The Wapshot Chronicle Read online

  Mark, her gardener, is already at work. He comes to work at seven. “Good morning, Mark,” Honora says gaily, but Mark is deaf and dumb. Before she employed Mark, Honora ran through every gardener in the village. The last one before Mark was an Italian who behaved badly. He threw down his rake and shouted, “She’sa no good, working for you, Missa Honora. She’sa no good. She’sa planta this, she’sa pullupa that, she’sa changes her mind every five minutes, she’sa no good.” When he finished he went out of the garden leaving Honora in tears. Maggie ran out of the kitchen and took the old lady in her arms, saying, “You mustn’t pay any attention to him, you mustn’t pay any attention to him, Miss Wapshot. Everybody knows how wonderful you are. Everybody knows what a wonderful woman you are.” Mark, being deaf, is protected from her interference and when she tells him to move all the rose bushes she might as well be talking to a stone.

  It is hard for Honora to get down on her knees, but she does this and works in her garden until the middle of the morning. Then she goes into the house, quietly washes her hands, gets a hat, gloves and a bag and goes out through her garden to the four corners, where she catches a bus to Travertine. Whether this fairly stealthy departure is calculated or not no one will ever know. If Honora asks people for tea and is not home when they, wearing their best clothes, arrive, she has not consciously done something that will make them feel ill at ease, but she has acted characteristically. At any rate a few minutes after she leaves her garden a trust officer of the Appleton Bank rings her front doorbell. During the years in which she has lived on the income from Lorenzo’s trust, Honora has never signed a form approving the bank’s management. Now the trust officer has been told not to leave St. Botolphs until he has her signature. He rings the doorbell for some time before Maggie throws open a window and tells him that Miss Wapshot is in the garden. Talking with Mark is hopeless, of course, and when he rings the doorbell again Maggie shouts at him, “If she ain’t in the garden I don’t know where she’s at but she might be at the farm where the other Wapshots live. That’s over on Route 40. A big house beside the river.” The trust officer starts for Route 40 just as Honora boards the bus for Travertine.

  Honora doesn’t put a dime into the fare box like the rest of the passengers. As she says, she can’t be bothered. She sends the transportation company a check for twenty dollars each Christmas. They’ve written her, telephoned her and sent representatives to her house, but they’ve gotten nowhere. The bus is decrepit and the seats and several of the windows are held together with friction tape. Jarring and rattling, it gives, for a vehicle, an unusual impression of frailty. It is one of those lines that seem to carry the scrim of the world—sweet-natured but browbeaten women shoppers, hunchbacks and drunks. Honora looks out the window and at the river and the houses—those poignant landscapes against which she has played out most of her life and where she is known as the Wonderful Honora, the Splendid Honora, the Grand Honora Wapshot. When the bus stops at the corner in Travertine she goes up the street to Mr. Hiram’s fish market. Mr. Hiram is in back, opening a crate of salt fish. Honora goes around and behind the counter to where there is a small tank of sea water for lobsters. She puts down her bag and stick, rolls up one sleeve and plunges her hand into the tank, coming up with a good four-pound lobster just as Mr. Hiram comes in from the back. “Put that down, Miss Honora,” he shouts. “They ain’t pegged, they ain’t pegged yet.”

  “Well, they don’t seem to be doing me any harm,” says Honora. “Just get me a paper bag.”

  “George Wolf just brought them in,” says Mr. Hiram, scurrying around for a paper bag, “and if one of those four pounders tooka hold of you you could lose a finger.”

