The Wapshot Scandal полностью

“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.”