The Wapshot Scandal

  The Sheffields were shocked and embarrassed. Honora’s voice carried, and passengers at the nearby tables had turned to stare at her. She tried to extricate herself by calling a waiter. “Check,” she called. “Check. Will you please bring me my check?”

  “There is no check, madam,” the waiter said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I forgot,” and limped out of the room.

  She was too angry at the Sheffields to be remorseful, but she was faced again with the fact that her short temper was one of her worst qualities. She wandered around the decks to cool off, admiring the yellowish shroud lights and thinking how like a second set of stars they were. She was standing on the stern deck, watching the wake, when a young man in a pinstriped suit joined her. They had a pleasant conversation about the stars, and then she went to bed and slept soundly.

  In the morning, after a hearty breakfast, Honora arranged for a deck chair on the leeward side. She then settled herself with a novel (Middlemarch) and prepared to relax and enjoy the healthfulness of the sea air. Nine quiet days would conserve her strength and perhaps even lengthen her life. It was the first time that she had ever planned a rest. Sometimes after lunch on a hot day she would shut her eyes for five minutes but never for longer. In the mountain hotels where she went for a change of air she had always been an early riser, a marathon chair rocker and a tireless bridge player. Up until now there had always been things to do, there had always been demands on her time, but now her old heart was weary and she should rest. She pressed her head against the chair cushion and drew the blanket over her legs. She had seen thousands of travel advertisements in which people her age stretched out in deck chairs, watching the sea. She had always wondered what pleasant reveries passed through their minds. Now she waited for this enviable tranquillity to steal over her. She shut her eyes, but she shut them emphatically; she drummed her fingers on the wooden armrest and wriggled her feet. She counseled herself to wait, to wait, to wait for repose to overtake her. She waited perhaps ten minutes before she sat up impatiently and angrily. She had never learned to sit still, and, as with so much else in life, it seemed too late now for her to learn.

  Her sense of life was a sense of motion and embroilments, and even if to move gave her a keen pain in the heart, she had no choice but to move. To be stretched out in a deck chair that early in the day made her feel idle, immoral, worthless and—what was most painful of all—like a ghost, neither living nor dead; like some bitterly unwilling bystander. To tramp around the decks might tire her, but to be stretched out under a blanket like a corpse was a hundred times worse. Life seemed like a chain of brilliant reflections on water, unrelated perhaps to the motion of the water itself but completely absorbing in their color and shine. Might she kill herself with her love of things? Were the forces of life and death identical? And would the thrill of rising on a fine day be the violence that ruptured the vessels of her heart? The need to move, to talk, to make friends and enemies, to involve herself was irresistible, and she struggled to get to her feet, but her lameness, her heaviness, the age of her body and the shape of the deck chair made this impossible. She was stuck. She grasped the armrests and struggled to raise herself, but she fell back helplessly. Again she struggled to get up. She fell back again. There was a sudden sharp pain in her heart, and her face was flushed. Then she thought that she would die in another few minutes—die on her first day at sea, be sewn into an American flag and dropped overboard, her soul descending into Hell.

  But why should she go to Hell? She knew well enough. It was because she had been all her life a food thief. As a child, she had waited and watched until the kitchen was empty and had then opened the massive icebox doors, grabbed a drumstick off the cold chicken and dipped her fingers into the hard sauce. Left alone in the house, she had climbed to the top pantry shelf on an arrangement of chairs and stools and eaten all the lump sugar in the silver bowl. She had stolen candy from the highboy, where it was saved for Sunday. She had, when the cook’s back was turned, ripped a piece of skin off the Thanksgiving turkey before grace was said. She had stolen cold roast potatoes, doughnuts set out to cool, beef bones, lobster claws and wedges of pie. Her vice had not been cured by her maturity, and when, as a young woman, she invited the altar guild to tea, she ate half the sandwiches before they arrived. Even as an old woman leaning on a stick, she had gone down to the pantry in the middle of the night and stuffed herself with cheese and apples. Now the time had come to answer for her gluttony. She turned desperately to the man in the deck chair on her left. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “but I wonder if . . .” He seemed to be asleep. The deck chair on her right was empty. She shut her eyes and called on the angels. A second later, the moment after her prayers had gone up, a young officer stopped to wish her good morning and to extend an invitation from the captain to join him on the bridge. He pulled her out of her chair.

