Coverly looked up at the wall, at her mistake, and noticed that the flowers were not the true colors and shapes of roses at all. The buds were phallic and the blooms themselves looked like some carnivorous plant, some petaled fly-catcher with a gaping throat. If they had been meant to remind her of the roses that bloomed in the summer they must have failed. They seemed like a darkness, a corruption, and he wondered if she hadn’t chosen them to correspond with her own sense of this time of life.
“Will you please get me some whisky, Coverly,” she said. “It’s in the pantry. I don’t dare ask her.” Honora nodded her head toward the back of the house where the nurse must be sitting. Then she screened her mouth with her left hand, presumably to direct her voice away from the door, but when she spoke it was in such a vituperative hiss that it must have carried down the hall. “She drinks,” Honora hissed, rolling her eyes wildly toward the kitchen in case Coverly should have missed the point.
Coverly was surprised to have his old cousin ask for whisky. She used to take a drink at the family parties but always with the most vocal misgivings and reservations as if a single highball might stretch her out unconscious on the floor, or still worse, lead her to dance a jig on a table. Coverly went through the dining room to the pantry. The two changes he had noticed, disrepair and an obsession with roses, were continued here. The walls were covered with dark-throated roses and the table was ringed and scored under a thick layer of dust. There was, in the lap of one of the chairs, a broken leg and arm. The place was out of hand but if she was dying, as she had said, she seemed, like a snail or nautilus, to be approaching the grave in the carapace of her own house, projecting her dimness of sight and her loss of memory in cobwebs and ashes.
“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Wapshot?” This was the nurse. She sat in a chair by the sink, empty-handed.
“I’m looking for some whisky.”
“It’s in the jelly closet. There isn’t any ice but she doesn’t like ice in her drinks.”
There was plenty of whisky. There was a half-case of bourbon and at least a case of empty bottles scattered helter-skelter on the floor. This was completely mysterious. Had the nurse ordered in these cases of whisky and swigged them alone in the kitchen?
“How long have you been working for Miss Wapshot?” Coverly asked.
“Oh, I’m not working for her,” the nurse said. “I just came in today to improve appearances. She thought you’d worry if you found her alone so she asked me to come in and make things look nice.”
“Is she alone all the time now?”
“She is when she wants to be. Oh, there’s plenty of people who’ll come over and make her a cup of tea but she won’t let them in. She wants to be alone. She doesn’t eat anything any more. She just drinks.”
Coverly looked more closely at the nurse to see if, as Honora had claimed, she was drunk and meant to shift her vices onto the old woman.
“Does the doctor know about this?” Coverly asked.
“The doctor. Ha. She won’t let the doctor into the house. She’s killing herself. That’s what she’s doing. She’s trying to kill herself. She knows that the doctor wants to operate on her and she’s afraid of the knife.”
She spoke with perfect pitilessness as if she were the knife’s advocate, its priestess, and Honora the apostate. So that was it; and what could he do? His time in the kitchen was running out. If he stayed any longer she would become suspicious. It was unthinkable that he would return and charge her with the fraudulence of the nurse and the empty whisky bottles. She would deny it all flatly and would, what’s more, be deeply wounded for he would have rudely broken the rules of that antic game in which their relationship was contained.
He went back through the pantry and the dining room, reminded by its disrepair of death, as a plain fact with which she seemed to be grappling boldly. He remembered walking down from the beach at Cascada with a bagful of black clams on his back. What does the sea sound like? Lions mostly, manifest destiny, the dealing of some final card hand, the aces as big as headstones. Boom, it says. And what did all his pious introspection on metamorphosis amount to? He thought he saw on the beach the change from one form of life to another. The sea grass dies, dries, flies like a swallow on the wind and that angry-looking tourist will make a lamp base out of the piece of driftwood he carries. The line of last night’s heavy sea is marked with malachite and amethyst, the beach is scored with the same lines as the sky; one seemed to stand in some fulcrum of change, here was the barrier, here as the wave fell was the line between one life and another, but would any of this keep him from squealing for mercy when his time came?
“Thank you, dear.” She drank thirstily and gave him a narrow look. “Is she drunk?”
“I don’t think so,” Coverly said.
“She conceals it. I want you to promise me three things, Coverly.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to promise me that if I should lose consciousness you will not have me moved to the hospital. I wish to die in this house.”
“I promise.”
“I want you to promise that when I’m gone you won’t worry about me. My life is over and I know it. I’ve done everything I was meant to do and a great deal I was not meant to do. Everything will be confiscated, of course, but Mr. Johnson won’t do this until January. I’ve asked some nice people here for Christmas dinner and I want you to be here and make them welcome. Maggie will do the cooking. Promise.”
“I promise.”
“And then I want you to promise me, to promise me that . . . Oh, there was something else,” she said, “but I can’t remember what it was. Now I think I’ll lie down for a little while.”
“Can I help you?”
“Yes. You can help me over to the sofa and then you can read to me. I like to be read to these days. Oh, remember how I used to read to you when you were sick? I used to read you David Copperfield and we would both cry so that I couldn’t go on. Remember how we used to cry, Coverly, you and I?”
The fullness of feeling in this recollection refreshed her voice and seemed to send it back through time until it sounded for a moment like the voice of a girl. He helped her out of the chair and led her over to the old horsehair sofa, where she lay down and let him cover her with a rug. “My book is on the table,” she said. “I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo again. Chapter twenty-two.” When she was settled he found her book and began to read.
His recollection of her reading to him was not an image, it was a sensation. He could not recall her tears while she sat by his bed but he could recall the violent and confused emotions she left behind her when she went away. Now he read uneasily and he wondered why. She had read to him when he was a sick child; now he read to her as she lay dying. The cycle was obvious enough, but why should he feel that she, as she lay on the sofa, utterly helpless and infirm, had the power to weave spells that could ensnare him? He had never had anything from her but generosity and kindness, so why should he perform this simple service uneasily? He admired the book, he loved the old woman and no room on earth was so familiar as this, so why should he feel that he had stepped innocently into some snare involving a fraudulent nurse, a case of whisky and an old book? Halfway through the chapter she fell asleep and he stopped reading. A little later the nurse came to the door wearing a black hat and with a black coat over her uniform. “I have to go,” she whispered. “I have to cook supper for my family.” Coverly nodded and listened to her footsteps pass into the back of the house and then the closing of the door.