ascended into heaven, where she must have been kept very busy since she was a member of that first generation of American women to enjoy sexual equality. She had exhausted herself in good works. She had founded the Woman’s Club, the Current Events Club, and was a director of the Animal Rescue League and the Lambert Home for Unwed Mothers. As a result of all these activities the house on River Street was always filled with dust, its cut flowers long dead, the clocks stopped. Sarah Wapshot was one of those women whose grasp of vital matters had forced them to consider the simple tasks of a house to be in some way perverted. Coverly married a girl named Betsey Marcus from the Georgia badlands; a counter girl in a Forty-second Street milk bar. At the time of which I’m writing he worked at the Talifer Missile Site. Moses had thrown up his job as a banking apprentice to work for Leopold and Company, a shady brokerage house. He married Melissa Scaddon. Both Moses and Coverly had sons.

Spread them out on some ungiven summer evening on the lawn between their house and the banks of the West River, in the fine hour before dinner. Mrs. Wapshot is giving Lulu, the cook, a lesson in landscape painting. They have set up their easel a little to the right of the group. Mrs. Wapshot is holding a paper frame up to the river view and saying: “Cherchez la motif, Lulu. Cherchez la motif.” Leander is drinking bourbon and admiring the light. For a man who is, in all his ways, plainly provincial, Leander’s life has possessed more latitude than one would have guessed. He once traveled as far west as Cleveland with a Shakespearean company and, a few years later, ascended one hundred and twenty-seven feet in a hot-air balloon at the county fair. He is proud of himself, proud of his sons; pride is some part of the calm and inquisitive gaze he gives to the river banks, thinking that all the rivers of the world are old but that the rivers of his own country seem oldest.

Coverly is burning tent moths out of the apple trees. Moses folds a sail. From the open windows of their house they can hear the Waldstein Sonata being played by their cousin Devereaux, who is practicing for his concert debut in the fall. Devereaux has a harried, dark face and is not quite twelve years old. “Light and shadow, light and shadow,” says old Cousin Honora of the music. She would say the same for Chopin, Stravinsky or Thelonious Monk. She is a redoubtable old woman in her seventies, dressed all in white. (She will switch to black on Labor Day.) Her money has saved the family repeatedly from disgrace or worse and while her own home is on the other side of town she gives this landscape and its cast a proprietary look. The parrot, in his cage by the kitchen door, exclaims: “Julius Caesar, I am thoroughly disgusted.” It is all he ever says.

How orderly, clean and sensible the world seems; above all how light, as if these were the beginnings of a world, a chain of mornings. It is late in the day, late in this history of this part of the world, but this lateness does nothing to eclipse their ardor. Presently there is a cloud of black smoke from the kitchen—the rolls are burning—but it doesn’t really matter. They eat their supper in a cavernous dining room, play a little whist, kiss one another good night and go to sleep to dream.