Honora was sewing. She took her time getting to the door. First she reached for her stick and went around the parlor gathering up all the photographs of Moses and Coverly. She dumped these onto the floor behind the sofa. The reason she did this was that, although she liked having photographs of the boys around, she never wanted any of the family to catch her in such an open demonstration of affection. Then she straightened her clothes and started for the door. Leander was pounding on it. “If you mar the paint on my door,” she called to him, “you’ll pay for it.” As soon as she opened the door he stormed into the hall and roared, “What in Christ’s name is the meaning of this?”
“You don’t have to be profane,” she said. She put her hands over her ears. “I won’t listen to profanity.”
“What do you want from me, Honora?”
“I can’t hear a word you say,” she said. “I won’t listen to swearing.”
“I’m not swearing,” he shouted. “I’ve stopped swearing.”
“She’s mine,” Honora said, taking her hands down from her ears. “I can do anything I want with her.”
“You can’t sell her.”
“I can too,” Honora said. “The D’Agostino boys want to buy her for a fishing boat.”
“I mean she’s my usefulness, Honora.” There was nothing pleading in his voice. He was still shouting. “You gave her to me. I’m used to her. She’s my boat.”
“I only loaned her to you.”
“Goddamn it, Honora, the members of a family can’t backbite one another like this.”
“I won’t listen to swearing,” Honora said. Up went her hands again.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to stop swearing.”
“Why did you do this? Why did you do this behind my back? Why didn’t you tell me what was on your mind?”
“She belongs to me, I can do anything I want with her.”
“We’ve always shared things, Honora. That rug belongs to me. That rug’s mine.” He meant the long rug in the hall.
“Your dear mother gave that rug to me,” Honora said.
“She loaned it to you.”
“She meant me to have it.”
“That’s my rug.”
“It’s nothing of the kind.”
“Two can play at this game as well as one.” Leander put down the sign and picked up an end of the rug.
“You put down that rug, Leander Wapshot,” Honora shouted.
“It’s my rug.”
“You put down that rug this instant. Do you hear me?”
“It’s mine. It’s my rug.” He pulled the folds of the rug, which was long and so dirty that the dust from its warp made him sneeze, toward the door. Then Honora went to the other end of the rug, seized it and called for Maggie. When Maggie came out of the kitchen she grabbed Honora’s end—they were all sneezing—and they all began to pull. It was a very unpleasant scene, but if we accept the quaintness of St. Botolphs we must also accept the fact that it was the country of spite fences and internecine quarrels and that the Pinchot twins lived until their death in a house divided by a chalk line. Leander lost, of course. How could a man win such a contest? Leaving Honora and Maggie in possession of the rug he stormed out of the house, his feelings in such a turmoil that he did not know where to go, and walking south on Boat Street until he came to a field he sat down in the sweet grass and chewed the succulent ends of a few stalks to take the bitterness out of his mouth.
During his lifetime Leander had seen, in the village, the number of sanctuaries for men reduced to one. The Horse Guards had disbanded; the Atlantic Club was shut; even the boat club had been floated down to Travertine. The only place left was the Niagara Hose Company, and he walked back to the village and climbed the stairs beside the fire engine to the meeting room. The smell of many jolly beefsteak suppers was in the air, but there was no one in the room but old Perley Sturgis and Perley was asleep, On the walls were many photographs of Wapshots: Leander as a young man; Leander and Hamlet; Benjamin, Ebenezer, Lorenzo and Thaddeus. The photographs of himself as a young man made him unhappy and he went and sat in one of the Morris chairs near the window.
His anger at Honora had changed to a pervasive sense of uneasiness. She had something up her sleeve and he wished he knew what it was. He wondered what she could do and then he realized that she could do anything she pleased. The Topaze and the farm were hers. She paid the school bills and the interest on the mortgage. She had even filled the cellar with coal. She had offered to do all this in the kindest imaginable way. I have the wherewithal, Leander, she had said. Why shouldn’t I help my only family? It was his fault—he couldn’t blame her—that he had never expected consequence for this largess. He knew that she was meddlesome but he had overlooked this fact, borne along on his conviction of the abundance of life—carp in the inlet, trout in the streams, grouse in the orchard and money in Honora’s purse—the feeling that the world was contrived to cheer and delight him. A ragged image of his wife and his sons appeared to him then—thinly dressed and standing in a snowstorm—which was, after all, not so outrageous since couldn’t Honora, if she wanted, let them all experience hunger? This image of his family roused in him passionate feelings. He would defend and shelter them. He would defend them with sticks and stones; with his naked fists. But this did not change the facts of possession. Everything belonged to Honora. Even the rocking horse in the attic. He should have led his life differently.
But out of the window he could see the blue sky above the trees of the square and he was easily charmed with the appearance of the world. How could anything go wrong in such a paradise? “Wake up, Perley, wake up and we’ll play some backgammon,” he shouted. Perley woke up and they played backgammon for matchsticks until noon. They had some lunch in the bakery and played backgammon some more. In the middle of the afternoon it suddenly occurred to Leander that all he needed was money. Poor Leander! We cannot endow him with wisdom and powers of invention that he does not have and give him a prime-ministerial breadth of mind. This is what he did.
He crossed the square to the Cartwright Block and climbed the stairs. He said good afternoon to Mrs. Marston in the telephone-company office—a pleasant white-haired widow surrounded by many potted plants that seemed to bloom and flourish in the fertile climate of her disposition. Leander spoke to her about the rain and then went down the hall to the doctor’s office, where a WALK IN sign hung from the doorknob like a bib. In the waiting room there was a little girl with a bandaged hand, leaning her head against her mother’s breast, and old Billy Tompkins with an empty pill bottle. The furniture seemed to have been brought in from some porch, and the wicker chair in which Leander sat squeaked as loudly as if he had sat down on a nest of mice. The pack, hedges and jumpers of a fox hunt appeared on the wallpaper and in these repeated images Leander saw a reflection on the vitality of the village—a proneness to dwell on strange and different ways of life. The door to the inner office opened and a dark-skinned young woman who was pregnant came out. Then the child with the bandaged hand was led in by her mother. She was not in the office long. Then Billy Tompkins went in with his empty pill bottle. He came out with a prescription and Leander went in.