“Moses has been sailing every day of his vacation,” Mrs. Wapshot said to Rosalie. “It’s just as though I didn’t have an older son.”
“He wants to win a cup,” Coverly said. They stayed in the garden until Lulu called them into lunch.
After lunch Rosalie went upstairs and lying down in the still house she fell asleep. When she woke the shadows on the grass were long, and downstairs she could hear men’s voices. She went down and found them all in the garden, once more, all of them. “It’s our out-of-door sitting room,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “This is Mr. Wapshot and Moses. Rosalie Young.”
“Good evening, young lady,” Leander said, charmed by her fairness, but not at all foxy. He spoke to her with a triumphant and bright disinterestedness as if she had been the daughter of an old friend and drinking companion. It was Moses who was surly—who hardly looked at her, although he was polite enough. It made Mrs. Wapshot unhappy to see any impediment in the relationships of the young. They ate cold carp in the homely dining room, half lighted by the summer twilight, half by what seemed to be an inverted bowl of stained glass, pieced together mostly out of gloomy colors. “These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at the table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns. She was one of those women who seemed to have learned to speak by rote. “May I please be excused,” Moses mumbled as soon as he had cleared his plate, and he was out of the dining room and had one foot in the night before his mother spoke.
“Don’t you want any dessert, Moses?”
“No, thank you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Pendletons’.”
“I want you home early. Honora is coming.”
“Yes.”
“I wish Honora would come,” Mrs. Wapshot said.
Honora will not come—she is hooking a rug—but they do not know and so rather than dwell with the Chekovian delays of this family watching the night come in we might climb the stairs and pry into things of more pertinence. There is Leander’s bureau drawer, where we find a withered rose—once yellow—and a wreath of yellow hair, the butt end of a Roman candle that was fired at the turn of the century, a boiled shirt on which an explicit picture of a naked woman is drawn in red ink, a necklace made of champagne corks and a loaded revolver. Or we might look at Coverly’s book shelf—War and Peace, The Complete Poetry of Robert Frost, Madame Bovary, La Tulipe Noire. Or still better we might go to the Pocamasset Trust Company in the village where Honora’s will lies in a safe deposit box.
Chapter Eight
Honora’s will was no secret. “Lorenzo left me a little something,” she had told the family, “and I have to consider his wishes as well as my own. Lorenzo was very devoted to the family and the older I grow the more important family seems to me. It seems to me that most of the people I trust and admire come from good New England stock.” There was more of the same; and then she said that since Moses and Coverly were the last of the Wapshots she would divide her fortune between them, contingent upon their having male heirs. “Oh, the money will do so much good,” Mrs. Wapshot had exclaimed, while institutes for the blind and the lame, homes for unwed mothers and orphan asylums danced in her head. The news of their inheritance did not elate the boys—it did not seem at first to penetrate or alter their feelings toward life, and Honora’s decision only seemed to Leander to be a matter of course. What else would she have done with the money? But, considering the naturalness of her choice, it came as a surprise to everyone that it should lead them into something as unnatural as anxiety.
On the winter after Honora had made her will Moses came down with a severe case of mumps. “Is he all right?” Honora kept asking. “Will he be all right?” Moses recovered but that summer a little gasoline stove in the galley of their sailboat exploded, burning Coverly in the groin. They were on tenterhooks again. However, these forthright assaults on the virility of his sons did not trouble Leander as much as those threats to the continuation of the family that lay beyond his understanding. Such a thing happened when Coverly was eleven or twelve and went with his mother to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was transported. When he got back to the farm he would be Oberon. Girdling himself with a loose arrangement of neckties, he tried flying from the back stairs into the parlor, where his father was adding up the monthly accounts. He couldn’t fly, of course, and landed in a pile on the floor—his neckties undone—and while Leander did not speak to him angrily he felt, standing above his naked son in the presence of something mysterious and unrestful—Icarus! Icarus!—as if the boy had fallen some great distance from his father’s heart.
Leander would never take his sons aside and speak to them about the facts of life, even although the continuation of Honora’s numerous charities depended upon their virility. If they looked out of the window for a minute they could see the drift of things. It was his feeling that love, death and fornication extracted from the rich green soup of life were no better than half-truths, and his course of instruction was general. He would like them to grasp that the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and the continuousness of things. He went skating on Christmas Day—drunk or sober, ill or well—feeling that it was his responsibility to the village to appear on Parson’s Pond. “There goes old Leander Wapshot,” people said—he could hear them—a splendid figure of continuous and innocent sport that he hoped his sons would carry on. The cold bath that he took each morning was ceremonious—it was sometimes nothing else since he almost never used soap and got out of the tub smelling powerfully of the sea salts in the old sponges that he used. The coat he wore at dinner, the grace he said at table, the fishing trip he took each spring, the bourbon he drank at dark and the flower in his buttonhole were all forms that he hoped his sons might understand and perhaps copy. He had taught them to fell a tree, pluck and dress a chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catch a fish, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc.
He was not surprised to find his ways crossed and contested by his wife, who had her own arcane rites such as arranging flowers and cleaning closets. He did not always see eye to eye with Sarah but this seemed to him most natural, and life itself appeared to regulate their differences. He was impulsive and difficult to follow—there was no telling when he would decide that it was time for the boys to swim the river or carve the roast. He went trout fishing each spring at a camp in the wilderness near the Canadian border and decided one spring that the time had come for Moses to accompany him. For once Sarah was angry and stubborn. She didn’t want Moses to go north with his father and on the evening before they were to leave she said that Moses was sick. Her manner was seraphic.
“That poor boy is too ill to go anywhere.”
“We’re going fishing tomorrow morning,” Leander said.
“Leander, if you take this poor boy out of a sickbed and up to the north woods I’ll never forgive you.”
“There won’t be anything to forgive.”
“Leander, come here.”
They continued their discussion or quarrel behind the closed doors of Sarah’s bedroom but the boys—and Lulu—could hear their angry and bitter voices. Leander got Moses out of bed before dawn on the next day. He had already packed the bait and fishing tackle and they started for the Langely ponds in the starlight while Sarah was still asleep.
It was May when they left—the valley of the West River was all in bloom—and they had had a brace or more of those days when the earth smells like a farmer’s britches—all timothy, manure and sweet grass. They were north of Concord when the sun came up and they stopped in some town in New Hampshire for lunch. They were far north of the lush river valley by then. The trees were bare and the inn where they stopped still seemd to be in the throes of a cold winter. The place smelled of kerosene and the waitress had a runny nose.