The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [19]
Honora doesn’t put a dime into the fare box like the rest of the passengers. As she says, she can’t be bothered. She sends the transportation company a check for twenty dollars each Christmas. They’ve written her, telephoned her and sent representatives to her house, but they’ve gotten nowhere. The bus is decrepit and the seats and several of the windows are held together with friction tape. Jarring and rattling, it gives, for a vehicle, an unusual impression of frailty. It is one of those lines that seem to carry the scrim of the world—sweet-natured but browbeaten women shoppers, hunchbacks and drunks. Honora looks out the window and at the river and the houses—those poignant landscapes against which she has played out most of her life and where she is known as the Wonderful Honora, the Splendid Honora, the Grand Honora Wapshot. When the bus stops at the corner in Travertine she goes up the street to Mr. Hiram’s fish market. Mr. Hiram is in back, opening a crate of salt fish. Honora goes around and behind the counter to where there is a small tank of sea water for lobsters. She puts down her bag and stick, rolls up one sleeve and plunges her hand into the tank, coming up with a good four-pound lobster just as Mr. Hiram comes in from the back. “Put that down, Miss Honora,” he shouts. “They ain’t pegged, they ain’t pegged yet.”
“Well, they don’t seem to be doing me any harm,” says Honora. “Just get me a paper bag.”
“George Wolf just brought them in,” says Mr. Hiram, scurrying around for a paper bag, “and if one of those four pounders tooka hold of you you could lose a finger.”
He holds the paper bag open and Honora drops the lobster into this, turns and plunges her hand into the tank again. Mr Hiram sighs, but Honora comes up quickly with another lobster and gets it into the bag. When she has paid Mr. Hiram she carries her lobsters out to the street and walks to the corner where the bus is waiting to pick up passengers for St. Botolphs. She hands the bag of lobsters to the bus driver. “Here,” she says. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She starts for the dry-goods store but, as she walks by the five-and-ten-cent store, the smell of frankfurters draws her in. She sits at the counter. “Your frankfurters smell so deliciously,” she tells the clerk, “that I can’t resist having one. Our Cousin Justina used to play the piano in here, y’know. Oh, if she knew I remembered, she’d die. . . .” She eats two frankfurters and a dish of ice cream. “That was delicious,” she tells the counter girl, and gathering up her things she starts down the street again toward the bus stop when she notices the sign above the Neptune movie theater: ROSE OF THE WEST. What harm can there be, she thinks, in an old lady going to a movie, but when she buys her ticket and steps into the dark, bad-smelling theater she suffers all the abrasive sensations of someone forced into moral uncleanliness. She does not have the courage of her vices. It is wrong, she knows, to go into a dark place when the world outside shines with light. It is wrong and she is a miserable sinner. She buys a box of popcorn and takes an aisle seat in the last row—a noncommittal position that seems to lighten her burden of guilt. She munches her popcorn and watches the movie suspiciously.
In the meantime Maggie is keeping her lunch warm on the back of the stove and her lobsters, battling for life in the paper bag, have made the trip to St. Botolphs and are now on their way back to Travertine. Mr. Burstyn, the trust officer, has driven to West Farm. Sarah has been courteous and helpful. “I haven’t seen Honora myself,” she says, “but she’s expected. She’s interested in some