A nurse opened Honora’s door. She gave Coverly a knowing smile as if she had heard a great deal about him and had already formed an unfavorable opinion. “She’s been waiting for you,” she whispered. “The poor thing’s been waiting for you all day.” There was no reason for reproach. Coverly had wired his old cousin and she knew exactly when he would arrive. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” the nurse said and went down the hall. The house was dirty and cold. The walls, plain as he remembered them, were now covered with a paper printed in black latticing and dark red roses. He opened one of the double doors into the living room and thought at first that she was dead.
She slept in a shabby wing chair. During the months since he had seen her she had lost her corpulence. She was terribly wasted. She had been robust—hardy, as she would have said—and now she was frail. Her leonine face and the childish placement of her feet were all that was not changed. She slept on and he looked around the room which, like the hallway, seemed neglected. Here was dust, cobwebs and flowered wallpaper. The curtains were gone and he could see the light snow through the high windows. Then she woke.
“Oh, Coverly.”
“Cousin Honora.” He kissed her and sat on a stool by her chair.
“I’m so glad you got here, dear, I’m so glad you came.”
“I’m glad to be here.”
“You know what I did, Coverly? I went to Europe. I didn’t pay my tax and Judge Beasely, that old fool, said they’d throw me in jail so I went to Europe.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“Remember the tomato fights?” Honora asked, and he wondered if she had lost her mind.
“Yes.”
“After the frost I used to let you and the others come into my tomato patch and have tomato fights. When you’d thrown all the tomatoes you used to pick up the calling cards the cows had left and throw those.” That this redoubtable old woman should call a steaming pile of cow manure a calling card was a reminder of the eccentric niceties of the village. “Well, when you’d thrown all the calling cards and all the tomatoes you used to be quite a mess,” Honora said, “but if anyone asked you if you’d had a good time I expect you’d say yes. That’s the way I feel about my trip.”
“I see,” said Coverly.
“I’ve changed,” Honora asked, “you can see that I’ve changed, can’t you?” There was some lightness, some hopefulness, even some pleading in her voice as if he might say persuasively that she hadn’t changed at all and she could then stamp out into the garden and rake a few leaves before the snow covered them.
“Yes.”
“Yes, I suppose I have. I’ve lost a lot of weight. But I feel much better.” This was bellicose. “However, I don’t go out now because I’ve noticed that people don’t like to see me. It makes them sad. I see it in their eyes. I am like an angel of death.”
“Oh, no, Honora,” Coverly said.
“Oh, yes, I am. Why shouldn’t I be? I’m dying.”
“Oh, no,” Coverly said.
“I’m dying, Coverly, and I know it and I want to die.”
“You shouldn’t say that, Honora.”
“And why shouldn’t I?”
“Because life is a gift, a mysterious gift,” he said feebly in spite of the weight the words had for him.
“Well,” she exclaimed, “you must be going to church a great deal these days.”
“I sometimes do,” he said.
“High or low?” she asked.
“Low.”
“Your family,” she said, “was always high.”
This was harsh, flat, that old contrariness upon which she had counted more than anything else to express herself, but now she seemed too feeble to keep it up. She followed his eyes to the ugly wallpaper and said: “I see you’ve noticed my roses.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m afraid they’re a mistake but when I came home I called Mr. Tanner and asked him to bring me over some wallpaper with roses on it to remind me of the summer.” Stooped and leaning forward in her chair, she raised her head, her eyes, and gave the roses a terribly haggard look. “I get awfully tired of looking at them,” she said, “but it’s too late to change.”
Coverly looked up at the wall, at her mistake, and noticed that the flowers were not the true colors and shapes of roses at all. The buds were phallic and the blooms themselves looked like some carnivorous plant, some petaled fly-catcher with a gaping throat. If they had been meant to remind her of the roses that bloomed in the summer they must have failed. They seemed like a darkness, a corruption, and he wondered if she hadn’t chosen them to correspond with her own sense of this time of life.
“Will you please get me some whisky, Coverly,” she said. “It’s in the pantry. I don’t dare ask her.” Honora nodded her head toward the back of the house where the nurse must be sitting. Then she screened her mouth with her left hand, presumably to direct her voice away from the door, but when she spoke it was in such a vituperative hiss that it must have carried down the hall. “She drinks,” Honora hissed, rolling her eyes wildly toward the kitchen in case Coverly should have missed the point.
Coverly was surprised to have his old cousin ask for whisky. She used to take a drink at the family parties but always with the most vocal misgivings and reservations as if a single highball might stretch her out unconscious on the floor, or still worse, lead her to dance a jig on a table. Coverly went through the dining room to the pantry. The two changes he had noticed, disrepair and an obsession with roses, were continued here. The walls were covered with dark-throated roses and the table was ringed and scored under a thick layer of dust. There was, in the lap of one of the chairs, a broken leg and arm. The place was out of hand but if she was dying, as she had said, she seemed, like a snail or nautilus, to be approaching the grave in the carapace of her own house, projecting her dimness of sight and her loss of memory in cobwebs and ashes.
