The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [20]
Honora sits through the movie twice. When she leaves the theater she feels weary and sad like any sinner. The lobby of the theater slopes like a kind of tunnel down toward the sidewalk. There is a small stretch here of some slippery composition stone and on it a spot of water or moisture from the iceman’s load or a child’s pop bottle. Someone may even have spat. Honora slips on this and crashes down onto the stone. Her purse flies in one direction and her stick in another and her three-cornered hat comes down over her nose. The girl, the woman, the hag, in fact, in the ticket window sees all of this and her heart seems to stop beating for she sees here, in the fallen old woman, the ruthlessness of time. She fumbles around for the key to the cash register and locks up the money. Then she opens the door to her little tower, sanctuary or keep and hurries to where Honora lies. She kneels beside her. “Oh, Miss Wapshot,” she says. “Dear Miss Wapshot.”
Honora raises herself by the arms and gets to her knees. Then slowly she swings her head around to this Samaritan. “Leave me alone,” she says. “Please leave me alone.” The voice is not harsh or imperious. It sounds small, plaintive, the voice of a child with some inner trouble; a plea for dignity. Now more and more people come to her side. Honora is still on her hands and knees. “Please leave me alone,” she tells the gathering. “Please mind your own business. Please go away and leave me alone.” They recognize that what she is expressing is the privateness of pain and they move back. “Please leave me alone,” she says, “please mind your own business.” She straightens her hat and, using her stick for a support, gets to her feet. Someone hands her the purse. Her dress is torn and dirty but she walks straight through the gathering to the corner where the bus to St. Botolphs is waiting. The driver who took her to Travertine earlier in the day has gone home to supper and has been replaced by a young man. “What,” Honora asks him, “have you done with my lobsters?”
The bus driver tells her that the lobsters have been delivered and he has the good sense not to ask for her fare. So they travel up the River Road to St. Botolphs and Honora gets off at the four corners and enters her garden by the back gate.
Mark has done a good job. The paths and the flower beds look neat in the twilight—for it is nearly dark. The day has pleased her and she liked the movie. By half-closing her eyes she can still see the colored plains and the Indians riding down from the butte. Her kitchen windows are lighted and open on this summer night and as she approaches them she sees Maggie sitting at the kitchen table with Maggie’s younger sister. She hears Maggie’s voice. “Perch,” says Maggie. “Perch, she says, rattling the dish cover and breathing smoke and fire. Whatever in the world made you think I wanted perch for breakfast? For weeks she’s been telling me how she’d like a bit of perch and I bought a couple from the little Townsend boy yesterday with my own money and I cooked it for her nicely and all the thanks I get is this. Perch, she says. Whatever made you think I wanted perch for breakfast!”
Maggie is not bitter. Far from it; she and her sister are laughing uproariously at the memory of Honora who stands now outside the lighted windows of her own house in the dusk. “Well then,” says Maggie, “I hear Mr. Macgrath coming up the walk and putting the mail into the slot and so I go down the hall to get her letters and I give them to her and