He went to a pew way forward, genuflected with a loud creaking of his kneebones and said his prayers, immersed in the immemorial and Episcopal smell of ancient rains. Mr. Applegate came in without his cassock and lighted the candles. He returned to the altar a moment later, carrying the Host. “Almighty God,” he intoned, “unto Whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from Whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts with the inspiration of Thy holy spirit. . . .”
The resonance of the Mass moved into that gloomy place on Christmas Eve with the magnificence of an Elizabethan procession. Perorative clauses spread out after the main supplication or confession in breadth and glory and the muttered responses seemed embroidered in crimson and gold. On it would move, Coverly thought, through the Lamb of God, the Gloria and the Benediction until the last Amen shut like a door on this verbal pomp. But then he sensed something strange and wrong. Mr. Applegate’s speech was theatrical but what was more noticeable was a pose of suavity, a bored and haughty approach to the holy words for which Cranmer had burned. As he turned to the altar to pray Coverly saw him sway and grab at the lace for support. Was he sick? Was he feeble? The woman with the lights in her hat turned to Coverly and hissed: “He’s drunk again.” He was. He spoke the Mass with scorn and contumely, as if his besottedness were a form of wisdom. He lurched around the altar, got the general confession mixed up with the order for morning prayer and kept saying: “Christ have mercy upon us. Let us pray,” until it seemed that he was stuck. There is no point in the formalities of Holy Communion where, in the case of such a disaster, the communicants can intervene and there was nothing to do but watch him flounder through to the end. Suddenly he threw his arms wide, fell to his knees and exclaimed: “Let us pray for all those killed or cruelly wounded on thruways, expressways, freeways and turnpikes. Let us pray for all those burned to death in faulty plane-landings, mid-air collisions and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all those wounded by rotary lawn mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers and other power tools. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the days that the Lord hath made in ounces, pints and fifths.” Here he sobbed loudly. “Let us pray for the lecherous and the impure. . . .” Led by the woman with the flashing hat, the other worshipers left before this prayer was finished and Coverly was left alone to support Mr. Applegate with his Amen. He got through the rest of it, divested himself, extinguished his candles and hurried back to his gin bottle, hidden among the vestments, and Coverly walked back to Boat Street. The telephone was ringing.
“Coverly, Coverly, this is Hank Moore over at the Viaduct House. I know it’s none of my business but I thought maybe you were wondering where your brother was and he’s over here. He’s got the widow Wilston with him. I don’t want to put my nose in nobody else’s business but I just thought you might like to know where he was.”
It was Christmas Eve at the Viaduct House but the scene upstairs was flagrantly pagan. This was no sacred grove and the only sound of running water came from a leaking tap but Moses the satyr leered through the smoky air at his bacchante. Mrs. Wilston’s curls were disheveled, her face was red, her smile was the rapt and wanton smile of forgetfulness and she held a lovely glass of lovely bourbon in her right hand. Her jowls—the first note of pendulousness to be massively reiterated by her breasts—were very meaty. “Now you listen to me, Moses Wapshot,” she said, “you just listen to me. You Wapshots always thought you were bettern everybody else but I wanna tell you, I wanna tell you, I can’t remember what I wanna tell you.” She laughed. She had lost the power of consecutive thought and with it all the stings and pains of living. She waked and yet she dreamed. Moses, naked as any satyr, smacked his lips and left his chair. His walk was lumbering, bellicose and a little haunted. It was on the one hand pugnacious and had on the other the lightness, the fleetness, the hint of stealth of a man who is stepping out of a liquor store after having paid for a quart of gin with an unsubstantiated check. He made his way to her, smacked her wetly in several places and gathered her up in his arms. She sighed and lolled in his embrace. He started for the bed with his jolly burden. He weaved to the right, recouped his balance and weaved to the right again. Then he was going; he was going; he was gone. Thump. The whole Viaduct House reverberated to the crash and then there was an awful stillness. He lay athwart her, his cheek against the carpet, which had a pleasant, dusty smell like the woods in autumn. Oh, where was his dog, his gun, his simple joy in life! She, still lying in a heap, was the first to speak. She spoke without anger or impatience. She smiled. “Let’s have another drink,” she said. Then Coverly opened the door. “Come home, Moses,” he said. “Come home, brother. It’s Christmas Eve.”
Christmas Day in the morning, when Coverly woke and romanced Betsey, was dazzling. The frost on the windowglass, shaped like shrapnel, distilled and amplified the light. Maggie came early and opened the furnace drafts and presently hot air and coal gas began to pour out of the registers. Binxey emptied his stocking and unwrapped the presents that Coverly had bought for him and they all had breakfast in the warm kitchen off a wooden table that was as slick and porous as hand soap. The kitchen was not a dark room but the power of light on the new snow outside made it seem cavernous.
Moses woke in a crushing paroxysm of anxiety, the keenest melancholy. The brilliance of light, the birth of Christ, all seemed to him like some fatuous shell game invented to dupe a fool like his brother while he saw straight through into the nothingness of things. The damage he had done to his nerves and his memory was less painful than a sense he suffered of approaching disaster, some pitiless fatality that would break him without making itself known. His hands had begun to shake and in another fifteen minutes he would begin to sweat. This was the agony of death, with the difference that he knew the way to life everlasting. It was in the bottles of bourbon Honora had left in the jelly closet. He thought of bourbon while he shaved and dressed but when he went down to the kitchen and found them sitting at the table there he saw them not as the members of his family but as cruel obstacles, standing between himself and the alpine landscapes in a bottle of sour mash. The coffee and orange juice that Maggie gave him seemed innocuous and nauseating. How could he get them out of the room? If he had only thought to buy some presents and left them under the tree, he might have been alone for a minute. “Jelly,” he exclaimed. “I want some jelly for my toast.” He went into the closet and shut the door.
Going through the dining room after breakfast Coverly saw that Maggie had set the table for twelve guests and he wondered who they would be. Honora had always had a large table at Christmas. After Thanksgiving she would begin—in public places—trains, buses and waiting rooms—to look around for those faces that bore the inexpungeable mark of loneliness and invite them to her house for Christmas dinner. Intuition and practice had made her discerning and she could single out her prey unerringly and yet, knowing as she did how the passion of loneliness runs through the lives of all men, she was oftener rebuffed than accepted by strangers who, she saw, as they turned away from her, would sooner spend their holiday in a bare room than admit to her or even to themselves that they lacked a host of friends and relations and a groaning board. Wayward pride had been her adversary, and a formidable one, but the wish to fill up her table seemed, like her love of fires and her disinterest in money, aboriginal, and she had once gone up to the railroad station waiting room on Christmas morning and corraled the strays who were warming themselves there at the coal stove.