“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Wapshot?” This was the nurse. She sat in a chair by the sink, empty-handed.
“I’m looking for some whisky.”
“It’s in the jelly closet. There isn’t any ice but she doesn’t like ice in her drinks.”
There was plenty of whisky. There was a half-case of bourbon and at least a case of empty bottles scattered helter-skelter on the floor. This was completely mysterious. Had the nurse ordered in these cases of whisky and swigged them alone in the kitchen?
“How long have you been working for Miss Wapshot?” Coverly asked.
“Oh, I’m not working for her,” the nurse said. “I just came in today to improve appearances. She thought you’d worry if you found her alone so she asked me to come in and make things look nice.”
“Is she alone all the time now?”
“She is when she wants to be. Oh, there’s plenty of people who’ll come over and make her a cup of tea but she won’t let them in. She wants to be alone. She doesn’t eat anything any more. She just drinks.”
Coverly looked more closely at the nurse to see if, as Honora had claimed, she was drunk and meant to shift her vices onto the old woman.
“Does the doctor know about this?” Coverly asked.
“The doctor. Ha. She won’t let the doctor into the house. She’s killing herself. That’s what she’s doing. She’s trying to kill herself. She knows that the doctor wants to operate on her and she’s afraid of the knife.”
She spoke with perfect pitilessness as if she were the knife’s advocate, its priestess, and Honora the apostate. So that was it; and what could he do? His time in the kitchen was running out. If he stayed any longer she would become suspicious. It was unthinkable that he would return and charge her with the fraudulence of the nurse and the empty whisky bottles. She would deny it all flatly and would, what’s more, be deeply wounded for he would have rudely broken the rules of that antic game in which their relationship was contained.
He went back through the pantry and the dining room, reminded by its disrepair of death, as a plain fact with which s
he seemed to be grappling boldly. He remembered walking down from the beach at Cascada with a bagful of black clams on his back. What does the sea sound like? Lions mostly, manifest destiny, the dealing of some final card hand, the aces as big as headstones. Boom, it says. And what did all his pious introspection on metamorphosis amount to? He thought he saw on the beach the change from one form of life to another. The sea grass dies, dries, flies like a swallow on the wind and that angry-looking tourist will make a lamp base out of the piece of driftwood he carries. The line of last night’s heavy sea is marked with malachite and amethyst, the beach is scored with the same lines as the sky; one seemed to stand in some fulcrum of change, here was the barrier, here as the wave fell was the line between one life and another, but would any of this keep him from squealing for mercy when his time came?
“Thank you, dear.” She drank thirstily and gave him a narrow look. “Is she drunk?”
“I don’t think so,” Coverly said.
“She conceals it. I want you to promise me three things, Coverly.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to promise me that if I should lose consciousness you will not have me moved to the hospital. I wish to die in this house.”
“I promise.”
“I want you to promise that when I’m gone you won’t worry about me. My life is over and I know it. I’ve done everything I was meant to do and a great deal I was not meant to do. Everything will be confiscated, of course, but Mr. Johnson won’t do this until January. I’ve asked some nice people here for Christmas dinner and I want you to be here and make them welcome. Maggie will do the cooking. Promise.”
“I promise.”
“And then I want you to promise me, to promise me that . . . Oh, there was something else,” she said, “but I can’t remember what it was. Now I think I’ll lie down for a little while.”
“Can I help you?”
“Yes. You can help me over to the sofa and then you can read to me. I like to be read to these days. Oh, remember how I used to read to you when you were sick? I used to read you David Copperfield and we would both cry so that I couldn’t go on. Remember how we used to cry, Coverly, you and I?”
The fullness of feeling in this recollection refreshed her voice and seemed to send it back through time until it sounded for a moment like the voice of a girl. He helped her out of the chair and led her over to the old horsehair sofa, where she lay down and let him cover her with a rug. “My book is on the table,” she said. “I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo again. Chapter twenty-two.” When she was settled he found her book and began to read.
His recollection of her reading to him was not an image, it was a sensation. He could not recall her tears while she sat by his bed but he could recall the violent and confused emotions she left behind her when she went away. Now he read uneasily and he wondered why. She had read to him when he was a sick child; now he read to her as she lay dying. The cycle was obvious enough, but why should he feel that she, as she lay on the sofa, utterly helpless and infirm, had the power to weave spells that could ensnare him? He had never had anything from her but generosity and kindness, so why should he perform this simple service uneasily? He admired the book, he loved the old woman and no room on earth was so familiar as this, so why should he feel that he had stepped innocently into some snare involving a fraudulent nurse, a case of whisky and an old book? Halfway through the chapter she fell asleep and he stopped reading. A little later the nurse came to the door wearing a black hat and with a black coat over her uniform. “I have to go,” she whispered. “I have to cook supper for my family.” Coverly nodded and listened to her footsteps pass into the back of the house and then the closing of the door.
