“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
