Rosalie might have gone on to tell her the rest of it and it would have gone something like this: I mean it just seems that all I ever heard about was sex when I was growing up. I mean everyone told me it was just marvelous and the end of all my problems and loneliness and everything and so naturally I looked forward to it and then when I was at Allendale I went to this dance with this nice-looking boy and we did it and it didn’t stop me from feeling lonely because I’ve always been a very lonely person so we kept on doing it and doing it because I kept thinking it was going to keep me from being lonely and then I got pregnant, which was dreadful, of course, with Daddy being the priest and so virtuous and prominent, and they nearly died when they found out and they sent me to this place where I had this adorable little baby although they told everyone I was having an operation on my nose and afterwards they sent me to Europe with this old lady....
Then Coverly came down the lawn from the house. “Cousin Honora called,” he said, “and she’s coming for tea or after supper, maybe.”
“Won’t you join us?” Mrs. Wapshot asked. “Coverly, this is Rosalie Young.”
“How do you do,” he said.
“Hello.” He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered into the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates and sure enough, while he stood there smiling at her he raised his right hand to his mouth and began thoughtfully to chew on a callus that had formed at the base of his thumb.
“Moses?”
“He’s at Travertine.”
“Moses has been sailing every day of his vacation,” Mrs. Wapshot said to Rosalie. “It’s just as though I didn’t have an older son.”
“He wants to win a cup,” Coverly said. They stayed in the garden until Lulu called them into lunch.
After lunch Rosalie went upstairs and lying down in the still house she fell asleep. When she woke the shadows on the grass were long, and downstairs she could hear men’s voices. She went down and found them all in the garden, once more, all of them. “It’s our out-of-door sitting room,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “This is Mr. Wapshot and Moses. Rosalie Young.”
“Good evening, young lady,” Leander said, charmed by her fairness, but not at all foxy. He spoke to her with a triumphant and bright disinterestedness as if she had been the daughter of an old friend and drinking companion. It was Moses who was surly—who hardly looked at her, although he was polite enough. It made Mrs. Wapshot unhappy to see any impediment in the relationships of the young. They ate cold carp in the homely dining room, half lighted by the summer twilight, half by what seemed to be an inverted bowl of stained glass, pieced together mostly out of gloomy colors. “These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at the table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns. She was one of those women who seemed to have learned to speak by rote. “May I please be excused,” Moses mumbled as soon as he had cleared his plate, and he was out of the dining room and had one foot in the night before his mother spoke.
“Don’t you want any dessert, Moses?”
“No, thank you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Pendletons’.”
“I want you home early. Honora is coming.”
“Yes.”
“I wish Honora would come,” Mrs. Wapshot said.
Honora will not come—she is hooking a rug—but they do not know and so rather than dwell with the Chekovian delays of this family watching the night come in we might climb the stairs and pry into things of more pertinence. There is Leander’s bureau drawer, where we find a withered rose—once yellow—and a wreath of yellow hair, the butt end of a Roman candle that was fired at the turn of the century, a boiled shirt on which an explicit picture of a naked woman is drawn in red ink, a necklace made of champagne corks and a loaded revolver. Or we might look at Coverly’s book shelf—
