He threw his paper cup into a can, and finishing his circuit of the carnival saw, walking through the deep grass smell and the summer gloom, a group, a family perhaps, in which there was a woman wearing a yellow skirt. The color of the skirt set up in him a yearning, a pang that put his teeth on edge, and he remembered that he had once loved a girl who had a skirt of the same color although he could not remember her name.
“I want a specialist, a brain specialist,” Moses heard his friend shouting when he returned to the hospital. “Charter a plane if it’s necessary. Money is no consideration. If he wants a consultant, tell him to bring a consultant. Yes. Yes.” He was using a telephone in an office across the hall from the waiting room that had been given by the Watkins family and where it had grown dark without anyone’s bothering to turn on a lamp. Only a few lights seemed to burn in the hospital at all. The bereaved and elderly lover sat among covered typewriters and adding machines and when he had finished his conversation he looked up to Moses and either because the light caught his spectacles or because his mood had changed, he seemed very officious. “I want you to consider yourself on my payroll as of this morning,” he said to Moses. “If you have other engagements to fulfill you can cancel them, confident that I will more than make this worth your while. The hospital has given me a room for the night and I want you to go back to the inn and get my toilet articles. I’ve made out a list.” he said, passing such a list to Moses. “Estimate your mileage and keep track of the time and I will see that you are amply reimbursed.” Then he picked up the telephone and asked for long distance and Moses stepped out into the dark hall.
He had nothing better to do and he was glad to drive back to the inn, not so much from a commendable sense of charity and helpfulness as from his desire to draw into a sensible perspective the events of the last few hours. Back at the inn he gave the manager—like a true Wapshot—the most meager account of what had happened. “She was in an accident,” he said. He went upstairs to the room that had been occupied by poor Mr. Cutter and his paramour. All the things on the list were easy to find—everything but a bottle of rye but after looking in the medicine cabinet and behind the books in the shelves he looked under the bed and found a well-stocked bar. He had a drink of Scotch himself in a tooth-brush glass. Back at the hospital Mr. Cutter was still on the telephone. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Now you get some sleep, my boy,” he said mingling paternalism with officiousness. “If you don’t have a place, go back to the inn and ask them to give you a room. Report back here at nine o’clock. Remember that money is no consideration. You’re on my payroll.” Moses went back to the bridle path to get his fishing tackle, which he found unharmed except for a fall of dew, and spent the night in his rented shack.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next day at dusk, Mr. Cutter’s paramour regained consciousness, and in the morning Moses arranged to have his car driven to New York and flew to the city with Mr. Cutter and the patient in a chartered ambulance plane. He was not quite sure where he stood on Mr. Cutter’s payroll, but he had nothing better to do. He went to Coverly’s address as soon as he got to New York, not knowing that his brother was on Island 93. Betsey was there and he took her out to dinner. She was not the girl he would have married, but he found her likable enough. A day or so later he had an interview with Mr. Cutter and a few days later he was enrolled in the Fiduciary Trust Company Bond School at a better salary than he had received in Washington and with a more brilliant future. The letter Leander wrote to him in Washington lay on the hall floor of his apartment and it went like this:
“Slight mishap to Topaze on 30th. All hands removed with dry feet. Sank in channel and was removed as navigational hazard by Coast Guard on Tues. Beached and patched at Mansion House. She’s at your mooring now (Tern’s) and has been at same since mishap. Afloat but not seaworthy. Beecher estimates cost of repairs at $400. Till empty here and Honora very unco-operative. Can you help? Please try my son and see what you can do. These are d——d difficult days for your old father.
“Topaze gone, how will I fare? Geezer as old as me begins to cherish his time on this earth but with Topaze gone days pass without purpose, meaning, color, form, appetite, glory, squalor, regret, desire, pleasure or pain. Dusk. Dawn. All the same. Feel hopeful sometimes in early morning but soon discouraged. Sole excitment is to listen to horse races on radio. If I had a stake could quickly recoup price to repair Topaze. Lack even small sum for respectable bet.
“Was generous giver myself. On several occasions gave large sums to needy strangers. One-hundred-dollar bill to cab starter at Parker House. Fifty dollars to old lady selling lavender at Park Street Church. Eighty dollars to stranger in restaurant who claimed son needed operation. Other donations forgotten. Cast bread upon waters, so to speak. No refund as of today. Tasteless to remind you but never spared the horses with family. Extra suit of sail for Tern. Three hundred dollars for dahlia bulbs. English shoes, mushrooms, hothouse posies, boat club dues and groaning board consumed much of windward anchor.
“Try to help old father if within means. If not, feel out acquaintances. There is one easy spender in every group of men. Sometimes gambler. Topaze good investment. Has shown substantial profit for every season, but one. Grand business expected in Nangasakit this year. Good chance of returning loan by August. Regret hand-kerchief tone of letter. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.”
The mooring that Leander mentioned was a mushroom anchor and chain in the river at the foot of the garden, and the old launch could be seen from there. Mrs. Wapshot stared at the Topaze one afternoon when she was picking sage. She felt a stirring in her mind and her body that might mean that she was going to have a vision. Now in fact so many of Mrs. Wapshot’s imaginings had come true that she was entitled to call them visions. Years and years ago, when she was walking by Christ Church, some force of otherness seemed to stop her by the vacant lot that adjoined the church and she had a vision of a parish house—red brick with small-paned casement windows and a neat lawn. She had begun her agitation for a parish house that afternoon and a year and a half later her vision—brick for brick—was a reality. She had dreamed up horse troughs, good works and pleasant journeys to have them materialize oftener than not. Now, coming back from the garden with a bouquet of sage, she looked down the path to the river where the Topaze lay at her mooring.
It was a gray afternoon along the coast, but not an unexciting one—there might be a storm, and the prospect seemed to please her, as if she held on her tongue, like a peppercorn, the flavor of the old port and the stormy dusk. The air was salty and she could hear the sea breaking at Travertine. The Topaze was dark, of course, dark and she seemed unsalvageable in that light—one of those hulks that we see moored by coal yards in city rivers, kept afloat through some misguided tenderness or hope, wearing sometimes a For Sale sign and sometimes the last habitation of some crazy old hermit whose lair is pasted up with pearly-skinned and spread-legged beauties and whose teeth are pulled. The first thing that crossed her mind when she saw the dark and empty ship was that she would not sail again. She would not cross the bay again. Then Mrs. Wapshot had her vision. She saw the ship berthed at the garden wharf, her hull shining with fresh paint and her cabin full of light. She saw, by turning her head, a dozen or more cars parked in the cornfield. She even saw that some of them had out-of-state license plates. She saw a sign nailed to the elm by the path: VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND. In her mind she took the path down the garden and crossed the wharf to board the ship. Her cabin was all new paint (the life preservers were gone), and lamps burned on many small tables, illuminating a cargo of ash trays, cigarette lighters, playing-card cases, wire arrangements for holding flowers, vases, embroidery, hand-painted drinking glasses and cigarette boxes that played “Tales from Vienna Woods” when you opened them. Her vision was in detail and splendidly lighted and warm as well, for she saw a Franklin stove at one end of the cabin with a fire in the grate and the perfume of wood smoke mingled with the smell of sachets, Japanese linen and here and there the smell of tallow from a lighted candle. The S.S. Topaze, she thought again, The Only Floating Gift Shoppe in New England, and then she let the stormy dusk reclaim the dark ship and went very happily into the house.