As for Moses, it was only a matter of chance that he was not already a father.
Chapter Nine
Henry Parker brought Rosalie’s clothes out from the city in his produce truck and she stayed on at the farm, although she talked about going on to Chicago to visit a girl she had known in Allendale. But her plans to go, whenever she made them, seemed to render the old square house and the valley in such a fine, golden light and to arouse such tenderness in her for everything she saw that she stayed on. Sometimes, walking on a beach and when there is no house near, we smell late in the day, on the east wind, lemons, wood smoke, roses and dust; the fragrance of some large house that we must have visited as children, our memories are so dim and pleasant—some place where we wanted to remain and couldn’t—and the farm had come to seem like this for Rosalie.
She liked the old house best when it rained. When she woke in the morning and heard the noise of rain on the many roofs and skylights it was always with a great sense of comfort. She planned to read on the rainy days—to catch up on my reading, she said. All the books she chose were ambitious, but she never got through the first chapter. Sarah tried gently to direct her. Middlemarch is a very nice book or have you tried Death Comes for the Archbishop? After breakfast Rosalie would settle herself in the back parlor with some book and in the end she would take the old comic sections out of the woodbox and read these. She sometimes went into the village, where she was pleased to find that there was no question about her identity. You must be the young lady who’s staying with the Wapshots, everyone said. She tried to be helpful around the house, sweeping the living room and wandering around with a dust cloth, but she was at that time of life when the ornaments and moveables of middle age seemed like thorns and stones in her path and she was always knocking things over. She secretly did not understand why Mrs. Wapshot should bring so many flowers into the house and put them into vases and pitchers that kept tipping over. Her laughter was loud and sweet and almost everyone was glad to hear her voice; even her most distant footstep. She was good-natured about everything including the water pump, which broke down several times. When this happened Coverly drew water from a well near the woodshed for Rosalie and Mrs. Wapshot to wash with but the men took their baths in the brook.
Honora had never come to judge her. This was a family joke. “You can’t go to Chicago until you’ve seen Cousin Honora,” Leander said. The drill and stir of rain on the roofs assured her that her idle life at the farm was natural—that she was charged with nothing more than letting time slip through her hands. When she thought of her friend she tried to rationalize his death as we will, stumbling onto such conclusions as that it was time for him to go; he was meant to die young; and other persuasive and consoling sentimentalities. She dreamed of him once. She woke from a sound sleep, feeling that he was in trouble. It was late and the house was dark. She could hear the brook and in the woods an owl—a small and gentle chant. He is in trouble, she thought then, lighting a cigarette, and she seemed to see him, his back to her, naked in that he was defenseless, and lost, she could see, by the way he held his head and shoulders—lost or blinded, and wandering in some maze or labyrinth in great pain. She could not help him—she saw that—although she could feel the pain of his helplessness in the way he moved his hands like a swimmer. She supposed that he was being punished although she didn’t know what sins he had committed. Then she went back to bed and to sleep but the dream was over as if he had wandered out of her ken or as if his wandering had ended.
Leander took her off for a day on the Topaze. It was lovely seaside weather and she stood on the forward deck while Leander watched her from the wheelhouse. A stranger approached her as they started across the bay and Leander was happy to see that she paid him very little attention and when he persisted she gave him a chilly smile and climbed up to the wheelhouse. “This is absolully the funniest old boat I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Now Leander did not like to have people speak critically of the Topaze. Her light words made him angry. His respect for the old boat might be a weakness but he thought that people who did not appreciate the Topaze were lightheaded. “I’m starving,” Rosalie said. “All this salt air. I could eat an ox and it isn’t ten o’clock.” Leander’s feelings were still smarting from her first words. “At the lake at this camp where I went to,” she said, “there was a kind of boat that took people around, but it wasn’t as much fun as this. I mean I didn’t know the captain.” She sensed the mistake she had made in speaking lightly of the Topaze and now she tried to make amends. “And the other boat wasn’t as seaworthy,” she said. “I suppose she’s awfully seaworthy. I mean I suppose she was built in the days when people knew how to build seaworthy boats.”
“She’s thirty-two years old this spring,” Leander said proudly. “Honora doesn’t spend more than two or three hundred dollars on her a season and she’s brought her passengers through thick and thin without harming a hair on their heads.”
They went ashore together at Nangasakit and Leander watched her eat four hot dogs and wash them down with tonic. She didn’t want to ride on the roller-coaster and he guessed that her ideas of pleasure were more sophisticated. He wondered if she drank cocktails in lounges. In speaking of her home she had spoken both of wealth and meanness and Leander guessed that her life had been made up of both. “Mother gives an enormous garden party, every summer,” she had said, “with an orchestra sort of hidden in the bushes and millions of delicious cakes,” and an hour later she had said, speaking of her own ineptitude as a housekeeper, “Daddy cleans the bathrooms at home. He gets into these old clothes and gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs the floors and tubs and everything....” The hired orchestra and the housecleaning priest were equally strange to Leander and interested him, mostly in that her background seemed to stand between Rosalie and her enjoyment of Nangasakit. He would have liked to ride on the roller-coaster himself and he was disappointed when she refused. But they walked on the wrecked sea wall above the white sand and the green water and he was happy in her company. He thought—like Sarah—how much he would have liked a daughter, and the images of her career formed swiftly in his mind. She would marry, of course. He even saw himself throwing rice at her as she ran down the steps of Christ Church. But somehow her marriage went wrong. Her husband was killed in the war perhaps or turned out to be a drunk or a crook. In any case she came back to take care of Leander in his old age—to bring him his bourbon and cook his meals and listen to his stories on stormy nights. At three o’clock they went back to the boat.
Everyone liked Rosalie but Moses, who stayed out of her way and was surly with her when they met. Mrs. Wapshot kept urging him to take her sailing and he always refused. It may have been that he associated her with that first night in the pasture and the fire or that—and this was more likely—that she seemed to him to be his mother’s creation, to have stepped out of Sarah’s brow. He spent most of his time at the Pocamasset boat club, where he raced the Tern, and he sometimes went fishing in the brook that flowed from Parson’s Pond down behind the barn into the West River.