1Betsey was in the hospital for two days and then she came home but she didn’t seem to get better. She was unhappy as well as sick and Coverly felt that she was pushing some kind of stone that had nothing to do with their immediate life—or even with her miscarriage—but with some time in her past. He cooked her supper each night when he came home from the laboratory and talked or tried to talk with her. When she had been in bed for two weeks or longer he asked her if he could call the doctor. “Don’t you dare call the doctor,” Betsey said. “Don’t you dare call the doctor. The only reason you want to call the doctor is to have him come and prove that there isn’t anything wrong with me. You just want to embarrass me. It’s just meanness.” She began to cry but when he sat on the edge of the bed she turned away from him. “I’ll cook the supper,” he said. “Well, don’t cook anything for me,” Betsey said. “I’m too sick to eat.”

2When Coverly stepped into the dark kitchen he could see into the Frascatis’ lighted kitchen where Mr. Frascati was drinking wine and patting his wife on the rump as she went between the stove and the table. He slapped the Venetian blinds shut and, finding some frozen food, cooked it after his fashion, which was not much. He put Betsey’s supper onto a tray and took it into her room. Fretfully she worked herself up to a sitting position in the pillows and let him put the tray on her lap but when he went back into the kitchen she called after him, “Aren’t you going to eat with me? Don’t you want to eat with me? Don’t you even want to look at me?” He took his plate into the bedroom and ate off the dressing table, telling her the news of the laboratory. The long tape he had been working on would be done in three days. He had a new boss named Pancras. He brought Betsey a dish of ice cream and washed up and walked down to the shopping center to buy her some mystery stories at a drugstore. He slept on the sofa, covered with an overcoat and feeling sad and lewd.

3Betsey remained in bed another week and seemed more and more unhappy. “There’s a new doctor at the laboratory, Betsey,” Coverly said one night. “His name is Blennar. I’ve seen him in the cafeteria. He’s a nice-looking fellow. He’s a sort of marriage counselor, and I thought …”

4“I don’t want to hear about him,” Betsey said.

5“But I want you to hear about him, Betsey. I want you to talk with Dr. Blennar. I think he might help us. We’ll go together. Or you could go alone. If you could tell him your troubles …”

6“Why should I tell him my troubles? I know what my troubles are. I hate this house. I hate this place, this Remsen Park.”

7“If you talked with Dr. Blennar …”

8“Is he a psychiatrist?”

9“Yes.”

10“You want to prove that I’m crazy, don’t you?”

11“No, Betsey.”

12“Psychiatrists are for crazy people. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Then she got out of bed and went into the living room. “Oh, I’m sick of you, sick of your earnest damned ways, sick of the way you stretch your neck and crack your knuckles and sick of your old father with his dirty letters asking is there any news, is there any good news, is there any news. I’m sick of Wapshots and I don’t give a damn who knows it.” Then she went into the kitchen and came out with the blue dishes that Sarah had sent them from West Farm and began to break them on the floor. Coverly went out of the living room on to the back steps but Betsey followed him and broke the rest of the dishes out there.

13On the day after they were married they had gone out to sea in a steamer of about the same vintage as the Topaze but a good deal bigger. It was a fine day at sea, mild and fair and with a haze suspended all around them so that, but for the wake rolled away at their stern, their sense of direction and their sense of time were obscured. They walked around the decks, hand in hand, finding in the faces of the other passengers great kindliness and humor. They went from the bow down to the shelter of the stern where they could feel the screw thumping underfoot and where many warm winds from the galley and the engine room blew around them and they could see the gulls, hitchhiking their way out to Portugal. They did not raise the island—it was too hazy—and warped in by the lonely clangor of sea bells they saw the place—steeples and cottages and two boys playing catch on a beach—rise up around them through the mist.

14The cottage was far away—a place that belonged to Leander’s time—a huddle of twelve or sixteen cottages, so awry and weather-faded that they might have seemed thrown up to accommodate the victims of some disaster had you not known that they had been built for those people who make a pilgrimage each summer to the sea. The house they went to was like West Farm, a human burrow or habitation that had yielded at every point to the crotchets and meanderings of a growing family. They put down their bags and undressed for a swim.

