Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [116]
Vivian, in a milk blue wool dress, emerges from the hallway with a wooden caddy of flatware. She holds it aloft, a hostess with a plate of hors d’oeuvres. “I left the kettle and the teapot and two cups in the kitchen,” she says. “Thought you might want one last cup of tea. Or am I wrong? Do you want to go straightaway?”
“No,” Honora says, “a cup of tea might be good. All the stuff is here in the hall. Alphonse can just keep making trips. The only thing that will be a problem for him is that rocker.”
“What are you going to do about the piano?” Vivian asks.
“I’m going to leave it,” Honora says. “It was here when I got here.”
“Whose is it?”
“I think it belongs to someone who used to live in the house,” she says. “I never felt that it was ours.”
“Oh, and by the way,” Vivian says, turning, “I couldn’t find the letter from the school. Are you sure you left it by the sink?”
“It was there this morning,” Honora says. “Maybe I put it in my pocketbook. I’ll check.”
In four days, Alphonse will begin classes at the Ely Day School in Ely. It will mean a two-mile walk to school, but Alphonse doesn’t seem to think that this will be a problem. Honora isn’t so sure about how he will manage during the winter months, but they will just have to figure that out when the time comes.
Vivian said that she had always wanted a house sitter, though it was perfectly apparent to Honora that the thought had never crossed Vivian’s mind until the very moment when she made the offer. The bank will take possession of Honora’s house on Friday. Honora doesn’t want to be here when it happens.
“Come stay with me until I go back to New York,” Vivian pleaded, “and then stay on through the winter. When I come in June, you can type my plays.”
A year ago, Honora would have refused Vivian’s offer. A year ago, Honora would have been unable to accept such overt charity. But not now. Not since that morning when McDermott spun in the middle of the floor and Vivian slipped with Alphonse to safety behind a sofa. It was the only way Honora could keep Alphonse with her, she realized at once, and so she said yes. Without a second thought.
One morning in mid-August, Alphonse took the trolley to the end of the Ely Road and walked the rest of the way to the beach. His brothers and sisters had all been divided up among their relatives, he said when Honora opened the door. He himself was being sent to his uncle Augustin and his aunt Louise in Lowell. He wanted to live with Honora instead, he said, and would that be all right? The boy’s chin was trembling, and Honora knew how much it had cost him to have to ask her this. She hugged the boy, and the two of them wept like infants on the granite doorstep.
Alphonse had lost his mother and McDermott — the two people he had loved most in the world. Sometimes it seems to Honora scarcely possible that the boy is still standing.
Honora fills the kettle and sets it on the stove, remembering the first day she entered this kitchen and found her way to the window and opened the shutters and saw the glass coated with a year or two of salt. The filmy light, like that from frosted glass, lit up an iron stove, its surface dotted with animal droppings. The oven door opened with a screech and bang that startled her.
She waits for the water to boil. She remembers how Sexton fixed the tap and how the faucet retched and spattered brown water into the sink.
For ten days in late July and early August, Honora took the trolley to the Ely Falls Hospital. She said hello to the policeman who guarded Sexton’s door — a man named Henry. She sat beside Sexton’s bed and knit a pair of socks. Though his leg was healing, her husband never spoke a word. Honora, after two or three days of frantic questioning, finally gave up trying. Sexton’s eyes had moved so close together that it seemed that only a thin bridge of bone separated them. He did not comb his hair. When his leg was healed, he would go to jail.
On the morning of the eleventh day, before Honora had had a chance to leave the house,