  He holds the paper bag open and Honora drops the lobster into this, turns and plunges her hand into the tank again. Mr Hiram sighs, but Honora comes up quickly with another lobster and gets it into the bag. When she has paid Mr. Hiram she carries her lobsters out to the street and walks to the corner where the bus is waiting to pick up passengers for St. Botolphs. She hands the bag of lobsters to the bus driver. “Here,” she says. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She starts for the dry-goods store but, as she walks by the five-and-ten-cent store, the smell of frankfurters draws her in. She sits at the counter. “Your frankfurters smell so deliciously,” she tells the clerk, “that I can’t resist having one. Our Cousin Justina used to play the piano in here, y’know. Oh, if she knew I remembered, she’d die. . . .” She eats two frankfurters and a dish of ice cream. “That was delicious,” she tells the counter girl, and gathering up her things she starts down the street again toward the bus stop when she notices the sign above the Neptune movie theater: ROSE OF THE WEST. What harm can there be, she thinks, in an old lady going to a movie, but when she buys her ticket and steps into the dark, bad-smelling theater she suffers all the abrasive sensations of someone forced into moral uncleanliness. She does not have the courage of her vices. It is wrong, she knows, to go into a dark place when the world outside shines with light. It is wrong and she is a miserable sinner. She buys a box of popcorn and takes an aisle seat in the last row—a noncommittal position that seems to lighten her burden of guilt. She munches her popcorn and watches the movie suspiciously.

  In the meantime Maggie is keeping her lunch warm on the back of the stove and her lobsters, battling for life in the paper bag, have made the trip to St. Botolphs and are now on their way back to Travertine. Mr. Burstyn, the trust officer, has driven to West Farm. Sarah has been courteous and helpful. “I haven’t seen Honora myself,” she says, “but she’s expected. She’s interested in some furniture in the barn. She may be there.” He walks down the driveway to the barn. Mr. Burstyn is a city boy and the size of the barn and its powerful smells make him homesick. A large yellow spider on the barn floor comes straight toward him and he makes a wide circle around the insect. There is a staircase up to the loft. Two of the lifts are broken and a third is about to break and when he gets up into the loft there is no one there although it would be hard to make sure, for the loft is lighted by a single window hung thickly with spiderwebs and drifted with hayseed.

  Honora sits through the movie twice. When she leaves the theater she feels weary and sad like any sinner. The lobby of the theater slopes like a kind of tunnel down toward the sidewalk. There is a small stretch here of some slippery composition stone and on it a spot of water or moisture from the iceman’s load or a child’s pop bottle. Someone may even have spat. Honora slips on this and crashes down onto the stone. Her purse flies in one direction and her stick in another and her three-cornered hat comes down over her nose. The girl, the woman, the hag, in fact, in the ticket window sees all of this and her heart seems to stop beating for she sees here, in the fallen old woman, the ruthlessness of time. She fumbles around for the key to the cash register and locks up the money. Then she opens the door to her little tower, sanctuary or keep and hurries to where Honora lies. She kneels beside her. “Oh, Miss Wapshot,” she says. “Dear Miss Wapshot.”

  Honora raises herself by the arms and gets to her knees. Then slowly she swings her head around to this Samaritan. “Leave me alone,” she says. “Please leave me alone.” The voice is not harsh or imperious. It sounds small, plaintive, the voice of a child with some inner trouble; a plea for dignity. Now more and more people come to her side. Honora is still on her hands and knees. “Please leave me alone,” she tells the gathering. “Please mind your own business. Please go away and leave me alone.” They recognize that what she is expressing is the privateness of pain and they move back. “Please leave me alone,” she says, “please mind your own business.” She straightens her hat and, using her stick for a support, gets to her feet. Someone hands her the purse. Her dress is torn and dirty but she walks straight through the gathering to the corner where the bus to St. Botolphs is waiting. The driver who took her to Travertine earlier in the day has gone home to supper and has been replaced by a young man. “What,” Honora asks him, “have you done with my lobsters?”<
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  The bus driver tells her that the lobsters have been delivered and he has the good sense not to ask for her fare. So they travel up the River Road to St. Botolphs and Honora gets off at the four corners and enters her garden by the back gate.

  Mark has done a good job. The paths and the flower beds look neat in the twilight—for it is nearly dark. The day has pleased her and she liked the movie. By half-closing her eyes she can still see the colored plains and the Indians riding down from the butte. Her kitchen windows are lighted and open on this summer night and as she approaches them she sees Maggie sitting at the kitchen table with Maggie’s younger sister. She hears Maggie’s voice. “Perch,” says Maggie. “Perch, she says, rattling the dish cover and breathing smoke and fire. Whatever in the world made you think I wanted perch for breakfast? For weeks she’s been telling me how she’d like a bit of perch and I bought a couple from the little Townsend boy yesterday with my own money and I cooked it for her nicely and all the thanks I get is this. Perch, she says. Whatever made you think I wanted perch for breakfast!”

