John Cheever - The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics)

JOHN CHEEVER

The Wapshot
Chronicle

Contents

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781409088899

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 1998

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Copyright John Cheever 1954, 1956, 1957

John Cheever has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by Harper in 1957 First published by Vintage in 1998

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099275275

To M with love:
and with best wishes to practically everybody else I know

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle , won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.

ALSO BY JOHN CHEEVER

Novels

The Wapshot Scandal

Falconer

Bullet Park

Oh What a Paradise It Seems

Short Stories

The Way Some People Live

The Enormous Radio

The Housebreaker of Shady Hill

Some People, Places and Things

That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel

The Brigadier and the Golf Widow

The World of Apples

The Stories of John Cheever

Journals

The Journals

Letters

The Letters of John Cheever (edited by Benjamin Cheever)

Four chapters of this book appeared in a slightly different form in The New Yorker magazine and the author is indebted to the editors of The New Yorker .

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town. It had been an inland port in the great days of the Massachusetts sailing fleets and now it was left with a factory that manufactured table silver and a few other small industries. The natives did not consider that it had diminished much in size or importance, but the long roster of the Civil War dead, bolted to the cannon on the green, was a reminder of how populous the village had been in the 1860s. St. Botolphs would never muster as many soldiers again. The green was shaded by a few great elms and loosely enclosed by a square of store fronts. The Cartwright Block, which made the western wall of the square, had along the front of its second story a row of lancet windows, as delicate and reproachful as the windows of a church. Behind these windows were the offices of the Eastern Star, Dr. Bulstrode the dentist, the telephone company and the insurance agent. The smells of these officesthe smell of dental preparations, floor oil, spittoons and coal gasmingled in the downstairs hallway like an aroma of the past. In a drilling autumn rain, in a world of much change, the green at St. Botolphs conveyed an impression of unusual permanence. On Independence Day in the morning, when the parade had begun to form, the place looked prosperous and festive.

The two Wapshot boysMoses and Coverlysat on a lawn on Water Street watching the floats arrive. The parade mixed spiritual and commercial themes freely and near the Spirit of 76 was an old delivery wagon with a sign saying: GET YOUR FRESH FISH FROM MR. HIRAM. The wheels of the wagon, the wheels of every vehicle in the parade were decorated with red, white and blue crepe paper and there was bunting everywhere. The front of the Cartwright Block was festooned with bunting. It hung in folds over the front of the bank and floated from all the trucks and wagons.

The Wapshot boys had been up since four; they were sleepy and sitting in the hot sun they seemed to have outlived the holiday. Moses had burned his hand on a salute. Coverly had lost his eyebrows in another explosion. They lived on a farm two miles below the village and had canoed upriver before dawn when the night air made the water of the river feel tepid as it rose around the canoe paddle and over their hands. They had forced a window of Christ Church as they always did and had rung the bell, waking a thousand songbirds, many villagers and every dog within the town limits including the Pluzinskis bloodhound miles away on Hill Street. Its only the Wapshot boys. Moses had heard a voice from the dark window of the parsonage. Git back to sleep. Coverly was sixteen or seventeen thenfair like his brother but long necked and with a ministerial dip to his head and a bad habit of cracking his knuckles. He had an alert and a sentimental mind and worried about the health of Mr. Hirams cart horse and looked sadly at the inmates of the Sailors Homefifteen or twenty very old men who sat on benches in a truck and looked unconscionably tired. Moses was in college and in the last year he had reached the summit of his physical maturity and had emerged with the gift of judicious and tranquil self-admiration. Now, at ten oclock, the boys sat on the grass waiting for their mother to take her place on the Womans Club float.

Mrs. Wapshot had founded the Womans Club in St. Botolphs and this moment was commemorated in the parade each year. Coverly could not remember a Fourth of July when his mother had not appeared in her role as founder. The float was simple. An Oriental rug was spread over the floor of a truck or wagon. The six or seven charter members sat in folding chairs, facing the rear of the truck. Mrs. Wapshot stood at a lectern, wearing a hat, sipping now and then from a glass of water, smiling sadly at the charter members or at some old friend she recognized along the route. Thus above the heads of the crowd, jarred a little by the motion of the truck or wagon, exactly like those religious images that are carried through the streets of Bostons north end in the autumn to quiet great storms at sea, Mrs. Wapshot appeared each year to her friends and neighbors, and it was fitting that she should be drawn through the streets for there was no one in the village who had had more of a hand in its enlightenment. It was she who had organized a committee to raise money for a new parish house for Christ Church. It was she who had raised a fund for the granite horse trough at the corner and who, when the horse trough became obsolete, had had it planted with geraniums and petunias. The new high school on the hill, the new firehouse, the new traffic lights, the war memorialyes, yeseven the clean public toilets in the railroad station by the river were the fruit of Mrs. Wapshots genius. She must have been gratified as she traveled through the square.