  On the bridge she shot the sun with a hand sextant and reminisced. “When I was nine years old, my Uncle Lorenzo bought me a twelve-foot sloop,” she said, “and for the next three years there wasn’t a fisherman at Travertine I couldn’t outsail.” The captain asked her for cocktails. At lunch the steward seated her with a twelve-year-old Italian boy who spoke no English. They got along by smiling at one another and making signs. In the afternoon she played cards until it was time to go down and get ready for the captain’s cocktail party. She went to her stateroom and took out of her suitcase a rusty curling iron that had served her faithfully for thirty-five years or more. She plugged this into an outlet in the bathroom. All the lights in the cabin went off, and she yanked out the plug.

  A moment later, there were sounds of running in the corridors, and people called confusedly to one another in Italian and English. She hid her curling iron in the bottom of her suitcase and drank a glass of port. She was an honest woman, but she was too stunned, at the moment, to confess to the captain that she had blown a fuse.

  She seemed to have done much more. Opening the door to her stateroom, she found the corridor dark. A steward ran by, carrying a lamp. She closed the door again and looked out of her porthole. Slowly, slowly, the ship was losing way. The high white crest at the bow slacked off.

  In the corridors and on the decks there were more calls and sounds of running. Honora sat miserably on the edge of her berth, having, through her own clumsiness, her own stupidity, halted this great ship in its passage across the sea. What would they do next? Take to the boats and row to some deserted island, rationing their biscuits and water? It was all her fault. The children would suffer. She would give them her water ration and share her biscuits, but she did not think she had the strength to confess. They might put her in the brig or drop her overboard.

  The sea was calm. The ship drifted with the swell, and had begun to roll a little. The voices of men, women and children echoed off the corridors and over the water. “It’s the generators,” she heard someone say. “Both generators have blown.” She began to cry.

  She dried her tears and stood by the porthole, watching the sunset. She could hear the orchestra playing in the ballroom, and she wondered if people were dancing in the dark. Way below her, in the crew’s quarters, someone had put out a fishing line. They must be fishing for cod. She wished she had a line herself, but she didn’t dare ask for one, because they might then discover that she had stopped the ship.

  A few minutes before dark, all the lights went on, there was a cheer from the deck, and the ship took up its course. Honora watched the white crest at the bow form and rise as they headed once more for Europe. She didn’t dare go up to the dining room, and made a supper of Saltines and port wine. Later she took a turn around the decks, and the young man in the pin-striped suit asked if he could join her. She was happy to have his company and the support of his arm. He said that he was traveling to get away from things, and she guessed that he was a successful young businessman who wanted, quite naturally, to see the world before he settled down with a wife and children. She wished, fleetingly, that she h
ad a daughter he could marry. Then she could find him a nice position in St. Botolphs, and they could live in one of the new houses in the east end of the village and come and visit her, with their children, on Sundays. When she tired, she was quite lame. He helped her down to her cabin and said good night. He had excellent manners.

  She looked for him in the dining room the next day, and she wondered if he was traveling in some other class, or belonged to the fast set that didn’t come down for lunch but instead ate sandwiches in the bar. He joined her on deck at dusk that night, when she was waiting for the dinner chimes to ring.

  “I don’t see you in the dining room,” she said.

  “I spend most of my time in my cabin,” he said.

  “But you shouldn’t be so unsociable,” she said. “You ought to make friends—an attractive young man like you.”