15It was out of season, early or late, and the inn and the gift shop were under lock and key and they went down the path, hand in hand, as bare as the day they were born with no thought of covering themselves, down the path, dust and in some place ashes and then fine sand like the finest sugar and crusty—it would set your teeth on edge—down onto the coarser sand, wet from the high tide and the sea, ringing then with the music of slammed doors. There was a rock offshore and Betsey swam for this, Coverly following her through the rich, medicinal broths of the North Atlantic. She sat naked on the rock when he approached her, combing her hair with her fingers, and when he climbed up on the rock she dived back into the sea and he followed her to shore.

16Then he could have roared with joy, kicked up his heels in a jig and sung a loud tune, but he walked instead along the edge of the sea picking up skimmers and firing them out to beyond the surf where they skittered sometimes and sometimes sank. And then a great sadness of contentment seemed to envelop him—a joy so fine that it gently warmed his skin and bones like the first fires of autumn—and going back to her then, still picking skimmers and firing them, slowly, for there was no rush, and kneeling beside her, he covered her mouth with his and her body with him and then—his body raked and exalted—he seemed to see a searing vision of some golden age that bloomed in his mind until he fell asleep.

17The next night when Coverly came home, Betsey had gone. The only message she left him was their canceled savings-account bank-book. He wandered around the house in the dim light. There was nothing here that she had not touched or rearranged, marked with her person and her tastes, and in the dusty light he seemed to feel a premonition of death, he seemed to hear Betsey’s voice. He put on a hat and took a walk. But Remsen Park was not much of a place to walk in. Most of its evening sounds were mechanized and the only woods was a little strip on the far side of the army camp and Coverly went there. When he thought of Betsey he thought of her against scenes of travel—trains and platforms and hotels and asking strangers for help with her bags—and he felt great love and pity. What he could not understand was the heaviness of his emotional investment in a situation that no longer existed. Making a circle around the woods and coming back through the army camp and seeing the houses of Remsen Park he felt a great homesickness for St. Botolphs—for a place whose streets were as excursive and crooked as the human mind, for water shining through trees, human sounds at evening, even Uncle Peepee pushing through the privet in his bare skin. It was a long walk, it was past midnight when he got back, and he threw himself naked onto their marriage bed that still held the fragrance of her skin and dreamed about West Farm.

18Now the world is full of distractions—lovely women, music, French movies, bowling alleys and bars—but Coverly lacked the vitality or the imagination to distract himself. He went to work in the morning. He came home at dark, bringing a frozen dinner which he thawed and ate out of the pot. His reality seemed assailed or contested; his gifts for hopefulness seemed damaged or destroyed. There is a parochialism to some kinds of misery—a geographical remoteness like the life led by a grade-crossing tender—a point where life is lived or endured at the minimum of energy and perception and where most of the world appears to pass swiftly by like passengers on the gorgeous trains of the Santa Fe. Such a life has its compensations—solitaire and star-wishing—but it is a life stripped of friendship, association, love and even the practicable hope of escape. Coverly sank into this emotional hermitage and then there was a letter from Betsey.

19“Sweetie,” she wrote, “I’m on my way back to Bambridge to see Grandma. Don’t try to follow me. I’m sorry I took all the money but as soon as I get work I’ll pay it all back to you. You can get a divorce and marry somebody else who will have children. I guess I’m just a wanderer and now I’m wandering again.” Coverly went to the telephone and called Bambridge. Her old grandmother answered. “I want to speak with Betsey,” Coverly shouted. “I want to speak with Betsey.” “She ain’t here,” the old lady said. “She don’t live here any more. She done married Coverly Wapshot, and went to live with him somewheres else.” “I’m Coverly Wapshot,” Coverly shouted. “Well, if you’re Coverly Wapshot what you bothering me for?” the old lady asked. “If you’re Coverly Wapshot why don’t you speak to Betsey yourself? And when you speak to her you tell her to get down on her knees to say her prayers. You tell her it don’t count unless she gets down on her knees.” Then she hung up.