Chapter VII
The two stories about Honora Wapshot that were most frequently told in the family concerned her alarm clock and her penmanship. These were not told so much as they were performed, each member of the family taking a part, singing an aria so to speak, while everyone joined in on the Grand Finale like some primitive anticipation of the conventions of nineteenth-century Italian opera. The alarm clock incident belonged to the remote past when Lorenzo had been alive. Lorenzo was determined to appear pious and liked to arrive at Christ Church for morning worship at precisely quarter to eleven. Honora, who may have been genuinely pious but who detested appearances, could never find her gloves or her hat and was always tardy. One Sunday morning Lorenzo, in a rage, led his niece by the hand into the drugstore and bought her an alarm clock. So they went to church. Mr. Briam, Mr. Applegate’s predecessor, had started on an interminable sermon about the chains of St. Paul when the alarm clock went off. Since most of the congregation was asleep they were startled and confused. Honora shook the clock and then proceeded to unwrap it but by the time she got through to the box in which it sat the ringing had stopped. Mr. Briam then picked up the chains of St. Paul and the alarm clock, on repeat, began to ring again. This time Honora pretended that it wasn’t her clock. Sweating freely, she sat beside this impious engine while Mr. Briam went on about the significance of chains until the mechanism had unwound. It was an historic Sunday. The tales about her penmanship centered on a morning when she had written to the local coal dealer protesting his prices and then had written to Mr. Potter to share with him his sorrow over the sudden loss of his sainted wife. She got the letters in the wrong envelopes but since Mr. Potter could read nothing of her letter but the signature he was touched by her thoughtfulness and since Mr. Sumner, the coal dealer, was unable to read the letter of condolence he received he mailed it back to Honora. She had been taught Spencerian penmanship but something redoubtable or coarse in her nature was left unexpressed by this style and the conflict between her passions and the tools given to her left her penmanship illegible.
At about this time Coverly received a letter from his old cousin.
Someone more persevering might have broken the letter down word by word and diagnosed its content but Coverly was not this gifted or patient. He was able to decipher a few facts. A holly tree that grew behind her house had been attacked by rust. She wanted Coverly to return to St. Botolphs and have it sprayed. This was followed by an indecipherable paragraph on the Appleton Bank and Trust Company in Boston. Honora had set up trusts for Coverly and his brother and he supposed she was writing of these. The income enabled Coverly to live much more comfortably than he would have been able to on his government salary and he hoped nothing was wrong here. This was followed by a clear sentence stating that Dr. Lemuel Cameron, director of the Talifer site, had once received a scholarship endowed by Lorenzo Wapshot. She closed with her customary observations on the rainfall, the prevailing winds and the tides.
Coverly guessed that her reference to the holly tree meant something very different but he didn’t have the emotional leisure to discover what was at the back of the old woman’s mind. If there was trouble with the Appleton Bank and Trust Company—and his quarterly check was late—there was nothing much he could do. The remark about Dr. Cameron might or might not have been true since Honora often exaggerated Lorenzo’s bounty and had, like any other old woman, a struggle to remember names. The letter arrived at a bad time in his affairs and he forwarded it on to his brother.
Betsey had not rallied from the failure of her cocktail party. She hated Talifer and squarely blamed Coverly for making her live there. She avenged herself by sleeping alone and by not speaking to her husband. She complained loudly to herself about the house, the neighborhood, the kitchen, the weather and the news in the papers. She swore at the mashed potatoes, cursed the pot roast, she damned the pots and pans to hell and spoke obscenely to the frozen apple tarts, but she did not speak to Coverly. Every surface of life—tables, dishes and the body of her husband—seemed to be abrasive facets of a stone that lay in her path. Nothing was right. The sofa hurt her back. She could not sleep in her bed. The lamps were too dim to read by, the knives were too dull to cut butter, the television programs bored her although she watched them faithfully. The greatest of Coverly’s hardships was the breakdown in their sexual relationship. It was the crux, the readiest source of vitality in their marriage, and without this her companionship became painful.
Coverly tried to throw a ring of light around her figure and saw or thought he saw that she might be heartlessly overburdened by a past of which he knew nothing. We are all, he thought, ransomed to our beginnings, and the sum in her case might have been exorbitant. This might account for that dark side of her nature that seemed more mysterious to him than the dark face of the moon. Were there instruments of love and patience that could explore this darkness, discover the wellsprings of her misery and by charting it all draw it all into the area of reasonableness; or was this the nature of her kind of woman to stand forever half in a darkness that was unknown to herself? She looked nothing like a moon goddess, sitting in front of the television set, but of all the things in the world her spirit with its irreconcilable faces seemed most like the moon to him.
One Saturday morning when he was shaving he heard Betsey’s voice—strident and raised in anger—and he went downstairs in his pajamas to see what was the matter. Betsey was upbraiding a new cleaning woman. “I just don’t know what the world’s coming to,” Betsey said. “I just don’t know. I suppose you expect me to pay you good money for just sitting around, for just sitting around smoking my cigarettes and watching my television.” Betsey turned to Coverly. “She can hardly speak English,” Betsey said, “and she doesn’t even know how to work a vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t even know how to do that. And you. Look at you. Here it is nine o’clock and you’re still in your pajamas and I suppose you’re going to spend the day just sitting around the house. It just makes me sick and tired. Well, you take her upstairs and you show her how to work the vacuum cleaner. Now you march, both of you. You get upstairs and do something useful for a change.”
The cleaning woman had dark hair and olive skin. Her eyes were wet with tears. Coverly got the vacuum cleaner and carried it up the stairs, admiring the stranger’s ample rump. There was between them the instantaneous rapport of unhappy children. Coverly plugged in the cord and turned on the motor but when he smiled at the stranger things took a different turn. “Now we put it in here,” Betsey heard him say. “That’s right. That’s the way. We have to get it into the corners, way into the corners. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Back and forth, back and forth. Not too fast . . .” Downstairs Betsey thought angrily that Coverly had at last found something useful to do on Saturday mornings and that at least one room would be clean. She went into the bathroom where she had a vision—not so much of the emancipation of her sex as the enslavement of the male.
Routine progress—a feminine President and a distaff Senate—did not appear in Betsey’s reverie. Indeed, in her vision the work of the world was still largely done by men, although this had been enlarged to include housework and shopping. She smiled at the thought of a man bent over an ironing board; a man dusting a table; a man basting a roast. In her vision all the public statuary commemorating great men would be overthrown and dragged off to the dump. Generals on horseback, priests in robes, solons in tailcoats, aviators, explorers, inventors, poets and philosophers would be replaced by attractive representations of the female. Women would be granted complete sexual independence and would make love to strangers as casually as they bought a pocketbook, and coming home in the evening they would brazenly describe to their depressed husbands (sprinkling Adolph’s meat tenderizer on the London broil) the high points of their erotic adventures. She would not go so far as to imagine any legislation that would actually restrict the rights of men; but she saw them as so browbeaten, colorless and depressed that they would have lost the chance to be taken seriously.