He went to the long and dirty window to see the snow. There was some yellow light at the horizon, not lemony, not confined to its color, the light of a lantern, a lanthorne, a longthorne, the shine of light on paper, something that reminded him of childhood and its garden parties, isolated now by the lateness of the hour and the season.
“Coverly?” she asked, but she spoke in her sleep. He went back to his chair. He saw how terribly emaciated she was but he liked to think that this had not changed the force of her spirit. She had not only lived independently, she seemed at times to have evolved her own culture. There was nothing palliative in her approach to death. Her rites were bold, singular and arcane. The gloom and disrepair of her beloved house, the fraudulent nurse, the gaping roses—she seemed to have arranged them all around her satisfactorily as an earlier people had confidently supplied themselves, while dying, with enough food and wine for a long voyage.
“Coverly!” She woke suddenly, lifting her head off the pillow.
“Yes.”
“Coverly. I just saw the gates of Heaven!”
“What were they like, Honora, what were they like?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say, I couldn’t describe anything like that, they were so beautiful, but I saw them, Coverly, oh, I saw them.” She sat up radiantly and dried her tears. “Oh, they were so beautiful. There were the gates and hosts of angels with colored wings and I saw them. Wasn’t that nice?”
“Yes, Honora.”
“Now get me some more whisky.”
He went lightheartedly through the dark rooms, as happy as if he had shared her vision, and made some drinks, consoled to think that she would not, after all, ever die. She would stop breathing and be buried in the family lot but the greenness of her image, in his memory, would not change and she would be among them always in their decisions. She would, long after she was dust, move freely through his dreams, she would punish his and his brother’s wickedness with guilt, reward their good works with lightness of heart, pass judgment on their friends and lovers even while her headstone bloomed with moss and her coffin was canted and jockeyed by the winter frosts. The goodness and evil in the old woman were imperishable. He carried her drink back through the darkness and put another log on the fire. She said nothing more but he filled her glass twice.
He called Dr. Greenough at half-past six. The doctor was having his supper but he came about an hour later and pronounced her dead of starvation.
So they wouldn’t all come back to a place that was changed and strange and Coverly was the only member of the family at her funeral. He had no way of finding Moses, and Betsey was busy closing up the house in Talifer. Melissa had disappeared and the last we see of her is on a bus returning from one of the suburbs to the city of Rome. It is nearly Christmas but there are not many signs of this. Either Emile or his barber has cultivated a lock of hair that hangs over his forehead, giving him a look that is arch, boyish and a little stupid. He seems a little drunk and is, of course, hungry. Melissa’s hair is dyed red. One result of living with someone so much younger—and they are living together—is to have made her manner girlish. She has developed a habit of shrugging her shoulders and resettling her head, this way and that. She is not one of those expatriates who is ashamed to speak English. Her voice is musical, genteel, and it carries up and down the bus. “I know you’re hungry, darling,” she says, “I know that but it’s really not my fault. As I understood it they had invited us to lunch. I distinctly recall that she asked us for lunch. What I suppose happened was that after she had invited us to lunch the Parlapianos asked them to lunch and they decided to jettison us; put us off with a drink. I noticed that the table wasn’t set when we came in. I knew something was wrong then. It would have been much pleasanter if she’d telephoned and canceled the engagement. That would have been rude enough but to have us come all the way out there expecting lunch and then to tell us that they were engaged is one of the rudest things I’ve ever heard of. All we can do is to forget it, forget it, it’s just something else to be forgotten. As soon as we get back to Rome I’ll do the shopping and cook you some lunch. . . .”
And so she does. She goes to the Supra-Marketto Americano on the Via Delle Sagiturius. Here she disengages one wagon with a light ringing of metal from a chain of hundreds and begins
to push her way through the walls of American food. Grieving, bewildered by the blows life has dealt her, this is some solace, this is the path she takes. Her face is pale. A stray curl hangs against her cheek. Tears make the light in her eyes a glassy light but the market is crowded and she is not the first nor the last woman in the history of the place to buy her groceries with wet cheeks. She moves indifferently with the alien crowd as if these were the brooks and channels of her day. No willow grows aslant this stream of men and women and yet it is Ophelia that she most resembles, gathering her fantastic garland not of crowflowers, nettles and long purples, but of salt, pepper, Bab-o, Kleenex, frozen codfish balls, lamb patties, hamburger, bread, butter, dressing, an American comic book for her son and for herself a bunch of carnations. She chants, like Ophelia, snatches of old tunes. “Winstons taste good like a cigarette should. Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean,” and when her coronet or fantastic garland seems completed she pays her bill and carries her trophies away, no less dignified a figure of grief than any other.