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 The driver who took her to Travertine earlier in the day has gone home to supper and has been replaced by a young man.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?”
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…”