Now the love song of Coverly Wapshot was slapstick and vainglorious and at the time of which I’m writing he had developed an unfortunate habit of talking like a Chinese fortune cookie. “Time cures all things,” he would say or, “The poor man goes before the thief.” In addition to his habit of cracking his knuckles he had acquired an even more irritating habit of nervously clearing his throat. At regular intervals he would emit from his larynx a reflective, apologetic, complaining and irresolute noise. “Grrgrum,” he would say to himself as he washed the dishes. “Arhum, arrhum, grrumph,” he would say as if these noises subtly expressed his discontents. He was the sort of man who at the PR conventions he sometimes attended always dropped his name tag (Hello! I’m Coverly Wapshot!) into the wastebasket along with the white carnation that was usually given to delegates. He seemed to feel that he lived in a small town where everyone would know who he was. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Betsey was one of those women who, like the heroines in old legends, could turn herself from a hag into a beauty and back into a hag again so swiftly that Coverly was kept jumping.
Coverly, like some despot, was given to the capricious rearrangement of the facts in his history. He would decide cheerfully and hopefully that what had happened had not happened although he never went so far as to claim that what had not happened had happened. That what had happened had not happened was a refrain in his love song as common as those lyrical stanzas celebrating erotic bliss. Now Betsey was a complaining woman or, as Coverly would put it, Betsey was not a complaining woman. She had been unhappy at Remsen and had wanted to be transferred to Canaveral, where she saw herself sitting on a white beach, counting the wild waves and making eyes at a lifeguard. If Betsey had been painted she would have been painted against the landscapes of northern Georgia where she had spent her mysterious childhood. There would be razorback hogs, a dying chinaberry tree, a frame house that needed paint and as far as the eye could see acres of swept red dirt that would turn slick and wash off in the lightest rains. There was not enough topsoil in that part of the state to fill a bait can. Coverly had seen this landscape fleetingly from the train window and of her past he only knew that she had a sister named Caroline. “I was so disappointed in that girl Caroline,” Betsey said. “She was my only, only sister and I just wanted to enjoy a real sisterhood with her but I was disappointed. When I was working in the five-and-dime I gave her all my salary for her trousseau but when she got married she just went away from Bambridge and she never once wrote me or told me her whereabouts in any way, shape or form.” Then Caroline began to write Betsey and there was a
What had not happened or what might possibly have happened and been overlooked by Coverly’s way of thinking began with Caroline’s visit. She arrived on a Thursday. All the windows were lighted when Coverly came home from work and when he stepped into the house he could hear their voices from the living room. Betsey seemed happy for the first time in months and met him with a kiss. Caroline looked up at him and smiled, the color and cast of her eyes concealed by a large pair of spectacles that reflected the room. She was not a heavy woman but she sat like a heavy woman, her legs wide apart and her arms hung gracelessly between them. She was wearing a traveling costume—blue pumps that pinched her feet and a tight blue skirt that was rucked and seamed like a skin. Her smile was sweet and slow and she got to her feet and gave Coverly a wet kiss. “Why, he looks just like Harvey,” she said. “Harvey was this boy in Bambridge and you look just like him. He was a nice-looking boy. His family had a nice house on Spartacus Street.”
“They didn’t live on Spartacus Street,” Betsey said. “They used to live on Thompson Avenue.”
“They lived on Spartacus Street until his father got the Buick agency,” Caroline said. “Then they moved to Thompson Avenue.”
“I thought they always lived on Thompson Avenue,” Betsey said.
“It was that other boy that used to live on Thompson Avenue,” Caroline said. “The one that had curly hair and crooked teeth.”