  “I don’t think you’d like me,” he said, “if you knew the truth.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “If you’re a member of the working class or something like that, it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I went up to Jaffrey last summer for a rest, you know, and I met this very nice lady and befriended her, and she said the same thing to me. ‘I don’t think you’d like me,’ she said, ‘if you knew who I was.’ So then I asked her who she was, and she said she was a cook. Well, she was a very nice woman, and I continued to play cards with her, and it didn’t make any difference to me that she was a cook. I’m not stuck-up. Mr. Haworth, the ashman, is one of my best friends, and often comes into the house for a cup of tea.”

  “I’m a stowaway,” the young man said.

  She took a deep breath of sea air. The news was a blow. Oh, why should life appear to be a series of mysteries? She had imagined him to be prosperous and successful, and he was merely a lawless outcast. “Where do you sleep?” she asked. “Where do you eat?”

  “I sleep mostly in the heads,” he said. “I haven’t eaten for two days.”

  “But you must eat.”

  “I know,” he said wistfully. “I know. You see, what I thought I might do is to confide in someone—a passenger—and then, if they were friendly, they could order dinner in their stateroom and I could share it.”

  For a second she was wary. He seemed importunate. He had moved too swiftly. Then his stomach gave a loud rumble, and the thought of the hunger pangs he must be suffering annihilated her suspicions. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Gus.”

  “Well, I’m in Cabin 12 on B Deck,” she said. “You come down there in a few minutes, and I’ll see that you get some supper.”

  When she got to her cabin, she rang for the waiter and ordered a six-course meal. The young man arrived and hid in the bathroom. When the table was set with covered dishes, he came out of hiding, and it did her heart good to see him eat.

  When he had finished his dinner, he took out a package of cigarettes and offered it to her as if she was not an old lady but a dear friend and companion. She wondered if, under the beneficial influence of the sea air, her appearance had grown more youthful. She accepted a cigarette and blew out four matches trying to get it lighted. When it was finally ignited, the smoke cut her throat like a rusty razor. She had a paroxysm of coughing, and scattered embers down the front of her dress. He did not seem to notice this loss of dignity—he was telling her the story of his life—and she held the cigarette elegantly between her fingers until the fire died. Smoking a cigarette definitely made her feel younger. He was married, he told her. He had two little children—Heidi and Peter —but his wife ran away with a sailor and took the children to Canada. He didn’t know where they were. He worked as a file clerk for an insurance office and led a life that was so lonely and empty that he had boarded the ship one day during his lunch hour and stayed aboard when she sailed. What was there to lose? He would at least see a little of the world, even if he was sent home in the brig. “I miss the kiddies,” he said. “That’s the main thing. You know what I did last Christmas? I bought one of those little trees you get in the five-and-ten, and I decorated it, in this room where I live, and I bought presents for the kiddies, and then on Christmas Day I just pretended that they came to see me. Of course, it was all make-believe, but I opened the presents and everything, just as if they were there.”

  After dinner Honora taught him to play backgammon. He picked up the game very quickly, she thought, and was a remarkably intelligent young man. It seemed a great shame to her that he should waste his youth and his intelligence in loneliness, sorrow and boredom. He was not handsome; his face was too changeable, and his grin was a little foolish. But he was really just a boy, she thought, and with experience and kindness his face would change. They played backgammon until eleven, and, to tell the truth, she had not felt so happy, or at least at ease, since she had begun her travels. When they said good night, he lingered at the door, and seemed, with his inward and foolish—or was it sly?—grin, to be implying that she might let him sleep in the spare berth in her cabin. Enough was enough, and she closed the door in his face.

  He did not appear the next day, and she wondered where in the great ship he was hidden, hungry and alone. The bouillon and sandwiches that were passed on the promenade deck only reminded her of the cruel inequalities of life, and she did not enjoy her lunch. She spent most of the afternoon in her cabin, in case he should need her help. Just before the dinner chimes rang, there was a soft knock at the door, and he came in. After dinner she got out the backgammon board, but he seemed restless, and she won every game. She pointed out that he needed a haircut, and when he said that he didn’t have any money, she gave him five dollars. He said good night at ten, and she invited him to return the next evening for his dinner.

