Honora’s will was no secret. “Lorenzo left me a little something,” she had told the family, “and I have to consider his wishes as well as my own. Lorenzo was very devoted to the family and the older I grow the more important family seems to me. It seems to me that most of the people I trust and admire come from good New England stock.” There was more of the same; and then she said that since Moses and Coverly were the last of the Wapshots she would divide her fortune between them, contingent upon their having male heirs. “Oh, the money will do so much good,” Mrs. Wapshot had exclaimed, while institutes for the blind and the lame, homes for unwed mothers and orphan asylums danced in her head. The news of their inheritance did not elate the boys—it did not seem at first to penetrate or alter their feelings toward life, and Honora’s decision only seemed to Leander to be a matter of course. What else would she have done with the money? But, considering the naturalness of her choice, it came as a surprise to everyone that it should lead them into something as unnatural as anxiety.
On the winter after Honora had made her will Moses came down with a severe case of mumps. “Is he all right?” Honora kept asking. “Will he be all right?” Moses recovered but that summer a little gasoline stove in the galley of their sailboat exploded, burning Coverly in the groin. They were on tenterhooks again. However, these forthright assaults on the virility of his sons did not trouble Leander as much as those threats to the continuation of the family that lay beyond his understanding. Such a thing happened when Coverly was eleven or twelve and went with his mother to see a performance of
Leander would never take his sons aside and speak to them about the facts of life, even although the continuation of Honora’s numerous charities depended upon their virility. If they looked out of the window for a minute they could see the drift of things. It was his feeling that love, death and fornication extracted from the rich green soup of life were no better than half-truths, and his course of instruction was general. He would like them to grasp that the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and the continuousness of things. He went skating on Christmas Day—drunk or sober, ill or well—feeling that it was his responsibility to the village to appear on Parson’s Pond. “There goes old Leander Wapshot,” people said—he could hear them—a splendid figure of continuous and innocent sport that he hoped his sons would carry on. The cold bath that he took each morning was ceremonious—it was sometimes nothing else since he almost never used soap and got out of the tub smelling powerfully of the sea salts in the old sponges that he used. The coat he wore at dinner, the grace he said at table, the fishing trip he took each spring, the bourbon he drank at dark and the flower in his buttonhole were all forms that he hoped his sons might understand and perhaps copy. He had taught them to fell a tree, pluck and dress a chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catch a fish, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc.
He was not surprised to find his ways crossed and contested by his wife, who had her own arcane rites such as arranging flowers and cleaning closets. He did not always see eye to eye with Sarah but this seemed to him most natural, and life itself appeared to regulate their differences. He was impulsive and difficult to follow—there was no telling when he would decide that it was time for the boys to swim the river or carve the roast. He went trout fishing each spring at a camp in the wilderness near the Canadian border and decided one spring that the time had come for Moses to accompany him. For once Sarah was angry and stubborn. She didn’t want Moses to go north with his father and on the evening before they were to leave she said that Moses was sick. Her manner was seraphic.
“That poor boy is too ill to go anywhere.”
“We’re going fishing tomorrow morning,” Leander said.
“Leander, if you take this poor boy out of a sickbed and up to the north woods I’ll never forgive you.”
“There won’t be anything to forgive.”
“Leander, come here.”