  Maggie is not bitter. Far from it; she and her sister are laughing uproariously at the memory of Honora who stands now outside the lighted windows of her own house in the dusk. “Well then,” says Maggie, “I hear Mr. Macgrath coming up the walk and putting the mail into the slot and so I go down the hall to get her letters and I give them to her and you know what she does?” Maggie rocks back and forth in her chair with laughter. “She takes these letters—there must be twelve of them altogether—and throws them into the fire. Oh Lord, she’s better than a three-ring circus.”

  Honora walks past the window on the soft grass but they have not heard her; they are laughing too loudly. Halfway down the house she stops and leans heavily, with both hands, on her cane, engrossed in an emotion so violent and so nameless that she wonders if this feeling of loneliness and bewilderment is not the mysteriousness of life. Poignance seems to drench her until her knees are weak and she yearns so earnestly for understanding that she raises her head and says half a prayer. Then she gathers her forces, enters the front door and calls cheerfully down the hall, “It’s me, Maggie.” Upstairs in her bedroom she drinks a water glass full of port and while she is changing her shoes the telephone rings. It is poor Mr. Burstyn, who has taken a room at the Viaduct House, which is no place for a respectable man to stay. “Well if you want to see me, come and see me,” Honora says. “I’m not very hard to find. Excepting to visit Travertine I haven’t been out of St. Botolphs in nearly seven years. You can go and tell those men at the bank that if they want someone to talk with me they’d better get someone with more gumption than it takes to find an old lady.” Then she hangs up the receiver and goes down to supper with a good appetite.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The morning light and the bruit of the family going around the upstairs hallway woke the girl. She felt at first the strangeness of the place, although there were not many places with which she was familiar any more. The air smelled of sausage and even the morning light—golden with all its blue shadows—seemed foreign in a way that pained her and she remembered waking up on her first night at camp to find that she had wet the bed. Then she remembered the accident—all that—but not in detail; it loomed up in her mind like a boulder, too big to be moved and too adamant to be broken and have its contents revealed. All that stood in her mind like a dark stone. The sheets—linen and damp—brought her back to the pain of strangeness and she wondered why a person should feel, in the world where she was meant to live, so miserable and abraded. She got up out of bed to discover that her whole body was lame and sore. In the closet she found her coat and some cigarettes in the pocket. The taste of smoke diminished the painful sense of strangeness by a little and she carried a clamshell for an ash tray to the side of her bed and lay down again. She shivered, she trembled, she tried unsuccessfully to cry.

  Now the house, or the part of it where she lay, was quiet. She heard a man calling good-by. On the wall she noticed that stuck behind the picture of a little Dutch girl were some palm fronds from Palm Sunday and she hoped that this was not the house of a priest. Then, in the downstairs hall, she heard the telephone ring and someone shouted, “Hello, Mabel. I may not be coming over today. No, she ain’t paid me yet. She don’t have any money. They get all their money from Honora. She don’t have any money. No, I can’t borrow no more money on my insurance. I told you, I told you, I did ass them, I assed them. Well, I need shoes myself the way she expects me to go upstairs and downstairs fifty times a day. They got somebody here now. Did you hear about the accident? There was an accident here last night. A car went off the road and a man was killed. Terrible. Well, he had a girl with him and they brought her in here and she’s here now. I’ll tell you later. I SAID I’LL TELL YOU LATER. They got her here now and that makes more work for me. How’s Charlie? What are you going to have for supper? Don’t have the meat loaf. You don’t have enough of it. I said, don’t have the meat loaf. Open a can of salmon and make Charlie a nice salad. There isn’t enough meat loaf. I just told you. Open a can of salmon and get some of those nice rolls from the bakery. Make him a pie for dessert. They got nice pie apples now. Is he still constipated? They got pie apples, they have so got pie apples, I saw them day before yesterday, they got pie apples at Tituses’. You go down to Tituses’ and get some pie apples and make him an apple pie. Do what I tell you. I’ll tell you about the accident when I see you. I don’t know how long she’s going to stay. I don’t know. I got to make the beds now. Good-by…”

  After this the house was quiet again and then she heard someone climbing the stairs and the pleasant noise of dishes on a tray. She put out her cigarette. “Good morning,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “Good morning, Rosalie. I’m going to call you Rosalie. We don’t stand on ceremony here.”