  He didn’t come. When the dinner chimes rang at seven, she called a waiter and ordered dinner so that it would be ready for him, but he didn’t come. She was sure then that he had been caught and thrown into the brig, and she thought of going to the captain, as the young man’s advocate, and explaining the loneliness and the emptiness of his life. She decided, however, not to act until morning, and she went to bed. In the morning, as she was admiring the ocean, she saw him on the main deck, laughing and talking with Mrs. Sheffield.

  She was indignant. She was jealous, although she tried to rationalize this weakening of her position as a sensible fear that if he confided in Mrs. Sheffield, Mrs. Sheffield would betray him. He saw Honora, clearly enough—he waved to her—but he went on talking gaily with Mrs. Sheffield. Honora was angry. She even seemed to be in pain, stripped as she was of that sense of ease and comfort she had enjoyed while they played backgammon in her cabin, stripped of a sense of her unique usefulness, her indispensability. She went around the bow to the leeward side of the ship, to admire the waves from there. She noticed that, with her feelings unsettled, the massive, agate-colored seas, veined with white, seemed mightier. She heard footsteps on the deck and wondered was it he? Had he come at last, to apologize for talking with Mrs. Sheffield and to thank her for her generosity? She was sure of one thing: Mrs. Sheffield wouldn’t take a stowaway into her cabin and give him supper. The footsteps passed, and so did some others, but the intenseness of her anticipation did not. Would he never come? Then someone stopped at her back and said, “Good morning, darling.”

  “Don’t call me ‘darling,’” she said, turning around.

  “But you are ‘darling’ to me.”

  “You haven’t got your hair cut.”

  “I lost your money on the horse races.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “A nice man in the bar treated me to sandwiches and drinks.”

  “What were you telling Mrs. Sheffield?”

  “I wasn’t telling her anything. She was telling me about her orlon wardrobe, but she’s asked me to have drinks with them before lunch.”

  “Very well, then, they can give you lunch.”

  “But they don’t know I’m a stowaway, darling. You’re the only one who knows. I wou
ldn’t trust anyone else.”

  “Well, if you want some lunch,” she said, “I might be in my cabin at noon.”

  “You’d better make it half-past one or two. I don’t know when I’ll get away from the Sheffields,” he said, and walked off.

  At half-past twelve she went down to her cabin to wait for him—for, like many of the old, she traveled with her clocks fifteen or twenty minutes fast, and was a half-hour early for all her engagements, sitting empty-handed in waiting rooms and lobbies and corridors, feeling quite clearly that her time was running out. He blew in a little after two, and he refused at first to hide in the bathroom. “If you want me to go to the captain and tell him there’s a stowaway aboard, I’ll do it,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll do it. There’s no point in having the news percolate up to him from the kitchens, and it will if the waiter sees you here.” In the end, he hid in the bathroom and she ordered lunch. After lunch he stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. She sat in a chair, watching him, tapping her foot on the carpet and drumming her nails on the arm of her chair. He snored. He muttered in his sleep.

  She saw then that he was not young. His face was lined and sallow; there was gray in his hair. She saw that his youthfulness was a ruse, an imposture calculated to appeal to some old fool like herself, although she was doubtless not the only dupe. Asleep, he looked aged, sinful and cunning, and she felt that his story of the two children and the lonely Christmas had been a lie. There was no innocence in him beyond the naïveness with which he would count upon preying on the lonely. He seemed a fraud, a shabby fraud, and yet she could not inform on him; she could not even bring herself to wake him. He slept until four, woke, pierced all of her skepticism with one of his most youthful and engaging grins, said that he was late and went out. The next time she saw him, it was three in the morning and he was taking her money belt out from under the carpet.