Chapter Twenty-Seven
Leander did not understand why Theophilus Gates would not lend him enough money to have the bow of the Topaze repaired while he would loan Sarah all the money she wanted to turn the old launch into a floating gift shop. That is what happened. The day after her vision Sarah went to the bank and the day after that the carpenters came and began to repair the wharf. The salesmen began to arrive—three and four a day—and Sarah began to stock the Topaze, spending money, as she said herself, like an inebriated sailor. Her happiness or rapture was genuine although it was hard to see why she should find such joy in a gross of china dogs with flowers painted on their backs, their paws shaped in such a way that they could hold cigarettes. There may have been some vengefulness in her enthusiasm—some deep means of expressing her feelings about the independence and the sainthood of her sex. She had never been so happy. She had signs painted: VISIT THE S.S. TOPAZE, THE ONLY FLOATING GIFT SHOPPE IN NEW ENGLAND, and posted at all the roads leading into the village. She planned to open the Topaze with a gala tea and a sale of Italian pottery. Hundreds of invitations were printed and mailed.
Leander made a nuisance of himself. He broke wind in the parlor and urinated against an apple tree in full view of the boats on the river and the salesmen of Italian pottery. He claimed to be aging swiftly and pointed out how loudly his bones creaked when he stooped to pick a thread off a carpet. Tears streamed capriciously from his eyes whenever he heard a horse race on the radio. He still shaved and bathed each morning, but he smelled more like Neptune than ever and clumps of hair grew out of his ears and nostrils before he could remember to clip them. His neckties were stained with food and cigarette ash, and yet, when the night winds woke him and he lay in bed and traced their course around the dark compass, he still remembered what it was to feel young and strong. Deluded by this thread of cold air he would rise in his bed thinking passionately of boats, trains and deep-breasted women, or of some image—a wet pavement plastered with yellow elm leaves—that seemed to represent requital and strength. I will climb the mountain, he thought. I will kill the tiger! I will crush the serpent with my heel! But the fresh winds died with the morning dusk. There was a pain in his kidney. He could not get back to sleep and he would limp and cough through another day. His sons did not write him.
On the day before the Topaze opened as a gift shop, Leander paid a call on Honora. They sat in her parlor.
“Would you like some whisky?” Honora asked.
“Yes, please,” Leander said.
“There isn’t any,” Honora said. “Have a cookie.”
Leander glanced down at the plate of cookies and saw they were covered with ants. “I’m afraid ants have gotten into your cookies, Honora,” he said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Honora said. “I know you have ants at the farm, but I’ve never had ants in this house.” She picked up a cookie and ate it, ants and all.
“Are you going to Sarah’s tea?” Leander asked.
“I don’t have time to spend in gift shops,” Honora said. “I’m taking piano lessons.”
“I thought you were taking painting lessons,” Leander said.
“Painting!” Honora said scornfully. “Why I gave up my painting in the spring. The Hammers were in some financial difficulty so I bought their piano from them and now Mrs. Hammer comes and gives me a lesson twice a week. It’s very easy.”
“Perhaps it runs in the family.” Leander said. “Remember Justina?”
“Justina who?” Honora asked.
“Justina Molesworth,” Leander said.
“Why, of course I remember Justina.” Honora said. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“I meant that she played the piano in the five and ten,” Leander said.
“Well, I have no intention of playing the piano in the five and ten,” Honora said. “Feel that refreshing breeze,” she said.
“Yes,” Leander said. (There was no breeze at all.)
“Sit in the other chair,” she said.
“I’m quite comfortable here, thank you,” Leander said.
“Sit in the other chair,” Honora said. “I’ve just had it reupholstered. Although,” she said as Leander obediently changed from one chair to the other, “you won’t be able to see out of the window from there and perhaps you were better off where you were.”
Leander smiled, remembering that to talk with her, even when she was a young woman, had made him feel bludgeoned. He wondered what her reasons were. Lorenzo had written somewhere in his journal that if you met the devil you should cut him in two and go between the pieces. It would describe Honora’s manner although he wondered if it wasn’t the fear of death that had determined her crabwise progress through life. It could have been that by side-stepping those things that, through their force—love, incontinence and peace of mind—throw into our faces the facts of our mortality she might have uncovered the mystery of a spirited old age.
“Will you do me a favor, Honora?” he asked.
“I won’t go to Sarah’s tea if that’s what you want,” she said. “I’ve told you I have a music lesson.”
“It isn’t that,” Leander said. “It’s something else. When I die I want Prospero’s speech said over my grave.”
“What speech is that?” Honora asked.
“Our revels now are ended,” Leander said, rising from has chair. “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.” He declaimed, and his declamatory style was modeled partly on the Shakespearians of his youth, partly on the bombast and singsong of prize-ring announcements and partly on the style of the vanished horsecar and trolley-car conductors who had made an incantation of the place names along their routes. His voice soared and he illustrated the poetry with some very literal gestures. “… and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” He dropped his hands. His voice fell. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Then he said good-by and went.
Early the next morning Leander saw that there would be no sanctuary or peace for him in the farm that day. The stir of a large ladies’ party—magnified by the sale of Italian pottery—was inescapable. He decided to visit his friend Grimes, who was living in an old people’s home in West Chillum. It was a trip he had planned to make for years. He walked into St. Botolphs after breakfast and caught the bus to West Chillum there. It was on the other side of Chillum that the bus driver told him they had reached the Twilight Home and Leander got off. The place from the road looked to him like one of the New England academies. There was a granite wall, set with sharp pieces of stone to keep vagrants from resting. The drive was shaded with elms, and the buildings it served were made of red brick along architectural lines that, whatever had been intended when they were built, now seemed very gloomy. Along the driveway Leander saw old men hoeing the gutters. He entered the central building and went to an office, where a woman asked what he wanted.