  “Good morning.”

  “The first thing I want you to do is to let me telephone your parents. They’ll be worried. But what am I talking about? That’s not the first thing I want you to do. The first thing I want you to do is to eat a nice breakfast. Let me fix your pillows.”

  “Oh, I’m awfully afraid that I can’t eat anything,” the girl said. “It’s awfully nice of you but I just couldn’t.”

  “Well, you don’t have to eat everything on the tray,” Mrs. Wapshot said kindly, “but you’ve got to eat something. Why don’t you try and eat the eggs? That’s all you have to eat; but you must eat the eggs.”

  Then the girl began to cry. She laid her head sidewise on the pillow and stared into the corner of the room where she seemed to see a range of high mountains her look was so faraway and heartbreaking. The tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “I’m very sorry. I suppose you were engaged to him. I suppose …”

  “It isn’t that,” the girl sobbed. “It’s just about the eggs. I can’t bear eggs. When I lived at home they made me eat eggs for breakfast and if I didn’t eat my eggs for breakfast well then I had to eat them for dinner. I mean everything I was supposed to eat and couldn’t eat was always juss piled up on my dinner plate and the eggs were disgusting.”

  “Well, is there anything you would like for breakfast?” Mrs. Wapshot asked.

  “I’d love some peanut butter. If I could have a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of milk …”

  “Well, I think that can be arranged,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and carrying the tray and smiling she went out of the room and down the stairs.

  She felt no resentment at this miscarriage of her preparations and was happy to have the girl in her house, as if she was, at bottom, a lonely woman, grateful for any company. She had wanted a daughter, longed for one; a little girl sitting at her knees, learning to sew or making sugar cookies in the kitchen on a snowy night. While she made Rosalie’s sandwich it seemed to her that she possessed a vision of life that she would enjoy introducing to the stranger. They could pick blueberries together, take long walks beside the river and sit together in the pew on Sunday. When she took the sandwich ups
tairs again Rosalie said that she wanted to get up. Mrs. Wapshot protested but Rosalie’s pleading made sense. “I’d just feel so much better if I could get up and walk around and sit in the sun; just feel the sun.”

  Rosalie dressed after breakfast and joined Mrs. Wapshot in the garden where the old deck chairs were. “The sun feels so good,” she said, pushing up the sleeves of her dress and shaking back her hair.

  “Now you must let me call your parents,” Sarah said.

  “I just don’t want to call them today,” the girl said. “Maybe tomorrow. You see, it always bothers them when I’m in trouble. I just don’t like to bother them when I’m in trouble. And they’ll want me to come home and everything. You see Daddy’s a priest—rector really, I mean communion seven days a week and all that.”

  “We’re low church here,” Mrs. Wapshot said, “but some people I could name would like to see a change.”

  “And he’s absolutely the most nervous man I ever knew,” Rosalie said. “Daddy is. He’s always scratching his stomach. It’s a nervous ailment. Most men’s shirts wear out at the collar, I guess, but Daddy’s shirts wear out where he scratches himself.”

  “Oh, I think you ought to telephone them,” Mrs. Wapshot said.

  “It’s just because I’m in trouble. They always think of me as making trouble. I went to this camp—Annamatapoiset—and I had this sweater with an A on it for being such a marvelous camper and when Daddy saw it he said I guess that A stands for Always in Trouble. I just don’t want to bother them.”

  “It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Please, please.” She bit her lip; she would cry and Mrs. Wapshot swiftly changed the subject. “Smell the peonies,” she said. “I love the smell of peonies and now they’re almost gone.”