The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [21]
Honora walks past the window on the soft grass but they have not heard her; they are laughing too loudly. Halfway down the house she stops and leans heavily, with both hands, on her cane, engrossed in an emotion so violent and so nameless that she wonders if this feeling of loneliness and bewilderment is not the mysteriousness of life. Poignance seems to drench her until her knees are weak and she yearns so earnestly for understanding that she raises her head and says half a prayer. Then she gathers her forces, enters the front door and calls cheerfully down the hall, “It’s me, Maggie.” Upstairs in her bedroom she drinks a water glass full of port and while she is changing her shoes the telephone rings. It is poor Mr. Burstyn, who has taken a room at the Viaduct House, which is no place for a respectable man to stay. “Well if you want to see me, come and see me,” Honora says. “I’m not very hard to find. Excepting to visit Travertine I haven’t been out of St. Botolphs in nearly seven years. You can go and tell those men at the bank that if they want someone to talk with me they’d better get someone with more gumption than it takes to find an old lady.” Then she hangs up the receiver and goes down to supper with a good appetite.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The morning light and the bruit of the family going around the upstairs hallway woke the girl. She felt at first the strangeness of the place, although there were not many places with which she was familiar any more. The air smelled of sausage and even the morning light—golden with all its blue shadows—seemed foreign in a way that pained her and she remembered waking up on her first night at camp to find that she had wet the bed. Then she remembered the accident—all that—but not in detail; it loomed up in her mind like a boulder, too big to be moved and too adamant to be broken and have its contents revealed. All that stood in her mind like a dark stone. The sheets—linen and damp—brought her back to the pain of strangeness and she wondered why a person should feel, in the world where she was meant to live, so miserable and abraded. She got up out of bed to discover that her whole body was lame and sore. In the closet she found her coat and some cigarettes in the pocket. The taste of smoke diminished the painful sense of strangeness by a little and she carried a clamshell for an ash tray to the side of her bed and lay down again. She shivered, she trembled, she tried unsuccessfully to cry.
Now the house, or the part of it where she lay, was quiet. She heard a man calling good-by. On the wall she noticed that stuck behind the picture of a little Dutch girl were some palm fronds from Palm Sunday and she hoped that this was not the house of a priest. Then, in the downstairs hall, she heard the telephone ring and someone shouted, “Hello, Mabel. I may not be coming over today. No, she ain’t paid me yet. She don’t have any money. They get all their money from Honora. She don’t have any money. No, I can’t borrow no more money on my insurance. I told you, I told you, I did ass them, I assed them. Well, I need shoes myself the way she expects me to go upstairs and downstairs fifty times a day. They got somebody here now. Did you hear about the accident? There was an accident here last night. A car went off the road and a man was killed. Terrible. Well, he had a girl with him and they brought her in here and she’s here now. I’ll tell you later. I SAID I’LL TELL YOU LATER. They got her here now and that makes more work for me. How’s Charlie? What are you going to have for supper? Don’t have the meat loaf. You don’t have enough of it. I said, don’t have the meat loaf. Open a can of salmon and make Charlie a nice salad. There isn’t enough meat loaf. I just told you. Open a can of salmon and get some of those nice rolls from the bakery. Make him a pie for dessert. They