He told them what to do. Beyond opening the doors of the hearse he didn’t raise a finger himself. “He goes right in there, boys, right on that platform. Just give him a push. Just give him a push there.” He slammed the doors and tried the handle. He had the biggest car in St. Botolphs, as if first among the powers of death was richness, and he climbed into the driver’s seat and drove slowly away.
By morning the news of the accident was known to almost everyone in St. Botolphs. The young man’s death filled them with sadness; and they asked what Honora Wapshot would think of the stranger at the farm. Now it was only natural that they should think of Honora, for this childless matriarch had done much more for the family than give Leander the
She was born, as we know, in Polynesia, and raised by her Uncle Lorenzo in St. Botolphs. She attended Miss Wilbur’s Academy. “Oh, I was an awful tomboy,” she often said of her youth, covering a smile with her hand and thinking, probably, of upset privies, tin cans tied to dog tails and other small-town pranks. She may have missed the tender love of her parents, who died in Polynesia, or been oppressed by her elderly uncle or been forced by something such as loneliness into the ways of a maverick but these were her ways. You could say of Honora that she had never subjected herself to the discipline of continuousness; but we are not dealing here with great cities and civilizations but with the society of an old port whose population diminished year by year.
After her graduation from Miss Wilbur’s, Honora moved with Lorenzo into the city, where he served in the state legislature and where she occupied herself in social-service work that seemed to be mostly of a medical nature. She claimed that these were her proudest years and as an old lady she often said that she wished she had never given up social work, although it was hard to imagine why she should long, with such snarling and bitterness, for the slums. She liked, at times, to reminisce about her experiences as a Samaritan. These tales could take your appetite away and make your body hair bristle, but this may have been no more than that attraction to morbidity that overtakes many good women late in life. We hear them on buses and trains, in kitchens and restaurants, talking in such sad and musical voices about gangrene that they only seem to express their dismay at discovering that the body, in spite of all its ringing claims to the contrary, is mortal. Cousin Honora did not feel that she should use a medical vocabulary and so she had worked out a compromise. What she did was to pronounce the first syllables of the word in question and mumble the rest. Thus hysterectomy became hystermumblemumble, suppuration became suppurmumblemumble and testicles became testimumblemumbles.
When Lorenzo died he left Honora with a much larger trust than she might have expected. The Wapshot family had never—never in the darkest night with the owls chanting—discussed this sum. A month or two after Lorenzo’s death Honora married a Mr. de Sastago who claimed to be a marquis and to have a castle in Spain. She sailed for Europe as a bride but she returned in less than eight months. Of this part of her life she only said: “I was once married to a foreigner and was greatly disappointed in my expectations. . . .” She took her maiden name again and settled down in Lorenzo’s old house on Boat Street. The best way to understand her is to watch her during the course of a day.
Honora’s bedroom is pleasant. Its walls are painted a light blue. The high, slender posts of her bed support a bare wooden frame that is meant to hold a canopy. The family has urged her to have this removed because it has fallen several times and might crash down in the middle of the night and brain the old lady while she dreams. She has not heeded these warnings and sleeps peacefully in this Damoclean antique. This is not to say that her furniture is as unreliable as the furniture at West Farm but there are three or four chairs around her house which, if you should be a stranger and sit in them, will collapse and dump you onto the floor. Most of her furniture belonged to Lorenzo and much of it was bought during his travels in Italy for he felt that this New World where he lived had sprung from the minds of Renaissance men. The dust that lies on everything is the world’s dust, but the smell of salt marshes, straw floor matting and wood smoke is the breath of St. Botolphs.
